NYC MARCH FOR CIVIL RIGHTS | NAACP's James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson, c. 1917.

July 28, 2020—On this day in 1917, 10,000 Blacks organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) marched on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Credit for this is given to novelist-poet-songwriter James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), who was also a lawyer, a U.S. consul overseas and a leader of the NAACP.

Behind the scenes at the NAACP was Inez Milholland Boissevain's father, John E. Milholland, who was the NAACP's first Treasurer. Inez, of course, died in 1916 and her father would still be grieving.

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a hotel headwaiter and his mother was a teacher at the segregated Stanton School, which  Johnson attended until he went to his school. He grew up in a middle-class home, and his mother encouraged him to pursue his interests in reading and music.

Johnson attended high school and college at Atlanta University. He received his bachelor’s degree 1894. After college, Johnson became the principal of Stanton School, and expanded the school to include a high school. He also began studying law.  In 1898, he was admitted to the Florida Bar, the first Black person to be admitted.

Johnson continued to serve as principal and began practicing law. In addition, he wrote  poetry and songs. In 1901, Johnson decided to pursue a career in writing. He and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, left for New York City to write songs for musicals. They composed about two hundred songs for Broadway.
I
n New York, Johnson also became involved in politics. In 1904, he served as treasurer for the Colored Republican Club. In 1906, the Roosevelt Administration appointed Johnson as the United States consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. In 1909, he served as consul in Corinto, Nicaragua until 1913. In addition to his service as consul, during this time, Johnson anonymously published his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912).

In 1916, Johnson accepted the position of field secretary for the NAACP.  He worked at opening new branches and expanding membership. In 1920, the NAACP appointed him executive secretary. In this position, he was able to bring attention to racism, lynching and segregation. After ten years of serving as executive secretary, Johnson accepted a creative writing teaching position at Fisk University.

Johnson developed his own philosophy on lessening racism in America. While W.E.B. Du Bois advocated intellectual development and Booker T. Washington advocated industrial training to combat racism, Johnson believed it was important for Blacks to produce great literature and art. By doing so, Johnson held that Blacks could demonstrate their intellectual equality and advance their placement in America. 

One of his more popular works was God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927). In 1927, he also reissued his first novel under his own name. Johnson died in 1938, after a train hit the car his wife was driving.

Sources: NAACP History.

BIRTH | John Ashbery

John Ashbery

July 28, 2020—Today is John Ashbery's birthday. I was privileged to live in the same building in Chelsea, Manhattan for half his life. We shared the management skills of an overqualified young woman who cleaned our apartments. 

He was a generous man, and did a reading an an exhibition of the art of Brigid Marlin. He had just published "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1974) and Brigid was similarly fascinated with convexity and had done several self-portraits of that nature. John Ashbery when I spoke with him was always thoughtful and instructive. 

Here is what Garrison Keillor says about him:

He was born in Rochester, New York (1927), and raised on a farm near Lake Ontario. He worked as an art critic in Paris and New York in the 1950s and '60s, and his poetry has been influenced by abstract expressionist art. It's also often called "difficult." "I'm quite puzzled by my work too, along with a lot of other people," he told Contemporary Authors. "I was always intrigued by it, but at the same time a little apprehensive and sort of embarrassed about annoying the same critics who are always annoyed by my work. I'm kind of sorry that I cause so much grief." He's won nearly every American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a MacArthur "Genius" grant. In 2009, he became the first living poet to be the subject of one of the Library of America's "Collected Poems of ..." series. The Oxonian Review remarked: "It is a fitting honour for a man whose decades-long reign as one of the high priests of the contemporary American poetry scene has always been something of a paradox. Having received nearly every major award for achievement in the humanities, he continues to incite considerable debate as to whether his poems 'mean' anything at all." Ashbery told the London Times: "I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life."

BIRTH | A Little Engine that Could, July 25, 1814

George Stephenson (1781-1848)
Father of Railways

July 25, 2020—On this day in 1814, English engineer George Stephenson (1781-1848) introduced his first steam locomotive, a little engine that could named Blücher.

