Quotulatiousness

December 8, 2023

The development of the American suburb

Filed under: Architecture, Books, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the latest book review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, Jane Psmith discusses A Field Guide to American Houses (Revised): The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture, by Virginia Savage McAlester. In particular, she looks at McAlester’s coverage of how suburbs developed:

After some brief but interesting discussion of cities,1 most of the page count is devoted to the suburbs. It’s a sensible choice: suburbs have by far the most varied types of house groupings, and more than half of Americans live in one. But what exactly is a “suburb”? It’s a wildly imprecise word, referring to anything that is neither truly rural nor the central urban core, and suburbs vary tremendously in character. As a working definition, though, a suburb is marked by free-standing houses on relatively larger lots. (If you can think of a counter-example that qualifies but is “urban”, I’ll bet you $5 it started out as a suburb before the city ate it.)

This means that building a suburb has a few obvious technological prerequisites, which McAlester lists as follows: First, balloon-frame construction, which enabled not just corners but quick and inexpensive construction generally and removed much of the incentive for the shared walls that were so common in the early cityscape. Second, the proliferation of gas and electric utilities in the late nineteenth century meant that the less energy-efficient free-standing homes could still be heated relatively inexpensively. Third, the spread of telephone service after 1880 meant that it was much easier to stay in touch with friends whose front doors weren’t literally ten feet away from yours.2 But by far the most important technological advances came in the field of transportation, which is obviously necessary if you’re going to live in the country (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and work in the city.

The first of these transportation advances was the railroad. In fact “railroad suburb” is a bit of a misnomer, because most of the collections of houses that grew up around the new rail stops were fully functional towns that had their own agricultural or manufacturing industries. The most famous railroad suburbs, however, were indeed planned as residential communities serving those wealthy enough to pay the steep daily rail fare into the city. Llewellyn Park near New York City, Riverside near Chicago, and the Main Line near Philadelphia are all examples of railroad suburbs that have maintained their tony atmosphere and high property values.

The next and more dramatic change was the advent of the electric trolley or streetcar, first introduced in 1887 but popular until about 1930. (That’s what all the books say, but come on, it’s probably October 1929, right?) Unlike steam locomotives, which take quite a long time to build up speed or to slow down again, and so usually had their stations placed at least a mile apart, streetcars could start and stop far more easily and feature many more, and more densely-placed, stops. Developers typically built a streetcar line from the city veering off into the thinly-inhabited countryside, ending at an attraction like a park or fairground if possible. If they were smart, they’d bought up the land along the streetcar beforehand and could sell it off for houses,3 but either way the new streetcar line added value to the land and the development of the land made the streetcar more valuable.

You can easily spot railroad towns and streetcar suburbs in any real estate app if you filter by the date of construction (for railroad suburbs try before 1910, for streetcar before 1930) and know what shapes to look for. Railroad towns are typically farther out from the urban center and are built in clusters around their stations, which are a few miles from one another. Streetcar suburbs, by contrast, tend to be continuous but narrow, because the appeal of the location dropped off rapidly with distance from the streetcar line. (Lots are narrow for the same reason — to shorten the pedestrian commute.) They expand from the urban center like the spokes of a wheel.

And then came the automobile and, later, the federal government. The car brought a number of changes — paved streets, longer blocks, wider lots (you weren’t walking home, after all, so it was all right if you had to go a little farther) — but nothing like the way the Federal Housing Authority restructured neighborhoods.

The FHA was created by the National Housing Act of 1934 with the broad mandate to “improve nationwide housing standard, provide employment and stimulate industry, improve conditions with respect to mortgage financing, and realize a greater degree of stability in residential construction”. It was a big job, and the FHA set out to accomplish it in a typical New Deal fashion: providing federal insurance for private construction and mortgage loans, but only for houses and neighborhoods that met its approval. This has entered general consciousness as “redlining”, after the color of the lines drawn around uninsurable areas (typically old, urban housing stock),4 but the green, blue, and yellow lines — in order of declining insurability — were just as influential on the fabric of contemporary America.

A slow economy through the 1930s and a prohibition on nonessential construction during the war meant that FHA didn’t have much to do until 1945, but as soon as the GIs began to come home and take advantage of their new mortgage subsidies, there was a massive construction boom. With the FHA insuring both the builders’ construction loans and the homeowners’ mortgages, nearly all the new neighborhoods were built to the FHA’s exacting specifications.

