Looking forward

The New York Times celebrates 160 years in 2011 and congrats on that accomplishment.

When the paper celebrated its 80th in 1931, the editors asked a lot of famous people to predict what the world would be like in another 80 years.  Most of those well-known names are forgotten now – no one predicted that  - although we do remember Henry Ford and William Mayo.

NYT newsroom, 1942. Photo by Marjorie Collins

But others, like Willis Whitney, Arthur Keith, Michael Pupin and William Ogburn, have all become footnotes.  Pupin, an inventor and academician, was the most off-base in his conviction that wealth would be more equally distributed in 2011.  Keith, a Scottish anatomist, shrewdly anticipated that medicine would become overspecialized.

William Ogburn, however, gets my vote for Nostradamus of his time.  Ogburn was a sociologist, a professor at Columbia University, president of the American Sociological Society and the American Statistical Association. And he had this to say about the future:

Technological progress, with its exponential law of increase, holds the key to the future. Labor displacement will proceed even to automatic factories. The magic of remote control will be commonplace… The communication and transportation inventions will smooth out regional differences and level us in some respects to uniformity. But the heterogeneity of material culture will mean specialists and languages that only specialists can understand. The countryside will be transformed by technology and farmers will be more like city folk…

-The New York Times, September 13, 1931.

Ogburn, who also predicted that government would grow,was really paying attention.

William Ogburn looking ahead.

He’d invented the concept of ‘cultural lag’ in 1922 – the idea that there is a delay between a new technology and its incorporation into the culture.  During that delay, the technology itself is changed to some degree by the society that adopts it.

Ogburn wasn’t exactly psychic – born in 1886, he had already seen his world transformed by the car, the electric light, the telephone and radio.  But he was certainly smart enough to extrapolate from those changes to a future that was much more of the same.  (By the time he died in 1959, he had also lived through color movies and television, chemical and mechanical agriculture, the atomic bomb and the start of the space race.)

Henry Ford, btw, bailed on the question, saying no one could really predict the future.  But Ogburn gave it a shot and was impressively accurate.  So, who is ready to do the same for 2091?

A random act of culture

Now we wind down our mini-Advent week with a kind of flash mob, but without the dancing.  I love the way people always stop, look puzzled and confused and then begin to smile. Back on the 31st with some predictions for the new year. . .

Fiat lux

For more than thirty years after the acceptance of the decorated tree at Christmas, many of them were lightless.  It was all very well if you had a castle with big rooms, high ceilings and servants to keep on eye on things, but the average family with children often avoided adding candles to the tree altogether.

Then, in 1882, Edward H. Johnson had a set of red, white and blue lights especially made for his Christmas tree.  Conveniently, Johnson lived in one of the few parts of New York City that had electricity.  He was, after all, a partner of Thomas Edison’s and vice-president of Edison Electric.

The night his tree was lit for the first time, however, none of the New York press showed up for what really was a historic event.  Apparently journalists at the time were tired of ballyhooing yet another of Edison’s breakthroughs. A reporter from Detroit wrote about it, however, and described it as ‘a superb exhibition.’

President Grover Cleveland proudly displayed the first electrically lit White House tree in 1895, but lights didn’t hit the home market until just after WWI.  That’s when Albert Sadacca, reading about a bad tree-candle fire in New York City in 1917, decided electric lights had to be made available.  Using materials from his parents’ small manufacturing business he came up with a workable string of lights. He and his brothers founded NOMA and while sales didn’t really pick up until the 20s, they eventually took off.  NOMA was the biggest seller of tree lights until the 1960s.

But before icicle lights, twinkling lights, LED lights, this is what it looked like (Caution – don’t try this if you don’t live in Denmark):

In the mail

Even before A Christmas Carol and a Christmas tree, the first Christmas card appeared in London.  Sir Henry Cole,  a man who had a finger in any number of pies, had helped introduce the Penny Post in 1840 and two years later he decided Christmas cards might help stir up a little business.

Sir Henry Cole, ca. 1880.

He commissioned a well-known artist – John Callcott Horsley – to design a card, had two thousand printed up and found that sales were brisk in spite of the price: a shilling apiece.  Horsley’s first design, controversial even at the time because it showed a child drinking wine, was auctioned at Christie’s in 2001 for more than $36,000.

People collect Christmas cards – Princess Mary did and then donated her collection to the British Museum.  The most collectible apparently come from the so-called golden age of printing – between the 1840s and the 1890s. An original Horsely card sells for about $12,000.

In 1987, the average household received about 30 Christmas cards, but by 2004 that number was down to 20.  For collectors, the decline in the sending of Christmas cards, part of the general decline in snail mail, is probably a mixed blessing – less to collect, but what there is will be more valuable.

And speaking of the golden age of printing, the quite stunning image of Sir Henry Cole is called a woodburytype, a process invented by Walter Woodbury in 1866.  A tedious process involving a gelatin relief that results in an intaglio print, it was the very best way of reproducing photographs since it preserved middle tone values.  I don’t know why it is no longer used, but if you read the description you will probably leap to the conclusion that it is prohibitively labor intensive.  Here, btw, is the famous Horsely:

O Tannenbaum

On December 20, 2007, Queen Elizabeth II, aged 81 years and 8 months, became the oldest living monarch in English history.  She dethroned – so to speak – the previous record holder, Queen Victoria, who lived to be 81 years, 7 months and 29 days.

Victoria and Albert with their nine children.

But Elizabeth, who has reigned for 58 years and 316 days, has a bit to go to break Victoria’s record of reigning for 62 years and six months.

The Royals modified for the American market.

She will also have to do something spectacular to match Queen Victoria’s contribution to popular culture.  Victoria and Albert pretty much created the modern middle-class Christmas.  If Dickens taught everyone how to behave at Christmas, then the Royal Family demonstrated what it should look like.

Christmas trees had come to England a generation before, when George III married Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz – Victoria had seen them at the palace.  But they were the province of aristocrats and royalty.  The first Christmas tree in France, for instance, was put up by the Duchesse d’Orleans.

In 1848, the Illustrated London News ran a woodcut showing the royals at Windsor Castle with their Christmas tree.  It was wildly popular (royals have always been good for circulation) and suddenly, the upwardly-mobile middle class began celebrating with a tree.

Two years later, Godey’s Lady’s Book copied the image, removing Albert’s mustache and Victoria’s tiara so the couple looked like Americans.  GLB was the Good Housekeeping of its time.  By 1870, pretty much everybody in the US celebrated with a tree.

These days the Queen's tree is delightfully underwhelming.

The practice of putting up a tree at Christmas has been traced to Estonia. In the 15th century, the Brotherhood of the Black Heads, a Tallinn guild of unmarried merchants, was apparently in the habit of putting up a tree in the town square and on the big day, dancing around it with ‘a flock of maidens’ and then setting it on fire.  Good times. The practice caught on with other guilds and in Bremen in the 16th century, guilds decked a tree with dates, nuts, fruit and pretzels, and allowed their children to gather the treats on Christmas day.

The crazy thing is,  if you are a regular viewer of ‘The Amazing Race,’ you might actually have seen the House of the Brotherhood of the Black Heads two seasons ago – teams were wandering around it with candelabra looking for manuscript pages.  Really, everything is connected.

A Christmas Carol

This is the day that the modern celebration of Christmas began.

Charles Dickens

Okay, a bit of an overstatement perhaps, but the day that A Christmas Carol was published in 1843 was a key part of the rapid convergence of events that produced the holiday as celebrated in most of Western Europe and the US.

Charles Dickens created the first secular, family-centered, gift-giving, charitable-minded version of Christmas to become popular on a large scale. Another day we will delve into the appearance of Christmas trees, cards, stockings, decorations and the significance of Godey’s Lady’s Book, but even without all the trimmings, Dickens’ little story would still be pivotal.

The first edition of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve.  It sold well into the new year and by the following Christmas was in its seventh edition. In fact, in 157 years, it has never been out of print, although it did not make Dickens rich.

Basil Rathbone

It was slow to catch on in the States, but 20 years later, the New York Times joined the British press in praising it.  Many critics spoke of how Dickens had brought back the traditional Christmas, but in fact a really traditional holiday involved much church attendance and almost no gift-giving.

A Christmas Carol created its own tradition.  It has been presented innumerable times on stage, in film, on television,  on radio and been recorded and provided a vehicle for many outstanding actors. There have been animated versions, female Scrooges and even a Barbie version.

Gerald Charles Dickens

On radio the part of Scrooge has been played by Lionel Barrymore, Basil Rathbone, Alec Guinness and Lawrence Olivier.  Movie Scrooges include Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone, Alistair Sim, Patrick Stewart, Albert Finney, George C. Scott and Jim Carrey.  Scrooges on television include John Carradine, Frederic March, Ralph Richardson and – you guessed it - Basil Rathbone. Twice.

Patrick Stewart does a one-man stage version, Ronald Colman did a recording and Anthony Newley starred in a Broadway musical version.  For pure authenticity, however, no one can hold a candle to Gerald Charles Dickens, reading the story aloud just as his great-great grandfather used to.

Yesterday, we saw three excellent Scrooges: Reginald Owen in 1938, Alistair Sim in 1951 and Patrick Stewart in 1999.  You can even find a complete 1935 version with Seymour Hicks on YouTube.  Everyone has a favorite Scrooge.  This is mine:

A Christmas Carol, part II

Big day tomorrow – here are the trailers:

To be continued. . .

Public Proclamation No. 21

On December 17, 1944, the US government issued Public Proclamation No. 21: ‘Persons of Japanese Ancestry Exemption From Exclusion Orders, 10 Fed.Reg. 53.’

For the more than 100,000 Japanese, two-thirds of whom were Japanese-Americans with full American citizenship, the nightmare of internment in ‘relocation’ camps was nearly over.  The new policy went into effect in January, though most of the camps were open through the summer as internees slowly relocated once again – and this time they were on their own.  The government that had torn them from their jobs, homes, communities and hauled them to isolated barracks in ten remote locations declined to do more than give them $25 and a train ticket.

Main street, Manzanar. Photo by Ansel Adams, 1943. LoC PPD

Today, only Manzanar remains.  The center for internees from San Francisco and Los Angeles, Manzanar was a great treeless plain in the Owens Valley.  Most of the area was owned by the city of Los Angeles, which had bought up 80% of the valley from the ranchers and farmers that lived there at the turn of the century.  The city wanted their water, the water that had made the Owens Valley viable.  ’Manzanar,’ after all, meant apple orchard.  But the water was siphoned off by the city and by 1929 Manzanar was abandoned.

Young internee in transit. Photo by Dorothea Lange, 1942. LoC PPD

The War Relocation Agency leased six thousand acres from the city.  The first internees were volunteers who were sent to build the camp.  Ultimately, almost 11,000 people, most of them American citizens, lived at Manzanar.

Two of America’s great photographers – Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange – photographed Manzanar.  Their work can be found in the LoC Prints and Photographs Division.

Something about Jane

Today we celebrate the 235th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth in 1775.

Jane Austen, photo from the JA Society of North America.

To show they care, Amazon is making all her books available for free on Kindle.  Of  course, all her books are already available for free on any number of web sites, including Project Gutenberg.

The Jane Phenomenon is way bigger than her books.  If you google ‘Austen websites,’ you get 277,000 links.  Many are duplicates, but you can join any number of fan sites like this and this and this.

Or you can learn to talk like Jane. dance like Jane, dress like Jane and visit her home. Last year, Jane aficionados met in Bath to see if they could get into the Guinness Book with the largest number of people in Regency dress parading through the streets.  Oh, yes – you can also make a Jane Austen high tea.

Movies and television feed at the Austen trough non-stop.  If you haven’t seen Hollywood’s first stab at Austen, you are fortunate indeed.  Do not make the effort.  Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet is almost but not quite bad enough to be funny – it’s just painful.

What has brought on this Janemania?  What is it about her books and her life that so fascinates 21st century readers?  The Regency, after all, was one of the briefest periods in English history, lasting a mere 8 years technically (1811-1820) or about 40 years, if you measure from late George III (1797) to the accession of Victoria (1837).

Greer Garson as Miss Bennet.

It was a period of royally-sanctioned loose morals, excessive displays of wealth and a shocking disparity between rich and poor.

But it was also a time of great creativity, an enthusiastic  appreciation of the arts and a sense of cultural refinement.  Best of all, fashions were highly flattering for women and much less cumbersome than in the previous century.  All of this seems very appealing to modern fans.

And of course Austen’s books – rightly called literature due to their language and structure – are all really just about getting a husband.  This is a topic that apparently never palls.

Victorian writers were interested in the same topic, though, but haven’t achieved any of the status of Austen.  Anthony Trollope is the quintessential writer of the genre and Hollywood has yet to come calling. Why?

Chawton, where she lived and wrote.

Having encountered Austen long after a thorough study of Trollope, I see a modern streak in her work that the Victorians could never claim.  In both Trollope and Austen, the beautiful, biddable girl with the sweet temper gets the really rich husband, while the bluestocking gets the interesting one.  For both, the ultimate state of happiness is marriage, the plot is all about overcoming obstacles to get to it.

But in Trollope, the main obstacle is invariably money, the great concern of the middle class. That’s who his readers were.  There are innumerable – and lengthy – forays into property, wills, income and economic class-consciousness. In Austen, the obstacles are more likely to be on a personal level, having to do with temperament, sensitivity, even ethics.

That alone frees Jane Austen from her time, keeps her fresh and relevant for us. Now, here’s the Bath Parade:

Settling down

In 1172, Donna Berta di Bernardo, a widow, donated 60 soldi for the construction of a campanile for the cathedral of Pisa.  Sixty soldi was a lot of money – about nine ounces of gold, currently about $10,000.

Her donation bought a lot of large stones from the quarries in the hills behind Pisa, and almost nine hundred years later, most of them are still there.

The campanile got started the next year, but by 1178, as construction reached the third floor, the tower began to sink.  It was sitting on unstable subsoil, a problem no one had foreseen.

Piazza del Duomo, 180. Photo by Patrick Landy (FSU Guy).

So they stopped building the campanile for about a century – Pisa also was busy fighting wars at the time and the upshot was that the soil settled enough for construction to continue.

But the campanile – the leaning tower – never stopped tilting.  So, in the 1970s, a consortium of architects, engineers, mathematicians and construction experts of all kinds met to consider the problem.  They studied it for two decades.  Finally, in January of 1990, the tower was closed to the public and efforts to correct the tower’s subsidence problem began.

In essence, the plan involved removing soil from under the high side – removing it very slowly and carefully – and straightening the tower.

It took eleven years, but on December 15, 2001, the scaffolding was removed and the tower was reopened to the public.  Work, however, went on.  More soil was removed, the surface was cleaned and in 2008 it was announced that not only had the tower been returned to the position it had in 1838, but for the first time ever, it had stopped moving.

It cost Italian taxpayers $27 million, but given its money-making potential, no one objected.  But will the world still flock to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa if there’s no chance of being there for that historic moment when it falls?