It was used to carry coal from Newcastle upon Tyne to the rest of the world by sea.

This was the first-ever practical locomotive, able to haul 30 tons of coal up a hill at 4 mph. It was used to tow coal wagons along the wagonway from Killingworth to the coal staiths at Wallsend for transfer to ships.

From this first locomotive, Stephenson quickly developed better ones, using his "steam blast" technology. He created his famed Rocket locomotive in 1829.

Born June 9, 1781, in Wylam, Northumberland, England, he died August 12, 1848 in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. In addition to inventing the first practical locomotive, he created the first railway line in 1825. He is properly called the “Father of Railways.” 

He was the son of a mechanic and so learned to operate a Newcomen atmospheric-steam engine by 19 years if age. The engine was used to pump out a coal mine near Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He enrolled in night school after following the news about Napoleon, and he learned how to read and write.

His knowledge of steam engines won him the post of engine wright, chief mechanic, at  the Killingworth colliery. In 1813, he visited a neighboring colliery to examine a “steam boiler on wheels” constructed to haul coal out of the mines. It was promising but broke down frequently.

With the support of Lord Ravensworth, principal owner of Killingworth, Stephenson built the Blücher. Not satisfied, he sought to improve his locomotive’s power and introduced the steam blast, redirecting exhaust steam up a chimney, pulling air after it and increasing the draft. The new design made the locomotive practical and opened up the railway age.

R.I.P. | John Lewis, 1940-2020

Rep. John Lewis receiving the President's
Medal of Freedom, 2010.

The following appreciation of Rep. John Lewis is from guest blogger Doug Clemmons, a Baltimore-based attorney who wrote earlier about a life-changing meeting with the late Elijah M. Cummings. 

The late Honorable John Lewis was a living American hero for his entire adult life.

He is worthy of the praise you would give someone injured on the field of battle fighting for the freedom of Americans—even those who never knew on a personal level the soldier’s sacrifice or name.

Fortunately I had the opportunity to serve, and learn from, a Congressman that provided me the freedom to attend many hearings and events where Lewis was a speaker. John Lewis was close to (and looked like) the late Congressman Elijah Cummings, another wonderful leader I had the great privilege to meet and was not always properly recognized, but was always there for his constituents.

These two Congressmen shared a trait I would describe as an aura. You knew if you were wrong, you would be in for an earnest and peaceful fight that would not end until you changed my way of thinking.

The New York Times obituary of John Lewis summarized: “Images of his beating at Selma shocked the nation and led to swift passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He was later called the conscience of the Congress.”

Doug Clemmons, Esq.

It has been a year for deaths of those who worked on behalf of their brothers. Another Atlantan and an original Freedom Rider, Reverend Cordy Tindell Vivian, affectionately known as C.T., also died this past weekend. He was 15 years older than Lewis and an 18-year veteran of the civil rights movement. He had participated in a lunch counter sit-in in 1947, when he risked his life alongside another minister, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman Lewis.

I am thankful for the right to vote and I am thankful for the contributions of all the Black leaders to the cause of freedom and equality. In times like these I have special reason to be grateful for their legacies and the courage they showed in building them.

FOREIGN FLYERS | July 10, Battle of Britain Starts

A German map for the invasion of England.

July 10, 2020—On this day in 1940 the Battle of Britain began. It was to be the beginning of Operation Sea Lion, Hitler's invasion of England.

It was intended to be a preliminary air battle of a few days. It ended up becoming a standoff, as the Royal Air Force held off the Luftwaffe for the entire summer.

Of the RAF flyers, Sir Winston Churchill said on August 20, 1940: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

"The Few" included 550 foreign flyers, out of 2,900 RAF pilots. The foreign flyers  came from Commonwealth countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as expatriates from Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and other countries under Nazi occupation.

