Rabindranath Tagore was an eminent scholar and prolific Indian writer in the latter half of the Nineteenth-Century and first half of the Twentieth-Century.  He was born at Jorasanko, Calcutta, India on May 7, 1861.  At an early age he showed promise as a writer, specifically of poetry. Rabindranath went on to write over 3000 poems, 2000 songs (including the Indian National Anthem), 8 novels, 40 volumes of essays, and 50 plays.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his most famous work Gitanjali (Song Offerings), which was published in 1910.

In 1906, Rabindranath sent his son, Rathindranath, to the University of Illinois at Urbana to study agriculture.  In 1912-1913, Rabindranath spent time himself at the University of Illinois where he became friends with Professor Arthur Seymour and his wife Mayce.  Dr. Seymour was the head of the University of Illinois’ International Studies program.  In 1926, Dr. Seymour became a professor of French at the Florida State College for Women and served as Head of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages until 1946.

In 1982, The Tagore Collection was donated to Special Collections by the estate of Marion Jewell Hay.  Marion Hay became a professor of education at Florida State College for Women in 1929 and retired from Florida State University in 1967.

Letter from Rabindranath Tagore to Mayce Seymour, December 27, 1955. Box 1158, folder 2.

The majority of the correspondence in the collection is between Rabindranath and Professor Seymour and his wife, as well as other friends and family.  Also included in the collection are biographical materials related to Rabindranath’s life in India and the United States, photographs, articles, periodicals, and artwork.  To view the finding aid, click here.

Rabindranath died when he was eighty years old on August 7, 1941, at Jorasanko, Calcutta, India.  He is remembered as a poet, musician, artist, philosopher, mystic, and teacher.

Garson Kanin’s memoir of W. Somerset Maugham is the subject of his appearance at this 1967 Books and Authors Luncheon.

Kanin addresses the most commonly asked questions raised by his book Remembering Mr. Maugham (1966). The first is, “Who the hell are you to write about Somerset Maugham?” He describes their friendship, which began when Maugham was 60, and lasted 30 years. In addition to Maugham’s talents as a writer, he was a financial genius and “had great good luck.” A more alarming question Kanin encounters is “Who was Somerset Maugham?” He makes a case for Maugham as “a supreme stylist,” though perhaps not in the sense with which the term is regarded today. “He strove for a style that would best communicate to everyone who could read. He wrote for the world.” Kanin goes on to call Maugham’s story “The Treasure” “the sexiest story in the English language.” Yet not a word of it would seem amiss on the front page of a newspaper.  A GI wrote Maugham a fan letter saying he had read three of his books and had not had to look up a single word.

Kanin explains, in answering another common question, why the book is not presented in chronological order. This is an impressionistic portrait of his friend, in no way a biography, he says. Also, he admits, Maugham “had a bad third act” and he did not want his book to have a depressing ending. Finally, he says, he wrote this book to strike a blow against the “youth cult” he feels has been monopolizing American culture. Though he only knew Maugham during the last third of his life, “the world would have been a lot poorer if he hadn’t lived.” 

Garson Kanin was born in 1912. His father, a real estate developer, owned a movie theater. As a boy, Kanin spent hours in the projection booth studying silent films frame-by-frame. Eventually he dropped out of high school and took a variety of jobs in  the theater and in Hollywood. At the age of 24, he directed his first play and, soon after, his first movie. Kanin never settled into the role of exclusively being a director, though. In 1946 he wrote and directed the play “Born Yesterday,” which, as the website garsonkanin.com reports:

… catapulted the then-unknown Judy Holliday to stardom. The hit comedy ran for four years (1,649 performances) …Also in 1946 Kanin directed Ruth Gordon’s play “Years Ago.” Kanin co-wrote four screenplays with Gordon, three of which — “A Double Life”  (1948), “Adam’s Rib” (1949) and “Pat and Mike” (1952) — were nominated for Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay. Kanin also directed Gordon in plays, including “The Leading Lady” and “A Very Rich Woman,” both written by Gordon, as well as “The Smile of the World,” which he wrote in 1949.

