Clifford Browder's Blog, page 24
January 24, 2018
338A. Free: Dark Knowledge, chs. 1-3
Dark Knowledge
Chapters 1-3
1
I had never quite liked my uncle, and he had never quite liked me. But I had two good reasons to see him, an invitation and a question, so there I was, bound for his office on South Street, where bowsprits of anchored sailing vessels jutted high in the air overhead, while stevedores hustled huge bales and barrels and crates onto wagons or off of them, and iron-wheeled drays clattered on cobblestones amid smells of whale oil and sawn wood and brine. These were the sights and sounds and smells that three generations of my family, the Harmonys – tough, keen, hardbitten men -- had known and reveled in, as they set out for rampageous adventures in hot distant places. The very thought of those adventures always sparked me, fired me up. After a few minutes I stepped into the ship chandlery that still bore the sign HARMONY BROTHERS, even though my father had left the firm years before. Knowing me, the salesmen nodded but left me alone. I loved the sight of those mysterious instruments that I would never use – barometers and sextants and quadrants – and the smells of cordage, paint, canvas, and oils. Buoys and bells dangled from rafters, big windlasses sat heavy on the floor, cutlasses and axes gleamed. Gingerly I ran my finger along the cutting edge of a cutlass, imagining the heroic purposes such weapons might be put to – Grandpa Harmony battling boarders from a British man-of-war, or Great Uncle Noah fighting off hordes of pirates in the Sunda Straits, before succumbing to their poisoned darts -- while a few feet away a salesman spieled on to a customer about the latest model of bilge pump. The chandlery was a world that I could glimpse close up yet always from a distance, a world that my grandfather had exposed me to early with robustious tales of battles and pirates and typhoons, a world that beckoned and enticed me but in the end shut me out; it was and wasn’t mine. In the office next door I told a clerk I wanted to see my uncle. Just what his business was, aside from the chandlery, I couldn’t be sure; I knew he was a shipper of goods and a shipowner, but precisely what he shipped or owned escaped me, since he kept pretty mum about it. Around me in the front office were crates and bins offering samples of goods; in back, clerks perched on high stools penned entries into ledgers ata counter. “Good morning, Cousin Chris. We haven’t seen you down here for quite a while.” It was Cousin Dwight, Uncle Jake’s older son, tall, heavyset, with a wisp of waxed mustache curled over his lip like a snake: for a Harmony, a bit of a dandy. But a hero, too: in Mobile Bay the ironclad Tecumsehhad been blown to bits out from under him, leaving him splashing about in the water, one of the few survivors, with shots whizzing and booming all around -- an incident that, as he told it, prompted Admiral Farragut’s famous cry: “Damn the torpedoes – full steam ahead!” “Good morning, Dwight. I was hoping to see your father.” “He’s with a customer. Is there anything I can do for you?” “Thanks, not really. I need to see Uncle Jake.” “So how’s the scholar? Learning all kinds of things, I’m sure.” (A touch of irony; Dwight hadn’t been to college, didn’t miss it.) “Well, classes are suspended for the summer.” “Just lolling around, then?” “Not really. Ma has me sorting out Pa’s old papers in his desk.” “Anything interesting?” “Old bills long since paid, sewing machine announcements, hotel brochures from 1863. He never threw anything away.” “I see. Pa will be with you shortly, I’m sure.” Dwight retired into a back office, probably miffed because I wouldn’t deal with him. We’d never got on. I found him pushy and aggressive; he thought me soft. Suddenly Uncle Jake’s voice thundered forth from his back office. “If they think that, they can kiss my royal ass. My terms are clear; I won’t renegotiate. If that’s not good enough, the deal is off – do you hear? – off! I don’t need those shit-their-britches, and you can tell them that from me. Go to hell, all of you! Good day!” His voice had boomed; the whole room heard. The clerks didn’t even look up, just kept on pushing their pens. Then a silk-hatted older man came out of Uncle Jake’s office, a troubled look on his face, and hurried off. Uncle Jake stepped into the outer office in shirt sleeves, his eyes flashing under heavy brows, his face as red as his square-cut beard. When he saw me, his features softened. “Chris, boy, how are you? Come in, come in.” He waved me into his office. I took off my silk hat with the band of crape; we sat. Over his desk hung a large print of the clipper ship Falcon, which on its first run in the early fifties had made record time to California and been hailed by all as a wonder; part owner, he never let anyone forget it. He struck me as a hard man, as hard and keen as the cutlass I’d just touched in his chandlery. “Pardon my Dutch, Chris; I was a bit het up. You’re how old now?” “Twenty, sir.” “Old enough to have heard talk like that before. Men at sea, with no women around, talk like that too much. Not that you’ve been to sea or ever will be, unless of course you’ve changed your mind.” “Uncle Jake, I’m not meant for the sea.” “True enough: too thin, too slight. Not your fault, but once out of the harbor, you’d heave your cookies in the deep.” Years before, when Grandpa Harmony had taken all the kids in a small boat to see the lighthouse at Sandy Hook, I’d retched over the side all the way. Dwight of course told his father, and the two of them had been reminding me of it ever since. “Be that as it may,” said Jake, “don’t mention my cussing to your ma. It might make for rowdy weather between us.” “I won’t, sir. I promise.” “How is she, by the way? Haven’t seen her since the funeral.” “She’s getting used to Pa’s not being around, but it’s tough for all of us. She’s putting up a thumping big monument in Woodlawn, and lights candles in front of his daguerreotype, talks to him sometimes, prays a lot.” “Like me, when I lost Emmie. Didn’t pray much, but I talked to her at first.” Uncle Jake had lost his wife several years back. Suddenly his eyes cut into mine. “So, Chris, what can I do for you?” “First of all, sir, Ma wants to invite you and Dwight to dinner next Sunday, if you’re free. She’s still in deep mourning but is willing to see family.” “I should think so. Moping around won’t bring Mark back. Tell her Dwight and I will be delighted to come. Maybe about three?” “Three would be fine, sir.” “Chris, your pa and I had our differences at times, but Mark Harmony was a decent man. Too decent for his own good.” “Yes sir. Ma asked me to clean out his desk. Right off I found a diary. The very last entry in it, written the day before he died, thanked the Lord that he’d been able to see his family through the financial convulsion of the last decade and the tribulations of this one. ‘In spite of earlier doubts and fierce misgivings,’ he wrote, ‘thank God for the Venture.’ We can’t figure out what he meant. Would you have any idea, Uncle Jake?” His features tightened ever so slightly, and he looked away. “The ‘Venture’?” “Yes sir, with a capital V. We think it might have been some stroke of business he pulled off just before the war. He’d lost a deal of money, but after that everything was fine.” “I’m afraid I can’t help you, Chris. I know nothing about any ‘Venture.’ That’s old stuff. Does it matter?” “Well, it might help me with the family history I’d like to do someday. With classes over for the summer, I thought I might get started, maybe go through the stuff in Grandpa’s chest.” “Chest? What chest?” “The sea chest with all Grandpa’s papers. It came to us when he died, and it’s been sitting in the library ever since. Pa meant to sort it out but never did.” “Chris, I should have been told about that chest. Old Biggs was Caleb Harmony’s executor, but Biggs left it to me to go through my father’s personal effects.” “Ma told you about it at the time. You shrugged it off, said you were busy.” “I was, and then I guess it slipped my mind. I’d like to have a look at it.” “I’ll tell Ma, sir. Maybe when you come next Sunday.” “To really look into it, I’d need to take possession.” He was fingering a gold penknife; something was up. “Well sir, I’d kind of like to hold on to it. For the family history, you know. I really mean to write it.” “Chris, this family doesn’t need a scribbler; we’re doers. Forget the history. Don’t look back – that’s dead. Always look ahead!” “But Uncle Jake, the Harmonys have been everywhere, done everything. It’s a roaring good story, it’s prime. If it isn’t recorded, it’ll soon be forgotten. That’s where I come in. I’ll make sure the Harmony name lives on. Because you’re heroes, all of you, and you ought to be remembered!” (This was laying it on pretty thick, but with Jake you just about had to.) “Chris, life at sea isn’t all glorious adventure. It’s hard, it can twist your gut. It’s ugly sometimes, and sometimes just plain boring.” “Then tell me, Uncle Jake. I’ll put that in, too.” “No you won’t!” He slammed his fist hard on his desk. Papers flew; the Falcon hung crooked on the wall. Then, calmer: “For God’s sake, Chris, don’t mess with things you know nothing about.” “Well, sir, I still think you’re all heroes. Even Rick. How is he, by the way?” Asking about his younger son always put Uncle Jake off. Rick was a bit of a scamp, going off to dubious exploits at sea and then turning up when least expected, spouting tales of adventure and woe. “How should I know, Chris? I’m only his father. He’s been gone a year and a half without word. He could be drowned or in Timbuctoo.” A hint of regret? I couldn’t tell. Then suddenly he eyed me cannily, spoke softly. “You’re a shrewd little bastard, aren’t you? I hadn’t realized.” I smiled. “Just curious, Uncle Jake. Rick is family. I like to keep up.” He rose quickly from his desk. “See you next Sunday, Chris. Dwight and I will be delighted.” We shook hands. He was barking orders at a clerk as I left.
When I got back to our brownstone on St. Mark’s Place, Ma called me and my sister Sal into the sitting room. Sal was my twin, a brisk brunette with eyes of green agate. She and I shared everything, could often read each other’s thoughts, which was sometimes fun and sometimes just a mite awkward, since there are things a fellow’s sister doesn’t need to know. “I’ve been reading your father’s diary,” said Ma. “There are two entries you might find of interest, since they have to do with a ‘Venture.’ Here they are.” She cleared her throat, read. “16 October 1858. Another row with Jake over the Venture. He’s not telling me enough. What have I got into? He assures me all is well, substantial Profits will result. How? From what? A Mistake from beginning to end, but I’m committed, it’s too late to pull out.” She showed us the entry, paused to let us absorb it, then took back the diary, flipped through some pages, resumed. “9 August 1859. Good Profit from the Venture; Jake has settled the Accounts. He promises even more Profits, but I insisted that I want my share now and won’t be involved in any further Transactions. I’m out of it, thank the Merciful Lord, and will have no further Dealings with Jake.” Again, she showed us the entry and waited while we absorbed it. “Your father was not a happy man. I had no idea. I’ll inform you, if I encounter any more entries that seem relevant.” With that, she left us. That was Ma’s way: quiet, dignified, using few words, but when she spoke, you listened. We pondered in silence for a moment, then I told Sal about my meeting with Uncle Jake. “So Uncle Jake was in some ‘Venture’ with Pa, as we just learned from the diary, but now he won’t admit it.” “Exactly.” “So he’s a liar. And he wants to take possession of the chest.” She scrunched up her features in a frown. “Mr. Biggs asked him to sort out Grandpa’s personal effects.” “Will Ma let him have it?” “She might be glad to get rid of it.” The chest had been dumped on us when Grandpa died and had been sitting in a dark corner of the library ever since. Ma wanted to store it in the attic, but Pa clung to it, promising to sort through the contents, which of course he never did. In desperation Ma covered it with an old shawl and a burnt china mug, and we all forgot about it; it had hunkered down in the shadows. “Look,” said Sal, “you’ll need it for that family history you’ve been threatening to write.” “That’s what I told Uncle Jake, but he said forget about it, always look ahead, never back. Grandpa Harmony told me once that I was much too young for such a hefty undertaking, and Pa just plain damped me down, ordering me to stick to my studies.” “So nobody in the family wants you to write that history. Yet it’s a dandy story, it’s keen.” “That’s what I told Uncle Jake. We owe it to the family, the city, and the nation.” “Why doesn’t he see it that way? And why does he want to get his paws on that chest?” “There must be something in it he doesn’t want us to know about.” “Then it’s high time we had a look in there ourselves.” “Pa told me not to mess with it until I got my degree.” “Oh rats! We’re going to have a look right now!” That said, she hustled me into the library, whisked off the scarf and the mug, and with me helping, and the hinges creaking, opened the musty old chest. Loose papers spilled out amid a smell of dried ink and decay.
2
“What do you make of it?” asked Sal. Snatching up loose papers from the chest at random, we’d been reading in silence for at least twenty minutes. “It’s what in pidgin English is called a chow-chow,” I explained, having picked up the term in my readings. “A mix of stuff, a muddle. Loose pages from journals and letters, bills of lading, lists of port expenses, ships’ manifests. Grandpa must have tossed it all in the trunk and forgotten about it. But it’s super. For a historian” – so I now termed myself – “a devilish hot smash of a find!” “Look at this,” said Sal, thrusting at me a sheet of paper yellowed with age.
Rec’d from brig Resolute, J. Hawkins, master, 1 hogshead fine French brandy adressed to Harmony & Biggs, New York, containing preserved remains of Noah Harmony, deseased of Panama fever, Chagres, 11 Sept. 1823, age 31 yrs, 5 mos., 3 days, recovered from sea by said brig off Barnegat Light, having presumably washed overbord from another vessel, identity unknown, and now duly delivered hear for Christian burial, God’s will be done. Caleb Harmony, 16 Oct. 1823.
Sal looked perplexed. “So Great-Uncle Noah was shipped home in a hogshead of brandy that was lost at sea and then recovered and delivered as addressed?” “I guess. Quite a postmortem adventure!” “I thought he died fighting pirates in the Sunda Straits.” “So did I.” “Grandpa said his ship was becalmed, and suddenly thirty whatchamacallits -- ” “Thirty proas.” “ – attacked from all sides. He died a hero fighting pirates.” “A pistol in one hand, a cutlass in the other.” “And not from some silly old yellow fever.” “Killed the pirate chief with his last breath, and was buried at sea with full honors.” “So do you believe it now, or not?” “Well, Pa warned me more than once to take Grandpa’s stories cum grano salis.” “Please, no Latin.” “With a grain of salt.” “Grandpa lied?” “Pa didn’t quite say that. He said Grandpa liked to spin a good yarn.” Sal frowned. “You mean like those silly dime novels you used to read?” “I outgrew them long ago. This is something else again.” “And these,” she said, brandishing a loose page covered with a neat, tight hand. “Aren’t these journal entries from when Grandpa was rounding Cape Horn? They aren’t just a yarn too, are they?”
July 4. Terrible gale to westward; no thot of celebration. Mountinous seas, violent hale and snow skwalls. Strange hissing and singing sounds heard in the roar of the wind, abundant wild fowl, monstrous whales. One man overbord, reskew impossible; may the Good Lord receeve him in his Grace. Crew stedfast, passengers terrified. I prey to God we find good wether soon. Little progress. Lat. 56o 20’ S., long. 65o27’ W.
I glanced at the page she was holding. “No, those entries are solid, they’re for real. He always said that rounding the cape was the toughest sailing he’d ever known.” “Snow and ice in July?” “In the southern hemisphere it’s winter when we have summer.” “Oh.” “That was early in his career; I can tell.” “How?” “His handwriting is still quite legible. Later it became a god-awful scrawl.” My first job one summer had been as office boy at the Mariners’ Bank, where Grandpa had become president. They hired me because I alone could decipher his script. “But the stuff that really gets me,” said Sal, “is Grandpa’s letters to Grandma about the China trade. This one, for instance.”
When our ship rounded a bend in the river, I was thrilled to see a long line of vessels ankored side by side, perhaps a hundred of them, each flying its national flag. This is Whampoa, the port of Canton. Proceding upriver in a small boat, I marveled at the thik swarm of craft -- clumsy-looking oceangoing junks with sharp prows painted with huge eyes to watch for the devils of the deep, river junks manned by near naked koolies pulling on long sweeps, and mandarin patrol boats with red sashes around the muzles of their cannon. As we approached the confined district outside the city where, by the grace of the Son of Heaven, forin devils are allowed to reside and trade, we picked our way thru a hord of sampans with barbers, juglers and storytellers drifting past us, and pedlers hawking bird cages, and wives cooking over open fires on the stern while hens and ducks in wikker baskets clucked and skwawked insessantly. It was a feast of life, my dear Sarah, a mix of sites, sounds and smells like I have never encountered in all my roavings on the far seven seas.
Sal read it over twice. “Yes, that must have been a bang-up sight to see.” “There’ll be more,” I said. “We’ve just scratched the surface. But so far, nothing about any ‘Venture,’ and nothing for Uncle Jake to get worked up about.” “That letter congratulating Grandpa on becoming president of the bank, what’s that all about?” She showed me yet another loose paper.
Dear Caleb, Well, you old dog, you have survived storms and earthquakes and Chinamen and British men-o’-war to get yourself into the Chamber of Commerce, and now, to further dazzle the lubbers, you strut in clean cuffs and glossy patent leathers as the president of a bank. Congrats, old salt. Needless to say, I am devoured by envy, hence this hurried hodgepodge of a letter. Ah, Caleb, if you can holystone yourself, you sly Presbyterian, so can I. Gideon of old I shall no longer be. I shall trade my sea togs for finery, put on the sheen of Virtue, and tread its narrow Lane. You have sprigs, and sprigs of sprigs, as do I. For their sake – and our own – we must shed our naughty ways. Rechristened, I shall strut not a prince, but a king. Embrace me, fellow royal. Cleansed of our past, we
I put the letter down. “From some old pal of his, I guess. The rest of it is missing.” “He makes it sound like Grandpa had to become respectable. Wasn’t he always?” “Maybe not in the eyes of bluebloods. He smelled too much of the waterfront. Once he became a shipowner, that changed.” “I still don’t get it. The whole letter, I mean.” “Neither do I: a mysterium immensum.” “In English, please.” “A big mystery. But ‘sprigs of sprigs,’ that’s us.” “Us?” “His grandchildren.” “Oh. And in the letter of his to someone about supplies – a copy by a clerk, I suppose – why does he put ‘rum’ and ‘hats’ and ‘soap’ in quotation marks?” “I hadn’t noticed.” She showed me the letter; the first part was missing.
20 “rum” casks, 50 lbs lumber, 1 crate “hats,” 3 boxes “soap.” Daily exercise and song are highly recommended; an upturned kettle can serve as a drum. Also recommended is a familiar diet of rice, pepper, palm oil, potatoes, and corn. Beware of diseases of a febrile character and the flux. Allow substantial sums for gratuities, and at all times have on hand the two sets of papers. I wish you Godspeed; the prospects are bright. -- C. Harmony
I read it again, twice. “Yes, quote marks. But why?” “It’s like saying, ‘I don’t really mean these things; they stand for something else.’ ” “They’re code words?” “Exactly. There was something he couldn’t just say right out.” “But what?” “We’ll have to find out. Maybe this is what Jake’s worried about.” “Maybe. And maybe you’ve been reading too many novels.” “Grandpa’s papers are better than any novel. Misspellings and all, they’re real, they’re the Harmonys, they’re us.” That said, she scooped up more papers and resumed reading. I did, too, and started sorting them into piles. In time, I hoped, we’d gather together all the scattered pages of the letters and journals, and then organize them in chronological order. Meanwhile it was a rich, haphazard feast. We read until dinner, when Ma’s entreaties pulled us away from the chest. After dinner we went back to it and read until bedtime. “So?” said Sal finally, with a yawn. “It’s juicy, it’s prime. But the more I read, the less I understand.” “Me, too. There’s always something implied, something not spelled out.” “Fascinating. But let’s not get carried away.”
A ship with reefed sails and VENTURE on its bow, foundering in mountainous seas where whales broach and plunge, with sheets of gray water flying over it, its masts and decks coated with ice. Sinking in a squall, it becomes a junk with huge eyes on its prow, its cannon ringed with red sashes, while clucking hens strut on the deck. Nearby, rising silently out of a floating hogshead, Noah Harmony looms, wasted and delirious, his clothes stained with bloody black vomit, his skin a sickly yellow, as slowly, accusingly, he points the skinniest of fingers: Why do you disturb me? Why?
I woke up in a sweat.
3
“Pa, were you a cabin boy at fifteen?” “No, at sixteen.” “A ship’s master at twenty?” “More like twenty-two. So long ago. Why do you ask?” “Just wondering.” “You’ve been listening to Grandpa, haven’t you? The so-called family motto: cabin boy at fifteen, ship’s master at twenty.” “Well … yes.” “Don’t worry about it, Chris. Not everyone is meant for the sea. I wasn’t.” “But you went to sea for quite a spell, didn’t you?” “Six years. That was my youth, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But then I’d had enough. I wanted to come ashore, snug down, get married. And I did.” “Uncle Jake didn’t, though, did he?” “He got married, but he didn’t quit the sea. Not for a long, long time. It was in his blood.” “He sure is Go Ahead, isn’t he? A real wide-awake, a hustler.” “Yes, Chris, he’s all that and more.” “Like Grandpa.” “But Grandpa has a mellow side, too; Jake doesn’t. Oh, Jake can be charming, all right, but at heart he’s a mean, hard man. Keep smooth weather between you; you wouldn’t want him for an enemy.” “No sir.” “You wouldn’t want that at all. And there’s a difference between his side of the family and ours. They have adventures and tell tall tales, but don’t believe everything they say. We live quieter; we have the burden of truth. Remember that, Chris. It’s important.” “Yes, Pa. The burden of truth.” “Let that be your ballast, your anchor. In the long run it’ll keep you safe.”
