Pigs in the Church

Coat of arms for the Corbin family,
of which I am a descendant.
(From: byandbylord.blogspot.com)

"The reality of privilege, by the seventeenth century, had virtually no connection at all with the medieval vision of an aristocracy of warriors whose qualities were said to be inherited, from father to son. Of those medieval knights, precious few still had descendants in possession of their ancestral fiefs in the sixteenth century. While the actual personnel of the medieval warrior caste was gone forever--the families having died out or lost their seigneurial rights--the trappings of chivalry, constantly reinterpreted, remained in place, secured by a steady flow of edicts from the royal palaces. Coats of arms were fabricated at short notice, for a price, by specialists in heraldry. The palaces and country houses of Europe were filled with phony dukes and marquises who asserted the antiquity of their privileges, which they did not hesitate to trace back to ancient Rome or even ancient Troy.

Newcomers to noble status, whether they had bought their fiefs in 1500 or in 1600, knew how to keep up appearances. They dressed the part. They built elaborate country houses. They maintained large numbers of retainers. They were presented at court. Their claims might arouse the suspicion of a handful of noblemen of older vintage, the king himself might laugh, privately, at their pretensions, but in public, as they made their way in silk-lined coaches toward masked balls and other expensive entertainments, who could deny their eminence?

Were they not received at court? Were they not lords among their peasants? Were they not set apart from commoners by their expensive wigs, their fashionable clothes, their perfumed gloves, the jeweled swords which hung from their belts? Participants in a ballet of deference, the noblemen and would-be noblemen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were constantly removing and replacing their wide-brimmed hats, acknowledging the superior rank of a duke or president, receiving the homage of their own presumed inferiors. Bowing and scraping, insisting on their prerogative to remain seated or to keep their hats on, attended by servants and pushing their way into the place they felt entitled to on public occasions, hordes of men and women insisted on their various and conflicting positions in the world of privilege. They came to blows, at church, over the right to be seated in the front benches. 'They are like pigs,' wrote a country priest. 'Like pigs, they tear each other up. They have nothing but contempt for each other, they think that they can add weight to their own reputation by accusing others of being of more recent nobility.' Since privilege was largely a matter of wealth and of appearances [not birth], it is not surprising that appearances mattered so much. Kings set the tone, establishing elaborate hierarchies at court. At the royal palace in Versailles, thousands of courtiers lived in fear of committing breaches of etiquette, clinging to bewildering distinctions of rank. It was bad manners to knock at a door in Versailles. The proper way was to scratch at the door with the little finger of the left hand. If the servant of a social superior brought you a message, you had to receive him standing and bareheaded. If you encountered the royal dinner on its way from the kitchens to the table, you were obliged 'to bow as to the King himself, sweeping the ground with your hat and saying, in a low, reverent, but distinct voice: 'The King's dinner.' Who could sit down, in the presence of whom, and on what, was a vexing problem at court. Two prominent people could not meet without verifying the seating arrangements in advance. A fifteen-year-old duchess, elevated by her recent marriage to a rank which made her superior to her own mother, has a screaming fit when the usher on duty throws open both leaves of the door as her mother enters the room. As her social inferior, the mother was entitled only to one half of the door being opened for her." (63) --George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe

I am descended from the Corbin family, which has its own coat of arms, pictured above. Therefore, I hereby assert my full privileges. I am declaring myself tax-exempt and demand that you not read this blog while you are sitting on the toilet or riding the bus. Such action would not be respectful to my rank.

The Giraffe? It Stinks

Sienese district or ward flags. (From: Wikipedia)

"An extreme example of a city where ward membership has provoked passionate feelings since the thirteenth century is that of the Italian city of Siena. Each Sienese ward still has its own flag today, its colors, its symbols. There is the ward of the Eagle, the ward of the Snail, Owl, Tortoise, Giraffe, Goose--and so on. The modern Sienese still know precisely where the boundaries of their wards are drawn. Being 'of the Goose' or 'of the Giraffe' is a matter of great importance in Siena. Children are brought up to be proud of their own ward and contemptuous of rival ones. A Giraffe mother will spoon-feed her baby, saying 'One for mummy, one for daddy, one for the Giraffe.' The same mother will then condition the child to dislike the rival ward of the Caterpillar by saying: 'And this one is for the Caterpillar,' only to withdraw the spoon quickly, just as the baby opens its mouth. A two-year-old boy wearing a scarf with the Caterpillar colors is asked his name. 'Marco,' he says. 'And how old are you?' is the next question. Marco holds up two fingers. Then he is asked: 'How is the Caterpillar?' 'Bello [It is beautiful],' he replies. 'And what about the Giraffe?' 'It stinks,' says the child." (36) --George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe

Pass Some of that Spicy Sauce, Please!

A spice market in Istanbul. (From: Wikipedia)

"The twentieth-century American, taking for granted refrigeration, ease and rapidity of transport, and the resulting extraordinary variety of diet, may find perplexing his ancestors' lust for spices. We must remember some of the foods Europeans lacked. They had no rice, no corn, no potatoes; little cheese or butter; fresh fruits and green vegetables only in season, and few of these in the larger cities; almost no sugar. Fresh meat was relatively plentiful at the moment of massive slaughter in the autumn. At other times of year meat was salted and more than a little high; and since its source was excess work animals, it was hardly of prime quality. The ordinary diet was based on bread and gruel, enlivened by pickled cabbage, turnips, peas, lentils, and onions. The entire art of cookery lay in the sauce, and the piquancy of the sauce lay in its spices. Men wanted spices because they teased the palate, disguised the disagreeable or dull, gave variety to the menu. They wanted them for medicines and drugs, for perfumes and for use in religious ceremonies. The result was a most powerful demand for camphor, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, mace, cardamom, and, above all, for pepper and cloves--all products of Asia and excessively rare in Europe." (36) --Eugene F. Rice, Jr. and Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 2nd edition

I might also add that medieval Europeans had no tomatoes. Tomatoes are native only to South America. So, for hundreds and hundreds of years before the 16th century, Italian cooks had no tomatoes!

St. Nicholas Hails from Tug Hill

Clement Clark Moore (From: Wikipedia)

Clement Clarke Moore wrote "Twas the Night Before Christmas" in 1822. This was the first popular culture item to conceive of St. Nicholas in the contemporary manner of a big man in a red suit with a sleigh pulled by a reindeer and gifts for all the good little boys and girls. The cartoonist Thomas Nast was inspired by Moore's poem to draw St. Nicholas. His were the first pictures of the new Santa Claus. These are all well-known facts of 19th century Christmas history. What is not precisely known is where Moore was when he wrote the poem. This is of crucial significance because proponents of one or the other location adduce a number of inspirations for the poem based on where they believe Moore wrote it. There are two possible locations: 1) Constableville, New York, or 2) Greenwich Village, New York City.

"Involved in the debate is Constable Hall, a stately limestone mansion in the rugged Tug Hill Country of northern New York state, far from Moore's New York City home. One 'Historic Museum Guide' for New York states with full conviction: 'It was at Constable Hall in 1822 that Clement Clark Moore, a first cousin of William Constable, Jr.'s widow, wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which is popularly known today as "Twas the Night Before Christmas.' 

Constable Hall, Constableville, New York
(From: Constable Hall Museum)

"A second opinion relating to the Constables has subsisted through the years. Some believe that although Moore was not present in the Hall at the time of its writing, the poem was intended as a gift for the Constable children whose father had earlier died to an accident during the building of the elegant home...

"And from where did Clement Moore draw inspiration for the poem? Again, opinions seem to vary with the source.

"Constable Hall was built in Lewis County by William Constable Jr. on a vast expanse of land inherited from his father. Constable's wife, Mary Eliza McVicker Constable, was a first cousin of Clement Moore and his visits there are documented. 

