DailyNewsGems

When Baseball was King of New York City

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Now that we’re in the dog days of August and the pennant races in MLB are heating up, one book I recently devoured might whet your appetite for the postseason.

Novelist, journalist, and historian, Kevin Baker, wrote an entertaining, well researched book about America’s national pastime: “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of New York City.”

Baker describes how baseball with its origins as a simple country game, first played in cow pastures and rural patches of farm land, eventually migrated to the major metropolises and in particular New York City.

NYC has been the most populated city in the United States since 1790, when it

exceeded Philadelphia.

It continued to grow by leaps and bounds in large part through immigration. The population of NYC was 3. 4 million in 1900; and doubled over the next 50 years, leaping to 7.89 million residents in 1959.

Before the big ballparks were erected, historians tell us early baseball in New York were played in Central Park, the Parade Ground near Prospect Park, Carroll Park in Brooklyn, and open lots and public parklands in New Jersey.

The decade between 1947 and 1957, of course, was christened the golden age of baseball in New York City.

And for good reason.

During that span, the Yankees won nine pennants and seven World Series-five of them in a row. The Dodgers won six pennants and one world championship. Three times they finished second. The Giants won two NL championships and one World Series.

Taken together, from 1947 through 1957, New York teams came away with 13 MVP awards, eight Rookie of the year honors, seven home run titles, five no-hitters, and four batting championships.

The New York Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants—advanced to the World Series every year (between 1947-1957) except 1948, the last year Cleveland won a World Series.

And speaking of Cleveland, Baker’s book has plenty of material that would interest Cleveland baseball fans.

He touches on the 1920 World Series, when the Cleveland Indians beat the Brooklyn Robins (Dodgers) in seven games in a best of nine series, a Series which was especially noted for the first unassisted triple play executed in World Series history by the Indians second-sacker, Bill Wambsganss, who made a leaping catch of a line drive, scorched off the bat of Clarence Mitchell in the 5th inning for the first out; he stepped on second base to retire Brooklyn’s Pete Kilduff for the second out, and then tagged a surprised looking Otto Miller (caught between first and second), squashing a Brooklyn rally and completing the historic feat.

Game 5 of the 1920 Series was additionally noted for featuring the first home run hit by a pitcher in a World Series, Cleveland native, Jim Bagby, of the Indians, who cracked a three-run blast off of Brooklyn pitcher Burleigh Grimes in the 4th inning.

History was previously made in the first inning of Game 5 of the 1920 World Series when Elmer Smith of the Indians smacked the first grand slam in World Series history.

The Dodgers wouldn’t be in another World Series for more than 20 years; Cleveland would have to wait almost 30 years.

Baker devotes a significant amount of space to the Polo Grounds, located between 155th and 157th streets at Eighth Avenue, nestled on the Harlem River in Upper Manhattan, home of the New York Giants of the National League from 1891 through 1957.

The Polo Grounds was additionally the home of the New York Yankees from 1913 to 1922 and New York Mets in their first two seasons (1962, 1963).

Source:  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle

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In addition to the Giants winning five World Series titles in the Polo Grounds, the stadium is best remembered, sadly, for the place where Cleveland Indians’ shortstop, Ray Chapman, was struck in the head by a pitch thrown by Yankees pitcher Carl Mays on August 16, 1920 and died within hours.

He was only 29 and was the only MLB player killed by a pitch.

Baker provides readers with some fascinating details of Chapman and the submarine pitcher for the Yankees. Mays had a sordid reputation for being erratic with his pitches, some even went so far as to label him, a “headhunter.” In 1917, he led the league in hit batters.

Ty Cobb, in particular, was constantly getting plunked by Mays offerings. Fed up with his wild pitches, Baker wrote that Cobb once laid down a bunt on the first base line and intentionally spiked the back of May's leg, splitting it open and vowing, "The next time you cover the bag, I'll take the skin off your other leg."

Prior to his ill-fated at bat against Mays, Chapman never hit the Yankees submarine pitcher very well; so, the theory goes, the Indians’ shortstop crouched down in the batter’s box, hoping to give himself a competitive advantage in picking up Mays low pitches.  When he was first hit, Chapman stood motionless before quickly collapsing to the ground. The ball hit Chapman’s head with such a force, the ball rolled forward to the pitcher’s mound.

Mays initially thought the ball hit Chapman’s bat, so he rifled the ball to first base, before chaos ensued. When he was carried to the clubhouse, one of the last words heard from Chapman’s mouth was the request that his wedding ring be placed on his finger.

Medical records determined Mays pitch cut a three-and-a-half fissure along the base of Chapman's skull, which drove a piece of bone down against his brain.

Despite being demonized for throwing the pitch that killed and greeted with a cascade of boos on road games, Mays maintained his innocence throughout his career. “My conscience is absolutely clear,” the sulky pitcher once said. He also told the press, “I merely wish to say that I am not a murderer, nor do I take unfair advantage of anyone."

At least 5 other A.L. teams, according to Baker, threatened to boycott games if Mays pitched.

Mays was 26-11 in 1920 and sported a league-leading six shoutouts.

Despite winning over 200 games in his bumpy career, allegations first reported by New York journalist, Fred Lieb, that he threw the 1921 World Series, put the kibosh on any thoughts of Mays being considered for the Hall of Fame when his career ended.

Beginning in 1921, owners of the New York clubs began to see the size of the gate receipts swell. In 1923, the Giants had drawn the largest National League crowd ever, 41,000 for a regular season game; and the 1921 World Series between the Yankees and Giants drew the very first million-dollar gate for the Fall Classic.

1921 would mark the first of 13-Subway Series’ (1921-1956) the Yankees would play against either the Giants or the Dodgers in World Series matchups, driving home the universal impression that New York was, indeed, the undisputed baseball capital of the nation.

After a 44-year hiatus, the New York Subway Series was resurrected when the Yankees defeated in the New York Mets in 5 games during the 2000 World Series.

Baker does a superb job in batting down some myths that have been floating through the annals of baseball history. One is that the New York Yankees adopted pinstripes on their uniforms to cover up Babe Ruth’s bulging waistline. Not true. The Chicago Cubs were actually the first team to wear pinstripes in 1907; then the Giants began wearing them in 1911. The Yankees first adopted the pinstripes in 1912, well before the Babe came on board. They stopped wearing them in 1913 and 1914, then began wearing them permanently, beginning in 1915.

Baker also clarifies the term, “Murderers' Row” used to describe the first six hitters of the 1927 Yankees (Earle Combs, Mark Koenig, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Bob Meusel, and Tony Lazzeri) was actually first used to describe the 1919 New York Yankees, though that team paled in comparison to the 1927 Yankees who sported an astounding 110–44 record (.714), captured the A.L. pennant by 19 games, and swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series.

For those long-entrenched New York Yankee haters, long stretches of Baker’s book might be awfully hard to swallow, such as this poisonous line: “In a 30-year run from 1923 to 1953, the Yankees met and defeated every NL team but the Braves, they won 16 of 18 World Series and compiling a record of 68-26 in the Fall Classic, for a .723 winning percentage. The only World Series they lost at all in this period were the Cardinals, in 1926 and 1942.”

It gets worse Yankee bashers.

“In the 1930's,’’ Baker reminds us, “the Yankees reeled off consecutive seasons of 102, 102, 99 and 106 victories and lost a combined total of three games in four World Series triumphs. The streak culminated in a 1939 team than many would rank as the best major-league team of all time, ahead of the 1927 Yankees.”

Those kind of nauseating statistics would turn anyone’s stomach, including the Brooklyn Dodgers, who only managed one World Series championship (1955) over their cross-town rivals after losing in 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953. The Yankees beat the “Dem Bums” again in 1956, the Dodgers final season in Brooklyn, before packing up and dashing off for the West Coast.

Still, those baseball fans who take a dim view of New York baseball teams can at least take heart, that all these feats and gargantuan triumphs Baker writes so eloquently about, are in the past, which took place during a bygone era and have softly faded into the night.

The Yankees, after all, haven’t been in a World Series for 15 years, the Mets for almost 10 years.

I’m sure 28 other teams and their fans in MLB hope it stays that way for another 15 years.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]  

 August 10, 2024

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).

 

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

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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)

 

Winston Churchill's Iconic Status Questioned in New Book

***

British statesman, writer, historian, and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945), Winston Churchill, once famously said, “history will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

Well, history hasn’t been very kind to Winston Churchill lately, because a trend is in progress with revisionists and other commentators looking back on history with a 21^st century progressive and moral lens—on a mission to shame history’s most decorated historical figures. Knowing a rebuttal for those accused won’t be coming because they’re no longer around to defend themselves, makes their case appear even stronger.

