Item From the Past: Arlington National Cemetery

I took a lot of pictures at Arlington Nat'l Cemetery this time last year. Such as the memorial to the sailors lost on the Maine, built using one of the masts of their ship.

The Confederate Memorial is in a quiet corner of the cemetery, away from the tour bus route.

Pretty much by chance, I saw the graves of some noteworthy people. Such as Robert Fechner, director of the CCC for most of its existence.

Oscar York, a Tuskegee Airman.

Also, the two memorials to the lost Shuttles. First, Challenger. The lost crew should have a memorial – but one with bronze astronaut faces that all grin like jack o’ lanterns?

The Columbia memorial, with its flight-patch in bronze, is near Challenger. Much more dignified, I thought.

Those Weren't the Days

The XXX Olympiad has put me in the mood to read about the III Olympiad, among other things. I'm funny that way. But it's interesting to read about, mainly because the St. Louis Games had fiasco written all over them.

Back when Chicago made its futile pitch for the 2016 Games, I thought one claim the city had on the event was the fact that St. Louis had snatched the Games away from Chicago in 1904, to complement the Louisiana Purchase Exposition -- the Meet Me in St. Louis world's fair. Some sources say the fair organizers essentially bullied Baron de Coubertin by threatening to hold separate athletic events to overshadow the Olympics. In any case, the Games ended up being overshadowed by the fair anyway. Also, they were badly run; hardly international at all, since most of the best European athletes didn't want to come; and marred by various notorious incidents, both in the opinion of people at the time and more recently.

The story of the marathon that year is bizarre in the extreme, and well-told at Marathon & Beyond. This amusing podcast is about the runner who actually won the race, as opposed to the guy who cheated. Throw in a Cuban who stops to eat apples along the way, some Zulus recruited to the race at the last minute, and racers having to dodge auto-mobiles and horse-drawn vehicles on dusty, pre-modern roads, and you've got kinetic comedy. I'm surprised no movie along the lines of The Great Race or Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines was ever made from the story.

The disgraceful history at "Anthropology Days" at the Games is discussed by Slate in 2008 and the Daily Mail this year. Go to the IOC web site, and the incident is downplayed considerably in the short page about the 1904 Games. That is, not mentioned.

Remember the Akron

I forgot about the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, which was yesterday, but today's close enough. So I poked around a little because it's easy to find film and audio and a lot of reading about the disaster on line, such as on this page about the history of WLS, where Herb Morrison worked when he made the famed recording describing the explosion and fire as he saw it. The lesson here? Besides not to load your airship with hydrogen, that is. If you want your disaster remembered, point cameras at it.

The point is driven home by the loss of the U.S. Navy airship Akron in 1933. More people died in that disaster than the Hindenburg. Though it was a helium ship, bad weather took it down off the coast of New Jersey (and what is it with New Jersey and airships?). Still, who's heard of that accident anymore? Of course, the Akron was major news at the time, but left no dramatic images. Even the song about it, I think, is lackluster, but things might have been different had Jimmie Rodgers or Woody Gutherie written a song about the Akron, though Rodgers was nearly dead himself by then.

Speaking of helium, years ago I read that the Germans couldn't make enough of it to raise a ship like Hindenburg, so they used hydrogen and tried with German thoroughness to control any possible sources of ignition. In hindsight, not thorough enough. According to this always interesting site devoted to National Historic Chemical Landmarks, the virtual U.S. monopoly on helium also had its advantages in wartime a few years later.

"Large-scale production of helium came too late to be of much value in World War I, but it did play a major role in World War II, when helium-filled U.S. Navy patrol blimps safely escorted thousands of ships carrying troops and supplies," the American Chemical Society says (and they ought to know). "The blimps used sensitive listening devices that when lowered into the water could detect submarines up to five miles away. At the time, the Allies had a virtual monopoly on helium, because the only known gas wells capable of producing helium in large quantities were in the United States and Canada."

The Next '20s Just Isn't Going to be the Same

Spring break time and it actually still feels like spring, though they say cool (not cold) air is on the way. Back to posting around April 1. In the meantime we will not be going hither and yon, or even part way to yon. But there may be a few new sights to report on come April. Sights are sights, even if they're close to home.

I must be in an early 20th century frame of mind, since lately I've been reading The New Deal (2011) by Michael Hiltzik, an engaging work. Besides discussing the broader scope of the various economic and social policies under that rubric, the book also details the efforts of cabinet members and advisors, some of them mostly forgotten now, who shaped and executed those policies. There are also some wonderful asides, such as a discussion of how a photograph of plutocrat J.P. Morgan Jr. and Ringling Bros. midget Lya Graf at U.S. Senate hearings on Wall Street came to be (June 1, 1933).

Also, I've been watching some Max Raabe videos not posted when we saw him a few years ago. In the one below, he explains why the version of "Singing in the Rain" they're about to do isn't quite like the version from the movie. We heard him discuss this in English in his droll way, and then heard their exceptional rendition of the song. The clip has the added bonus of featuring the fetching Cecilia Crisafulli.

