50 Years Ago - Wellesley Class of 1966 Elected MLK "Honorary Member"

Invitation to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to become an
"honored member" of the Wellesley Class of '66.

In January, Wellesley College hosted the 15th annual Martin Luther King breakfast.

No mention was made in the write-up of the event, which included singing by the Wellesley Choral Society, that this month will be the 50th Anniversary of an election by the Class of 1966.

This election made the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. an "Honorary Member" of the Wellesley Class of 1966.

We have a record of the "heartfelt" invitation on January 26, 1966 from Zoe Sarbanes, President of the Wellesley Class of 1966.

The vote of the class was apparently taken "last spring", i.e., approximately in April 1965.

Martin Luther King's draft response.

We also have a record of his acceptance of the honor, on yellow-lined paper, addressed to "Miss [Louisa] Knight", who must have sent a followup letter asking for his response.

He apologizes for the delay in his response. MLK says:

I am indeed honored in having been elected an honorary member of the Wellesley Class of 1966. This is an admirable tribute to the American Negro and our struggles for freedom and equality. Consequently, if it is not too late, I would be proud to accept such a tribute. It is an honor for both myself and the staff of the S.C.L.C. which works so diligently and patiently to support me in our struggle for freedom. I am grateful to the students of Wellesley College for having bestowed such an honor upon me. This support is both heartening and encouraging.

So:

• He was elected by the Class of 1966, 50 years ago - April 1965.
• He was invited twice in 1966, by the Class President and another classmate, Louisa Knight (Vice President? Secretary?).
• Then he drafted an acceptance, some time in (probably) April 1966.

But no one remembers him coming to the Wellesley graduation. Was his acceptance typed up and mailed out to Louisa Knight? Was it too late to work him into the Wellesley Commencement program? Is there a story here buried in some file?

WELLESLEY | Class of '66 in Boston

At the Union Club in Boston, to celebrate the 70th birthday of Joan Hass. L to R: Mary Shepard, 
Hannah McClennan, Joan Barkhorn Hass, Jolinda K. Taylor, Alice Tepper Marlin. Photo by JT Marlin.

April 13, 2015 - As Hillary Rodham Clinton, Wellesley '69, was announcing her candidacy for President of the United States, I was a bystander in Boston yesterday at a fourth get-together of Wellesley '66 classmates in 2014-2015.

The class is preparing for its 50th Reunion on June 3-5, 2016.

The first three events were in:
1. New York City (my photo)
2. East Hampton, N.Y.
3. Vero Beach, Fla.

This one was in Boston, Mass., to celebrate the 70th birthday of Joan Barkhorn Hass. Five Wellesley classmates, including Joan, were in attendance.

The event was held at the Union Club, of which Joan Hass was the first female President, during the 2012-2013 term that included the club's 150th Anniversary year.

After the birthday party, Bill and Jolinda Taylor kindly took us on a visit to the Boston Athenaeum, an outstanding private library with many books from George Washington's library.

The Union Club in Boston - Formed in the Darkest Days of the Civil War

Dr. Edward Everett, former President of
Harvard, then the Union Club.

April 10 - This evening Alice and I went to the Union Club for a Surf and Turf dinner. This private club has a distinguished history, of special note as we are between two 150th anniversaries - of Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9 and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14.

The club was founded not much more than two years earlier, in late 1862, by Bostonians who were concerned about the future of the American Union.

Article I of the club says: "The condition of membership shall be unqualified loyalty to the Constitution and Union of the United States and unwavering support of the federal government in efforts for the suppression of the Rebellion."

The club's first elected president, Dr. Edward Everett, was a man of great distinction - former president of Harvard, Governor of Massachusetts, Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Senator. The club was formal inaugurated on April 9, 1863 and Everett made a lengthy speech for the Union.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Two years later, to the day (i.e., yesterday, 150 years ago) Confederate General Lee surrendered his huge Army of Northern Virginia, which had been surrounded by Union General Ulysses S. Grant, at the Court House in Appomattox, Virginia. This made inevitable total victory by the North in the Civil War, although the war did not end immediately.

John Wilkes Booth - a famed 26-year-old actor who took the side of the Confederacy - responded to the increasingly bad news for the South by meeting with six friends. They decided to kidnap the president and abduct him to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. They fixed a date on March 20, 1865 and lay in wait… but Lincoln failed to appear as he was scheduled.

Lincoln was assassinated five days after Lee's surrender.

Booth’s revised plan was the assassination of Lincoln, to give hope to those continuing to fight on desperately for the Confederacy. 

He found out that Lincoln was to attend Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln was in a private box next the stage, with his wife Mary and a young couple - Army Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris (Rathbone’s fiancée, daughter of one of New York’s senators).

Booth entered the box and fired a single shot (a one-ounce ball) at the back of Lincoln’s head with his .44 Deringer pistol at point-blank range. He then knifed Rathbone, who came toward him, and jumped onto the stage shouting, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!”) – the Virginia state motto. Booth broke his leg in the jump. He hobbled out of the theater and escaped on horseback.

This scene is reenacted here in a four-minute clip. 

The audience thought at first that the assassination was part of the play. When Mary screamed, only then did those present realize what happened. A 23-year-old young Army doctor (Dr. Charles A. Leale) went to the presidential box and found the president slumped in his chair, struggling to breathe and in paralysis. 