"A 1998 Palm Beach Post newspaper story contends that on one such visit Moore encountered a Dutch gardener named Pieter, 'plump and jolly' and perhaps the inspiration for Santa Claus according to one of the last generation of Constables to live in the Hall. The account implies that physical features of the Hall, such as a large chimney and interior shutters in each room, are suggested in the poem." (338-339) --James Hughes, "Those Who Passed Through: Unlikely Visits to Unlikely Places," New York History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (Fall 2010)

Thomas Nast's 1881 Drawing of St. Nicholas
(From: St. Nicholas Center)

Wait a second... the Palm Beach Post?? Hughes rests content with the Palm Beach Post as a source?! I found Hughes' article fascinating because (sad to say) I have never heard of this story of Moore and Tug Hill before. I was glad to read the article. But I am disappointed to see a writer published in New York History citing a contemporary newspaper as his final source of information on a historical matter. I think we could all agree that a published article in a history journal should dig deeper than a current newspaper source.

Nevertheless, what a great story! I cannot wait to visit Constable Hall the next time I go back to northern New York!  

(By the way, Hughes goes into equal depth in the article on the possibility of Greenwich Village as the location for Moore's creativity. But, despite my love for New York City, I'm giving the limelight to Tug Hill because limelight does not shine on Tug Hill very often.)

The Real Meaning of "Manhattan"

Oak-Hickory Forest (From: Wikipedia)

"The Moravian missionary John Heckewelder reported an Indian tradition that when the Dutch first landed on Manhattan Island they gave liquor to the local inhabitants, as a consequence of which 'the Delawares call this place (New-York Island) Mannahattanink or Mannahachtanink to this day,... the same as to say, the island or place of general intoxication.' Another version, published earlier but evidently somewhat revised, has this as a tradition among the Delawares and the Mahicans that they named the island 'Manahachtanienk' meaning 'the island where all became intoxicated.' The story does not agree with known facts, notably the existence of the name already at the time of Hudson's voyage [long before the Dutch arrived], if not before, and the translation is nothing more than a folk etymology... (283)

The Mannahatta Project, which reconstructs the natural history of Manhattan as of 1609, has spread the claim that the name used by the local Lenape Indians was Mannahatta and meant 'island of many hills.' In fact, the spelling 'Mannahatta' is taken from a poem by Walt Whitman and does not mean in any spelling 'island of hills' let alone 'island of many hills'..." (287) --Ives Goddard, "The Origin and Meaning of the Name 'Manhattan,'" New York History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (Fall 2010)

Goddard bolsters his argument as to the incorrectness of both of the above proposed meanings (and others) with extended historical and linguistic arguments. So, what does "Manhattan" mean, according to Goddard? The original Native American inhabitants of Manhattan were Munsees. Their language was Munsee, part of the major linguistic group of Algonquins. Goddard locates the meaning of "Manhattan" as they themselves used it by focusing on the report of Albert Anthony, a 19th century Munsee Indian living on a reservation in Ontario. Anthony provided the Munsees' traditional explanation of "Manhattan" (the following is a quote of Anthony):

"Our traditions affirm that at the period of the discovery of America, our Nation resided on the Island of New York. We call that island Man-a-ha-tonh, The place where timber is procured for bows and arrows. The word is compounded of N'man-hum-in, I gather, and tan-ning, at the place. At the lower end of the island was a grove of hickory trees of peculiar strength and toughness. Our fathers held this timber in high esteem as material for constructing bows, war-clubs, etc." (289)

I am always fascinated to read about the natural history of Manhattan before the European exploration. The contrast between the current and pre-European landscapes could not be greater. The natural order here is almost completely obliterated. Think of it: a grove of hickory trees in lower Manhattan. Amazing!

Football and Bull Fights

"It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture." (160) --Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1994 Dover edition)

Veblen was not much of a football fan, was he? He wrote this in 1899. If you haven't read any Victorian texts recently, "physical culture" was the term then used for exercise and maintaining good physical fitness. Veblen's larger point is that football accentuates archaic human traits of predation and barbarism that are little economic use to a society. His ideas were part of the popular late 19th century ideology of social evolution. (You are probably more familiar with Herbert Spencer as social evolution's main advocate.) Veblen thought the evolution of the human species is driven by the natural selection of traits that enable humanity to progressively produce more wealth. For Veblen, it all comes down to whether certain human traits are useful in an economic sense. Apparently, football does not make the cut!

The Theory of the Leisure Class is a classic of economics and sociology. I would recommend it for its unique descriptions and explanations of Victorian upper class society--which, by the way, can be largely adapted to Americans of all classes today. His observations of the upper class's "conspicuous consumption" help one to understand why contemporary Americans (and probably all of Western society) are obsessed with consuming goods--cars, clothing, houses, etc--in order to remain "respectable" to their neighbors. However, Veblen's book is awfully convoluted. The organization of his arguments within chapters is sometimes hard to distinguish. I think he could have written this book using half the number of pages--and been better off for it.    

Drinking Health to King Jesus

George Whitefield, whose preaching in 1740
began theGreat Awakening.
(From www.nndb.com)

The Great Awakening was "the boisterous and often fractious religious revivals that gripped New England following George Whitefield's celebrated preaching tour of 1740. Partisans of the Whitefieldian awakenings frequently referred to local events in places such as Newbury [Mass.] as a 'surprising,' 'extraordinary,' 'Glorious,' 'Marvelous,' and 'wonderfull' outpouring of God's Holy Spirit. More often, they simply called it 'the Work'...

"[In 1744], a Rowley [Mass.] layman named Richard Woodbury descended on Newbury, accompanied by Daniel Rogers and Nicholas Gilman. Together, they spent more than a month laboring to stir up fervent revival advocates in the town's two largest parishes. Woodbury claimed to possess the 'Power to bless and curse eternally whom he pleased.' He dared to drink 'healths to King Jesus' and vehemently condemned to hell anyone who questioned his charismatic authority. Exhibiting what one report called a 'strange Emotion,' Woodbury frequently fell into trances during which he would roll on the floor and rail against revival opposers, crying out that they had crucified Christ. Other reports suggested that he and his disciples bent to the ground and made crosses in the dust, before kissing and licking the earthen symbols." (65)  --Douglas L. Winiarski, "The Newbury Prayer Bill Hoax: Devotion and Deception in New England's Era of Great Awakenings," Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 14 (2012)

I should hasten to add in fairness that George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards, all closely associated with the First Great Awakening, would all have strongly disapproved of the sort of madness described above. There were both respectable and disreputable aspects of the First Great Awakening. Needless to say, Woodbury, Rogers, and Gilman represented the wilder side.

Smallpox Under a Walnut Shell

"In 1716, while searching the [Royal Society's] Philosophical Transactions... [Cotton] Mather came across a report from Turkey describing a medical procedure that produced a mild case of smallpox and left the patient immune to the disease. The process involved removing infected tissue from one person and transferring it to a healthy individual. According to the report, a medical practitioner used a sharp needle to puncture a few pocks on a young person with a mild case of smallpox and extracted a small sample of the pus, which was pressed into a clean glass vessel that was covered and kept warm until it reached the home of the inoculee. There, the practitioner made one or two small wounds in the patient's arm with a needle or lancet, inserted a drop of the pus, and gently mixed it with the oozing blood. A walnut shell provided temporary protection for the wound. In due time, pocks appeared, but fewer than in natural smallpox, and the patient seldom suffered a high fever or other serious discomforts." (10) --Amalie M. Kass, "Boston's Historic Smallpox Epidemic," Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 14 (2012)

Dr. Zabdiel Boylston was one of the first physicians in Boston
to use smallpox inoculation. (From: Mass Moments)

I wonder how it was first discovered that the inoculation procedure described above protected people against a more severe case of smallpox. Who was the very first physician to conduct it--and what were they thinking?! Just as important, who was the first volunteer for the experiment?

