Lance Mannion

Everybody Was Wrong

Posted Monday morning, Memorial Day, May 26, 2020.

“Gassed” by John Singer Sargent. 1919. Imperial War Museum London, via Wikipedia.

The first fallen soldier laid to rest in the Tomb of the Unknowns died in World War I...

Nearly all the arguments about the war turned out to be wrong. It did not make the world safe for democracy, or usher in a new world order as Wilson had hoped. Roosevelt was wrong in predicting it would smash German militarism. Jim Europe was wrong in expecting it to improve the standing of African-Americans. Mencken was wrong in predicting that it would take [the United States] years to win on the battlefield. Trotsky was wrong in his forecast of world revolution. House was wrong in thinking that the United States couldn’t get an army overseas in time to make a difference. La Follette was wrong in thinking that the U-boat menace couldn’t be defeated. Speransky-Grant was, for the most part, wrong in thinking that the Russian Revolution was carried out by German agents. James Houghteling, like Wilson and Roosevelt, was spectacularly wrong about Russian democracy.

---from “March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revoution” by Will Englund.

Mapping the terrain into which our hero was born

Posted Thursday morning, May 14, 2020.

“Looking Oceanward from Todt Hill” by Jasper Crospey. 1895. Courtesy of the Staten Island Museum. It doesn’t look like Staten Island changed much in the hundred years between when Cornelius Vanderbilt was born and Crospey, himself a Staten Island native, painted this scene.

I enjoy it when writers “draw” good topographical maps with words. Here biographer T.J. Stiles is setting the scene for the birth of his subject, Cornelius Vanderbilt, by mapping the terrain into which he was born...

[Vanderbilt’s mother] Phoebe Lived in Port Richmond, that most ancient kind of community---a farming village, its air pungent with the smell of animal manure and open fire, its unpaved paths sticky with mud from the season's rains. It sat on the northern edge of Richmond County, better known as Staten Island, a sprawling, sparsely occupied landscape of not quite four thousand souls who still governed their affairs with town meetings. The islanders tiled the steep green hillsides, let pigs wander and forage for themselves, and built their houses close to the soft, swampy shores that crumbled into the kills---the tidal creeks that wrapped around the island’s edges. Staten Island sat like a stopper in the mouth of New York Harbor, separated from Long Island by the two-mile-long Narrows, where the ocean decanted into the bay. West of Staten Island stretched the mainland of New Jersey, and across the length of the harbor sat Manhattan, a long and narrow island that extended between the deep East and Hudson (or North) Rivers like a natural pier of bedrock.

---from “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt” by T.J. Stiles.

Buster Keaton understanding how the magic worked

Posted Tuesday morning, May 12, 2020.

Buster Keaton on hold: assiduous googling isn't turning up what movie this shot is from, but whatever it was and wheneverr it was made, it  looks like Keaton had come to understood pretty well by then how the magic worked.

New York City, 1917: Twenty-one-year old Buster Keaton setting an example for us all who need to understand how the “magic” is made…

At a studio on East 48th Street, a young vaudeville star named Buster Keaton was making his first film, Butcher Boy, directed by the comedian Fatty Arbuckle. At the end of his first day on the set, Keaton brought the camera home, where he took it apart so he could fully understand how the magic was made…

---from “March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution” by Will Englund.

"A work of bare utility"

Posted Friday afternoon, February 21, 2020.

Detail from “Brooklyn Bridge” by John Marin. 1912. Colby College Museum of Art. Via WikiArt.

Finished listening to David McCullough’s “The Great Bridge” yesterday. Still one of my favorite books. This is still one of my favorite passages from the book. It still chokes me up:

In truth there is really no end to the number of things the bridge meant to people. For whole generations growing up in New York and Brooklyn it was simply a large, dominant, and generally beloved part of the natural order of things The river without the bridge or Brooklyn without the bridge would have been unthinkable and year after year people went to it on especially fine days, or at moments of personal stress or joy, the way people go to a mountain or walk beside the sea.

For countless people their first walk on the bridge would remain one of childhood’s earliest memories. Countless others would tell how it was the place where they fell in love. No doubt it was. Al Smith was among those who loved to sing “Danny By My Side”, the opening line of which runs “The Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday is known as lovers’ lane.”

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the most popular of the many novels to be written with a Brooklyn setting, a soldier from Pennsylvania says, “I thought if I ever got to New York, I’d like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.” It was something felt by whole generations of Americans before and since. They would come from every part of the country, take photographs of it and from it with one of the new Kodak cameras introduced not long after the Bridge was finished, or buy some of the stereopticon views that sold by the millions. They would ride bicycles across, take honeymoon strolls by moonlight, carry newborn babies proudly down the promenade, or scatter the ashes of the dearly departed from the middle of the main span.

It was a place to go on stifling summer nights, to take some exercise to and from work, to walk the baby, to watch the gulls,to find relief from the city. Its promenade was and would remain one of the most exhilarating walks on the continent. To be on the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge on a fine day, about halfway between the two towers, looking over the harbor and the city skyline, was to be at one of the two or three most soul-stirring spots in America, like standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon…

 The finest thing written at the time the bridge was opened appeared in Harper’s Weekly.The author was a newspaperman named Montgomery Schuyler and his article, “The Bridge as a Monument,” was not only the first critical review of the great work, but a bugle call, as Lewis Mumford would say, for serious architectural criticism in America. Schuyler did not think much of the bridge as a work of art. Still, everything considered, he judged it “one of the greatest and most characteristic” structures of his century. “It so happens,” he wrote, “that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey to some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge”

---from “The Great Bridge” by David McCullough.

John Burroughs' complaint against Thomas Edison

Posted Tuesday morning, February 18, 2020.

From left: John Burroughs, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone on a camping trip in the Adirondacks, August 1916. Via Henry Ford Flickr.