Please continue to pray for Deb, my sister-in-law, in her slow recovery, and for her husband Jay, whose life is quite difficult now.

The Schiller Park Greyhound Track

While coming home from an event in Rosemont on Tuesday, I stopped for a light at the intersection of Lawrence Ave. and Mannheim Road (US 12), which is on the eastern edge of O'Hare International Airport and (I think) happens to be in the small suburb of Schiller Park. I noticed a sign I'd never noticed before, and I happened to have a camera handy. Normally I'd take such a picture for reference only, but it turned out reasonably well, considering it was taken on an overcast day through a car windshield. So here it is.

Former Site of Dog Track • Raced Greyhounds • Schiller Park Historical Commission (Bullet points added.)

So a dog track used to be here. O'Hare was built in the 1950s, so it must have been before that. Maybe on clear, moonless nights when the traffic isn't so heavy, you can stand near the sign and hear the faint baying of ghostly hounds, forever rounding the track to the cheers of Depression-era working men.

Curiously, according to testimony heard by the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce in 1950, "During the heyday of Al Capone, the Capone syndicate was in control of dog tracks in virtually every part of the country... The Capone syndicate czar of dog racing during that period was Edward J. O'Hare, who was killed in gang warfare in Chicago on November 9, 1939."

Edward "Easy Eddie" O'Hare testified against Capone in the early '30s and for that, we can be sure, he eventually bought the farm. He was also father of the fighter pilot Edward "Butch" O'Hare, for whom the airport is named, and who didn't live much longer than his dad, since he was killed in action in the Pacific in late 1943.

It seems likely that the Schiller Park dog track would have been in the orbit of the elder O'Hare. For all I know, the track might have been small potatoes to him, but he surely must have visited on occasion. I doubt that he could ever imagined something so important in the area would someday have the same name as him, though honoring his son.

Friendship 7

Worth remembering: John Glenn's flight around the Earth 50 years ago today. I'm not old enough to remember that day, but I learned about it not so many years later from space-flight books and a back issue of National Geographic, complete with that magazine's trademark vivid pictures and illustrations. I checked just now: it was the June 1962 issue, the fourth cover in this gallery. More about the creation of the article is here.

There's a lot of video material about the flight online, including this slick but informative short from NASA.

These are mediocre times for the likes of NASA and the U.S. space program, so I can see why the agency might want to remind the world of its salad days. Such is the uneven course of exploration, or human affairs for that matter. Still, I suspect that the agency, or some successor entity, or private initiatives, will see other space triumphs in future decades, and the stall of the early 21st century will be forgotten.

Also worth remembering: the July 21, 1961, flight of Liberty Bell 7 by the luckless Gus Grissom, who came before Glenn but after Alan Shepard, and whose Mercury flight tends to be ignored compared to those other two. At the end of Grissom's suborbital, his spacecraft sank in the ocean and he almost drowned. And, of course, he died with Ed White and Roger Chaffee in early 1967 in the Apollo 1 fire. That mission had originally been slated to fly 45 years ago tomorrow.

Italian Sausage & A Visit to the Expo

Over the weekend we visited our old haunts in the western suburbs, and had a fine supper at a place called Phillies in Willowbrook, Illinois. "Old Fashioned Thin Crust Pizza is Our Specialty," its card says. The girls had some pizza, and it was a good thin-crust pie all right. I had a first-rate Italian sausage sandwich.

Good food is important, but Phillies has something else no other restaurant I've ever been to has: an entire room dedicated to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Dozens and dozens of framed photos of the world's fair hang on the walls of that room, with some other pics scattered around the rest of the restaurant. Buildings, interior shots, pictures of people attending the fair, machines on display, the first Ferris wheel, and more -- including two rows of photos of denizens of the Midway Plaisance in native costume. It was a marvelous exhibit.

This list gives a good idea of the variety to be found on the Midway during the fair, and these photos include some of those on the wall at Phillies, especially the individuals posed in their native garb. As we were leaving, I made sure we all looked around the room. "As soon as I get my time machine," I told the girls, "I know where I'm going."

12/8/41: A Strong Passive Tense

I played the Pearl Harbor address, so easily available online, for Lilly today. At the moment she happens to be studying World War II in her social studies class (please never to call it "history"), but her teacher didn't play it in class, despite today being a perfect time to do so, and the fact that it's one of the most famous speeches ever given by an American president.

Listening to it again myself, it occurred to me that the very first sentence belies the idea, advocated with unreasoning vigor by some editors and English teachers, that the passive voice is a mark of namby-pamby or evasive writing. It can be used those ways, of course ("mistakes were made"), but so what?

I've seen editing guides that discourage the passive, and no less a writer than George Orwell discouraged the construction in the famed "Politics and the English Language." But Orwell wasn't right about everything, and nor are editors and English teachers. FDR knew how to create a powerful passive. There it is, in the first sentence.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date that will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

Now, imagine that a narrow-minded editor had gotten ahold of it.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date that will live in infamy -- naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately attacked the United States of America."

In this case, the active is weak and the passive is strong. The president wasn't trying to deliver a news report. Emphasizing what happened to the United States of America was what he set out to do, and he did it.

Vocal Refain By Glee Club

Up in the southeastern sky at about 10 p.m. this evening was Orion, trailing a fairly bright Moon. But he was bright in the winter air. So winter's here.

Is anyone recording topical songs any more? I suppose someone must be, but I'm too out of touch with contemporary recording to know. So I look around a little and the answer is "yes." If you can call "Osama bin Laden Is Dead!!!" a song. I don't have the urge to listen to it.

Today I did listen to a few of the songs listed at "Pearl Harbor - Popular Songs" by the UMKC University Libraries. It seemed like the thing to do. All of them have long faded, but I did know "Remember Pearl Harbor" by Don Reid and Sammy Kaye. Recorded 10 days after the attack and a best-seller in its time, it's the World War II song that sounds the most like a college fight song. "Go to meet the foe?" How gallant.

I knew it already because it was on the soundtrack of Radio Days. Which I acquired while living in Japan. Life's peculiar sometimes.

That Which We Have

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Posting will resume next Monday. Eat meat or a meat substitute, entertain yourself and dwell on what you have, rather than what you don't.

And remember those pious puritans at the near-mythic First Thanksgiving, who ate freshly killed animals; sang and danced and played games with Indians; and got good and drunk. They'd had a hard couple of years, after all, and probably were just glad to be alive and able to celebrate an English harvest festival (with new native elements) on these new shores.

Since I live at some distance from the rest of my family, it's been difficult for all of us to join together over the years. But we did so for Thanksgiving 2001, in Dallas.

Left to right: Yuriko, me, Lilly, my nephew Robert, brother Jay, mother Jo Ann, nephew Dees, brother Jim, Eleanor (Deb's mother) and sister-in-law Deb. My nephew Sam isn't in the picture because he took it, and Ann isn't in it because she hadn't been born yet, making her appearance about 14 months later.

Tippecanoe and the Comet Too

Today is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Tippecanoe, so naturally I poked around a little and found out about other things. I have a knack for tangential learning.

Also 200 years ago, the people of the world were treated to the Great Comet of 1811 -- and presumably both sides at Tippecanoe saw it overhead. The Comet Primer says, "One of the largest comets in history was the Great Comet of 1811. It was one of the few comets in history to be discovered with a relatively small telescope at an unusually great distance from the Sun, in this case over half-way to the planet Jupiter's orbit. The nucleus has been estimated as between 30 and 40 kilometers in diameter. At one point during September to October 1811, the coma reached a diameter roughly equivalent to the diameter of the Sun and was a very notable naked-eye object seen by people around the world."

We need one like that to liven up the sky again in our time. After all, it's been a while since Hale-Bopp, and the 1811 comet sounds brighter yet (even though Hale-Bopp was bright enough to see within the city of Chicago). A new comet might help make up for the visual disappointments of the most recent Halley's and Kohoutek before that. Even better would be the entertainment provided by those who see the end of the world in such an event -- and there would be such people. Along with others to help them prepare for the end of the world, for a small fee.

The fine radio program Stardate did a two-parter about the Comet of 1811 recently. This is Part One and Part Two of the program, in transcript and podcast form.

Commie Plots

Forest Home Cemetery, part of which is the old German cemetery Waldheim, is gorgeous in fall. This is what it looked like on Wednesday at about noon.

It's also the location of the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument by sculptor Albert Weinert, which I mentioned recently. I last visited in 2002, despite the fact that I drive by the cemetery periodically on the Eisenhower Expressway, along with thousands of other motorists.

I didn't have a lot of time for yesterday's visit, but I did want to find a few permanent residents that I'd missed before, such as that all-purpose early 20th-century radical, Emma Goldman. I don't know how I missed her memorial when I first visited the Haymarket monument, since it's only a few feet away. A stone's throw, if you're in a reactionary mood. Anyway, this is her memorial.

And a close up of the bas-relief of her by sculptor Jo Davidson, who did a lot of portraiture -- quite a list.

Next to Emma Goldman are a cluster of plain, rectangular stones, marking the final resting places of other, lesser-known radicals. Most of the stones included fitting epitaphs. Among others, there was:

Elizabeth G. Flynn "The Rebel Girl" • Fighter For Working Class Emancipation

William Z. Foster Working Class Leader • Tireless Fighter for Socialism

Eugene Dennis Communist Leader • Fighter for Working Class Internationalism

Jack Johnstone A Life Dedicated to Human Freedom

Sylvia Woods Heroine in the Struggle

Wish I could have stayed longer. Sometime I want to hunt up Billy Sunday and Samuel Gompers, and spend a little more time looking at the funerary art.

Return to Showmen's Rest

Besides being the Day of the Dead, it so happened that I had an interview and property tour to do in west suburban Berwyn, Illinois, today. So my plans could easily be expanded to include visits to the west suburban cemeteries of Woodlawn Cemetery and Forest Home Cemetery (Waldheim), both in Forest Park.

I posted about Woodlawn and its Showmen's Rest six years ago. Has it really been that long? This time I brought a camera. It was a fine fall day, after all.