Most recently, journalist and historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft has taken to a public flogging of Churchill in broad daylight in his new book, “Churchill’s Shadow,” hoping to shatter all the hero worshiping and adulations given to the “British Bulldog” for most of the 20^th century and spilling over into the 21^st century.

Wheatcroft challenges readers to widen their net when looking at Churchill’s life by taking a sharper, more critical look at some of his unseemly characteristics which have largely been swept under the rug.

Readers are going to have to decide for themselves whether his account is a character assassination or an objective, non-partisan look at arguably one of the most worshiped figures of the 20^th century.

Peter Baker, Chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, recently reviewed Wheatcroft’s book, writing that “on both sides of the Atlantic, we are living in an era when history is being re-examined, a time when monuments are coming down and illusions about onetime heroes are being shattered.”

Between the covers, Wheatcroft, according to Baker’s account, underscores Churchill’s perceived racism, narcissism, heavy drinking, his unabashed imperialist tendencies, neglecting his own children, along with being a horrible judge of character, and, naturally, a shameless mythmaker.

In Wheatcroft’s book, he becomes the prosecutor, judge and jury of Churchill’s life and career without the former prime minister ever appearing on the witness stand.

While Baker might not be in perfect agreement with Wheatcroft demolishing the iconic status of Churchill, he does concede that Wheatcroft makes a compelling argument in unpacking the complicated features of Churchill, just not the ones we selectively choose to remember.

“History is not one-dimensional,” Baker wrote. “Churchill was indeed a complicated figure, one whose stirring defense of Britain at its moment of maximum peril — and by extension that of Western civilization — overshadows fewer worthy parts of his record.”

Roger Louis, an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and editor-in-chief of “The Oxford History of the British Empire” thinks “Churchill’s Shadow” was a book that needed to be written and according to him, an accurate reassessment. “It makes clear,” Louis told me, “what most authorities on Churchill would recognize as a long overdue account and concludes with a fair judgment: “he saved his country and saved freedom.”

Will Wheatcroft’s book significantly reshape Churchill’s legacy?

Not according to Richard M. Langworth, Senior Fellow at Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project.

“I think there is scarcely a dent in Churchill's legacy: first because most of the charges are false, and second because they ignore what really matters. Only a small fraction of people believes such things,” Langworth observed.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has been making “the case for the defense” against blatant inaccuracies written about Churchill for years-- such as its “Truths and Heresies," department.

The Churchill Project additionally documents a selection of popular quotes wrongly attributed to Churchill. Followers of Winnie, for example, might be surprised to learn he never said: "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: what counts is the courage to continue.” Nor did he say, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

In addition to Peter Baker, “Churchill’s Shadow’’ was reviewed by British historian and biographer Richard Aldous in the Wall Street Journal in which he praises Wheatcroft for the first part of his book, but takes him to task for the second part in which he belittles historian Andrew Roberts (author of “Churchill: Walking With Destiny,” 2018), along with other historians for their "Churchillolatry.”

“That’s a shame,” Aldous wrote, “not least because Mr. Roberts’s is a much better book—deeply researched in the archives and the product of decades of Churchill study.”

 Aldous is additionally puzzled that Wheatcroft questions the wisdom of the British state paying £12.5 million for the Churchill papers. “Those papers are now available digitally, though Mr. Wheatcroft seems not to have made much use of them,” Aldous wrote.

 Aldous contends Wheatcroft was correct in suggesting that so much of what Churchill believed in and championed has “withered away” as Britain lost its leadership prominence as the 20^th century came to a close. But Aldous is just as quick to point out that while Britain is no longer a superpower, it still maintains the fifth largest economy in the world, has a permanent seat on the United Nations Council, is a leading member of NATO, and is now part of the Aukus security alliance (with Australia and the United States).

“All these elements of status and power,” Aldous argues, “have their origins in the late 1940s and 1950s, a period Mr. Wheatcroft views so balefully. “

Chris Waters, professor of Modern European History at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts) agrees with Wheatcroft that the cult surrounding Churchill since World War II emphasizing his “finest hour” speech too often dominates the “more problematic side Churchill’s character and politics,’’ which should be more thoroughly scrutinized.

Waters argues as Britain has lost its prominent status on the world stage, there’s a tendency to fall prey to nostalgia, especially about Churchill going to eyeball-to-eyeball with Adolf Hitler and standing tall after the Luftwaffe sprayed bombs on London for 57 consecutive nights between September and November 1940.

Waters believes, strongly, that we should “demolish the myth that has grown up around Churchill since the War, but we should not demolish the statues or fail to respect his many triumphs and contributions to the nation either!”

Since the main thrust of “Churchill’s Shadow” was to smash what Wheatcroft considered the blatant idolatry of Churchill in historian Andrew Robert’s 2018 masterpiece, “Churchill Walking with Destiny,” (published in 2018), it didn’t take long for Roberts to answer back.

In an article published by The Churchill Project , the biographer and historian highlighted some weaknesses or inaccuracies in Wheatcroft’s work.

Wheatcroft stated Churchill was not a well-travelled man. Quite the contrary, Roberts fired back. “Churchill visited America 16 times and Canada nine times, crossing both from coast to coast. He served for years in India and Afghanistan, fought in Cuba, South Africa, the Sudan and on the Franco-Belgian border, honeymooned in Italy, holidayed in France, Italy, Florida, Monaco, Madeira, Morocco, Bahamas and Spain, mountaineered in Switzerland, twice visited Stalin in Moscow, held conferences in Cairo and Tehran, watched army maneuvers with the Kaiser in Germany, cruised the Mediterranean and Caribbean, and also visited Palestine, Iceland, Turkey, Cyprus, Uganda, Belgium, Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania), Mozambique, Kenya, Bermuda, Monaco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Malta, Holland, Trinidad, Jamaica and Greece.”

In another part of the book, Wheatcroft argues that Churchill’s judgement was strategically flawed. “Yet,” Roberts answers, it was Churchill and “Alan Brooke (senior officer of the British army) who not only came up with the Mediterranean strategy that liberated North Africa and Italy but also sold it to the Americans, and ensured no over-hasty return in force to the European continent before D-Day.”

In addition, charges that Churchill cultivated fascist leanings in the 1920’s isn’t supported by any reputable sources, Roberts claims, except political enemies of the “British Bulldog.”

Roberts argues, among other weaknesses of the book, that many of Wheatcroft’s sources are dubious, including the use of internet articles by the former journalist Johann Hari, who later had to return a journalism prize for inventing quotes.

In summing up Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s book, Roberts wrote that “never in the field of Churchill revisionism have so many punches been thrown in so many pages with so few hitting home.”

Winston Churchill addresses the House of Commons of Canada in 1941. 

Photo Credit: CP Archive

***

Admittedly, one of the biggest problems in assessing the life and times of Winston Churchill, much like Abraham Lincoln, is that he endured many failures and hardships before rising to the top when his country needed him most, during its darkest hour.

Churchill spent sixty years of his political life in the House of Commons. Taking a broad brush to Churchill’s accomplishments and failures over so many decades of service, isn’t fair. He entered the House of Commons in 1900, and over 19 contested elections, he was successful in 14 of them.

He failed miserably in 1915 as First Lord of the Admiralty in orchestrating the disastrous Dardanelles naval campaign, which resulted in the loss of thousands of British lives. As Chancellor of the Exchequer (treasurer) he blundered badly by restoring Britain to the gold standard, which resulted in unemployment, deflation, and a general strike. He also voted against self-rule for India, unable to let go of the romanticism associated with Britain’s imperial history. And much like Lincoln, he succumbed to severe bouts of depression, “The Black Dog’’ as he called it.

Imagine, Churchill was 65 years old when he became PM in 1940, about the time most are retiring.

Prior to leading Britain out of the dark storm, Churchill served in every important cabinet post except for Foreign Minister.

So, all those setbacks and failures he experienced may very well have prepared him for a time when the country needed a strong, resolute leader to face the menace of Nazi Germany. Churchill undoubtedly met the challenge as PM and as head of the Ministry of Defense.

“I felt as if I was walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour," he would later write.

While all of us may fall prey to Churchill idolatry now and again, it’s hard to imagine how Britain and Western Europe could have survived World War II had not Churchill been in the right place at the right time, with decades and decades of experience under his belt.

I’m not reading many books that focus on Abraham Lincoln being defeated for the state legislature in 1832, his abysmal failings in business, being defeated for the U.S. Senate, not once (1854) but twice (1858), and being defeated in the nomination for the Vice Presidency in 1856.

