07 Wednesday Aug 2013
Posted in Quote of the day
≈ Comments Off on Quote of the day
Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization; 6 January 1872
Except for his stealing, Tweed would have been a great man; but had he been honest, he wouldn’t have been Tweed and would not have left nearly so great a mark.
–Kenneth D. Ackerman, Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York
(image/NYPL)
06 Tuesday Aug 2013
Posted in Monuments and Statuary, Washington, D.C.
≈ Comments Off on One day in August
The Hayfoot and I were walking across the Mall from the National Museum of American History yesterday on our way to the FDR Memorial when, crossing Independence Avenue, we heard a tap-tap-tapping sound emanating from the direction of the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial. The MLK statue is one of those disasters so jarringly off in its size and scope, so inappropriate for the man it is meant to honor, so . . . wrong, that it is almost magnificent. Its inappropriateness was all the more obvious after having just left the museum, where we had just seen the “Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863 and the March on Washington, 1963″ exhibit.
The tapping we heard was somehow appropriate for the still new memorial: it was the engravers chipping away the original, paraphrased “drum major” inscription that angered so many. A ranger told us that the work is all but complete, and that the finishing touches will be in place in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington in a few weeks.
MLK Jr Memorial from rear, with scaffolding and covering, 5 August 2013
. . . and from the front
04 Sunday Aug 2013
This week marks the 99th anniversaries of the start of the Great War, the series of events that, one-by-one, led tragically and inevitably to mobilization and the great catastrophe that was 1914-1918. By 4 August 1914 most of the primary players had issued their declarations of war and their armies were now moving across Europe. I mentioned to a friend last week that the WW1 Centennial Commission in Kansas City has just about put its entire advisory body into place. I shuddered, though, when noting that the few remaining positions are going to various “celebrities.” Is it just me, or is having, say, George Clooney giving advice on how we should remember WW1 a bad idea? Hopefully, they will re-think that.
Food will win the war – You came here seeking freedom, now you must help to preserve it – Wheat is needed for the allies – waste nothing
I am currently half way through David Laskin’s The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War. WW1 was a frequent topic in my Interpretation at Ellis Island for obvious reasons. One of the lesser known stories of the war was the Black Tom affair of 30 July 1916, in which German saboteurs set of an explosion on a wharf in Jersey City that could be heard as far as Philadelphia. Beyond that serious event, there were a number of issues pertaining to race, nationality, and allegiance that made for discussion. It is a story that has special meaning for me.; members of my own family had just emigrated to the United States in the years before the war and soon found themselves in the trenches. It is a part of my family history I am just now learning about. Laskin’s book examines the war from the perspective of twelve men who had recently come to the United States from Europe and soon found themselves wearing an American uniform in the American Expeditionary Force. Laskin examines the myriad issues–cultural, linguistic, religious, political–these men had to face, often with mixed results. It is a complicated story and, ultimately, a fundamentally American one. I hope these are some of the conversations we have in the next few years.
(image/1917 poster by Charles Edward Chambers, in Yiddish; Library of Congress)
The Strawfoot 