The Polish No. 303 fighter squadron shot down 126 Luftwaffe planes during the battle, more than any other Allied unit. The RAF’s top ace was Josef Frantisek, a Czech aviator who claimed 17 aerial victories.

Some were from the United States. One famous flyer was 29-year-old Billy Fiske, who  was a gold-medal winner for bobsledding at the Winter Olympics.

At the end of his teaching year at the University of Maryland, where he was a mathematics teacher, my uncle Willem van Stockum signed up to teach flying to the Royal Canadian Air Force. As conditions worsened in his native Holland, he volunteered to be a bomber pilot for the RAF, although at 33 he was considered old for this job. He left from his base in Melbourne, Yorkshire on June 9 and was shot down a few hours later. It was during the week of D-Day. He is buried near where his plane came down, in Laval.

He was listed as Dutch, and he has a tombstone provided by the Dutch Government. But he was trained as a mathematician at Trinity College, Dublin, obtained his degree from the University of Edinburgh, was living in the United States when he signed up and was seconded by the RCAF. All these countries claim him.

His Flying Officer (pilot) counterpart on the other plane shot down that night was from Australia.

BIRTH | Dorothy Thompson, 1893

Dorothy Thompson,
Time Cover, June 1939

July 9, 2020—This day in 1893 was born journalist Dorothy Celene Thompson,   in Lancaster, New York. Time magazine poll ranked her as one of the two most important woman in the United States, along with Eleanor Roosevelt. She married novelist Sinclair Lewis.

A foreign correspondent for the New York Evening Post in the 1920s, she later became its bureau chief in Berlin. She so angered Adolf Hitler with her reporting on the Nazis, that he personally expelled her. 

Her syndicated column, On the Record, appeared three times a week in as many as 170 papers, and she also had a popular radio show that was listened to by overseas troops during World War II. She died in 1961.

In early 1944 she wrote a column on, and devoted a radio show to, the idea that soldiers fighting for the Allies needed a vision of the postwar world to motivate them. 

My uncle Willem van Stockum, then a volunteer bomber pilot at the 10 Squadron RAF base in Melbourne, Yorkshire, responded to his sister, Hilda van Stockum. He said that visions of the future do not motivate soldiers. 

What motivates soldiers, Willem said, is outrage at tyranny. 

His letter to my mother on this subject was published as an article, "A Soldier's Creed," in The Horn Book in its Christmas 1944 issue under the authorship of "A Bomber Pilot." It has been widely referenced and quoted. 

Willem van Stockum was shot down over France in June 1944 on his sixth mission, during the week of D-Day, attacking Nazi supply lines before and after the Normandy invasion. He is buried with his crew and that of another plane shot down on the same mission, in France. A book on his life was written by Robert P. Wack, Time Bomber (Boissevain Books, 2014).

Willem van Stockum, RAF. 

