The F.D.R.-Woodin Miracle in The East Hampton Star

FDR's first Treasury Secretary, Will Woodin, is not as well known as his second (Henry Morgenthau), largely because Woodin gave the job everything he had, including his life. He died close to the first anniversary of his swearing in.

He was a fascinating person, a lover of music and a composer. He wanted to be a doctor but followed his father into the railway car business.

He made a significant contribution to the successful implementation of the New Deal, despite being a Republican and disagreeing with some of FDR's program.

Here is the story I wrote for the East Hampton Star, published today -
GUESTWORDS: The F.D.R.-Woodin Miracle | The East Hampton Star

Remembering Those Who Died in the Dutch Resistance and the Death Camps (Update)

The Terezin concentration camp - a day trip away from Prague - was the subject of a PBS show earlier this evening. There were two stories to tell. 

• One was of a generation of Czech musicians incarcerated in the camp only to be transported to death camps to be killed on arrival. A total of 140,000 of them - equal to half the population of Newark, NJ - were locked up and taken away to die. During their incarceration they put on many performances of a Requiem Mass. "We only had a piano, and we had to memorize all the music and the Latin words," said a survivor, "but it seems as though we had a full orchestra." They sang in defiance of their Nazi captors, who came to listen, and they were transported to a different world.
• The other story was how the Nazis utilized Terezin to fool the Swiss Red Cross into thinking this is how Jews were treated in the camps. They scrubbed the town and made it look like a paradise. It was a true Potemkin Village, with false storefronts stocked with what they confiscated from the prisoners. The only word I can think of to describe what they did is diabolical. 

Then on Facebook a relative, Terry Mesritz, notes that the day is in Europe devoted to the memory of war heroes, and she remembers Jan ("Canada") Boissevain, Adrienne "Mies" van Lennep  Boissevain, their sons Gi and Janka and their cousin Louis Daniel. 

Another relative doesn't know whether they died or not - I can answer that. Jan "Canada" was arrested first and died eventually in Buchenwald. Gi and Janka, who were leaders of CS6 (named after Corellistraat 6 where their parents lived) were shot at the same time in Overveen and are buried in the Eeregraafsplaats Bloemendaal. Mies survived the war and became further known for inventing the Festival Skirt to symbolize the rebuilding of Holland with what is available. I am adding a link to her name for anyone who wants to know about this family of Resistance leaders in the Netherlands.

Comment - Update

At the request of a relative and someone who wants to make a television miniseries out of two of my mother's books, I have been posting more on the Boissevain family during the Dutch resistance. The posts are by way of chapters of a book.

Should Harvard Be More Like MIT?

The New York Times on  Friday, April 5 had a front-page story by John Markoff on edX (which the Times insists on spelling EdX).  It was announced last year by President Deutsch (http://hvrd.me/JOVnQI). The NY Times story has about 1,000 comments.

Basically, edX has developed a way to grade exam essays without human intervention. It looks at concepts etc. In principle, with on-line lectures and on-line exams, a course can be designed and taped, and  put on autopilot, with no further involvement by the professoriate. Just IT guys to make sure everything is password-protected and identity-certain. 

The edX project is a joint Harvard-MIT project and it seems to be moving Harvard in the direction of MIT, just by virtue of the need for more IT people to make it all happen. 

What's going on? Here are some theories:

• Harvard has to become more of a place that enterpreneurial students like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg won't leave after a couple of years. MIT and Stanford know best how to turn students into startups and, if all goes well, billionaires.   
• The loss on the Harvard endowment in 2008 was about $11 billion, one-third of the total. As of 2012, the Endowment was down about $4 billion, but the $6 billion of debt to keep things running is costing about $0.5 billion a year in interest. 
• Raising more money is better than cutting, but cutting is more reliable. 
• The edX idea is sufficiently interesting and complex and potentially revolutionary that it may distract attention away from budget-cutting in the wake of the deficits.

Where is all this heading? Here are some possibilities to be on the lookout for, in the form of budgetary-relief recommendations to the administration. (It must be said that I do not necessarily endorse all these hypothetical recommendations!)  