But we do remember Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (November 19, 1863) in which he famously said: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

 Churchill, to be sure, possessed heaps of flaws, prejudices, and undoubtedly exercised poor judgement at times in his career, but do we honor Churchill today for his personality qualities and boorish behavior, or do we honor him for his indomitable courage and leadership in rallying the nation during arguably one of the most destructive conflicts in human history, when FDR and the United States was nowhere to be found.

 

--Bill Lucey

November 3, 2021

[email protected]

Did Ethel Rosenberg Deserve the Electric Chair?

 

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1951.

Photo Credit: Not provided.

***

British author and journalist, Anne Sebba, who has written biographies on some shadowy British figures, including Jennie Churchill and Wallis Simpson, among others, traveled across the Atlantic to explore one of the most controversial characters of them all in her new book, “Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy."

In one of the most highly debated cases in American history, Ethel, along with her husband, Julius Rosenberg, were tried and convicted of espionage for providing the Soviet Union classified information on the Manhattan Project. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953.

Ethel Rosenberg was the first woman executed by the United States Government since Mary Surratt, an American boarding house owner, was hanged (July 7, 1865) for her role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

The Manhattan Project was a code name attached to a top-secret project involving Allied scientists working to develop an atomic bomb. According to recorded testimony, British physicist Klaus Fuchs, working at Los Alamos, met with a Soviet agent (named Raymond) on two different occasions and transferred notes on the working design for the atomic bomb.

Fuchs would eventually be arrested and pressured to name his co-conspirators. He confessed to spying and passing to the Soviets information about the Manhattan Project.

There isn’t much debate surrounding Julius Rosenberg, the husband of Ethel Rosenberg. He was a card-carrying Communist party member since December 12, 1939, approximately six months after marrying Ethel in a small civil ceremony.

Mountains of court testimony, FBI records, and recently declassified cables, show irrefutably that Julius Rosenberg was a prime mover and shaker of a spy ring which involved transferring classified information about the development of the United States first atomic bomb from the Los Alamos Laboratory (New Mexico) to a courier, Harry Gold, who was alleged to have passed it on to the Soviets.

Testimony reveals David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, passed a "sketch of a high-explosive lens mold" to Gold at Julius Rosenberg’s request; a sketch that was eventually transferred to the Soviets.

 Greenglass worked as a machinist-soldier stationed at Los Alamos. He was recruited by Julius Rosenberg to assist in this espionage ring.

 So, exactly how did Ethel become linked in this spy ring?

When the FBI questioned Greenglass on June 15, 1950; in addition to naming his wife Ruth and Julius Rosenberg in the spy ring, he told the feds that Ethel Rosenberg, the wife of Julius, was in Julius’s apartment room and typed hand written notes on classified information from him.

In fact, no handwritten or type-written notes were ever found and they were never presented in court, raising credibility problems for the prosecution’s case that Ethel Rosenberg was an accomplice to the spy ring. The charges that Ethel Rosenberg typed the notes, in other words, was unsubstantiated.

In exchange for their testimony, David and Ruth Greenglass were given appreciably lighter sentences.

It wouldn’t be divulged until 2008 that the Greenglass’s (both Ruth and David, active participants in the spying activity) lied in their original testimony about Ethel Rosenberg typing notes that would facilitate the spy ring. They later claim they were coerced by the prosecuting team, led by the ruthless firebrand Roy Cohn, to fabricate their story so they could force Ethel Rosenberg to disclose additional badly needed information about the spy ring.

In order to save his wife from prosecution, David Greenglass told journalist Sam Roberts that he was squeezed by the prosecution to commit perjury. His false testimony additionally saved his wife from prosecution.

David Greenglass was released from prison in 1960 after serving 10 years of his 15-year sentence. His wife, Ruth, was never charged.

***

Groundless accusations against Ethel Rosenberg and the reason she was sentenced to death becomes the central focus of Anne Sebba’s fascinating book.

Most observers who have followed the Rosenberg case reach the overriding conclusion that threatening Ethel with a harsh punishment would make her share more information about the spy ring. She never offered prosecutor’s any more damaging information about the espionage activity because she wasn’t privy to such information. She was merely the wife of a Soviet spy, not a collaborator.

Martin Sobell, an American engineer, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, told reporters in 2008 that Ethel was guilty only "of being Julius's wife.”

Anne Sebba writes that the true extent of Ethel’s complicity will probably never be clearly known, but points out, “it was not a crime under U.S. Law to approve spousal wrongdoing, either during the war or the time of the trial.”

The fact that Julius Rosenberg didn’t distance Ethel from the real crime capers during the intense questioning, left many historians and journalists scratching their heads why he wouldn’t save his own wife from possible execution.

Not all observers, however, are convinced Ethel Rosenberg wasn’t an active participant in the spy ring.

Mark Kramer, Director of the Cold War Studies Project at Harvard University, told me “the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg at the trial was overwhelming, and Soviet foreign intelligence documents that became available in 2005 provide conclusive evidence that she gave her husband invaluable assistance with his espionage ring.”   “She did not deserve to be put to death” Kramer concedes, “but she certainly was guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage and was justifiably convicted, despite the misdeeds of the prosecutors.” Kramer thought a sentence of 15 to 25 years for Ethel Rosenberg would have been more appropriate. 

Along with the dubious charges against Ethel Rosenberg, Anne Sebba drives home the critical point that the execution of the Rosenbergs happened during a time of heightened paranoia in the United States about Soviet aggression and Communist intrusion into leading American institutions.

At the time of the Rosenberg case, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, the prominent ring leader of the “Second Red Scare,” charged that the State Department employed over 200 Communist agents, triggering fear and suspicion, leading to the blacklisting of a number of individuals who were hauled in front of McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and accused of unfounded subversion and treason charges.

“For one brief moment in time,” Sebba wrote, “hysteria overtook common sense and, in order to appear strong in the face of credible Communist threat, the American government allowed this profoundly moral woman to be executed, and in the most brutally incompetent manner.” “It is hard to imagine,” Sebba went on to write, “any other country, in Western Europe of the wider free world, where this terrible fate would have been inflicted on Ethel.”

The death penalty unquestionably met with the approval of a number of Americans at the time. As many as 68% respondents in a 1953 survey, supported the death penalty.

The death penalty might have been ok with a majority of the American public, but there was pent-up outrage, internationally, for the death sentence of Ethel Rosenberg, which Anne Sebba underscores.

At the time of the trial, for example, The New York Times printed a letter from German born physicist, Albert Einstein, who wrote: “My conscience compels me to urge you (President Eisenhower) to commute the death sentence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”

The Vatican newspaper (L’Osservatore Romano) published a passionate plea from the pope not to execute the Rosenbergs. Before he left office, President Truman received as many as three million letters and telegrams asking the Rosenbergs not be put to death.

Further, U.S. Ambassador to France, C. Douglas Dillon, predicted (probably correctly) that the Rosenberg executions would be viewed, many years later, as a knee jerk reaction to McCarthyism. The majority in France, in fact, opposed the executions which they viewed as “unjustifiable punishment.”

For decades after the trial, the Rosenberg’s sons Robert and Michael Meeropol believed both their parents weren’t spies and fought vigorously to clear their names.

All that changed in 2008, when 91-year-old Martin Sobell admitted for the first time that he was a Soviet spy in a New York Times article. He additionally implicated Julius Rosenberg in the spy ring. According to the New York Times, “coupled with some of that grand jury testimony, Mr. Sobell’s admission bolsters what has become a widely held view among scholars: that Mr. Rosenberg was, indeed, guilty of spying, but that his wife was at most a bit player in the conspiracy and may have been framed by complicit prosecutors.”

After such a sobering revelation, the Rosenberg sons finally gave up the fight and acknowledged their father, Julius Rosenberg, was indeed a Soviet spy.

Both sons, however, continue to fight for the exoneration of their mother, Ethel Rosenberg. In 2016, they made an impassioned plea to President Barack Obama to clear her name without success.

Now that there’s a new president, I asked Michael Meeropol whether he and his brother would make a plea to President Joe Biden to decide for himself whether their mother was a spy?

Mr. Meeropol responded to my email only to say, “my brother and I are considering the possibilities, but we have not made any decisions yet.”

Thanks to Anne Sebba’s compelling narrative, readers are given an opportunity to decide for themselves whether prisoner number “10510” (from the Sing Sing prison overlooking the east bank of the Hudson River) really deserved to be executed shortly after 8 p.m. on June 19, 1953, along with her husband, Julius.

 

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

June 19, 2021

Remembering 1948: Progress in Civil Rights and the World Champion Cleveland Indians

Larry Doby, left, with Satchel Paige, was the American League's first Black player.