The naturalist John Burroughs was friends with Henry Ford the industrialist. Through Ford Burroughs became friendly with the inventor, scientist, and industrialist Thomas Edison, and, between 1914 and 1924, the three, accompanied by Harvey Firestone---Yep. The tire guy.---made yearly road trips in small caravans of cars and well-provisioned trucks that functioned as rolling kitchens and commissaries, camping out in tents along the way. These trips always made national news, due to the campers’ fame and the goodwill in which they were almost universally held and to this was the period when Americans were taking to the road by the millions and, like good Americans of all periods in our history, loved to hear about themselves and the way their enviable way of life. The story of the trips, their friendship, and the growth of America as a culture on wheels is told in Jeff’s Guinn’s lively new book, “The Vagabonds.” Ford and Burroughs’ friendship was of longstanding when they made the first of these excursions. Burroughs and Edison got to know each other on the road, when neither was at his best. Edison let his expansive personality expand even farther and he tended to dominate conversations and take over direction of all aspects of the trip, even, on one trip, decreeing that no one was allowed to shave for the duration. Burroughs, a prickly and somewhat vain character all his life, was in his eighties and just thinking about the trip ahead of him made him tired and irritable. He forced himself to join for Ford’s sake and, apparently, for the publicity.

[Burroughs] had been anything but an overnight success; the son of a farmer who couldn’t afford to pay for his ambitious boy’s higher education, Burroughs worked his way through college and supported his fledgling writing career with jobs as a teacher, clerk, and eventually a federal bank examiner. A protege of Walt Whitman, Burroughs emerged as an author of national note only late in middle age.

Like any writer interested in making a living with his writing, he needed to self-promote. And he was proud and jealous of his reputation and liked to be the focus of attention:

At any rate, he seems to have started out on these trips grouchy and his mood didn’t improve along the way. He enjoyed the trips in retrospect. To his disgruntlement, the trip in 1916 began without Ford, who planned to catch up with them later after finishing up some business back in Michigan. This meant that it was up to Edison to pick up Burroughs at Woodchuck Lodge, his home in the Catskills, and take him north to the Adirondacks where Ford would meet them. Burroughs decided not to make the trip, but changed his mind at the last minute. He wasn’t happy with the decision. While he was waiting for Edison to arrive, he got a chance to vent...

Hoping for a little extra color in his story, a New York Times reporter arrived at Woodchuck Lodge early that morning, where he found the eighty-four-year old naturalist digging potatoes in a hillside garden. Burroughs was in a foul mood. Asked about Thomas Edison’s various achievements as an inventor, the old man snapped that as far as he knew, Edison was currently working on refinements to the phonograph. He added, ‘I much prefer having him work on that to having him devote his attention to motion pictures.”

Movies, Burroughs continued would be the ruin of the American intellect: “The average person goes to the moving picture theater and looks at senseless films for a couple of hours, and goes away without having really to use his brain once...In the old days, he might have been spending that time with a book before him, which would have given him more information and made him exercise his brain a little to get it.”

If movies increased in popularity, Burroughs prophosised, people might stop reading altogether. Left unspoken by the naturalist was that he made most of his income from writing books and Burroughs’s belief that infernal motion pictures, made possible in part by Thomas Edison, threatened to deprive him of his livelihood…

---from “The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s Ten-Year Road Trip” by Jeff Guinn.

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Civility, circa 1917

Posted Monday night, November 25, 2019.

Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator and Pugilist, known to his fans as Pinky. Via Wikipedia by way of the Boston Review.

Lodge was a United States Senator. A Republican United States Senator. Bannawart was peace activist. I’d bet he threw the first punch. Not because of the irony or the stock character nature of it---the pacifist with a violent temper. Because of what I know of Lodge. He was something of a stock character too: the war-lover who normally left the fighting to others. The hero of the moment, though, was, of course, the telegram delivery boy:

Earlier that Day, a small group of peace activists from Massachusett had called upon their senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, to ask him to reconsider his support for war. Lodge said he had been considering for three years and wasn’t going to consider anymore. The conversation, in a corridor, grew heated, and one of the visitors, Alexander Bannawart, observed that cowards were the ones supporting war. Lodge replied that if Bannawart were calling him a coward, “He was damned liar.” Then one man or the other struck the first blow. In the ensuing melee they both took punches. Bannawart, a form minor league ballplayer and executive, was bloodied and subdued by a passing Western Union messenger boy, and arrested. Lodge, who was 66, felt he had acquitted himself capitally. “At my age there is a certain aspect of folly about the whole thing in wrote in a letter to [his good friend Theodore Roosevelt], “and yet I am glad that I hit him. The Senators all appeared to be perfectly delighted.”

---from “March 1917” by Will Englund.

Bayonets and Blood

Posted Friday night, November 8, 2019.

Finished listening to “Hell and Good Company” this afternoon. Even when you know going in how it ends, even when you remind yourself Spain's been a democracy a decade longer than it was a dictatorship,even when you know that forty-four years later---This just in!---Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, it’s still gut-wrenching…

Past the Ebro, Franco’s forces pushed into Catalonia, Barcelona fell on 26 January 1939, Valencia on 30 March. On 1 April 1939 the Spanish Civil War ended in Republican defeat. In May the Nationalist armies paraded Franco’s victory on Madrid’s Gran Via while Spanish, Italian, and Condor Legion aircraft in formation spelled out the Caudillo’s name. Reprisals followed, firing squads manning machine guns, long years in prison, slave labor put to draining swamps and building monuments. “Our regime,” Franco announced grandly, “is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections.”

—-from “Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made” by Richard Rhodes.

"Fuego!"

Posted Monday evening, July 8, 2019.

The farmhouse at la Colonia de Víznar near the Andalusian village of Alfacar where the poet Federico Garcia Lorca was held prisoner the night before he was executed by a fascist firing squad in August 1936. His body was buried by the side of the nearby road in an unmarked grave that hasn’t been found yet although the search has been on for decades. Photo via Barbarous Nights.

