Humble Pie: Brother From Another Planet

In the days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, most of my friends and I huddled around the TV, and I distinctly remember seeing a scruffy guy in a blue jean jacket and denim pants, introduced as a "new and exciting voice of his generation," as if to say the nation would move on, as the youth of today will carry us past this tragedy, and on comes this oddball, singing some song with a guitar and a harmonica strung below his jaw.  

I said, "Who is this creep? And why is he on TV?" 

It seemed like just another disorienting dislocation and this was wrought by one of the three national channels.

It was Bob Dylan, of course, and I don't remember the song-- "Blowing in the Wind" maybe. All I remember was the sense that this was just another manifestation of the world having gone berserk.

He was just so different, nothing like anyone I knew, or had even seen on TV or in the movies.

The next Spring, at a place I was not, Pete Seeger introduced Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, and the crowd sitting on the lawn listening to him looked a lot like me and my friends, cotton collared shirts, some madras, and khakis, white socks and they looked at Dylan uncomprehendingly, or maybe enraptured--hard to tell. 

Clearly, Seeger knew the quality of what he had on stage with him, but I wonder how many of those listening had any idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeP4FFr88SQ

He really was a brother from another planet, playing his harmonica--how did he do that and hit all the notes? And playing his guitar and singing those fantastically complicated, lyrical, evocative words of "Mr. Tambourine Man," and once again, it was light years away from the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, the Beatles, Pat Boone. It was simply a different universe, disorienting, thrilling, disturbing.

But now, looking at that tape, I am astonished that America could appreciate him at all, much less produce this unique brain, voice, phenomenon.

Occasionally, in some fever dream, I might imagine myself as being successful, worthy, special, and then I look at Dylan and I am brought back down to earth: This is a man who is so far above the rest of us and we are all just standing here on earth, looking up.

Journey Through The Coastal Slave States

 

David Mamet mentioned the book in the New York Times Book Review, as the last "great book" he had read.

Frederick Law Olmsted

I had never heard of it.

"Journey Through the Coastal Slave States."

I'd heard of the author: Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, but who knew he had a career as a journalist in the 1850's and his letters from journeys in the slave holding South were avidly read back in New York and Boston?

I'm not sure it's for everyone, but if you've read as much about the American Civil War as I have, this one comes as a jaw dropping thunderbolt. You have to persist past the first few chapters. But you will be rewarded.

There are wonderful historians of the Civil War: the masterful James McPherson, the ardent Bruce Catton and even Shelby Foote (a Southern apologist) but these men were not alive during the Civil War. They have read the diaries, the primary sources, but when you read them, you read a second hand distillation, a point of view.

I have some volumes of newspaper and magazine articles from those years--Harper's and Vanity Fair, so I've read contemporary primary sources, but this book is astonishing on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin.

For one thing, Olmsted marshals financial, economic numbers in such mass and detail it's hard to imagine how, in the pre computer age of America, 1850's, anyone could have done the work to measure acres under cultivation, dollar value of cotton, cedar shingles, farms, ships, but he seems to have all this at hand and he uses them to stunning effect.

What emerges, as he describes the huge variety of servitude, from slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp, who lived without overseers or, for that matter, any white supervision, returning to their owners only after nine months, to collect new clothes and provisions, to field hands who worked 14 hour days under the hot Virginia sun, to house slaves, the mind reels. 

Olmsted compares the lot of the Southern slave to that of the free white workers in New York City, often children, who are given starvation wages but no clothes, housing or food and, he makes a case that slave wages in the North may be worse than living in the master's slave quarters in the South, where at least you are clothed, fed and sheltered from the weather.  The downstream logic is pretty clear that the workers in the North would have benefited from a socialist revolution of their own, after the Southern slaves were freed. And this book examines the "they were better off as slaves" argument from every angle and you do not come away thinking, "Oh! Right!"

What comes up repeatedly is the great lengths slavers went to keep their slaves from ever developing intellectually, from learning to read.  Slaves were taught to do tasks which made money for the owners, but learning anything beyond that was forbidden.  In fact, Negro congregations could not meet on Sunday unless a white man was present at the religious service. You can guess why.

And there are those moments when Olmsted reveals what some Southerners, who, as he says, were among those who did not live like ostriches with heads buried, but who looked at the advantages of climate, water power, fertile soil, easily available resources like coal, iron and river transport, still managed to be poorer and less powerful than their Northern countrymen. Olmsted refers to the small, soil poor state of Massachusetts and the sparsely populated state of New York as disadvantaged, and yet, they are pushing ahead in wealth and prospects far beyond the South. And all this, Olmsted implies, is because in the North, intellectual property, the power of the mind, would drive advancement, prosperity and happiness.

One Southerner observes there are roughly 160,000 adolescent white boys in Virginia in 1853, and another 400,000 Black boys of that age and none of them have had a lick of education, and what a huge waste of economic potential--a mind is a terrible thing to waste, circa 1850, and this from a white planter! He goes on to say few books are published anywhere in the South and even fewer are read. "We are not a reading people." And he notes that a slave who had saved up enough (from side line wages!) to purchase his own freedom, planned to move to Liberia and the first thing he wanted to do when he got there was to learn to write so he could write his former master and tell him how he was doing.

One astonishing anecdote after another.

The picture you get from Olmsted is definitely not "12 Years a Slave" and nobody should forget for an instant the horrors of slavery. Nor is the image Margaret Mitchell's screed, where all the slaves are not just happy, loved and loving and loyal, but, well, slavish.  What Olmsted does is to display the wide variety of human experience, and broaden the mind. 

If you grew up in the South, you recognize something here. When I was a boy, there were still living Confederate army veterans having reunions not far from my home in Arlington, Virginia. And there were plenty of colored folk whose grandparents or even parents had been slaves of one sort or another. And this book stirred memories of these folks, and made me think anew.

It is true there is no such thing as a very fine Nazi.

Some evils are just so vile, there are no 'if's and's or but's." And slavery, but most importantly the racism undergirding it was just so vile. Which is not to say there were not, in the individual experiences of the individual slaves,  some mitigating circumstances that might help us today to understand what kept that peculiar institution going for so long. 

Making Harvard Great Again

 

To title a post "Make Harvard Great Again," assumes, at base, that Harvard was once great.

What could possibly justify that thought? 

Well, if the mission of an American university is to cultivate, select and nurture succeeding generations of the best minds and to foster the generation of new knowledge and insights, then Harvard has, arguably, done this over the past century. 

Granted, one might argue it has failed at that, and no greater examples would be the observation that the two men who had the greatest impact on America through innovative thinking and new knowledge in the early 21st century were two men who spent a single year at Harvard, leaving once they realized Harvard had nothing to offer them: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, the men who dreamed up the idea that in the future people would have a computer in every home and that social networks would transform communications, the media and political life.

Of course, Gates was only one actor among many, including Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs (a Reed College drop out) and others who accelerated the dream of a computer in every home to a computer in every pocket, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who pioneered Google which made the internet accessible and foundational to every day life.  And, not to forget Jeff Bezos (Princeton) who revolutionized shopping, commerce, media streaming and a variety of other stuff.

The century since the 1920's saw the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, a steadfast proponent of segregation, embrace the "eugenics" movement which saw inter racial breeding as destructive to the superiority of the white race. While he allowed an honorary degree to Booker T. Washington, Negroes, and other non Wasps found no welcome at Harvard. As a "thought leader" Harvard's president led the nation to embrace a white supremacist ideology, and in that he found strong company with Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, and failed President of the United States.

So, I'm not so sure Harvard was ever really so great.

But there was a time, after World War II, when the baby boom generation was rising the Harvard name provided an aspiration of the ultimate in the idea of meritocracy. The new religion of that generation was of excellence, achievement and success based on hard work and native brilliance. Parents of that generation had just succeeded in defeating what looked to be an unstoppable, indomitable foe, the Axis of Germany and Japan, through, among other things, sheer technical competence which allowed the United States, which had 4 aircraft carriers at the time of Pearl Harbor to having 400 within a year, which allowed for the development of the atomic bomb and then a vaccine for polio, and a host of other scientific achievements, including landing a man on the moon.

Halfway through the 20th century, the luster of sheer technical dominance wore thin, as America descended into the miasma of Vietnam, where bringing to bear an irresistible force of arms was defeated by the determination of an agrarian nation which had a greater core value system. "We can gain the world, but lose our soul," Martin Luther King said, and we surely looked like that was our fate in Vietnam.

And all the best and the brightest from schools including Harvard told us we could calculate how many tons of bombs would win the war. Harvard's Henry Kissinger was more stupid than the average conscript from Beaver Falls, PA, who knew you couldn't win that war with bombs. 

So, what could Harvard do to achieve the goal of identifying the best and the brightest (assuming there is such a thing) and then training them, inspiring them, equipping them to move the ball forward?

Modern universities have never been very professional about the "personnel" aspects of their job, i.e. figuring out what "good" is in aspiring applicants.

My father, who spent his life in "personnel," had very modest expectation about the possibilities of identifying talent. When I pointed out to him that the SAT exams (pioneered by Charles Eliot at Harvard) never did better than to predict who would flunk out after the first semester at college, my father responded, "Well, but that's a good test then! That's all you can really hope for. You don't want to accept a bunch of kids who won't last past the first semester."

By mid century, however, the SAT was widely viewed as not just an infallible intelligence test but as a predictor of future academic glory. It never was that. At the few schools which bothered to track the performance of high SAT students, there was virtually no correlation between scoring high on the test and those kids who made Phi Beta Kappa. (A Wesleyan University study.)

So, how do you identify students who, beyond not flunking out, will actually learn and then go beyond what their professors know to explore new realms?

I have no data. But I have some ideas.

One goes back to my experience as a 4th year American medical student on a stint at a London teaching hospital. Listening to my presentation of a case who had been admitted the previous night, the English professor of medicine got a dreamy look on his face and confided to me later, "Oh, how I'd love just a dozen students of the quality of you Americans."

This stunned me, because I had been impressed greatly by the English medical students, their powers of observation, their ability to "connect the dots" in unraveling diagnostic quandaries. But there were differences: For one thing, the Brits thought of themselves as middle class tradesmen. They would be rewarded with no more than a modest place in the community, sort of gentile poverty, so they cleared out to the pub at 5 o'clock, and the only students you saw laboring over charts and patients at nights were American. The attitude of the Brit medical students was, "We may not work very hard, but they won't pay us much, either."

But the biggest difference was the age of the Brits vs the American medical students. The Brits entered medical school directly from high school--they were 18-21 years old, where the American medical students were 22-26 years old. We were simply more mature.

Maybe that misspent youth in organic chemistry laboratories, classes in philosophy and ethical studies had benefited some of the American students, but, overall, we were just older.

After World War II, colleges were swamped with returning GI's who got to go to college on the "GI plan" where Uncle Sam paid the tuition. Like the GI plan for mortgages, the government played a huge role in investing in the generation which had won the war, and, by extension, their children. These college freshman, who had spent 2 years or more at war, brought a vastly different set of understandings to the classroom. I can only imagine how those professors dealt with them, although some of the professors may have also served.

I know, some of my own professors in college had been soldiers in the great war and they brought what they saw to what they found in Shakespeare. I'll never forget that line from Falstaff, looking at the bloated corpse of a soldier, saying, "There's honor for you." And my professor said he understood that entirely, as he described sweeping body parts off airplane wings when he served in the Army Air Force.

And how does any of this relate to making Harvard great again?

Well, if students did not matriculate at Harvard directly from high school, but were compelled to work in teaching hospitals for a year or two,  if they were interested in becoming pre medical students, or at law firms, or architectural firms or financial houses and banks, maybe Harvard would have a better basis for selecting its students and maybe its students would be better students when they arrived.

This, of course, is unlikely to ever be accepted by all those parents who are in the college acceptance sweepstakes, who seek bragging rights. It would also mean that some high school grads would not go on to college at all, once they saw the real world--like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerman. 

But the colleges would be, most likely, better places.