Photo Credit: Sporting News, via Getty Images

***

"Our Team: The Epic Story Of Four Men And The World Series That Changed Baseball," by Luke Epplin is more than a book about the 1948 World Series, the last time the Cleveland Indians won a World Series.

It’s actually a splendidly written, meticulously researched, and upbeat social history about the expansion of Black American baseball players into Major League Baseball.

Heaps of attention has historically been paid to Jackie Robinson in becoming the first African-American baseball player in Major League Baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, while Larry Doby, a 23-year-old outfielder for the Newark Eagles, (the first American League African-American player to smash the color barrier 11 weeks later), often receives little attention or becomes a mere footnote by baseball historians.

Epplin, a New York City writer, centers this American social saga on four individuals: two Black, and two white, all of whom changed the face of baseball forever. Biographical sketches presented of Larry Doby, Satchel Paige, Bill Veeck, and Bob Feller become, knowingly or not, the unsung heroes of the integration of baseball.

Had it not been for Doby and Satchel Paige breaking the color line, many argue, the Indians might not have won the 1948 World Series.

Luckily for baseball, the integration of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Satchel Paige, and others, wouldn’t have been possible without two color-blind owners: Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers and of course, Veeck of the Cleveland Indians, who bought the Indians in June, 1946.

The progressive thinking Rickey reportedly said: “the greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of the game is the Black race.” “The Negro,” Ricky observed, “will make us winners for years to come.”

Bill Veeck, meanwhile, not only wasn’t afraid of welcoming Black players into the big leagues, he enthusiastically widened his net with the hiring of Black security guards, vendors, janitors, groundskeepers, ushers and musicians, along with offering a front office job to Olympic gold medalist, Harrison Dillard.

Despite the overabundance of promising talent in the Negro Leagues, it would take years before the rest of baseball would sign Black players, including the New York Yankees who didn’t sign a Black player until 1955, the Detroit Tigers not until 1958, and the Boston Red Sox were the last to the party, by not signing a Black player until 1959, more than ten years after the game was officially integrated.

Alabama born, Satchel Paige, 42-years-old, came on board in July, 1948 during the Indians stretch run of the pennant race. Epplin underscores how Satch during his first month with the Indians, only surrendered seven runs over 38 and a third innings, while generating rock star status. His first three starts in MLB, attracted more than 200,000 fans, inspiring sports columnist for the Cleveland News, Ed McAuley, to write that Paige was “the greatest drawing card in the history of baseball”

Overall, Paige pitched 21 games in the 1948 regular season, including seven starts with two complete game shutouts. His ERA that year was an impressive 2.48.

Larry Doby became the first Black player to belt a home run in a World Series in Game 4 of the Boston Braves and Indians Series. The Indians disposed of the Boston Braves in six games. Doby additionally led the Indians with a .318 batting average in the 1948 Series.

Not many people associate Iowa native Bob Feller with progressive thinking in race relations, especially in 1948. Rapid Robert, in fact, told reporters during his barnstorming tours that he didn’t think many Black players had the right stuff to make it in MLB, including Jackie Robinson.

Cleveland owner Bill Veeck witnesses the signing of ace pitcher Bob Feller to a contract for the 1948 season. Despite the high hopes for the staff ace, the right-hander won 19 games and led the AL for the seventh and last time, while the velocity on his blazing fastball began to wane. 

Photo Credit: The Rucker Archive

***

But if not for Feller’s widely reported barnstorming tours in the offseason, many in America wouldn’t be aware of the explosive talent of many Black players.

During the barnstorming tours, Joe DiMaggio, the “Yankee Clipper,” would say that Paige was the “best and fastest pitcher he ever faced.” Of course, many mainstream newspapers never published DiMaggio’s comments for fear it would imply Black players were better than whites.

For three consecutive barnstorming tours, Satchel Paige and Bob Feller met head-to-head.

Because of Feller’s major contribution with showcasing marquee Black ball players of the era through different sections of the country, Negro League players invited him to their Negro Baseball League Reunion in Kentucky.

Most fascinating about Epplin’s book of the 1948 World Series is that many of the progressive elements of the 1948 Cleveland Indians was mirroring many events and individuals outside of the diamond during the same year.

In 1948, for example, Atlanta, Georgia hired its first Black police officers at a time when a quarter of the Atlanta police department were reportedly members of the Ku Klux Klan. But much like Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, Black Atlanta police officers in 1948 had to tolerate racial taunts and abuse, they couldn’t lose their temper, they couldn’t ride police squad cars, and they couldn’t arrest white suspects. They had to call for assistance.

Additionally, in 1948, Alice Coachman Davis won the high jump at the Olympics in London, England, becoming the first Black woman to win an Olympic Gold medal.

In 1948, Johnny Ritchey became the first African-American baseball player to play in the Pacific League as a member of the San Diego Padres.

Most importantly, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which directed the armed forces to provide “equality of treatment and opportunity for all personnel without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”

Epplin chronicles how Larry Doby had to endure the humiliation of segregation in the military while serving his country. Robert H. Meyer, Professor Emeritus at Moravian College, observed that “Black vets, having just fought against Hitler and vicious bigotry, returned to the country to find themselves treated with a similar bigotry.”

Victoria W. Wolcott, Professor of History at the University of Buffalo, tells me, “1948 was an important milestone in the civil rights movement. It was a period of what historians refer to as “racial liberalism” following World War II.” “Because of migration,” Wolcott said, “during the war years large numbers of African Americans migrated to northern cities, where they could vote. The NAACP also grew significantly during the 1940s and even had some successful voter registration drives in southern cities like Atlanta—as well as legal victories that lead up to Brown v. Board of Education.

In his State of the Union address in 1948, President Truman made a major push for civil rights. Such progressive thinking lost him support in different sections of the country, but as it turned out, it was the Black vote he received which decisively helped him win the 1948 presidential election over Republican governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey.

Gregg Ivers, Professor of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University, depicts the 1940s as a “period underappreciated by the general public and even by educators, journalists, and others, who believe that the civil rights movement began with Brown and Rosa Parks.” “Nothing just happens,” Ivers stressed.

Ivers additionally pointed out that 1948 was the last year of the Negro Leagues, which opened up a fresh pool of Black players who were no longer bound to their teams and their domineering owners. Willie Mays played his last game in the Negro Leagues in 1948 as a member of the Birmingham Black Barons.

Progress with civil rights, however, ran into a major roadblock in the 1950s.

Jim Ralph, Professor of American History and Culture at Middlebury College, said so much of the progress with race relations in the mid and late 1940s, came to a screeching halt with the emergence of the Cold War and McCarthyism, which narrowed the activist tendencies of the country. “Left-leaning CIO unions,” Ralph observed, “which had often been pioneers in fighting against racist practices, were on the defensive.  A powerful voice for civil and workers’ rights like Paul Robeson found himself under attack for his sympathetic disposition toward the Soviet Union. “

As fascinating as Epplin’s book about the four central pillars in the integration of baseball is, the book, from this observer, is more a valentine to the City of Cleveland in 1948 during a time when industry was thriving, the city was prospering economically; a time when downtown Cleveland was bustling with restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues, and when civic pride was at an all-time high. It was the last time the Cleveland Indians were world champs, the toast of the town.

The years after 1948 in Cleveland, would usher in crushing heartbreak and disappointment.

As Epplin points out, “the year after Veeck departed, attendance dipped to below two million. Six seasons later, the Indians drew fewer than a million fans, second worst in the American League.”

Satchel Paige, moreover, would never taste another World Series appearance again. Ol’ Satch  was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1971 as the first electee of the Committee on Negro Baseball Leagues. He passed away on June 8, 1982.

Despite being the first African-American player in the American League, Larry Doby’s number wasn’t retired by the Indians until 1994, four years before he was elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Many argue that Doby, for one reason or another, never lived up to his full potential.

Bob Feller would appear in only one All-Star game after 1948; 1951 would be the last year the Indians one-time staff ace would win more than twenty games (the same year he threw his third and final no-hitter) and would start in only 15 games in his final two seasons with the Tribe before retiring in 1956 with 266 wins, ranking him 28^th in history. Feller never won a World Series game.

Due to an impending divorce and wanting to set up his children with a trust fund, Veeck sold the Indians after the 1949 season. He would later emerge as owner of the St Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox.

John A. Kirk, Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, summed up the year 1948 best, when he told me: “1948 was certainly a year of hope, in terms of the direction of race relations, and of liberal and progressive movements more generally.”

--Bill Lucey

June 27, 2021

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Ken Burns Explores Ernest Hemingway: The Man, the Writer, and the Myth in New Documentary

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is at it again.