On the dark field adjacent to the road, the soldiers told the prisoners to stop. The five men weren’t professional executioners. They had taken a side and now accepted their duties, some more zealously than others. One of the soldiers who would later brag in public about having shot Lorca in his “big head,” was the frst cousin of a man whom the poet had unflatteringly fictionalized in a new play. One of the other men had paced nervously earlier in the night, exclaiming, “This isn’t for me! This isn’t for me!” Another, the leader of the firing squad and a former chauffeur for the first prime minister of the Republic, had lost his ten-month-old son the day before.

The five men lifted their guns and fired.

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.

Romance de la Luna Luna

Posted Monday afternoon, July 8, 2019.

Detail from “Bathing Woman” by Joan Miro. 1925. Courtesy Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, via WikiArt.

Following up on the previous post, “There was, famously, no moon…”

Moon came to the forge
in her petticoat of nard
The boy looks and looks
the boy looks at the Moon
In the turbulent air
Moon lifts up her arms
showing — pure and sexy —
her beaten-tin breasts
Run Moon run Moon Moon

If the gypsies came
white rings and white necklaces
they would beat from your heart
Boy will you let me dance —
when the gypsies come
they’ll find you on the anvil
with your little eyes shut
Run Moon run Moon Moon
I hear the horses’ hoofs
Leave me boy! Don’t walk
on my lane of white starch

The horseman came beating
the drum of the plains
The boy at the forge
has his little eyes shut
Through the olive groves
in bronze and in dreams
here the gypsies come
their heads riding high
their eyelids hanging low

How the night heron sings
how it sings in the tree
Moon crosses the sky
with a boy by the hand

At the forge the gypsies
cry and then scream
The wind watches watches
the wind watches the Moon

--- “Ballad of the Moon Moon” by Federico García Lorca, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Arvio. Collected in “Poet in Spain”, poems by Lorca, translations by Arvio.

There was, famously, no moon

Monday morning, July 8, 2019.

“A small daub of beauty added onto a story that is at heart nothing more than proof of human brutality”: Andulsian countryside at night similar to the spot where the poet Federico García Lorca was executed by a fascist firing squad as Aaron Shulman describes it in “The Age of Disenchantments”. The countryside is similar. The sky is not. There was, famously, no moon the night Lorca died. Uncredited photo via GoSpain.

There are many books about Lorca, and nearly all of them mention the fact that the moon wasn’t visible on the night he was killed. I mention this, too, in my account of his death---twice, to be exact. The moon appeared frequently in Lorca’s poetry, perhaps most iconcally in “Romance de la Luna Luna” or “Ballad of the Moon, Moon” which includes the short line, so heartrending in retrospect, “Haye, luna, luna, luna”--- “Flee, moon, moon, moon.” The people who write about Lorca’s death highlight the moon’s absence because of the poetic irony and tragic aura: a man who constantly called out to the moon for inspiration wouldn’t have been able to seek its comfort during his last moments on earth as he looked up at the sky, knowing he was about to die.

 I understand why biographers underline Lorca’s abandonment by the moon. It is gorgeously terrible. Yet, objectively, it means absolutely nothing. The moon’s absences was incidental, random, trivia that only takes on the meaning we give it. It allows us to add a small daub of beauty, however painful, onto a story that is at heart nothing more than proof of human barbarity. We can’t control history, our evocations of Lora’s final minutes seem to say, but we can control the stories we tell about history. It’s true: converting experience into narrative gives an illusion of control, and sometimes even actual control. This is the ultimate tragedy of Lorca.---that he lost not just his life but his words, his role as teller of his story. His death was his end as narrator…

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.

"A winged heart and a crystalline waterfall"

Posted Monday morning, July 8, 2019.

“His pain fueled poems of melancholy longing and stage tragedies of disastrously failed love…: Scene from James Madison University’s student production of “Blood Wedding” by Federico García Lorca, Spring 2009. Set design and photo copyright Richard Finkelstein.

Born in 1898 to a well-off family in a village near Grenada, Lorca had grown up to be a gifted musician, pathbreaking poet, theater-filling dramatist, and unparalled party guest. His personality was so contagious that when a young Salvador Dali first met Lorca in college, the painter would literally run away from him to battle in private his jealousy of the Grenadine’s charisma. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, Lorca was one of the most-beloved Spanish language writers alive. Alongisde his literary peers, the Generation of ‘27, he reinvigorated Spanish poetry, bringing artistic innovations from the rest of Europe into harmony with Spain’s folkloric traditions, especially that of his native Andalusia with its rich Gypsy influences. The Chilean poet Pabol Neruda wrote onf his friend Lorca: “I have never seen grace and genius, a winged heart and a crystalline waterfall, come together in anyone else as they did in him.”

Behind that shimmiering waterfall, however, Lorca inhabited a fragile, shadowy inner world. As a gay man in a steadfastly homophobic society, he was never able to express his true self in all its complexity, perhaps te worst fate imaginable for someone as torrentially expressive as Lorca. His pain fueled poems of melancholy longing and stage tragedies of disastrously failed love…

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.

The great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca’s death as the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca himself might have written it if he had lived to write it

Posted Monday morning, July 8, 2019.

Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. The photo, via El Espanol, is uncredited and undated, but it looks to me that it was taken when Lorca was in his mid- to late thirties, which would mean it was taken not long before he was executed by a fascist firing squad near the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936.

Started “The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain’s Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War” by Aaron Shulman the other night. Stayed awake almost until dawn listening. Did it again last night. I’m not very far in but it’s already shaping up to be one of my favorite books of the year. This passage is the opening paragraph. It sounds to me like a paragraph Hemingway could have written or like a scene from a play Lorca would have liked to write himself but couldn’t for the obvious reason....