Kass describes what 17th century Bostonians believed the causes of smallpox to be. First of all, it was a punishment from God for the sins of an individual or community. Second, it was thought to result from an imbalance in bodily fluids--a conclusion based on ancient Greeks' humoral theory. Kass explains, "According to humoral theory, good health required a balance of the four elements--blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile--that constituted the bodily fluids. Disease indicated that one or more of the humors was either deficient or excessive due to internal or external factors." (4)

Bostonians were in some degree aware of smallpox's contagiousness. Kass describes how quarantine measures were taken and efforts made to clean up the city's streets at the first sign of smallpox. But does it not seem to be the height of insanity to transfer the bodily fluids from a person with a deadly disease to a healthy person! What was the reasoning here for the first physician to try this out?

The reasoning seemed to have been based on the observation that once a person had had smallpox, he/she was in most cases immune from it during subsequent epidemics. The idea must have been that if the pus could be taken from the sores of a person with a mild case of it and transferred to a healthy person, then the latter would hopefully be infected with only a mild case and later become immune. Seems reasonable in a way... but, with smallpox's contagiousness being common knowledge, I sure wouldn't want to be the first guinea pig for this experiment!

A "Rain of Blood"

Captain Joshua Slocum was the first person to circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat. Spray. In 1900, he published a best-selling book about the trip, Sailing Alone Around the World. The book has become a classic of nonfiction sea adventure prose. In the passage below, Slocum describes a strange natural phenomenon that occurred during his stay in Melbourne, Australia.

The Spray (From: Wikipedia)

It took him three years, 1895-1898, to accomplish this feat. He sailed a 37-foot yawl that he built himself while in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He called it the

"I should mention that while I was at Melbourne there occurred one of those extraordinary storms sometimes called 'rain of blood,' the first of the kind in many years about Australia. The 'blood' came from a fine brick-dust matter afloat in the air from the deserts. A rain-storm setting in brought down this dust simply as mud; it fell in such quantities that a bucketful was collected from the sloop's [Spray] awnings, which were spread at the time. When the wind blew hard and I was obliged to furl awnings, her sails, unprotected on the booms, got mud-stained from clue to earing.

"Red dust storm at Belmore Bridge, Maitland, New South Wales, Australia"
(From: Wikimedia Commons)

The phenomena of dust-storms, well understood by scientists, are not uncommon on the coast of Africa. Reaching some distance out over the sea, they frequently cover the track of ships, as in the case of the one through which the Spray passed in the earlier part of her voyage. Sailors no longer regard them with superstitious fear, but our credulous brothers on the land cry out 'Rain of blood!' at the first splash of the awful mud." (p. 177, Dover Edition, 1956) --Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

Chasing a Moonshiner "Far and Squar"

A policeman with wrecked automobile and
confiscated moonshiner, 1922. Pairing this picture with
the story here is not quite accurate. The story here about
"Byron" probably happened in either the 1950s or 1960s.
(From: Wikipedia) 

"'The facets of human nature are never in greater play.' These are Byron's words (though Byron is not his real name), which explain the fascination of his work to him and the common bond between the moonshiner, or blockader, and the revenuer. At their best, they respect each other as honorable men constantly testing each other over the years to determine whose skills are the sharper honed.

Once, for example, Byron was chasing a moonshiner's car through the mountains. He thought he was gaining ground when suddenly he missed a curve and spun into a ditch. The moonshiner could have made a clean getaway, but instead his car backed up as fast as he'd been moving forward.

'You hurt, captain?' asked the mountain man. He insisted on calling Byron captain, even though he'd only been a sergeant in the Marine Corps.

Then, however, he saw that Byron was unhurt and could back the car out of the ditch. 'How fur ahead of you was I?'

'Down to the turn, I think,' replied the revenue agent.

'Reckon it was a quarter mile more, captain.'

Byron knew that man was being truthful, according to the codes. If he or any other agent were to testify in court that a moonshiner on a chase was driving 120 miles per hour when he actually was doing only 90, that would not be playing 'far and squar.' An agent who lies is an unworthy competitor.