The symbol of the Showmen's League of America -- the organization of circus workers -- is an elephant. Four elephants flank the showmen's graves, and one is among the graves. Their trunks are down, as if in mourning.

Circus workers from 1918 to the present are buried here, most notably 56 victims of the circus train wreck of June 22, 1918. The Showmen's League web site tells the story. On that day, it says, "the Hagenback-Wallace Circus was scheduled to present its fabulous spectacle in the Show Grounds at 150th and Calumet Avenue in Hammond, Ind. At about 4 am while the train was heading toward Hammond, carrying 400 performers and roustabouts, [it] had to make a stop near Ivanhoe in order to cool an overheated wheel bearing box...

"An empty troop train was approaching at full speed from behind, piloted by engineer Alonzo Sargent, who had previously been fired for sleeping on the job. Ignoring the red lights and the efforts of a frantic flagman to signal the oncoming train, it plowed into the back of the circus train, destroying three sleeping cars before finally coming to a halt. A fire then broke out.

"Survivors of the crash, trapped under the wreckage, were unable to free themselves and escape the flames. An estimated 86 people died in the accident. No animals were killed. Most of the dead were roustabouts who had been hired hours or days earlier for the Hagenback-Wallace performance in Michigan City."

Many were buried anonymously.

Or identified only by what they did, such as the "4 Horse Driver."

Besides being a time of war and plague, 1918 was a bad year for U.S. train wrecks as well. The Great Train Wreck of 1918 in Nashville killed more than 100, and an accident in Brooklyn killed nearly 100.

More Cantigny Tanks

Lilly and Ann climbed on four or five of the 11 tanks at the Cantigny Tank Park yesterday. One of the smaller ones is the M5 Stuart, a mere 16.5 tons. Cantigny's web site says, "The M5 Stuart was the Army’s standard light tank at the beginning of World War II. It was primarily used in reconnaissance, flank security and infantry support roles... Originally designed as a light battle tank, its role was limited because its 37mm main gun and thin armor could not stand up to German tanks in direct combat. The tank did prove effective in an infantry support role, where it knocked out machine gun nests and other enemy strong points, supporting soldiers as they advanced."

Below is the M41A3 Walker Bulldog, during a rare moment when no one was climbing on it. A Cold War-era tank, Cantigny notes that "the M41 tank series never saw combat with the US Army, but was exported to over 18 countries."

Finally, this is the turret of an M24 Chaffee, with daughters no. 1 and 2 perched on top. It replaced the M5 Stuart as the Army's light tank in World War II. "Along with mechanized infantry support and reconnaissance missions, the M24 was also able to destroy enemy bunkers, buildings, and other strong points," Cantigny explains.

More on the Tank Park is here.

FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944

FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944 by David M. Jordan focuses on the neglected story of that election, and Jordan does a fine job of telling it, from the pre-primary maneuvering among both parties, but especially the Republicans, through to the surprisingly energetic campaign, both on the part of ailing FDR and his remarkably young opponent. Dewey was only 42 at the time, the youngest-ever Republican nominee for the top job and the first major-party presidential candidate born in the 20th century.

This particular election is generally glossed over in histories of the period, probably because hindsight considers it a foregone conclusion. In the event, it wasn't that close: FDR-Truman took 432 electoral votes and 53.4 percent of the popular vote vs. Dewey-Bricker's 99 electoral votes and 45.9 percent of the popular vote. Still, before the election, pollsters weren't quite so sure of the outcome, with some even predicting Dewey's election. That and '48 might tell us that pollsters weren't very good at predicting national elections in the 1940s, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. A Dewey upset was considered plausible at the time, even if not very likely, and in point of fact '44 was the closest presidential election in which FDR participated. As Jordan makes clear, Dewey ran a spirited campaign in the face of the odds.

But at a curious distance from the electorate. Apparently Dewey and his men thought it best, at least at first, to focus on radio speeches more than personal appearances. During an early campaign trip by train to the West Coast, for example, Dewey only made a handful of rear-platform speeches, the kind so effective for President Truman four years later. No doubt the strategy reflected Dewey's personality. "The man had one of the coldest personalities of anyone who ever contemplated a run for the American presidency," notes Jordan. "David Brinkley wrote, 'In public, Dewey came across as pompous and cold. And for good reason. He was both.' He was generally conceded to be intelligent, efficient, a master of detail, 'serious-minded to the point of severity' as one contemporary noted. 'He is as humorless as a man can be,' noted another."

Balancing the Republican ticket that year, at least in one respect, was Gov. John W. Bricker of Ohio. "The governor of Ohio... was an almost complete opposite of Thomas E. Dewey," says Jordan. "John William Bricker, it was said, was 'excellent company.' People liked being around Bricker, and he enjoyed being around others... Big, jovial John Bricker, one author wrote, 'had the essential of popularity, a real and lively interest in people.' " Bricker also represented the conservative wing of the Republican Party, as opposed to the more moderate Dewey, and had the endorsement of Sen. Robert A. Taft ("Mr. Republican") in the early '44 primaries. Bricker didn't fare well in those contests, however, but well enough to be an acceptable choice for the number-two slot.