One of the FHA’s major concern was avoiding direct through-traffic in neighborhoods. Many post-World War II developments were built out near the new federally-subsidized highways on the outskirts of the cities, so the FHA was eager to protect new subdivisions from heavy traffic on the interstates and the major arterial roads. Neighborhoods were meant to be near the arterials, but with only a few entrances to the neighborhood and many curved roads and culs-de-sac within it. Unlike the streetcar suburbs or the early automobile suburbs that filled in between the “spokes” of the streetcar lines, where retail had clustered near the streetcar stops, the residents of the post-World War II suburbs found their closest retail establishments outside the neighborhood on the major arterial roads. Lots became wider, blocks longer, and sidewalks less frequent; houses were encouraged to stay small by FHA caps on the size of loans. And although we tend to assume they were purely residential areas, the FHA encouraged the inclusion of schools, churches, parks, libraries, and community centers within the neighborhood.

    1. America doesn’t have many urban neighborhoods that predate 1750, and even fewer that persist in their original layout, but if you’ve ever visited one it’s amazing how compact everything feels even in comparison to the rowhouses of the following century.

    2. McAlester’s footnote for the paragraph that contains all this reads: “These three essentials were highlighted in an essay the author has read but has not been successful in locating for this footnote.”

    3. This is still, I am told, how some of the more sensibly-governed parts of the world run their transit systems: whatever company has the right to build subways buys up the land around a planned (but not announced) subway line through shell corporations, builds the subway, then sells or develops the newly-valuable property. Far more efficient as a funding mechanism than fares!

    4. This 2020 NBER working paper points out that redlined areas were 85% white (though they did include many of the black people living in Northern cities) and suggests that race played very little role in where the red lines were drawn; rather, black people were already living in the worst neighborhoods.

The Real Betty Crocker’s Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Filed under: Books, Business, Food, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Aug 2023
(more…)

December 7, 2023

Carl Gustaf: Recoilless Rifle | Anti-Tank Chats

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 25 Aug 2023

From The Falklands to Ukraine; the Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle was introduced in 1948 and is still used by armies around the world today.
(more…)

December 6, 2023

Halifax Explosion: Minute by Minute

Filed under: Cancon, History, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Terra Incognita
Published 5 Dec 2017

100 years ago, the Canadian port city of Halifax was struck by one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. How did it happen?
(more…)

QotD: What Charles VIII brought back from his Naples vacation

Filed under: China, Europe, France, History, Italy, Military, Quotations, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the basic formula for what would become gunpowder (saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur in a roughly 75%, 15%, 10% mixture) was clearly in use in China by 1040 when we have our first attested formula, though saltpeter had been being refined and used as an incendiary since at least 808. The first guns appear to be extrapolations from Chinese incendiary “fire lances” (just add rocks!) and the first Chinese cannon appear in 1128. Guns arrive in Europe around 1300; our first representation of a cannon is from 1326, while we hear about them used in sieges beginning in the 1330s; the Mongol conquest and the sudden unification of the Eurasian Steppe probably provided the route for gunpowder and guns to move from China to Europe. Notably, guns seem to have arrived as a complete technology: chemistry, ignition system, tube and projectile.

There was still a long “shaking out” period for the new technology: figuring out how to get enough saltpeter for gunpowder (now that’s a story we’ll come back to some day), how to build a large enough and strong enough metal barrel, and how to actually use the weapons (in sieges? against infantry? big guns? little guns?) and so on. By 1453, the Ottomans have a capable siege-train of gunpowder artillery. Mehmed II (r. 1444-1481) pummeled the walls of Constantinople with some 5,000 shots using some 55,000 pounds of gunpowder; at last Theodosius’ engineers had met their match.

And then, in 1494, Charles VIII invaded Italy – in a dispute over the throne of Naples – with the first proper mobile siege train in Christendom (not in Europe, mind you, because Mehmed had beat our boy Chuck here by a solid four decades). A lot of changes had been happening to make these guns more effective: longer barrels allowed for more power and accuracy, wheeled carriages made them more mobile, trunnions made elevation control easier and some limited degree of caliber standardization reduced windage and simplified supply (though standardization at this point remains quite limited).

The various Italian states, exactly none of whom were excited to see Charles attempting to claim the Kingdom of Naples, could have figured that the many castles and fortified cities of northern Italy were likely to slow Charles down, giving them plenty of time to finish up their own holidays before this obnoxious French tourist showed up. On the 19th of October, 1494, Charles showed up to besiege the fortress at Mordano – a fortress which might well have been expected to hold him up for weeks or even months; on October 20th, 1494, Charles sacked Mordano and massacred the inhabitants, after having blasted a breach with his guns. Florence promptly surrendered and Charles marched to Naples, taking it in 1495 (it surrendered too). Francesco Guicciardini phrased it thusly (trans. via Lee, Waging War, 228),

    They [Charles’ artillery] were planted against the Walls of a Town with such speed, the Space between the Shots was so little, and the Balls flew so quick, and were impelled with such Force, that as much Execution was done in a few Hours, as formerly, in Italy, in the like Number of Days.

The impacts of the sudden apparent obsolescence of European castles were considerable. The period from 1450 to 1550 sees a remarkable degree of state-consolidation in Europe (broadly construed) castles, and the power they gave the local nobility to resist the crown, had been one of the drivers of European fragmentation, though we should be careful not to overstate the gunpowder impact here: there are other reasons for a burst of state consolidation at this juncture. Of course that creates a run-away effect of its own, as states that consolidate have the resources to employ larger and more effective siege trains.

Now this strong reaction doesn’t happen everywhere or really anywhere outside of Europe. Part of that has to do with the way that castles were built. Because castles were designed to resist escalade, the walls needed to be built as high as possible, since that was the best way to resist attacks by ladders or towers. But of course, given a fixed amount of building resources, building high also means building thin (and European masonry techniques enabled tall-and-thin construction with walls essentially being constructed with a thick layer of fill material sandwiched between courses of stone). But “tall and thin”, while good against ladders, was a huge liability against cannon.

By contrast, city walls in China were often constructed using a rammed earth core. In essence, earth was piled up in courses and packed very tightly, and then sheathed in stone. This was a labor-intensive building style (but large cities and lots of state capacity meant that labor was available), and it meant the walls had to be made thick in order to be made tall since even rammed earth can only be piled up at an angle substantially less than vertical. But against cannon, the result was walls which were already massively thick, impossible to topple over and the earth-fill, unlike European stone-fill, could absorb some of the energy of the impact without cracking or shattering. Even if the stone shell was broken, the earth wouldn’t tumble out (because it was rammed), but would instead self-seal small gaps. And no attacker could hope that a few lucky hits to the base of a wall built like this would cause it to topple over, given how wide it is at the base. Consequently, European castle walls were vulnerable to cannon in a way that contemporary walls in many other places, such as China, were not. Again, path dependence in fortification matters, because of that antagonistic co-evolution.

In the event, in Italy, Charles’ Italian Vacation started to go badly almost immediately after Naples was taken. A united front against him, the League of Venice, formed in 1495 and fought Charles to a bloody draw at Fornovo in July, 1495. In the long-term, French involvement would draw in the Habsburgs, whose involvement would prevent the French from making permanent gains in a series of wars in Italy lasting well into the 1550s.

But more relevant for our topic was the tremendous shock of that first campaign and the sudden failure of defenses which had long been considered strong. The reader can, I’d argue, detect the continued light tremors of that shock as late as Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532, but perhaps written in some form by 1513). Meanwhile, Italian fortress designers were already at work retrofitting old castles and fortifications (and building new ones) to more effectively resist artillery. Their secret weapon? Geometry.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part IV: French Guns and Italian Lines”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-17.

December 5, 2023

See Inside Sherman Firefly | Tank Chats Reloaded

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 1 Sept 2023

Inspired innovation or a bit of a lash-up? In this video we look inside the legendary Sherman Firefly, the British Army’s Tiger killer. We also hear from a Firefly veteran, Ken Dowding, ex-14th/20th Hussars.
(more…)

QotD: British meals – the midday meal

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before one can discuss the midday meal […] it is necessary to explain away the mysteries of “lunch”, “dinner” and “high tea”. The actual diet of the richer and poorer classes in Britain does not vary very greatly, but they use a different nomenclature and time their meals differently, because certain habits adopted from France during the past hundred years have not yet reached the great masses.

The richer classes have their midday meal at one-thirty in the afternoon and call it “luncheon”. At about half-past four in the afternoon they have a cup of tea and perhaps a piece of bread-and-butter or a slice of cake, which they call “afternoon tea” and they have their evening meal at half-past seven or eight, and call it “dinner”. The others, perhaps ninety percent of the population, have their midday meal somewhat earlier – usually about half-past twelve – and call it “dinner”. They have their main evening meal at about half-past six and call it “tea” and before going to bed they have a light snack – for instance cocoa and bread-and-jam – which they call “supper”. The distinction is regional as well as social. In the North of England, Scotland and Ireland many well-to-do people prefer to follow the working-class time scheme, partly because it fits in better with the working day, and partly, perhaps, from motives of conservation: for our ancestors of a century ago also had their meals at approximately these hours.

But though the name and the hour may differ, every British person’s idea of midday meal is approximately the same. We are not here concerned with the quasi-French meals that are served in hotels, but solely with British cookery, and therefore we can leave both soups and hors d’oeuvres out of account. Most British people are inclined to despise both, and do not care for them in the middle of the day. British soups are seldom good, and there is hardly a single one that is peculiar to the British Isles, while even the word “hors d’oeuvre” has no equivalent in the British language. The British midday meal consists essentially of meat, preferably roast meat, a heavy pudding, and cheese. And here one comes upon the central institution of British life, the “joint”: that is, a large piece of meat – round of beef or leg of pork or mutton – roasted whole with its potatoes round it, and preserving a flavour and a juiciness which meat cooked in smaller quantities never seems to attain.

Most characteristic of all is roast beef, and of all the cuts of beef, the sirloin is the best. It is always roasted lightly enough to be red in the middle: pork and mutton are roasted more thoroughly. Beef is carved in wafer-thin slices, mutton in thick slices. With beef there nearly always goes Yorkshire pudding, which is a sort of crisp pancake made of milk, flour and eggs and which is delicious when sodden with gravy. In some parts of the country suet pudding is eaten with roast beef instead of Yorkshire pudding. Sometimes instead of roasted fresh beef there is boiled salt beef, which is always eaten with suet dumplings and carrots or turnips.

[…]

In the second half of the midday meal we come upon one of the greatest glories of British cookery – its puddings. The number of these is so enormous that it would be impossible to give an exhaustive list, but, putting aside stewed fruits, British puddings can be classified under three main heads: suet puddings, pies and tarts, and milk puddings.

[…]

If the midday meal ends with cheese, that cheese will probably be foreign. Some of the cheeses native to Britain are very good, but they are not produced in large quantities and are mostly consumed locally. The best of them is Stilton, a cheese rather the same kind as Roquefort or Gorgonzola, but stronger-tasting and closer in the grain. Wensleydale, a similar but milder cheese, is also very good.

George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)

December 3, 2023

Was Hürtgen Forest Worth it? WW2 – Week 275 – December 2, 1944

Filed under: Britain, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 2 Dec 2023

The bulk of the fight for Hürtgen Forest is now over, and today we look at the results. We also look at Soviet plans for their January offensive. In the field this week, the Red Army is still fighting in Hungary, the Allies are still trying to reach the Roer River in the west, and in the Pacific Theater the kamikaze menace is wreaking havoc with Allied scheduling.

00:00 INTRO
01:06 Soviet Offensive Plans for 1945
03:12 Red Army attacks in Hungary
06:19 The Port of Antwerp is clear for use
07:23 The Battle of Hurtgen Forest is Over
12:20 Allied advances to the Roer
14:19 Tension builds in Greece
15:32 The aerial situation in the Philippines
21:36 CONCLUSION
(more…)

December 2, 2023

NATO’s Ostfront

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander doesn’t like the misunderstandings that cause commentators to identify NATO’s primary (but thankfully not militarily active) front as a “flank”:

For those who follow me on twitter/X, you are quite familiar with the meme I’ve been posting since long before the Russo-Ukrainian War, all the way back to at least 2018.

This misuse of the King’s English soon became a bur under my saddle as this error continued to be made. Seeing a trend, the following meme was generated by a friend;

This is not a new problem, and I know exactly where it comes from. In my years as a NATO Staff Officer, it did not take long to notice a twitch in the eye of many, not only Germans, to the mention of an “Eastern Front”. It seems silly, and in the 21st Century is it, but it is a reality.

I refused to play along. Yes, I understand how a very few highly emotional people can’t let go of their grandfather’s nightmares, but it is time for the adults in the room to just go around them. Anyway, this is the English language, and while there were French and Walloon Waffen SS units along with Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, and a few volunteer Spanish and others now on the NATO bench that fought on the Eastern Front in WWII, it doesn’t have the same impact with them as we don’t discuss such things in polite company.

Eastern Front, Front de l’Est, or Ostfront, we should all have moved along. History — and proper military terminology — have been around for centuries. In any event, it doesn’t bother the Russians one way or the other and you are fooling yourself if you think it does.

The use of “Eastern Flank” instead of “Front” where referring to real military threat to NATO, the Russian Federation, is just childish.

Original FG42: A Detailed Comparison of the 1st and 2nd Patterns

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Aug 2023

Today we are looking at examples of the first (Type E) and second pattern (Type G) FG42, comparing their construction and disassembling both to get a close look at the internal differences. Despite sharing the basic mechanism, these two models share zero parts in common, not even the bayonets or magazines. We will also discuss the developmental path of the FG-42, and why the majority of production was the 2nd pattern but the vast majority of combat use was the 1st pattern …
(more…)

QotD: Western media and Putin’s war

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Regarding [Vladimir Putin’s] Magical Mystery War, I’m going with the stoyak that the casualty counts peddled by the [western media] is part of a very very old playbook which various Western observers have peddled since 1905-that of Russian stupidity and indifference to casualties. Russia loses a war? They’re stupid gopniks who flung their soldiers into meat grinders until they rebelled (1905 or 1917). Russia wins a war? They’re stupid gopniks who flung their soldiers into meat grinders until they won (1945, 2023). Note that you can effortlessly pivot your propaganda when it becomes obvious in hindsight the outcome of the war. This becomes very important when [Putin] negotiates his 18th century kabiniettskreig ending to the war, since nobody in the West, especially AINO, understands how a cabinet war is fought, much less ends. They will claim that they foiled Putin’s plan for conquering all Ukraine (which he never has wanted) by killing hundreds of thousands of poor, oppressed, stupid, vodka-fueled gopniks used as cannon fodder who simply overwhelmed the valiant forces of good by sheer numbers. Not by superior strategy or tactics, or weapons, but the good ol’ Russian sledgehammer. Just like Hitler’s excuse in 1945, when Ivan was knock knock knockin’ on his bunker door. His generals who survived carried that piece of gospel West when the US Army started studying how to fight the Reds and asked the Germans how they did it. Their answer was happily embraced by the next generation of Very Clever Boys in the 1960s and carried forward to today’s Fistagon — Wunderwaffen.

Pickle Rick, commenting on “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-12-01.

Rick agreed to me posting this quote as long as I included this colourized photo of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov (“because it’s gangsta as FUCK”)

November 30, 2023

Men and Morale: Canadian Army Training in the Second World War

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

WW2TV
Published 1 Feb 2023

Men and Morale: Canadian Army Training in the Second World War
Part of Canadian Week on WW2TV With Megan Hamilton

The Canadian Army of the Second World War spent more time preparing and training their citizen soldiers then they did in sustained action. This chiefly took place across Canada and in the United Kingdom. Adequate training functioned as a cradle for collective action, morale, empowerment, self-confidence, and, ultimately, success in battle. Yet, due to a number of factors, a sufficient standard of training was not always achieved by all.

There were limits to the Canadian Army’s ability to control the morale of its men as it created a vast organization from scratch. Training camp experiences varied, influenced by factors such as food, weather, comfort, group cohesion, leadership, skill level, discipline, social activities, and interactions with local civilians. In fact, it required a constant negotiation between camp leadership and the rank and file. Drawing from her research on both the Canadian and wider Commonwealth armies, Megan’s presentation will explain why soldiers’ morale in training was a difficult, yet vital, balancing act.

Originally from Vernon, British Columbia, Megan Hamilton is a social and military historian of the 20th century. She has an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Waterloo. Her federally-funded master’s research focused on the Canadian experience of the Second World War, specifically the Vernon Military Camp. Megan’s work has been published by a number of platforms and in 2022 she won the Tri-University History Program’s top essay prize for master’s students.

She is currently located in London, England, where she has begun a fully-funded PhD at King’s College London and the Imperial War Museum, supervised by Dr. Jonathan Fennell. Her dissertation is a study of Second World War army training across the Commonwealth.
(more…)

QotD: “Information velocity” in the English Civil War

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Information velocity had increased exponentially by the 1630s, such that the English Civil War was, in a fundamental way, a propaganda war, an intellectual war.

Some of the battles of the Wars of the Roses were bigger than some of the Civil War’s battles – an estimated 50,000 men fought at Towton, in 1461 – but the Civil War was inconceivably harder and nastier than the Wars of the Roses, because the Civil War was an ideological war. The Wars of the Roses could’ve ended, at least theoretically, at any time – get the king and five dukes in a room, hammer out a compromise, and simply order everyone in each lord’s affinity to lay down his weapons. The Civil War could only end when everyone, in every army, was persuaded to lay down his arms.

Thus the winners had to negotiate with the people, directly. The Putney Debates didn’t involve everyone in the realm, but they were representative, truly representative, of everyone who mattered. Though no one explicitly made an appeal to competence alone, it was – and is, and must be – fundamental to representative government. Guys like Gerrard Winstanley had some interesting ideas, but they were fundamentally impractical, and Winstanley was not popularly viewed as a competent leader. Oliver Cromwell, on the other hand, was competence personified – the Protectorate became Cromwell’s military dictatorship largely because the People, as literally represented by the New Model Army, wanted it so … and, thanks to much faster information velocity, could make their wishes known.

Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-25.

November 29, 2023

Alfred the Great

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ed West‘s new book is about the only English king to be known as “the Great”:

There are no portraits of King Alfred from his time period, so representations like this 1905 stained glass window in Bristol Cathedral are all we have to visually represent him.
Photo by Charles Eamer Kempe via Wikimedia Commons.

History was once the story of heroes, and there is no greater figure in England’s history than the man who saved, and helped create, the nation itself. As I’ve written before, Alfred the Great is more than just a historical figure to me. I have an almost Victorian reverence for his memory.

Alfred is the subject of my short book Saxons versus Vikings, which was published in the US in 2017 as the first part of a young adult history of medieval England. The UK edition is published today, available on Amazon or through the publishers. (use the code SV20 on the publisher’s site, valid until 30 November, which gives 20% off). It’s very much a beginner’s introduction, aimed at conveying the message that history is just one long black comedy.

The book charts the story of Alfred and his equally impressive grandson Athelstan, who went on to unify England in 927. In the centuries that followed Athelstan may have been considered the greater king, something we can sort of guess at by the fact that Ethelred the Unready named his first son Athelstan, and only his eighth Alfred, and royal naming patterns tend to reflect the prestige of previous monarchs.

Yet while Athelstan’s star faded in the medieval period, Alfred’s rose, and so by the fifteenth century the feeble-minded Henry VI was trying to have him made a saint. This didn’t happen, but Alfred is today the only English king to be styled “the Great”, and it was a word attached to him from quite an early stage. Even in the twelfth century the gossipy chronicler Matthew Paris is using the epithet, and says it’s in common use.

However, much of what is recorded of him only became known in Tudor times, partly by accident. Henry VIII’s break from Rome was to have a huge influence on our understanding of history, chiefly because so many of England’s records were stored in monasteries.

Before the development of universities, these had been the main intellectual centres in Christendom, indeed from where universities would grow. Now, along with relics, huge amounts of them would be lost, destroyed, sold … or preserved.

It was lucky that Matthew Parker, the sixteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury with a keen interest in history, had a particularly keen interest in Alfred. It was Parker who published Asser’s Life of Alfred in 1574, having found the manuscript after the dissolution of the monasteries, a book that found itself in the Ashburnham collection amassed by Sir Robert Cotton in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Sadly, the original Life was burned in a famous fire at Ashburnham House in Westminster on October 23, 1731. Boys from nearby Westminster School had gone into the blaze alongside the owner and his son to rescue manuscripts, but much was lost, among them the only surviving manuscript of the Life of Alfred, as well as that of Beowulf. In fact the majority of recorded Anglo-Saxon history had gone up in smoke in minutes.

A copy of Beowulf had also been made, although the poem only became widely known in the nineteenth century after being translated into modern English. The fire also destroyed the oldest copy of the Burghal Hidage, a unique document listing towns of Saxon England and provisions for defence made during the reign of Alfred’s son Edward the Elder. An eighth-century illuminated gospel book from Northumbria was also lost.

So it is lucky that Parker had had The Life of Alfred printed, even if he had made alterations in his copy that to historians are infuriating because they cannot be sure if they are authentic. He probably added the story about the cakes, for instance, although this had come from a different Anglo-Saxon source.

We also know that Archbishop Parker was a bit confused, or possibly just lying; he claimed Alfred had founded his old university, Oxford, which was clearly untrue, and he was probably trying to make his alma mater sound grander than Cambridge. Oxford graduates down the years have been known to do this on one or two occasions.

Grover Cleveland – more “republican” than any Republican alive today

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Not having studied American history in school, I don’t know a lot about most American presidents, especially those of the 19th century whose names aren’t Jefferson, Jackson, or Lincoln. One of the presidents I only knew about because his name turned up in a lot of original Trivial Pursuit questions was Grover Cleveland, the only man (so far) who has ever been elected to non-consecutive terms:

Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), President of the United States, 1885-89 and 1893-97.
Photo from the National Archives and Records Administration (NAID 518139) via Wikimedia Commons.

Cleveland won the White House in 1884 on a platform of restraining federal spending and corruption. Running for re-election in 1888, he won the popular vote but lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College. A major reason he came out of retirement to run again in 1892 was the reckless spending of the Harrison administration. He beat Harrison that year and became the only man ever elected to non-consecutive terms (1885-89 and 1893-97).

I call to the reader’s attention an article ex-President Cleveland wrote three years after the end of his second term, in June 1901. Titled “The Waste of Public Money”, it was one of half a dozen he penned for The Saturday Evening Post. In this one, he referred to “a malign condition which threatens us,” an “evil” that he saw as “calamitous and destructive to our national character and integrity”.

In 1901, the federal government spent half a billion dollars over the whole year, roughly equivalent in real terms to around $12 billion today. Washington spends that much now in about half a day. Lest you think the feds were misers in 1901, ponder what Cleveland had to say in his article that year:

    Probably no one will have the hardihood to deny that the cost of our Government is excessive and wasteful, and that for this condition the heedless neglect and indifference of our people are in some degree responsible … If the aggregate mass of our people are at all blameworthy on account of the present advanced stage of public prodigality, it is largely because they overlooked and tolerated its small beginnings, when at all times they should have been vigilant and uncompromising. A self-ruling people … should constantly remember that nothing multiplies itself more abundantly than national extravagance, and that neither an individual nor a popular government can easily correct or check habits of waste.

The former president did not for a moment believe that only the politicians were to blame for excessive spending. He boldly asserted that many Americans embraced it. They were effectively bought and paid for, guilty of “accepting the bribes of selfish and personal advantage which public waste and extravagance offer”.

Cleveland was often warned by advisers to moderate his stances to avoid controversy. Biographer H. Paul Jeffers quotes him as responding once to such advice by asking, “What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?” When he vetoed a bill to relieve drought-stricken farmers with federal money, he made it plain that “though the people support the government, the government should not support the people”. He saw his job as upholding the Constitution and keeping the federal government in its proper place, not weakening “the bonds of common brotherhood” by robbing Peter to pay Paul.

This was a man who said what he meant and meant what he said, come Hell or high water. He spoke with a clarity of principle that makes a nation great, and the absence of which makes a great nation fail. He understood that no society in history that allowed itself to be bribed by its politicians ever survived such legal larceny.

In the final paragraphs of his June 1901 Saturday Evening Post article, Cleveland admonished his fellow Americans. With these words, he urged them to muster the character to resist being bribed with their own money:

    The lessons of extravagance and paternalism must be unlearned; economy and frugality must be reinstated; and the people must exact from their representatives a watchful care for the general welfare and a stern resistance to the demands of selfish interests, if our Government is to be an enduring and beneficent protection to a patriotic and virtuous people.

Many Americans today would undoubtedly dismiss Cleveland’s warnings as “quaint” and “old-fashioned”. They want the government to give them stuff and they don’t think much about who will pay for it. They think even less about how it corrupts the national character.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress