Get Your Grump On

I'm going to do a little curmudgeonly practice here and suggest that we return the name "President's Day" to the shelf from which the retailers plucked it and call this "Washington's Birthday" again. I don't think we need to be clumping in utter failures like James Buchanan, vicious racists like Woodrow Wilson, office-dishonorers like Richard Nixon and so on with some of the men who have held the office of President and served our nation with honor and distinction.

Those of you who have been inflicting my blog upon yourself for lo these many years may remember that I have said this before. I have indeed, which only buttresses my pretensions to curmudgeonly status.

Worth the Trip

It's always neat when one's preferred baseball team does something really cool, like covering admission for anybody who wants to visit the Negro League Baseball Museum during the month of February, designated in the United States as Black History Month.

The role that the Negro Leagues played in building African-American communities in many cities and in the long fight towards desegregation is one that people should know if they want to consider themselves aware of our nation's history. As a multiple-time visitor of the NLBM, I can recommend it as an excellent way to begin learning about this important era.

And in February, "tuition" is free...

JB, POTUS

The Democratic presidential candidate with the initials JB was probably not the first choice for the ticket for a lot of party members. But the candidate with the most popular support held views that the majority of the country didn't much care for, and he threatened the party leadership by supporting policies that would likely keep them out of power in the legislature as well as within the party structure. So they took advantage of a split between other candidates that more overtly promoted these unpopular views and were able to frame JB as a kind of sensible consensus candidate.

His absence from the Washington mix during the previous term helped keep him above some of the worst excesses connected to that environment. His long experience in government in both elective and appointive office gave him an air of competence and calm that contrasted with the other parties' candidates. Against promises of radical change, intensified nativism and threats to the established order that would lead who knows where if enacted, JB made it clear that any changes would be carefully thought out and made in a professional, reasoned manner. The kind of upheaval argued for by others was not for him.

Once elected, though, it became clear that JB was not really a "different Democrat" from the other candidates for his party's nomination. He made support for the policies they had sought a big part his own agenda, and expressed sympathy for views he had seemed to disclaim on the campaign trail. He was warned that this kind of action would not help stave off challenges from the other party and might even embolden their more radical elements to work that much harder for the White House. By not standing against these more radical members of his own party and their support for increasingly unpopular views, JB risked potential civil unrest and worse but he was clearly not capable of standing against their energy and persuasion -- whatever else he had been during his long governmental career, he was no leader anymore.

Even his pledge to serve just one term and campaign hard for his Vice-President to succeed him proved inadequate, and so James Buchanan watched Abraham Lincoln win the election of 1860 as the country he had so inexpertly led for four years from disaster to disaster finally fell apart into open conflict.

Of course I was talking about James Buchanan. Who did you think I meant?

Unruined

In another of those occasional useful things that we see on the internet, the Budget Direct travel company used graphic designers, historians and architects to virtually "rebuild" six now ruined castles as they would have been seen in their glory. The finished product uses photo editing software, too, so that the images are not just drawings of the castles imposed on pictures but simulated photographs of the reconstruction work.

As it always seems when something is found on the internet that's cool and doesn't suck, it's one of those little quirk things.

Slice of History

Every now and again historians turn their skills onto matters worthwhile...

Major Effort

In this, the 100th year since the beginning of baseball's Negro Leagues, Major League Baseball is considering reclassifying at least two of the different leagues made up of African-American players as "major leagues."

As Dan McLaughlin notes in National Review, the push would do more than attempt to be another step in redressing the historical wrong of baseball's segregated era which stretched from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th. "Major League" has a specific definition for the organization, and the reclassification could bring about a change in the record books. 

McLaughlin points out that there have been other major leagues in addition to the two we recognize today. They were usually attempts to create a third league to rival the American and National Leagues which did not succeed. The criteria are not concrete, but things like a regularity of schedule and record-keeping play the largest role. Quality of play is a factor as well, but given the wide range in that arena among the thousands of players who have suited up in one of the two current leagues over their history, it can't really be the determining one.