No one is forgotten faster than a failed vice presidential candidate (e.g., William Miller, who did a "Do you know me?" Amex ad after the '64 election), and Gov. Bricker certainly falls into that category, though some lingering memory of him might remain in Ohio. Bricker did, however, offer the ticket a rhyming slogan, an example of which the book shows in a photo of Republican campaign memorabilia: "Win the War Quicker With Dewey and Bricker." Apparently the slogan wasn't that commonly used, and not destined for the fame of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." Dewey and Bricker lost, after all, but even before that the Republican ticket probably didn't want to emphasize that their victory would indeed mean a change in the management of the war effort, since that was in fact what the Democrats were emphasizing as a negative ("don't change horses in mid-stream").

As for the Democrats, the Roosevelt campaign didn't show much zing until the "Fala Speech" in late September, during which the president had some amusingly choice words for the Republicans, much to the delight of the audience, who were mainly Teamsters leadership. Late in the campaign, and thus late in the book, FDR went on an open-car motorcade through four of the five boroughs of New York City, which Jordan describes in fascinating detail. The president began at an Army base in Brooklyn, went through downtown Brooklyn, then on to Ebbets Field, then through Queens, then across to the Bronx, then down through Harlem and finally on down Broadway and into Times Square. "Through it all, the rain kept coming down, the wind blew, and Franklin Roosevelt kept smiling and waving to the thousands watching for him, with Fala by his side," Jordan says. "After all was over, the police estimated the total crowds at 3,050,000, though it may have been, as Ray Brandt of the St. Louis Post Dispatch put it, "a mere million or two."

The book spends an entire chapter and more on the central mystery of the 1944 election, namely how and why Harry Truman was chosen as the Democratic vice presidential candidate. No account of that event that I've ever read quite spells it out clearly, probably because it isn't quite possible to do so, but Jordan takes a good whack at it. Vice President Henry Wallace wanted to keep the job, but boll weevils and other conservatives in the party wanted him out. President Roosevelt seemed to prefer James Byrnes, but he also seemed to accept the judgment of other party leaders that as a Southerner, Byrnes would cost more votes (Northern blacks, labor) than he would win -- something FDR never told Byrnes he believed. Other names were bandied about, such as Sam Rayburn, Alben Barkley, William O. Douglas, Truman and even John G. Winant (American ambassador to the Court of St. James's at the time), though he wasn't very seriously considered.

Eventually, Democratic Party leaders held an informal but important meeting with the president at the White House before the convention that seemed to settle matters in favor of Truman -- except that it didn't quite, and Truman wasn't really told about it anyway, going to the convention supporting Byrnes for vice president, and even planning to put his name in nomination. When FDR's men told Truman, at first he said he didn't want it, but was famously persuaded by a brusk phone call from President Roosevelt to a room that Democratic leadership had rented in the Blackstone Hotel (not the first time the Blackstone made a president). Even then, Henry Wallace might have been re-nominated by his supporters at the convention, but FDR's men put a stop to it using hasty parliamentary maneuvers, and almost resorted to cutting an electric cable to stop the convention organist from playing "Iowa, Iowa, That's Where the Tall Corn Grows," a song associated with Wallace at the time.

The book also offers interesting sketches of some of the lesser figures in the election. The Republicans' 1940 surprise candidate, Wendell Willkie, wanted another shot and entered the early '44 primaries, only to lose to Dewey. Even more interesting for us (though not for him) was the fact that Willkie died unexpectedly about a month before the election, without endorsing Dewey -- or Roosevelt either, and while it seems hard to believe he might have, it was considered possible because he didn't believe Dewey was internationalist enough, or at least was bowing too much the isolationist elements in the Republican Party (presumably those isolationists would have finished the war and then rejected American participation in the likes of the UN, the Marshall Plan and NATO).

Another supporting character is Harold Stassen. Good old Harold Stassen, always running. That's how we remember him now, but 1944 was before all that. That year, Lt. Comdr. Stassen was off in the Pacific theater as Adm. Halsey's flag secretary, having resigned the governorship of Minnesota to do his part. He wasn't really a contender in '44, but his star was rising (he'd given the keynote at the Republican national convention in 1940), and he later had an important part in nominating Dewey again in '48 and Eisenhower in '52, after which he settled into his recurring-candidate mode. That's another story.

The book also provides some food for speculative thought. After all, we know that FDR was near the end of the line in November 1944, even if at time the electorate didn't. What if he had died six months sooner -- a few weeks ahead of the voting? Who would the Democratic National Committee have picked to take his place? Would Dewey have won against that person, and if so, how would have he deployed the atomic bomb? Assuming that FDR dies in 1945, as he did, what kind of president would Wallace have made, had he been allowed to stay on the ticket? Would he have used the bomb? And what kind of president would John G. Winant made, anyway? In history as it happened, the three-time Republican governor of New Hampshire, first chairman of the Social Security Board, head of the International Labor Organization and ambassador to the United Kingdom through much of World War II, retired to private life after the war and put a bullet through his head in 1947.