They resumed their positions and the pursuit went on. Byron failed to catch the man. The next time he came into Balsam Grove, he was asked with a smile, 'How's your driving, captain?'

And he was obliged to reply, 'Improving.'" (284)
--Michael Frome, Strangers in High Places: The Story of the Great Smoky Mountains

Rogers, you're fired.

Harold L. Ickes was U.S. Secretary of the Interior from 1933 to 1946. 

Harold L. Ickes (From: Wikipedia)

"Ickes was a strong member of Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet. He felt that he could resist, or even insult, members of the Senate... because he had the President's backing. He worked hard at conservation and left noteworthy accomplishments... However, he suffered from shortcomings in his own personality--which he recognized. He was temperamental, unpredictable, stubborn, given to tantrums, a many-sided man, difficult to understand, who could look out his office window and shudder with sentiment at the sight of a tree being removed from Rawlins Park, then turn around and blaspheme some well-intentioned and perfectly competent subordinate...

...a [national park] superintendent was summoned to his office. The man stood before his desk. The Secretary did not look up but continued working through his papers. 'Rogers,' said Ickes after a time, without ever greeting the man or even looking at him, 'you're fired.' The man's jaw dropped; he was wordless. Ickes continued with his desk work. The superintendent withdrew from the Secretary's office to national park headquarters, where he reported the grisly episode to Arthur E. Demaray, the Associate Director, whose special facility was handling Ickes. 'Don't worry,' Demaray directed. 'Go back to your park. We'll take care of it.' Not another word was heard from Ickes." (228) --Michael Frome, Strangers in High Places: The Story of the Great Smoky Mountains 

Exterminating Indians in the Christian Way

"Yonaguska, or Ya'nu-gun'ski, Drowning Bear, is a key figure in the Smoky Mountains story. Others in Georgia played much larger roles in the history of the [Cherokee] Nation, but none meant more to the isolated mountain Cherokee. He is described as a handsome, tall man of six foot three, a powerful orator, and a prophet... he swore off whiskey and led his people in taking the pledge. Thus, during Yonaguska's lifetime the Smoky Mountain Cherokee were free of the historic cursed plague inflicted upon them from without. Since early days, traders had found it profitable to haul in liquor, legally or otherwise. Sometimes treaty commissioners weakened Indian opposition with doses of firewater. Its dangers were of grave concern to Cherokee leaders, who enacted strict laws regulating the sale of whiskey, which the whites persistently and successfully evaded...

Drowning Bear's principal influence, however, was in holding his people to the mountains and to the old religion of the mountains. He did not succomb to Christian missionaries, but after listening to one or two chapters of the Bible, remarked, 'It seems to be a good book--strange that the white people are not better, after having had it so long." (86) --Michael Frome, Strangers in High Places: The Story of the Great Smoky Mountains

Drowning Bear died in 1839 at the age of sixty. His lifetime spanned a period of time in which the federal government made a series of forced treaties with the Cherokees that gradually took away their ancestral lands, culminating with the Trail of Tears in October 1838. 14,000 Cherokees were rounded up by the U.S. Army into concentration camps, then forced at gunpoint to march to Oklahoma. Several thousand died from starvation and weather exposure along the way. However, a small number of Cherokees managed to avoid the Trail of Tears by hiding out in the mountains. They are the ancestors of those Cherokees who today live in North Carolina. Drowning Bear was the leader of these fugitives.