Gordon and Kanin wed in 1942. Their screenwriting partnership was successful but brief, whereas their marriage became one of the legendary show business unions. As The New York Times remembered in its obituary of Kanin:

For most of his life, Mr. Kanin and his first wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, were a team. They were feisty, argumentative collaborators as playwrights and strikingly close as man and wife for 43 years. They became a fixture at the Russian Tea Room — first booth on the left — where they had lunch together almost every day. … But the chemistry that worked so well for the two stars did not rub off on Mr. Kanin and Miss Gordon, at least not at first. Although Mr. Kanin said they never had a single domestic quarrel, “the battles at work were horrendous.” Their first joint screenplay was such a hit, however, that Hollywood wanted more of the same. “We were trapped by success,” Mr. Kanin said. “The studio wanted us to write together or not at all.”

Throughout his career he wrote and directed plays and movies, and wrote novels and nonfiction. Kanin directed many more plays on Broadway, notably Barbra Streisand’s sensational debut in Funny Girl (1964). The picture one takes away from his career is of a talented “all-rounder,” more a Man of the Theater than one whose calling was specifically to write or direct. This can also be sensed in the above-cited speech. He seems to equate Maugham’s financial success and grand style with his literary achievement, turning a blind eye to what others saw as at times pedestrian prose and conventional attitudes. One also senses there is more to know about the great man than he is willing to let us, the public, in on. The novelist Glenway Wescott, reviewing the book, called it, “a valuable publication, though not exactly as charming or courageous as it might be.” John Rubinstein, son of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, speaking to WNYC’s Sara Fishko, recalled his father’s friendship with Kanin and compared the two:

He seemed to take great pleasure in his journey through life. Whatever it happened to be. He was a great storyteller. But the story telling always reflected his humor and his perception about people and about events. He seemed to be just having a good time. My father was like that in many ways, too. They both worked very hard and took their work very seriously. And took the world very seriously, too – politically and in every other way. They lived through those World Wars and all that. So they weren’t at all frivolous people. But they enjoyed the ride.

Kanin died in 1999, at age 86.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

To coincide with the release of the new James Bond film “Skyfall” the National Archives Blog features a post concerning the ‘real’ James Bond and the MI5 Diaries which are available for a limited time to download for free.

The candidate for the ‘real’ James Bond is “Forest Yeo-Thomas, a Second World War secret agent, codenamed ‘White Rabbit’, whose Special Operations Executive file was released to The National Archives in 2003.”

“The latest collection of Security Service (MI5) files are made public today and the undoubted highlights are the ten personal diaries of Guy Liddell, Deputy Director General of MI5 during the early Cold War.

Herman Kahn addresses the members of the Overseas Press Club about “The Likelihood of Nuclear War at Some Point in the 20th Century,” proclaiming the outlook is safer and calmer than five years before.

Kahn — physicist, well-known “futurist,” and partial inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” — claims that the biggest change has been in nuclear proliferation estimates. For example, China has tested a nuclear device, but India still seems to be debating whether such an escalation would be worthwhile, even though it has the means and know-how.  He argues that other countries with the capability to develop atomic weapons are hesitating, or have decided against it. Kahn also appears surprised that the U.S. government is showing “a higher degree of self-control than expected,” e.g., in Vietnam it appears that even if a large number of U.S.  troops were in grave danger, the nuclear option would probably not be considered.  In general, Kahn argues that most world leaders (particularly the Soviet Union) are recognizing that aggression does not seem to “pay,” although this is only a short-term prognostication. In the next 20 years or so he imagines there may well be significant proliferation leading to a myriad of smaller wars, though these wars would not necessarily go nuclear.

In the question segment of the talk, much of the conversation focuses on Vietnam. Kahn enthusiastically endorses bombing the North and makes interesting observations of the structure and composition of the South Vietnamese army. “We can hold Vietnam,” he insists but adds that this should be done primarily with Vietnamese troops.

In many ways, Kahn personified the Cold War intellectual. Born in 1922, he began his career as a physicist, working on the Manhattan Project, but quickly made a name for himself as a policy advocate with his book On Thermonuclear War (1960).  This book intrigued and maddened people on both sides of the arms divide by cold-bloodedly envisioning a “winnable” nuclear war. Whereas most people refused to even face the nuts-and-bolts questions such an encounter would pose, Kahn offered practical solutions like serving contaminated food to old people (because they are more likely to die before the effects could manifest themselves) and dismissed the fear of a rise in birth defects by pointing out that 4 percent of the population already is born with some abnormality. The book certainly struck a chord, becoming an unlikely best-seller while inciting reactions such as this, from the magazine Scientific American:

Is there really a Herman Kahn? It is hard to believe….No one could write like this, no one could think like this. Perhaps the whole thing is a staff hoax in bad taste.

Kahn parlayed the success of his book into establishing his own think-tank, the Hudson Institute, which did contract work for corporations and governments, applying “game theory” and other sophisticated tools to predict possible military, political, and economic scenarios. Despite the Institute’s proclamation that it was employing the highest scientific methods, many retorted that Kahn depended more on intuition and personality than hard data. Noam Chomsky, writing in The New York Review of Books, complained:

Kahn proposes no theories, no explanations, no factual assumptions that can be tested against their consequences, as do the sciences he is attempting to mimic. He simply suggests a terminology and provides a facade of rationality. When particular policy conclusions are drawn, they are supported only by ex cathedra remarks for which no support is even suggested … What is more, Kahn is quite aware of this vacuity; in his more judicious moments he claims only that “there is no reason to believe that relatively sophisticated models are more likely to be misleading than the simpler models and analogies frequently used as an aid to judgment.” For those whose humor tends towards the macabre, it is easy to play the game of “strategic thinking” à la Kahn, and to prove what one wishes.

Kahn’s attitude toward Vietnam, the next great area for think-tanks after the arms race, was hawkish, and he argued against all negotiation with the North, with the prescient caveat that directly increasing U.S. involvement would only make victory less likely. Employed by the Department of Defense, he took credit for coining the term “Vietnamization,” the ultimately failed strategy of training the South Vietnamese to win the war themselves.

In addition to his consulting work and writing, Kahn was a colorful character and a much sought-after speaker, able to banter with the press (as heard here), yet also give 12-hour lectures (divided into two, six-hour segments) to academics and generals. Perhaps his most accurate prediction was foreseeing America’s growing fascination with the future itself. He was constantly asked to weigh in on what would happen “in the year 2000” and beyond. In its obituary, The New York Times reported:

…his curiosity and interests seemed boundless. In an interview last fall, Mr. Kahn’s reflections ranged from the tactics of manned bombers in conventional warfare to legalized gambling, from Brazil in the 21st century to the United States Postal Service, from the use of low dams in Colombia to “decapitating” nuclear strikes. “I’m against ignorance,” Mr. Kahn said then. “I’m against sloppy, emotional thinking. I’m against fashionable thinking. I’m against the whole cliché at the moment.”

Kahn died in 1983. He was 61.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

The City of Vancouver Archives was kind enough to adopt me as an intern this summer. Never before has twelve weeks passed by so quickly! During my time at the Archives, I had the pleasure of dabbling in a number of aspects of archival work, including some unexpected outreach work acting as a researcher in the Archives’ new instructional video.

Rachel hard at work as Researcher #1 in the Archives’ 2012 how-to video. Still from video.

Artistic expression aside, I can now proudly say that I have processed a group of records from start to finish, appraising, selecting, arranging and describing the records of Richard Dopson, a prominent member of the Vancouver gay community and an important individual in the development of gay sports in the city. Organizing the records created over the last 30 years of passionate involvement on the part of Mr. Dopson was no small task! Vancouver hosted the Gay Games in 1990 and Dopson was co-chair of this international event.

The first box I ever opened as an archivist mostly contained ephemera collected by Mr. Dopson. Later boxes contained the more traditional archival records: minutes of meetings, research files, correspondence and those records generated in doing business and getting things done. Most of the ephemera was offered back to the donor.

Some of the Dopson fonds ephemera, most of which was offered back to the donor. Photograph by Rachel Sim.

A week and a half of my time was spent under the supervision of Rosaleen Hill in the Archives’ conservation lab. The delightfulness of Rosaleen’s company was eclipsed only by the fun that I experienced when taking on the tasks of a conservator. Most of my work in the lab involved cleaning—I cleaned glass plate negatives, architectural plans, and the backs of some canvas paintings—but I also had the opportunity to use the humidification chamber to flatten the architectural plans, several panoramic photographs, and a number of posters that were a part of Richard Dopson’s records.

Gay Games posters before time in the humidification chamber. Photograph by Rachel Sim.

Nice and flat after spending some time in the chamber! Photograph by Rachel Sim.

 As much as I love to clean and flatten records, the most exciting part of my lab experience was the afternoon outing that Rosaleen arranged. Thanks to her connections, a small group of us were given a behind-the-scenes tour of both the Museum of Anthropology and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Although I had a general idea of what to expect from my internship, there was nothing that could have prepared me for my time spent in the Reading Room. Having never worked or researched in an archives before, I was amazed at the wide range of resources that are available to researchers. It takes an expert to know one’s way around the stacks and direct people to the materials that they need. The Archives has on its staff a number of individuals who possess such expertise, but also provides a series of reference guides to researchers. These guides are a quick way for people to familiarize themselves with some of the Archives’ resources and begin to conduct their research.

The Archives’ reference guides.

Part of my internship involved updating these guides with my fellow intern and archivist-in-training extraordinaire, Kevin Owen. The revision of the guides will be an on-going process sparked by the adoption of a new database at the Archives. Kevin and I were able to complete the guides for using the fire Insurance and sectional maps, the City Directories and for researching buildings and houses. These new guides provide detailed instructions on how to use these resources and conduct your research, and are supplemented with a series of photographs.

“How to’ guides now revised, with images!

Of course, my experience would not have been nearly as enlightening or enjoyable if not for the people at the Archives. I must thank Archives Manager Heather Gordon for the opportunity, and the rest of the staff for all their guidance and patience. I learned so much this summer, largely because of the people with whom I was working. I also have to thank my fellow interns for making my time at the Archives especially fun! I could not have asked for a better internship, or better company.

Editor’s note: Rachel is a Dual Master’s of Archival Studies/Library and Information Studies candidate at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (University of British Columbia). Rachel plans to return to the Archives in early 2013 for a Professional Experience course helping our Digital Archivist Glenn Dingwall research the administrative histories of civic departments.

In 1965, thirteen students from area colleges participated in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)’s Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project, a civil rights initiative announced by Martin Luther King in April of that year. The goals of the project were political education and registering African Americans to vote in different locations throughout the south. The group was assigned to Williamston, NC, after attending training sessions in Atlanta, GA. Participating in the student-led group was Amherst professor Hugh Hawkins. Recognizing the significance of the experience, Professor Hawkins saved his letters and documents from his summer with the SCOPE project.

We in the archives are fortunate to have received Professor Hawkins’s papers, containing these notes and letters, as well as printed material from SCOPE, newspaper clippings, and audiotapes. These materials give first-hand insight into a turbulent and heroic time in the nation’s history.

The letters contain descriptions of civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Hosea Williams, and Sara E. Small. Dr. King gave a talk at the Atlanta training sessions for SCOPE volunteers on June 15, 1965.

A poster for a talk given by Dr. King that Professor Hawkins attended during training sessions in Atlanta.

Professor Hawkins described the speech that night in a letter to Walter Richard.

“We hurried back to hear Dr. King. His 20 min. address was slow starting (perhaps he was put off his pace by Bayard Rustin’s introduction which emphasized historical forces and ideas over any one man), but soon was as rousing as ever—used biblical quotations effectively and got lots of interruptions by applause. Then he had a question period, something very rare for him. He did remarkably well here—far closer to JFK’s style than LBJ’s, and he managed to take a fairly radical stance and gave encouragement to the more pacifistic students here.”

A pamphlet for the SCOPE program

A map of SCOPE areas of interest

On the Amherst campus, Professor Hawkins was active in establishing Black Studies as an academic department, and organizing an exchange program with black colleges. He was also co-chair (with a student, Harold Wade, Jr.), of the Black and White Action Committee. The History and American Studies professor retired from Amherst in 2000 and currently resides in Plainfield, MA.

Jane Jacobs, in this 1962 appearance at a Books and Authors Luncheon, explains her current role as a community leader in the fight against what she views as the excesses and excrescences of the arrogant Modernist redesign of city neighborhoods.

Jacobs recounts how as a journalist working for an architectural magazine she enthusiastically reported on vast “clearances” of so-called slums in the name of urban renewal. But when she revisited these sites after the project’s completion, she was disturbed to find that they did not look or function in the way their builders had promised. She asked the architects where, for example, were all the “happy promenaders”? They told her, “People are stupid. They don’t do what they’re supposed to do.”

Around this same time, a settlement worker in East Harlem, concerned about plans to radically redesign that neighborhood, began taking her on walking tours, where she listened to residents talk about what was needed and not needed, to improve their situation. This led her to realize that planners do not investigate “what makes the very intricate order of the city,” a quality she calls Urbanism.

This is not some vague quality like “personality,” she argues, but can be investigated and quantified in order to determine what changes are necessary. Yet planners, bound by the higher demands of theory, consistently refuse to do this. The citizens themselves must agitate, she argues, since “nothing is more inert than a planning office.” Immediately after finishing her book on the subject she was called upon to put her ideas into practice when a similar urban renewal project was proposed for her own neighborhood, the West Village. She briefly describes how the community forced the government to back down and debunks the notion put forward by her opponents that the book was cobbled together on short notice to sway public opinion.  

Jacobs was born in 1916. She began her writing career as a freelance journalist and had no formal training in architecture or urban planning when she wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). This “outsider’s approach” to what had previously been considered a subject only fit to be pronounced upon by disciples of Le Corbusier and the like infuriated the supporters of the status quo but opened a floodgate of community activism that survives to this day. Indeed, The New York Times in its obituary of Jacobs, called the book:

…as radically challenging to conventional thinking as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which helped engender the environmental movement, would be the next year, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which deeply affected perceptions of relations between the sexes, would be in 1963.

On another level, The Times also goes on to compare the book with those by Ralph Nader, Paul Goodman, and Malcolm X. So commonplace now are some of Jacobs’s proposals that it is hard to imagine the outrage and controversy they engendered.

Lewis Mumford, the architecture critic for The New Yorker, dismissed her suggestions, writing:

Like a construction gang bulldozing a site clean of all habitations, good or bad, she bulldozes out of existence every desirable innovation in urban planning during the last century, and every competing idea, without even a pretense of critical evaluation. 

What Jacobs called for was local input, diversity of class, diversity of building stock, and perhaps most controversially, a greater population density. As the website Project For Public Spaces argues:

Although orthodox planning theory had blamed high density for crime, filth, and a host of other problems, Jacobs disproved these assumptions and demonstrated how a high concentration of people is vital for city life, economic growth, and prosperity. While acknowledging that density alone does not produce healthy communities, she illustrated through concrete examples how higher densities yield a critical mass of people that is capable of supporting more vibrant communities. In exposing the difference between high density and overcrowding, Jacobs dispelled many myths about high concentrations of people.

All this flew in the face of urban theory at the time, which called for empty squares, soaring towers, and an implicit disregard for people living their ordinary lives in favor of a grand architectural statement. Much of this ethos was embodied by Robert Moses, the master builder of New York, who did battle with Jacobs on numerous occasions.  Her impressions, as recounted in a late interview with James Howard Kunstler, illustrate the fundamental gulf separating the two:

…I saw him only once, at a hearing about the road through Washington Square, which was to be an entrance ramp to the Lower Manhattan expressway. He was there briefly to speak his piece. But nobody was told that at the time. None of us had spoken yet because they always had the officials speak first and then they would go away and they wouldn’t listen to the people. Anyway, he stood up there gripping the railing, and he was furious at the effrontery of this and I guess he could already see that his plan was in danger. Because he was saying “There is nobody against this — NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY, but a bunch of, a bunch of MOTHERS! And then he stomped out.

In 1968, fearful that her sons would be drafted and forced to fight in the Vietnam War, which she opposed, Jacobs and her family moved to Canada. In Toronto, she continued to oppose large-scale “improvements” to her adopted city, notably the Spadina Expressway. She published books on other subjects as well, including Quebec separatism, the connection between morality and work, and the decline of North American civilization. None of these works, though, had the impact of her first. Not only had it caught the rising tide of 1960s protest, but it  survived to become required reading in today’s schools of architecture, the very profession that derided its initial appearance.

Jacobs died in 2006, at the age of 89.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

Here’s a nice depiction of alcohol-induced mayhem from Woulds’t Know Thyself, Or, The Outlines of Human Physiology (1858)…

This particular tavern has a lot of options on tap:

If you want to know more about how people of the past, ate, drank, dressed, bathed and generally took care of themselves, the next issue of Occasional Nuggets (on its way to mailboxes next week) is just for you.