Monday, April 5, the creator of prize-winning documentaries on the American Civil War, Jazz Music, and Baseball, teamed with director and producer, Lynn Novick, for a new documentary on American literature icon Ernest Hemingway. It will be a six-hour documentary broadcast over three nights.

The film preview promises to smash the man behind the myth and dispel many misplaced notions many have about the American literature legend.

If you talk to enough American literature scholars, you get the sense that many readers don’t even bother to read Hemingway because of the chauvinistic reputation attached to his bull-fighting, hard drinking, multiple marriages (four in all), killing animals for sport, and writing about the scourge of war.

We are, after all, living in the era of the MeToo Movement (the social movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment), a crusade against bullying, responsible drinking habits, and overall--a kinder gentler era than when Hemingway was plying his trade.

Many think the macho image often attributed to Hemingway is unreasonably exaggerated.

Author Gioia Diliberto in her biography of Hadley Hemingway (Hemingway’s first wife), titled “Paris without End,” wrote: "For all his macho posturing, Hemingway at his best wrote love stories that brilliantly charted the emotional nuances in relationships between men and women.” “His great talent,” Diliberto explained, “was in evoking the most intimate moments of longing, and all his fictional love stories flow from the central love story in his own life -- his marriage to Hadley."

Verna Kale, Professor of English and Associate Editor of The Hemingway Letters Project  at Pennsylvania State University, echoing Diliberto’s sentiments, said that Hemingway’s popular success, and the adaptation by fiction writers of his innovations, “obscure how innovative his work was in its time.  He refused to follow political or literary trends, and as a result his work has the kind of longevity that makes him widely read and studied today, and I do believe he qualifies as one of the greatest American writers--not just of novels but of short stories and what we now call creative nonfiction.”

Kale provided a sneak peek into what to expect from the upcoming PBS documentary. “His reputation as a masculine icon and celebrity may have undermined the appreciation of his work,” Kale observed.  “Both the documentary film and the ongoing project to publish Hemingway's correspondence show that he was a complicated person, full of contradictions. The film and his letters show the sides of him that are often overlooked: his sensitivity, his concern for family and friends, his interests in art and music, his commitment to anti-fascism.” Kale did point out that the film hardly sugar coats his character flaws. Hemingway could be “violent, angry, and proud,” Kale said.

Others aren’t so infatuated by the iconic status that Hemingway enjoys.

Writer and public intellectual, Gore Vidal, told political commentator Pat Buchanan in 1984: “I have a very low view of Hemingway; he’s sort of a Field & Stream writer. His gift for publicity propelled him ever forward. He didn’t develop.”

 Later in the interview with Buchanan, Vidal, said “For Whom the Bell Tolls is an embarrassing book which even he came to realize that.”

 Novelist Kurt Vonnegut remarked in 1990, following the rise of the feminist movements, Hemingway is “a little hard to read nowadays.” 

The brawny image of Hemingway wasn’t so pronounced in his novels as it was in the Esquire magazine pieces that he wrote in the 1930’s in which he projected himself to be tough as nails, vulgar, an adventurous outdoorsman, and a hopeless playboy and carouser.

Even in the prime of his career, Hemingway’s contemporaries pelted him with some harsh criticism.

In 1927, writer Virginia Woolf blasted Hemingway’s “self-conscious virility” of his fiction and with what she considered his “excessive use of dialogue.”

British writer Wyndham Lewis in his study of Hemingway (“The Dumb Ox”), faulted the American novelist for creating “stupid and insensitive characters” and of presenting them in a kind of baby talk borrowed from Gertrude Stein. 

While showering him with well-deserved praise for his literary skills, both Woolf and Lewis were highly critical of Hemingway for embracing unrealistically muscular characters by touching on such violent topics as war, boxing, and bullfighting, among others.

Arnold Weinstein, an American literary scholar at Brown University thinks, sadly, that the new age in American society has lessened the importance of Hemingway in college classrooms. I'd wager that English departments at elite universities have relatively little of Hemingway in their courses,” Weinstein told me. “Needless to say,” Weinstein continued; “there's lots of company, and there'll be even more of it as we move ahead, since there is an ever greater, ever angrier awareness of the systemic flaws, blind spots and injustices in American culture.”

Weinstein said that he’s still teaching, but his repertoire of authors is “imploding.” “It’s a pity given that Hemingway’s work with its depths, ambiguities and virtues are under the radar screen.”

Despite the criticism of Hemingway, especially in the 21^st century, living as we are in a more refined society, Suzanne Clark, Professor in the English Department at the University of Oregon, thinks Hemingway “is doubtless one of the great American writers of the 20th century, and he endures, in spite of much sniping at him.”  “Part of the reason why he endures,” Clark argues, “is that his style, which seems so simple, so straightforwardly factual, rewards close reading the way a poem does.  Hemingway seems easy but is after all as complex as the human experience. “ 

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born July 2, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. Soon after graduating from Oak Park High School, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star as a police reporter and feature story writing before venturing off to Italy where he was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in World War I. As an ambulance driver he was badly injured when a heavy machine-gun bullet ripped through his right knee. It was his first taste of war which would permeate many of his works of literature.

The Hemingway canon is vast from cub reporter to feature writer to war correspondent, short story writer, and novelist. But when people discuss Hemingway, they for the most part, center on four novels: “The Sun Also Rises” (1926), “A Farewell to Arms” (1929), “For Whom the Bells Tolls” (1940), and “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952).  Many of his short stories have also been widely hailed as splendid works of literature, including “Big Two-Hearted River,” “The Killers,’’ “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,”

What distinguished Hemingway from his predecessors, especially 19^th century authors were his simple, direct writing style.

“The Sun Also Rises”, was Hemingway’s first novel. It was published in 1926, a piece of fiction about a group of American and English expatriates in Paris, all of whom have suffered both physically and emotionally during World War I.

In reviewing “The Sun Also Rises,’’ The New York Times wrote “Mr. Hemingway writes a most admirable dialogue. It has the terse vigor of Ring Lardner at his best. It suggests the double meanings of Ford Madox Ford's records of talk. Mr. Hemingway makes his characters say one thing, convey still another, and when a whole passage of talk has been given, the reader finds himself the richer by a totally unexpected mood, a mood often enough of outrageous familiarity with obscure heartbreaks.” “No amount of analysis,” the Times went on to write, “can convey the quality of "The Sun Also Rises." It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. “

By the time he had written “For Whom the Bell Tolls’’ in 1940, Hemingway was considered one of the greatest novelists in American literature if not the world.  In their review "For Whom the Bell Tolls," J. Donald Adams, editor of The New York Times Book Review wrote: “This is the best book Ernest Hemingway has written, the fullest, the deepest, the truest. It will I think, be one of the major novels in American literature.” Adams summed up his review of For Whom the Bell Tolls by writing: “This is the work of a mature artist, of a mature mind.”

Ernest Hemingway in Kenya in 1952

Photo Credit:Earl Theisen / Getty

***

Before the publication of “The Old Man and Sea” in 1952, Hemingway spent a great deal of time stowed away in Finca Vigia, Cuba, where he lived from 1939 until 1960. “The Old Man and the Sea” was a novella about a Cuban fisherman and his battles with a giant marlin.

It was a smash success, earning Hemingway a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the following year, a Nobel Prize in literature in 1954.

In the New York Times review of  "The Old Man and the Sea" on August 28, 1952, Orville Prescott, the primary book reviewer for the New York Times , wrote: “The Old Man and the Sea" is fresh and healthy and the old man's ordeal is moving.”

“But good as "The Old Man and the Sea" is,” Prescott wrote, “it is good only in a limited way. The fisherman is not a well-characterized individual. He is a symbol of an attitude toward life. He often thinks and talks poetically and symbolically and so artificially.”

 After suffering from near fatal airplane crashes in Africa, in 1954, Hemingway’s health plummeted. He began suffering from severe depression, landing him in the hospital, where he underwent electroshock treatments.

Much like his father in 1928, the celebrated American novelist committed suicide on July 2, 1961 with one of his shotguns at his home in in Ketchum, Idaho. He was 61.

Whether Hemingway is still considered a major force in American literature, the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary will undoubtedly answer that question over the next few nights.

Charles Scribner Jr., the longtime head of the Charles Scribner's Sons book publishing company said in a 1982 lecture that “Hemingway’s books were the “foundation stones’’ of the firm’s publishing reputation.”

NOTE: Vern Kale, Associate Editor of The Hemingway Letters Project welcomes viewers of the documentary to the watch party and discussion on April 10, hosted by the Hemingway Society.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

April 3, 2021

The Diary of Anne Frank: 69 Years after the New York Times Book Review

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank, a gifted Jewish writer and diarist, never survived the Holocaust.