Such a decision would be the right one, McLaughlin writes. While it would not make things right for the men prevented from taking their shot at the Show because of the color of their skin -- even for the few Negro Leaguers who are still living -- it would stop the continuation of the injustice. In the same way that Jackie Robinson demonstrated that melanin had no role in creating a quality ballplayer, the move would show that historical injustice could not prevent the proper recognition of Negro League organization, talent and importance.

The move would have its own problems, of course. In addition to their league games Negro League teams often played many games in barnstorming tours against local or semipro teams. They dominated, as one might expect a team of professionals to do. Do those games count in figuring statistics? White major leaguers would create winter barnstorming teams as well -- they often played Negro Leaguers during them -- and they didn't count those hits or wins in their own official totals. Should the Negro Leaguers count their stats against the white barnstormer teams but not against the locals?

And the two dominant teams for much of the Negro Leagues' history were the Kansas City Monarchs and the Homestead Grays. Add the Indianapolis Clowns and Newark Eagles to them and you have a huge chunk of the Negro Leagues World Series champions before you -- realistically some of the actual Negro National League and Negro American League teams weren't much better than the local opponents on a barnstorming tour.

McLaughlin thinks those problems can be ironed out and he's probably right. Plus statistics are a baseball fan's preferred subject for arguments, so adding an entirely new set has great appeal for some. And while I agree that this kind of reclassification would be the right thing to do another argument makes me hesitate. As the 2013 movie 42 illustrated, stepping across Major League Baseball's disgraceful color line took a tremendous effort from and a tremendous toll on Jackie Robinson. I worry that naming the NNL and NAL as major leagues would be a step down the road to diminishing the significance and cost of his accomplishment.

I know, I know, that sounds unlikely. Baseball more than other major sports lives within and around its own history. The fact that every team officially retired jersey number 42 -- even teams which didn't exist when Robinson joined the Dodgers -- and that the entire league holds a recognition day in which every player wears that number on that one day should make it difficult for Robinson's monumental role to be lost to history. I agree. But then I remember how Millennials and Generation Z tend to handle history and my worry returns.

Historicity

After helping the folks out with an errand and having lunch I visited a nearby museum. It's been around a long time and I remember going to it when I was young.

One of the exhibits is a collection of different pottery vessels from native tribes dating back hundreds of years -- in a couple of cases probably a round thousand. It's a good focus for some thinking and reflection. Those people, if they'd been choosing what should be around a thousand years after them would probably not have picked bowls or pitchers, but that's what made it. When I wonder what from today will be around in 3020, I figure it will probably wind up being something as ordinary as a bowl. Granted, we've greatly expanded our catalog of useless things -- hey, Twitter, how ya doing? -- but we still have ordinary stuff.

History is worth reflecting on. Especially because when you don't know it you're liable to say something stupid like "Donald Trump is our first racist president" and ignore presidents who were literal slave owners and another who actually re-segregated the federal government. Or that in the case of African-Americans "in America and in society there ain't been no damn movement for us" literally one week after paying tribute to a civil rights leader who suffered a fractured skull as a part of a movement to end segregation and was later elected to Congress.

Who cares what happened in the past anyway, right?

Figured It Out

An odd archaeological find in southern Russia mystified scientists and researchers for years, primarily because it lacks some of the usual artifacts other similar sites contain.

The building, on an island in Lake Tere-Khol, is called "Por-Bajin" and is about the size of Buckingham Palace. Other very old buildings have things like furniture, artwork or even trash that archaeologists can compare with other items to get an idea of which time frame in which the building sits. But Por-Bajin didn't have a lot of those things and the ones it did have weren't very distinctive. Its purpose as well as its date was a mystery. The Uighur people of the area did not have a historical record that could identify it.

Researchers elsewhere had found two very sharp spikes in the amount of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere, in the years 775 and 994. Trees absorb carbon, so the different rings the trees added as they aged showed when the trees in Por-Bajin's foundation had been cut down: two years after the 775 spike.

This then matched with a Uighur Khan or ruler of the time who had attempted to impose a new religion on his people -- which infuriated them enough that they revolted and killed him in 779. Archaeologists think that Por-Bajin was meant to be a temple of this religion and was abandoned when the Khan was killed.

It's a good thing Por Bajin was on the Russian side of Mongolia; the country to the south of that nation has been rather ugly to the Uighur people of late.

Another Man

The well-known picture of four neatly-dressed African American young men sitting at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, is one of the iconic images of the Civil Rights movement. It was taken in February, 1960, on the second day that the men sat there, waiting to be served but denied because of evil of segregation and the color of their skin.

There is a fifth man in the picture, who is sometimes not noticed as much because he is working. Charles Bess was a busboy at Woolworth's and he was working behind the counter as he often did during that time in his life. In this story at Bitter Southerner, Sayaka Matsuoka reports on some of his impressions of the day and of its long term impact. She notes that when Woolworth's finally desegregated its lunch counter later that year, Bess and the other African-American employees were invited by the counter manager to be the first ones served. They changed out of their work gear into their street clothes and had a meal, right in the middle of the shift.

I'm always impressed with the people who led so many of the drives for desegregation. Their very mannered, respectful and calm demeanor made liars out of the segregationists who talked about riots and outside agitators and the like. It helped bring many people to their cause, even some who might be a little iffy about other matters concerning racial equality, because they could see these plain, ordinary working American folks being harassed, threatened, beaten and worse just because they wanted what were their rights as American citizens to travel, live, eat, drink, vote and go to school wherever they desired.

And every now and again we get to uncover the story of one of the people who wasn't on the front lines but who got to stand taller, hold a head up higher and live like a full and free citizen because of what the front line folks did. And that's pretty good too.

A Century

A hundred years ago today, representatives from eight clubs met at the YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri, to organize what would become known as the Negro National League. The first regulated group of baseball teams for African American players excluded from major league baseball, it would last until the beginning of the Great Depression.

Other leagues would follow, some of them formed around the teams that survived the NNL's demise. A Negro American League began in 1937 and ran until desegregation and economic realities forced its disbanding in 1962. A successor Negro National League formed in 1933 and played until 1948, when surviving teams joined the NAL.

The history of the teams, leagues, champions, statistics, stars and such is complicated. Had the most powerful owners banded together in the years prior to Jackie Robinson's signing by the Brooklyn Dodgers, could they have forced better terms from the major league teams and created an arrangement in which some of the storied franchises like the Kansas City Monarchs, Homestead Grays, Newark Eagles and Indianapolis Clowns continued to exist? Could a more visionary major league owner demonstrated the folly of excluding gifted players and a devoted fandom by recruiting legends such as Buck Leonard, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell or Satchel Paige?

Perhaps. History proceeded as it did, though, and we can't know what the "what-ifs?" might have meant for Negro League baseball teams and their stars, we can only know what was real. Which will be enough, because the teams were real, the players were real, and the example of human beings refusing to accept the idea that they were "second class" in any way was real as well.

Should your travels, O Tolerant Reader, ever take you through Kansas City, Missouri, and should you have the time, you could do worse than visit the Negro League Museum and perhaps see for yourselves what those players knew and tried to say: Sure, it's about baseball. But it's always about more than baseball.

Feeleth the Burn!

At Ask the Past, we find advice from 1560 about exercising, passed along from Domenico Romoli. His advice includes working all muscles equally, reading aloud at various volumes, walking the dog and quitting as soon as one begins to sweat.

There's nothing from Romoli about abandoning your new exercise resolution sometime in mid-February, but since people are pretty much the same now as then we can presume it's a part of the package.

To Immortal Memory...

Two hundred and fourteen years ago the Royal Navy won at Trafalgar, putting paid to the last serious Napoleonic attempt to break its blockade and dominance of the seas. It cost them the slight, one-armed and one-eyed man who might have been their greatest commander, Admiral Horatio Nelson. Though Nelson's personal legacy was mixed -- his one child came not with his wife but from a long affair with a married woman, for example, and his daughter was named "Horatia" -- his professional impact is difficult to overestimate.

Nelson's body was returned to Gibraltar packed in a cask of brandy, where it was transferred to a lead-lined coffin filled with wine. His Majesty's sailors then began referring to their rum as a "drop of Nelson's blood," and a time-keeping shanty grew from it. It's usually titled "Roll the Old Chariot Along," but now and again appears under the alternate heading.

Pure and dulcet perfection of tone, as the video makes clear, is not required to present it to the masses.

Scandal Revisited

A century ago, several of the Chicago White Sox took money to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. Thanks to a pretty good movie made from Eliot Asinof's 1963 book Eight Men Out, most folks today think they have the facts of the story down. But as the Society for American Baseball Research shows at the linked page, there are many things about which someone could say, "Say it ain't so" and be reassured that it was indeed not so.

Both the book and the 1988 John Sayles movie exaggerate some facts, make up some others and straight-out whiff on still more. This appendix offers a more extensive list of the errors, and the SABR folks include links to several articles and more extensive research to document their charges of error.

The truth, of course, is that the broken-open scandal, representing what was at the time just part of the overall gambling problem baseball faced, could have wrecked Major League Baseball. Although owners tried to coast a little through the 1920 season they eventually realized they had to clean things up. If you can't trust the score, why watch the game? Under Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball, the leagues took care of the first step they needed to clean up their game. They would not take the next step until the Brooklyn Dodgers started Jackie Robinson at first base in 1947. Although Landis had many opportunities to link his name with that historic step he never did, and left it as a credit to Happy Chandler and Branch Rickey.

The Right Address

Monday marks "Presidents Day," which we in modern times have adjusted to be the date of many silly sales and honoring all of the men who have held the office whether they merit it or not. Of course, no one who hasn't had to try to do the job really knows what it's like. But if you try to tell me that one-monther William Henry Harrison, acme of incompetence James Buchanan or the vile Woodrow Wilson deserve the same recognition as the effective manager Eisenhower, let alone the greatness of Lincoln or Washington, I will say you've probably taken United States history sometime in the last 20 years.

In any event, since the holiday was originally focused on Washington and later added Lincoln (in most states, anyway), it's a good time to contemplate Lincoln's famous Gettysburg address. This 2014 essay at National Affairs allowed political science professor Diana Schaub to do so, and is worth your attention. Re-reading the actual address itself -- three paragraphs, ten sentences, 272 words -- wouldn't be a bad idea either.

No One Told Thee Life Wouldst Be This Way

In case you had the idea that coffee-houses originated in 1990s Seattle, or 1950s New York, or somewhere else in our supernally hip modern era, check out this article at Building History, which notes that Sir Henry Blount, traveling through Turkey in 1634, found that the Turkish folks would sometimes spend "two or three hours in cauphe-houses, which, in Turkey, abound more than inns and alehouses with us."

No word on whether he found one that housed a group of six young adults who seemed to have a surprising amount of time during the day to lounge about one of those establishments instead of going to work.

Interesting Dilemma

Some moon dust has been stirred in the past week as people who've seen the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man have noted it doesn't have a scene in which Armstrong actually plants an American flag on the surface of the moon.

Armstrong and crewmate Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, in the lunar module Eagle. The self-effacing Armstrong never sought publicity and was uncomfortable with many aspects of the notoriety that came with being the first human being to set foot on a place not Earth. He rejected the idea that he himself had any special qualities or deserved that much attention, not quite understanding that people didn't think he landed on the moon because he was special, but that he was special because he landed on the moon. Other than the official 1970 release First on the Moon, co-written by Armstrong, Aldrin and mission pilot Michael Collins, Armstrong kept quiet about his life for many years. In 2005, James Hansen published the Armstrong biography First Man, on which the movie was based. Armstrong passed away in 2012.

Having not seen the movie itself -- it's not scheduled for release in the U.S. until October -- the only kind of comments I can make are about what other people have said. A lot of people, including Florida Senator Marco Rubio, have slammed the decision to leave out the flag planting. On the other side, Armstrong's sons Rick and Mark and Hansen himself have said the flag is clearly seen in several shots of the time Armstrong and Aldrin spent on the moon. So maybe we all ought to wait and see for ourselves.

And in the meantime, we can remember why nobody pays actors to say their own words. Ryan Gosling, who was minus 11 in 1969, plays Armstrong and he responded to the perhaps premature flag flap with some silly words, to wit: “I don’t think Neil viewed himself as an American hero, quite the opposite.” And, “I think this was widely regarded in the end as a human achievement and that’s how we chose to view it.”

First Man director Damien Chazelle has got a couple of strong directorial outings to his credit, helming J. K. Simmons' Oscar-winning performance in Whiplash and Emma Stone's in La La Land.  He fares less well as a writer, dragging down his batting average with The Last Exorcism Part II and 10 Cloverfield Lane. Still, that's not a reason to condemn the movie a month before it's out; as the younger Armstrongs and Hansen have both said it's not like the movie has no flag, or replaces the Stars and Stripes with the UN banner or a multi-colored MTV logo. It just doesn't show the actual moment of planting the flagstaff in the lunar soil.

Which in the end doesn't matter anyway, because on July 21, 1969, the actual Neil Armstrong put an actual American flag on the actual moon and, unless we've had some sneaky extrasolar visitors in the ensuing 49 years, it's still there. Here's hoping we go back one day and see for ourselves.

Read the Whole Thing

I thought about using Independence Day as an occasion to write an appreciation for the positive impact the American Revolution has had on the world.

Then I read Jeffrey Roberts Hummel's piece at The Library of Economics and Liberty and realized I didn't have to, because the San Jose State University econ prof had done it much better. I always like finding those articles before I write one of my own.

6/6/44

Thanks for Western civilization, gentlemen.

Simple Solution

Some historians are trying to figure out an ancient board game dating from the days of the Roman Empire. It was discovered when construction in Slovakia unearthed the tomb in which it was found, along with part of the occupant's skeleton and other grave items.

The game board -- and if you look at the picture at the link you will see it is literally made of boards -- is a 17x18 grid of squares and some black and white counters in different sizes. While other archaeological and historical records provide some possible hints, there's nothing that suggests exactly what the game is or how to play it. It resembles a Roman game that went out of fashion about 300 years earlier than the man in the tomb was buried, but there are significant differences that make the more recent game still a mystery.

I would offer them my game expertise, but I come from a group of friends that had a habit of making up our own rules for games even before we lost the official printed set that came in the box, so I would probably not be much help.

Old Jokes

Over at Today I Found Out, a piece outlines the oldest known jokes found in ancient tablets and writings. They demonstrate that humor does not always translate along across cultural boundaries -- Sumerians particularly.

Some of the jokes from ancient Greece draw a chuckle or two, although they seem a little like one of Henny Youngman's old routines. Which, I am certain, would have been gleefully pointed out by Don Rickles, were he still living.

Folks in my profession are known for attempting to include humor in our sermons, not always to good effect. Some of my colleagues simply insert an opening joke into the presentation whether it relates to the subject or not. Others of us will try to wax wry within the bounds of our topic, with better or worse results.

We follow in the footsteps of the first known Christian sermon, preached by the Apostle Peter in Acts 2. He opens by refuting the suggestion that the people infused with the Holy Spirit were in fact infused with more mundane spirits: "These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It's only nine in the morning!"

He was soon beaten and thrown into prison. Which should be a caution to more public speakers, both religious and secular.