That's just my digression, but it only goes to show how many fascinating stories there are in a good work of political history, such as FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944. Well worth reading.

The Least of Holidays

Leif Erikson Day has come and gone, and are we better for it? No, wait, that was Columbus Day (Observed). Lilly and Ann weren't in school yesterday, and we didn't get any mail. Except for those things, Columbus Day around here might as well be Leif Erikson Day.

The first U.S. president to proclaim a Columbus Day holiday was Benjamin Harrison, who did so for the 400th anniversary of the landing on San Salvador. Not, as you would think, on October 12, 1892, but instead on October 21, 1892. Columbus and his crew might have landed on October 12, but that was using the Julian calendar -- the Gregorian correction wasn't introduced to Catholic Europe until 1582, after all. In the 15th century, the difference between Julian and Gregorian would have been about nine days, so to be mathematically correct about the anniversary, you'd have to mark it on the 21st.

How learned of the Harrison administration. Or pedantic, take your pick.

The difference is still nine days, but clearly Congress wasn't interested in such subtleties when it created the federal holiday in 1937, so October 12 it is, at least until the holiday completely withers away, which we might live to see. But we still need some kind of holiday in October, to bridge Labor Day with Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. Maybe Towel Day can be moved to October 12, since that's the anniversary of the publication of the first of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book in the series in 1979.

The President is a Sick Man

The President is a Sick Man (Matthew Algeo, 2011) is my kind of book. A crisply written, popular history describing a fairly well-known yet astonishing incident in presidential history, namely Grover Cleveland's cancer and its secret treatment. The book fleshes the story out with plenty of interesting context and detail. Such as the extreme dread cancer posed for those living in the 19th century. Who can doubt it? Cancer is dreadful enough now. Imagine when the diagnosis meant an almost certain lingering death, the kind that Ulysses Grant suffered.

Turns out that President Cleveland had a rarer, much less dangerous kind of tumor in his mouth than former President Grant. But it was dangerous enough. It seems that medical science was just advanced enough in 1893 for Cleveland's doctors to excise the growth without killing the president, but it must have been a near thing.

"It's worth mentioning just a few of the tools that the surgeons would not have had at their disposal, simply because they had not been devised or perfected," writes Alego. "They would have no suction apparatus for draining blood or other fluids from the operative site and no means of artificially resuscitating the patient should his heart stop. There would be no electronic monitors, no ventilators, no laryngoscopes, no endotracheal tubes. Surgery had come a long way since the Civil War -- but still had a long way to go."

And, of course, no blood transfusions or antibiotics. Fortunately for Cleveland, his doctors were fully persuaded of the benefits of sterile surgery, then a fairly new idea. As Algeo put it, "surgery pre-Lister was a gamble that most patients were bound to lose." So Cleveland got vastly better treatment than poor President Garfield did only 12 year earlier, when doctors examining his GSW couldn't be bothered to wash their hands, even though they must have heard of Joseph Lister's ideas by then.

The medical drama's only part of the story, however. Doubly astonishing is the fact that the July 1, 1893, operation -- performed on the yacht Oneida in Long Island Sound, of all places -- was kept a secret until 1917, long after Cleveland had died of another kind of cancer (probably) elsewhere in his body.

Well, not quite a secret. One of the best-known journalists of the day, E.J. Edwards of the Philadelphia Press, found out about the operation and published a major exposé. But in an age when newspapers -- being the cable news of their time -- weren't above completely making things up, Edwards was discredited. Mostly because the president and everyone else on the ship lied like dogs about what had happened. President Cleveland just went fishing for a few days, that's all. Oh, and he had a few teeth pulled on board. And he has a touch of rheumatism. E.J. Edwards is damnable liar! The book's subtitle tells the tale: "Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Glover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth."

Conspiracy buffs, take note. Edwards found out about the operation because one of the doctors involved blabbed about it to a colleague, who then told someone who knew Edwards, who then went to the doctor who'd first blabbed, who then confessed the whole thing to Edwards.

The president was able to pull off the deception for a number of reasons, but probably most of all because he made a remarkable recovery, and was able to wear a vulcanized rubber prosthetic jaw so lifelike that no one noticed it. (A fact I remember learning in high school U.S. history class from a fine teacher, Mrs. Collins. It amazed me then, and still does.)

Also, to be fair to President Cleveland, he was certain that maintaining secrecy was the right thing to do, since news of his cancer -- about the worst health problem he could have, and still be alive -- would have made the Panic of 1893 even worse, and it was bad enough as it was, idling countless workers and bringing much commerce to a halt. He made a political calculation, too. Being perceived as ill with cancer would have hurt his chances of persuading Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, a cause dear to Cleveland, who was a gold-standard man. It's hard to imagine now the passion of the 1890s political quarrel between goldbugs and silverites, but some of it comes through in the book. It was the polarizing issue of the time, a collision of vested interests.

Cleveland got lucky, too, in that questions about his health were pushed off the front pages by a couple of large hurricanes that hit the United States in the late summer of 1893. One Category 2 storm hit New York City, and among other damage, destroyed an entire barrier island off Long Island. Another storm hit the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, an estimated Category 3 that probably killed a few thousand people and made tens of thousands more homeless.

The story of the Sea Islands Hurricane of 1893 is a fascinating aside in Algeo's book for a number of reasons, such as the fact that such a tremendous storm, on par with Katrina, has been completely forgotten (as has the 1900 storm that nearly destroyed Galveston or even the deadly New England Hurricane of 1938). It's also worth noting that neither the states nor the federal government provided much relief to the victims of the hurricane, partly because most of them were Gullah subsistence farmers, and partly because the Cleveland administration didn't believe disaster relief was within the purview of the federal government. Federal disaster relief is a 20th-century idea and, as far as I'm concerned, an important bit of progress since the Gilded Age, no matter what Ayn Rand-inspired jackasses tell us in our time.

The President is a Sick Man has a happy ending of sorts, in that in 1917 one of the surviving doctors, William Williams Keen, a dean of American medicine, wanted to tell the world what had happened. Cleveland's widow (the remarried Francis Cleveland Preston) agreed to it, so Dr. Keen published a long article about the operation in The Saturday Evening Post. Newspaperman E.J. Edwards was elderly at the time, but still alive, so he lived to see his vindication.

Remembrance

Schaumburg had a remembrance ceremony this afternoon at Veterans Gateway Park, including an invocation and a laying of wreathes. I stood a few feet away from the VFW member who played Taps, a gentleman of advanced age (Korea? An older soldier in Vietnam?). Age didn't hold him back. He played the melancholy notes flawlessly.

It didn't seem right to take any pictures during the ceremony. But afterward I took a few. This is the Schaumburg Fire and Police Color Guard, right after the ceremony.

The park is at the junction of two major thoroughfares, Schaumburg Road and Roselle Road. It features is a tall brick clock tower ringed by memorials to the armed services. The four wreathes -- one for each hijacked flight and its victims -- were at the base of the clock tower.

The National Gallery of Art

The old copy editor within me is always looking for mistakes in news stories. CNN published an article this morning called "Luxury, horror lurk in Gadhafi family compound," the gist of which is the shocking (shocking, I say) revelation that families of tyrants tend to live in gaudy palaces and abuse whomever is handy whenever the urge strikes, which is often. Anyway, the vanguard of the current Libyan regime change reached one of these palaces, and CNN was there to film it. "We filmed them quixotically studying the labels of Cristal champagne and fine St. Emilion Bordeaux, apparently not realizing each bottle is worth hundreds of dollars," the author wrote, referring to rebels ransacking the palace.

Quixotically studying? In the manner of Don Quixote? Waving the bottles at windmills, maybe? I think "quizzically" is what the writer needed here. I won't be too hard on the writer, because I do this kind of thing often enough -- think of one word and then write a similar one that's completely at odds with the meaning I wanted. But I will be hard on CNN because it's supposed to have someone to catch that kind of mistake. Then again, I checked the same story a few minutes ago, and an editor had removed "quixotically" all together, so someone caught it.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, isn't part of the Smithsonian. Yet it's housed in two large buildings on the National Mall and doesn't charge admission, so for tourist purposes, it might as well be. The museum also has a feature that many other large institutions of its kind should have more of: places to sit in the galleries with backs. Maybe it's a mark of my increasing age, or just that we walked a lot in DC and appreciated the National Gallery's seating more than backless benches, which seem more common in museums. Of course, the benches can be too comfortable. In one room I noticed a well-dressed middle-aged woman sitting on a bench, fast asleep. A few minutes later, a guard wandered in and gently woke her up.

Comfy benches or not, we didn't spend quite as much time at the National Gallery as we wanted (a persistent theme on this trip), but managed to take note of some noteworthy works, including items I remember seeing before, such as David's "The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries," and others I must missed before, such as "Ginevra de' Benci," which has the distinction of being the only Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Americas. No albino dwarfs in the service of Opus Dei attacked me while I was looking at the painting.

"Gallery of the Louvre" by Samuel F.B. Morse is also currently on loan to the National Gallery, and I spent a while looking that. Morse's backstory is just as interesting as the canvas. Not long ago I read "Henry, Morse and the Telegraph," a chapter in The Heroic Age of American Invention by L. Sprague de Camp (1961), which mentioned Morse's career as an artist, which was notable but not tremendously successful. So he made a career change. As an inventor, de Camp wrote, "Morse was not so much an outstanding inventor as a promoter of an invention and a manager of inventions." There's something to be said for that. It's Morse code, after all.

Done in the 1830s and newly restored, " 'Gallery of the Louvre' depicts masterpieces from the Louvre's collection that Morse 'reinstalled' in one of that museum's grandest galleries, the Salon Carré," says the museum web site. That is, he painted the salon like he wanted it to be, not like it was, and stacked it with paintings he admired.

It's an odd subject to modern eyes. Why paint a painting of paintings? But we're awash in instantly copied and transmitted images. They were not. Paintings of galleries weren't so unusual then, a time of greater scarcity of manmade images, and neither was the hanging of paintings floor-to-ceiling in a gallery, or for that matter, in private homes that could afford them. That was a detail that made me smile, the cluttered museum wall. We imagine that our way of doing things -- such as the spare, uncluttered formality of an art museum -- are timeless practices, but it isn't so.

Also temporarily on display at the museum, in its spacious West Building rotunda, is "The Capitoline Venus," on loan to the United States for the first time. I was glad to see her. She had her own guard, looking a little bored there in the rotunda because mostly people were wandering past the statue and not showing any interest, much less an urge to deface it.

For a statue 1,800-plus years old, the Venus in fine shape. Usually on display at the Capitoline Museums (Musei Capitalolini) in Rome, the work made me ponder certain questions, such as why the hell didn't I visit the Capitoline Museums? Just look at the "Gallery" section at the Wiki page. I've seen most of those works used to illustrate histories or other works about Antiquity, but not with my own eyes. I was right there in the Piazza del Campidoglio, surrounded by the Capitoline Museums, although that was during the evening and I guess they were closed. I did notice that the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius wasn't in piazza; air pollution had been eating at him, I think, and he had been taken inside the museums.

Just another reason to go back to Rome, though I suspect the clock might run out on me before I can make it. But if I do go back to the shores of the Mediterranean, maybe Leptis Magna will be easier to visit too, provided things have settled down in Libya. Mrs. Quarles, my Latin teacher in high school, told us of visiting the site in the days before Gadhafi came to power, and somewhere in my head ever since has been a synaptic-based index card reading LEPTIS MAGNA: GO THERE IF YOU CAN.

The Church and the Basilica

Two weeks ago we attended 10:30 a.m. services at St. John's Episcopal Church, which happens to be on Lafayette Square in Washington. It's an elegant church inside and out, originally designed in the 1810s by Benjamin Latrobe, Surveyor of the Public Buildings of the United States and the architect who oversaw the restoration of the U.S. Capitol after it burned, among many other projects.

It's also a church steeped in presidential history, counting a number of sitting presidents since James Madison as members. It's been customary since the time of Madison for each president, whatever his denomination, to visit at least once during his term. According to the National Park Service's "A National Registry of Historic Places Travel Itinerary," that even includes William Henry Harrison. Maybe he was heard to be blowing his nose and coughing more than usual during a service in March 1841. There was a presidential visit as recently as this July.

Pew 54 is called the "President's Pew." When the service was over, I went to look for it. Not only is it so marked with a small brass plaque, the kneeling cushions at Pew 54 and a good many other pews in front of it -- there are no built-in kneelers -- have the presidential seal as part of their design, along with the name of an individual president. I suppose they're all represented, from Madison to Obama.

On our last full day in Washington, we rode the Metro to the Catholic University of America and crossed the campus to reach the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It was either there or the National Cathedral, and the basilica won out because we could reach it without the extra bus ride that reaching the cathedral would have entailed. So the National Cathedral remains a sight to see, should I ever return to Washington.

The basilica is enormous. That isn't really the measure of a church, but it's striking all the same, even if you've read about it beforehand. At about 76,400 square feet, the basilica is the largest Catholic church in the United States. A cursory look at Wiki's "List of Largest Church Buildings in the World" puts it at 21st in the world and third in the United States, after the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and the National Cathedral, both of which are Episcopalian. Other sources say it's the 10th largest church in the world. Another way to describe it is about half the size of the interior space of St. Peter's in Rome.

Done in a blend of Byzantine and Romanesque styles, and without structural steel, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is also mind-bogglingly intricate, with dozens and dozens of chapels and side chapels and a few oratories on the main level and down in the crypt level too, many completed with funds from Catholic congregations around the world, such as Mary, Queen of Ireland; Our Lady of Guadalupe; Our Lady of Czestochowa; Our Lady of China; Our Lady of La Salettel; Our Lady of Siluva; Our Lady of La Vang; Our Lady of Bistrica; Our Lady of Lourdes; Our Mother of Africa, and more. Other chapels take their inspiration from the many and varied titles of Mary, such as Our Mother of Good Counsel, Mary Queen of Missions, Our Lady of Hope, Mother of Perpetual Help, Mary, Help of Christians, and more. All the various chapels are ornate, but so is pretty much every surface, nook and cranny of the basilica.

Vaulting overhead are large mosaics. Only one dome remains unfinished in this regard, and I understand plans are afoot to complete a design for it in some future decade. Among all the building's impressive mosaics, the most striking (fittingly) is the depiction of Jesus in north apse. According to the basilica, it measures 3,600 square feet and contains nearly 3 million tesserae. "Christ in Majesty has an apocalyptic nature," the basilica's web site says, "Jesus' strong youthful face and expression is consonant with the earliest images of Him in the Roman catacombs."

Even Roadside America has a take on this image, calling it "Mortal Combat [sic] Jesus." This is a good image of it -- better than on the basilica web site -- as well as a thoughtful blog posting. Jesus does have an unusually fearsome expression, at least to modern eyes, who are used to more placid views of the Savior. It reminded me of that bumper-sticker religious wisdom, "Jesus is coming, and boy is he pissed."