***

For those who love books and reading, you might be interested to know that the New York Times Book Review section celebrates its 125^th anniversary this year.

About 90 % of the books on my reading list are books I added after reading the Times Sunday Review of Books.

When did it all begin?

On October 10, 1896, the Times book review section was officially launched. It was originally published in the Saturday Review of Books and Art, based on the prevailing opinion that books should be treated as news. In 1911, it was moved to Sunday.

It wasn’t until August 9, 1942 that the Book Review section added a “Best Seller’s List.”

So, here we are, well into the 21^st century and I wondered which books, reviewed by the New York Times, have weathered the test of time and are still relevant?

There are so many books that are so influential and are as relevant today as when they were first published.

One of the first books that sprang to mind was “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank.

Jeffrey Shandler, professor in the department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University thinks that “without a doubt Anne Frank's diary is one of the most influential books of the 20th century, in part because it has become one of the most widely read books of any kind, translated into dozens of languages and published in many millions of copies since it first appeared in Dutch in 1947.”

“Those who read the whole diary,” Shandler explained, “can see that it is a more complex text than the most familiar phrases that have been plucked from it. The diary voices anxieties as well as hopes about the dire situation Anne and her fellow Jews were facing and also dwells on Anne's coming of age under extraordinary circumstances” For this reason, Shandler said, “it has been recognized as an important text of adolescent female writing.”

Anneliese Marie Frank, a girl of Jewish heritage, was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929. Her childhood took a drastic turn when she was about four years old.

In 1933, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis assumed power, Anne Frank, along with her elder sister, Margot, and their parents, Otto and Edith Frank, fled to Amsterdam. But when Nazi tanks stormed into the Netherlands on May 10, 1940 and cruel anti-Jewish decrees were introduced, the Franks took refuge in Otto Frank’s office building. The Franks and four other Jews hid in a “secret annex,” (at Prinsengracht 263) which was a group of rooms at the top and back of a building that served as a warehouse and office for Frank’s Dutch-owned business. Otto Frank ran a pectin business. Pectin is a key ingredient for making jams, jellies, and other preserves.

During the day they had to be quiet, but later in the evening, they were free to roam around.

On her 13^th birthday, Anne Frank was presented with a red-checkered diary by her father, which she affectionately called “Kitty,” her imaginary friend. Anne would write in the diary from July 5, 1942 until August 1, 1944. Three days later, the family was captured by the Nazis and sent to Westerbork, a transit camp in Drente, in the north of Holland. Less than a month later, they were deported to Auschwitz, the primary Nazi death camp in Poland. Less than two months later, Anne (15 years old) and her sister Margot (18 years old) were taken to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany. There, emaciated and malnourished, they died from typhus. Historians estimate Anne and her sister died sometime in the spring of 1945. A mere 6-7% of Jewish children survived the Holocaust, compared with 33% among adults. Margot and Anne Frank were among the 6 million Jewish people and 1.5 million children murdered by Nazis.

Of the eight people that hid in the ‘’secret annex,’’ Otto Frank was the only one who survived. He was one of about 7,500 liberated from Auschwitz, out of more than one million.

One of the few remaining relics of his family was his daughter Anne’s diary, which was given to him by Miep Gies, one of the helpers in the annex who helped hide eight individuals from the Nazis, including Otto Frank and his family. Gies had kept the diary in a desk drawer.

After removing some highly personal and embarrassing passages, Otto Frank sought out a publisher for the diary, On June 25, 1947, Anne Frank's Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex) was published in Dutch in a small edition of 3,036 copies.

After some modest success, Otto Frank successfully signed deals with publishers in West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany) and in France. Frank's Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex) was published in both German and French in 1950. The book wasn’t a best seller, but it did sell a respectable 4,600 first edition copies.

The real game changer for Anne Frank’s diary didn’t come until 1952, when the diary was published in English as “The Diary of a Young Girl.”

American novelist Meyer Levin wrote a review of the book on the cover of the New York Times Book Review section on June 15, 1952.  After the review, sales of Anne Frank’s Diary exploded. A second print run of 15,000 copies was issued, followed by a third of 45,000 copies. It wasn’t long before, millions had read “The Diary of Young Girl.”

In the review, Levin wrote: “her book is not a classic to be left on the library shelf. It is a warm and stirring confession, to be read over and over for insight and enjoyment.”

Describing the optimistic view Anne Frank held of the human race despite the torment and harsh conditions they were living under, Meyer went on to write “There is anguish in the thought of how much creative power, how much sheer beauty of living, was cut off through genocide. But through her diary Anne goes on living. This wise and wonderful young girl brings back a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit.”

Most surprising to any who read Meyer’s book review, is the understanding of how stylish Anne Frank’s writing was at such a tender age. “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, If I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

And as if to portend her imminent death, Anne wrote: “I want to go on living even after my death.” …. “I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.”

The central message Anne Frank wanted to communicate to all of us was “in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

F.K Schoeman, Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies and director of the Jewish Studies program at the University of South Carolina, describing the unconscionable hate and discrimination that existed in Anne Frank’s lifetime, says, “we are implicitly asked by her diary to be aware of what it means to live in a racist, hateful, antisemitic, misogynistic, unjust world for the victims of these wrong ideals.” “The "lesson," so to speak, of The Diary,” Schoeman continued. “lies beyond the last page of the diary: the fact that when we let democracy and justice slip through our fingers, an innocent 15-year-old girl (and 1.5 million more children like her) can be tortured and murdered while the world looks on without doing anything to help.” 

“The Diary of a Young Girl” became so popular and so widely read after Meyer Levin’s book review, that a play about Anne Frank was written by the husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which opened on Broadway at the Cort Theater on October 5,1955 and continued through June 22, 1957, after 717 performances.

It was a smash success, winning a string of Tony awards, including Best Play, and Best Director (Garson Kanin). The play additionally received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, along with a 1956 New York Drama Critics Circle award for Best Play.

The play was then adapted for a motion picture, which premiered in 1959. The film didn’t match the blockbuster success of the Broadway play, but it did earn Hollywood actress Shelley Winters an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. “The Diary of Anne Frank” also took home Oscars for Best Cinematography (Black-and-White), and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (Black-and-White).

Since Levin’s book review, along with the Broadway and film productions, the diary has been translated into some 70 languages and circulated in an estimated 30 million copies. 

Today, there is a cottage industry of tributes to Anne Frank and her diary, which includes: other films and television programs, ballets, operas, musical productions, paintings, drawings, sculpture, popular books, postage stamps, commemorative coins, videotapes, CD-ROMS, and mountains more.

A sliding bookcase in the "secret annex" that concealed the entrance to the hiding place at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam

Photo Source: Anne Frank House, Westermarkt 20, 1016 DK Amsterdam

***

In 1957, the house that Anne Frank and her family hid in (in the center of Amsterdam) was on the brink of being destroyed. But since there was so much fascination with Anne Frank, the house was preserved (with the “secret annex” intact) and opened as a museum on May 3, 1960.

In 2019, 1.3 million visitors paid a visit to the Anne Frank House, about 80,000 more than in 2018 and 40,000 more than in 2017 when the museum was renovated. According to a museum spokesperson, the number of visitors in 2020 was limited to 396,779, due to the COVID pandemic.

Asked whether the Diary of Anne Frank with its universal message of “courage” and “hope” in the face of danger still resonates today, Sara Sewell, Professor of History at Virginia Wesleyan University, thinks that the “diary had a tremendous impact on Holocaust Studies across the globe, particularly a generation or two ago. As the history of the Holocaust entered the US classroom, it was largely through Anne Frank, as she made this history accessible to millions of students who were also teenagers.”

As much as she praises Anne Frank’s diary for having such a profound impact on understanding the Holocaust, Sewell does point out a critical weakness of the Diary. The problem of “learning about the Holocaust through this text,” Sewell cautions, “is that it ends just as she began the most horrific phase of her persecution.” “In other words,” Sewell explained, “what people most need to know about the Holocaust (death camps and survival, death in camps) is not discussed, and therefore, readers have a skewed view of the Holocaust.”

It is rare, indeed, when a book review propels a book to such towering heights, but there’s no mistaking that Meyer Levin’s New York Times book review, written almost 70 years ago, helped immeasurably in making Anne Frank a household name, both here in the United States and around the globe.

 ---Bill Lucey

March 21, 2021

[email protected]

Digitizing the Vatican Library Brings the Past Back to Life

Now that we are well into the 21^st century, have medieval social historians, like Joëlle Rollo-Koster from the University of Rhode Island, faded into the thin night air and lost their relevance?