Before dawn on August 17, 1936, a man dressed in white pajamas and a blazer stepped out of a car onto the dirt road connecting the towns of Vizman and Alfacar in the foothills outside Grenada, Spain. He had thick, arching eyebrows, a widow’s peak sharpened by aa tar-black receding hairline, and a slight gut that looked good on his thirty-eight-year-old frame. It was a moonless night and he wasn’t alone under the dark tent of the Andalusian sky. He was escorted by five soldiers, along with three oter prisoners: two anarchist bullfighters and a white-haired schoolteacher with a wooden leg. The headlights from the two cars that had delivered them here illuminated the gropu as they made their way over an embankment onto a nearby field dotted with olive trees. The soldiers carried Astra semiautomatic pistols and German Mauser rifles. By now the four captives knew they were going to die. The man in the pajamas was the poet Federico García Lorca…

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.

Martin Luther’s Economy of Faith. Second Thesis: On how Man cannot afford to barter with God for His favor

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, June 30, 2019. Posted Tuesday morning, July 2.

Crisis of faith: Detail from “Dawn: Luther at Erfurt” by Joseph Noel Paton. 1861. Scottish National Galleries via Wikimedia Commons.

Following up from yesterday: If only he’d followed his own logic to its conclusion…

But Luther’s critique of the Roman Church was even now quickly diverging from a a broadly supported list of reforms to church practices and becoming a vision that stood to raze the traditional understanding of what the Church was. In essence, this was a vision of the incommensurateness of man and God. A revelation had struck Luther, namely that God was so infinitely powerful we could not possibly barter with Him for forgiveness using the currency of indulgences and pilgrimages and building churches. You cannot pay someone with cocoa beans and shells hen those things have no value. So infinite was the gulf between the things of God and those of Man that only unconditional surrender---faith---could have any value to him, and tus man’s interior relationship with God was infinitely more important than any external object or act. Though Luther held back from the full consequences of this logic, keeping a place for the Church in fostering this faith by preaching and the administration of the sacraments, it was hard to avoid the conclusion to which this led: in this world of unconvertible currency, there could be no place for the Church as a bureau de change between Man and God, turning the coin of this world that had value in the next.

---from “The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books” by Edward Wilson-Lee.

An absence of frivolous luxury

Posted Saturday morning, June 29, 2019.

“As far as they were concerned, their wealth was the product of hard work, and they were proud of it…”: “The Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild, known as the ‘Sampling Officials’” by Rembrandt. Commissioned by the Clothmakers guild, 1662. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, via Wikipedia.

In most of Europe, the newly rich imitated the taste and style of the aristocracy. The Netherlands, once again, was the exception; here, a bourgeois aesthetic began to assert itself as early as the seventeenth century. Successful Dutch merchants and professionals did not want to hold any kind of court, even if they could have afforded to do so, and they did not need countless retainers and a large entourage. As far as they were concerned, their wealth was the product of hard work, and they were proud of it; they showed the world an image of virtuous sobriety, discipline, and personal probity. Their architecture reflected this in its simple facades and large windows (nothing to hide here), their clothes in severe colors, and an absence of frivolous luxury. Even their graphic culture demonstrated their pride and self-image; witness Rembrandt’s portraits of his merchant contemporaries. The paintings and prints decorating their houses bore hidden moral messages, but they also revealed a world that married symbolism with a solid Dutch realism. Their landscapes depicted local scenes without mythological nymphs, fauns, gods, saints, or heroes; their seascapes dramatized the dangers of the element that made them rich, preferably with scenes of storms and shipwrecks; their portraits concentrated on faces and hands, not on accessories or allegories.

---from “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present ” by Phllipp Blom.

Edison sent back to the drawing board

Thursday morning, June 20, 2019.

Thomas Edison experimenting in his lab, circa 1921. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

The war is World War I. Loomis is the scientist-businessman-philanthropist Alfred Lee Loomis who founded and funded  a secret civilian laboratory that helped develop the atom bomb during World War II but who was an officer in the Army during the first world war supervising the development and testing of new weapons technology for the Army Ordnance Board. Aberdeen is the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland where Loomis was stationed and where that technology was tested. Edison is, well, Edison:

On January 1, 1918...Loomis was sent to Aberdeen. His “inventiveness,” along with a constant stream of ingenious ideas for new armaments and new solutions to old tactical problems, had earned him one of the most important jobs: chief of the development and experimental department. At Aberdeen, he joined some of the most distinguished physicists and astronomers in the country, who had been mobilized to help adapt the army to the needs of modern warfare. One of Loomis’ responsibilities was to test ideas for new weapons submitted to the Army Ordnance Board. Among the luminaries whose novel recommendations Loomis had to take into account and duly try out were those of Thomas Edison, who was by this time a genuine folk hero, his life story and list of major inventions...known to every schoolchild. Although he was already seventy years old and crustier than ever, he was still hard at work in his laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, and throughout World War I contributed technical advice and suggestions.

Loomis followed up on one recommendation and recalled that the “perilous experiment” not only blew up Edison’s scheme, it also almost annihilated a number of Aberdeen personnel as well. As the story was later recounted in Fortune magazine, “Edison’s idea was to work up a terrific spin on a large TNT-filled drum, and then suddenly drop it from a height. The theory was that the drum---trailing wires attached to a detonator---would bounce along of its own momentum until it reached the enemy lines, when it could be exploded. Put to the test, the drum dug a deep ole in the ground where it fell, bounced out, traveled about 200 feet, dug another hole, and then let go.

---from “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II” by Jennet Conant.

On Juvenal, Columbus---Hernando not Christopher---George W. Bush, and the folly that was Rome. Part I

Posted Monday morning, June 17, 2019.

“The Fire in the Borgo”, Vatican Palace fresco from the workshop of Raphael. Between 1514-1517. Via Wikimedia.

The things you learn on Google. Apparently, once upon a time, we had a President named George W. Bush. This George W. Bush is not to be confused with the talented but minor regionalist portrait painter George W. Bush, who’s friends with the Clintons and the Obamas. President George W. Bush was, by all accounts, a terrible president: He appointed two Right Wing corporatists to the Supreme Court. Tried to privatize Social Security and on the brink of the worst financial meltdown in U.S. history since 1929. Let a city drown in a hurricane then left people trapped there to stew in the oily floodwaters. Lied us into a war he then proceeded to lose---twice. Allowed himself to be used as a stooge by his evil Vice-president, who, among his many crimes and depredations, turned the United States into a torture state. And allowed his administration to be filled with corrupt phonies, incompetent cronies, ultra-conservative ideologues, and religious zealots all of whom he gave free reign to use their offices to advance their undemocratic and destructive agendas. It seems to be the case that this President Bush has been nearly erased from our collective memory by the lunatic doings of the current occupant of the Oval Office. Republicans especially seem to have a hard time remembering him. But I was suddenly reminded of him and got to thinking about him as I was reading the passage below from the ancient Roman poet Juvenal’s “Third Satire”. I’ve been reading and re-reading Juvenal over the last couple weeks for reasons I’ll explain later in the post, but I’ll just say for now that it has to do with Christopher Columbus, 16th not 1st Century Rome, and an excellent book we’re listening to here in Mannionville called “The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books” by Edward Wilson-Lee.

Here’s the passage from Juvenal:

...“But here
we inhabit a city largely shored up with gimcrack
stays and props: that's how | our landlords postpone slippage,
and---after masking great cracks in the ancient fabric---assure
th tenants they can sleep sound, when the house is tottering.
Myself I prefer life without fires, without nocturnal panics.
By the time the smoke’s reached the third floor---and you’re still asleep---
the heroic downstairs neighbour is roaring for water, shifting
his stuff to safety. If the alarm’s at ground-level
the last to fry is the wretch among the nesting pigeons
with nothing but tiles between himself and the weather.
What did Cordus own? One divan, |  too short to bed a dwarf in;
six mugs on a marble-topped sideboard; beneath it, a pitcher
and an upended bust of Chiron; on ancient settle
crammed with Greek books---though by now uncultured mice
had gnawed their way well through his texts of great poets.
Cordus had just about nothing---Who’d deny it?---yet that nothing
the wretched man lost in toto. Today the final
straw on his load of woe (broke, begging for crusts) is no one
will give him a roof and shelter, no one will buy him food.
But if some great man’s mansion is gutted, women go crazy,
top people put on mourning, the courts go into recess:
Then we deplore urban hazards, complain about fires!
Then contributions pour in while the shell is still ash-hot---
construction material, marble, fresh-gleaming sculptured nudes.
One friend provides antique bronzes by Euphranor and Polyclitus,
another, old icons looted from some Asiatic temple;
a third, bookshelves and books, with a study bust of Minerva;
yet another, a sackful of silver. And so this dandified
bachelor more than makes good his losses…”

It was that bit about “some great man’s mansion” that grabbed me. “The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books” is a cultural and social history of western Europe in the 1500s as experienced and influenced by the book’s central character, Chrisopher Columbus’ son Hernando. Hernando Columbus was as an adventurous and daring intellectual explorer as his father was a geographical one. We’re at the point where Hernando’s explorations have taken him to Rome where he continued his largely self-directed self-education in the churches and bookshops that served as the city’s public museums and libraries, in the private libraries and salons of the rich and intellectually and culturally connected, at public lectures by famous scholars, philosophers, art and literary critics, and---although they didn’t call themselves this---scientists, the 16th Century’s versions of TED talks, and in the streets, law courts, taverns, and theaters, and at parties and lavish dinners at great men’s mansions. Wilson-Lee brings up Juvenal to note that Rome as Hernando Columbus knew it wasn’t all that different from the Rome Juvenal satirized in his poem.

“Wandering the streets" Wilson-Lee writes, "would have immersed Hernando in the unending carnival of Rome’s lowlifes: this was still a city in which, as Juvenal had said in his Third Satire, it was careless to go out to dinner without making a will.”

“Carnival in the Piazza Colonna, Rome” by Jan Miel. 1645. Via Wikipedia.

The speaker of the poem is a friend of Juvenal who is fleeing Rome for a quieter, simpler, and more honest life in the countryside, having come to see the city as a sinkhole of corruption, vice, crime, licentiousness, hypocrisy, and greed. What most upsets and infuriates him is that people there value each other and themselves on the basis of their wealth and social standing, the former determining the latter:

“It’s the same with court witnesses: morals don’t count. If Numa or Scipio took the stand---
and he escorted the Mother Goddess to Rome---or Metellus
who rescued Minerva’s image from her blazing shrine, the immediate
question would still be: “How much is he worth?”, with only
an afterthought of his character. “How many slaves does he keep?
What’s his acreage? How big, how good, is his dinner-service?”
Each man’s word is as good as his bond---or rather, the number
of bonds in his strong box…”

What struck me hardest was that Juvenal’s Rome sounds like it could be Rome today---or New York or Washington D.C: a swamp in need of draining that’s going to fill up with new breeds of snakes, gators, and predators as soon as soon as their predecessors are chased out:

…“There’s no room in this city,” he said,
“For the decent professions: their emoluments are nil.
My resources have shrunk since yesterday, and tomorrow
will eat away more of what’s left…
So farewell, Rome, I leave you
to sanitary engineers and municipal architects, fellows
who by swearing black is white find it easy to land
contracts for a new temple, swamp-drainage, harbour-works,
river-clearance, undertaking, the lot---then pocket the profit
and fraudulently file their petition in bankruptcy…
These are such men as Fortune by way of a joke
will sometimes raise from the gutter and make top people…
Who today gets taken up if he’s not in the know,
mind seething with private matters never to be revealed?
Harmless secrets bear no obligations, nor will the person
who imparts them to you do you any favours thereafter;
but if Verres promotes a man, that man has the screws on Verres
and could trash him at will. Not all the gold washed seaward
with the silt of shady Tagus is worth the price you must pay
to be racked by insomnia, feared by your high-placed friends---
and for what? Too transient prizes, unwillingly resigned.”

At any rate…

The great man’s mansion Juvenal brought to mind was Mississippi Senator and Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott’s, which was blown down and drowned by Hurricane Katrina along with thousands of others in Mississippi. Long stretches of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast had suffered destruction comparable to New Orleans. Tens of thousands of Mississippians had lost their homes. Lott invited Bush to Mississippi to see the devastation for himself. He was asking for 20,000 trailers from FEMA to shelter the now homeless of his state while their communities rebuilt. Bush made the visit. But the only lost house that seemed to occupy his thoughts was Lott’s!

Detail from a self-portrait by George W. Bush. Via Smithsonian. 

End of Part I. Part II is in the works.

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The passages from Juvenal are from Peter Green's Penguin Classics translation of "The Sixteen Satires", which is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

"The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library" by Edward Wilson-Lee is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one Right Wing partisan hack to lie about the Founders' original intent

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Sunday, May 26, 2019. Posted Tuesday morning, May 28.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

Do I have to read Mike Lee 's book to know he's trying to turn the Declaration of Independence into a Right Wing Authoritarian religious tract?

It's almost funny how these Right Wingers who profess to revere the Founders miss how they're the type of half-educated, anti-intellectual, religious bigots the Founders looked down on and did their best to see wouldn't control the governing of the nation

These blockheads believe they know what the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams thought even though they wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes and have been left stammering and red-faced, staring down sheepishly into their wine glasses in a casual after-dinner argument with any of them.

Fundamental to the “orginalist”-“textualist”-Federalist argument is that the Founders anticipated the 21st Century and would have hated every minute of it.

The irony is that Adams, Franklin, and especially Jefferson would have despised Lee not least because he’s a Trump apologist and enabler and Trump is the kind of demagogue the Founders feared would bring about the end of the Republic

Lee is another one of those brave Republicans who initially thought Trump was unfit to be the nominee but fell into line once he was elected for the sake of the enacting the Right Wing agenda.

Lee and other Republicans like him found Trump personally distasteful, but what actually appalled them is that he was on his way to losing and bringing down a whole bunch of them with him. They were also afraid he was actually a populist, possibly even a liberal, at least on some issues, like health care, protecting Social Security and Medicare, and ending the forever war. Once they realized that he was just as big a liar and hypocrite as they were, just cruder and more brazen about it, and as cold-hearted and cruel as they were, they breathed a collective sigh of relief then went to work propping him up and using his popularity with the base as a shield and an asset.

To their way of thinking, which is always self-seeking an self-serving, better a criminal lunatic occupy the Oval Office than an honorable woman who'd see that other women of any and all colors, black and brown men, LGBT people, poor people, and sick people get a fair shake and a say in how the country's run.

Mike Lee and his Right Wing Republican ilk revere everything in the Declaration except for that troublesome line about how all men are created equal.

"The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts."

Posted Wednesday night, April 24, 2019.

The Berlin Wall falling, November 1989. Almay photo via the Guardian.

Americans and Europeans were guided [through the end of the 20th Century and into the 21st] by a tale about “the end of history, by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness…

...Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans...kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter of a century after the end of communism, and so raised a generation without history.

The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social good taken for granted elsewhere---education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave vacations---Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.

---from “The Road to Unfreedom” by Timothy Snyder.

Just words, except when they're not just HIS words

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, February 24, 2019. Posted Saturday morning, March 2.

The Angel on his Shoulder: Donald Trump in the Oval Office with the portrait of Andrew Jackson he had hung to advertise himself in photo ops as Jackson reincarnate. February 2017. Photo by Al Drago/New York Times via the Anchorage Daily News.

[Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a three part series. Part 1 is here.]

Yeah. Shithole countries.

From “Fear”, here’s Bob Woodward’s account of the meeting Lindsey Graham and Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, with whom Graham had worked out a compromise bill on immigration reform they thought Trump was going to sign, had with Trump. The meeting didn’t work out the way they expected:

So Graham and Durbin showed up at the White House, thinking they would meet alone with Trump. Instead there was a group of anti-immigrant [Republican] Senators, Congressman and staffers, including [Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly] and [senior advisor and speechwriter] Stephen Miller. Graham thought it looked like a lynch mob lined up on chairs in the Oval Office.

Graham began walking through the plan, which included the money Trump had asked for on border security.

It was not enough, Trump said, condescending.

Graham said he was sure they could do more but this where they had started, and he mentioned 25,000 visas from mostly African countries. He turned to the visas for places such as Haiti and El Salvador because of earthquakes, famine and violence.

“Haitians,” Trump said. “We don’t need more Haitians..” At that and the mention of immigrants from African countries, Trump said, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He had just met with the prime minister of Norway. Why not more Norwegians? Or Asians who could help the economy.

Durbin was sickened. Graham was floored.

“Time out,” Graham said, signaling for a halt with his hands. “I don’t like where this thing’s going.” America is an ideal, he said. “I want merit-based immigration from every corner of the globe, not just Europeans. A lot of us come from shitholes.”

Trump snapped back to reasonable, but the damage was done...

Before he tweet-tantrum-threatened NBC with “retribution” for the un-American act of airing a comedy show that dares to satirize everybody’s favorite President of the United States, Trump’s most recent verbal outrage was to tweet-tantrum-taunt-mock Elizabeth Warren for the upcoming defeat he would inflict on her on the 2020 presidential campaign trail.

Today Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to by me as Pocahontas, joined the race for President. Will she run as our first Native American presidential candidate, or has she decided that after 32 years, this is not playing so well anymore? See you on the campaign TRAIL, Liz!

Boy, is he proud of that Pocahontas jab. Like it’s the height of wit. Of course what he’s really proud of is how well it plays with his mobs of hideous men.

Detail from “The Trail of Tears” by Robert Lindneux. 1942. Courtesy of the Granger Collection via PBS.

The immediate reaction of the online commentary to the tweet was that there was a double-meaning in TRAIL. Actually, to some there wasn’t a double-meaning at all. Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith, for one, knew what one specific TRAIL he was twittering about:

I try to never dignify this man’s tweets, but there is little doubt here that he uses “TRAIL” to evoke the genocidal Trail of Tears, and does so to land a political jab. Warren has taken justifiable heat on this issue—but he used the murders of Indigenous people as a punchline.

What Smith and many others saw him doing was using the deaths of 4000 people to make a joke at Warren’s expense. He was finding it funny to picture her slogging through the snow while hungry, ill, and frostbitten men, women, and children dropped in their tracks around her and froze to death.

I’m not so sure.

That is, I’m sure he’d find the image funny because that’s the kind of fun-loving, sadistic, heartless, and racist bastard he is. What I’m not sure of is that he meant the reference. I’m not sure that he wrote the tweet.

Or wrote it all on his own. I think he might have had help.

And if TRAIL was a cruel and vicious double-entendre, it was that cruel and vicious help’s suggestion.

Fox News pundit and Trump apologist---but I repeat myself---came to Trump’s defense with a tweet in which he seemed to be arguing that Trump was too stupid to have meant what most folks thought he meant.

“He’s racist,” Hume seemed to be acknowledging, “but he’s not that racist he’d find genocide funny. So he must not have meant TRAIL to mean that particular Trail. And the proof of that,” Hume went on, is that he doesn’t know enough history to make such an on the nose historical reference. History is largely missing from not only his tweets but all his public statements and, as far as we can tell, from his thinking entirely.

Hume didn’t say it but whenever the word “history” appears in Trump’s statements, it’s advertising. Just words that are the equivalent of “Nine out of ten dentists recommend” or “Nobody beats our low prices!” When he calls himself “your favorite President” he doesn’t intend a comparison to any other President in history. He simply means “We serve the best Presidenting around!”

Oh, he knows what the Trail of Tears was, the commentators countered, because he knows all about that President.

Andrew Jackson, he’s claimed, is his favorite president.

Not really.

Donald Trump placing a wreath on Andrew Jackson’s tomb during his photo op visit to the Hermitage, Jackson’s Tennesse plantation home. March 15, 2017. Official White House photograph by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

Jackson is the president Steve Bannon thought Trump should model himself on. It was Bannon’s idea to hang the portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office where it would appear in photo ops looking over Trump’s shoulder, like an angel on his shoulder. What Trump knows about Jackson is the (probably) little that sank in from what Bannon taught him. Before Bannon held class, it’s a good bet all Trump knew about Jackson was his face was on the twenty-dollar bill.

And Trump is a poor student. He can’t be bothered to study. He doesn’t need to, being a genius and all. All he’s taken away from Bannon’s teaching is that Jackson is useful as an advertising gimmick for selling the Trump brand and everything Trump slaps his label on is a con. Andrew Jackson is a essentially a slogan, just words Trump can use to sell lies about himself to his mobs of suckers.

If you can bear it, watch the speech he gave when, to emphasize he was Jackson’s avatar, he made his photo-op pilgrimage to the Hermitage, Jackson’s slave-dependent plantation, in March of 2017. The speech, supposedly honoring Jackson, was an advertisement for himself---I like Jenna Johnson’s lede on her story: “Others may think of history as a lens. Donald Trump regards it as a mirror.”--- in which he claimed implicitly and explicitly all manner of similarities between himself and Jackson that were manifestly untrue.

But, again, if you can stomach it, you’ll notice something else about Trump’s way with words.

It’s colloquial.

Like I said in Part 1 of this post: Trump's use of words is…

…careless, impulsive, emotional, ignorant, profligate, and lunatic. He often doesn't mean anything more than he's mad about something, happy about something---happy in his mean-spirited, malicious, and self-serving way---has something he wants to boast about, or is simply feeling neglected and wants attention, and he spouts off using whatever words are within easiest reach.

But he also uses whatever words are within easiest reach to express any emotion and every thought, using them for effect and without worrying about their exact dictionary definitions, counting on whoever he’s talking to “know what I meant.”

In other…um…words (Ha ha, Lance. It wasn’t funny the first time.), he uses words the way most people do in their daily conversation. It’s part of his appeal to the supporters he calls (with fake affection) the “uneducated.” They hear themselves talking whenever he opens his mouth and because they flatter themselves they’re honest and intelligent and therefore mean what they say and assume what they say has meaning and means what they meant to say they assume the same things about him.

But colloquial speech can be intelligent, nuanced, eloquent, and even poetic. “I’m a poet and don’t even know it” is a truism. That’s because we use words for their connotations and associations as well as for their exact meaning.

“Emigrants Crossing the Plains or The Oregon Trail” by Albert Bierstadt. 1869. Via Wikimedia. 

So...trail might just refer to the campaign trail, if you ignore the capitalization, but given that it’s associated with Pocahontas it’s almost certainly a reference to Indians. But not specifically to the Cherokees, although Warren herself brings the association with the Cherokees into it and consequently the allusion to the Trail of Tears with it. Trails are a feature of the landscapes of clashes between cowboys and Indians. Cowboys and Indians being about as sophisticated as most white people get in their thinking about the European conquest of what’s become the United States. The Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, the Chisholm Trail, cattle trails, buffalo trails, Indian trails all figure in the stories we---white, bronze, brown, and black---tell ourselves about the settling of the West. James Earle Fraser’s sculpture “End of the Trail” provides one of the most iconic and moving images of the closing of the frontier.

The Trail of Tears stands apart from that list as a specific event and when people use it even colloquially they say the whole name and intend their listeners to picture that event, that is, the people driven from their homes dying in the snow.

It’s not unlikely that someone as lazy and ignorant in his thinking and habits of speech---not mention as racist---as Trump would casually make the association between the “fake” Indian Warren and the campaign trail with generic frontier trails. He very well not have intended to refer to the specific event that was an act of genocide. Not to forget, of course, that the settling of the continent was an centuries-long act of genocide.

But most people don’t think of it that way. The historical actuality hasn’t permeated the popular imagination yet.

People---who aren’t Native American---can be expected to use trail in association with the “winning” of the West in casual conversation without consciously invoking images of genocide. And remember Trump sees himself as being in constant casual conversation with his base who, like I said, hear themselves when he talks and tweets because in his way with words, at least, he’s one of them.

