If at first…

Gail Borden

Gail Borden introduced the world to condensed milk on this date in 1851.  He was yet another of the inventor/entrepreneurs that defined the Nineteenth Century.  He started out as a surveyor in Mississippi, then became a newspaper publisher in Texas, then invented a meat biscuit to feed soldiers and finally started working on a milk product.

He didn’t actually fail at anything – he got bored with surveying and although his newspaper had a good reputation, it not only didn’t make any money, the Mexican army destroyed it during an invasion of Texas.  His meat biscuit didn’t make any money either, although it won a prize at the exposition in London.

But condensed milk was the answer to everyone’s prayers.  In a world without refrigeration and poor sanitation, the diseases you could get from bad milk were legion, never mind the awful taste.  And Borden, while not vertically integrated, was vertically in control.  The process began on the farm – he set new standards of cleanliness for dairies and made sure they were followed.

The idea of condensed milk actually came from the Shakers, who had a similar process for preserving fruit juices.  Condensed milk, unlike evaporated milk, is simply milk solids with very little liquid and sugar added.  It was originally called sweetened condensed milk.

Borden was soon selling so much condensed milk that he leased his patent to others.  With the advent of the Civil War, the government bought great quantities of the stuff because of its long shelf life and nutritive value.

Gail Borden got rich, the company got huge and in the 1950s started diversifying. They soon owned snack foods, pasta (they once had 30% of the market), chemicals, adhesives (Elmer’s Glue) and so on.  In fact, they got too big not to fail and in the early 90′s went bankrupt and sold off bits.  The milk business went to Mexico’s Grupo Lala, the chemicals went to a new company that included BakeliteAG and snack foods went to Dean Foods.

Grupo Lala US owns Eagle Brand Condensed Milk, pretty much the same kind of stuff in the same kind of can that Gail Borden created a century and a half ago.

He had a girl’s name, btw, because that was his father’s name;  his mother’s name was Philadelphia.

Divine rights

Charles I of England by Antoon van Dyck.

Charles I wasn’t having many good days in 1647, but January 30 turned out to be one of the worst.  The Scottish Army, after collecting ₤400 – part of their back pay – from parliament left him on his own to negotiate with some Scottish MPs.  He wanted Scottish support in exchange for establishing Presbyterianism for three years, or ten, or whatever deal they could get.

But before things were settled, Cromwell’s army seized him, took him back to London and tried him.  He was hanged in 1649, also on January 30.

Frankly, he had it coming.  He’d lied to everyone, betrayed those closest to him, and pretty much treated everyone like dirt.  He had the same arrogant, high-handed ‘divine right of kings’ thing going on as his father, James I, but apparently without the smarts.

Granted, it would have taken a very great brain to deal with everything going on in the early 17th century – Calvinism, the Thirty Years War, the rise of parliament – just a lot of changes economically, religiously, culturally.

But Charles seemed to combine average intelligence with above-average chutzpah – when he married Henrietta Marie of France 1625, he promised Parliament not to lift any of the existing restrictions on Roman Catholics.  At the same time, he secretly promised Henrietta’s brother, Louis XIII, the exact opposite.  And he agreed to support France against Spain, thus drawing England into the European war which Parliament was trying to avoid.

He asked Parliament for money for the war, but they were uncooperative, so he dismissed them after a month and ruled on his own for 11 years.

During that time, he taxed the hell out of everybody and everything.  He resorted to the dreaded Star Chamber proceedings to convict and condemn without trial. Eventually, he called the Parliament back, but it didn’t go well.

Finally, though, it was the Presbyterians that did him in.  His bishops imposed the Book of Common Prayer on the Scottish church, which led to a spontaneous outburst of opposition. The Church of Scotland got rid of the Episcopalian bishops, which Charles considered rebellion.

It’s a very complicated back story – he went to war with Scotland and by the time the English Civil Wars were over, with his own Parliament – but the upshot was that the deal with the Scots fell through and the rest of course is history.

For reasons that elude me, he was canonized by the Church of England, which refers to him as Charles the Martyr.

Mea culpa…and a beggar’s opera

All those fabulous birthdays yesterday?  Well, they are actually today, so my apologies.  (It’s a side-effect of always working a day or two ahead.)  Sorry, Oprah.

Lotte Lenya as Jennie.

But it really was January 29 when The Beggar’s Opera opened in Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theater in London in 1728.  John Gay had written an anti-opera meant to be a satire on the newly popular Italian operas that were all the rage, but he didn’t shrink from mocking the aristocracy and politicians of the time either.

He used old Scottish ballads for the most part, with new satirical verses.

(Gay ultimately wrote a sequel called Polly, which was even more satirical and so offensive to PM Robert Walpole that he had it shut down. So Gay published it instead, making thousands of pounds from it.)

In the event, the play ran for two months, longer than any other play up until that time. A revival in 1920 set a theatrical record with 1,463 performances.

The idea for TBO came from our old friend Jonathan Swift, who had written to Alexander Pope a few years earlier, ”…what think you, of a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores there?”  Their friend John Gay decided it was an excellent idea, but better as a satire.

Two hundred years after, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht used Gay’s story as the basis of The Threepenny Opera, adding new music.  It starred the incomparable Lotte Lenya as Jennie.You can hear Lenya singing the pirate song here.

Gay’s epitaph was written by Pope, but a couplet by Gay himself was added:

Life is a jest, and all things show it,

I thought so once, and now I know it.

* * *

Only known photograph of Poe, ca. 1848.

This is also the day ‘The Raven’ was published in 1845 and became  an overnight hit.  Edgar Allan Poe, then 36, was well-known in literary circles for his criticism and magazine writing, but the poem made him famous.

Poe was the first American writer to attempt to support himself entirely by his writing.  As this is still not generally possible, it is easy to understand why he lived in poverty, drank to excess and died young.

His total profit from the poem that became a classic was the $9 he was paid initially by the New York Evening Mirror when it was published.

Poe’s legacy, of course, is almost immeasurable – from him, we can draw a direct line to Steven King, Caleb Carr and Thomas Harris, through Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle and just about any mystery writer whose work is not a police procedural.

Poe's home in the Bronx, phot by Zoirusha.

He can also boast the greatest number of landmarks of any American writer – no fewer than five sites are labelled Poe historic sites, including a bar in Baltimore where he drank.  His last home was in the Bronx, but he died, aged 40, in a hospital after collapsing in the street while visiting Baltimore.

‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary…’ the rest is here.

A small war

Today marks the beginning of the Finnish Civil War in 1918.

The town of Tampere, after the war.

It was a very short war, but has a long Wikipedia entry due to the fact that poor  Finland was still a pawn in the game between Russia and Germany and there was a lot going on in those countries at the time.  When the Socialists took over Parliament, they were called Reds and had the backing of Lenin.  But four-fifths of the country was controlled by conservatives – the Whites – and they were sustained by Germany.

Essentially, the German army defeated the Reds in less than four months and Finland became a German protectorate.  That was in May.  By November, the Germans had lost WWI and Finland was able to declare its independence.

Socialists went underground or were imprisoned or emigrated.  And that is one reason Fitchburg MA had a vigorous and influential Finnish  workingmen’s party that became very active in the labor struggles of the Twenties.

A famous Finn

Sadly, the little civil war had an enormously deleterious effect on the country.  Besides the 37,000 people killed, 20,000 orphans were created, Finland’s emerging industrial prosperity was dealt a major blow and agriculture was devastated.  Finnish politicians appealed to Herbert Hoover, head of the Committee for the Relief of Belgium and Hoover got the Allies to briefly lift their blockade of the Baltic so that food could be sent in.

It took Finland more than seven years to recover from its four-month war.  Today it is ranked the second most stable country in the world, the seventh most economically competitive and third in the world in graduation rates.  In 2010, Newsweek ranked it first in the world based “on health, economic dynamism, education, political environment and quality of life.”

* * *

OMG – it’s Oprah’s birthday today!  She’s in good company: Thomas Paine, Anton Chekov, Romain Rolland, Frederick Delius, Barney Oldfield, W.C. Fields, Paddy Chayefsky, Adam Clayton Powell, John Raitt, Germaine Greer and Tom Selleck.

Legal limbo

This date in 1926, the USA signed up to participate in the Permanent Court of International Justice, the judicial arm of the League of Nations.

Int'l Court of Justice at the Hague

That didn’t last long, so we signed up again in 1946 with the new International Court of Justice, the judicial arm of the United Nations.

We stuck with that one until 1984, when what is generally called the World Court handed down an opinion that we really didn’t like – the Court found in favor of Nicaragua in the case of Nicaragua v. United States.

The US was in violation of a previous treaty with Nicaragua and so our use of force was illegal under international law.  We owed reparations, said the Court.  So like the grown-ups we are, we took our marbles and went home.

We now participate on a case-by-case basis only.

Oh well, it isn’t like we’re the only ones – the UN itself doesn’t have to abide by court rulings. It’s set up so that any member state on the Security Council can veto a ruling, even when they have agreed to be bound by that ruling in advance.

Great.  And if only this were a singular flaw in the operation of the UN, it wouldn’t be so depressing.  The idea of the United Nations is a spectacularly brilliant one – the kind of civilized thinking that we associate with an advanced species.

But there is some basic weakness in the whole structure that keeps it from being really effective.  Let’s face it – in areas of potentially serious conflict the world is better off sending in George Clooney.

* * *

It’s Mozart’s birthday, so let’s give him a hallelujah chorus (his own) – Cecilia Bartoli is a little scary here, but she really works it, so start your day with some jubilation…

Those were the days

Angela Davis back in the day.

Angela Davis turns 66 today.

It seems like only yesterday that she was running for vice-president on the the Communist Party ticket and speaking to enthusiastic crowds in Havana.  And few ’60s activists can say both John Lennon and Mick Jagger have written songs about them.

Ronald Reagan got her fired from her first teaching job at UCLA because she was a communist, but she took it to court and was reinstated.

Now she is retired from a professorship at UC Santa Cruz, but still active as a visiting professor at Syracuse and a frequent speaker on what she calls the prison-industrial complex.

It is also the birthday of another cultural icon who we lost in 2008:

Moving forward

Peter the Great created the Holy Synod on this date in 1721, having forced the Russian Orthodox Church to rely on the services of a deputy patriarch for 21 years after the death of the Patriarch of Moscow in 1700.

Peter the Great by Kneller

Granted, it doesn’t sound very exciting, but it was one more critical foundation stone in the architecture of a modern Russian state.

Peter (1672-1725) got the idea that his country was a little behind the times after a tour of the West in 1697.  He had gone to ask various heads of state to help him get rid of the Ottomans and get control of the Black Sea.  Unfortunately, they all had other fish to fry, but Peter spent months studying shipbuilding in Holland, the structure of armies everywhere, the Royal Navy and city planning in England and whatever else he could find out along the way.

(In England, he had his portrait painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller and presented it to William III.  If he looks a little long-legged in the picture, it’s because he was – he was six feet eight inches tall.)

When he got home, he plunged right in, ordered the boyars (aristocrats) to cut their beards and wear modern clothing, required the nobility to educate their children, encouraged an end to arranged marriages, began to reorganize his army and navy, changed the New Year from September 1 to January 1 and adopted the Julian calendar.  It stopped being 7207 and became 1700.

And in the spirit of the modern love match, he sent his first wife to a convent and married his mistress.

Boyar

What he needed for his new army and navy though was a lot of men.  Too many of them were going into the church, finding homes in the hundreds of monasteries that had become the keepers of Russian culture during the preceding era of Mongol and Tartar invasions. By creating the Holy Synod – which was half ecclesiastics and half bureaucrats - he was able to make the church subservient to the state.

At the same, he decreed that no one could enter a monastic order until they reached the age of 50. Since few people got to that advanced age, he effectively ended the population drain to holy orders.

Why it took two decades to put this plan in place is not clear.  It may have been a deliberate effort to weaken the church politically by not appointing a patriarch for a long time, or it may  just have been because he was too busy fighting the Swedes, the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires, rebuilding his military, planning and building St. Petersburg (beginning with Peterhof, his palace), putting down the occasional rebellion and generally keeping busy.

Peterhof, photo by Mike Martin.

A best friend forever

Franz Kafka

Max Brod was a big-hearted guy, a good friend to have.  After all, in spite of being a successful, respected author of more than 80 books, he spent most of his time talking up his late lamented friend Franz Kafka.

Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague (then part of Austro-Hungary), lived to be 41,  was fluent in Czech and German, wrote in German, and worked for one year for an insurance company (which may have been the source of his attitude towards bureaucracy).  He was reserved, punctilious and altogether unlike his extroverted father, to whom he wrote a famous letter that began:

“Dearest Father,

You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking…”

Without Brod, there would be no Kafka.  Before Kafka died, he told Brod to burn all of his papers, diaries, unfinished work, notes – everything.  Brod swore he’d never do such a thing and Kafka named him executor anyway.  Or maybe that’s exactly why.

If today is really the day in 1913 that Kafka stopped working on his first novel – Amerika – and never went back to it, then there must be similar anniversaries for The Trial, The Castle and the novel version of Metamorphosis, all of which were unfinished.  When Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, he had published only a few short stories and he had no reputation to speak of.  It was Brod who got the three novels published, as well as some of the diaries.

The Kafka industry is really flourishing these days – translations have improved and the hunt for missing documents is enthusiastic, notably at San Diego State, where a group of scholars is in hot pursuit of papers confiscated by the Gestapo.  As recently as last year, a new short story was discovered.

Critical revisionism is ongoing, with new studies of Kafka’s insights into the law, a look at his sense of humor – apparently he intended at least some of what he wrote to be funny – and renewed efforts to classify his philosophy.  Is he an existentialist? Nihilist? Freudian?Surrealist?

Well, to be Kafkaesque is to be all of the above.  For a sample, you can read The Trial at Project Gutenberg.

* * *

Ernest Borgnine in 2006. Photo from USN photographer Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley

This is also the day in 1972 that Sgt. Shoichi Yokoi was discovered on the island of Guam, where he had lived in a cave for 28 years – since the end of World War II.  Yokoi had heard that the war had ended, but apparently he was ashamed to surrender.  His only comment upon returning to his homeland was, ”It is with much embarrassment that I have returned alive.”

* * *

It’s John Belushi’s birthday today and also Ernest Borgnine’s.  Borgnine was born in 1919 and gained fame for his role in ‘Marty,’ the movie based on Paddy Chayefsky’s play. Chayefsky was famous for his gritty dramas in the ’50s – here’s Mr. Borgnine in the title role on You Tube – sorry, it’s not embeddable.

Lost weekend

Back Monday with the story of Amerika…

High fashion

Christian Dior was born on this date in 1905 – interestingly, he shared a birthday with the man he referred to as ‘the master of us all,’ Cristobal Balenciaga.

Balenciaga was born in a Basque fishing village in 1895.  His mother was a seamstress and young Cristobal no doubt spent time watching her work.  At 12, he was apprenticed to a tailor and in his teens came to the attention of the local nobility, the Marquesa de Casa Torres, who paid for him to study in Madrid.

Balenciaga exhibit at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute. Photo by Sylvain Gaboury.

He quickly became a successful designer, but the civil war forced him to go to Paris and it wasn’t until the ’50s that he reestablished himself as an outstanding designer.  He was one of the few in the business who could design, cut and sew his own fashions.

Balenciaga was a favorite of Jackie Kennedy’s, but for political reasons (not buying American and spending too lavishly), her bills were paid by her father-in-law.

He retired in 1968, closing his houses in Paris, Barcelona and Madrid, but the Balenciaga name was bought by Gucci in the ’80s and reinvented.  A vintage Balenciaga, however, is as pricey as a vintage car.

One other birthday of note and here he is forty years ago (is that Peter Ustinov in the other chair?):