Hardly!

Turns out, Rollo-Koster is more relevant than ever. With the COVID-19 pandemic gripping the world (deaths having soared past the two million mark worldwide), many are seeking out her knowledge and expertise to learn how COVID compares with the Black Death of the 14^th century. About 25 million people are estimated to have died in Europe from the plague between 1347 and 1351.

But thanks largely to the digitization of documents from the Vatican Archives, mostly on CD-ROMs, researchers like Rollo-Koster are able to search 14^th century manuscripts to see how the word, “plague,” for example, was used, before, during (1348) and after the Black Death.  

Thanks to the magic of digitization (including advanced key word functions), Rollo-Koster didn’t have to plow through 500,000 documents (an impossible task) and was able to narrow her search down to a manageable 300 entries to see how the word was used.

Rollo-Koster discovered the word, “scourge’’ was used to describe heretics or bad rulers. It wasn’t until after Black Death that scourge was used to describe the disease. If she hadn’t been able to access the Vatican Archives, such precise information would have never been found.

The digitization of documents from the Vatican Library and Vatican Archives is still far from being completed, but even at this early stage, it has been an incredible boon for researchers. The Avignon registrars from the Avignon papacy (1309 to 1376), for example, which totals about 500,000 documents, all are digitized.

Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), opened the Vatican Archives to historians in 1883. 

Anthony Grafton, an American historian of early modern Europe at Princeton University and author of “Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture,” tells me that “DigiVatLab (Digital Vatican Library) during the last year, “has enabled scholars all over the world to continue to make discoveries and publish them, even when the library had to close (due to COVID), and it will continue to provide that service as normal conditions resume.”

Prior to DigiVatLab, Grafton said, scholars would have to journey to Rome on a sabbatical or during the interval between Commencement and the annual closing of the library.

Daniel Gallagher, a lecturer of Latin in the Department of Classics at Cornell University, says the digitization has helped expand accessibility to a wider group of scholars, especially those unable to make the trek to Rome.  Gallagher said “there are many scholars of Chinese history who have the expertise and access to corresponding sources outside the Vatican collection who can shed light on what is in the connection related to the Church’s activity in China.” Exciting stuff, Gallagher thinks.  “Correspondence between the missionary Jesuits and Franciscans in China and the Holy See reveals much about the culture and religion the missionaries were encountering and the means they used to communicate the Christian message to the natives they encountered. “

Once you consider how much rare material is actually housed inside the Vatican Library, you have a greater appreciation why it will take quite some time to digitize the entire collection.

It’s literally unfathomable to think that the library preserves 80,000 manuscripts of late-antique, medieval, Byzantine, and Renaissance provenance, in dozens of languages, from Aramaic to Old Church Slavonic just for starters. Also, at the Vatican Library, there are 60,00 or more of western manuscripts, 8,000 books printed before 1500, along with a vast collection of nonwestern books and manuscripts, treasures of humanity. It houses two million printed books. In fact, if you placed the books end to end in the Vatican Library it would measure 31 miles.  Add to this: a 4th-century Bible, the world's oldest, as well as copies of St Peter's letters and the gospels of Luke and John, dating from the 3rd century and written in Greek on papyrus.

Of particular interest to many is a 1493-book about Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World and 11 or 12 love letters of King Henry VIII to his alluring mistress, Anne Boleyn, which includes a hand drawn heart at the bottom of the page by the smitten English king. Henry’s love letters were actually stolen by a Vatican spy to build a case against his annulment request from Catherine of Aragon. A 1,600-year-old manuscript, displaying Virgil's poems once studied by Raphael can be found at the Library as well, though that manuscript is largely off-limits even to the most credentialed scholars.

Believe it or not, prior to the 17^th century, the Vatican lent out its holdings to the general public. Patrons would often check out books with the chain still on them as a reminder they belong to the library. The Vatican Library, as you might imagine, back then, maintained a primitive circulation system (simple notebooks, registrars). Still, according to Anthony Grafton, “librarians from Platina [Italian Renaissance Humanist] on swore solemn oaths to preserve and account for every book in their care.”

Professor Joëlle Rollo-Koster

Photo by Michael Salerno Photography

***

To get a sense of a typical day for a scholar in the Vatican Library or Vatican Archives in the 21^st century, Professor Joëlle Rollo-Koster, after rushing home to feed her dog on a pleasant Kingston, Rhode Island afternoon, took some time with me over the phone to discuss her experiences researching at the Vatican Library, mostly the Vatican Archives.

Rollo-Koster first explained to me that the Vatican Library is used primarily by literary scholars, the Vatican Archives, on the other hand, are mainly used by historians, especially social historians such as herself.

The criteria for gaining access to the library or archives is fairly straightforward: you need to be a researcher, historian, or scholar and need a letter of introduction. If you write a book using sources from the Archives, you need to give the book to the Library/Archives.

You can’t enter the library until you stopped by the Prefect or Secretary, were they’ll check your credentials, letter of introduction, and passport. At that point, they’ll issue you a pass which records exactly when you entered the Library.  All your personal items, moreover, are kept in a locker room. Personal items are strictly forbidden inside the Library or Archives.

Well into the 1980s, women who entered the Vatican Library or Archives had to be dressed in a long skirt. Pants worn by females were forbidden. The dress code imposed on women was relaxed sometime in the 1990s. Patrons to the Library aren’t allowed to make Xerox copies themselves. They need to fill out a form and present it to a library employee, which is then sent to the Prefect for approval.

Rollo-Koster said her area of study requires her to examine documents from the 1300s. To my surprise, Rollo-Koster said many of the documents are gorgeous, in tip-top shape, others are old and decrepit. Most librarians will then display the documents on a table underneath a book stand.

If patrons get hungry at the Library, they’re allowed to exit in the courtyard between the Archives and the Library. Many of the scholars will smoke cigarettes and talk with others about their projects. They also have access to a coffee shop and small cafeteria. “You have some of the best food in Rome here,” Rollo-Koster said.  If you arrive early enough, you can find a table. Otherwise, you just eat outside.

The French born Rollo-Koster (born and raised in Toulon) tells me the biggest satisfaction she gets through researching and writing about the 14^th century, is she is able to look at records of the lesser-known characters and bring their history to life.  “For hundreds of years,” Rollo-Koster continued, “no one paid attention, no one was interested in social history. They were interested in the history of the popes and the kings. The fact that those documents have been preserved, gives me a gate of entry. Those little guys who have disappeared from history, can have their stories retold, thanks to the Archives. “

Another major point that Rollo-Koster stressed to me is that contrary to popular belief, the 14^th century documents found at the Vatican Library and Archives are not dry, dead documents. “Documents can really bring life” “My aim” Rollo-Koster said, “is to bring back to life, all those people who have disappeared from history. The Vatican Archives gives me access to those people.”

So, exactly when did the Vatican Library and Archives collect such a staggering amount of information?

Most historians point to the well-read Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455), beginning in 1451, who re-established Rome as an academic center of worldwide stature, by building a modest library of over 1,200 volumes, including his personal collection of Greek and Roman classics and a series of texts brought from Constantinople. Nicholas wanted to establish not only a collection of books, but an institution. Nicholas additionally wanted to create a library at St Peter’s for general use by the Roman Court.

Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484) is credited with propelling the Vatican Library into an institution with the installation of books in a custom-built and beautifully decorated suite of rooms with gorgeous paintings.

A lesser-known fact about the growth of the Vatican Library is many from the Vatican were dispatched to ransack private and institutional libraries across Europe, searching in monasteries, above all for rare texts that had been copied and studied in antiquity and the early Middle Ages; documents, in other words that had fallen out of fashion. Leading erudite copyists were employed by the Vatican to translate into Latin the works of Greek poets, philosophers, and historians, many of which had been unknown in the West since ancient times.

Others, such as historian and Italian humanist Furvio Orsini, sold his books to the Vatican in exchange for a pension. The books remained in his possession until his death.

By Sixtus’s death in 1484, the Vatican Library housed more than 3,600 manuscripts. The concept of a central archive of the Holy See didn’t develop until Pope Paul V (1605-1621). In 1783, all remaining material in Avignon was brought to Rome; and in 1798 the archives of Castel Sant'Angelo (papal residence, fortress) were transferred to the apostolic palace, the official residence of the pope.

Today, the library now includes a rich history of science, learning, and the arts, on par with any institution in the world.  This we have Pope Nicholas V to thank for rejecting the common belief in the 15th century that Renaissance humanism represented a potential threat to the Church and its teachings.  Nicholas, undoubtedly going against the grain, encouraged the study of the pagan classics. 