Those Tricky Englishmen

Map of Delaware River (From: Wikimedia)

"In 1737, with English settlers advancing into Delaware Indian country and the Delawares grudgingly giving ground, a novel agreement was reached: The Indians would let white men inhabit the land along the Delaware River as far upstream as a man could walk in a day and a half. The Indians had in mind a normal pace; the whites did not. Thomas Penn, descendant of the founder of Pennsylvania, selected three young athletes, had them secretly reconnoiter a trail, and promised 5 [pounds] and 500 acres to the man who walked the farthest. Edward Marshall covered more than 65 miles in the allotted time--about twice the distance the Delawares had anticipated. They never forgot nor forgave the Englishmen's stratagem." (116) --Ronald M. Fisher, The Appalachian Trail

Whiskey from a Truck Radiator

Moonshining in Kentucky (From: Wikimedia Commons)

"In the 1920s Prohibition brought boom times to moonshiners, and in some mountain areas almost every family was involved in one way or another with production or sale of whiskey. Many neglected farming altogether to concentrate on this profitable sideline. But repeal of Prohibition in 1933 again made liquor legally available, and to stay in business moonshiners not only had to lower their prices but also to lengthen their lines of distribution. As the price went down, so did quality. More important, moonshiners increasingly used old auto and truck radiators as their condensing equipment. The soldered joints of the radiators contaminate the whiskey with poisonous--even lethal--lead salts." (34) --Ronald M. Fisher, The Appalachian Trail

Shred, Shred, Shred

Citizens protesting and entering the Stasi building
in Berlin; the sign accuses the Stasi and 
SED of being Nazistic dictators. (From: Wikipedia)

"As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989-1990, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany united with great speed and utter confusion. The records of the East German State Security Service (Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, called the MfS or Stasi) were at first neglected by West German authorities preoccupied with the seemingly hopeless task of steering monumental changes that were beyond any governmental control. The Communist security apparatus continued to operate after the fall of the Wall, and party loyalists ran shredding machines around the clock in an effort to destroy incriminating evidence from forty years of intelligence-gathering activity. The shreds, which were saved, actually filled 15,587 mail sacks. In the power vacuum, East German dissidents and some more politically mainstream citizens invaded the Stasi headquarters in Berlin on 15 January 1990 to halt the destruction of records by Stasi functionaries. Certainly the dissidents wanted to preserve the evidence of the fallen regime's oppression for historical reasons. On a more personal level, they also wanted to know exactly who had been reporting the adverse information about them that had affected their jobs, personal freedom, and basic aspects of their lives... Archivists took on seemingly impossible tasks, such as the re-assembly of shredded documents. Some 400,000 pages have been pieced back together." (100-101) --Elena S. Danielson, "Privacy Rights and the Rights of Political Victims: Implications of the German Experience," in Menzi L. Behrnd-Klodt and Peter J. Wosh, eds., Privacy & Confidentiality Perspectives: Archivists & Archival Records

A Coup D'Etat or a Night With Your Mistress?

General Georges Boulanger
(From Wikipedia)

"The real basis of [General George Boulanger's] appeal... and the quality that united so many diverse segments of French society in his support, was his embodiment of French hopes for a successful war of revenge against Germany. Here, at last, was the strong man the nation had been seeking, the French answer to [powerful German statesman Otto von] Bismarck. As if to confirm French patriots in their opinion, Bismarck in a speech of January, 1887, named Boulanger as the greatest obstacle to good relations between France and Germany...

In March, 1888, they committed the blunder of dismissing [Boulanger] from the army for engaging illegally in politics while in military service. As a result, Boulanger was no longer a soldier under government orders, and was free to stand for election to the Chamber of Deputies. In the following weeks he entered one by-election after another, as the French electoral system made it possible for him to do, and in each case he was triumphantly elected. The crucial test of Boulanger's popularity came on January 27, 1889, when he stood as a candidate in radical, skeptical Paris. The government threw all its resources in the campaign to defeat him, but again he won a tremendous victory. It was now generally expected that he would seize the opportunity offered by this popular mandate to overthrow the government. Plans for a coup d'etat were made by his supporters; the commanders of the key regiments in Paris waited for his orders. But instead of leading his troops against the government, he spent the night of January 27 with his mistress. Afterward, alarmed by the news of the government's intention to arrest him for treason, he fled abroad." (196-197)  --Norman Rich, The Age of Nationalism and Reform, 1850-1890

Archivist: "And in this box, we have radioactive uranium."

