James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003) was a distinguished man of letters writing about American history and art. As a historian and biographer he is best known for a four-volume biography of George Washington that earned him a National Book Award in biography and a special Pulitzer Prize. In 1931, he was the Executive Secretary for the New York City Board of Health’s Noise Abatement Commission. Like many civil servants at the time, he was asked to deliver remarks over WNYC on the work of his agency. Though memorable, it unfortunately was not a pleasant experience. He wrote about it in his 1996 autobiography, Maverick’s Progress:

My experience with radio broadcasting began when, as a twenty-three-year-old, I was scheduled to speak on noise abatement over New York City’s radio station, WNYC. The studios were under the roof of the huge municipal building.

It was with a great deal of uneasiness that I set out with my much-worked-over speech grasped convulsively in my hand. The occasion was so important to me that I expected to be received when I arrived with much attention. But the one elevator that went so high disgorged me into a tremendous empty space, lugubriously lit, with a few dirty sofas, against soiled walls and no humans in sight.

Empty, murky corridors went off in several directions. Dreading to be late, I feverishly sampled one corridor after another, banging on locked doors, forlornly rattling doorknobs. Finally, I sat down on one of the sofas, raising a cloud of dust. I was marooned in an atmosphere so depressing that even during subsequent years when I had become inured to radio, it never failed to lower my spirits. Now, terrified of disgracing myself on my first appearance before a huge audience, the more ominous because it would be unseen, I felt as if I had fallen into a morbid pit in my own psyche.

Finally, an oblong of light sprang onto the floor of one of the corridors. From the door that had been opened stepped a tall, willowy, immaculately dressed young man. Having approached me formally, he greeted me with all the ceremony I could have desired. I was led into a room furnished with a few rickety chairs and an oblong table bearing several microphones. My companion showed me how close I should put my mouth to the microphone, and asked me to say a few words so that sound could be adjusted. Then he spoke into his own microphone a few words of gracious introduction, and pointed to me.

My manuscript before me, I was reading smoothly, without any of the confusions or hesitations I had feared, when I felt a strange sensation on the top of my head. Something was happening to my hair. I felt that I should not interrupt my speech by turning from the microphone to investigate, but finally, as the sensation went on, I dared a quick backward glance. The announcer was running his hands through my curly red hair.

As I could not shout into the air waves, ‘Take your god-damned hands out of my hair!’ all I could do, as I read doggedly on, was to shake my fist backward over my shoulder. This had no effect. The hand continued to move through my hair.

The instant I had got through my speech, I sprang up to face the announcer. He was talking into his microphone, gracefully closing the show. Having finished, he rose languorously, delivered in my direction a deep courtier’s bow, and then dashed for the door, slamming it behind him. By the time I got the door open, the murky corridors had returned to their suicidal emptiness.

________________________________________________

Source: James Thomas Flexner in his autobiography, Maverick’s Progress, Fordham University Press, 1996, pgs. 467-468. Reprinted with permission and courtesy of Fordham University Press.

Stay cool out there this summer!

Apparatus for Treating Air – Willis H. Carrier, 09/1904 – 01/02/1906.  National Archives Identifier 7268013

 … [ Read all ]

It began at WNYC as the program South American Way (November 4, 1940 edition above) and ended up at WQXR as Nights in Latin America. Through it all, the source collection of recordings remained the same (and grew) as the show passed from one family member to another.

Evans Clark – South American Way

Evans Clark was a writer, largely on social and economic issues. He was also a teacher, foundation executive, health care official, housing expert and on the editorial board of The New York Times. But it was during his tenure as Executive Director of the Twentieth Century Fund (1928-1953)  that he was able to indulge his love of Latin American music by building a unique collection of more than six thousand discs of both commercial and one-of-a-kind transcriptions containing native folk and popular music from every country south of the U.S. border.  He put this collection to good use by sharing it with WNYC listeners from 1940 to 1946 on the weekly program South American Way. The title and theme music were taken from the popular 1939 song of the same name usually associated with the Andrews Sisters and Carmen Miranda, who sang it in the stage musical Streets of Paris and then on-screen in 1940 for the film Down Argentine Way.

Clark had become interested in Latin American music because he loved dancing and reportedly found Latin American rhythms fascinating. At one point as a member of the Music Committee of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a federal agency promoting economic cooperation with Latin America in the 1940s, Clark made a series of short trips to Latin America and wrote up his musical findings. Here he emphasized his focus on popular music.

“It appeals to almost everyone instead of to a few sophisticates and, therefore, has a far greater influence. Also, it reflects national traits and characteristics–it gives the ‘feel’ and atmosphere of a country as concert music never does–even when the latter is based on ‘indigenous themes.’ ” [1]

Pru Devon – Nights in Latin America

Born in Wales in 1908 and raised in Devonshire, Prunella Bodkin was the daughter of English Shakespearean actors and sang at the Welsh Eistedfodd. She described it as, “that fabulous gathering of bards and minstrels imbued with the same earthy exotic quality that you might today find in a remote village in Mexico, in Paraguay, or in a distant gathering of Gauchos far off in the Argentine Pampas.”[2] Her training was certified by London’s Royal Academy of Music. She came to the United States with her mother and brother at the age of 15, settling in San Diego, where she continued her education and discovered Mexican folk music, becoming a devotee. In 1930 she married Karl Kirchwey, the brother of Nation Magazine editor Freda Kirchwey. Freda, it turned out, was married to Evans Clark. They met and remained in touch after Karl’s death in 1943. Acknowledging a mutual appreciation for the music and his own growing work pressures prompted Clark to pass the show on to her, along with access to his unique music library. Devon described a pivital lunch with him to a Times reporter.

” ‘I remember how we both laughed when I off-handedly asked whether I couldn’t take over’…’On further thought the possibility didn’t strike her quite so funny; she auditioned for the station and consequently not only took over Mr. Clark’s show but originated two of her own.”[3]

As we were scanning a box on Roman sites around the Mediterranean this image of Leptis Magna sprang out at us. Located directly on the sea in what is now Libya, Leptis Magna rose to become one of the great cities and trading ports of the Roman Empire.

Economic decline and environmental change, including the progressive silting-up of its natural harbour, led to a decline of the city after the third century. Conquests and re-conquests added to the fate of the site, which eventually disappeared under sand.

Myres Collection: Institute of Archaeology, Oxford

This is the way ancient historian and photographer John Linton Myres (1869-1954) found it 1,000 years later, during one of his travels around the Mediterranean at the turn of the 20th century.

The image captures the magic and symbolism the site must have held for a European explorer: undisturbed and yet to be excavated, a visual incarnation of Shelley’s famous poem of Ozymandias, Myres being the traveller, recording his image in the full knowledge that his shadow would be as transient as the might of the once powerful rulers…

I’m loving Joseph McCormack’s new book, Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less.  The focus is on lean communication.  McCormack terms it Six Sigma for your mouth!  “In our attention deficit economy, being brief is what’s desperately needed and rarely delivered.”

People speak at about 150 words per minute, but we have the mental capacity to deal with 750 words per minute.  That leaves a space of 600 words where we drift—think other thoughts, take a mini-vacation, lose focus, etc.

Military Photographer of the Year Winner 1997. Title: Thoughts Elsewhere.
Major Kurt Tek daydreams while coming home from a deployment, 01/01/1997. National Archives Identifier 6498091

McCormack’s tips for clear, concise, and compelling oral presentations are simple:  map it, tell it, talk it, and show it.  Outline your remarks—background, relevance, information to impart, conclusion, and follow-up anticipating expected questions.  Use narrative storytelling to deliver the message.  Use a controlled conversation rather than a monologue.  And use visuals to increase engagement.  Most importantly, stop talking and give people a chance to process.  “The mind is a processor, and if you keep hitting the send button, the effect can be maddening and futile.”

I was especially taken with his advice on avoiding TL/DR (too long, didn’t read) on email messages:

• Make it Inviting—a strong subject line
• Limit to One Screen
• Embrace the White Space—instead of 8-10 sentence

… [ Read all ]

The late A. Bartlett Giamatti, was President of Major League Baseball’s National League and a renowned scholar of Renaissance literature and a former President of Yale University, On November 24, 1987 he gave a finely crafted talk on baseball as a meditation and narrative on life at the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum.

Giamatti’s extensive academic credentials include the books Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic and Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature. But he was also a lifelong Red Sox fan who wrote extensively about baseball, including articles for The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Harpers with such titles as Tom Seaver’s Farewell and Baseball and the American Character.

Less than two years before he was named Commissioner of Major League Baseball — a post he held for less than a year before his untimely death by heart attack at the age of 51 –Giamatti shared his thoughts on how the structure and rhythms of baseball send players on timelessly epic quests while allowing viewers to reach a transcendent state.

Giamatti sees the landscape architecture of the baseball field as a sort of mandala, a sacred construction with circles – the pitcher’s mound and circle around the batter’s box – all enclosed by a larger square turned on its points to form a diamond. He likens to the verse repetitions of a sonnet the game’s ritual repetition of the numbers 3 and 4 or their multiples – three strikes, three outs, nine men, nine innings, four balls, four bases, four-sided batter’s box, 400 feet from home plate to center field. These cycling patterns create a contemplative environment within which, Giamatti posits, the spectator can find the Self or even the Godhead. Home plate becomes the omphalos, the center of the universe, the point where all conscious energy converges.

Yet a baseball game’s beautiful symmetry, Giamatti says, is also a pastoral setting for an epic struggle. Within the confines of its pleasing patterns, violence and unpredictability erupt as counterpoint with players embarking on a quest that will only end with a victor and a loser. The game’s leisurely pace and structure will suddenly give way to speed and dynamic movement towards freedom. Giamatti sees the action of baseball as Homeric in scope: the journey home –Odysseus’s goal — repeated again and again. To go back home, the place of self-definition, is not an easy task. The most violent actions occur just before the player arrives, rounding third and crashing into home plate.

For Giamatti the recounting of baseball exploits after they have transpired is also akin to epic poetry. While the players tell a truth by their actions, those for whom the game is played control the narrative. The late Baseball Commissioner walks his listeners through the lobby of a large hotel in St. Louis during a playoff series involving the home team Cardinals. The talk of baseball comes from many voices — team executives, scouts, grandmothers sipping coffee, baseball writers, boys with their fathers, groupies – all talking anecdotally about the game, each giving their personal slant and color. These loops and segments of talk become the story of baseball passed on to others as the fables are continuously refined. Hearing these many voices all discussing the same thing – baseball – made Giamatti realize what Aristotle meant by talk being the imitation of an action.

At the end of the late Commissioner’s remarks, a member of the audience suggested that baseball players should all be made to listen to this lecture and wondered “who among them would then dare to spit on the field again.” Giamatti, who would go on to ban Pete Rose from the game for gambling, laughed and said “all of them.”

The original WNYC broadcast date for the produced program was April 18, 1993.

Gibney in 1936 from an advertisement in Fortune magazine for Dictaphone.

A recent acquisition that we purchased at auction was a folder of letters written to Sheridan Gibney (AC 1925). Gibney was a very successful playwright, Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter, and three-time president of the Screenwriter’s Guild. He wrote dozens of successful screenplays, two of which, in particular, became film classics: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), both starring Paul Muni. For the Pasteur biopic, Gibney won two Oscars for Best Writing.

The newly acquired letters will make a good addition to our existing collection of Gibney’s papers.

Gibney’s third and final tenure as president of the Screenwriter’s Guild coincided with the infamous anti-Communist “witch hunt” by the House Un-American Activities Committee beginning in 1947. For that reason, his career is a representative case for the fraught relationship between culture and politics. As he wrote in his brief unpublished memoir (available in his biographical file in the Archives), Gibney always considered himself to be against Communism, but his position as guild president brought his career to a halt when the so-called “unfriendly witnesses” at the House committee hearings implicated the Screenwriter’s Guild as a hotbed of Communism — and Gibney was guilty by association.

Gibney’s senior portrait in the 1925 Olio, the college yearbook.

His success in drama notwithstanding, Gibney’s great love, especially during his undergraduate years at Amherst, was poetry. Robert Frost considered him one of his best pupils. At one critical point in his undergraduate career, Gibney felt alienated by what he perceived as a lack of intellectual seriousness at Amherst. He considered dropping out to write and travel in Europe, citing Frost as his model: he, Frost, never earned a college degree yet supported himself by writing, teaching and lecturing — even, for a time, farming.

Gibney ultimately went on to complete his Amherst degree (and even earned an honorary degree from the college in 1938). His youthful desire to get away to Europe to have new experiences and write was fulfilled after graduation, when he sailed to France. His papers here contain dozens of interesting letters to his mother, as well as to his mentor, the writer, professor of English, and composer John Erskine. His letters from Paris in 1925 — the Paris of expatriate writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound and James Joyce — are full of rather earnest but pleasure-filled observations, and flashes of writerly enthusiasm. Gibney was a man ready to make his mark on the world.

Among his many letters home, this one, dated October 26, 1925 (and below it, an excerpt) gives a flavor of his experience at the time:

An excerpt:

I have a drama in mind such as will rattle the teeth out of your head and make you feel like a frightened god who has lost control of the world he has created. I shall have every seat in the theatre provided with smelling salts and soothing syrup. No one will be allowed in without a physical examination and a certificate from the board of health testifying that there is no inherited tendency toward epilepsy, pernicious hysteria, shell-shock, spontaneous paralysis, amnesia, cerebral hemorrhage, or whooping cough. All Kentuckians will be excluded on principle. Married women under fourteen and bachelors over ninety (unless rejuvenated) will likewise be excluded and all pockets will be “débarrassé” of dangerous weapons at the gate. The playgoers will be fastened to their seats by straight-jackets. There will be ambulances at the door throughout the entire performance. Eugene O’Neill will be allowed admittance to the opening night provided he takes thirty grains of morphine in the presence of witnesses and I shall have a box with thirty secret service men and five howitzers. You will be delighted with it.

The franc waxes better and better. In a month or two I shall buy France for you and Italy for your garden.

Paris continues unsettled. It rained for a week so I bought a pair of rubbers and the sun has shone ever since. I dare not buy an umbrella for fear of drought. Shall hear Tosca next Thursday for twenty-nine cents.

My companions. A young German studying for a degree at the Sorbonne lives above me. We converse in a composite language of German, French, and English. Three girls studying music, two of whom have beautiful voices: the other a beautiful face. A Californian international lawyer and family, by name Cerf. Two chaps who graduated in my class last year at Amherst. One divorcee, aged thirty. Very interesting but dangerous. A woman who has experienced much and learned little. I have not undertaken to “uplift” her. One hybrid negro with a pleasing manner and a “life story” studying at the Sorbonne. Two painters with an extravagant sense of color and a most niggardly sense of everything else. One Frenchman; the poor chap is lonely in this foreign land. One barber who has cut hair in Borneo. Et je pense c’est tout.

Erskine writes that he will be in Paris December first to remain until he sails, so I shall not go South until after Christmas if I go at all. I have been writing poetry of late, reading, and preparing for my drama. I think I shall have the drama finished in the rough by the first of March. Then, if I have nothing else to do, I shall rewrite The Harvest Moon. I still have faith in the possibilities of that play.

[…]

Last week I went out to Versailles for the day and came home very much depressed. It reminded me of a beautiful sea shell one finds on a desolate beach, dead, uninhabited, and forgotten. It is the melancholy sepulchre man builds for the spirit of his age and then passes on leaving this solitary tomb to the waste of time like an empty shell on some bleak and unfrequented shore. If all could see and feel its vast significance how much of the petty could be rid from life; how much of the noble and beautiful could be saved and garnered in the hearts of men! For we are all born with the power to become seers and thinkers and lovers of this experience of life in the midst of a universe, but too often four walls darken our vision, delusive passions warm our thought, and the love of small things drains from us our strength to love the great. It is not toil that does this. No man need work in a factory so long as a potato will grow in the ground. No man need have wealth so long as he has health. No man need have diamonds and electric light so long as the sun shines. Eh bien! Ultimately a man’s desires and rewards are both within himself.

Tonight I take a boat ride down the Seine to St. Cloud if it doesn’t rain. Living gets cheaper and cheaper as the franc drops again. Good weather and lots of love.

 

Fondly,

Sheridan

On July 7, 2014, the President signed into law S. 1681, “Fiscal 2014 Intelligence Authorization.”  The Senate passed the bill on June 11, 2014 and the House of Representatives passed it by voice vote on June 24, 2014.  The legislation included a section that amended Section 710(b) of the Public Interest Declassification Act of 2000 (Public Law 106-567; 50 U.S.C. 3161 note) by striking “2014.” and inserting “2018.”  This extension will allow our Members to continue our work advocating for reform of the classification system.  We believe modernization is essential to foster more effective national security policies and practices and improve democratic discourse.

We thank the Congress for including this language in the legislation and the President for signing it.  We would also like to thank Representative Mike Rogers who first introduced H.R. 4681, “Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 2014 and 2015,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and James Risch and Representative Darrell Issa and their staff members for their support of the PIDB’s work and for their efforts to see the PIDB reauthorized.

On Friday, June 20, the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) held a congressional briefing on the Report to the President on Transforming the Security Classification System, which offered fourteen key recommendations on how to reform the security classification system to better reflect the digital age.  The need for increased transparency and improved public access to declassified information is greater than ever, and we would like to thank Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen for sponsoring the event as well as all congressional staff who attended.  Our visit to the Hill underscores the unique partnership between the PIDB and Congress, and we look forward to closer collaboration in the future.

After an overview of the history and work of the PIDB by our Executive Secretary John Fitzpatrick, our board members outlined the reasons for fundamental framework reform.  Our 70-year-old classification and declassification systems are antiquated and unsuited to processing large quantities of electronic information; in addition, present policies are heavily skewed toward classification – while classification system costs have nearly tripled since 2000, there is relatively little funding for declassification.  These practices highlight the government’s tendency to over-classify and reinforce the public’s lack of confidence in the existing systems to adequately protect their right to information.  President Obama recently committed to implementing many of the Board’s proposals through his Second Open Government National Action Plan.

The PIDB thanks Congress for its continued backing of the PIDB’s work and  appreciates the bipartisan bills aiming for reauthorization of the PIDB.  Vice Chair Congressman David Skaggs in particular highlighted Congress’s role and stake in furthering the mission of the PIDB – congressional oversight, he noted, is crucial to upholding government accountability, and the declassification of Executive Branch records considerably aids Congress’s ability to provide checks and balances.  Congressman Skaggs also discussed the possibility of subjecting congressional committee records for formal declassification review; these collections are invaluable in providing insight to Congress’s oversight and legislative contributions.  In closing, we would like to emphasize that the PIDB – a hybrid of Presidential and congressional appointees – is fundamentally nonpartisan in nature; its purpose is to serve the public interest and our democracy.  Having just celebrated the 238^th anniversary of America’s birth, it is vital that we bear in mind the core principle upon which our nation was founded- a government instituted by the people, for the people.  We at the PIDB remain committed to working with Congress and the Executive Branch to uphold this vision.