Diana Walsh Pasulka, Professor of Catholic Studies at University of North Carolina Wilmington, underscores how preserving and learning from history is so critical to the continuation of civil society. Pasulka, for example, tells me that she has “uncovered primary sources that enrich our understanding of not only European history, but also data that helps contemporary industries, such as the space industry and others.” “The digitization of these materials,” Pasulka continued “is one of the most important endeavors that has been undertaken to preserve knowledge of historical records that are fragile and in danger of being lost forever.”

Most importantly, the digitization of the Vatican Library and Archives means it is joining the ranks of other prominent institutions who have digitized their archives, such as the British Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cambridge University, and the Library of Congress.

--Bill Lucey

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February 28, 2021

 

Charles Dickens Revisited: 150 Years Later

Portrait Of Charles Dickens is a painting by William Powell Frith

***

Have you wondered how our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens, is holding up after all these years?

2020 marked the 150^th year of his death. The celebrated Victorian novelist died on June 9, 1870 after suffering a brain aneurysm. He was 58, leaving his final novel, Edwin Drood unfinished.

The Dickens canon includes: 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles. Dickens also lectured and performed readings extensively (including the United States), while championing children's rights, education, penal reform, legal reform, sanitation, and public health.

As the conventions of society advance in the 21^st century, some iconic historical figures once widely admired have fallen into disgrace to the point of having their memorials and statutes removed or destroyed for not clinging to 21^st century progressive thinking in previous centuries.

In the United States, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and third U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson; along with the original liberal lion, Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, have been scorned for their ownership of slaves.

Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890-1896, Cecil Rhodes is despised for his imperialism and colonization; and may have paved the way for Apartheid in South Africa. In his will, he left sizeable fortunes to Oxford University to establish the Rhodes scholarships to provide places at Oxford for students from the United States, the British colonies, and Germany. Former president Bill Clinton, United States Ambassador Susan Rice, and U.S. Senator Cory Booker, among others, were recipients of Rhodes benevolence.

And in June of this year, the British Bulldog, Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square in London was sprayed over for a couple of days with the phrase “Churchill was a racist.” Many argue Churchill was unsympathetic to Blacks and their struggles for equality. He was also known to have expressed some grotesque racial epithets about not only Blacks, but people from India.

So, as one of the finest English novelists in British literature is being lionized and honored 150 years after his death, I wondered if there are any shocking occurrences of Dickens past that were swept under the rug and only recently have come to light?

Robert L. Patten, Professor (Emeritus) of Humanities and English at Rice University, observed that “Dickens could be vicious, breaking with friends, colleagues, and some of his children—he told one son that it would have been better if his brother had never lived.” “There were times,’’ Patten explained, “especially after the first Indian uprising and the massacre at Cawnpore, when he could be deeply, terribly racist. But his efforts, in periodicals as well as fictions, in speeches as well as philanthropy, to help the poor, the suffering, the abused, the uneducated, to better lives, was massive, sustained, and immensely influential.”

Carolyn Oulton, Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers at Canterbury Christ Church University (Canterbury, Kent, England), said that “people feel disappointed by his [Dicken's] personal failings in ways that they wouldn't in relation to other writers. They also make excuses for him - the endless speculation about whether Ellen Ternan was really his mistress - in ways that would be unthinkable and possibly unnecessary with regard to his contemporaries.”

Dickens marriage to Catherine Hogarth (April, 1836) became irrevocably disrupted when Ellen Ternan, an 18-year-old actress, met Dickens in August, 1857, when he was 45. She eventually became the novelist’s mistress. Catherine and Charles had 10 children together; Catherine also suffered two miscarriages. At the urging of her mother, Catherine Hogarth left Dickens in 1858 as the two of them drifted apart and increasingly became incompatible. Their separation was highly publicized and splashed across British newspapers.

Oulton points out that Dickens was capable of cruelty, but also great loyalty. “He worked relentlessly to make money for relations who had very little claim on him but also cast people off easily if they offended him. He made some dreadful comments about women (most Victorians did), but he also showed them a lot of professional respect. “

In commemorating 150 years since Charles Dickens death, Professor Oulton has mapped the different places the English novelist travelled through London, including the places where he wrote certain novels, such as David Copperfield and Great Expectations.

One critical chapter of Dickens life that remains untarnished 150 years after his death, was his vigorous agitation for improvements in the quality of life for the poor and less fortunate.

He experienced poverty at a young age. His family’s financial plight forced them to move to a poor era of London, Camden Town. At age 12, with his father experiencing mounting debts, the young Dickens was plucked from school and forced to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, a factory which specialized in “blacking,’’ or shoe polish.

 ‘Please sir, may I have some more?’ James Mahoney’s illustration for chapter one of Dickens’s ‘Adventures of Oliver Twist.’ (Image: Public domain)

***

As he progressed into adulthood and began his writing career, Dickens walked his talk.

The trials and tribulations of his impoverished childhood found its voice in many of his novels, including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, and David Copperfield. Oliver Twist, Dickens second novel, is especially renowned for illustrating the harsh life and squalor of the slums of an orphan (Oliver Twist) trying to make his way through the mean streets of London.

Dickens additionally exposed the punishing brutality at an English boys’ school in Nicholas Nickleby (published in 1838). His father served time for debt at the Marshalesa Prison. The humiliation of a debtor’s prison found expression in Little Dorrit.

Remarkably, 150 years after his death, the legacy of Charles Dickens still lives on in the 21^st century.

To underscore Dickens staying power in the 21^st century, Robert L. Patten informed me that on the 200th anniversary of his birth, in 2012, “worldwide celebrations organized by the British Council and the Charles Dickens Museum reached an audience of over 60 million. More new copies of A Christmas Carol were sold that year in Italy than in the United Kingdom.”

Professor Patten has written extensively on Dickens, including authoring the books: "Charles Dickens and His Publishers," and "Charles Dickens and 'Boz': The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author."

George H. Ford, Professor of English at the University of Rochester, once wrote that “since the 1950s, Dickens reputation has risen to great heights, so high that recently there have been more written him each year than about any other author in the English language except Shakespeare.”

What’s more, in any movie database you’ll find at least fifty adaptations based on the books written by Charles Dickens.

Malcolm Andrews, Emeritus Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies in the School of English at the University of Kent (Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom), informs me that “the Dickens Fellowship (founded in 1902), to which I belong and whose journal I edit) has branches all over the world.” “Not surprising,’’ Andrew said, “since he himself was/is an inspiration for fellowship: so much of his work was a mission to bring people together, to dissolve class divisions, to reunite families (hence his special concentration on Christmas), and to rejuvenate people's imaginations. On the latter note, one of my favorite quotations of his is this -- about his hoped-for legacy:”

“'I hope I have done my part to make the rising generation "more childish," in rendering them a little more imaginative, a little more gentle, and a little less conceited and hard, than they would have been without me. I desire to do nothing better.”

 As much as the literature of Dickens is still highly revered, Charlie Tyson PhD student in English at Harvard University, cautions, however, that Dickens novels have lost a little steam in college classrooms, mostly because his novels run so long, as many as 800 pages in some cases.

“Teachers,” Tyson tells me, “usually select Hard Times (well worth reading, but not Dickens's best) or Great Expectations. Last year I taught a seminar on "The Queer Bildungsroman" (a Bildungsroman is a coming-of-age novel) in which we read David Copperfield in full; my students loved it, but spending 25% of our semester on a single novel was something of a risk.”

Tyson additionally thinks writers like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, among the Victorian novelists, packs more of a philosophical punch and exhibit more artistic control than Dickens. Still, Tyson contends Dickens “remains one of the best entry points into the classic phase of the English novel. He is especially good to read when you are a child, because he specializes in injustices and cruelties administered to children.”

Thankfully, Charles Dickens has held up reasonably well 150 years after his death. He’s still taught widely in college classrooms both in the United and Britain. His quotes from a Christmas Carol are still widely invoked around the holidays, especially “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.”

And his character flaws are largely dismissed as the antiquated spirit of the age in Victorian society.

Further, during a time when vast amounts of people are experiencing job losses, mounting debt, and financial hardship since COVID-19 ruthlessly struck the world, Dickens novels about suffering, stresses of the less fortunate, while attacking privilege, snobbery, and injustice--rings as true today as it did in the 19^th century.

One of the most tender lines about Dickens and his legacy came from an 1870 New York Times obituary of the English writer and social critic.”

“It is the accidents of life which decide the fate of men. In the lonely places of the earth his books have been unfailing solace to many an exile, and they have shed hope and light in many a sick room, and comforted a many an afflicted heart.”

--Bill Lucey

November 15, 2020

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