1.Decentralize and privatize intra-mural athletics. This will save $3 million per year. The houses should fund their own programs with alumni appeals. Few people attend these events and they are a luxury Harvard can’t afford any more. If alumni object, let them pay for this stuff. Instead,  offer every student (1) a multi-purpose elliptical trainer in every living unit and (2) one free hour per month with a trainer. This will start a lifetime wellness program for each student. MIT has this right.

2.Invest in intercollegiate sports. This will eventually generate $3 million more per year. Savings from intramural sports should be invested in the major sports teams and Olympic-eligible athletes. We must encourage them. Sales of tickets to Boston-area fans will eventually generate $3 million more than we spend. Those state colleges know this.  

3.Step up scholarships in intercollegiate sports. This will generate $5 million more per year. Harvard needs professionals on the playing field. The pursuit of amateurism is nostalgic but antiquated. Amateurism discriminates against the poor by denying them an alternate track to Harvard. It also means we lose students to colleges with a more serious athletic program. Our stadiums are half-filled at best. We need world-class players, on the basketball court or on the football field. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

4.Cut staff in departments like modern languages, with too many professors. This will save $10 million per year. The best way to learn a modern language is to go to the country or countries where is spoken. Or buy a Rosetta Stone DVD. Average research productivity of foreign-language instructors is pathetic.  

5.Consolidate overlapping departments like History and English.Save $10 million per year. Today’s history is simply yesterday’s journalism, which is taught in the English department – or on the job. Some biographers’ work transcends journalism, but how many people can be as successful at it as Robert Caro, and even he spent years earning little money. In the free-content Google world, books don’t sell as well, and Wikipedia shows that thousands of people are willing to write and edit biographies and histories for nothing. Should Harvard be encouraging its students down this road to rags?

6.Cut out the small courses. Save $10 million per year. Department major requirements force students into wasteful apecialized courses – like Old English, which just provides employment for Old English professors. Elementary and remedial courses are inappropriate for a great university.  Unemployed English majors who teach basic English composition should be doing this in high school. In any case, Spell Check means spelling is just less important because if I get it wrong, Bill Gates will tell me.

7.Bury the dead languages. Save $10 million per year. Leave the dead languages like Latin and Ancient Greek – not to mention Old Russian, Old Anything - to the European and religious-based universities, where their value is better appreciated. The study of philosophy actually interferes with output. Every course that a student takes in philosophy is correlated, ceteris paribus, with a 5.4% decline in subsequent lifetime income. In a world where we are in a life-and-death struggle with India and China, we cannot afford to put distracting existential questions in the heads of our entering freshmen. Years 1-3 - Transfer all arcane languages to the Divinity School. Years 4-5 – Sell the Divinity School to a religious institution or some other narrowly based institute that wants another school to become more like a university.

8.Use money saved to strengthen STEM Faculty. This will initially cost $10 million per year, but will be made up by grants. The money we save by eliminating waste in other departments we can use to ramp up the departments that will make America more competitive, the so-called STEM departments:

- Science, especially biotech.

- Technology, primarily computer languages, aps and hardware.

- Engineering, primarily Internet initiatives.

- Mathematics to support the other three areas.

We need to institute a required freshman course on innovation, which will cover angel investing, venture capital, social entrepreneurship, initial public offerings, executive compensation, matching gifts, charitable lead trusts, charitable remainder trusts, naming opportunities and the lifetime  responsibilities of alumni. Books are being prepared for free distribution to explain the full range of charitable opportunities for those who have successfully mastered the innovation sequence.

9.Rethink the Allston Science Center as an incubator. This will save investing $6 billion over 5 years. The Endowment loss means the Allston Science Center had to be stopped. It should be rethought as gates to science and engineering, as an incubator or innovation center, open even to freshmen. Ample spaces should be provided for our growing number of business partners to kibitz on the ideas that are percolating inside. They need playbooks – a photo of every freshman’s face, books of biographies, and students’ output on specific projects, to be provided by much-expanded Harvard Tech-Transfer and Placement-IPO Offices. Maybe the new Science Complex will be named after a woman. How about the Marie Curie Center?