At any rate, I’d be inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here and agree with Hume. Not that Trump isn’t that racist or that he’s too ignorant to know the history of the Trail of Tears. But it just doesn’t seem like his style. History doesn’t figure bigly in his rhetoric. I’d be inclined if it wasn’t for the capitalization.

But notice something about that capitalization. It’s the only word he capitalized. That’s not like him.

Trump capitalizes words for their marketing appeal. He wants certain words to jump out at you like in newspaper ads, store window signs, and labels on cereal boxes. He uses capitals to sell not simply for emphasis. He doesn’t want his audience to think about what the words mean. He wants them to react by applauding or reaching for their wallets.

Notice something else that’s not like him?

The sentences parse.

Trump has never written all his tweets. He’s had other people tweet for him when he’s too busy or lazy to do it himself. But it seems to me that he’s delegated more of his twittering lately or at least let them be subjected to editing. And I suspect he didn’t write this one. I even think I know who wrote it for him.

If you go back to that passage from “Fear” at the top of the post, you’ll notice who else Woodward reports was in the shithole meeting beside Graham and Durbin and Trump and John Kelly.

Stephen Miller.

End of Part 2. Follow the link to jump back to Part 1, “Just Words”. Part 3 is in the works.

“End of the Trail” by James Earle Fraser. Photo by Shawn Conrad. Via Wikipedia.

End of Part Two. Follow the link to Part Three: Putting "just words" in his mouth.

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Related Mannion Re-run: "Anybody can be President, even Andrew Jackson" .

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"Fear: Trump in the White House" by Bob Woodward is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Filed under “The President Checks In” and “First as tragedy, then as farce”.

Black Dan and his dealings with the devil

Posted late Friday night, February 23, 2019.

“Black Dan”: Daniel Webster as he might have looked in 1830 when he gave his Senate speech that famously ended with "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable” or when he contended with Mr Scratch in Hell’s Courtroom for the soul of Jabez Stone in “The Devil and Daniel Webster”.  Detail from a portrait by Francis Alexander, 1835. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery via Wikipedia.

I admire although with some ambivalence Henry Clay. I loathe and despise John C. Calhoun. But I have nothing but affection for Daniel Webster. I’m embarrassed to admit, however, the roots of my affection are in the short story by Stephen Vincent Benét, which I first read in sixth grade, and ‘Daniel Webster” entered my imagination along side Tom Sawyer, Natty Bumpo, Phileas Fogg, Captain Nemo, Ishmael, Sherlock Holmes, and Long John Silver---and what a league of extraordinary gentlemen that is. Webster was as real to me as they were. But real to me in just that way. Everything I’ve learned about him since has been added to the tall tale of his out-arguing Mr Scratch. This is probably why I so easily overlook his corruption, forgive him for his cynicism, and smile at his peccadillos. He’s as impervious to historical fact in my imagination as Davy Crockett and the Knights of the Round Table. But that hasn’t meant I haven’t learned the history or from it. And what I’ve learned is that of the three---Clay, Calhoun, and him---Webster had the largest, warmest heart, the gladdest hand, the most open-mind, the keenest eye for reality, the truest democratic and egalitarian nature, and far and away the broadest sense of humor. And vain as he was, he seems to have been the most self-aware and therefore most sensible of irony, particularly as it applied to himself. In short, the character from the tall tale is a lot like the figure from history, who, it should be noted, was more often on the right side of history.

It should also be noted that he failed in the end on most fronts.

At any rate, here’s how H.W. Brands’ introduces him  in “Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants” ...

But Daniel Webster had a way with words that seemed almost supernatural. Indeed, some said he must have struck a bargain with the devil to acquire such a gift. He perfected the art of persuasion in the courtroom and became the most sought-after, and generously compensated, advocate of his era. The stern justices of the Supreme Court were no match for Webster; at the conclusion of his argument for Dartmouth College in a landmark case, even John Marshall---John Marshall!---wept. When Webster spoke in Congress, Washington stopped what it was doing and hurried to hear him.

Yet Webster was profligate: with his talents, his time, his earnings. Things came too easily to him. It was said of Webster that he must be a fraud: no one could be as great as he looked. “God-like Daniel,” people called him, and it went to his head. His most important speeches he prepared carefully, but lesser ones---lesser for him yet beyond mere mortals---he tossed off with scarcely a thought. As much as he earned, he spent even more. He was always in debt and in need of the income his law practice supplied. He wasn’t above taking discreet payments from the powerful people whose interests he protected in Congress.

He had the caliber to be president but not the true aim. He had come close to the White House almost by accident. Yet of the towering figures of the age---Clay, Calhoun, and Webster were spoke of as the “great triumvirate,” not always admiringly---he was the only one, in 1850, who retained a chance of reaching the summit of American politics. Which was to say, as the California crisis loomed, that from a personal perspective Daniel Webster had the most to lose.

He could easily lose it all. His Massachusetts constituents had long loved him, but the abolitionist movement was powerful in the state, and its leaders were demanding that he share their intolerance of slavery. Many abolitionists had no more devotion to the Union than the most secessionist Southerners did, if the Union required toleration of slavery. Siding with them risked making Webster as much a pariah outside New England as John Calhoun had become outside the South. Yet opposing them, and taking an compromising stand for the Union---beside Henry Clay---could cost him his political base and possibly his livelihood.

Throughout his career Webster had dodged difficult choice, and gotten away with it. His silver tongue had talked him out of one cul-de-sac after another. But he had never faced a test like this. He would have to speak as he had never spoken. He could make John Marshall weep, but to hold his home base and maintain his hopes for the presidency---to sustain his section without imperiling the Union---Daniel Webster might have to go back to the devil for a second mortgage on his soul…

Sounds like Brands was just as affected and at as early an age as I was by the tall tale.

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Related history lesson from Politico: "Daniel Webster delivers famous Senate speech, Jan. 26, 1830".  

And here's the story "The Daniel and Daniel Webster".

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“Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants” by H.W. Brands is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.