The Consequence of Matters

It's the birthday of Walt Whitman, born in West Hills, Long Island, New York in 1819. Whitman worked as a printing press typesetter, teacher, journalist, and newspaper editor. He was working as a carpenter, his father's trade, and living with his mother in Brooklyn, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "The Poet," which claimed the new United States needed a poet to properly capture its spirit. Whitman decided he was that poet. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman later said. "Emerson brought me to a boil." Whitman began work on his collection Leaves of Grass, crafting an American epic that celebrated the common man. He did most of the typesetting for the book himself, and he made sure the edition was small enough to fit in a pocket, later explaining, "I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air." He was 37 years old when he paid for the publication of 795 copies out of his own pocket. Many of...

On this day in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. The monument was first proposed in 1867, but construction didn't begin until 1914; the cornerstone was set in 1915. Architect Henry Bacon designed it to resemble the Parthenon, believing that a defender of democracy should be memorialized in a building that pays homage to the birthplace of democracy. The monument has 36 marble columns, one for each state in the union at the time of Lincoln's assassination. On the south  wall is inscribed the Gettysburg Address, and on the north, his second inaugural address. There's a persistent myth that one of the words in the inaugural address is misspelled, but it's not true. Stonemasons did accidentally carve an "E" where they meant to carve an "F," but it was filled in immediately and no evidence remains. The marble and granite chosen for the monument came from Massachusetts, Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, and Alabama. Bacon intended to show t...

elephones and elevators were beginning to creep into everyday life. In the arts, Picasso and Gertrude Stein were testing the limits of representation and narrative. World War I was on the horizon, and the political situation in Europe was unsettled. On the evening of May 29, 1913, two types of people had gathered for the debut of this ballet: the wealthy, who expected beautiful music and choreography in a traditional vein; and the Bohemians, who were eager for something bold and new. Stravinsky's opening called for a bassoon to "play higher in its range than anyone else had ever done." The audience stirred. The curtain rose on dancers dressed not in elegant, drifting tulle, but in heavy, drape-like fabric. And they did not leap lightly. They stomped about the stage. Audience laughter drove Stravinsky to the wings, where choreographer Vaslav Nijinksy had to shout his directions to the dancers, so loud was the reaction from the audience. The music was dissonant, primitive...

It is the birthday of the first openly gay man elected to public office. Harvey Milk was born in Woodmere, New York in 1930. He was the younger of two boys and was teased as a child for his big ears and big nose. He played football in high school, studied math in college, and wrote for the college newspaper. He later joined the Navy and served on a submarine rescue ship during the Korean War. He moved from job to job after leaving the Navy. He taught high school, became an actuary, worked on Wall Street. He moved to San Francisco in 1969 and fell in love with the city, which had become a hub for gay men. He met his lover Scott Smith in San Francisco, and after a roll of film Harvey dropped off at a camera shop was ruined, the two decided to open a camera store with the $1,000 they had between them. One day when a state worker visited Castro Camera and informed Milk that he owed $100 in state sales taxes, he was outraged. After weeks of complaining at various state offices, he g...

Today is the birthday physicist John Bardeen, born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1908. Before he came along, the only way to transmit and amplify electric impulses was through a vacuum tube, a large glass device, which was bulky, fragile, expensive, and used a lot of energy. Plus it took awhile for the filaments to heat up, so if you turned on a radio powered by a vacuum tube, you had to wait awhile for it to get up and running. After he got a master's in electric engineering, taking five years to do that plus his BS, he went to work for Gulf Research Laboratories, a division of Gulf Oil Company. He worked on methods to do gravitational and magnetic surveys that would give hints about what might be underground, but the work bored him. After a few years, he applied and was accepted to the graduate school of mathematics at Princeton University. There he worked with Eugene Wigner, a major figure for us physicists. He was the first to apply methods of a branch of mathematics called gr...

Everyone knows that Donald Trump blew up at Pelosi and Schumer and immediately held an "impromptu" press conference in the Rose Garden laying into them for Pelosi's "cover up" remark. How impromptu was it? There was a poster already prepared and printed handouts of talking points available in the seconds it took Trump to reach the podium. “Instead of walking in happily to a meeting, I walk in to look at people who said I was doing a coverup,” Trump said, adding that he can’t  work on infrastructure “under these circumstances.” But that was actually the third story of the day. Earlier, the New York Times said "President Trump effectively blew up negotiations with Democratic leaders over a plan to rebuild the nation’s highways, airports and other infrastructure on Tuesday night, insisting that they put the idea aside until Congress approves a new trade pact with Mexico and Canada." So it isn't the presidential harassment, it is the trade de...

It's (or rather yesterday it's; I was busy) the birthday of Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in 1941. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in nearby Hibbing, just off the road that ran all the way up from New Orleans and lent its name to his sixth album, 1965's Highway 61 Revisited. He moved down to Minneapolis and studied art at the University of Minnesota, and though he'd started out his musical career with a rock 'n' roll band, he soon converted to folk, playing gigs at a coffeehouse, the 10 O'clock Scholar, in the Dinkytown neighborhood north of campus. Rock was catchy, but it wasn't deep enough to satisfy him, and he later said: "I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings." He left Dinkytown for New York and became the darling of Greenwich Village's folk community. By...

It's the birthday of documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895. She contracted polio when she was seven, and developed a permanent limp as a result. When she was 12, her father abandoned the family, so she dropped her middle name and adopted her mother's maiden name. She studied photography at Columbia University, and then in 1918 she began to travel, selling her photographs as she went. She ran out of money by the time she got to San Francisco, so she settled there, opened a photography studio, and made a good living shooting portraits of the Bay Area's upper class. She began taking photographs of men on breadlines, striking workers, and the homeless during the Great Depression, to call attention to their plight, and she did indeed attract the attention of other local photographers. She was hired by the Resettlement Administration, which would later become the Farm Security Administration, to document the...

Today is the birthday of Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring is credited with launching the environmental movement. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, its scientific rigor spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter. Carson was born in 1907 on a family farm near Pittsburgh. She was an avid reader and began writing stories at age 8. Her first published work was at age 10 In St. Nicholas, a popular children's magazine. She attended the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) and was admitted to graduate studies in biology at Johns Hopkins. Due to family financial difficulties. her work at Hopkins was sporadic, but led to a master's degree in 1932. S...

On this day in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law. It was the first legislation to diverge from the previous official U.S. policy to respect Native Americans' legal and political rights. Jackson announced his policy by saying, "It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation." He also said, "Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people." The act has been referred to as a unitary act of systematic genocide, because it completely discriminated against an ethnic group, to the point of certain death of vast numbers of its population. The Indian Removal Act was controvers...

Ed Kilgore perfectly states what is most unsettling about the rise of Biden, and Obama before him. It seems Biden learned nothing at all from being Veep. Long but worth reading: One of the latent questions in American politics for both parties is whether Donald J. Trump is some sort of horror-movie version of a unicorn, who after this term, and perhaps another one, will retreat to Mar-a-Lago, leaving the Republican Party — and the United States — scarred but not fundamentally changed. For obvious reasons, Republicans don’t discuss this view of their own future very openly, lest their master resent the suggestion that he’s a man whose moment is rapidly slipping away. You hear the subject discussed more among Democrats, particularly those who are running for president to consign Trump to the ash bin of history. Joe Biden, for example, has made it clear he considers the 45th president an aberration, whose evil spell over Republicans will dissipate once he’s out of office. But Trump’s...