Booth had been recognized and he fled with David Herold across the Potomac to Virginia, where he was hunted down to a farmhouse. The soldiers torched it. Herold surrendered. Booth stayed inside until the heat became too intense. When he became visible, a sergeant shot him and Booth lived only three more hours.

Several soldiers carried Lincoln to a red brick boarding house across the street. When Dr. Robert King Stone, the Lincoln family physician, arrived in his carriage, he pronounced that nothing could be done for Lincoln, who had already been suffering from the health effects of being a wartime president. He had fainted two months earlier in an argument with his Attorney General over pardons for desertion.

The president’s body was taken to the White House and was in due course carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state. On April 21, Lincoln’s body was put on a train to his hometown of Springfield, Ill. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the railroad route. He was buried next his son Willie, who predeceased him, at Oak Ridge Cemetery, near Springfield.

Four co-conspirators including David Herold were convicted of conspiracy to murder and were hanged for this on July 7, 1865. The four included Mary Surratt, who ran the boarding house where the seven conspirators first met.

WOODIN | 7. East Hampton 1912-1934 (Updated July 7, 2016)

This chapter of a book on Will Woodin has been transferred to a private blog. To obtain access, contact the author, John Tepper Marlin, jtmarlin@post.harvard.edu.

WOODIN | Appendix A. The Kondratiev Waves (Updated May 15, 2015)

The Kondratiev industrial waves of about 50 years each were started by Scotsman James Watt's steam engine.

It was not just more efficient than the 1712 steam-engine design of Thomas Newcomen.

It made possible many new uses of the engine because it could drive a wheel.

Newcomen's boiler created steam that was fed into a closed container. When the steam cooled, it created a vacuum that pumped water up from coal mines.

Watt's Steam Engine, developed 1763-1775.

First Wave, Steamboats, 1800-1850. Watt, by introducing a separate steam condenser, permitted a shorter cycle. Instead of a chamber that slowly filled and emptied, his engine enabled a piston to cycle up and down, allowing for rotary motion. This invention led to riverboats and steamships in the first Kondratiev wave, 1800-1850. Watt shrunk the world.

(The American south was able to transport cotton  up and down the Mississippi and other rivers. New canals were built to take goods through to the Great Lakes. Combined with the new ability to harvest short-staple cotton via Eli Whitney's cotton gin, it meant that by 1850 the south producing three-fifths of American exports, with cotton accounting for most of that. It also created a demand for slaves and led to the Civil War, but that is another story.)

Second Wave, Railroads, 1850-1900. The second phase of the industrial revolution resulted from the transfer of the steam engine from boats to locomotives. This created the railway age. Many railways were built alongside canals, so that one mode of transportation could complement the other.

George Stephenson's Locomotive, Invented 1814.
First Railway (8 miles, for a Coal Mine), 1819.

Railways were faster than steamboats. The world shrank some more.

At the heart of this railway revolution was American Car & Foundry, which originated in Berwick, Pa. and in 1899 monopolized the railway-car supply business, making its CEO, Will Woodin, very wealthy.

Third Wave, Electricity, 1900-1950.  The steam engine was used to generate power and supply electricity to the public through electric utilities that wired every home. Thus the steam engine drove 150 years of economic growth.

These three spurts of growth of 50 years each, from 1800 to 1950, were the original  Kondratiev waves, named after Nikolai Kondratiev, a Russian who was executed by Stalin on September 17, 1938 during the Purges for refusing to toe the party line.

Fourth Wave, Cars and Petroleum, 1950-2000.  The fourth wave was the invention of the automobile and of ways to turn petroleum into plastic and other products.

Fifth Wave, Information Technology, 2000-2050. The fifth wave - Information Technology, 1990-2010 - was viewed as shorter, only 20 years. But one could argue that this wave is continuing and will keep going until 2050.

The Sixth Wave, ??. The chart at the beginning of this Appendix, based on Leo Nefiodow's extension of Kondratiev's work, shows "Psychosocial Health" as the next phase after technology/IT - shrinks, guidance counselors, rehab facilities and home care for almost everyone.

Certainly, jobs in health care have been growing, but this growth - like the growth of education - is running into limits to people's willingness or ability to pay for the services. Private health care appears to be a private choice and the appetite for health care services seems boundless. The problem is the cost side, who is paying, and how much they are willing to pay.

This leads me to the McKinsey projection of the sources of growth in coming years. They narrow these sources down to four, which they call "global trends". I list them in a different order than they do:

• Technology.
• Urbanization.
• Graying of the global population.
• Freer flow of trade, people, data.

Technology has broken through many predicted limits. Possibly the other three trends will do the same. Or, another scenario, we will see limits to urbanization and graying and free flow. We may see a backlash as we have in U.S. attitudes to trade and migration and open data.

The industrial revolution seems a simple process to manage by comparison - but only because we have seen how innovation addressed each problem and mostly solved it.

The Queen Mary Syndrome (Superseded)

This post is Superseded, merged with Chapter 15 of my biography of Will Woodin. Here.

The post is maintained to avoid breaking links.

2. Berwick

This post has been transferred to a private blog.
To obtain access, contact jtmarlin@post.harvard.edu.