Uncle Jake and Dwight came to dinner by carriage, which Ma considered just a bit flash, since we didn’t keep one. They had a hint of pomade in their hair, and both sported gold cuff links and a diamond tiepin. Ma used our best dishes, a set of blue-and-white chinaware that Grandpa had brought back from Canton long ago. Jake and Dwight raved about Ma’s roast turkey, which Jake carved with a flourish, eyes flashing, announcing, “The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat!” They ate with gusto, pronouncing Ma’s turnips and spuds delicious and her plum cake “confoundedly good.” Ma’s cooking was super, but I thought their praise just a bit much. Throughout dinner, and afterward in the parlor as well, they regaled us with stories, Dwight telling about running the Vicksburg batteries with Farragut and his fleet in ’62, and Jake relating how years before on the brig Hunter, bringing palm oil and ivory from the Guinea coast, he took command when the captain and mates were stricken with fever, and sold the cargo for a roaring good price in New York. “You know how I never come down with fever, not in Africa or in the Americas either? I took the advice of a Spanish gent who’d been in those parts many a time: soak your feet in brandy, wear thick wool socks, avoid night air and the noonday sun. Other poor devils took sick, turned yellow, and wasted away, but I was in fine fettle.” Finally he sent Dwight to fetch their carriage; a look passed between them. Then, to end the evening with a bang, he entertained us with a host of anecdotes about old merchants and skippers he had known. This was Uncle Jake at his best. He had us laughing one minute, and shocked or all but in tears the next. Yet as he talked, he kept fingering his gold penknife, which struck me as odd. When he launched into yet another yarn about a sailmaker who married three ladies of property – albeit one at a time – and had even Ma, who was kind of straitlaced, laughing to the point of tears, Sal slipped quietly out of the room. Moments later we heard her shout, “Chris, they’re stealing the chest!” I was on my feet in a flash. Darting into the hallway, I found Dwight and Uncle Jake’s black coachman Luke lugging Grandpa’s heavy chest toward the open front door, while Sal shouted and protested. Making a flying leap, I landed on the chest, which under my weight crashed to the floor. Luke stepped back in astonishment, but as Sal and I yelled “Thief!” at the top of our lungs, Dwight’s look of surprise changed to rage. Lunging, he pummeled me with his fists. I tried to hit back, couldn’t, so I huddled up and fended off his punches as best I could, while still yelling “Thief! Thief! Thief!” By the time our cries brought Ma and Uncle Jake from the parlor, and the cook and the maid from the kitchen, my face was bloodied up and pretty much of a mess. “Stop it, Dwight!” yelled Jake. Dwight stepped back, breathing hard, scowling. “Thief!” I cried, pointing at Dwight. I was sitting crumpled on the floor, one eye shut, nose bleeding. “Sal,” said Ma, “fetch a wet towel and help your brother stop the bleeding. Annie and Meg, get back to the kitchen. Dwight and Jacob, what’s this all about?” The servants left. Dwight started to speak, but his father cut him off. “Martha, I was only taking what’s rightfully mine; I didn’t think you’d care. But Dwight’s too free with his fists; I’ll deal with him later.” “Jacob, that chest isn’t yours.” “I’d be doing you a favor to take it off your hands. What do you want with all those old papers?” “More to the point, Jacob, what do you want with them?” “Just a matter of winding up some loose ends from Pa’s estate. Dull legal stuff. Those papers may or may not be relevant.” Ma eyed him something fierce. “The chest stays here. Put it back where you found it.” Jake’s features tightened, but at a nod from him Dwight and the coachman lugged the chest back into the library. “And now, Jacob, you and your minions can leave.” She said “minions” with a sting of contempt. “That chest is mine, Martha, and I mean to have it.” “Jacob, you are not a gentleman.” “Martha, I never said I was. But thanks for the dinner. I hope you’ll make it into half mourning soon; Mark would approve. When you do, I’ll welcome you back to the land of the living.” Preceded by his “minions,” he flashed a sour smile and left. Sal came with a wet towel and dabbed my face; I was surprised by the splotches of blood on the towel: roses, a whole bouquet. Then she ran to a front window, looked out. “They’re going,” she reported. “They’re gone.” “Did they put the chest back exactly where they found it?” asked Ma. Sal ran to the library, looked. “Yes, Ma, they did.” “And that’s where it shall stay. Christopher, I advise you to take up boxing; I don’t think Dwight is done with you. As for the chest, the two of you must go on searching it. Jacob’s worried about something; find out what it is.” “Yes, Ma,” we chorused. “Sal, put some salve on your brother’s wounds. Annie and Meg will see to the dishes. I’m going to bed. I suggest that you two do the same.” Of course we didn’t. “Dwight really hates you,” said Sal, as she put on the salve. My bleeding had stopped, but the sight in one eye was a blur. “I guess he does. I didn’t know it until today.” “Me neither.” “But why? I’ve never done him hurt.” “He’s jealous, because you were Grandpa’s favorite.” “I wasn’t! He liked all of us.” “Dwight was the oldest, biggest, strongest, and fastest, and we all knew it, but Grandpa liked you best.” “Why?” “You were the youngest of the boys, not as big and strong as the others. You had a wonderful smile, an even temper, and you loved to hear his stories.” “We all did.” “Yes, but as Dwight got older, he got bored with them, he fidgeted. He didn’t want to hear any more about Grandpa’s adventures; he wanted to get out and have adventures of his own." “He did. Look at all he went through in the war.” “But he’s still jealous. Take Ma’s advice, learn to box. I’d love to see you punch him in the face.” “So would I.” “Chris, you’re a hero. The way you jumped right on that chest!” “I feel like mush.” “You’re a hero.” “And I’ve never been in a war.” “You’re in one now!”
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Dark Knowledge is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Signed copies are available from the author; contact him at his e-mail address: cliffbrowder@verizon.net.
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Coming soon: Symbols of Hate. Should those objectionable statues -- objectionable to some -- come down? Is Columbus a hero or a sponsor of genocide? And why did I hate Teddy Roosevelt?
© 2018 Clifford Browder
January 21, 2018
338. New York and the Slave Trade
Dark Knowledge, the third title in my Metropolis series of novels set in nineteenth-century New York, was released by Anaphora Literary Press on January 5, 2018, making it available from
Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Signed copies are available from the author. The post below was inspired by the research I did for the book, using primary sources whenever possible. For more about this and other works of mine, see below following the post.
SMALL TALK
Every writer who gets published learns quickly the joys and horrors of exposure, when reviews begin to come in. Here are two LibraryThing pre-publication reviews of my novel Dark Knowledge, showing the difference in readers’ reactions to the same work. The first is a one-star review, the worst that any work of mine has ever received; the second is one of several four-star reviews. Ratings range from one star, the worst, to five stars, the best; four stars is very good, but not quite a rave. To give five stars, the reviewer has to be vaulted into realms of unmitigated bliss.
I've tried, but I just can't get into this book. The plot is thin and convoluted; lots of useless details that I'm having a hard time keeping straight and threading together into a story. The characters are shallow and unsympathetic. (✪)
I'm interested in what a thoroughly enjoyable read this was, given that transport of slaves was central to the story. Browder managed to touch me with complicity without making me uncomfortable. The trials and successes of a budding historian finding out about his family's part in in slave trade were used to tell a lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent. I received this as a LibraryThing Early Review copy. Thank you. (✪✪✪✪)
NEW YORK AND THE SLAVE TRADE
By the mid-nineteenth century the port of New York was the busiest in the hemisphere, doing trade with all the major ports in the world. That New York City was also the center of the illegal slave trade in the 1850s may surprise many today, but such was the case. Respectable citizens were hardly aware of the trade, but those on the waterfront, even if uninvolved, could see signs of it. Any vessel bound for Africa was suspect. During eighteen months of the years 1859-60, eighty-five slavers were reported to have been fitted out in New York harbor, transporting from 30,000 to 60,000 slaves annually. This post will have a look at that trade, drawing mostly on primary sources.
Ships used in the slave trade: schooner (left), brig (center), and bark (right). Small, fast ships thatcould outrun British cruisers were preferred.
BPL
In June of 1860 – on the very eve of the Civil War – a young New Englander named Edward Manning, being short of cash, went to a New York City shipping office and signed up for three years on the Thomas Watson, a whaler being fitted out in New London, Connecticut. Going to New London, he found a smart-looking vessel of 400 tons, remarkably clean for a whaler, many of whose crew were, like himself, “greenies.” A fine-looking woman came aboard and conferred with the captain in his cabin; she was said to be one of the owners. Had he not been a greenhorn, young Manning might have wondered why the ship was taking on so much rice, hard tack, beef, pork, casks of fresh water, and other supplies – far more than was needed for the crew of a whaler – as well as quantities of pine flooring that would be laid over the stores in the hold so as to create a new deck. He might also have wondered why the ship couldn’t get clearance and sail from New London, but instead went down to New York, accompanied all the way by a U.S. revenue cutter, all of which suggested that the ship was somehow suspect and might have a history. In New York the Thomas Watson anchored briefly off the Battery, then caught a favorable breeze and sailed from there, presumably bound for waters rich in whales.
As the vessel crossed the North Atlantic, it proved to be a smart sailer, hard to overtake. Nearing the presumed whaling grounds, the captain posted a lookout aloft to look out for “blows,” and even sent out boats in quest of whales, sustaining the image of a whaler all the way to the coast of Africa. Approaching that coast, it sighted a British man-of-war, at which point the “old man,” as the crew referred to the skipper, ordered the men to remove the pine flooring and store it aft. As the warship approached, it fired a shot across the whaler’s bow, raising a splash. “What ship is that?” came the query. “The Thomas Watson.” “I’ll board you!” So spoke the greatest navy in the world, displaying the arrogance typical of a world power. By now the greenies had long since grasped the fact – not particularly dismaying to most of them – that the Thomas Watson was no whaler but a slaver in disguise, hoping now to outwit the British Navy, which was intent on suppressing the slave trade, illegal in most parts of the world. A gig came alongside, and the English commander boarded the vessel, conferred with the captain in his cabin, and then inspected the deck and hold. Though he found no overt signs of a slaver, he was frankly skeptical and promised to have a look at the vessel again in the future. Once the departing visitors were out of earshot, the captain, an irascible man, exclaimed, “You English sucker! You’ll see me again, will you? I’ll show you!” In point of fact, they never encountered the warship again.
HMS Black Joke firing on the Spanish slaver El Almirante. The British ship freed 466 slaves.If the greenies had any reservations about serving on a slaver, they had little choice, being far from home and near the coast of Africa. Enhancing their resignation may have been the realization that no trade on the seas was more lucrative than this one, which might mean more pay at the end of the run, if the British Navy -- and the American, though it was typically less in evidence – could be eluded. In 1860 the trade still flourished, taking slaves from West Africa to Cuba, then a Spanish colony, where the authorities looked the other way while the planters acquired more labor for their sugar plantations and paid well for it. Of the whole crew, only Manning voiced objections to serving on a slaver, for which he earned the captain’s undying enmity.
As the Thomas Watson neared the African shore, a small boat with naked black rowers approached, waving a bright red rag. A Spaniard came on board, embraced the captain, and kissed him. They conferred, then the Spaniard departed, leaving the crew mystified as to what this was all about. The Spaniard was allegedly a palm oil merchant, but the mystery remained.
For two weeks the Thomas Watson cruised about, not too far from the African coast, maintaining the feeble pretense of whaling. Then they approached an uninhabited stretch of shoreline, where only a long, low shed was visible – a barracoon (slave barracks) -- as he later learned. The captain, showing signs of nervousness, posted the mate aloft with a spyglass, ordering him to report any ship in sight. “Sail ho!” the mate finally cried out. “Where away?” asked the captain. “Right ahead, and close to the beach.”
They now made contact with a schooner, and the palm oil merchant reappeared, boarded the ship, and gave the captain another affectionate kiss. The pine flooring was now quickly laid, creating a deck to receive the oncoming cargo. Naked blacks – men, women, and children – now issued from the shed and walked in single file to the beach, where their black guards began tossing them into a surf boat that then negotiated the surf safely and transferred its human cargo to a small boat from the ship. The slaves were then taken to the ship and piled into the hold, the women separately in steerage. The ship was rolling all this while, so the slaves were seasick, and the foul air and great heat made the hold unbearable. Five or six were dead by morning, and their bodies were tossed overboard.
Model of a slave ship. The slaves are packed in on a deck laid over the stores in the hold,which include ivory tusks. This vessel is armed, but most slavers relied on speed to escape
pursuing warships.
Kenneth Lu
Having secured its cargo, the Thomas Watson immediately weighed anchor and got under way, carrying some eight hundred blacks of all sizes and ages, with the Spanish captain and a crew of eighteen whites. The Spaniard, a veteran of the trade, was now in charge, whip in hand, and his ferocious manner kept the slaves in check. Guarded by overbearing guards of their own race, whom Manning identified as Kroomen (an African people living in Liberia and the Ivory Coast), the slaves were brought up on deck and fed rice and sea biscuits, but the stench below was suffocating, until means were found to let air in for ventilation. The Spaniard was a man of moods and contradictions. He delighted to let the little girls come up and play on deck, but when a man was caught stealing water, he had him flogged unmercifully. And yet, having some knowledge of medicine, he improvised a hospital on deck and treated those who were ill, probably saving the lives of several. Dysentery was the commonest ailment, but there were two fatal cases of smallpox, one of scurvy and one of palsy. Also, one woman gave birth to twins, but both infants died.
Slaves on deck, being shackled.The long transatlantic trip was not pleasant even for the whites on board. Scared out of the hold, the ship’s rats invaded the forecastle, where the crew slept. Manning tells how one night he felt sharp claws on his face, and a rat gnawing at his big toe, whose toenail was almost gone; after that he slept on the deck. When a crewman died of a fever in the dark, dingy hole of the forecastle, he was sewed up in canvas and laid out on a plank on deck; then, with no attempt at a service, the plank was raised at one end, and the body slid into the sea. Meanwhile the American captain was getting drunk daily on rum and then retiring to a spare boat on the poop deck to sleep it off. The Spanish captain remonstrated with him, protesting that he was setting a bad example for the crew, but to no avail.
The condition of the slaves was now of some consequence, as the vessel was approaching Cuba. They were brought up on deck in batches, and bathed in the spray from a hose. To fumigate the hold, the crew stuck red-hot irons into tin pots filled with tar, sealed the hold with hatches, and waited two hours; by then the hold was considered cleansed.
Having been at sea for six months, the crew were now eager to make land. The likable second mate expressed the hope that he would make enough money on this voyage to buy a little place ashore and settle down; for him, it was just a job. They now scraped the ship’s name off the stern, thus making them all outlaws, and the vessel fair game for anyone. Special precautions had to be taken, for British men-of-war patrolled the Cuban coast as well, and the appearance there of a whaler would arouse suspicion, especially if large numbers of blacks were seen on deck. In time they rendezvoused successfully with two schooners, one of which came alongside; brought up to the deck, the blacks were made to jump down to the schooner’s deck, the Kroomen going last. The Spanish captain too left the ship, and the second schooner took on half the blacks from the first one, after which the two schooners made for land. Their cargo delivered, the crew of the Thomas Watson then removed the telltale pine flooring and threw it overboard.
The ship now sailed to Campeche, Yucatan. Chloride of lime was sprinkled in the hold to eliminate the smell of slaves in confinement, but some hint of the odor remained. The crew were now paid, and paid well, in Spanish doubloons, and Edward Manning took passage on a Mexican schooner to New Orleans, where he arrived in January 1861. There, finding Secession in the air and the people feverish, the New Englander got out fast, returning to New York by rail. When war broke out, he joined the U.S. Navy and served for the duration. The Thomas Watson became a Confederate blockade runner but while pursued by Northern warships it ran aground on a reef off Charleston, South Carolina, and was burned by the Northern ships to the water’s edge.
Such was the account of Edward Manning, which he published with the title Six Months on a Slaver in 1879. Though opposed to slavery, he tells his story in a sober, matter-of-fact way, expressing sympathy for the slaves, but never inveighing against the evils of slavery. In short, he lets the story tell itself. The book is a rare example of a firsthand account of the trade, since those involved usually shunned publicity. The voyage was routine, with no drama: no pursuit by British cruisers, no slave revolt, no storm, no high death rate among the slaves. The vessel’s prompt departure from the port of New York, which Manning doesn’t explain, was probably facilitated by prior negotiations with the authorities there and smoothed with a bribe. Manning doesn’t identify the coast where the slaves were taken on, but it was certainly that part of West Africa where the Atlantic trade flourished: the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), and the Slave Coast, this last being the coastal area of modern-day Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria.
The first meeting with the palm oil merchant, later identified as the Spanish captain, was to arrange a rendezvous for loading the slaves; this was to make sure that the loading would go quickly, so the vessel could get away fast from the coast without being caught by a British warship. The Spaniard was evidently a loose packer, meaning that he allowed the slaves ample room and thus kept mortalities to a minimum; tight packers usually had corpses to dispose of, and the corpses, once in the sea, drew sharks that might follow the ship for days: the sure sign of a slaver to the captain of a British cruiser. But in the vast expanse of the North Atlantic, there was little risk of detection, until the slaver approached the Cuban coast. The Kroomen guards were probably not destined for slavery, but further employment by the Spaniard on future voyages, it being a sad fact that blacks too participated in the trade and facilitated it.
“The Slave Trade in New York,” a January 1862 article in The Continental Monthly, a new periodical of the time published in New York and Boston, gives useful background for Manning’s story. Since by then reform was under way, the conditions described are those prevailing before the 1860 election: exactly the time when Manning was recruited for the Thomas Watson. According to the article, New York City was the world’s leading port for the slave trade, with Portland and Boston next. (The author might have added New Orleans.) Slave dealers, some of them seemingly respectable Knickerbockers, contributed liberally to political organizations and thus influenced elections not only in New York but also in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. The captains involved in the trade lived in residences and boardinghouses in the eastern wards of the city and formed a secret fraternity with signs, grips, and passwords. A slave captain planning a voyage would initiate preparations in a first-class hotel like the Astor House, where the risk of detection was less than in a private office. Runners, provided with the names of men of every nationality who had served on slavers before, would be sent to boardinghouses to recruit a crew; their appraisal of prospective crewmen was reliable, their blunders few. Rather than equipment for a whaling voyage, as in the case of the Thomas Watson, apparatus for refining pine oil, a common and legitimate import from Africa, was often used as a blind, for a U.S. marshal would inspect in port any vessel suspected of being a slaver. One yacht owner was quoted as saying that he had paid $10,000 to get clearance. But getting clearance at the custom house was easy, a transparent disguise being enough. And should a slaver be captured by a British warship, the New York owners were rarely troubled, having a corps of attorneys on retainer to defend them.
As an example of the laxity of the law, the article tells the story of the brig Cora, a slaver captured at sea and brought to New York. Her skipper, Captain Latham, was lodged in the Eldridge Street Jail, where inmates caroused freely with liquor and champagne. Securing funds from a Wall Street connection, Latham bribed one of the U.S. marshal’s assistants with $3,000 and so was allowed to leave the premises, buy a suit at Brooks Brothers, and proceed to the dock just in time to catch a steamer to Havana. Since then Latham was said to have returned to the city in disguise.
Not all slave voyages were as routine and uneventful as that of the Thomas Watson. Edward Manning never got ashore to see a caravan of slaves arrive from the interior. One such caravan of twelve hundred naked slaves, captured and guarded by other blacks, has been described as arriving at the coast to the sound of rifle fire, tom-toms, and drums. The trading that ensued might involve an exchange of slaves, ivory, gold dust, rice, cattle, skins, beeswax, wood, and honey for cotton cloth, gunpowder, rum, tobacco, cheap muskets, and assorted trinkets. A strong, healthy male of twenty might fetch three Spanish dollars; women and boys went for less.
A slave caravan.As a slaver weighed anchor laden with “black ivory,” heart-rending scenes might occur. On one occasion blacks in two canoes and on a raft came alongside a departing brig, begging to be taken also, so they could rejoin relatives now chained under the hatches. Seeing that they were old, the captain took only three. The others persisted, till a six-pound shot destroyed the raft. Some of the crew were troubled by this, but the captain remarked coolly, “Your uncle knows his business.”
And what became of the elderly and sick slaves that no trader wanted? On one occasion eight hundred of them were taken out in canoes by other blacks and sunk with stones about their necks. Here again, the cruelty of blacks on blacks matched that of whites on blacks. The slave trade corrupted all who were involved in it.
The worst that could happen at sea was not so much a slave revolt but a fire. One repentant skipper told of such a horror at night, when all their cargo was locked under hatches. The crew tried to put out the fire below with buckets of water, but the flames spread amidships and the vessel was doomed. “Bear away, lads!” ordered the skipper. “Lashings and spars for a raft, my hearties!” The crew improvised a raft from the masts and bowsprit, and hoisted out the two boats, while the fire smoldered between decks and the slaves screamed. As the crew abandoned ship, a merciful mate lifted the hatch gratings and flung down the shackle keys, so the slaves could escape from the hold. As the ship’s two boats towed the raft clear of the burning vessel, the slaves gained the deck, only to become enveloped in flames. Some jumped into the sea and tried to climb aboard the boats and raft; a few succeeded, but the crewmen, fearing that they would be swamped, fought most of them off with handspikes. As the white survivors distanced themselves from the vessel and the drowning slaves, the sea was illumined for miles by the flaming brig. Out of 640 slaves, 115 were saved on the raft. Saved, of course, for slavery. For the traders, not a very satisfactory voyage.
Did those who participated in the trade ever repent of it? Yes, but usually on their deathbed. Said one: “There is no way to stop the slave trade but by breaking up slaveholding. Whilst there is a market, there will always be traders. Men like me do its roughest work, but we are no worse than the Christian merchants whose money finds ships and freight, or the Christian planters who keep up the demand for negroes. May God forgive me for my crimes, and may my story serve some good purpose in the world I am leaving.”
And as Edward Manning’s account makes clear, slave trading was an equal opportunity operation. Even in those Victorian times, when ladies were confined to the parlor, with forays into the nursery and outings for good works, some seemingly respectable women were up to their ears in the trade. The woman Manning observed was a New London resident, but there were more such women in New York. They kept a low profile, but occasionally their name crept into print. A Law Intelligence report in the New York Tribune of September 22, 1862, told how a Mrs. Mary Jane Watson of 38 St. Mark’s Place had operated as a blind for John A. Machado, who skippered the bark Mary Francis on a run from Africa to Cuba. Machado was arrested in New York, but to my knowledge no woman was ever prosecuted for participation in the trade.
So good Christian men and women – ship owners, ship fitters, insurers, and provisioners, aided by banks extending loans to planters, and by iron merchants providing shackles and manacles – chose to get involved in this shameful web of complicity. Why? Two reasons: money and immunity. A healthy young slave costing $50 in Africa could easily bring $350 or even $500 in Havana, and a healthy but inferior slave at least $250. And the chances of getting caught and prosecuted were minimal. For some, the temptation was simply too great, especially when you could remain at a safe remove and leave the dirty work to others. So it went until Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, and the new Republican administration enforced the law banning the trade and ended it once and for all.
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.
The back cover summary:New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
Just released; available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
An English map of the Gold Coast, Slave Coast, and Ivory Coast of West Africa, 1670.Coming soon: As a free sample, the first four chapters of Dark Knowledge. After that, Symbols of Hate: When should an objectionable statue be removed, and when should it stay? And after that, maybe Goldman Sachs again, the vampire squid of Wall Street.
© Clifford Browder 2018
January 14, 2018
337. The Next Big Thing: Ten That Changed Us, Shook Us Up
Dark Knowledge, the third title in my Metropolis series of novels set in nineteenth-century New York, was released by Anaphora Literary Press on January 5, 2018, making it available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Signed copies are available from the author. For more about this and other works of mine, see below following the post.
A note to my friends: Yes, I publicize my books, because you have to, and this year there will be more. BUT: Don't buy them unless you really wish to read them. I don't want to be one of those writers whose friends say, "Oh my God, he's published another book! I suppose we'll have to buy it." Some of my friends buy all my books, some buy none, and some buy some but not others, and all of that is okay. In time, books usually find their audience.
SMALL TALK
Just after 7 a.m. the driver stopped his car on the lower level of the bridge, where there is no pedestrian walkway, only a maintenance catwalk and a barricade-height railing. He quickly climbed over the railing and jumped into space and his death. Later retrieved from the water far below, the body was identified as that of a 38-year-old man from Queens. This was the fifteenth suicide on the bridge for 2017, three more than in 2016, but three less than in 2015.
The bridge in question is the George Washington Bridge, spanning the Hudson River and joining Washington Heights, Manhattan, to Fort Lee, New Jersey: a magnificent double-decked suspension bridge dating from 1931 that I have walked many times on the upper level, a heavily trafficked span whose constant din of traffic has not kept me from gazing in awe at the towers soaring high above me and at the steel harp of the cables, or kept me from looking dizzily down into empty space and, far below, the waters of the Hudson, splashed on sunny days with dots or streaks of silver. Just looking down for a moment makes my legs go weak, so scary and yet fascinating is that vertiginous drop. And when I reach either end of the bridge and feel terra firma under me again, I always feel a bit of relief.
The George Washington Bridge rivals the Empire State Building, and the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, as a preferred site for suicide attempts. An attempt is thwarted on the bridge about every five days, for a total of 68 “saves” in 2017 as of November last. Port Authority officers train cameras on the pedestrian walkway, and if they see someone lingering too close to the railing for a bit too long, they can dispatch a fully equipped emergency unit to prevent the attempt. In addition to the 68 “saves,” 37 possible attempts were thwarted when officers, forewarned by someone, stopped the presumed suiciders before they even reached the bridge.
But officers can’t prevent every attempt, as the total of 15 suicides for 2017 attests, so a new preventive is being installed: an 11-foot-high fence connected to netting that forms a canopy over the pedestrian walkway. This is a much more formidable obstacle than the barricade-height railing already in place; to get past it would take time and effort, giving the officers more time to intervene. According to suicidologists (yes, there really is such a word, though my spell check doubts it), barriers on bridges are effective in reducing rates of death by suicide. So more power to the barriers, and if you ever take a walk across the bridge (which I highly recommend), just don’t linger long by the railing.
Source note: This article was inspired by an article by James Barron in the New York Times of December 30, 2017.
THE NEXT BIG THING
It bursts upon the scene. Fans want to attend it, consumers want to buy it, investors want to invest in it before word gets around. It excites, it maddens, it intoxicates. Above all, it is something startlingly new, astonishingly different. And it can make the world better … or worse.
No, don’t mean the entrepreneur-led charitable foundation of that name that seeks to empower young entrepreneurs to take on the world, admirable a goal as that is. Nor do I mean any number of novels and high-tech gadgets and other stuff marketed online as “the next big thing.” I mean a rich variety of break-through inventions, styles, fashions, and fads that swept New York and the nation, if not the world, changing, or seeming to change, the way we live. Let’s have a look at ten of them.
1. Fulton’s steamboat, 1807
In 1807 Robert Fulton’s pioneer North River Steamboat, later rechristened the Clermont, made the round trip on the Hudson River from New York to Albany and back in an amazing 32 hours. Amazing because, prior to this, the Hudson River sloops, sailing upstream against the current and often against wind and tide as well, took as much as three days just to get to Albany. Steamboats revolutionized traffic on the waterways of America and the world, bringing distant places closer together and, in New York State, letting New York City legislators get to the state capital expeditiously, so they could pursue their legislative schemes and stratagems, and try to keep upstate lawmakers, whom they termed “hayseeds,” from neglecting or abusing their beloved Babylon on the Hudson.
Steamboats on the Hudson at the Highlands. A Currier & Ives print of 1874.2. Jenny Lind, 1850
The Castle Garden concert.Promoted shrewdly and outrageously by P. T. Barnum, the master of humbug, the Swedish coloratura became a sensation in America. Citizens who knew little or nothing about coloratura sopranos suddenly felt an intense need to hear the Swedish Nightingale warble her magical notes. Thousands thronged the piers to witness her arrival on September 1, some of them suffering bruises and bloody noses in the process; a fatal crush was narrowly avoided. To get her through the crowd, Barnum’s coachman had to clear the way with his whip. As for her first performance on September 11 at Castle Garden on the Battery, she astonished the packed audience with her vocal feats. All tickets having been sold already at auction, some without tickets hired rowboats and rowed out into the harbor to hear her from there, faintly but distinctly.3. The Hoopskirt, 1856
When news reached these shores that Eugénie, the Empress of the French, had adopted a new style of dress, the hoopskirt, averaging some three yards in width, the fashionable women of New York and the nation simply had to add this marvel of technology to their wardrobe, and the factories of New York bustled and hummed accordingly, turning out up to four thousand a day. For the next ten years or so, the ladies labored to maneuver through narrow doorways, and to sit gently and comfortably, in these cagelike monstrosities of fashion, until word came that the Empress of the French now favored quite another style, the bustle, which spelled the end of the hoopskirt.
An 1856 cutaway view from Punch.4. The Black Crook, 1866
It opened on September 12 at Niblo’s Garden, a huge theater on Broadway, and ran for a record 474 performances: a heady brew of a melodrama with a scheming villain who contracted to sell souls to the devil in exchange for magical powers. An extravaganza of extravaganzas with a hodgepodge of a plot, it featured a kidnapped heroine to be rescued by a hero; a fairy queen who appeared as a dove and was rescued from a serpent; a grotto with swans, nymphs, and sea gods that rose magically out of the floor; a devil appearing and disappearing in bursts of red light; fairies lolling on silver couches in a silver rain; angels dropping from the clouds in gilded chariots; a “baby ballet” with children; a fife and drum corps; the raucous explosion of a cancan with two hundred shapely legs kicking high, then exposing their frothy underthings and gauze-clad derrieres. When, at the end of the five-hour spectacle, the cast took their curtain calls before a wildly applauding audience, they were cheered by leering old men in the three front rows who pelted them with roses. Denounced from pulpits as “devilish heathen orgies” and “sins of Babylon,” it was a long-time smashing success, revived often on Broadway and touring the country for years. Some see it as the origin of both the Broadway musical and burlesque.
An 1866 poster. For spectacle, even the Met Opera today couldn't match it.5. Edison’s incandescent light, 1882
At 3:00 p.m. on September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison flicked a switch at his Pearl Street power plant in downtown Manhattan, suddenly illuminating the Stock Exchange, the offices of the nation’s largest newspapers, and certain private residences, including that of financial mogul J.P. Morgan. “I have accomplished all that I promised,” announced the Wizard of Menlo Park.
A young inventor already credited with the invention of the phonograph, Edison had demonstrated his new incandescent light bulb to potential backers in December 1879, and subsequently to the public. “When I am through,” he told the press, “only the rich will be able to afford candles.” Impressed, wealthy patrons such as Morgan and the Vanderbilts had invested in the enterprise. At his research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison and his team worked diligently to develop and patent the basic equipment needed, including six steam-powered dynamos, 27-ton “Jumbos,” the largest ever built. The dynamos at the Pearl Street plant were then connected by copper wires running underground to other buildings whose owners had contracted with Edison for illumination.
Laying Mr. Edison's electrical wires in the streets, 1882. The miracle of lighting by electricity had been demonstrated in New York, but throughout the nation the public held back, having heard reports of horses being shocked and workmen electrocuted. Insisting that electric light was clean, healthy, and efficient, not requiring the sprawling, foul-smelling facilities needed to provide gas for gas lighting, Edison staged an Electric Torch Light Parade where 4,000 men marched through Manhattan, their heads adorned with illuminated light bulbs connected to a horse-drawn, steam-powered generator. The marchers weren’t electrocuted, proving that electricity was safe, and the public was slowly won over. Hotels, restaurants, shops, and brothels soon became radiant with light. Darkness was banished and urban life transformed, and pickpockets could work in the evening.6. First U.S. auto fatality, 1899
On September 13, 1899, Henry Hale Bliss, a real estate dealer, was struck by an electric-powered taxi while getting off a streetcar at West 74th Street and Central Park West, and knocked to the ground; rushed to a hospital, he died the following morning, the first such fatality in the nation. The taxi driver was arrested and charged with manslaughter, but was acquitted on the grounds of having exhibited no malice or negligence. All of which is a reminder that the Next Big Thing can bring perils as well as benefits. Installed on the centennial of the accident, a plaque commemorating his death now marks the spot.
7. The Armory Show, 1913
A 1913 button.The International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the 69thRegiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26thStreets, introduced avant-garde European art to Americans who were primarily used to realism, shocking them with a heavy dose of Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism. Especially jolting to their eyeballs was Marcel Duchamp’sNude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which expressed motion through a succession of superimposed images not of human limbs, but of conical and cylindrical abstractions in brown, a double blast of Cubism and Futurism. Organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, this assemblage of 1300 works, including a fair number of nudes, was more than some could take. Accusations of quackery, insanity, immorality, and anarchy multiplied, parodies and cartoons mocked the show, and former president Theodore Roosevelt declared, “That’s not art!” But the civil authorities declined to close the exhibition down, and Americans began adjusting to the startling, radical, nerve-jolting, and precedent-shattering phenomenon that was modern art.
Duchamp's descending nude.8. The Charleston, 1923
It burst upon the nation when a tune called “The Charleston” ended the first act of the Broadway show Runnin’ Wild, and the all-black cast did an exuberant, fast-stepping dance that grabbed the audience, the city, and the nation, and then went on, some say, to become the most popular dance of all time. (But what about the waltz?) The song’s African American composer, James P. Johnson, had first seen the then-unnamed dance danced in 1913 in a New York cellar dive frequented by blacks from Charleston, South Carolina, who danced and screamed all night; inspired, Johnson then composed several numbers for the dance, including the one made popular by the musical. But the dance itself, which made the tango seem tame and the waltz antiquated, has been traced back to the Ashanti tribe of the African Gold Coast. The dance was brought to this country by slaves; after emancipation, African Americans seeking jobs in the North brought it to Chicago and New York, where Johnson discovered it, and the rest is history.
The dance spread like fever. Dance halls and hotels featured Charleston contests; ads in New York papers seeking a black cook, maid, waiter, or gardener insisted, “Must be able to do the Charleston,” so they could teach their employers the dance; hospitals throughout the country began admitting patients complaining of “Charleston knee”; an evangelist in Oregon called it “the first step toward hell”; and the collapse of three floors above a dance club in Boston, killing fifty patrons, was blamed on vibrations of Charleston dancers, causing the mayor to ban the dance from all public dance halls. But the more the dance was censured or banned, the more popular it became; the whole nation was “Charleston mad.” (Ragtime, then jazz, then the Charleston: the African American contribution to American pop culture has been phenomenal.)
A personal aside: I discovered the Charleston when I sawThe Boyfriend, a frothy 1954 Broadway musical that re-created and spoofed the musicals of the 1920s, while vaulting Julie Andrews into stardom. Ever since, having been raised on the waltz and the foxtrot, I’ve wanted to do the Charleston, but never found anyone to teach it to me. I’d like to say that my parents did the dance, but they were in their thirties when it burst upon the scene, and living quietly in and near Chicago, untroubled by Al Capone and his cohorts, and raising one infant son and soon expecting another (guess who). In my later years, feeling totally uninhibited at last, I did my share of wild dancing, but never the Charleston, for which I feel grievously deprived. Why the Charleston? It’s joyous, it’s crazy, it’s wild. Go check it out on You Tube and you’ll see what I mean. But I don’t plan to do it now. If I did, the Daily Drivel, a tabloid published only in my mind, would flash a headline:
OCTOGENARIAN RISKSFRACTURING HIS HIPWHILE DOING THECHARLESTON
DOCTORS ADVISETRANQUILIZERSAND THERAPY
(P.S. to the above. Thanks to two charming young teachers on You Tube, I have in fact learned a basic step or two of the Charleston, which I now do wildly in my apartment, humming to myself some jazzy music probably snatched from The Boyfriend. So far, no mishap. I urge everyone in the mood for a bit of craziness to learn, at least a little bit, this wild and crazy dance. It banishes tedium, relieves depression, and incites joy.)
9. New York World’s Fair, 1939-1940
A view of the Trylon and Perisphere.Covering 1200 acres in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, it exposed 44 million visitors to “the World of Tomorrow,” as embodied in the Trylon, a soaring 610-foot spire, and the Perisphere, a huge sphere housing a diorama depicting a utopian city of the future. The fair’s modernistic vision of the future was meant to lift the spirits of the country, which was just barely emerging from the Great Depression, and meant also, of course, to bring business to New York. (Little did the optimistic planners realize that the world was about to be convulsed by World War II.) Exhibits included the Westinghouse Time Capsule, a tube buried on the fair’s site and containing writings by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, copies of Life Magazine, a Mickey Mouse watch, a kewpie doll, a pack of Camel cigarettes, and other goodies meant to convey the essence of twentieth-century American culture. A Book of Record deposited with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington contains instructions for locating the buried capsule, instructions that will be translated into future languages with the passage of time. One indeed wonders what future generations, if such there be, will think of us when, if all goes as planned, they locate and open the buried capsule a mere 5,000 years from now.
The Futurama exhibit, showing a street intersection of the City of Tomorrow. I'll let residents of New York
and our other big cities report to what extent this
has been achieved. Also featured at the fair was Westinghouse’s Electro the Moto-Man, a 7-foot robot that talked and even smoked cigarettes; an appearance by Superman; a General Motors pavilion with an astonishing Futurama exhibit of the U.S. of tomorrow; an IBM pavilion with electric typewriters and a fantastic “electric calculator”; a Borden’s exhibit with 150 pedigreed cows, including the original Elsie, on a Rotolactor that bathed and milked them mechanically; Frank Buck’s Jungleland, with three performing elephants and 600 monkeys; a Billy Rose Aquacade with synchronized swimmers; and a Salvador Dalí pavilion with scantily clad performers posing as statues. This and some neighboring girlie shows prompted complaints, and the New York Vice Squad on occasion raided the Amusement Area, but these tributes to the world of today were never quite shut down. As for the World of Tomorrow, some of it, such as robots and computers, has come to pass, but a lot has not, showing once again the near impossibility of accurately predicting the future.
10. The Beatles, 1964
On February 7, 1964, the now legendary foursome, then newly popular in Great Britain, arrived at New York’s Kennedy Airport, where, to their astonishment, they were greeted by 4,000 fans held back by police barriers, and – just as important – 200 journalists. Intensifying anticipation of their arrival were five million posters distributed throughout the nation to announce their coming, and the phenomenal success of their song “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which had sold a million and a half copies in just three weeks. Grinning and waving cheerily, the lads from Liverpool were immediately subjected to a chaotic press conference where they played the journalists for straight men.
“What do you think of Beethoven?” one reporter asked.
“Great,” replied Ringo Starr. “Especially his poems.”
From left to right: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Greeting fans at Kennedy Airport.
After an hour of this banter they were put into limousines, one per Beatle, and driven into the city to the sumptuous Plaza Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, where a ten-room suite on the 12th floor had been reserved for “four English gentlemen.” The sedate Plaza didn’t know what had hit it, as Beatles fans – mostly hysterical young women – ran against traffic to the hotel, eager to get even the barest glimpse of the Fab Four in their collarless sleek mod suits, their young faces topped by pudding-bowl haircuts called “mop tops” that provoked much comment, not all of it positive, from the press. BEATLES 4 EVER proclaimed an outsized sign that the fans held aloft, as they chanted “We want the Beatles” and screamed and wept, and sometimes fainted from excitement. Their idols reveled in the hotel’s luxury but felt besieged, their suite guarded by round-the-clock guards. Two large cartons addressed to the Beatles arrived at the hotel, but proved to contain two female fans who, being detected, never reached their goal. Another sixty got as far as the 12th-floor stairwell before being caught and expelled.
Briefly eluding their fans, the boys were soon riding in Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage, staring in wonder at the city, and Ringo was photographed dancing the night away with singer Jeanie Dell at the Headline Club. But this was mere prelude to their first U.S. TV appearance on the Ed Sullivan show on February 9, which was watched by an estimated 73 million viewers, this blogger among them, though their music was barely heard over the screams of the teenage girls in the audience. Continuing their ten-day tour, on February 11 they gave a concert at the huge Coliseum in Washington that was attended by 20,000 fans, then the next day gave two back-to-back performances at Carnegie Hall in New York, where fan hysteria caused the police to close off the surrounding streets. After more concerts, on February 22 they flew back to England, allowing a semblance of normality to return to this city and the whole East Coast.
Meanwhile their singles and albums were selling millions of records, and their first feature-length film, A Hard Day’s Night,was released in August 1964, a gentle spoof of the whole scene that this blogger much enjoyed. And later that month, to capitalize on the Beatlemania now raging in the U.S., the foursome returned for a second tour and played to sold-out houses across the country. Some critics scoffed and quibbled at their music, but it hardly mattered; by now the foursome had the young audience firmly in their grip. The renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski, commenting to an audience of his own at Carnegie Hall, complained that the Beatles’ music, which he happened to like, was drowned out by the teen audience’s screaming. “If you can’t hear them,” he asked, “why are they so great?” The answer came at once from a red-headed girl in the audience: “Because they’re cuties!” As for the older set, they were probably relieved, in that age of strident youthful rebellion, to encounter four likable twenty-somethings who didn’t threaten anyone. And the twenty-somethings raked in millions.
So what today will be the Next Big Thing? Driverless cars? Robot-operated factories? A cure – a real cure – for cancer? Life on Mars? Some crazy new dance? Your guess is as good as mine. But this much is certain: sooner or later it will come, and when it does, it will astonish, madden, and excite.
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.
The back cover summary:New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
Just released; available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
A poster for the Chicago World's Fair of 1933, which I attended as a tiny tot. The "Century of Progress" coincided
with the worst depression in the nation's history.
Coming soon: New York and the Slave Trade: a shameful chapter in the city's history.
© 2018 Clifford Browder
January 7, 2018
336. Money: Is It Even Real?
Dark Knowledge, the third title in my Metropolis series of novels set in nineteenth-century New York, was released by Anaphora Literary Press on January 5, 2018, making it available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Signed copies are available from the author. For more about this and other works of mine, see below following the post.
A note to my friends: Yes, I publicize my books, because you have to, and this year there will be more. BUT: Don't buy them unless you really wish to read them. I don't want to be one of those writers whose friends say, "Oh my God, he's published another book! I suppose we'll have to buy it." Some of my friends buy all my books, some buy none, and some buy some but not others, and all of that is okay. In time, books usually find their audience.
SMALL TALK
Greenwich Village, including the West Village where I live and the East Village, has seen many significant beginnings. For instance:
Jane Jacobs, the pioneering preservationist, wrote her first book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, while living here, and in the 1960s helped defeat an urban renewal plan by Robert Moses that would have devastated Washington Square Park -- the first defeat of such a plan.The first public meeting of the NAACP occurred here at Cooper Union in 1909.Margaret Sanger, the founder in 1916 of the first birth control clinic, lived here.Thomas Paine, the fiery patriot whose 1776 pamphlet Common Sense helped bring on the American Revolution, lived here.Bell Labs, where TV, talkie movies, lasers, and the transistor were developed, was here from 1898 to 1966.Dating from 1971, Westbeth, the first large-scale adaptation of an industrial building (Bell Labs) for residential use, is here.Bob Dylan first performed here, at Gerde's Folk City, in 1961.Billie Holiday first sang her protest against lynching, Strange Fruit," here at the first racially integrated nightclub, Café Society.The first community garden was here.Hare Krishna was founded here in 1965.The gay rights movement began here with the Stonewall Riots of 1969.The first rock musical, Hair, was produced here at the Public Theater in 1967.
And so on, and so on. Notice how many of these "firsts" occurred in the wild and raucous 1960s, before the West Village became a hopelessly high-rent district. For that kind of creativity, today you'd have to go to the distant farther reaches of Brooklyn, or even out of the city. Which raises the question, "Does gentrification kill creativity?" Probably, alas, though some may argue otherwise.
Money: Is It Even Real?
There are three subjects that have always fascinated, even obsessed people: sex, health, and money. Books on these subjects may not make the bestseller lists, but they are sure to sell. Because we want and need – or think we need – a lot of all three. So let’s consider money. Not that I’m an expert on the matter, I am not; these are simply the thoughts of a layman. First of all, what is money?
“Money is fiction,” a Wall Street professional remarked, with an enigmatic smile, when queried by a TV host planning to do a program on the subject. The program that resulted told of a small Pacific island where the commonly accepted money was statues. The statues were installed at various spots on the island, usually on someone’s property, and everyone knew who owned each. If one islander bought a plot of land from another, the buyer might give one of his statues in exchange. No need to move the statue, since in this small community everyone knew who the new owner was. The statues were not made on the island but imported from another island that produced them. On one occasion when an islander imported a new statue by ship, and the ship foundered in a storm, sending the statue to the bottom of the sea, it hardly mattered; everyone knew who the owner of the lost statue was, and credited him with this new acquisition. Even at the bottom of the sea, this hunk of stone was accepted as money, because the islanders believed in its value. Money is fiction.
In America today, a huge society where no one can know everyone, we don’t use statues for money, we use dollar bills. But a dollar bill is in itself just a piece of printed paper; it has no intrinsic value. We accept it as having value because we have faith in the U.S. treasury and the U.S. economy, and right now the dollar is very strong compared to other currencies, because people the world over know that the U.S. economy, if not robust, is still stronger and healthier than all the other economies, some of which are on life support. People believe in the dollar.
Why paper money? Because it’s easy to tote around. I came to appreciate this once when, traveling in our western states, I began getting silver dollars in change; the novelty soon wore off, and I was annoyed at having to lug around this heavy weight in my pockets. Still, there was a time when governments minted gold and silver coins that had the value designated on them; in times of economic crisis people grabbed them and hoarded them. But their value still depended on the common belief that gold and silver had value; without that act of faith, even gold and silver coins would be worthless.
But this country didn’t always have dollars. Back in the first half of the nineteenth century the common currency was notes issued by banks that were under state, but not federal, regulations, and those regulations varied from state to state. The notes of the big New York banks, being backed by substantial assets, were highly prized throughout the nation and could be redeemed in gold and silver coins (specie). But in boom times there were so-called “wildcat banks” in the South and West launched by enterprising gentlemen who had high hopes but only the flimsiest assets; when the boom ended, those banks usually went bust.
New York City has always been a place where people came to make money. It began as a flourishing port, and as money flowed to it, it became the nation’s leading money center as well, with banks and insurance companies clustered along Wall Street and in its vicinity. But merchants and drovers from other states flocked to it, the drovers driving cattle and other livestock to sell, and the merchants coming to replenish the goods of their stores. With them both drovers and merchants brought what was termed “uncurrent money,” notes drawn on the banks of their region, often obscure little country banks that New Yorkers viewed with distrust. These notes were honored in the city, but only at a discount that fluctuated, maybe seventy or sixty or fifty cents on the dollar, as reported in long lists of small print in the daily newspapers.
Dan Drew, a former drover who had become proprietor of the Bull’s Head Tavern, where drovers sold cattle to the city’s butchers, saw a chance here to make money. He opened a firm on Wall Street and began buying uncurrent money at a discount. Knowing him from his days at the Bull’s Head, the drovers flocked to him, eager to unload their unwanted bank notes even at a steep discount. Drew then hung on to the notes and waited patiently until their value rose a bit, at which point he sold them at a profit. Nice for him, but less so for the drovers.
This state of things, with no federal currency and only bank notes from different states with different regulations, was chaotic. There were those who called for a national currency that would be honored in every corner of the country, but many were suspicious of a strong federal government and resisted change. (Yes, there were libertarians back then, too.) Change did finally come, but only as the result of a crisis. Which is the American way: resist reform until things blow up in your face, then think about it.
What blew up in everyone’s face was the Civil War. Suddenly, in 1861, the U.S. government found its expenses soaring, as it put out contracts for uniforms, tents, blankets, rifles, bayonets, ammunition, and everything else needed to fight a long and costly war. New York banks ran out of money to lend, and foreign banks demanded an exorbitant rate of interest, so President Lincoln decided on a bold and risky step: to print paper money in large quantities backed by nothing but the name of the federal government; the government’s creditors would either accept it or not. And so, once Congress passed the Legal Tender Act of 1862, the printing presses got busy and bills began rolling out whose green print gave them the name of “greenbacks.” The creditors accepted them, but with gold in hiding and greenbacks plentiful, the value of greenbacks declined in terms of gold. Then news of Union victories caused the price of greenbacks to rise, and the price continued to fluctuate, depending on news from the battlefields.
An 1862 greenback.And so, with the country locked in a fierce struggle to preserve its very existence as a nation, speculators began betting on the price of gold. If the North lost the war, gold would be of value, but greenbacks might be repudiated by the government. But if it won the war, greenbacks would be of value, and gold would be less attractive. To put it simply:
a Northern victory: a Northern defeat: gold up gold down greenbacks down greenbacks up
A wild speculation followed, with traders betting for or against greenbacks, and against gold or for gold, while the big operators planted agents at the front to wire back the battle news at once, to give them an advantage in trading. Lincoln in the White House was well aware of all this, though powerless to stop it. “What do you think of those fellows in Wall Street who are gambling in gold at such a time as this?” he asked Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania. “They are a set of sharks,” said Curtin. “For my part,” said Lincoln, banging his fist on a table, “I wish every one of them had his devilish head shot off!”
And this regarding a speculation where no one ever saw gold, just certificates and statements of account. Greenbacks versus gold: paper against paper, fiction against fiction. Yet fortunes were made and lost.
Clearly, to talk about money is to talk about gold. So where is there gold, great chunks of it, today? In this country, in a fortress-like building in Fort Knox, Kentucky, which holds, in the form of gold bars, a large portion of the U.S. government’s official gold reserves, worth some $380 billion and constituting about 3% of all the gold ever refined throughout human history. Guarding this treasure are alarms, video cameras, microphones, minefields, barbed razor wire, electric fences, and armed guards, plus helicopter gunships, tanks, and an Army combat brigade in the vicinity.
The Fort Knox gold vault today.
Bars of gold in the gold vault of the FederalReserve Bank of New York. Yet there is even more gold – some 7,000 metric tons of it -- in the underground vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at 33 Liberty Street in downtown Manhattan. In that vault, resting on bedrock 80 feet below street level and 50 feet below sea level, is 40% of the world’s gold, most of it held in trust for the central banks of foreign nations.
The gold at Fort Knox has long gripped the public’s imagination, as seen in the James Bond movie Goldfinger, based on the novel of the same name, where the villainous Goldfinger sends Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus to spray the soldiers guarding Fort Knox with deadly nerve gas, so that he can steal its hoard of gold bullion. (Needless to say, James Bond foils the plot, and the gold remains under wraps at Fort Knox.) In fact, the gold at Fort Knox is so closely guarded that conspiracy theories surface from time to time, asking whether there is any gold there at all, following which assurances are made by those privileged few who are allowed to inspect the vault. In this layman’s humble opinion, there is gold aplenty there, and I’ll leave it to the experts to debate whether or not this hoard should even exist.
Gold fascinates us as no paper money ever can. It is the refuge sought by many whenever the economy seems threatened and paper money is suspect. Today nutritionist Gary Null, who also opines on economic matters on radio station WBAI, predicts that in the near future the dollar will be dethroned as the world’s most stable and sought-after currency, with resulting disruption in world markets. So where does he advise savvy investors to put their money? In gold.
As a layman I don’t presume to know whether Null’s advice is sound. There have always been “gold bugs” predicting imminent financial ruin and talking up gold as the only safe form of wealth. But in the long run stocks and bonds have outperformed gold, which, like all commodities, fluctuates in value.
A new form of money has surfaced recently: bitcoin, a digital currency launched in 2009 by persons unknown using the name Satoshi Nakamoto and not backed by any central bank. Like conventional money, however, it depends on people having faith in it. It has proved profitable for some, but at present I see it, and other digital currencies that have since appeared, as just another form of funny money, a highly speculative venture that could well end as most speculations do: in a bust.
All this talk about money and gold rings strangely in the supposedly Christian West, for Jesus was not exactly friendly to wealth. In Matthew 19:24 he famously declared, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The poor were much dearer to him than the rich, and in the temple he overturned the tables of the money changers and drove them out.
The early Church condemned usury – the lending of money at exorbitant interest rates – and Henry Adams’s classic work Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres observed that the Virgin, to whom the cathedral of Chartres is dedicated, had little interest in bankers. This suspicion of bankers, whether Christian-inspired or not, has persisted into modern times and even infiltrated popular entertainment. Whenever the radio soap opera Ma Perkins required a villain, the writers trotted out the local banker, who never failed to cause trouble until finally foiled by Ma. And following the financial crisis of 2008, the reputation of bankers in this country was, for a while, somewhere below that of cockroaches.
But as feudalism and the age of faith transitioned into capitalism and a more secular time, the churches – both Roman Catholic and Protestant – found that bankers and the money they provided (at a good interest rate) were, under certain circumstances, perhaps acceptable. It’s no coincidence, I suspect, that the Medici family of Florence, the greatest bankers of Renaissance Italy, provided two Popes to the Vatican, as well as two queens to the kingdom of France. And in 1942 Pope Pius XII by papal decree founded the Vatican Bank, a privately owned institute located exclusively on the territory of the Vatican and reporting to the Pope. Its operations have been murky and touched by scandal and corruption, including charges of money laundering. Today Pope Francis is encouraging more transparency and reform in the operations of the bank and the Curia, but there is an old Italian saying, “Popes come and go, but the Curia is forever.”
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.
The back cover summary:New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
Just released; available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: The Next Big Thing. What was it in the past, and what will it be in the future? Want to take a guess?
© 2018 Clifford Browder
December 31, 2017
335. Eight Famous Sayings: Were They Really Said?
Life Wounds, Books Heal -- American proverb
For a reprint of a five-star review of my historical novel Bill Hope: His Story, and a comment by me, go here and scroll down. It's the kind of review authors dream of and rarely get. To see my comment, click on "comment," in small print following the review. And feel free to add a comment of your own.
SMALL TALK
Since the sayings that follow have little to do with New York, the presumed subject of this blog, I'll do some small talk about someone who is very New York, albeit Staten Island. This comment is inspired by an article in the New York Times of December 21 by Alan Feuer, entitled "An Odd Staten Island Lawyer Now a Puzzle for Prosecutors." The gentleman in question is Richard Luthmann, whom I had never heard of before. A photo shows a man of 38, spectacled, his upper lip overlaid with a mustache resembling a hairy black caterpillar, and a black-bearded chin over a bow tie that is evidently his trade mark, this one being crimson in color and suggesting a small bat in flight.
So why is Mr. Luthmann a puzzle? First of all, being a devoted follower of "Game of Thrones," he once asked a judge to let him settle a lawsuit by dueling with his adversary's lawyer in what he called his "common law right to Trial by Combat." Also, when accused of creating phony Facebook pages to discredit his political enemies, he responded by writing on Facebook, "I am a bear with the taste of blood in my mouth." These and other antics help explain why he's considered a local oddity, Staten Island's version of the trickster. Perennially bow-tied, volatile and angry, he apparently resents his failure to qualify for a 2013 campaign for borough president, when he failed to obtain enough signatures to get on the ballot. A month after that he crashed his car into a guardrail and was arrested for drunken driving, though the charges were later dismissed.
But now the plot thickens. Federal prosecutors have accused him of a series of crimes that include the following:
posting images on the Internet of a local politician with hash tages like "#targetpractice" and "#hunting season" trying to pay a stripper $10,000 to claim she was raped by a candidate running for district attorneytrying to sell shipping containers of cheap filler material to local businessmen as scrap metalasking a Mafia associate to beat up one enemy and murder another These charges have left Staten Island agog. Mr. Luthmann had been viewed as eccentric and flamboyant, but not violent -- in short, a harmless oddball -- but now, who knows? He is currently jailed for lack of bail, but his lawyer hopes to free him soon. Meanwhile, though innocent until proved guilty, he is my prime candidate for New York rascal of the moment, succeeding Martin Shkreli, whom I have chronicled often in the past, and who now is lost to us, confined in Durance Vile (see posts #306 and #317). Shkreli, now inmate #87850-053 in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, awaits sentencing on January 16, and the lawyer who helped him in his misadventures has himself been convicted of fraud and faces a possible 20 years in prison. Meanwhile, we will follow Mr. Luthmann's adventures with interest.
EIGHT FAMOUS SAYINGS: WERE THEY REALLY SAID?
In the age of Trump and the era of fake news, we don't need to be reminded that history at times risks being a blend of myth and legend, rather than solid fact. Many of the sayings famously attributed to various historical figures often turn out to be fabrications. Let’s have a look at eight of them and see if they are authentic.
1. Madame de Pompadour, “Après moi, le déluge.” (After me, the deluge.)
As the reigning mistress of Louis XV, she supposedly said this, indicating a cynical indifference to what might follow after her. In other words, she’d had her fun and didn’t care it might cost later generations. Sometimes it has been attributed to the king himself, and sometimes it has been rendered in the plural, “Après nous, le déluge.” In any case, the convulsions of the French Revolution have been cited as what indeed did follow, making the remark symptomatic of the blindness, folly, and selfishness of the ruling classes prior to 1789.
Madame de Pompadour, portrait by François Boucher, ca. 1750.The only authentic reference to this remark comes in a letter, circa 1788, of an actress named Marie Fel to a friend, recounting anecdotes told her by her lover, the artist Maurice Quentin de La Tour, who had painted a portrait of Madame de Pompadour in the 1750s. La Tour said that, while he was doing the portrait, Louis XV entered the room, very despondent because of the French defeat at the battle of Rossbach (1757). Madame de Pompadour then told the king he must not be depressed, lest he become ill, “au reste après eux le déluge” (“in any case, it would be after them that the deluge would come”).
Assuming this anecdote is accurate, what did la Pompadour mean? Was she cynically prescient, or was she simply quoting a popular saying already in use? In a 1782 letter to the French philosophe d’Alembert, Frederick the Great said that he was glad to have been born in the time of Louis XIV, and added that, as a consolation in the face of the future, one should say “après moi, le déluge.” For Frederick, the saying simply meant that the future was beyond our control. The phrase was evidently in use prior to the Revolution in criticisms of the French government’s financial policies; as early as 1769, the reformer Mirabeau stated in writing that the government’s policies reflected that “dangerous sentiment “après moi, le déluge.”
All of which suggests that the saying was becoming common, and not necessarily linked to Madame de Pompadour. The first such linking comes in an 1812 essay by the English writer Richard Edgeworth, who said it was one of her favorite maxims. The first French linking is in a preface to the 1824 memoir of la Pompadour’s chambermaid, who quoted her mistress as responding to all threats of the future with the words “après nous, le déluge.” But these sources obviously have the benefit of hindsight and so were well aware of the convulsion to follow. So maybe Madame did say it, once or often, but with what meaning we can’t be sure. It has been cited ever since as an example of cynical prescience, and as such will no doubt continue to be cited; it’s just too good to let go of.
Am I a bit protective of Madame? Perhaps. As a high-school student long ago I fluffed up my hair in a style that bears her name: a pompadour. And as a student of history I have to recognize how she, a commoner born with the last name “Poisson,” which in French means “fish,” had come a long way, helped by her parents who, realizing they had a jewel of a daughter, displayed her at a spot in the Bois de Boulogne where the king was known to pass in a carriage. Sure enough, young Miss Fish caught the monarch’s eye, negotiations with the parents followed, and his majesty bedded the young beauty (or maybe she bedded him). In the years that followed she was busy entertaining the bored king at Versailles, while France lost its first colonial empire to Perfidious Albion. But she at least patronized the theater and the arts, and encouraged a style of furniture that is marvelously light and elegant. And by dying in 1764, she – unlike her successor, Madame du Barry – got out before the Revolution.
Even today la Pompadour is with us, and not just because of my teen-age hairdo. Who could resist sitting in a Louis Quinze chair, with its curved legs and padded seat? All the more so, since it was in just such a chair that Madame settled her luscious body parts, when not consoling the king either vertically or horizontally. Just sitting in a Louis Quinze chair can make you feel sophisticated, elegant, and superbly aristocratic. Après nous, le déluge.
2. Marie Antoinette: “Let ’em eat cake.”
In the early days of the French Revolution, when she was told that the people were in revolt because they had no bread, Queen Marie Antoinette supposedly said, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (“Let them eat cake”). Widely reported, the callous indifference of this remark made her a symbol of all that was wrong with the monarchy, and helps explain why she would soon, quite literally, lose her head. “Let ’em eat cake” has ever since been used to indicate one’s indifference to some problem or situation. A friend of mine, when deep in his cups, used to utter it with an enigmatic smile, though I was never sure who or what he was targeting. But did the queen really say it?
Marie Antoinette, portrait by Le Brun, 1783.First of all, even if she did, the remark may not have resulted from callousness. Sometime in the past year I encountered an article claiming that back in 1789 there was a kind of cake in France that cost little more than bread; ergo, her remark might simply have been a practical suggestion, nothing more.
Still, did she really say it? Historians say no, pointing out that the queen, despite her lavish life style, had genuine sympathy for the poor and donated generously to them. Furthermore, in one form or another the expression had been floating around for years, attributed to various royals, including Louis XIV’s queen, Marie-Thérèse, and two aunts of Louis XVI. So the attribution to her was probably just another bit of libel meant to besmirch the royal image and undermine the ancien régime. What Louis XVI and his queen desperately needed nd never had was a good PR team.
3. Henry IV of France: “Paris vaut une messe.” (“Paris is well worth a mass.”)
Henry of Navarre, who later became the first Bourbon king of France as Henry IV, was a Huguenot (Protestant) at the time of the religious wars that were tearing sixteenth-century France apart. When the last Valois king, Henry III, was assassinated in 1589, Henry of Navarre became the legal heir to the throne. But many Catholics refused to accept him as their monarch, and Paris, the capital, refused to let him set foot within its gates. What to do? To put an end to the religious wars and win over the people of Paris, Henry converted to Catholicism in 1593, supposedly remarking, “Paris vaut une messe.” Though he did indeed end the religious wars and in 1598 issued the Edict of Nantes, granting religious freedom to the Huguenots, his remark has often been cited as proof of his insincerity, his conversion being an act f Machiavellian self-interest. But again, did he say it? Probably not, since no contemporary source mentions it; only years later, in a satirical work of 1622, did the saying appear in connection with his name.
Even if Henry did say it, he is a colorful figure, albeit little known outside France, and his lusty sexual appetite gave him the name of “le vert gallant.” I always thought this meant “the lusty gallant,” but it has been translated as “the green gallant,” which tells us nothing, and also as “the gay old spark” and “the old rake.” Clearly, Henry didn’t let advancing years or his religion dim his appetite for female companionship of the most intimate kind. How he would fare today, in the age of Weinstein, I hesitate to say.
4. Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
A noble thought that we are much in need of today (and perhaps every day), supposedly said by him during the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, unless he said it two years earlier at the Republican convention of 1856. But since these two attributions were made almost a half century later, we don’t know when he said it, or even ifhe said it. A New York Times reporter, reporting a political convention in 1887, mentioned Lincoln’s saying the phrase, so by then it was obviously linked to him. And not only linked to him, but used blatantly in advertising. Clothing, dentistry, root beer, tobacco, pianos, whiskey, cigars, ice cream, and condensed milk – all these were promoted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the help of Lincoln’s alleged remark.
5. Abraham Lincoln: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”
Harriet Beecher Stowe, ca. 1852. No glamorpuss,but her book helped bring on the Civil War.
These were allegedly the words with which Lincoln, in late 1862, greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when she was introduced to him. Indeed, her best-selling book, published in 1852, is thought to have fed the fires of the North’s anti-slavery sentiment. The story of the meeting is in the Stowe family tradition, but without any sound source from the time. Only in 1896, the year of her death, did the story of her meeting with the President appear. Significantly, Stowe herself never reported the meeting and the President’s words, even though she made a trip to Washington in late November 1862. Three of her relatives claimed to have been present at the meeting, but their accounts differ. Her son Charles recounted the episode in some detail in the second version of his biography of Stowe, published in 1911; the first version, published in 1889, makes no mention of it. So maybe it occurred, and maybe not; we can’t be sure.
6. William Tecumseh Sherman: “War is hell.”
A man who knew war and how to inflict the hell of it.This brief, forceful statement has long been attributed to this Northern Civil War general, famous – and in the South notorious – for his march through Georgia to the sea, wreaking havoc on the countryside as he went. His candid view of war – its cruelty, its destruction – is well documented, and in an 1879 address to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy he said: “You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is hell!” There are variants of this statement, but the basic thrust of it is consistent and clear. Yes, Sherman did say it, and in different forms many times.
7. Theodore Roosevelt: “What this country needs is a splendid little war!”
Roosevelt the Rough Rider, minus his horse, 1898.So spoke Teddy Roosevelt, the future Rough Rider and, in time, president of the United States, in the late 1890s, when war with Spain over the Spanish colony of Cuba was looming. Or so I always thought. And the boisterous Teddy got his war: a conflict only three months long, in which the U.S. destroyed two Spanish fleets, invaded the Philippines and Cuba, and by defeating a once major world power then in steep decline, gained recognition for itself as a major power in the world. Splendid, indeed, and at little cost. And Teddy, having charged up San Juan Hill and by his own account killed a Spaniard in the process, vaulted himself into a vice presidency and then, with President McKinley’s assassination, into the presidency itself. Impressive, to say the least. But did he make that statement about a splendid little war?
Evidently not. Yes, the phrase got said, but by Secretary of State John Hay, who wrote Roosevelt in a letter dated July 27, 1898: "It has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave." This did not anticipate the war, but followed most of it, Roosevelt and his Rough Riders having charged up San Juan Hill on July 1, 1898. Mr. Hay, I might add, did not know war firsthand as General Sherman did.
The toothy grin I so detested. I rather like depriving the bumptious Teddy of the saying by attributing it to someone else, for this Roosevelt has never been a favorite of mine. Not because he was an avowed racist and imperialist, but because my father, a great outdoorsman, seeing in me a wimpish introverted bookworm, praised the outdoors-loving Teddy to the skies. Afraid of becoming a sissy, Roosevelt had gone west into the Dakotas, spent days in the saddle as a cattle rancher, and come back a man. This paternal praise of the 26th president of the United States so irked me that, had I had a portrait of him handy, I would gladly have hurled a volley of darts into his toothy grin and then uttered his favorite exclamation, “Bully!” On the other hand, he did give his name to the teddy bear, and in my childhood I had several.8. Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death!”How it leaps off the page of grade-school history books, this dramatic exclamation of the Virginia politician at the outset of our Revolutionary War. Like the preceding sayings, it’s almost too good to be true. I always understood that he said it at some political convention in Virginia, and when hushed by its more cautious members, declared, “The gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. Give me liberty or give me death!” A hothead for some, a sterling patriot for others. So did he say it?
An 1883 illustration. No need to ask what he's saying; it can only be one thing. Yes, no question, he did. On March 23, 1775, at a session of the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond, he gave a speech urging the colony of Virginia to form militias to defend itself against the British who, though outright war had not yet begun, were already threatening force against the Americans in Boston. His words were not transcribed, but no one present forgot Henry’s impassioned closing words: “Give me liberty or give me death!” Years later his biographer, William Wirt, reconstructed the speech by consulting men who had heard it long before. His version concludes:It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace, but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Small wonder that his closing words became a rallying cry for the colonists in the war that followed. But his concept of liberty had its limits. Though he condemned slavery, he was in fact a slaveholder and, like so many of the Founding Fathers, saw no practical way to abolish the system in his lifetime.
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.
The back cover summary:New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Sherman's march to the sea. Bringing the hell of war to Georgia.Coming soon: Money -- Is It Even Real?
© 2017 Clifford Browder
December 24, 2017
334. Light: The Conquering of Darkness
Life Wounds, Books Heal -- American proverb
For a reprint of a five-star review of my historical novel Bill Hope: His Story, and a comment by me, go here. It's the kind of review authors dream of and rarely get. To see my comment, click on "comment," in small print following the review. And feel free to add a comment of your own.
The author.Hans Hillewaert
Small Talk
Since we're at the winter solstice, marking the birth of light and hope, the subject of darkness and light seems appropriate. Here in the city with our tall buildings obscuring the sky, and our (usually) reliable lighting, we miss the drama of nightfall and dawn, the death and birth of light. Only in smaller towns and rural areas can this daily spectacle be viewed. Which reminds me of the most impressive sunrise and sunsets I have ever witnessed or heard of. The sunrise occurred when, long ago, I climbed Mount Canigou in the French Pyrenees, spent the night in a hostel near the summit, and woke up to see, through a window, the sky suffused with a ruddy glow the like of which I had never seen before, and haven't seen since. Quickly I downed a light breakfast and rushed out to find not a trace of red, but a sky now milky white: another sight unique to my experience and never repeated since. Fifteen minutes later, when I reached the summit with other hikers, French and Catalan, the milky white too had disappeared, leaving only the bright, clear blue of a cloudless summer day.
As for sunsets, my partner Bob and I saw many while vacationing on Monhegan Island, ten miles off midcoast Maine. Going out of our cabin and down the hill to the deserted dock, we would see the red or yellow orb of the sun slowly vanish over the distant mainland, while dozens of seagulls circled in the air above us, their cries the only sound in the magical stillness of the island.
Yet those sunsets seem mild, compared with a winter sunset viewed on Monhegan by a friend of mine. Going out late on a sunny but snowy January day to photograph the fishermen rowing in to shore from their boats moored in the harbor, she suddenly saw clouds roll in and the sky darken. Then, low in the sky, a hazy, round sun burned through the clouds and, falling to the horizon, turned from pale yellow to bright red and finally an exquisite burnt orange. Everything around her -- harbor, boats, fish shacks, and snow -- was enveloped in a soft, hazy, stunningly beautiful yellow, then red, then orange. Finally, as the sun dipped below the horizon, the sky and all around her became a menacing black and, with a storm approaching, she hurried back to her lodging. The memory of this sunset remains vivid in her mind to this day.
Sunrise and sunset instill in us a sense of wonder and redeem us from our drab daily lives. There is magic around us, blatant or subtle, if only we will look. What would we do without the miracle of light?
Light: The Conquering of Darkness
Gustave Doré, The Creation of Light“Let there be light,” said God in Genesis 1:3, “and there was light.” In myths worldwide, light is associated with life and good, whereas darkness is associated with death and evil. Lucifer, the Light Bearer, rebelled against God and was cast down into hell to become the Prince of Darkness. In many cosmic myths the forces of light and darkness are at war, nor is the victory of light guaranteed. Prehistoric humans huddled around their fire at night, or used fire as a barrier at the entrance to their cave. For them, darkness meant risk and danger and prowling wild beasts, whereas light brought at least relative security. And without light there could be no life, so they worshiped the sun, the source of life and light.
The story of lighting in the city of New York, like that of all cities, replicates these cosmic myths and beliefs, for it is the story of light versus darkness, of pushing back the frontier of night. In our well-lit cities today, we have little experience of the night sky, the starry infinitudes of space – an experience both humbling and inspiring. But back in the eighteenth century, before the coming of gaslight and electricity in the nineteenth, darkness was a part of people’s lives, something to wonder at, yet also something to be reckoned with, something to be fought. And what means of illumination could they use, to fight back the darkness of night? Outside, torches; in their homes, the fire on the hearth, candles, and lamps.
What we have lost.Daniel Delli
The torch, dating from prehistoric times, has been called the first portable lamp. The fabled lighthouse of Alexandria, one of Herodotus’s Seven Wonders of the World, was simply a soaring tower with a torchlike fire at the top, visible for miles at sea. In this country, well into the nineteenth century torchlight parades honored visiting dignitaries like the Prince of Wales in 1860, and rallied supporters during political campaigns.
A Byzantine oil lamp. Inside homes, the wood fire on the hearth was a source of light and warmth and, in the kitchen, the means for cooking meals. Lamps too existed from prehistoric times: a small open or covered bowl containing some kind of inflammable liquid, and a porous wick that sucked up the liquid and could be lighted. At first the bowls were improvised from rocks, shells, and horns; later they were fabricated. The oil might be fish oil, nut oil, sesame oil, or any number of other plant oils, olive oil being the commonest in the Mediterranean countries. These are the lamps mentioned in both the Old and New Testament of the Bible. 
A whale oil lamp. In the 1700s, however, the American colonists discovered that spermaceti, a semiliquid, waxy substance obtained from the head of the sperm whale, burned with a bright glow without any disagreeable odor. It was therefore used more and more in both lamps and candles, and in street lamps as well, creating a profitable market that sent whalers out in great numbers to search the North Atlantic and later, in the nineteenth century, as the sperm whale population in the Atlantic declined, on voyages of several years into the far Pacific, as described in Melville’s Moby Dick.The candle is a relatively recent invention. It was known in China and India before it was created in the West, where it was used by nomadic tribes in Europe in the late Roman period. Beeswax candles were used in medieval church rituals, but since beeswax was expensive, ordinary people used tallow candles, which were smelly and smoky, dripped, and gave a feeble light. (Tallow: a mixture of refined animal fats.) Starting in the eighteenth century, for Americans who could afford them, candles using sperm oil were far superior.
But what about the interiors of large buildings like theaters? The theaters of ancient Greece and Rome relied on daylight; night performances were unheard of. But during the Renaissance, theater moved indoors into the great halls of the nobles, and then into theaters as such, which were lit from overhead by chandeliers with candles – not the ideal lighting, since they dripped hot grease indiscriminately on actors and audience alike, but the best that the times could do. So let's count our blessings today; in our theater seats we're quite safe from drippy candles, and risk only a crashing chandelier, if a Phantom of the Opera is lurking overhead.
So eighteenth-century New Yorkers fought the night with means of illumination that had been used for centuries, even millennia: torches, hearth fires, lamps, and candles. All these involved flame and, when used inside, had serious drawbacks: they had to burn right side up, be supplied with air, be distanced from inflammable objects, and be protected from drafts.
Another problem: these fires were hard to start. What, no matches? Not until 1827, when the first friction matches, called lucifers (that name again!), were invented in England; they soon appeared in New York. But before that, how did people light candles and lamps? From other candles and lamps, if available, otherwise from fire struck with flint and steel. And yes, there’s the old joke about doing it by rubbing two Boy Scouts together, inspired by the Scouts’ practice of rubbing two dry sticks together to produce the friction that creates a flame. But however it was done, it was a lot of work.
The nineteenth century brought changes that revolutionized lighting. Candle making by machine made mass production of candles possible, so that cheap candles became available to everyone, and with the introduction of paraffin wax in the mid-1850s, candles were made that burned cleanly without the smell of tallow candles. But by the second half of the century candles were on their way out, replaced by competing illuminants. First introduced in London in 1814, gaslight came soon afterward to New York, where the Common Council granted charters to competing companies to lay pipes in different sections of the city, replacing the whale oil lamps then in use. In 1824 a banker’s residence in Cherry Street became the first house in the city to receive gaslight. (Bankers and their friends have a way of getting the latest improvements first.) In the 1820s and 1830s gaslight lit more and more of the streets, with lamp lighters lighting the polished glass boxes of the lamps at dusk and snuffing them at dawn. But gaslight was not for every community, as it had several requirements. A plentiful supply of coal, from which the gas was manufactured, was needed, and the means of transporting it. New York City’s coal was mined in the mountains of Pennsylvania and shipped by barge via the Delaware and Hudson Canal to the Hudson River and then on to the city. Gas works were also needed: clusters of red-hot retorts where the coal was burned to create gas, and gas containers, big bulblike structures of iron where the gas was held, before being sent by underground pipes to the streetlamps, fancy hotels and stores, and well-appointed homes of the affluent. Gas works were ugly and smelly, and therefore confined to the Hudson and East River waterfronts, well out of sight – and smell – of the fashionable sections of the city.
Inside a nineteenth-century gas retort. Not something you would want next door.
Gaslight needed big money and a lot of effort to put up all those smelly gas works, so it was confined to the big cities; small towns and rural communities were not accommodated. But it transformed New York, providing lighting such as had never before been possible. Hotel lobbies glowed, and the front windows of Fifth Avenue brownstones blazed with light as arriving guests mounted the steep front stoops, while theaters offered Spanish dancers, waterfalls, and naughty cancans in a stellar glare, and pickpockets worked overtime in the evening, though second-story men lamented the illumination, so detrimental to their operations. Another significant development came in 1859 with the discovery of oil in a farming district of northwestern Pennsylvania, which ended abruptly that region’s rural tranquility. Oil rigs began drilling intensively, and kerosene, a petroleum derivative, became readily available and cheap enough to be widely used in lamps. As an illuminant it quickly replaced whale oil, which could only be obtained in far distant oceans. Characteristic of the kerosene lamp was a glass chimney that protected the flame and controlled the flow of air to it, and a knob that adjusted the size of the wick, and thus the size and brightness of the flame. Kerosene lamps didn’t require the infrastructure of gaslight and so could be used anywhere. My first awareness of these lamps came in the bad Westerns, often Saturday afternoon serials, that afflicted my childhood. These were the “Meanwhile back at the ranch …” species, humdrum black-and-whites meant to lure their young victims back a week later for the next installment, which they rarely did. Viewing them, I always knew that at some point a fight would erupt in the ranch house, a kerosene lamp would be knocked over, curtains would catch fire, and the whole place go up in flames; I was rarely disappointed.
A kerosene lamp, ca. 1888.Later I encountered the lamps in real life. In the 1960s, when I first went to Monhegan Island off midcoast Maine, kerosene lamps were still in use there; I learned such niceties as how to refill them, how to light them, and how to trim the wicks of these rather cumbersome contraptions. Schooled by those dreary old Westerns, I was careful to keep them away from curtains. Only with the creation some years later of a local company to supply electricity to the island – first for only a few hours, then for more, and finally all day and night – were the kerosene lamps supplanted, thus repeating the progress of mid-nineteenth-century New York. Progress may be long in coming, but come it does … finally.
By the late 1870s gaslight, so wondrous at first, and hailed as a clean source of light, had worn out its welcome in the city. Gas jets emitted headache-inducing fumes of ammonia, sulfur, and carbon dioxide, turned ceilings black, and defiled the parlor, that sanctuary of middle-class gentility, with soot. In the land of Go Ahead, in this progress-giddy age, surely something better could be devised.
It was. On December 20, 1880, all of Broadway between Union and Madison Square was suddenly bathed in light. New Yorkers were dazzled, amazed. Projecting the light were a series of twenty-foot-tall cast-iron posts, one per block, each with an arc light that cast a brilliant glow. Arc lights, powered by steam engines and electric generators, were cheaper to install than hundreds of lampposts, so they were soon spreading illumination along the avenues and over markets, factories, railroad stations, and wharves. But arc lights were too intense for use in homes, and they too gave off noxious fumes, and created power failures when assailed by storms. (Sound familiar?) Something still better was needed.
In 1878 Thomas Edison, a young inventor already known for numerous inventions that included the phonograph, informed the press that was he going to develop an incandescent lamp suitable for homes. Canny investors on both sides of the Atlantic perked up their ears, opened their wallets, and helped create the Edison Electric Light Company, of which Edison himself, wise now in the ways of Wall Street, retained significant control. Vast sums and great hopes were invested in this ingenious experimenter, who in this matter so far had produced only promises – brash, glowing promises, but promises only, mere words. Supremely confident, he got to work in his research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
A portrait of the young Edison.Months passed, progress was made. Aldermen and councilmen were invited to Menlo Park for a gala demonstration of the new lights. Edison established his power station on Pearl Street, had armies of workmen dig trenches to lay subterranean wires in massive insulated power mains, and installed powerful generators in the power station. Then, on September 4, 1882, fifty square downtown blocks housing the city’s key financial, commercial, and manufacturing establishments were suddenly illuminated. If gaslight had been a wonder, and arc lights magic, this was a miracle.
J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts (those bankers and their friends again!) immediately installed incandescent lights in their mansions, and within a year over five hundred wealthy homes were electrified. The Stock Exchange followed, then office buildings, machine shops, piano factories, sugar refineries, department stores, and theaters, and middle-class homes as well, though tallow candles were still used in tenements. People in New York, and then the world over, marveled: with a flick of a switch, there was light. No lamp to fill, no wick to trim, no fumes, no flickering, just bright, steady light.
Night life intensified, as hotels, restaurants, and shops, and brothels and gambling parlors too, turned radiant with light, and customers flocked. By the mid-1890s people were beginning to call a stretch of Broadway blazing with illuminated signs the “Great White Way.” The New York of today was coming into being, to be further enhanced in the 1920s and 1930s by the advent of neon lights, first developed commercially by the French engineer and inventor Georges Claude. Today, if in our cities awareness of the night sky has all but vanished, no one seems to care, since there is so much to do at night down here. Yes, darkness has been vanquished:
with a flick of a switch -- light! We take it so for granted.
Times Square at night, the ultimate in neon lights.Boris Dzhingarov
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.
The back cover summary:New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Luca GaluzziComing soon: As usual lately, no idea. Inspiration will have to strike.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
December 17, 2017
333. The Nose: What Kind of Beak Do You Have?
Life wounds, books heal.
Bill Hope: His Story. A young pickpocket named Bill Hope tells of his brutal treatment in Sing Sing, his escape from another prison in a coffin, his forays into brownstones and polite society, and his time among the "loonies" in a madhouse. A holiday gift for those who like historical fiction, action/adventure, and stories of Old New York. For more information on this and other titles, see below at the end of the post.
The author.
Thomas Lersch
Small Talk
This week’s post is about that noble protuberance, the nose, so let’s talk about how it performs in New York. It is, of course, is meant for sniffing. In one short block in New York, I can register a gallery of smells, as for instance:
Tobacco from a smoke shop. Baked bread from a bakery. Newsprint when buying a newspaper. Asphalt when a pothole is being filled. Sawn wood on a construction site. Wet wool when snow or rain moistens an overcoat. Spruce from a sidewalk stand selling Christmas trees. Hot air and chemicals from a dry cleaning establishment. Exhaust fumes from a bus pulling away from a curb. Smells of rubble, plaster, and splintered wood heaped in a dumpster outside a residence or shop undergoing renovation. Wet cement when a section of sidewalk is being replaced.
Admittedly, the unpleasant aromas far outnumber the pleasant ones, but that’s not always the case. One might walk by a flower stand or a garden, after all, or a vendor of roast chestnuts in autumn. So all is not lost, not even in New York, though an effort must be made.
333. The Nose
Sitting recently at my usual table at Philip Marie, a restaurant at the corner of West 11th Street and Hudson in the West Village, I had a good view of the front window and the young couple at the table by that window. They were having great fun, at times laughing hilariously and clinking their glasses of Mimosa, totally unaware of the casual voyeur at a table nearby. Alas, at times I saw them both in profile and couldn’t help but notice that both had a nose just a wee bit too prominent. Which projected me into a train of thoughts about noses that I’m now recording here.
Of all our facial features, the nose is prominent and inherently gross. The mouth too is gross, being associated with sex and gluttony, but for many of us the nose has priority, being situated right smack in the middle of our face. The Victorians recognized this and their manuals of etiquette emphasized that the nose was to be ignored when possible, and its needs attended to discreetly in private. What, after all, is a sneeze, if not a form of orgasm, and orgasm was something the Victorians, prolific though they were, shrank from acknowledging. Nor was a runny nose much better, being messy in the extreme. And our expression “nosey” suggests prying, intrusive, offensively inquisitive, which hardly enhances our olfactory protuberance. Also, think of how dogs, with their keen sense of smell, sniff one another’s rear end by way of greeting – something many of us even today, post-Victorian worldlings that we are, would rather not observe.
mcfarlandmo
Pascal in his Pensées remarked, “Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.” Indeed, her beauty ensnared both Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, with dire consequences for both Egypt and Rome. In Pascal’s seventeenth century a large nose suggested dominance and strength of character, though I suspect that Cleopatra’s beauty was just as significant, as attested by Roman historians and further commemorated by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra.
The French may have a thing about the nose, for their way of expressing “They will laugh in your face,” is to say Ils vous riront au nez. Where we say “face,” they say “nose” (nez). Which brings us to a classic of French theater, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, the story of a French swashbuckling poet of the seventeenth century who singlehanded could hold off a swarm of enemies with his sword, but who was plagued with an outsized nose. The play is written in less than brilliant verse, but it survives nonetheless and its final scene, where the dying Cyrano at last confesses his feelings to the woman he has always loved, can elicit a tear or two from even the most hardbitten spectator.
As for noses and their influence on us, I recall my friend Ken who referred to his appearance and experiences as either “b.n.j.” or “a.n.j.,” meaning “before nose job” or “after nose job.” In his young youth, before I knew him, being unhappy about his “Jewish” or “Semitic” nose, he had had surgery by a surgeon specializing in such cases. The result was successful, for I never noticed anything untoward about his nose and would never have suspected a nose job, had he not told me about it. Yet he once showed me a photo of himself in his late teens, “b.n.j.,” lying on a blanket on a beach in swimming trunks. This surprised me, for he had said many times that he would never exhibit himself in such a fashion, lacking a muscled male torso as he did. Yet this photo of him had, as I immediately remarked, an undeniably sensual aspect, and he admitted that other friends had observed the same. So maybe noses aren’t so significant after all; other matters also come into play. But don’t tell that to the nose surgeons; it might deprive them of a lucrative practice.
Noses have been variously classified and analyzed, often using names of celebrities. But this is too transitory, too perishable; celebrities come and go. Analysts of the matter – usually plastic surgeons – name up to 14 kinds, but I’ll settle for less. Here are some common types:
· Greek nose: straight from top to tip. Often requested in plastic surgery.· Roman or aquiline nose: with a prominent bridge, making it look slightly curved or bent. From the Latin aquilinus, “eagle-like.” Also called the hawk nose.· Snub nose: stubby, short.· Fleshy nose: more fatty than bony. Also called the Einstein, after you-know-who. Very common among men and women.
There is much brouhaha about which noses are the most attractive, with plastic surgeons chiming in online. But on the right people, almost all of them can look attractive.
Famous noses:
1. Santa Claus, as described in the famous poem “Twas the night before Christmas”: “His eyes—how hey twinkled! His dimples, how merry! / His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!” (Which is not to suggest that Santa was into his cups.)2. Pinocchio, whose nose grew longer whenever he told a lie.3. J.P. Morgan, the giant of finance, whose nose was flagrantly purple because of a skin condition known as rhinophyma. Being sensitive on the matter, lunged at anyone trying to photograph him.4. Michelangelo, whose flat nose resulted from a punch by a fellow Florentine artist in his youth.5. President Richard Nixon, whose up-turned ski-jump nose was the delight of cartoonists.
Old J.P., lunging at a photographer.
Big noses are usually thought of as repellent, but what constitutes one is relative. When Chinese immigrants first came to this country in the nineteenth century, they referred to Americans – meaning Caucasians – as “Round Eyes” and “Big Noses.” Napoleon, on the other hand, equated big noses with big brains and promoted his officers accordingly. “When I want any good head work done, I choose a man with a long nose.”
Francis I of France, as rendered by Titian, 1539.
A big nose, but Titian makes him look elegant.
So who could be described as having the proper sized nose? Maybe the American actor John Barrymore, who in the 1920s acquired the nickname “The Great Profile”; I’ll let the readers judge.
John Barrymore, circa 1920.
But come to think of it, if you start noticing noses – especially in profile – the results may be dismaying. This is how friendships die and self-esteem crumbles. Get away from that mirror and stop scanning your friends’ nasal geography. But don’t start noticing chins either; even more than a nose, a weak or receding chin can demolish a profile. If you must study facial features, focus on the eyes. They are expressive, enticing, mysterious, rarely gross.
Yes, Gross. But think of all the aromas it can capture.LHOON
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews
"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.
The back cover summary:
New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Fresh baked bread, a feast for the nostrils.
FotoDawg
Coming soon: Light: The Conquering of Darkness
© 2017 Clifford Browder
Bill Hope: His Story. A young pickpocket named Bill Hope tells of his brutal treatment in Sing Sing, his escape from another prison in a coffin, his forays into brownstones and polite society, and his time among the "loonies" in a madhouse. A holiday gift for those who like historical fiction, action/adventure, and stories of Old New York. For more information on this and other titles, see below at the end of the post.
The author.Thomas Lersch
Small Talk
This week’s post is about that noble protuberance, the nose, so let’s talk about how it performs in New York. It is, of course, is meant for sniffing. In one short block in New York, I can register a gallery of smells, as for instance:
Tobacco from a smoke shop. Baked bread from a bakery. Newsprint when buying a newspaper. Asphalt when a pothole is being filled. Sawn wood on a construction site. Wet wool when snow or rain moistens an overcoat. Spruce from a sidewalk stand selling Christmas trees. Hot air and chemicals from a dry cleaning establishment. Exhaust fumes from a bus pulling away from a curb. Smells of rubble, plaster, and splintered wood heaped in a dumpster outside a residence or shop undergoing renovation. Wet cement when a section of sidewalk is being replaced.
Admittedly, the unpleasant aromas far outnumber the pleasant ones, but that’s not always the case. One might walk by a flower stand or a garden, after all, or a vendor of roast chestnuts in autumn. So all is not lost, not even in New York, though an effort must be made.
333. The Nose
Sitting recently at my usual table at Philip Marie, a restaurant at the corner of West 11th Street and Hudson in the West Village, I had a good view of the front window and the young couple at the table by that window. They were having great fun, at times laughing hilariously and clinking their glasses of Mimosa, totally unaware of the casual voyeur at a table nearby. Alas, at times I saw them both in profile and couldn’t help but notice that both had a nose just a wee bit too prominent. Which projected me into a train of thoughts about noses that I’m now recording here.
Of all our facial features, the nose is prominent and inherently gross. The mouth too is gross, being associated with sex and gluttony, but for many of us the nose has priority, being situated right smack in the middle of our face. The Victorians recognized this and their manuals of etiquette emphasized that the nose was to be ignored when possible, and its needs attended to discreetly in private. What, after all, is a sneeze, if not a form of orgasm, and orgasm was something the Victorians, prolific though they were, shrank from acknowledging. Nor was a runny nose much better, being messy in the extreme. And our expression “nosey” suggests prying, intrusive, offensively inquisitive, which hardly enhances our olfactory protuberance. Also, think of how dogs, with their keen sense of smell, sniff one another’s rear end by way of greeting – something many of us even today, post-Victorian worldlings that we are, would rather not observe.
mcfarlandmoPascal in his Pensées remarked, “Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.” Indeed, her beauty ensnared both Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, with dire consequences for both Egypt and Rome. In Pascal’s seventeenth century a large nose suggested dominance and strength of character, though I suspect that Cleopatra’s beauty was just as significant, as attested by Roman historians and further commemorated by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra.
The French may have a thing about the nose, for their way of expressing “They will laugh in your face,” is to say Ils vous riront au nez. Where we say “face,” they say “nose” (nez). Which brings us to a classic of French theater, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, the story of a French swashbuckling poet of the seventeenth century who singlehanded could hold off a swarm of enemies with his sword, but who was plagued with an outsized nose. The play is written in less than brilliant verse, but it survives nonetheless and its final scene, where the dying Cyrano at last confesses his feelings to the woman he has always loved, can elicit a tear or two from even the most hardbitten spectator.
As for noses and their influence on us, I recall my friend Ken who referred to his appearance and experiences as either “b.n.j.” or “a.n.j.,” meaning “before nose job” or “after nose job.” In his young youth, before I knew him, being unhappy about his “Jewish” or “Semitic” nose, he had had surgery by a surgeon specializing in such cases. The result was successful, for I never noticed anything untoward about his nose and would never have suspected a nose job, had he not told me about it. Yet he once showed me a photo of himself in his late teens, “b.n.j.,” lying on a blanket on a beach in swimming trunks. This surprised me, for he had said many times that he would never exhibit himself in such a fashion, lacking a muscled male torso as he did. Yet this photo of him had, as I immediately remarked, an undeniably sensual aspect, and he admitted that other friends had observed the same. So maybe noses aren’t so significant after all; other matters also come into play. But don’t tell that to the nose surgeons; it might deprive them of a lucrative practice.
Noses have been variously classified and analyzed, often using names of celebrities. But this is too transitory, too perishable; celebrities come and go. Analysts of the matter – usually plastic surgeons – name up to 14 kinds, but I’ll settle for less. Here are some common types:
· Greek nose: straight from top to tip. Often requested in plastic surgery.· Roman or aquiline nose: with a prominent bridge, making it look slightly curved or bent. From the Latin aquilinus, “eagle-like.” Also called the hawk nose.· Snub nose: stubby, short.· Fleshy nose: more fatty than bony. Also called the Einstein, after you-know-who. Very common among men and women.
There is much brouhaha about which noses are the most attractive, with plastic surgeons chiming in online. But on the right people, almost all of them can look attractive.
Famous noses:
1. Santa Claus, as described in the famous poem “Twas the night before Christmas”: “His eyes—how hey twinkled! His dimples, how merry! / His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!” (Which is not to suggest that Santa was into his cups.)2. Pinocchio, whose nose grew longer whenever he told a lie.3. J.P. Morgan, the giant of finance, whose nose was flagrantly purple because of a skin condition known as rhinophyma. Being sensitive on the matter, lunged at anyone trying to photograph him.4. Michelangelo, whose flat nose resulted from a punch by a fellow Florentine artist in his youth.5. President Richard Nixon, whose up-turned ski-jump nose was the delight of cartoonists.
Old J.P., lunging at a photographer.Big noses are usually thought of as repellent, but what constitutes one is relative. When Chinese immigrants first came to this country in the nineteenth century, they referred to Americans – meaning Caucasians – as “Round Eyes” and “Big Noses.” Napoleon, on the other hand, equated big noses with big brains and promoted his officers accordingly. “When I want any good head work done, I choose a man with a long nose.”
Francis I of France, as rendered by Titian, 1539. A big nose, but Titian makes him look elegant.
So who could be described as having the proper sized nose? Maybe the American actor John Barrymore, who in the 1920s acquired the nickname “The Great Profile”; I’ll let the readers judge.
John Barrymore, circa 1920.But come to think of it, if you start noticing noses – especially in profile – the results may be dismaying. This is how friendships die and self-esteem crumbles. Get away from that mirror and stop scanning your friends’ nasal geography. But don’t start noticing chins either; even more than a nose, a weak or receding chin can demolish a profile. If you must study facial features, focus on the eyes. They are expressive, enticing, mysterious, rarely gross.
Yes, Gross. But think of all the aromas it can capture.LHOONBROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.
The back cover summary:New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Fresh baked bread, a feast for the nostrils.FotoDawg
Coming soon: Light: The Conquering of Darkness
© 2017 Clifford Browder
December 13, 2017
332. NEW YORKERS ARE TOUGH
Yes, last Monday a would-be Muslim terrorist from Bangladesh strapped a homemade pipe bomb to his body and blew himself up in a busy corridor under Times Square during rush hour. Fortunately, only he was seriously injured, and the resulting disruption was temporary. But it could have been a lot worse, as when another Muslim terrorist drove a truck along a bike path in Lower Manhattan last Halloween, killing eight and injuring twelve others. Yes, this latest attempt could have been serious, but it wasn’t, and New Yorkers were soon commuting as usual and give no sign of doing otherwise. Why? It’s simple:
NEW YORKERS ARE TOUGH
We survived 9/11 and the deaths of hundreds, didn’t we? When I look out my bedroom window when I get up each morning, or look out my kitchen window in the evening, in the distance downtown I see the Freedom Tower on the World Trade Center site, a reminder of that havoc. At night it shines with lights and is topped by an antenna with a blinking red light, which prompts me to call it the Tower of Light. Its construction on the site of that havoc and rubble – accomplished only after years of debate and dispute by the squabbling parties involved – is proof of this city’s resilience, its determination to DREAM DARE DO, to not be held back by anything, to forge ahead against all obstacles, aware that THE EYES OF THE WORLD ARE UPON YOU. Pretentious? Certainly. Exceptionalist? You bet. Delusional? Maybe, maybe not. But that’s New York:
NEW YORKERS ARE SURVIVORS
It’s an old tradition. We survived
· The cholera epidemic of 1832· The great fires of 1835 and 1845· The draft riots of 1863, when mobs ruled the streets for three days· The Great Blizzard of 1888, when the city was paralyzed, buried under tons of snow· The financial panics of 1837, 1857, 1873, 1894, 1907, and 1929· The Wall Street bombing of 1920 that killed some 30 people· Prohibition· The Great Depression of the 1930s, with millions out of work· Son of Sam, the serial killer who terrorized the city· The blackouts of 1965, 1977, 1994, and 2003 (I experienced them all)· Screeching subway trains, lurching buses, and an ancient and crumbling infrastructure (a crisis in progress}· Donald Trump in the White House (another crisis in progress)
So come what may – and it probably will -- we will be all right.
December 10, 2017
331. How America Goes to War: 1861 and Later
A book is a dream you hold in your hand.
Small Talk
This is an experiment: a few chatty words about everything and nothing, before I get on to the post. Tell me things you'd like me to talk about, but please, not our Twitterer in Chief, who gets too much of exposure as it is.
Three signs of the season here in New York City:
Dead oak leaves in every shade of brown are being blown about, often in little swirls and flurries, by autumn winds.I saw a big blue truck on West 14th Street packed high with stacks of tightly bound Christmas trees, surely to be distributed to retail sites on the sidewalks of the city.I bought from L.L. Bean a thick wool beanie to warm my chilly ears when I go out in wintry weather. The problem: I think that people, when their ears are concealed, look absolutely silly. We humans weren't meant to be seen earless, and my beanie makes me look earless and silly -- sillier than usual, that is. So will I wear the beanie and look silly, or leave it at home and look human, albeit with half-frozen ears? Time will tell.
deavmi
Also: For several days I've had my nose deep in Carolyn Howard-Johnson's The Frugal Book Promoter, absorbing advice on promoting myself and my books. It seems you have to develop a brand; Mark Twain did it brilliantly, so writers and other creative types should do it, too. My first thought: Though ripe in years, I learned the Charleston a while ago; geezers rock. This is my first attempt at developing my brand. You see where this is leading.
My second thought: Since I hate poetry (see post #295), I can promote myself as the first poet to urge his friends and fans to read his other stuff but to avoid his poetry. Now that is original. So let's get on to the wars.
How America goes to war: 1861 and Later
Here is a revised version of post #76, first published on
August 4, 2013. It seems relevant today.
That New York City went to war in 1861 surprised many in the South and even some in the North, for the city had strong commercial ties to the South, and its merchants dreaded war. So as Secession loomed, the merchants advocated compromise with the South, and Mayor Fernando Wood, the slickest and deftest of politicians, even proposed that the city secede from the North, so as to maintain its ties with the South. (Not the last time the city dreamed of going it alone.) `But all that changed in April 1861, when newspaper headlines broke the news: THE WAR COMMENCED, WAR AT LAST. The South had opened fire on Fort Sumter; it was war indeed.
I have read about and witnessed several beginnings of war and noticed certain phases common to all of them:Patriotism raised to a fever pitch.Celebration of heroes real or manufactured.Demonization of the enemy.The sobering up.Let's see how these played out in New York in the spring of 1861.
Patriotism raised to a fever pitch
When news of the attack on Fort Sumter reached the city on Friday night, April 12, it spread quickly. All the next day newspaper offices were thronged by crowds eager for newspapers and the latest news. People gathered at every corner where news bulletins were posted, and the presses printed extras as each new dispatch came in by telegraph. When the President called for 75,000 three-month volunteers, majors and colonels proliferated overnight, opening rolls for enlistment, and tents soon sprang up at the Battery, and barracks in City Hall Park. "'Tis sweet, oh 'tis sweet, for one's country to die," sang fresh-faced volunteers, while multitudes scuffed their voices on the Star-Spangled Banner, and preachers preached, "Beat your ploughshares into swords!" Lawyers and boilermakers shouldered arms and tramped in ragged parade, schoolboys drilled in schoolyards, and 1812 veterans tottered forth, yearning to serve their country yet again. When the elite 7th Regiment of the National Guard drilled in its armory, hundreds flocked to watch, admission by ticket only; it had been ordered to Washington.
There was a great demand for flags, streamers, and bunting. Flags appeared in store windows, on church steeples, on ships in the harbor, in lapels and the fronts of men's hats, in ladies' bonnets, even in the fists of infants and the manes of horses. On Monday, April 15, a noisy crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside the offices of the New York Herald, whose owner, James Gordon Bennett, was thought to be partial to the South. While they stared up at the newspaper's windows and hooted and jeered and demanded that it fly the flag, a committee of gentlemen called on Bennett and warned him that not flying the flag would put his paper and perhaps himself in danger. Bennett, a cynic immune to lofty causes and the surge of sentiment, agreed to do so, but had no flag to fly. Finally one was obtained that, in the absence of a flagpole, was hung out a window, to mixed groans and cheers from below. Meanwhile the Times and Tribune, ardent supporters of the President, were flying huge banners atop their offices.
Other papers deemed insufficiently patriotic were similarly threatened, as were hotels once graced by the drawl of Southern chivalry; in every case flags were conspicuously displayed. In all these situations the police followed the crowd discreetly, so as to prevent any violence. As well they might, since an effigy was found hanging in City Hall Park with a placard in bold letters: ROPE ALL TRAITORS, and another was seen hanging by its neck out a window on a downtown street with a sign proclaiming, EVERY TRAITOR SHOULD BE SERVED THUS. More than one citizen who expressed, or was thought to have expressed, sympathy for the South or disloyalty to the President was beaten and knocked down in the street. Small wonder that the Herald staff were said to be armed, and to have pumps ready to throw boiling water on any mob attacking their building.
And the ladies? They were in it up to their delicate ears, adorning themselves with flags and bunting, cheering volunteers as they drilled, and evincing a most passionate fondness for uniforms. At a party a young woman asked her fiancé if he was going to volunteer. "Do you really want me to volunteer and get killed?" he asked. Springing up from her seat, her eyes flashing fire, her cheeks flushed, she announced, "If you are a coward and dare not fight for your country, you are not the man for me!" So if young men flocked to volunteer, they weren't inspired by patriotism alone, since to cut a shine with the girls, you had to be in uniform.
Support for the military came from surprising quarters. RADWAY'S READY RELIEF was touted in a long ad in the Times as appropriate for every man in the Army or Navy to allay inflammation, prevent mortification in case of gunshot wounds, and prevent the need for amputation. It was also a cure for malarious fevers, dysenteries, rheumatism, and other maladies. A retired Colonel Gates of the U.S. Army was quoted as saying that he would no more think of retiring to bed without a bottle of it than to go into battle without his sword. Needless to say, someone always gets rich in a war, but this was nothing, compared to the war contractors who would soon be supplying the military with the best shoddy blankets and collapsible boots available.
On Friday, April 19, the 7th Regiment marched down flag-bedecked Broadway on its way to Washington, shouldering rifles with bayonets, while a huge crowd of spectators greeted them with cheers and tears and cries of "God bless them!" Mothers watched discreetly from the back windows of closed carriages drawn up on the curbstones, while others watched from windows or rooftops, and boys scaled lampposts, trees, and fences for a better view. Other regiments would soon follow, including Colonel Elmer Ellsworth's Fire Zouaves in red shirts, gray baggy pants, and blue overcoats. A regiment of volunteers from the slums danced with delight on receiving revolvers and bowie knives, and weren't the least bit put off by reports that a secessionist mob in Baltimore had attacked a Massachusetts regiment en route to Washington: "We can fix that Baltimore crowd! We boys is sociable with pavin' stones, too!"
The Fire Zouaves, recruited from the city's firemen, march down Broadway en route to Washington.
Then, on Saturday, April 20, over one hundred thousand citizens gathered at Union Square for the largest patriotic rally the city had ever seen. There were speeches from five stands, and lesser spiels from front stoops, carts, and windows, as city officials, rescued from franchise scandals and complaints about manure in the streets, stood brisk and square, flanked by braided generals, as out of the mouths of orators poured acclamations: "Divine Providence ... Constitution ... flag insulted ... Christian civilization ... sacred independence ... freedom against oppression ... God." Rippling through the sea of waving flags were prayers and resolutions, plus cannon booms and cheers.
The rally in Union Square. One detail seems inaccurate: the flag flying from the George Washington statue, supposedly from Fort Sumter, seems remarkably intact.
Celebration of heroes real or manufactured
No need to manufacture a hero, as New Yorkers had a real one when Major Robert Anderson, the Fort Sumter commandant, arrived in the city from Charleston on April 18 with his beleaguered garrison and its battle-shredded flag. The 5th Regiment marched to the Brevoort House to salute him, and he appeared on a balcony to cheers. The next day, when the 7th Regiment paraded down Broadway en route to the capital, Anderson appeared again on a balcony and was again received with cheers. At the April 20 rally in Union Square he was hailed yet again with tremendous roars from the crowd, and the flag, now a patriotic symbol for the North, was flown from the equestrian statue of George Washington. The flag was then taken from city to city for patriotic rallies and fund-raising efforts for the war, and on April 14, 1865, four years to the day after the fort's surrender, it was raised again by Anderson, now a major general, over the battered remains of the fort.
Another hero was Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, who on May 24, 1861, one day after Virginia's secession from the Union, was ordered with his Fire Zouaves across the Potomac to Alexandria, Virginia, where a large Confederate flag was flying above the Marshall House Inn. The occupation was unopposed, but when Ellsworth went to the Marshall House and cut down the flag, the hotel's owner, James Jackson, killed him with a shotgun blast to the chest, and was immediately himself killed by a corporal accompanying Ellsworth. Ellsworth's body was taken to the White House, where it lay in state, and was then removed to the City Hall in New York, where thousands came to view the first man to die for the Union cause. "Remember Ellsworth!" became a patriotic slogan. Heroes -- and heroines -- are sometimes in short supply and have to be invented. In Iraq in 2003, Private First Class Jessica Lynch was wounded and captured when her convoy was ambushed by Iraqi forces. Initial press reports described her as a hero who fought the enemy ferociously before succumbing to wounds and being captured. The aura around her only increased when, soon after, she was rescued from an Iraqi hospital by U.S. Special Operations Forces. Returning to the States, she was appalled to learn of the reports about her in the press. She later testified before Congress that she had never fired her rifle, which had jammed, and that she was knocked unconscious when her vehicle crashed. Asked about her heroine status, she insisted, "That wasn't me. I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do. I'm just a survivor." For her honesty alone perhaps she deserves a medal. Another case dates from the Philippines in December 1941, soon after the Pearl Harbor attack plunged us into war and we were desperate for heroes. On December 10 Army Air Corps pilot Colin P. Kelly's B-17 bomber was sent on a mission to attack Japanese naval forces off the coast of Luzon. Sighting a large warship that they identified as the battleship Haruna, his crew dropped three bombs that they believed hit the target and destroyed it. When the plane was returning to base, it was attacked and badly damaged by a Japanese fighter; Kelly remained at the controls so his men could bail out, but he himself did not survive. He was hailed as America's first hero of the war, but his story was exaggerated and garbled. Many Americans thought that he had crashed his plane into the Haruna and destroyed the ship, and that for this act he received posthumously the nation's highest award, the Medal of Honor. In fact he received the second highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and after the war it was learned that the Haruna was not even in the area and that no Japanese ship had been sunk. Kelly was nonetheless a hero, having sacrificed his own life to let his crewmen escape.
Demonization of the enemy
As hostilities heated up, George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary that "these felons," meaning the Rebels, had murdered Northern wounded in cold blood as the defeated Northern forces fell back. So began the demonization of the enemy. As the war dragged on, sober leading citizens asserted that the Rebels had bayoneted the wounded, and even dug up the remains of a brave officer so they could cut off his head and burn his flesh to ashes. Enemy soldiers were said to have stripped the Northern dead of their uniforms and left them naked on the field to be devoured by dogs or to rot. They reportedly even boiled the flesh from the bones of the dead and then from those bones made ornaments for themselves and their friends, or for sale in the markets. Reliable witnesses, it was claimed, had confirmed these stories, which were then included in a report to the Senate. Today we can voice skepticism about these charges, but in point of fact both sides on occasion committed atrocities, including at times violating and dismembering corpses. "War is hell," General Sherman famously remarked after the war. But wartime reports of atrocities should be received with skepticism, even though some of them may indeed be confirmed in time.
A man you'd love to hate.
And so full of himself!
America has been lucky in its choice of enemies, many of whom lent themselves to demonization. How could you not hate the fiercely mustached Kaiser, posing in bemedaled uniforms under a spiked or eagle-topped helmet? Even before we entered World War I, British propaganda had his troops hanging up children by their thumbs and slicing the breasts off women in Bleeding Belgium. Hitler too, with his little patch of mustache, was easily demonized, and postwar revelations only confirmed his monstrous guilt. Saddam Hussein was likened to Hitler, nor have we had to date any good reason to rehabilitate him. But in the Civil War such figures as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson could not easily be demonized, and today the latter two are admired and eulogized even in the North. There were monsters back then too, and on both sides, but rarely at the top levels of command.
Many of our enemies have been militarists and tyrants, and, taking themselves very seriously, are vulnerable to caricature as well. If demonization paints your enemies as the direst of threats, caricature makes them ridiculous. Hitler and the Kaiser were easily caricatured, but with Hideki Tojo, the Japanese wartime premier, cartoonists had a field day -- not without a touch of racism -- making him toothily grotesque. But caricature has its limits, for one laughs at its victims, whereas war demands that you see them as demons you can hate. Even forest fires were blamed on Tojo and Hitler.
The sobering up
"On to Richmond!" Horace Greeley's Tribune urged, as the blue-coated ranks headed south. For weeks afterward cannon were trundled through the city's streets, bunting makers toiled, and hoopskirted ladies in front parlors sewed nightcaps for soldiers, while in the kitchen their maids did the same. Letters arrived reporting that the boys had been assaulted by mosquitoes and flies. "On to Richmond!" exhorted Mr. Greeley, fretting at the front's calm. Then, on July 22, came stark tidings: the Northern legions had been trounced by the Rebels and stampeded from the field in disgrace, along with a panicky horde of sightseers -- politicians and their wives, who had come out to picnic and watch the battle -- the rout going almost to the gates of Washington. Shame spread throughout the city, and resolve tightened. Wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary: "We are not yet fighting in earnest. Our sluggish, good-natured, pachydermatous people need much kicking to heat its blood. Not a traitor is hanged after four months of rampant rebellion. We have got to hang rebels, arm the niggers, burn their towns." More volunteers were called for, anthems sung, bounties offered. It was going to be a long war. The last war where these phases were clearly displayed was World War II, and the sobering up then came quickly, given the initial Japanese victories throughout the Far East, and the toll taken by enemy submarines off both our coasts. Since then we have been involved in undeclared wars that the public could not embrace wholeheartedly, and that often did not end in clear-cut victory.
What I recall in World War II was more grim determination than patriotic fervor, a mood far different from the intense patriotism of World War I, which my parents told me of, including an account of a young man so ashamed of being rejected by the services that he often kept to the alleys of Indianapolis, rather than be seen on the street. Nor did the slogans of World War II match in fervent idealism those of the previous war, as for instance "Make the world safe for democracy" and "The war to end wars." Nor do I recall parades of soldiers marching off to war. In my home town of Evanston, draftees were served coffee and a sandwich by civilian volunteers and then, in the early morning hours, were whisked off by bus to an induction center. Maybe we had learned something after all.
A World War I recruiting poster,
just as relevant for World War II.
A demonized Germany wading
through a sea of dead bodies.
Personal note : When news of Pearl Harbor came to my hometown, Evanston, Illinois, the city fathers at once placed a guard around the water works, lest Tojo and his perfidious legions corrupt our water supply. Unlikely, but why take a chance? Fortunately, no Japanese submarines were reported in the placid waters of Lake Michigan. But one dissident escaped the authorities' notice: my father, an unrepentant isolationist, a staunch Republican whose loathing of the President knew no bounds, and who even insisted that FDR was just a bit loony. In Great Britain he would probably have been jailed for defeatism or undermining the nation's morale. (But that's another story.)
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews
"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.
The back cover summary:
New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: Nightshades: they beautify, they mystify, they kill.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
Small Talk
This is an experiment: a few chatty words about everything and nothing, before I get on to the post. Tell me things you'd like me to talk about, but please, not our Twitterer in Chief, who gets too much of exposure as it is.
Three signs of the season here in New York City:
Dead oak leaves in every shade of brown are being blown about, often in little swirls and flurries, by autumn winds.I saw a big blue truck on West 14th Street packed high with stacks of tightly bound Christmas trees, surely to be distributed to retail sites on the sidewalks of the city.I bought from L.L. Bean a thick wool beanie to warm my chilly ears when I go out in wintry weather. The problem: I think that people, when their ears are concealed, look absolutely silly. We humans weren't meant to be seen earless, and my beanie makes me look earless and silly -- sillier than usual, that is. So will I wear the beanie and look silly, or leave it at home and look human, albeit with half-frozen ears? Time will tell.
deavmiAlso: For several days I've had my nose deep in Carolyn Howard-Johnson's The Frugal Book Promoter, absorbing advice on promoting myself and my books. It seems you have to develop a brand; Mark Twain did it brilliantly, so writers and other creative types should do it, too. My first thought: Though ripe in years, I learned the Charleston a while ago; geezers rock. This is my first attempt at developing my brand. You see where this is leading.
My second thought: Since I hate poetry (see post #295), I can promote myself as the first poet to urge his friends and fans to read his other stuff but to avoid his poetry. Now that is original. So let's get on to the wars.
How America goes to war: 1861 and Later
Here is a revised version of post #76, first published on
August 4, 2013. It seems relevant today.
That New York City went to war in 1861 surprised many in the South and even some in the North, for the city had strong commercial ties to the South, and its merchants dreaded war. So as Secession loomed, the merchants advocated compromise with the South, and Mayor Fernando Wood, the slickest and deftest of politicians, even proposed that the city secede from the North, so as to maintain its ties with the South. (Not the last time the city dreamed of going it alone.) `But all that changed in April 1861, when newspaper headlines broke the news: THE WAR COMMENCED, WAR AT LAST. The South had opened fire on Fort Sumter; it was war indeed.
I have read about and witnessed several beginnings of war and noticed certain phases common to all of them:Patriotism raised to a fever pitch.Celebration of heroes real or manufactured.Demonization of the enemy.The sobering up.Let's see how these played out in New York in the spring of 1861.
Patriotism raised to a fever pitch
When news of the attack on Fort Sumter reached the city on Friday night, April 12, it spread quickly. All the next day newspaper offices were thronged by crowds eager for newspapers and the latest news. People gathered at every corner where news bulletins were posted, and the presses printed extras as each new dispatch came in by telegraph. When the President called for 75,000 three-month volunteers, majors and colonels proliferated overnight, opening rolls for enlistment, and tents soon sprang up at the Battery, and barracks in City Hall Park. "'Tis sweet, oh 'tis sweet, for one's country to die," sang fresh-faced volunteers, while multitudes scuffed their voices on the Star-Spangled Banner, and preachers preached, "Beat your ploughshares into swords!" Lawyers and boilermakers shouldered arms and tramped in ragged parade, schoolboys drilled in schoolyards, and 1812 veterans tottered forth, yearning to serve their country yet again. When the elite 7th Regiment of the National Guard drilled in its armory, hundreds flocked to watch, admission by ticket only; it had been ordered to Washington.
There was a great demand for flags, streamers, and bunting. Flags appeared in store windows, on church steeples, on ships in the harbor, in lapels and the fronts of men's hats, in ladies' bonnets, even in the fists of infants and the manes of horses. On Monday, April 15, a noisy crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside the offices of the New York Herald, whose owner, James Gordon Bennett, was thought to be partial to the South. While they stared up at the newspaper's windows and hooted and jeered and demanded that it fly the flag, a committee of gentlemen called on Bennett and warned him that not flying the flag would put his paper and perhaps himself in danger. Bennett, a cynic immune to lofty causes and the surge of sentiment, agreed to do so, but had no flag to fly. Finally one was obtained that, in the absence of a flagpole, was hung out a window, to mixed groans and cheers from below. Meanwhile the Times and Tribune, ardent supporters of the President, were flying huge banners atop their offices.
Other papers deemed insufficiently patriotic were similarly threatened, as were hotels once graced by the drawl of Southern chivalry; in every case flags were conspicuously displayed. In all these situations the police followed the crowd discreetly, so as to prevent any violence. As well they might, since an effigy was found hanging in City Hall Park with a placard in bold letters: ROPE ALL TRAITORS, and another was seen hanging by its neck out a window on a downtown street with a sign proclaiming, EVERY TRAITOR SHOULD BE SERVED THUS. More than one citizen who expressed, or was thought to have expressed, sympathy for the South or disloyalty to the President was beaten and knocked down in the street. Small wonder that the Herald staff were said to be armed, and to have pumps ready to throw boiling water on any mob attacking their building.
And the ladies? They were in it up to their delicate ears, adorning themselves with flags and bunting, cheering volunteers as they drilled, and evincing a most passionate fondness for uniforms. At a party a young woman asked her fiancé if he was going to volunteer. "Do you really want me to volunteer and get killed?" he asked. Springing up from her seat, her eyes flashing fire, her cheeks flushed, she announced, "If you are a coward and dare not fight for your country, you are not the man for me!" So if young men flocked to volunteer, they weren't inspired by patriotism alone, since to cut a shine with the girls, you had to be in uniform.
Support for the military came from surprising quarters. RADWAY'S READY RELIEF was touted in a long ad in the Times as appropriate for every man in the Army or Navy to allay inflammation, prevent mortification in case of gunshot wounds, and prevent the need for amputation. It was also a cure for malarious fevers, dysenteries, rheumatism, and other maladies. A retired Colonel Gates of the U.S. Army was quoted as saying that he would no more think of retiring to bed without a bottle of it than to go into battle without his sword. Needless to say, someone always gets rich in a war, but this was nothing, compared to the war contractors who would soon be supplying the military with the best shoddy blankets and collapsible boots available.
On Friday, April 19, the 7th Regiment marched down flag-bedecked Broadway on its way to Washington, shouldering rifles with bayonets, while a huge crowd of spectators greeted them with cheers and tears and cries of "God bless them!" Mothers watched discreetly from the back windows of closed carriages drawn up on the curbstones, while others watched from windows or rooftops, and boys scaled lampposts, trees, and fences for a better view. Other regiments would soon follow, including Colonel Elmer Ellsworth's Fire Zouaves in red shirts, gray baggy pants, and blue overcoats. A regiment of volunteers from the slums danced with delight on receiving revolvers and bowie knives, and weren't the least bit put off by reports that a secessionist mob in Baltimore had attacked a Massachusetts regiment en route to Washington: "We can fix that Baltimore crowd! We boys is sociable with pavin' stones, too!"
The Fire Zouaves, recruited from the city's firemen, march down Broadway en route to Washington.Then, on Saturday, April 20, over one hundred thousand citizens gathered at Union Square for the largest patriotic rally the city had ever seen. There were speeches from five stands, and lesser spiels from front stoops, carts, and windows, as city officials, rescued from franchise scandals and complaints about manure in the streets, stood brisk and square, flanked by braided generals, as out of the mouths of orators poured acclamations: "Divine Providence ... Constitution ... flag insulted ... Christian civilization ... sacred independence ... freedom against oppression ... God." Rippling through the sea of waving flags were prayers and resolutions, plus cannon booms and cheers.
The rally in Union Square. One detail seems inaccurate: the flag flying from the George Washington statue, supposedly from Fort Sumter, seems remarkably intact.
Celebration of heroes real or manufactured
No need to manufacture a hero, as New Yorkers had a real one when Major Robert Anderson, the Fort Sumter commandant, arrived in the city from Charleston on April 18 with his beleaguered garrison and its battle-shredded flag. The 5th Regiment marched to the Brevoort House to salute him, and he appeared on a balcony to cheers. The next day, when the 7th Regiment paraded down Broadway en route to the capital, Anderson appeared again on a balcony and was again received with cheers. At the April 20 rally in Union Square he was hailed yet again with tremendous roars from the crowd, and the flag, now a patriotic symbol for the North, was flown from the equestrian statue of George Washington. The flag was then taken from city to city for patriotic rallies and fund-raising efforts for the war, and on April 14, 1865, four years to the day after the fort's surrender, it was raised again by Anderson, now a major general, over the battered remains of the fort.
Another hero was Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, who on May 24, 1861, one day after Virginia's secession from the Union, was ordered with his Fire Zouaves across the Potomac to Alexandria, Virginia, where a large Confederate flag was flying above the Marshall House Inn. The occupation was unopposed, but when Ellsworth went to the Marshall House and cut down the flag, the hotel's owner, James Jackson, killed him with a shotgun blast to the chest, and was immediately himself killed by a corporal accompanying Ellsworth. Ellsworth's body was taken to the White House, where it lay in state, and was then removed to the City Hall in New York, where thousands came to view the first man to die for the Union cause. "Remember Ellsworth!" became a patriotic slogan. Heroes -- and heroines -- are sometimes in short supply and have to be invented. In Iraq in 2003, Private First Class Jessica Lynch was wounded and captured when her convoy was ambushed by Iraqi forces. Initial press reports described her as a hero who fought the enemy ferociously before succumbing to wounds and being captured. The aura around her only increased when, soon after, she was rescued from an Iraqi hospital by U.S. Special Operations Forces. Returning to the States, she was appalled to learn of the reports about her in the press. She later testified before Congress that she had never fired her rifle, which had jammed, and that she was knocked unconscious when her vehicle crashed. Asked about her heroine status, she insisted, "That wasn't me. I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do. I'm just a survivor." For her honesty alone perhaps she deserves a medal. Another case dates from the Philippines in December 1941, soon after the Pearl Harbor attack plunged us into war and we were desperate for heroes. On December 10 Army Air Corps pilot Colin P. Kelly's B-17 bomber was sent on a mission to attack Japanese naval forces off the coast of Luzon. Sighting a large warship that they identified as the battleship Haruna, his crew dropped three bombs that they believed hit the target and destroyed it. When the plane was returning to base, it was attacked and badly damaged by a Japanese fighter; Kelly remained at the controls so his men could bail out, but he himself did not survive. He was hailed as America's first hero of the war, but his story was exaggerated and garbled. Many Americans thought that he had crashed his plane into the Haruna and destroyed the ship, and that for this act he received posthumously the nation's highest award, the Medal of Honor. In fact he received the second highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and after the war it was learned that the Haruna was not even in the area and that no Japanese ship had been sunk. Kelly was nonetheless a hero, having sacrificed his own life to let his crewmen escape.
Demonization of the enemy
As hostilities heated up, George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary that "these felons," meaning the Rebels, had murdered Northern wounded in cold blood as the defeated Northern forces fell back. So began the demonization of the enemy. As the war dragged on, sober leading citizens asserted that the Rebels had bayoneted the wounded, and even dug up the remains of a brave officer so they could cut off his head and burn his flesh to ashes. Enemy soldiers were said to have stripped the Northern dead of their uniforms and left them naked on the field to be devoured by dogs or to rot. They reportedly even boiled the flesh from the bones of the dead and then from those bones made ornaments for themselves and their friends, or for sale in the markets. Reliable witnesses, it was claimed, had confirmed these stories, which were then included in a report to the Senate. Today we can voice skepticism about these charges, but in point of fact both sides on occasion committed atrocities, including at times violating and dismembering corpses. "War is hell," General Sherman famously remarked after the war. But wartime reports of atrocities should be received with skepticism, even though some of them may indeed be confirmed in time.
A man you'd love to hate. And so full of himself!
America has been lucky in its choice of enemies, many of whom lent themselves to demonization. How could you not hate the fiercely mustached Kaiser, posing in bemedaled uniforms under a spiked or eagle-topped helmet? Even before we entered World War I, British propaganda had his troops hanging up children by their thumbs and slicing the breasts off women in Bleeding Belgium. Hitler too, with his little patch of mustache, was easily demonized, and postwar revelations only confirmed his monstrous guilt. Saddam Hussein was likened to Hitler, nor have we had to date any good reason to rehabilitate him. But in the Civil War such figures as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson could not easily be demonized, and today the latter two are admired and eulogized even in the North. There were monsters back then too, and on both sides, but rarely at the top levels of command.
Many of our enemies have been militarists and tyrants, and, taking themselves very seriously, are vulnerable to caricature as well. If demonization paints your enemies as the direst of threats, caricature makes them ridiculous. Hitler and the Kaiser were easily caricatured, but with Hideki Tojo, the Japanese wartime premier, cartoonists had a field day -- not without a touch of racism -- making him toothily grotesque. But caricature has its limits, for one laughs at its victims, whereas war demands that you see them as demons you can hate. Even forest fires were blamed on Tojo and Hitler.
The sobering up
"On to Richmond!" Horace Greeley's Tribune urged, as the blue-coated ranks headed south. For weeks afterward cannon were trundled through the city's streets, bunting makers toiled, and hoopskirted ladies in front parlors sewed nightcaps for soldiers, while in the kitchen their maids did the same. Letters arrived reporting that the boys had been assaulted by mosquitoes and flies. "On to Richmond!" exhorted Mr. Greeley, fretting at the front's calm. Then, on July 22, came stark tidings: the Northern legions had been trounced by the Rebels and stampeded from the field in disgrace, along with a panicky horde of sightseers -- politicians and their wives, who had come out to picnic and watch the battle -- the rout going almost to the gates of Washington. Shame spread throughout the city, and resolve tightened. Wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary: "We are not yet fighting in earnest. Our sluggish, good-natured, pachydermatous people need much kicking to heat its blood. Not a traitor is hanged after four months of rampant rebellion. We have got to hang rebels, arm the niggers, burn their towns." More volunteers were called for, anthems sung, bounties offered. It was going to be a long war. The last war where these phases were clearly displayed was World War II, and the sobering up then came quickly, given the initial Japanese victories throughout the Far East, and the toll taken by enemy submarines off both our coasts. Since then we have been involved in undeclared wars that the public could not embrace wholeheartedly, and that often did not end in clear-cut victory.
What I recall in World War II was more grim determination than patriotic fervor, a mood far different from the intense patriotism of World War I, which my parents told me of, including an account of a young man so ashamed of being rejected by the services that he often kept to the alleys of Indianapolis, rather than be seen on the street. Nor did the slogans of World War II match in fervent idealism those of the previous war, as for instance "Make the world safe for democracy" and "The war to end wars." Nor do I recall parades of soldiers marching off to war. In my home town of Evanston, draftees were served coffee and a sandwich by civilian volunteers and then, in the early morning hours, were whisked off by bus to an induction center. Maybe we had learned something after all.
A World War I recruiting poster,just as relevant for World War II.
A demonized Germany wadingthrough a sea of dead bodies.
Personal note : When news of Pearl Harbor came to my hometown, Evanston, Illinois, the city fathers at once placed a guard around the water works, lest Tojo and his perfidious legions corrupt our water supply. Unlikely, but why take a chance? Fortunately, no Japanese submarines were reported in the placid waters of Lake Michigan. But one dissident escaped the authorities' notice: my father, an unrepentant isolationist, a staunch Republican whose loathing of the President knew no bounds, and who even insisted that FDR was just a bit loony. In Great Britain he would probably have been jailed for defeatism or undermining the nation's morale. (But that's another story.)
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.
The back cover summary:New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: Nightshades: they beautify, they mystify, they kill.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
December 3, 2017
330. The Apple: Tantalizing, Healthy and Forbidden
A book is a house of gold. -- Chinese proverb
Bill Hope: His Story. In this novel, the second title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, a street kid named Bill Hope pours out the story of his career as a pickpocket in a torrent of words. For this and other titles, see below at the end of the post.
The Apple: Tantalizing, Healthy and Forbidden
Weeks ago I meant to do a post about the apple, but the banana snuck in and upstage it; the apple didn’t have a chance, since the banana was backed by the CIA. (See post #315, “Bananas, Chiquita and the CIA.”) But my fondness for apples brings me now to the subject, with appropriate scorn for that phallic yellow interloper from Central America. Apples, after all, are a major product of New York State, which in this regard is surpassed only by that fructiferous johnny come lately, the state of Washington.
Raman Patel
My love affair with apples began long ago in my Illinois childhood, when in the fall my family would drive out into the country to buy produce from the roadside stands of the Luxemburgers, as the farmers in the area were called, being presumably from the tiny duchy of Luxemburg. We would come back laden with corn on the cob, potatoes, beans, and other vegetables, and a bag of apples, our favorites being Winesap and Jonathan. Those roadside stands, and the farms that offered them, are long since gone, supplanted by ruthlessly expanding suburbia, but the memory of those excursions is fresh.
It was later my great good luck that I came to New York City (also known as the Big Apple) and there, in time, discovered the Union Square and Abingdon Square greenmarkets, where every fall apples appear in abundance. At Abingdon on a recent Saturday one stand that specializes in apples and apple-based products offered no less than seventeen varieties of apples. Commonly available are Macintoch, Red and Golden Delicious, Fuji, Winesap, Gala, Cortland, Rome, Ida, Jonagold, Braeburn, Paula Red, Empire, Honeycrisp, Granny Smith, and others, including some unfamiliar ones recently hybridized. Described as sweet or tart, crisp or creamy or mellow or juicy, most of them come from upstate. One October, when I was on a bus bound upstate to a cousin’s wedding, on both sides of the road I saw miles and miles of orchards, their boughs heavy with apples just begging to be picked. Many of them, I’m sure, soon ended up in the greenmarkets of New York City, where, in the month of October, being newly picked, they have a taste that will never again be matched.
Pkvan
Usually, at that time of the year, I was vacationing on Monhegan Island, ten miles off midcoast Maine, where wild apple trees bear generously all over the island, some of the apples edible and some not. One isolated tree in the woods I accessed by a deer path, using a borrowed apple-picker to harvest loads of slightly tart apples that were good for eating and perfect for baking. The tree was on a hillside, and a few tantalizingly plump apples at the very top of the tree always remained out of reach of the apple-picker, and if I shook the tree to bring them down, they fell and rolled right down the slope into the brush and disappeared. When my bag was filled to the limit with apples, I would lie in the dry grass near the tree, watching a patch of blue sky traversed at intervals by soaring gulls and an occasional peregrine falcon, and reveling in the silence and solitude. This went on for years, my apples in great demand by friends in the village for baking, until the island’s deer were eliminated so as to remove the threat of ticks, and the deer path became overgrown. So fond was I of that tree, that for several seasons I tried to find a way to it, dodging around blackberry brambles and fallen spruce trees, stumbling this way and that through the undergrowth, until I finally gave it up, poignantly aware that my apple tree was lost to me forever.
But not the apples of New York State, including the small, spotted yellow ones growing wild that I have discovered, and sometimes harvested, in Van Cortlandt and Pelham Bay Park. Not that they were always here. Long ago, doing research for a friend’s projected vegan cookbook, I studied the history of foods – yes, each food has a history, and usually a fascinating one – and so learned that the apple originated in southern Russia or Asia Minor (now Turkey), then spread throughout the eastern hemisphere. In the 1600s English settlers brought it to North America, where crab apple trees, bearing barely edible apples, had existed since time immemorial. Today, in this country alone, there are over seven thousand varieties, only a few of them – for me, a few dozen – available in markets and stores.
Apples in this country grow from New England through the Midwest and on west to Colorado and Washington state. And yes, there really was a Johnny Appleseed, whose real name was John Chapman (1774-1845), who encouraged the growing of apples throughout the Middle West, though the legendary image of him running around barefoot as he scattered apple seeds all over the place is myth; he was a nurseryman who planted nurseries, left them in charge of a neighbor, and returned after a year or two to care for them. He was also a man of faith influenced by the Swedish philosopher and mystic Swedenborg, and when he died he left to his sister an estate of 1200 acres of valuable nurseries.
In all the apple-growing regions of the U.S., small family farms once had orchards bearing varieties of apples now lost, or almost lost, to us, since the apple trees died when the farms were overwhelmed by the advent of industrialized agriculture. But a few trees survived in the woods, or were absorbed by parks and other public lands, and there, today, they can be found by investigators – or should one say treasure hunters – determined to discover at least some of the lost varieties. Have you ever heard of Mother apples, or the Rambo (no, I’m not making this up), or the Nero or the Arkansas Beauty or the Limber Twig? Neither had I until last May, when an article in the New York Times told how volunteer apple hunters, with the help of old catalogs and county fair records, were busy exploring abandoned farm sites in Washington state, North Carolina, and Maine. Will these long-lost varieties finally appear in our markets and stores? Not likely, for they bruise easily, don’t store well, and don’t produce an economically viable number of apples per tree. But these devoted apple hunters, though few in number, are doing their best to recover and nourish these fragments of our agricultural past.
But to get back to New York State, few of us think about the farms and farmers that produce the apples now found in our greenmarkets and stores. The upstate farms are often run by third- or fourth-generation owners, and harvested by Jamaican and other immigrants who return for the harvest year after year. Armed with buckets and aluminum ladders, they work ten-hour shifts picking apples day after day, hurrying to be done by late October, getting time off only if it rains … or snows. Usually they sleep in barrack-style dorms on the farm, where, when not working, they play dominoes, drink beer, watch TV, and joke with their friends.
Immigrants have been harvesting New York State apples since the late 1960s, when farmers could no longer find reliable local help willing to work at the wages they could afford to pay. The foreigners come under a federal H-2A program that grants visas to foreign workers coming here for temporary labor that now pays $12.38 an hour, more than New York State’s minimum wage of $11.00, and much more than the workers can make when they return home, where they get jobs as carpenters, taxi drivers, and farmers. Conditions aren’t ideal and workers can be exposed to pesticides, but they keep on coming year after year, even up to the age of 70, and it benefits both the home country and the U.S. Without the H-2A program, the apple industry of New York couldn’t exist. Fortunately, the anti-immigrant regime of our Twitterer-in-Chief has not set its sights on the H-2A program … not yet, at least.
Happily for all concerned, the apple is just plain flat-out healthy. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” goes that age-old saying, and there is truth in it. Apples contain malic and tartaric acid, which cleanse the liver and digestive tract, and are rich in the soluble fiber pectin, which reduces cholesterol, counteracts toxins, and removes radioactive residues from the body. And raw apples have beta-carotene, vitamin C, and potassium, all of which the body needs. But be sure to eat the skin, since that is where most of these nutrients are found.
Eating healthy for two.
If all this doesn’t impress you with the significance of apples, remember that they caused the Trojan War. Eris, the goddess of Discord, threw a beautiful apple marked “For the fairest” into a gathering of the gods to which she had not been invited, and Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite promptly claimed it. To settle the dispute, they appealed to the Trojan prince Paris, to whom Hera promised power and wealth, Athena promised victory in war and wisdom, and Aphrodite offered Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Helen, who happened to be the wife of Menelaus, and with Aphrodite’s help he stole her away to Troy. Outraged and eager for spoils, the Greeks fought a ten-year war to get her back and in the end looted and destroyed the city of Troy. All this because of that one damned apple!
Golden apples were also the forbidden fruit of the Garden of the Hesperides, conferring immortality on whoever ate them. To keeps mortals from eating them and thus becoming equal to the gods, the gods had the three nymphs known as the Hesperides guarding the apples, and as a fiery back-up, a dragon. Only Hercules, as one of his many labors, managed to get past the nymphs, kill the dragon, and claim the apples, which he then, good sport that he was, returned to the gods.
The Garden of the Hesperides, as rendered by Edward Burne-Jones, ca. 1869-73.
A Pre-Raphaelite artist. Admittedly, the Renaissance painters made the whole
scene quite a bit sexier.
That said, I’ll add a Christian twist. Many believe that the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden, though translated only as “fruit” in the King James version of the Bible, was an apple. Others suggest the pomegranate or the tomato, and some subversives have even suggest the banana, whose phallic presence there I myself resolutely reject. (No associate of the CIA belongs in Eden.) Surely it was an apple that Adam and Eve consumed, skin and all, but in spite of all that pectin and potassium, disastrous consequences resulted that blight us to this day.
Adam and Eve, the snake, and two apples, as rendered in a
stained-glass window in a church in Carcassonne, France.
Txlixt TxlixT
Eve and the apple, as rendered by Gleb Kalashnikoff, 2007. Would you be tempted?
Finally, I’ll add what my dictionary of symbols states for the apple. As a forbidden fruit, it is a warning against the exaltation of materialistic desire, a useful lesson in view of the recent brouhaha of Black Friday consumerism. But also, being almost spherical in shape, the apple signifies totality, is a symbol of the All. So with this in mind, and in hopes of better health and totality, do respectfully gobble down your Macs and Granny Smiths.
Does it bring you closer to the All? I hope so.
Patrick nickan
Source note: For information on lost varieties of apple and those who are trying to reclaim them, I am indebted to an article by Kirk Johnson, entitled "In Search of an Ancient Harvest," in the New York Times of May 30, 2017. For information on Jamaicans who harvest New York State apples, I have drawn on an article by Tik Root, entitled "Apple Pickers of Jamaica (Not the One in Queens)," in the New York Times of October 8, 2017.
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews
"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. More excerpts to come.
The back cover summary:
New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: As usual lately, no idea. Inspiration will have to strike.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
Bill Hope: His Story. In this novel, the second title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, a street kid named Bill Hope pours out the story of his career as a pickpocket in a torrent of words. For this and other titles, see below at the end of the post.
The Apple: Tantalizing, Healthy and Forbidden
Weeks ago I meant to do a post about the apple, but the banana snuck in and upstage it; the apple didn’t have a chance, since the banana was backed by the CIA. (See post #315, “Bananas, Chiquita and the CIA.”) But my fondness for apples brings me now to the subject, with appropriate scorn for that phallic yellow interloper from Central America. Apples, after all, are a major product of New York State, which in this regard is surpassed only by that fructiferous johnny come lately, the state of Washington.
Raman PatelMy love affair with apples began long ago in my Illinois childhood, when in the fall my family would drive out into the country to buy produce from the roadside stands of the Luxemburgers, as the farmers in the area were called, being presumably from the tiny duchy of Luxemburg. We would come back laden with corn on the cob, potatoes, beans, and other vegetables, and a bag of apples, our favorites being Winesap and Jonathan. Those roadside stands, and the farms that offered them, are long since gone, supplanted by ruthlessly expanding suburbia, but the memory of those excursions is fresh.
It was later my great good luck that I came to New York City (also known as the Big Apple) and there, in time, discovered the Union Square and Abingdon Square greenmarkets, where every fall apples appear in abundance. At Abingdon on a recent Saturday one stand that specializes in apples and apple-based products offered no less than seventeen varieties of apples. Commonly available are Macintoch, Red and Golden Delicious, Fuji, Winesap, Gala, Cortland, Rome, Ida, Jonagold, Braeburn, Paula Red, Empire, Honeycrisp, Granny Smith, and others, including some unfamiliar ones recently hybridized. Described as sweet or tart, crisp or creamy or mellow or juicy, most of them come from upstate. One October, when I was on a bus bound upstate to a cousin’s wedding, on both sides of the road I saw miles and miles of orchards, their boughs heavy with apples just begging to be picked. Many of them, I’m sure, soon ended up in the greenmarkets of New York City, where, in the month of October, being newly picked, they have a taste that will never again be matched.
PkvanUsually, at that time of the year, I was vacationing on Monhegan Island, ten miles off midcoast Maine, where wild apple trees bear generously all over the island, some of the apples edible and some not. One isolated tree in the woods I accessed by a deer path, using a borrowed apple-picker to harvest loads of slightly tart apples that were good for eating and perfect for baking. The tree was on a hillside, and a few tantalizingly plump apples at the very top of the tree always remained out of reach of the apple-picker, and if I shook the tree to bring them down, they fell and rolled right down the slope into the brush and disappeared. When my bag was filled to the limit with apples, I would lie in the dry grass near the tree, watching a patch of blue sky traversed at intervals by soaring gulls and an occasional peregrine falcon, and reveling in the silence and solitude. This went on for years, my apples in great demand by friends in the village for baking, until the island’s deer were eliminated so as to remove the threat of ticks, and the deer path became overgrown. So fond was I of that tree, that for several seasons I tried to find a way to it, dodging around blackberry brambles and fallen spruce trees, stumbling this way and that through the undergrowth, until I finally gave it up, poignantly aware that my apple tree was lost to me forever.
But not the apples of New York State, including the small, spotted yellow ones growing wild that I have discovered, and sometimes harvested, in Van Cortlandt and Pelham Bay Park. Not that they were always here. Long ago, doing research for a friend’s projected vegan cookbook, I studied the history of foods – yes, each food has a history, and usually a fascinating one – and so learned that the apple originated in southern Russia or Asia Minor (now Turkey), then spread throughout the eastern hemisphere. In the 1600s English settlers brought it to North America, where crab apple trees, bearing barely edible apples, had existed since time immemorial. Today, in this country alone, there are over seven thousand varieties, only a few of them – for me, a few dozen – available in markets and stores.
Apples in this country grow from New England through the Midwest and on west to Colorado and Washington state. And yes, there really was a Johnny Appleseed, whose real name was John Chapman (1774-1845), who encouraged the growing of apples throughout the Middle West, though the legendary image of him running around barefoot as he scattered apple seeds all over the place is myth; he was a nurseryman who planted nurseries, left them in charge of a neighbor, and returned after a year or two to care for them. He was also a man of faith influenced by the Swedish philosopher and mystic Swedenborg, and when he died he left to his sister an estate of 1200 acres of valuable nurseries.In all the apple-growing regions of the U.S., small family farms once had orchards bearing varieties of apples now lost, or almost lost, to us, since the apple trees died when the farms were overwhelmed by the advent of industrialized agriculture. But a few trees survived in the woods, or were absorbed by parks and other public lands, and there, today, they can be found by investigators – or should one say treasure hunters – determined to discover at least some of the lost varieties. Have you ever heard of Mother apples, or the Rambo (no, I’m not making this up), or the Nero or the Arkansas Beauty or the Limber Twig? Neither had I until last May, when an article in the New York Times told how volunteer apple hunters, with the help of old catalogs and county fair records, were busy exploring abandoned farm sites in Washington state, North Carolina, and Maine. Will these long-lost varieties finally appear in our markets and stores? Not likely, for they bruise easily, don’t store well, and don’t produce an economically viable number of apples per tree. But these devoted apple hunters, though few in number, are doing their best to recover and nourish these fragments of our agricultural past.
But to get back to New York State, few of us think about the farms and farmers that produce the apples now found in our greenmarkets and stores. The upstate farms are often run by third- or fourth-generation owners, and harvested by Jamaican and other immigrants who return for the harvest year after year. Armed with buckets and aluminum ladders, they work ten-hour shifts picking apples day after day, hurrying to be done by late October, getting time off only if it rains … or snows. Usually they sleep in barrack-style dorms on the farm, where, when not working, they play dominoes, drink beer, watch TV, and joke with their friends.
Immigrants have been harvesting New York State apples since the late 1960s, when farmers could no longer find reliable local help willing to work at the wages they could afford to pay. The foreigners come under a federal H-2A program that grants visas to foreign workers coming here for temporary labor that now pays $12.38 an hour, more than New York State’s minimum wage of $11.00, and much more than the workers can make when they return home, where they get jobs as carpenters, taxi drivers, and farmers. Conditions aren’t ideal and workers can be exposed to pesticides, but they keep on coming year after year, even up to the age of 70, and it benefits both the home country and the U.S. Without the H-2A program, the apple industry of New York couldn’t exist. Fortunately, the anti-immigrant regime of our Twitterer-in-Chief has not set its sights on the H-2A program … not yet, at least.
Happily for all concerned, the apple is just plain flat-out healthy. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” goes that age-old saying, and there is truth in it. Apples contain malic and tartaric acid, which cleanse the liver and digestive tract, and are rich in the soluble fiber pectin, which reduces cholesterol, counteracts toxins, and removes radioactive residues from the body. And raw apples have beta-carotene, vitamin C, and potassium, all of which the body needs. But be sure to eat the skin, since that is where most of these nutrients are found.
Eating healthy for two.If all this doesn’t impress you with the significance of apples, remember that they caused the Trojan War. Eris, the goddess of Discord, threw a beautiful apple marked “For the fairest” into a gathering of the gods to which she had not been invited, and Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite promptly claimed it. To settle the dispute, they appealed to the Trojan prince Paris, to whom Hera promised power and wealth, Athena promised victory in war and wisdom, and Aphrodite offered Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Helen, who happened to be the wife of Menelaus, and with Aphrodite’s help he stole her away to Troy. Outraged and eager for spoils, the Greeks fought a ten-year war to get her back and in the end looted and destroyed the city of Troy. All this because of that one damned apple!
Golden apples were also the forbidden fruit of the Garden of the Hesperides, conferring immortality on whoever ate them. To keeps mortals from eating them and thus becoming equal to the gods, the gods had the three nymphs known as the Hesperides guarding the apples, and as a fiery back-up, a dragon. Only Hercules, as one of his many labors, managed to get past the nymphs, kill the dragon, and claim the apples, which he then, good sport that he was, returned to the gods.
The Garden of the Hesperides, as rendered by Edward Burne-Jones, ca. 1869-73.A Pre-Raphaelite artist. Admittedly, the Renaissance painters made the whole
scene quite a bit sexier.
That said, I’ll add a Christian twist. Many believe that the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden, though translated only as “fruit” in the King James version of the Bible, was an apple. Others suggest the pomegranate or the tomato, and some subversives have even suggest the banana, whose phallic presence there I myself resolutely reject. (No associate of the CIA belongs in Eden.) Surely it was an apple that Adam and Eve consumed, skin and all, but in spite of all that pectin and potassium, disastrous consequences resulted that blight us to this day.
Adam and Eve, the snake, and two apples, as rendered in a stained-glass window in a church in Carcassonne, France.
Txlixt TxlixT
Eve and the apple, as rendered by Gleb Kalashnikoff, 2007. Would you be tempted?Finally, I’ll add what my dictionary of symbols states for the apple. As a forbidden fruit, it is a warning against the exaltation of materialistic desire, a useful lesson in view of the recent brouhaha of Black Friday consumerism. But also, being almost spherical in shape, the apple signifies totality, is a symbol of the All. So with this in mind, and in hopes of better health and totality, do respectfully gobble down your Macs and Granny Smiths.
Does it bring you closer to the All? I hope so.Patrick nickan
Source note: For information on lost varieties of apple and those who are trying to reclaim them, I am indebted to an article by Kirk Johnson, entitled "In Search of an Ancient Harvest," in the New York Times of May 30, 2017. For information on Jamaicans who harvest New York State apples, I have drawn on an article by Tik Root, entitled "Apple Pickers of Jamaica (Not the One in Queens)," in the New York Times of October 8, 2017.
BROWDERBOOKS
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1. No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015). Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe. In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you. An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Review
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you. Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint." Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
2. Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.
Reviews"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure. A must read." Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book. The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character. I would recommend this." Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon.
3. Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series. Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author. Adult and young adult. A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. More excerpts to come.
The back cover summary:New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Early reviews
"A lively and entertaining tale. The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent." Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale." Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing. The Author obviously knows his stuff." Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.
4. The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.
What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York? Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn). Women have read it and reviewed it. (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)
Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read." Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same." Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters. Highly recommended." Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: As usual lately, no idea. Inspiration will have to strike.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