I didn’t join the war to improve the Universe; in fact, I am sick and tired of the eternal sermons on the better world we are going to build when this war is over. I hate the disloyalty to the past twenty years. Apparently people think that life in those twenty years, which cover most of my conscious existence, was so terrible that no-one can be expected to fight for it. We must attempt to dazzle people with some brilliant schemes leading, probably, to some horrible Utopia, before we can ask them to fight.
I detest that point of view. I hate the idea of people throwing their lives away for slum-clearance projects or forty-hour weeks or security and exchange commissions. It is a grotesque and horrible thought. There are so many better ways of achieving this than diving into enemy guns. Lives are precious things and are of a different order and entail a different scale of values than social systems, political theories, or art.
“Why are we not given a cause?” some people ask. I do not understand this question. It seems so plain to me. There are millions and millions of people who are shot, persecuted and tortured daily in Europe. The assault on so many of our fellow human beings makes some of us tingle with anger and gives us an urge to do something about it. That, and that alone, makes some of us feel strongly about the war. All the rest is vapid rationalization. All this talk about philosophy, the degeneration of art and literature, the poisoning of Nazi youth, which the Nazi system entails, and which we all rightly condemn, is still not the reason why we fight and why we are willing to risk our lives.
Here, let us say, is a soldier. He asks himself, “Why should I die?” You would tell him: “To preserve our civilization.” When the soldier replies: “To Hell with your civilization; I never thought it so hot,” you take him up wrongly when you sit down and say to yourself: “Well, after all, maybe it wasn’t so hot,” and then brightly tap him on the shoulder and say: “Well, I’ve thought of a better idea. I know this civilization wasn’t so hot, but you go and die anyway and we’ll fix up a really good one after the war.” I say you take him up wrong because his remark: “To Hell with your civilization” doesn’t really mean that he is not seriously concerned about our civilization. He is simply revolted by the idea of dying for ANY civilization. Civilization simply isn’t the kind of thing you ever want to die for. It is something to enjoy and something to help build up because it’s fun, and that is that, and that is all.
When a man jumps into the fire to save his wife he doesn’t justify himself by saying that his wife was so civilized that it was worth the risk! There is only one reason why a man will throw himself into mortal combat and that is because there is nothing else to do and doing nothing is more intolerable than the fear of death. I could stand idly by and see every painting by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo thrown into a bonfire and feel no more than a deep regret, but throw one small, insignificant Polish urchin on the same bonfire and, by God, I’d pull him out or else. I fight quite simply for that and I cannot see what other reasons there are. At least, I can see there are reasons, but they are not the reasons that motivate me.
During the first two years of the war when I was an instructor at an American University in close contact with American youth and in close contact with the vital isolationist question in the States, I often felt that there was much insincerity, conscious or unconscious, on our, the Interventionist, side of the argument. We had strong views on the danger of isolationism for the United States. We thought, rightly, that for the sake of self-interest and self-preservation the United States should take every step to ensure the defeat of the Nazi criminals. But however sound our arguments, our own motives and intensity of feeling did not spring from those arguments but from an intense passion for common righteousness and decency.
Suppose it could have been proved to us at that time that the participation of the United States in the stamping out of organized murder, rape and torture in Europe could only take place at great cost to the United States, while not doing so would in no way impair her security. Would we not still have prayed that our country might do something? And would we not have been proud to see her do something?
There is an appalling timidity and false shame among intellectuals. The common man in the last war went to fight quite simply as a crusader. I am not talking about politics now, I am not either asserting or denying that England declared war from purely generous and noble considerations, but I am asserting that the common man went and fought with the rape of Belgium foremost in his mind and saw himself as an avenger of wrong.
After the war the common man went quietly back to his home. The intellectuals, however, upon coming back, ashamed of their one lapse of finding themselves in agreement with every Tom, Dick and Harry, must turn around and deride the things they were ready to give their lives for. As they were the only vocal group, the opinion became firmly established that the last war was a grave mistake and that anyone who got killed in it was a sucker.
And now, in this war, these intellectuals are hoist with their own petard. They lack the nerve and honesty to represent the American doughboy to himself for what he is. They do not give him the one picture in his mind which would stimulate his imagination and which would make him see beyond the fatigues, the mud, the boredom and the fear. The picture is there for anyone to paint who has a gift for words. It is a simple picture and a true picture and no one who has ever sat as a small child and listened with awe to a fairy story can fail to understand. The intellectuals, however, have made fun of the picture and so they won t use It.
But some day an American doughboy in an American tank will come lurching into some small Polish, Czech or French village and it may fall to his lot to shoot the torturers and open the gates of the village jail. And then he will understand.
There is a lot of talk among our intellectuals about our youth. Our youth is supposed to want a change, a new order, a revolution or what not. But it is my conviction that that is emphatically NOT what our youth wants. Have you ever been in a picture house on a Saturday afternoon, when it is filled with children and some old Western movie is ending in a race of time between the hero and the villain? Have you seen the rapt attention, the glowing faces, the clenched fists? What our young men really want is to be able to give that same concentrated attention and emotional participation, this time to reality, and this time as heroes and not as spectators, that they were able to give to unsubstantial shadows, before long words and cliches had killed their imaginations. Killed them so dead that they can no longer see even reality itself imaginatively.
It is up to the intellectuals to rekindle the thing they have tried to destroy. It is as simple as St. George and the Dragon. Why not have the courage to point out that St. George fought the dragon because he wanted to liberate a captive and not because he wanted to lead a better life afterwards? Some day, sometime, my picture of an American doughboy in a Polish village will become true. Wouldn’t it be better for him then to have the cross of St. George on his banner than a long rigmarole about a better world?
As long as our intellectuals and leaders do not have the courage to risk being thought sentimental and out-of-date and are not willing to stress that nations as well as individuals are entitled to their acts of heroism and chivalry, they will never be able to give our youth what it needs.
It is true that every fairy story ends with the words: “and they lived happily ever after.” How irritating a child would be, though, if it interrupted its mother at every sentence to ask: “But, Mummy, will they live happily ever afterwards?” It simply isn’t the point of the fairy story and it isn’t the point of this war.
Presumably we won’t live happily ever after this war. But just as a fairy story helps to increase a child’s awareness and wonder at the world, so this war may make us more aware of one another. Perhaps we shall learn, and perhaps some things will be better organized. I hope so. I believe so. But only if we engage in this war with our hearts as well as our minds.
For goodness’ sake let us stop this empty political theorizing according to which a man would have to have a University degree in social science before he could see what he was fighting for. It is all so simple, really, that a child can understand it.

BIRTH | William Strunk Jr. of Strunk & White

William Strunk, Jr.

July 1, 2020—This day in 1869 was born William Strunk Jr., born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1869). He was an English professor at Cornell, where he published his grammar book The Elements of Style,

E. B. White

He intended it as a reference for his students, and one of those students was Elwyn Brooks White. E.B. White went on to become a famous writer for the New Yorker (he wrote Charlotte's Web), and in 1957, White was commissioned to revise and expand the original grammar book. The new version of the book, commonly referred to as "Strunk & White," has sold more than 10 million copies.

WOODIN | Index to Biography

Will Woodin (L) and FDR.

I am writing a biography of William H. Woodin, the first Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was President of American Car & Foundry (ACH) in 1917-33, once one of the 20 companies of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  He was also Chairman of American Locomotive (ALCo). The book is nearing completion and here is a first stab at an index (page numbers to be inserted when the book is paginated). Thanks to Holly Chin, summer intern from Wellesley College, for her assistance with this index and with other research and publication tasks to get this book in front of the public! John Tepper Marlin

1932 General Election

Acheson, Dean

Alexander Hamilton, Musical

American Car & Foundry (ACF)

Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Armenian War

Atherton, California

Baltimore & Ohio Railroad

Banks

Berwick Railroad

Berwick Store Company

Berwick, Pennsylvania

Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania

Brains Trust

Brough, Louise, Winner of Woodin Cup

Brown, John

Bryan, William Jennings

Bryn Mawr College

Bureau of Engraving and Printing

Bush, George W., 43rd President

Carnegie, Andrew

Charles I

Cintas, Oscar Benjamin

Civil War, U.S.

Clark, Sarah

Cleveland, Grover, 22nd and 24th President

Coal

Coin Collecting

Columbia County, Pennsylvania

Columbia University

Committee on Banking and Currency

Commodities Futures Modernization Act

Connecticut

Cotton, Rev. John

Cromwell, Oliver

Cuba

Davenport, Rev. John

Devon Colony, The

Devon Yacht Club

Dickerman, Bill

Dickerman, Mary Louise

Dickerman, William C.

Diner, Hasia

Dow Jones Industrial

Dune House, The

East Hampton Presbyterian Church

East Hampton Star

East Hampton, N.Y.

Eaton, Fred

Eaton, Theophilus

Emergency Banking Act

FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

Federal Reserve Board

Fireside Chat (FDR)

Fletcher, Duncan, Senator

Foster, Elizabeth

Free Masons

Free Silver Movement, The

Gerli, Anne (see also Anne Harvey)

Germany

Gibson, Althea

Glass, Carter

Gold Reserve Act

Gold Standard

Gram, Carl W.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

Great Depression, The

Great Migration, The

Greenbacks

Gruelle, Johnny

Guild Hall

Harrington, Katherine

Harrison, George L.

Hartford, Connecticut

Hartman, Sarah

Harvey, Anne

Harvey, Col. Olin

Harvey, Mary

Heights, The

Hoffman, Mary Mae (Maisie)

Hooker, Charles I.

Hooker, Rev. Thomas

Hoover, Herbert

Hutchinson, Anne Marbury

Hyde, Carolyne

International Tennis Hall of Fame (ITHF)

Iron

J.P. Morgan, Bank

Jackson & Woodin

Jackson, Col. Clarence

Jackson, Mordecai

Jacobs, Helen, Woodin Tennis Cup Winner

Jahnke, Nora Hannah Morris

James VI

Jessup, Annie (Nan)

Kennedy, Joe

Kondratiev Cycle

Kondratiev, Nikolai

Lehman Brothers

Lily Pond Lane, East Hampton

London, England

Long Island, New York

Lord Brooke

Mack, George

Maidstone Club

Mallory, Molla

Marble, Alice

Market Street

Massachusetts Bay Colony

Mayflower

McFadden, Louis Thomas

Mellon, Andrew

Miller, Charles

Mills, Ogden

Miner, Anne Woodin

Miner, Charlie Jr.

Miner, Charlie Sr.

Miner, Mary “Perky”

Moley, Raymond

Morgenthau, Hans

Morgenthau, Henry

Nanin, The, Boat owned  by Woodins

New Haven, Connecticut

New York City

New York State

Norbeck, Peter

Norbert, Peter

Olympics

Osborne DuPont, Margaret

Owen, Evan

Oxford, Connecticut

Panic of 1873

Panic of 1893

Pecora Committee (see also Ferdinand Pecora)

Pecora, Ferdinand

Pennsylvania

Phipps, Louis E.

Phipps, William Hamilton (Bill)

Pine Grove Cemetery

Poliomyelitis, Illness of FDR

Populists

Presbyterian

Princeton University

Pullman Strike

Puritans

Quakers

Queen Mary Syndrome

Raggedy Ann Songs, Music by Will Woodin

Railway Age

Railways

Riomar, Vero Beach

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR)

Rowe, Billy

Rowe, Elizabeth “Libby” Foster

Rowe, Woody

Russia

School of Mines (see also Columbia University)

Securities and Exchange Act

Selden, William H., Sr.

Shakespeare, William

Sir Henry Rider Haggard

Slowe, Lucy Diggs

Smith, Al

Snow, Ann (Mrs. William H. Woodin III)

Spain

Steagall, Henry

Steel

Stephenson, George

Strach, Mary Harvey

Stuart, Jeb

Subject Topics

Susquehanna River

Susquehanna Valley

Tariffs

Thaw, Harry K.

Thaw, William II

Thomas, Beth (Mrs. William Woodin III)

Treasury

Tucson, Arizona

Vero Beach, Florida

Warm Springs Foundation

Washington, D.C.

Williams, Rev. Roger

Wilmot, Mary

Wilson, Woodrow

Winthrop, John

Woodin Cup  (Maidstone Club)

Woodin, Benjamin

Woodin, C. R. (Clement)

Woodin, David Charles

Woodin, Elizabeth “Libby” Foster (see Rowe, Elizabeth “Libby” Foster)

Woodin, Joseph B.

Woodin, Milo

Woodin, Will H. III

Woodin, William H. (Will)

Woodin, William H. II (Willy)

World War I

World War II

Yale University

Zehnder, Charles H.