10.Move ahead cautiously with distance learning options. Maybe $50 million  per year. The collaboration with MIT on the edX program is an exciting way to get past William Baumol’s cost disease problem. We are still teaching the way Socrates did centuries ago! The huge lecture hall was one innovation, but we can reach so many more people with on-line videos. One charismatic professor on line – and we then put our graduate students to work grading the exams and papers! A concern is that competition among on-line programs may drive down price. How do we maintain the integrity of the Harvard brand? If Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had been on-line students, would they have been as successful? We don’t know, do we?

GUNS | "All Shooters Were Dems"

Someone took out an ad in a newspaper asserting that all of the recent shooters were Democrats. The ad ended with the simple solution–don't let Democrats have guns.

It is an example of ideology-based passing on of data that fit a thesis and ignoring data that do not.

I have not done my own research on this but according to another source, the publicized recent shooters include:

• Adam Lanza - no evidence he is a Democrat and his mother Nancy Lanza was a registered Republican. 
• Columbine shooters - claim that parents were Democrats not evidence-based. 
• Eric Harris was from a military family. 
• Dylan Klebold’s family was active in their Lutheran church. 
• Nidal Hasan, the man accused the Fort Hood shooting, lived in Virginia or Texas, neither of which have registered party affiliations. 
• Seung-Hui Cho of the Virginia Tech shooting was a Korean national with permanent residency status, not a citizen of the USA; he wasn’t eligible to vote in the U.S. 
• James Holmes from Aurora was not registered to vote. Congresswoman Giffords’ shooter was a registered independent. 

I am posting this in the hope of trying to neutralize misinformation.

CHELSEA | Saving Manhattan's Sole Underground Railway Bldg. (Updated June 1, 2016)

Julie Finch, Host of Fundraiser in
her loft home. Photos by JTMarlin.

March 17, 2013–Yesterday my wife Alice and I were privileged to be able to attend a fundraiser on behalf of the only underground railroad site in Manhattan, at 339 West 29th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues.

(I have also written about this on Huffington Post.)

This was a stop for fugitive slaves and their families from below the Mason-Dixon line to upstate New York, where they felt safe, or even to Canada if their pursuers were prepared to spend a lot of money to get them back.

The fugitives headed north in the night, guided by the Big Dipper – "Follow the drinking gourd," they were told, because it pointed to the North Star.

A major hero in bringing people through the railway system was Harriet Tubman. (Update May 17, 2015: Tubman just won a poll to be the first woman on a dollar-denominated bill, to replace Jackson on a $20.)

The only documented underground railway site on the island of Manhattan is the Gibbons Underground Railway Site at what used to be known as Lamartine Place. The current owner of the site has added an "ugly, illegal" floor to the historic house on a block that is of historical importance. The Friends of Lamartine Place are raising funds to pay Jack Lester, an attorney who has gone to court to require the landlord to remove the addition.

Fern Luskin, who documented
the historical importance of
the Gibbons Site.

Prior owners of the house – Abby Hopper Gibbons and James Sloan Gibbons – harbored runaway slaves in their home.

The house is also of historical importance because the family residing there managed to escape from the house during the Draft Riots by running over the rooftops of the row houses on what was then Lamartine Place and is now just called 29th Street.

The Friends of the Gibbons Underground Railroad site was organized by Fern Luskin and Julie M. Finch. I heard of the fundraiser via Assemblyman Richard N. Gottfried and the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club, which was represented by several officers.

One candidate for Borough President, Robert Jackson, was in attendance, and another candidate, Julie Menin, was represented by Andrew D. Brokman. The other two main Democratic candidates are Gale Brewer and Jessica Lappin. (Postscript: Gale Brewer was elected Borough President.)

For information on the broader problem of landmarking in New York City, visit the site of the Historic District Council at http:/hdc.org/.

Benedictines, Franciscans, Jesuits - 2

After the white smoke and the announcement of Pope Francis I's papal name, early commentators confidently asserted that the Pope was thinking of Francis Xavier, co-founder with Ignatius of Loyola of the Society of Jesus. This would have been much less interesting, because the new pope is a Jesuit, the first Jesuit pope. 

They say about the biblical scribes that they pursued the principle of lectio difficilior potior – the reading that is harder to understand is the more powerful (interesting) – and is also more likely to be dismissed by an unimaginative scribe. Calling himself after Francis Xavier would have been a sectarian assertion.

It turns out that Pope Francis named himself after St. Francis of Assisi, who with his follower St. Anthony of Padua created the Franciscans to minister to the poor and get back in touch with the natural world. This is much more interesting, and is in line what we know about the life of Pope Francis. That a Jesuit named himself after the founder of a less worldly order speaks doubly for inclusion – both of other points of view and of the least powerful.

The Capuchin (as in cappuccino coffee) friars are super-Franciscans who reformed the reformers. It is said that Archbishop Sean Patrick O'Malley, the sole Capuchin in the College of Cardinals, decided to bring together the various orders for some silo-breaking. The facilitator of the conference was a well-known TV personality who arrived in a Bentley.

A Benedictine at the conference reportedly turned to a Franciscan next to him and asked him humorously: "How many novenas would you imagine it would take for a struggling monastery to acquire a Bentley?" The Franciscan looked at him blankly and asked, "What's a Bentley?" The Jesuit next to him asked, "What's a novena?"

Later on, the auditorium lights suddenly went off. The Benedictine in attendance started singing "Salve Regina" to ask Mary to intercede to get the lights on again. The Franciscan went outside and led others in singing "If I had a hammer" and other inspiring folk songs. The Jesuit took out a flashlight, checked the circuit-breaker, examined the wires, found the bad connection, repaired it, then switched the breaker back to "ON". Voilà!

HOLY ORDERS | Benedictines, Franciscans, Jesuits

Nowhere have I seen anyone note the sudden juxtaposition of three orders–the Benedictines, the Franciscans and the Jesuits–in Rome as Pope Benedict retired and Pope Francis was installed.

Pope Benedict XVI was named for St. Benedict, who founded the earliest of the three orders. The Franciscans were next, as St. Francis broke away from the Benedictines to form a simpler order; he was followed by St. Anthony of Padua and they ministered to the poor. The Jesuits were founded in Spain, in response to the Reformation, by Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier.

It is significant that Pope Francis I is named for the original St. Francis, the poor friar, not the Francis who co-founded his own order, the Society of Jesus, the more scholarly and worldly missionaries. He is the first Pope Francis, which suggests the controversies that surrounded both the Xavier and Assisi Francises.

Often, the fastest way to understand the practical differences among the many different orders is to pay attention to the jokes they tell one another. Here are two about Benedictines, Franciscans and Jesuits. (Full disclosure: I spent three years at a Benedictine school in Yorkshire, England, and three years at a Benedictine school in Rhode Island. I am proud of the education I received.)

• Three priests die the same week and they are ushered in to meet God for the first time. One is a Benedictine, one a Franciscan and the third is a Jesuit. God asks if they are comfortable and if there is anything they would want to return to earth for. The Benedictine says: "I miss singing Gregorian chant. I would like to go back and pick up some of the music and bring it back." The Franciscan says: "I have thought of another reason why rich people should share their wealth.  When they get here, they will have to learn how to make do without it. It's very hard for some, and sharing more on earth would be good practice. I would like to go back and tell people that." The Jesuit said: "If I could return to earth, I would find a better doctor."
• A Franciscan and a Jesuit were killed in the same accident and were in line together before St. Peter. The Franciscan humbly lets the Jesuit ahead of him. The Jesuit is met with a trumpet player, a Bentley with driver, and a choir of angels with flowers; he is shown a picture of his new oceanside home with its own golf course attached, and off they go. The Franciscan takes it all in. When it comes to his turn, St. Peter gives him a map of Heaven and the keys to his third-floor walk-up. The Franciscan pauses and says: "Could you just check that the names are correct? I let the Jesuit in ahead of me and maybe there was a mixup." St. Peter's eyes narrow. "We don't make mistakes here, father. What you may need to know is that the Franciscans are everywhere up here and it's been a long time since the last Jesuit made it.