Chicago Pile One Scientists; Enrico Fermi is the
first man in the front row. Albert Wattenberg is
the third man in the front row. (From the Atomic Archive)

"University of Illinois physicist Albert Wattenberg didn't go to the Chicago branch of the National Archives last year looking for trouble. But when he could barely lift an 8-inch metal rod from a box containing artifacts used by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues to build a nuclear pile under the University of Chicago football stadium, he new something was wrong. 'There's only one metal that heavy,' says Wattenberg, who was part of Fermi's team in the 1940s. 'It was obviously uranium.'

Wattenberg had literally put his fingers on a half-century of carelessness in preserving the beginnings of the nation's nuclear history. Thousands of artifacts contaminated by radionuclides during the testing and production of nuclear materials--laboratory notebooks, classified documents, components from experiments, and the like--were being stored along with nonradioactive material in files open to public inspection. Although the health hazards associated with these materials are small... the contamination is presenting the Department of Energy and the National Archives with a major cleanup problem." --Science, January 14, 1994, quoted on p121 in Gregory S. Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives 

The archivist who processed that box must have been using a "More Product, Less Process" (MPLP) approach! "Hmmm... that's just a box of uranium pile artifacts. They certainly don't need item-level analysis. Next box, please!"

One-Fifth of a Five Sentence Five-Year Plan (Submitted Annually)

Seymour Cray (From: Wikipedia)

"For most routine transactions, records creation is managed through forms. Indeed, a branch of records management known as 'forms management' specializes in the creation of such documents. Forms routinize the types of information collected and the manner in which it is displayed... At higher levels of administration, the use of forms to control records creation is usually less successful... Some administrators, particularly those with reputations independent of their positions, go beyond merely creating records in very general forms or those that incidentally do not conform with 'standardized' procedures and use records creation as a way to flaunt their opposition to bureaucratic procedures. Seymour Cray, for years one of the world's most respected computer scientists and also an employee of Control Data Corporation, mocked the company's policy of creating one- and five-year plans by annually submitting a one-sentence plan, noting that this sentence was one-fifth of his five sentence five-year plan." (52) --Frank Boles, Selecting & Appraising Archives & Manuscripts

Seymour Cray was the creator of the first supercomputer. He was clearly a man to be respected by his peers at the Control Data Corporation. Just as clearly, he was a man who knew his true position in the world. One can clearly picture him, sitting at his desk, signing off on yet another one-sentence plan and forwarding it to his superiors at Control Data as he chuckles under his breath, "I wrote a one-sentence 0.2 year plan because I can write a one-sentence 0.2 year plan!" And we can envision Control Data's executives meeting to discuss what to do about that mischievous Seymour Cray. And the records managers cursing Seymour Cray because he just didn't conform to their perfect five-year plan categories. But what could they do? The man invented the supercomputer. I suppose they just had to let Seymour be Seymour.

Nixon:"Just destroy all the tapes."

Richard Nixon (From: Wikipedia)

"Richard Nixon had a one-line retort on Monday when asked about the lesson of Watergate: 'Just destroy all the tapes.' That's what he told the annual luncheon of The Associated Press when asked what his presidential successors could learn from his experience." (53) --Gregory S. Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, quoting Newsday, April 22, 1986

Lawrence the Librarian

Tintoretto's "The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence" (From: Wikipedia)

"Lawrence the Librarian was a church archives official in Rome. In the year A.D. 258, as part of Roman persecution of Christians, imperial guards searching for membership lists demanded surrender of the church's archives. Lawrence previously had hidden the archives and refused to divulge their location. The guards tied him to a grid iron over a charcoal fire, but Lawrence still refused to relinquish the archives, telling his tormentors, 'I am roasted enough on this side, turn me over and eat.' In subsequent years, a cult grew up around Lawrence. Numerous churches were dedicated to him and he was the subject of artwork by Rubens, Titian, Ribera, and Fra Angelico. Even today, pilgrims still visit the basilica over the tomb of this librarian who died to defend the archives in his custody." (11)
--Gregory S. Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives