By the hair of my chin: Facial hair through the ages

Presented to the Club by William A. Selke on Monday evening, March 21, 2011



It was on "The hair of my chin," his beard, that the little pig vowed his defiance to the wolf. With men, as well as well as little pigs, beards have been traditional symbols of maleness, and, in some eras, have had important significance. Implying that a man would rather emasculate his chin than fail to live up to a promise is reflected in the oath, “By my beard” used by Shakespeare in “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” In all but the most primitive societies, when a beard was worn, it has been a conscious choice, but that choice has waxed and waned throughout history. It is the wearing of beards, and the razors for removing them, that we will consider this evening.



On display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo are several oval gold disks, with small handles on one side, identified as razors of the period four millennia ago. If one doubted that these devices were effective, relics and pictures of Egyptian royalty of that period show the men shaven, though in some cases with a small circular beard, real or artificial – of gold – in the middle of their chins. Clean chins and jaws have been a possible choice for the elite for a very long time.



Meanwhile, across the Red Sea, Jews following the instructions in Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 27 wore truly full beards. That verse states that “Ye shall not round the corners of your heads; neither shall thou mar the corners of thy beard.” (We might note that verse 18 of that same chapter includes the “Great Commandment “ –“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”) Over the course of history, we’ll see men adding or removing their beards for indefinite reasons, but in this case the authority is clear.





Moving forward to ancient Greece we note that Zeus was always bearded, as was Poseidon. but the young god, Apollo, was usually represented as a beardless youth, a kouros. Statues of mortals are less common, but the customs of the mortals can be inferred from contemporaneous statues of the gods. The similarity in appearance of gods and mortals is evident in the fact that a number of unwitting women bore children fathered by gods whom they had mistaken for their husbands. Hermes, always free-spirited, wore a beard when posing for his early statues, but was beardless from the fifth century BCE.



Greek fashions changed after Alexander the Great’s sweep of conquest in the 4th century BCE. He ordered that all his troops remove their beards, so as to deny the enemy handles by which soldiers could be grabbed and killed. While it was introduced for practical military reasons, shaving spread through the Macedonian Empire as fashion. When a beard was worn, it would be by a philosopher, as a professional badge. This predictably led to proverbs such as “The beard does not make the sage.” So, in the third century BCE, the majority of aristocratic Greeks shaved.



As the Roman forces took over the Greek Empire, the Hellenistic era begins with the conquerors learning to imitate the Greeks they had conquered. That most expert military leader, Scipio Africanus, who was granted that name for his conquering of Hannibal in 202 BCE, is represented in Rome clean-shaven in a splendid bronze bust. And that style was followed by all the early Caesars . Shaven Ceasars were the rule until 117 AD, when the brilliant and transformative leader, Hadrian, wore a beard to signify his respect for the cultural richness of the Greece of 500 years earlier. His successors followed his model for centuries.



Looking at the Middle East two thousand year ago, we ask did Jesus wear a beard? We never see representations of him without one, and we can be sure that no artist took it upon himself to make such an important decision himself. The teachings of Leviticus were, from the start followed carefully by members of some groups – the orthodox Jews throughout time – but not widely. Nowhere in the Gospels is there direct mention of Christ’s beard, nor, for that matter of its absence. The evidence of his beard comes from centuries of biblical scholarship. The Old Testament book of Isaiah, you will recall, foretells the coming of the Messiah. Chapter 5, verse 6 states “I gave my back to those who strike Me, and my cheeks to those who pluck out the beard.” This is indirect, but unassailable proof.



In his depiction of the Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci showed all of those gathered with beards except for two. One of these is conventionally identified as the Apostle John, known to be younger than his fellows, and therefore, frequently shown as beardless, as was Apollo, the young one in an earlier holy group. On less distinct grounds, the other beardless man is thought to be the Apostle Philip. One would hope it is with tongue in cheek that some feminists now question those identifications, all of them male. They propose that one of the beardless figures is Mary Magdalene and the other, perhaps Martha.



In the Islamic tradition, God commanded Abraham to keep his beard. Accordingly, Muhammad encouraged the growing of beards. In recent times, only a minority of schools of Islamic Law regard beard wearing as compulsory, but all regard it as at least commendable.



Whether the man is Greek or Roman or Jew, his beard starts to grow when, during puberty, pre-existing hair follicles are stimulated by dihydrotestosterone, a derivative of the male hormone, testosterone. A particular follicle will produce hair for a fixed period, designated the anagen. The length a hair can reach depends on the duration of the anagen; since the hair is dead, its growth is not influenced by whether it is cut or not. The anagen of follicles on the arm, for example, will be a few weeks to three months. On the scalp or chin, it is two to six years. When the anagen is over, during a period called the catagen, no further length is added, but a clublike end is put on the base of the hair. After a few months of rest, the follicle pushes out the old hair and another anagen commences.



There are significant differences in the beards of men of different races with in general Caucasians with bigger beards than East Asians. What might be called the earliest Asian immigrants in the US, the so-called native Americans,” are essentially beardless.



Looking for a group within the Caucasian race with a genetic difference in beard length, one might look at the Lombards, the Germanic group which conquered northern Italy in the 6th century and who controlled most of Italy near the end of the seventh. Their name, Lombard, is indeed a latinization of “Longo bardi,” — long beard. I was disappointed to find that the there is no evidence that the anagen period of the chins of Lombard men was ever unusually long. Instead, the name comes from what is probably a fanciful tradition. As the story is told, when the ancestors of the Lombards were a very small tribe in Northern Europe they found themselves opposed by superior force. As they lined up to battle their foe, they were badly outnumbered by the attacking tribe. The order went out for the women to pull their long hair up over their faces and to stand next to their husbands This fooled the invaders and brought instant victory. The term, Lombardy, whatever its true derivation, remains the name of the northern part of Italy, where the descendents of the Germanic invaders remain to this day.



Psychological warfare is not a recent innovation. When those early German tribes were threatening Rome, the defenders tried to demonize their opponents by attributing atrocities to them. They alleged that before a young German man was allowed to wear a beard, he must personally kill a Roman. Whether that was accurate or mere slander, it is an example of the current customs by which the wearing or the shaving of a beard is governed by tests of manhood. In some groups, one can shave only after killing a deer. In others, shaving follows finishing hockey playoffs. A feature of the 250th birthday celebration of Great Barrington is a contest for the longest, bushiest, and most creative beards. After the judging, participants will have “…those follicles (sic) removed for free…” at Sim’s Barber Shop. For some men, unhappy about the trends of our society, the appeal of any customs involving beards is that they are among the last refuges that can’t be invaded by women



In Renaissance Europe, church hierarchies kept switching between requiring priests to be shaven and forbidding them to wear beards. Martin Luther wore a beard, and so young Reformist priests wore beards as marks of their positions. Across the Channel, Henry VIII wore a beard, and his archbishop, Henry Cranmer, honored Henry by growing a notable beard. His subsequent defiance of the catholic Mary I led to his being burned at the stake as a heretic in 1556. With the resumption of the Reformation, it was the bearded Catholic priests who perished on the stake.



In his 1949 book “Beards: Their social standing, religious involvements, decorative possibilities, and value in offense and defense through the ages,” Reginald Reynolds relates how in the 16th and 17th centuries there were constant fights within the church hierarchy as to whether the wearing of beards should be mandatory, or should be proscribed. The disputants were bitter in their partisanship, even though they could not have believed that either side had divine favor. The theologian Valerino Bolzai acknowledged that neutrality with his judgment that “God is not offended by hair,” In Italy some in the clerical community seems reluctant to let shaving be a personal or a parochial choice. In 1656, in Benevento, an Antibeard Party lost in its bid before the regional council for ecclesiastical enforcement of their position that priests must shave. In a show of good sense, that council held that the only theological limitation on facial hair was that mustaches must be sufficiently short as to avoid defiling the sacrament



Even though the switches in custom over the last millennium are dictates of fashion, not instructions from a deity. Following the local style could be an essential career move. Monarchs are accustomed to being flattered, and we know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Thus when bare-chinned, eight-year old Louis XIII ascended the French throne in 1610, beards disappeared from court. Philip 5th of Spain, crowned in 1683, couldn’t grow a beard. So members of his court also displayed bare cheeks and chins.



Getting closer to our time we note that mid-19th century figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne just had big mustaches, but by the end of that century the leading literary figures wore beards. Melville and Henry James and James Russell Lowell all sported beards. J. Willard Gibbs of Yale – the first American Ph.D. in engineering, father of chemical thermodynamics, is always pictured with a beard. The leaders in other fields at that time are also pictured with beards, Charles Darwin, Richard Wagner, Auguste Rodin, to name a few.



While numerous generals and civilian leaders wore beards in the early 19th century, our presidency has generally had fewer beards than business and political leaders of their eras. The New York Times recently showed an unfamiliar picture of Lincoln, taken in June 1860. One sees that he has not yet joined what was a nationwide swing to beards. A photograph from later that year shows him starting the beard which in 1861 marked the man we remember. There was a short run of presidential non-shavers, but that ended, with Benjamin Harrison being our last bearded president. After the terms of William Howard Taft, no facial hair at all has been worn in the White House.



For thousands of years, the means existed for men to be shaven if they wished. The metals used for razors followed the general advances of technology, with bronze replacing gold and iron replacing bronze. After the eruption of Vesuvius an 79 AD, pieces of glassy obsidian provided a sharper edge than the metal of the day. Obsidian knives were employed for ceremonial sacrifice by the pre-Columbian Meso-Americans



Eventually, there developed the open-bladed steel straight razor with folding handle, and the strop for the final sharpening This was the true classic design, the standard of excellence for centuries. In the OED, there is a citation for “strop: strip of leather or wood covered with leather for sharpening razors” dated 1702.



Some men found the idea of straight razors near their throats worrisome. They might have shaved themselves were it not for the fear of accidental suicide. In recognition of these potential users in the late 1800s several so-called safety razors were brought to market. In every case, the guard, which protected the throat, prevented the sharpening of the blade in place, making shaving a rather involved process. In 1898, the American team of William Nickerson and King Gillette patented a safety razor with easily changeable disposable blade. Gillette was at that time a very successful salesman for the Crown Cork and Seal Company. From that experience he knew it was possible to make a lot of money by supplying a large number of well-made small and simple objects. (These caps sealed 90 percent of the beer bottles we saw earlier this season). Gillette’s razor was introduced to the market in 1902 and immediately took a leading share of this growing field. Gilllette is usually, but undeservedly, regarded as the inventor of the business model in which the razor is sold at a loss and the profit comes from the sale of the blades. In its introduction, his razor sold for a very high price, five 1902 dollars. Later, to maintain share in the emerging market, he copied his competitors, who already had adopted the strategy usually referred to as ”giving away the razor.” (Currently there may be no better example of this business model than the pricing of computer scanner-printers. The price of two pairs of short-lived refills – color and black – exceeds the price of the printer, itself.)



At some point in the history of shaving there appeared a vital accessory product, the little white styptic pencil, to stanch the flow of blood from the inevitable nick or gouge. While I mention these little cuts in connection with straight razors, only with the advent of plastic injector cartridges was nicking entirely eliminated. Those without a styptic pencil stuck a bit of tissue paper on the bleeding spots, hoping to remember to remove them before the public day began.



Gillette had a flair for marketing, and he expanded the market of shavers. His picture was part of the trademark and appeared on every folder of blades. In 1910, after Theodore Roosevelt had left the presidency of the United States, with great fanfare, Gillette offered him the presidency of the Gillette corporation at a salary of one million dollars. Of course Roosevelt declined, but at very little cost, each party received desired publicity.



Throughout the western world, the first decades of the twentieth century saw change from one in which all men had beards to one in which almost all shaved (or were shaved) daily. The introduction of the safety razor must have helped, but there were other forces in the same direction. In World War I, many of the British inductees, rural laborers, most of whom were bearded, were found to be infested with head lice. The vital step in fighting these parasites was denying them shelter, which meant ridding the soldier of hair, both from his head and from his face. From then on, he had to shave. Among American draftees, infestations were not as severe, but sanitation still favored clean shaving. To this end, the army bought a Gillette shaving set for each inductee, and, of course, made every inductee a consumer of Gillette’s blades. The advent of gas warfare in World War I brought forth an issue somewhat parallel to that faced by Alexander’s Macedonian troops. Beards could interfere with the sealing of gas masks. On this basis the armies of many countries still require that in some branches, if not all, soldiers be clean-shaven. Concern about the fitting of emergency oxygen masks led to the world-wide prohibition of beards on airline pilots.



In the 1920s, beards became a rarity. The only bearded man that I can remember seeing in the flesh, except for the department store Santa, was an uncle, who stereotypically was an alienist. That trend continued through World War II, so that beard wearing in the United States fell to its all-time low by the 1950s. Teaching at Columbia at that time, I don’t remember any of the academic giants of the Philosophy or the English Departments following the example of the bearded philosophers of ancient Athens. Elsewhere, there were small numbers of beard-wearers, following the customs of their groups. An example are Amish men. Young bachelors must be clean shaven, but upon marrying, the Amish man grows a beard which he wears for the rest of his life. The leaders of the Eastern Orthodox church retained their beards. Some Catholic monastic orders continued, and still continue to wear beards, and as do orthodox Jews. But all these small groups together represent a small fraction of American men.



In the late 1960s, the trend reversed, and we started to see more beards. These new beards were not on the Melvilles of the day, but on young men who spurned conventional fashion. But, as we come up to the present, beards spread more and more widely in our society, and lately appear more on members of the Establishment than of the counterculture. The neatly dressed young Mormons who ring our doorbells did not abandon shaving, but members of a wide range of the professions have done so. In the past few days I’ve seen pictures of the following: David Wessel, Economics editor of the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Josten, Chief lobbyist of the US Chamber of Commerce, Randy Moss, wide receiver, Dr. C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General, Benjamin Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged terrorist .



Picking up on the story of razors, we find that although his company thrived, Gillette, himself, having been spectacularly extravagant, suffered ruinously in the great depression. When he died in 1932 he was almost bankrupt. From the very beginning, Gillette razors dominated the market around the world. But in 1960, their position was challenged by a competitor, Wilkinson Sword of Sheffield, England, who introduced a superior blade. It was of stainless steel. It was known that when a blade is used, it rendered the blade dull. The stainless alloy used by Wilkinson extended the life of the blade more than enough to justify its premium price. But after a brief dent in their market share, Gillette blades, now stainless, were again dominant.



The Gillette Company thrived, buying up competitors and other consumer-care businesses including Oral-B, Duracell, and Braun. The company was finally sold to Procter and Gamble for $57 billion in 2005 and the brand name Gillette is still strong.



The pairing of Gillette razors and Duracell dry cells matches the fact that the Wilkinson Sword Company, which sells its razors in the US under the Schick tradename, is now owned by Eveready Battery, the Energizer Company These groupings of product lines — razors and batteries — are evidence that in modern business, having common distribution channels is more important than, for example, having similar technological bases.



The American inventor Col. Jacob Schick introduced the first electric shaver in 1928, starting what is called in the trade “dry” shaving (the traditional use of razors being called “wet”). Dry shaving had a further lift when Remington Rand introduced an electric shaver in 1937. More recently, a third design, called a Rotary razor, was introduced by Philips Laboratories. Dry shaving changed where one shaved; it didn’t need to be to the bathroom. Then, with the introduction of rechargeable batteries, it was not even tied to the electric socket and so really set free. Driving in morning commuter traffic in Atlanta one sees almost equal numbers of men, telephoning, drinking caffeinated beverages, and shaving.



Reliable statistics on how American men treat their cheeks are hard to find. Any survey involving the internet is prone to distortion by a disproportionate participation by prepubescent boys. With that caveat, consider a recent report:

• Wet shaving — 45 percent


• Dry shaving — 17 percent


• Not shaving — 38 percent

Another survey found that 75 percent of men shave daily. Of the nonshavers, 7 percent cite religious restrictions — presumably these include Orthodox Jews as well as Amish Christians. That survey found 64 percent wet shavers vs. 11 percent dry shaving. It should be noted that some of the newer electric razors are waterproof, leaving ambiguous whether the “wet” category includes electric shavers used with water.



If an anthropologist wanted to fix the date of construction of an American house of the 20th century, he could inspect the bathroom and note changes to accommodate differences in how we shaved. One clue would be the presence or absence of a slot in the back of the medicine cabinet for used razor blades. We used to poke our blades in there, only occasionally wondering about their ultimate fate. When it was no longer a simple blade that we discarded, but instead an injector, or an entire plastic-handled razor, the slot was too narrow to accommodate it, But, for that matter, those discards would not be pose the disposal problem as did a menacing bare blade. Next, the spread of electric razors spurred the installation of Ground-fault- detector electric plugs near the bathroom mirror



My recollections of my first professional haircuts, are of the wonderful barber chairs, and white-coated men wielding frightening straight razors bending over customers, whose faces were covered with thick foam, whipped up with a brush which had been in one of the elegant mugs from the shelves which covered the back wall of the shop. But that hedonistic luxury of being shaved by a barber has almost vanished from our lives. My barber in Lee shaves a few men each week. Generally, they are men physically unable to shave themselves, because of fractured limbs or severe palsy. Theirs is not the excellence achieved only with a straight razor; he uses a cheap plastic throw-away. In New York City one can still be shaved with the incomparable straight razor. The Metropolitan section of the Sunday Times of November 14 carried a feature entitled “A Straight Razor, a Warm Towel, a Fading Art.” It tells about The Hair Box, a storefront in Soho, which has housed a barber shop for over 100 years. There, old Italian men enjoy haircuts for $20, and shaves for $17. For a very different clientele the Style section a week later mentions that places like the “fancy pants” New York Shaving Company in NoLita, charge $25 to $40 for a straight razor hot shave.



For millennia, man had shaved with single blades. Very slight gains in closeness of shave can be demonstrated by two-blade assemblies at little additional cost. The second blade stretches the skin, pushing up the follicle as did the free hand of the user of a straight razor. But with the fraction of American men shaving having fallen so radically in the past 50 years, one might wonder why Gillette and Schick spend so much on developing flashier and flashier new razors, adding blade after blade for incremental, if detectable, improvement in actual performance? However, there is a rational explanation, viz. the evolution of the broadcasting of sports events on television. The audience for these broadcasts is well matched to shaving devices, and pictures of these products can be quite alluring. Verbal descriptions of a razor with – now — one more blade than the competitor’s couldn’t have stirred much interest in “play-by-play” but now men don’t give much thought to spending a dime or two more each day for fancier new razors. Were it not for playoffs and the World Series, we might never have had razors with more than two blades?



While it may not have been a widespread feeling, I believe that many of us would have worn beards in the past had we not faced a serious obstacle. That barrier was the awkward period between the stopping of shaving and the displaying of a recognizable beard. A recent development makes it possible to make that transition without at any point being out of style. In much earlier eras, aristocratic German youths sat for portraits wearing several days’ growth of beard – stubble. In the 60s, a stunt by some trend-setting American young men was to appear ostensibly unshaven, wearing one, or two, or three day’s growth of stubble. Third day growth, for example, is clearly perishable, but daily use of an electric clipper with suitable spacers permitted presenting the same – presumably transient — appearance day after day. American television viewers were introduced to stubble by a series called Miami Vice carried by NBC in the 1984 to 1989 seasons. Appropriately, the clipping equipment to maintain the stubble was called a Miami Device. (Recently, I saw one for sale in a local drugstore for $15). This practice was given impetus by publication of what was purported to be the results of a poll in the UK. It stated that women rated men with facial stubble as tough, mature, aggressive, dominant and masculine, and judged them as the best romantic partners either for a fling, or for a longtime relationship With endorsements like that, it is not surprising that the wearing of stubble spread around the globe like a porcine flu.



It is ironic to contrast the current glamorization of stubble with the attitude towards five-o’clock shadow in 1960. For the first televised debate, presidential candidate Richard Nixon spurned the use of makeup to cover his five-o’clock shadow. He lost badly and it is generally agreed that his appearance that night contributed significantly to that loss. And as for importance of the debate, we should note that in the general election Nixon received only 0.2 percent fewer votes than Kennedy.



Over the span of history, we’ve seen the fashion in beards swinging back and forth, even within the 140 years of our club. Were you to be required to make a prediction, would you expect such oscillations in style to continue through the next 140 years?



Phone by dawkeye, used under Creative Commons License.

Read More

Food for thought: The Beard-Child-Claiborne-Waters culinary revolution

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, April 11, 2011



In the last 50 years there has been a revolution in this country. It has been non-violent, but certainly exciting, spirited, and dramatic. It has affected each of us in either major or minor ways, but no one has been immune.

I’m talking about the change in America’s food and eating habits.

Fast food is one branch of this upheaval. But the other direction – and one more interesting to me – has been the enormous increase in the variety of food we now take for granted. An orange in your Christmas stocking (perhaps along with a lump of coal if you had been involved in some misdeeds) was a treat – now we have grapefruit and oranges year round. Salsa and sushi were unknown. Now salsa has surpassed ketchup as America’s most popular condiment and sushi is even in Pittsfield, Lenox, and Great Barrington.

Butter used to be, well, just butter. Now it comes in a variety of butterfat contents. And one writer describes being at a salt tasting, of all things. “The waiter, like some particularly elegant cocaine dealer, gently spooned nine mini-mounds onto a little board, each salt a different hue and consistency from the next – one as fine and white as baking powder, another dark and chunkily crystalline.” This is a long way from the all-purpose Morton’s Salt we grew up with.

It is, in short, a great time to be an eater. And how often do we get to say something as unreservedly upbeat as that? We often complain that things aren’t as good as they used to be: movies, music, baseball, political talk – but food is one area of American life where things just continue to improve.

If we’re cooking at home, we have a greater breadth and higher quality of ingredients available to us. If we’re eating out, we have more options open to us.

How did we get to this point? We learned there is more to the restaurant world than Schrafft’s or Howard Johnson’s and food became part of our popular culture – with even its own TV channel.

The consensus seems to be that it began with James Beard who developed a successful catering company in New York called Hors d’Oeuvres, Inc., starting in 1939. His mother, who ran a boarding house in Portland, Oregon, was a superb cook and he learned from her. He came to New York wanting to be an actor in the theater, but had no success. He did, however, have a highly cultivated palate and was a great charmer of the people he often cooked dinner for and who were able to give him and his catering business significant publicity.

The success of his catering company led to a series of cooking book contracts. Along with the recipes – and probably more important – he defended throughout his books the pleasures of real cooking and fresh ingredients. He wrote a lot about outdoor grilling at home and that men could legitimately be involved in home cooking. His writing was appealing and his considerable girth made him non-threatening to the home-based, non-professional cook. 

To Beard, cooking and eating comprised a fulfilling cultural pastime, to be pursued as ardently as golf, opera, or any other activity that aroused one’s passions. His enthusiasm was contagious and he was read widely.

At the same time in New York the 1939 World’s Fair along with World War Two led to several notable French chefs arriving ultimately to open a remarkable group of top-tier classic French restaurants. Le Pavillion, the Colony, Le Cirque, La Caravelle, to name a few, based on 18^th Century French traditional recipes and techniques to some degree interpreted by Escoffier in Paris and London. Another was the Brussels where some 60 years ago a very indulgent bachelor uncle of mine and his long-legged very glamorous to me lady friend introduced me to smoked eel. To this day I still enjoy it when I can find it. I courted Ann while I was living in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone and we frequented a French bistro on Third Avenue in Manhattan where the order of the day was piles of sautéed frog’s legs and match-thin French fries along with a bottle of wine. Each of these restaurants generated others as employees trained at these left to open their own establishments.

Post-war America, partly because of GI’s coming back from Europe, considered classic French cooking to be the highest form of culinary art. Chuck Williams, the founder of the kitchenware store Williams-Sonoma, writes as he completed his Air Force service and built himself a house in the then undiscovered hinterland of Sonoma, California, that "The magic that France had at the time was felt by so many of us. It was roaming on the side streets of Paris and eating in the small mom-and-pop restaurants. It was the haunting music and songs sung by Edith Piaf that I heard everywhere. It was the wonderful pastry and chocolate shops in every block, the butcher shops, the crepe and waffle stands, the standup bars where you stopped for an espresso, a café au lait, or a cognac. I wanted to capture the magic of Paris in my shop and make it completely French."

Also enthusiastic about all things French was a young, 6-foot, 2-inch, Smith College graduate from Pasadena, California, named Julia McWilliams. She spent the war years working for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services — the predecessor of the CIA) in Washington and then in India on a tea plantation the OSS had commandeered as its base of operations from which to plot attacks on the Japanese. It was there that she met Paul Child a cartographer for the OSS.

Child was a good six inches shorter than she, but he loved to cook and dine out and was very knowledgeable about cooking. Eventually they were assigned to Kunming in China where Julia became interested in food and the various Chinese cuisines.

Back in the United States the couple was married in 1946 and soon left for Paris where Paul Child worked for the State Department implementing the Marshall Plan. During the decade they were in France, Julia set about learning all things French which eventually included enrollment at the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school. Her teacher had apprenticed under Escoffier himself. At night she often cooked for dinner the dishes the class had made that day.

Meanwhile, back in New York, a young man, and the third member of our founding trio, named Craig Claiborne – also with a mother who ran a boarding house and cooked extraordinarily well – arrived fresh from a stint at a Swiss hotel school. By luck he got himself a short-lived job writing for Gourmet magazine which turned out to be mostly useful for the people he met and the connections he made. One of these led him to an interview at The New York Times which was looking for a food editor but had always had a woman in the position. It had apparently not occurred to the Times that a man could do the job.

He was eventually hired and began a twenty-year association with the paper that was destined to change America’s food culture. He started at a time when post-war Americans were ready to improve their kitchens and cooking. They were ready to go beyond food as “maintenance” and explore new ideas. GI’s brought back familiarity with ethnic cooking as well as French Cuisine. And Claiborne was ready to lead the way by treating food as more than just recipes. It was a journalistic responsibility to discover what was going on in America’s more creative kitchens. He wrote about home cooks as well as professionals. He introduced the idea of restaurant reviews that could make or break a place.

The food world reaction was one of awe. Here was a man writing about food and cooking with the same intellect and rigor that the Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote about Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett.

An interesting side note is that in 1961 when Claiborne wanted to do a cookbook using the Times name, the paper thought a cookbook would be so minor that Claiborne was given the rights to use the Times name with no obligation. The New York Times Cookbook became a best seller and sold more than three million copies.

Going back to Julia Child, who we left in Paris at the Cordon Bleu, her next adventure was to open a cooking school in Paris to educate Americans, who were wealthy wives brought abroad by their husbands’ jobs in business or government, about French cooking. Along with running the school with two French collaborators, the idea of a cookbook for Americans emerged.

This became Mastering the Art of French Cooking after a decade of recipe testing and adapting French measurements, methods, and ingredients to the American kitchen. 

The success of the book lies in both its multi-year meticulous preparation and Child’s charismatic publicizing of it. There is probably no other cookbook in American history that better combines breadth, thoroughness of explanation, culinary authenticity, distinctive authoritarian voice, and reliability. Whereas Escoffier’s book assumed the reader knew the fundamentals of French cookery, Julia assumed the cook knew nothing. The recipe for a basic omelet runs seven pages and has six illustrations.

Alfred Knopf published the book in 1961. By this time Julia and her husband had returned to the United States and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shortly after the book was published Craig Claiborne gave it a rave review in the Times calling it the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on French cooking and predicting it would endure as the definitive work for non-professionals. James Beard gave the book his blessing and he and Child became great friends. Julia often was a guest instructor at Beard’s school which was at his town house in Manhattan. Beard was often a guest at the Childs’ getaway home in Provence, spending entire days in the kitchen with Julia.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking went through five printings. Its publication coincided with Jacqueline Kennedy’s time in the White House and her hiring of a French chef by the name of Rene Verdon. The Times, now the lifestyle manual of culturally correct postwar upper middlebrows, played Verdon’s hiring on page one with a article by Claiborne that described Verdon’s first official assignment, a luncheon for the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, that included trout cooked in Chablis, fillet of roast beef au jus, and artichoke bottoms Beaucaire – filled with a fondue of tomatoes simmered in butter. French food was now fashionable – and to some extent competitive because now you could really astonish your dinner party guests.

Kitchenware suddenly attained the status of fetish objects in certain American circles. You just had to have a Le Creuset casserole dish and a crepe pan the size of a manhole cover. Williams-Sonoma was now “the source” and was located in the heart of San Francisco.

To add to the excitement, WGBH TV station in Boston started “The French Chef” cooking show starring, who else, Julia Child. For the better part of ten years she was a cooking instructor to America and quickly became the most popular attraction on WGBH. The show was picked up by public television stations throughout the country.

So while Craig Claiborne was dominating the print media with his New York Times columns reviewing restaurants and providing his readers with recipes for such dishes Spanish paella and other ethnic foods, Julia was the television personality keeping America’s cooks (and eaters) focused on whatever was this week’s recipe. She criss-crossed the country for book signings and cooking demonstrations.

But it rapidly became apparent, as attention to food increases, that the quality of American ingredients was sadly deficient.

We had only parsley, no chives, said one French chef. He also pointed out the experience of needing special mushrooms and having them arrive in cans from Germany instead of fresh. It turned out they were grown in Oregon and because there seemed to be no market in the states for them, they were shipped to Germany for canning and then sent back to the U.S. when ordered. By this time they barely resembled the original. So professional chefs were frustrated.

Home cooks were becoming totally dependent on the large supermarket chains that were springing up – particularly in the suburbs, aided by the increase in car ownership, the advances in refrigeration, and even the introduction of the shopping cart. The old butcher, baker, or greengrocer shops were becoming obsolete.

One food columnist wrote that she found her local Grand Union supermarket to be at once disturbingly alien while also marvelously convenient. The pre-butchered chicken parts in cellophane-sheathed white Styrofoam containers, she wrote, arranged in refrigerator cases and illuminated by florescent lights were something out of a science-fiction movie. The chicken pieces lying there were dead in their little coffins. Bread, it was noted, looked and tasted like facial tissue.

By the early seventies out on the West Coast, a group of culinary-minded young radicals had gotten mad as hell about the supermarket state, and they decided they were not going to take it any more.

Many of them had come together on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and had been the prime movers of the radical Free Speech Movement that demonstrated and for a while took over the Berkeley campus in the 1960’s. Gradually their counter-culture philosophy came to include a serious disagreement with the giant agricultural businesses and supermarkets that were determining the American diet. There came to be a feeling that just because you were a revolutionary didn’t mean your idea of a good meal should be Chef Boyardee ravioli reheated in a dog dish – as Alice Waters who went on to fame as the owner of the exemplary Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley put it.

She and others encouraged small providers (what we now see as “organic” growers) and co-operative grocery stores throughout the California Bay area. Farmers’ markets, brimming with fresh, local produce became regular fixtures. Interestingly, this winter on Sanibel Island off Fort Myers in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a weekly farmers’ market for the first time. Sanibel has always been deprived of fresh produce, which is silly considering all the agriculture nearby. But it was only this year that the Food Revolution arrived and incidentally included wonderful fresh greens that we don’t get here and marvelous fresh Gulf shrimp that were never frozen. It has been said that the fresh food movement was perhaps the Berkeley counter-cultural movement’s greatest and most lasting triumph. 

The emphasis on high quality ingredients spread rapidly throughout the country.

The Spartan, traditional health foods stores were supplemented by colorful, bountiful markets with organically grown produce and fresh baked goods. Whole Foods market became a national chain. The ranks of specialty coffee companies grew, such as Starbucks, which started in Washington. Coffee and activism were a good fit; most coffee beans came from Third World countries where poverty and human-rights violations were problems, and many specialty coffee drinkers were college students who were eager to be politically engaged. 

But it wasn’t just the politically conscious, back-to-mother earth foodies who discovered the power of upscale, high quality food, it was also the next generation Italian grocers and Jewish delicatessen men who saw a world beyond the small markets of their fathers. Balducci’s, Zabar’s, and DeLuca’s in New York are examples. They set out to re-educate the American palate. The stores became destinations for specialty foods. Guido’s here in the Berkshires is part of the same trend.

The food revolution is here and it is continuing. We can watch Price Chopper supermarket on Route 7 and Guido’s virtually next door expanding to go head to head to capture not only the shopper’s dollar but also his or her participation in this new world of food.

Read More

"Nothing intelligent to say...": Servants and slaves in southern New England; the initial years for natives and settlers

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, January 23, 2011 by Robert G. Anderson



Last fall I began to search for material about slavery in 17th century southern New England with the hope that I would have something intelligent to say for my first endeavor as “reader.” No surprise, there is a richness, complexity and darkness to the history of natives and settlers, as differing peoples began to mix it up in this territory. I will describe some key events from 1620 to 1640, an incomplete narrative, after taking a look at the respective cultures that clashed once English settlers began to arrive on native land. My enigmatic title is part of a quote from the novelist Kurt Vonnegut which I will explain later.



I hope to explore how English settlers got here, how servitude evolved and slavery took hold as a significant economic, social and security development. The sources I found are almost exclusively based upon accounts of colonist history by colonists and accounts of native activity by colonists. Archeology has provided limited data regarding the lives of natives in the early 1600s. What we mostly have is one side of the story.



I. Backdrop of the Clash of Peoples



As far back as 7,000 years ago peoples inhabited our four season region of woodland, mountains and coastland. The migrating Algonquin people arrived 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, divided into nations, living a life of hunting, fishing, gathering and seasonal crop farming, with clustered villages along the coast in the warm months and inland by other waters during the coldest, following game. They lived in circular thatched dwellings easily moved with the seasons or in more permanent longhouses.





By the early 1600’s there were six Algonquin peoples residing in the region, each with populations of 10,000 to 20,000, a common language and distinguishing dialects and habits. They were traders and gifted in negotiation and diplomacy as a shifting balance of power forged alliances between them in the face of disputes and aggression. Each of the peoples was led by a sachem or pow-wow, a male head who was priest, medicine man and chief. Conflicts between native peoples might lead to violent skirmishes or raids, often resolved through diplomacy and concession. Slaves were a benefit of a war victory, traded as a commodity or often incorporated with standing into village life. There was no servant class per se, although women attended to the activities and burdens of family and village life.



Families were comprised of a man and a woman with children living in a round house that would include other families and generations, especially in the cold months. Women tended to home based work, child care and planting while men were hunters and warriors. The environment was revered and studied, viewed as alive with lessons, trusted for providing necessities. Deer, turkey, geese, fish, shell fish and berries were abundant. Fields and open spaces were burned off twice yearly to stifle growth and enhance crops, while swamps with thick forests, inhabited by the plenteous beaver served as refuge from danger.



We know much more about Elizabethan England in the early 1600s, estate, farm and village based. Nobility ruled as the landed aristocracy. A rising gentry sought to find fortune and land, fed by the economy of trade that began to reach to other shores. Working on the estates were yeomen, farmers who with good fortune were issued, loaned or sold modest plots of land for farms and herds. When the harvest was abundant, villages bustled with craftsmen, artisans and merchants.



A large servant class was estate based and included the unskilled, those bonded to service for stated years, a documented contract between parties. Children of the poor were often given over to the owners of estates, farms or shops to learn a trade or to creditors. Indentured servants, age 15 and over, could be bonded for seven years or more to work off a debt, for a minor crime, or for passage to other shores.

New settlements in Ireland, called plantations, as the migrants were known as planters, were founded beginning in the 1500s amidst natives viewed as heathen and uncivilized. There was opportunity, land and resources on the horizon.



During this volatile religious and political time under Charles I, separatists coalesced in many villages in search of freedom from the newly formed Church of England and rallied by a communal ideal based upon Christian scripture. Led by pious gentry, separatist communities met in homes, comprised of the families of artisans and yeomen of modest means. They sought to return to the purity of the early church, with no papist hierarchy and ritual. After being derided as puritans, they began to embrace the label. They viewed themselves as chosen by God to found a new Israel, a purified community where they would have the freedom from the influence of others. They were ready to venture as pilgrims to seek out a new land, where they might settle and prosper.



II. The Journey of Separatists



Such a community had developed by 1600 in the inland town of Scooby, half way between bustling London and the border with Scotland. “Come out from among them and be ye separate saith the Lord and touch not the unclean thing” (Christian Scripture II Cor. 6:17) was the holy covenant for the some 300 faithful who gathered under the leadership of John Robinson and the younger William Bradford. As self proclaimed “saincts” they separated themselves from and increasingly defied Anglican doctrine and bishop and congregated independently, centered on their hearing and learning from the authority of Holy Scripture. Any outside their circle were known as “strangers.”



Isolation in matters of faith brought day to day social and economic strife and hardship. After a few years of intense scrutiny and growing persecution, the Scooby community resolved in 1611 to migrate to Leyden and the tolerant Netherlands across the North Sea (Club member Al Easton provided us with a valuable description last year). They claimed to be pilgrims but the capital P did not appear until the 19th century as a primary designation.



During the 10-year sojourn in Leyden under John Robinson’s compassionate and wise leadership, the community struggled to adjust to the seduction of a more tolerant culture, the younger generation less willing to remain separate. Longing led to resolve to relocate to a distant shore where they might live untainted by strangers. Plans were made by wealthy members to venture to a new Dutch colony across the seas, an “unpeopled” land. Contracts were signed with a Dutch trading company and merchants to secure the Mayflower and the smaller Speedwell to depart in the spring of 1620, to transport some 120 members. By the early summer supplies had not been secured by the merchants, deposits had disappeared and the separatists could only pay for half of the passage leading to just as many non-separatist strangers signing on.



The Speedwell proved to be unseaworthy so those passengers were taken into the Mayflower, already a miserable arrangement with insufficient food, beer and supplies, doubled up quarters and a late start for a three month westerly sail into frightening gale force winds. There was hardly enough provisions, most was consumed before the trip was half over, starvation, disease and death was rampant. The Mayflower Compact was written in this desperate situation, to band together against foreboding elements, as separatists and non-separatists, “into a civil body politic. . . to enact, constitute and frame. . . just and equal laws. . . for the general good of the colony.” In exasperating hours better nature prevailed and groundwork was set among the adventurers for civil consent to be instituted.



Upon sighting land in late November, still short of their destination of New Amsterdam, they scouted for the best locale in the arm of an extended cape and settled amidst ice and snow to a formerly inhabited clearing near a swamp. They learned later that this opportune spot had been abandoned by natives just a year before, due to an epidemic which had killed most of the Pokanoket peoples who lived there. “A virgin soil plague”, likely smallpox or influenza, had been transmitted by European traders. No sachem had the power to stave off the disease which killed over 90 percent of the native settlement. When the migrants learned of the plague they attributed it to God’s preparing the way for their welfare at the site they named Plymouth Plantation, after the port of their departure. From its inception it was an armed fortress and every settler carried a weapon.



III. Clash of Peoples and Cultures



There were primarily six nations among the eastern Algonquin peoples who shared a common language: the Pokanoket (later Wampanoags), Massachusett, Naragansett, Pequot, Nipmuc and Mohegan. The more western Naragansett and Mohegan nations had evaded the rampage of recent epidemics. They were professing new might and strength from gods that had spared them, leaving their weakened neighbors fearful of aggression. Skirmishes between warriors, kidnappings and the enslavement of captured neighbors resulted from border hostility but the preference was diplomacy, negotiated concessions and treaties to resolve disputes and solidify peace, always culminated with extensive ceremonies.



European traders were known to the native peoples for over 15 years prior to the first English settlement. Provisions, beaver and animal pelts were traded for metal tools, weapons and pots. In 1614, the abduction by Thomas Hunt and crew of 27 warriors who came on his ship with gifts to trade quickly spread as a hateful tale about the men with firing weapons who travelled in big ships. Hunt’s captives were either sold into slavery to the Spanish or taken against their will to England as evidence of the new mysterious land. The notorious Hunt kidnappings led the following year, 1615, to natives reciprocating by capturing a group of unsuspecting French traders, killing most and trading three into slavery. One native, Squanto, brought to England in servitude by Hunt was taught English and remarkably returned with traders in early 1621 to become a trusted translator and diplomatic courier. His subsequent efforts to undercut Massasoit, the Pokanoket sachem in tribal negotiations with the pilgrims led to his poisoning and death.



Natives who observed the appearance of the Mayflower kept their distance for months, fearing abduction or death. The presence of women and children and efforts to build strange wooden homes in clusters led natives to reconsider. Why would they settle at the site of horrifying sickness, death and sorrow? Were their gods fearless? The migrants, meanwhile, hungrily dug up caches of stored native corn which did not trouble the observers since they had no sense of personal property. The Pokanokets were willing to share what they had to demonstrate goodwill. Massasoit, a sophisticated diplomat, weakened by the loss of most of his warriors to the epidemic, set to watch and wait. The new migrants fearfully knew they were being observed from a distance.



In March 1621, Squanto was sent to propose a meeting and hostages were exchanged leading to a face to face conference between Massasoit and the pilgrim’s Governor John Carver accompanied by William Bradford. They exchanged gifts and a libation and offered friendship. Massasoit upon drinking the aqua vit broke out in a cold sweat. Tensions were high but an agreement with six points was reached that day. Parties resolved not to injure or hurt each other, to send any offender for punishment, to restore tools, to aid each other in the event “any did unjustly war” against one of them, to deliver confederates, and to leave their weapons behind when visiting. In his nation’s weakened state Massasoit had found a new ally. When pilgrims carried their muskets to a follow up ceremony even as the natives laid down their bows, Massasoit’s brother called them to respect the treaty. Firearms were then set aside, the treaty tested in its first hours.



Other native peoples were wary of the new settlers and allied to watch developments. In 1623, when Massasoit became deathly ill with typhus and was reported to have already died, Edward Winslow volunteered to visit the village to pay respects, finding Massasoit still alive and petitioning for medicine to restore his health. Winslow cooked up a pottage and Massasoit remarkably improved and the alliance was saved. A civil and diplomatic approach with natives continued to calm the waters and Winslow’s ability was lauded.



A new settlement at Wassagusett, north of Plymouth, was a disaster of poor planning and starvation. The village’s intrusion had provoked the Massachusett tribe, English hostages were being held and a rumor arose that natives were mobilizing against all English settlers to wipe them out. Massasoit warned of the danger and advised an attack before hand, seemingly a way to diminish his neighboring enemies who had taken advantage of his people’s weakened state. The settlers, with no reliable intelligence of their own, agreed to attack.



Miles Standish, the colony’s military leader, led an armed party to Wassagusett in 1623 and was told by the settlers that though the situation was dire, the natives had in no way been threatening. Some settlers were even living in round houses with the native Massachusett. Challenged face to face in a meeting over a meal, Standish attacked two native emissaries and killed seven warriors who had come with them. This provocative incident, fed by rumor, became known as the Wassagusett massacre, the first military incident in the clash of cultures. Massachusett natives fled to the west, taking their stories to Mohegan territory. Conflict developed among Plymouth settlers about the use of military means. Word spread among the native peoples that murder and massacre could be expected; if you were not an ally you were an enemy. In the face of their intruders, native peoples came to refer to themselves as “original people” or ‘true people.” In Leyden, John Robinson, the Scooby community founder, was quite troubled when informed of the violent actions against natives.



IV. Various Migrations



Back in England, after almost a decade of heightened civil unrest and persecution of those opposed to the authority of the English throne and church, a significantly larger and more prosperous band of puritan believers crossed the sea in 1629 to the new found land of promise. A royal charter as the Massachusetts Bay Company had been secured and a fleet of 11 ships with 1,000 migrants, hundreds of livestock and chickens, departed from England led by John Winthrop in the ship Arabella, landing in summer to what would become Boston harbor. During the 1630s over 20,000 migrants would follow to the eastern shore of the colony, fanning out to enclaves in the circle of the harbor and to outposts beyond the eastern plains to inlets and along a steady river running north to south to a large sound. The 1630s became known as the decade of the great migration, the first land stampede of our history. Plymouth plantation with its tiny harbor became a backwater, little more than 300 as thousands of new arrivals reached these shores. By 1638 settlers outnumbered natives.



Various forms of servitude in colonial New England stemmed from the culture and mores of both natives and settlers. Neither were slaving societies that relied upon mass labor for military, agriculture or public works. As noted, natives had slaves primarily as the benefit of a war victory, often incorporating those captured into their family units, especially women and children. Men who were slaves might also be given standing after some years of demonstrated trustworthiness and hard work.



The settlers brought with them lifelong servants as well as bonded servants in a contractual form of servitude. Slavery in the new settlements, as a justified form of property, grew out of political, social and economic developments, first as a result of outright war and then by colonial laws and judicial edicts. Later in the century slavery would become a major commodity in trans-Atlantic trade between England, the Americas and Africa. While the English settlers came with reliance upon a white servitude class, they readily accepted both servants and slaves of other races primarily for household labor in the new land. Settlers looked upon natives, marked by racial difference, as uncivilized savages living in an untamed wilderness who held heathen and magical beliefs. They would benefit as a servile class by civilizing Christian benefactors.



The constant flow and migration inland of settlers in the 1630s brought curiosity, wariness, consternation and fury within and among the native peoples of the area. Natives learned about the baffling notion of land ownership and sachems negotiated sales with eager settlers, at first for a few household items of trade and later for firearms and clothing, with little understanding of land value. Efforts by natives to stave off and concede to new arrivals did not stem the tide. The elders of the Bay and Plymouth colonies encouraged ( and evicted) newly arriving non-separatist strangers to move on to settlements west and south, leading to direct contact with all nations by the late 1630s. Recognition of the distinguishing characteristics between native peoples was evident but skin color was the defining reality. Natives were outsiders. Courts and laws began to define forms of social control and privileges in land purchases.



V. Violent Clashes and Slavery



The Pequot War of 1637 was the major development in the acceptance of slavery. Trade by the Bay Colony was extending to Dutch and other English colonies to the south and west. Clashes by new settlements in the west along the Connecticut River with native peoples included disputes over property and hunting rights, destruction of native crops by settler livestock, selling of alcohol and dishonest traders. In 1634, scores of the Pequot people, inhabiting what is now eastern Connecticut, died in a smallpox epidemic. The election of a new sachem led to a split with the Mohegans who then quickly allied with English settlers. Weakened to half their numbers, the Pequots felt cornered. A trader and founder of Wethersfield, John Oldham was killed in July of 1636, a killing attributed to Pequot natives and settlers called for punishment.



As tensions and rumors increased on the expanding frontiers, the role of separatist Roger Williams is valuable for our discussion (Harold Salzman in his recent Club paper cited Williams’ crucial role in fostering religious freedom). Expelled from the Bay Colony in 1636 for his heretical pronouncements, Williams ventured south with his followers to land purchased from Massasoit, adjacent to the land of the Pequots and Narragansetts. He had privately professed the necessity of what he referred to as “friendship” with natives as well as “civility and courtesy” since in his eyes they were not heathen. Williams was learning their language and seeking to understand their way of life and point of view. When it came to land issues, he claimed that they were more Christian than many settlers. Soon after his expulsion, however, he was petitioned by Bay Colony leaders to mediate their competing claims with natives, to seek an alliance with the Naragansetts and to convince the Pequots to lay down their arms, to cease raids and the taking of prisoners. The Pequots refused Williams’ offer of negotiated peace but the Naragansetts agreed to the alliance with the English, creating another significant division between the native peoples.



When the captains of several trading vessels were killed by natives in spring 1637, a united military party of the various settlements was sent south along the coast to attack the isolated Pequot tribe. Once again unconfirmed reports and rumors were fed by fear of the wilderness.



Coming upon the main Pequot settlement and fortress in May of 1637 near what is now Mystic, Connecticut, the united troops of the colonies, together with native allies, attacked and set them ablaze, shooting men, women and children who attempted to flee. At the end of the day over 500 Pequot natives had been massacred. Upon hearing the news Bradford wrote, “It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire… and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.”



Nothing intelligent can be said about a massacre. Settlers came to regard these actions not only as collateral to a just war but as a final way to solve the threat of the enemy.



The Pequot War brought new precedents. Justification about what to do with captives was acted on by the governing Bay colony court, namely as property to be sold into slavery for war expenses. Over 180 surviving women and children were sold within the colony and 124 men were sold and shipped out to Bermuda and the West Indies, lest they rise up and attack settlers. The surviving Pequot, some 2,000 in number, fled west and sought refuge with the Mohegan peoples though they were allies with the English. A fear of natives on the widening English frontier grew. Decades later courts were still ruling on runaway servants, now adults, bonded from the Pequot War.



With the onset of war, slavery became justified as a permanent and perpetual form of servitude. No contract or form of indenture was needed. Judicial edict began to solidify special colonial laws, joining Negroes and Indians as a different class, as property, deeded or otherwise. Such became an essential preface to the role of New England traders in the enslavement and transport of Africans to these shores. The civil contract was first and foremost for the settlers.



More extensive atrocities of war took place in the second generation, King William’s War in 1675-1676, pitting settlers with their native allies against other native peoples, losses by both sides in the thousands, the destruction of countless settler towns and a tragic diaspora of natives from our area. The prevailing rules of engagement had been set in the war of the first generation, the Pequot War. If we see our region’s heritage as the clash of peoples, one could surmise that our first civil war began within years of the settler’s arrival to these shores, more pointedly a series of wars and genocidal retaliations, which along with slavery has been lost in a darkened corner of our common history.



VI. Concluding Remarks



Historians have described three basic motives of European zeal to colonize the Americas in these early years: elements of fame, fortune and faith. Our English ancestors, separatists and non-separatists, were driven by a combination of destiny and righteousness, based on a covenant with God and a search for prosperity. What it meant to be a civil people, to provide for welfare in the face of an unnumbered enemy, to shape the common good, a commonwealth was being forged. We find formulations about just war, justified military action and the killing of civilians taking hold from the onset. Property rights came long before human rights in this civil contract.



One cultural historian described this period not as “good pilgrims and savage natives or dastardly pilgrims and innocent natives.” In the first decades of English arrival to our region migrants and natives could not peacefully live in the same territory due to divergent world views and ways of living, especially when an imbalance of populations and civil power increased.



Settlers had come with a quest to subdue an uninhabited wilderness. As colonies took root, a racial bias against darker skinned and uncivilized native peoples emerged. In the second generation, settlers founded what came to be known as praying towns where agreeable natives were clothed, their hair cut, a trade and domestic life taught as well as the ability to read and converse in English. They were to be civilized with the hopes that they would convert to and be matured in the Christian faith. The yoke of Christ was cited as a civilizing and humbling form of servant hood and social control.



In 1629, the Massachusett Bay Colony adopted a seal for the charter granted by King Charles I. Around the circumference were Latin words stating the “seal of the Society of Massachusetts Bay in New England.” The center depicts a native, clothed with leaves for a loin cloth holding a bow in the left hand and an arrow pointed downward in his right, depicting a gesture of peace. He stands on the land, two tiny pine trees to either side. The trail from his mouth read “Come over and help us.” The intent of the seal was to underscore the religious and economic benefits of colonization of the natives and land which the settlers were civilizing and creating into a commonwealth. Until recently this represents the prevailing interpretation of our history. The words stem from Christian scripture (Acts 16:9), where the Apostle Paul entreats missionaries to come over to Macedonia, crossing from what would be known as Asia Minor to Europe, to bring words of deliverance. The seal and subsequent revisions depict a native offering peace and seeking aid from the commonwealth.



In Slaughter House Five, Kurt Vonnegut, a US Army prisoner of war, recounts his survival of the bombing of Dresden in World War II and his effort to make sense of a world where massacres, on whatever scale, continue to occur. He exclaims to Sam, the publisher offering him the contract for his book, “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” The passionate impulse or strategy to finish off the enemy, to wipe them out, is a feature of war. All that might be said finally is that such an impulse and strategy is part of our earliest history, a legacy to be held in the light of day.

Read More

Yes! They built them here: Rolls Royce manufacturing in Springfield, Massachusetts

Logo on a Springfield Rolls

Prologue



Had you just returned from The Great War, say around 1919 or so, you would have noticed that the Wilson Administration’s haphazard efforts to rev up the economy to absorb the many doughboys being mustered out were having a negligible effect.  The economic first fruits of what eventually would be called “The Roaring 20s” were still far from ripe, and the sons of America’s great burgeoning middle class were coming home from Europe to marry their sweethearts and to have kids.



The members of their parents’ generation, born in the late 1870s and early 1880s, who may have served in the Spanish-American War, who suffered economic deprivation in the depression years of the “Gay ‘90s,” and who marveled at the American “Can Do” spirit that constructed the Panama Canal, did well during The Great War.  A great many companies, formed during the darker economic days of the late 19th Century, expanded and profited in the early 20th Century.  They were buoyed by the groundswell of trust-busting and prosperity that characterized the “Oughts” and the “Teens.”



The doughboys returned to jobs as farmers, factory workers, clerks, salesmen, and accountants. Some had money in their pockets…but all were suffering from two to three years of pent-up demand.  One savvy engineer in Detroit, a chap named Henry Ford, figured out how to meet that demand.  He devised a way to produce a four wheeled, self-propelled vehicle called a Model T, on a scale so efficient that the end product — a transportation appliance, if you will — started out being sold in 1907 at $850, but could be sold in the early 1920s for the princely sum of $290.

But if you were a member of the elder generation and fortunate enough to be of the ownership class, you were prepared to spend a great deal more on an automobile.  You could afford the best…and you knew that the name of “the best” started with a “P.”   You would choose either a Packard from Detroit, or a Peerless from Cleveland, or a Pierce Arrow from Buffalo.  These were cars of the highest quality in both their design and their construction.  Typically they cost somewhere between five and seven thousand dollars, depending upon the configuration of the car you ordered from the manufacturer.



But, if you were among the truly elect, let’s say from the class of American wealth who’d built the cottages of the Berkshires or Newport, those whose net worth was the envy of the world, you didn’t buy an automobile that started with the letter “P.”  Between 1921 and 1931, you could buy an American automobile with a double name, both of which began with an “R,” because Yes! They built them here.





Act One:  Satan’s Kingdom, November 1977



I have always had a passion for walking in the woods.  Not hunting, not fishing, not camping — simply walking.  I become lost in my thoughts or I spend time noticing little details of what’s bloomed along the path I’m following.  I find it soothing, as if trees themselves are absorbing whatever’s troubling me at the moment.  I always come out of the woods feeling at peace.



It was on a Sunday afternoon during November 1977 that I was on just such a walk in the woods neighboring the Farmington River in New Hartford, Connecticut, the eastern-most town in Litchfield County.  I was passing through conservation land in a section of town known as “Satan’s Kingdom.”  I don’t know the derivation of the name;  but if you were to stop at the post office in New Hartford to ask for “Satan’s Kingdom,” they’d direct you eastward through the hamlet of Pine Meadow, past the old Waring Blender factory, about a mile or two from the Canton town line.



It was a gray afternoon; pure November.  The sky was pewter, the leaves had fallen from the trees and blanketed the floor of the forest, and a myriad of gray trunks lined the rutted dirt road I was walking along.  The breeze had a nip in it and would carry a leaf or two in a swirl around my head.  But I was too busy to notice, choosing instead to mind my footfalls, making sure I wouldn’t trip on the frozen jeep tracks that had hardened in the road, leftovers from a late October rain.



There were no birds to sing in the treetops; they were long gone.  All you could hear was the rattling of oak leaves clinging to the branches that were buffeted by the wind and the babble of the Farmington River as it hurried on its way to the mighty Connecticut.



But hold on!  There was a hum down the road a piece.  Not very loud, mind you, but down around the bend, out of sight.  Sure enough, I saw what it was as I passed over a small rise in the road.  Down the gentle slope, coming slowly around the bend, I could see through the woods some kind of antique automobile, picking its way through the ruts and carefully avoiding the larger of the rocks embedded in the road.



It was a deep green, open touring car with two aboard.  The driver was seated on the wrong side of the car, and his passenger, a woman of a certain age bundled up in a wool coat and scarf with her hair tucked beneath a dark beret, came slowly up the rise to meet me.  I stepped aside and waited for them to pass.



The green automobile was no less than an ancient Rolls Royce, replete with wooden spokes and skinny little tires barely broader than the wooden wheels of a horse-drawn buggy.  It was a lengthy car, with a broad-but-empty back seat.  The driver, wearing a tweed cap and jacket, tugged at his brim with a gloved hand, acknowledging my stepping aside to allow him and his vehicle to pass.  His passenger stared straight ahead, not noticing me in the slightest.



They passed me by, continuing to pick their path along the right-of-way, and passed down the gentle slope on the other side of the rise.  I stood and watched them until the road took another bend, and they disappeared from view.



Months passed.  Winter came and went.  And the following spring, while attending a vintage car meet in nearby Avon, Connecticut, what do you think I saw?  The very same car with the very same couple, lining up with all the other old cars hoping to qualify for a ribbon from the local judges.



I approached the green car, screwed up my gumption, and spoke to the couple.  It was immediately apparent that the woman who’d failed to acknowledge my presence in the woods the previous November was far from impolite.  She was blind.



Her husband was a voluble fellow, who stepped down from his automobile and entertained my questions.  “Yes,” he told me, “this most certainly is a Rolls Royce — a 1921 Silver Ghost, in fact.  But this is no ordinary Silver Ghost, don’t you know.  This one was built in Springfield, Massachusetts.”



“Springfield?”  I asked, rather puzzled.



“Oh yes!” he replied.  “They built them here.”





Act Two:  Exposition



Frederick Henry Royce was the quintessential engineer.  He possessed an analytical and exacting mind and owned an electrical manufacturing firm of some modest success.  In was in his factory in 1904 that he built his first car…which he dubbed a “Royce.”  Within a year he’d sold one to an adventurer and bon vivant by the name of Charles Stewart Rolls, who was the classic salesman — boisterous, generous, “hail-fellow-well-met.”



Though cut from two different bolts of cloth, Royce and Rolls hit it off, and in 1905, the two decided to form a company to produce automobiles utilizing Rolls’ abilities to raise capital through his considerable personal relationships and Royce’s impeccable engineering skills.



In 1905 and 1906 the newly founded company produced 40 vehicles with four cylinder engines that produced an astonishing 20 horsepower.  In the autumn of 1906, Charles Rolls, considered by some to be a marketing whiz, decided to take four cars to America to drum up interest in its rapidly growing market for high-end luxury vehicles.



Rolls was driver and an automobile enthusiast, and during that trip, he took great delight in meeting Wilbur and Orville Wright, whose adventures at Kitty Hawk just three years before had captured the world’s imagination.  The encounter turned out to have more significance, though, than Charles Rolls realized.  He was absolutely smitten with what was then termed the “aero plane,” and within four years he was dead, Britain’s first flying casualty.



But Rolls was delighted by his reception in America.  He sold his first car immediately upon arrival.  The car had barely made it out of the cargo hold before it was sold and was shipped to Texas.  The second of the four was sold in quick time to a local resident in New York, and Charles Rolls hung on to the remaining two.  One appeared at the New York Auto Show, which engendered an order for four more cars and resulted in the creation of the entity that would become the Rolls-Royce American distributor.



But it was the non-auto show vehicle that made the most news.  Charles Rolls took his car to Detroit, where he met with William C. Durant, the general manager of Buick and Ransom E. Olds, the owner of Oldsmobile.  Durant had built a grueling test track for new automobiles.  Not a single car of the era could round the track for more than three hours before breaking down — not a Buick, not an Oldsmobile, not a Ford, not a Cadillac, not even a Stoddard-Dayton, which had been designed from 1906 to be America’s finest example of automotive engineering.  Durant suggested that Rolls try his luck.



The Silver Ghost not only broke the three hour mark; it went on to complete a full 24 hours before it motored away.  The news was electrifying.



The annual American sales of Silver Ghosts went from four in 1906 to 100 in 1913.  But the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 meant there were no more Rolls-Royce chassis to be had.  Instead, owners elected to rebody their pre-war cars, ensuring that they would keep up with the latest fashions.  Therein lies a huge difference between buying a luxury automobile in 1913, and buying a luxury car today.



Were you to walk into a Rolls-Royce showroom in those days, be it in London or New York, you would buy nothing more than a chassis with an engine, steering column, and wheels.  No body, no seats, no accessories.  And it wasn’t cheap.  You’d be plunking down about $10,000.  The corresponding cost for a Peerless, Pierce-Arrow, or Packard was about three thousand dollars less, and you’d obtain delivery of a complete car, just like the one you saw on the showroom floor.



The custom in Europe, including Great Britain, was completely different.  You bought a chassis from a manufacturer, and you took it to a coach builder.



There were coach builders in the United States, too.  In fact, some of the more successful ones were scooped up in later years by the American manufacturers themselves.  In the 1930s, Fischer Auto Body was acquired by General Motors.  Likewise, LeBaron was purchased by Chrysler.



But at the turn of the 20th Century, there were dozens of American coach building companies, each of which was eager to build you a body for whatever frame you had purchased.  In the case of Rolls, the locations of coach makers ranged from Amesbury, Massachusetts to Cincinnati, Ohio.  The most notable of the group was the Brewster Coachworks of Long Island, New York, a company that had started building horse-drawn coaches in the mid-19th Century.



After four long and bloody years, the guns across Europe fell silent.  Though victorious, the British had suffered tremendous losses, and Britain as a nation was exhausted.



Not so in the United States.  Yes, American men died in the fighting after the country entered the war in 1917, but the percentage of the men in the ranks who were killed or wounded paled in comparison to that of the British, the French, the Belgian or the German armies.  Before entering the war, the nation had begun to flex its industrial muscle, producing a soaring economy that barely broke its stride with the advent of hostilities.  And with the Armistice in 1918, America was ready to supply an exhausted Europe both with aid and with goods.



Henry Royce, whose partner had died in a plane crash eight years earlier, recognized that the American automotive market was so large that it exceeded that rest of the world combined.  He also realized that his chassis’ reputation in America had only increased during its four year absence from the market.  Lastly, his business sense told him that the price he’d established in the United States between 1906 and 1914 would yield a far greater profit were he able to avoid paying tariffs.  The only way to do that was to begin manufacturing Rolls Royces in America.



In 1919, Royce dispatched Claude Johnson, his general manager, to New York.  His mission?  To scout out an appropriate location to establish a manufacturing plant.  Johnson before the war had advocated the creation of such a plant, even to the point of renting space in 1913 from the Brewster Coachworks at their facility on Long Island.



This time, however, Johnson had even grander ideas.  He settled on a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, formerly home to the American Wire Wheel Company.  Springfield made great sense from a business standpoint, as the region was filled with skilled machinists and metal workers who had learned their trade in the armories and factories along the Connecticut River from Vermont to Long Island Sound.  The region, famed for producing everything from Columbia bicycles to Colt revolvers, from Royal typewriters to Winchester repeaters, was the Silicon Valley of its day.



Springfield was also equidistant between Rolls’ two largest markets:  Boston and New York City.  And the American Wire Wheel factory sat alongside a rail line, making it an ideal site for shipping chassis to coachbuilders.



In 1920, no less than Henry Royce himself, along with 50 British managers and foremen and their families, arrived in Springfield to set up the facility.  In short order, after hiring some 400 assembly workers, the factory produced its first Rolls Royce “Silver Ghost” chassis in early 1921.  The company stated firmly from the very start that the output of the Springfield factory was to be the equal of that of its Derby, England production plant. 



The first 25 rolling chassis were identical to those produced in England, in large part because they were constructed of parts manufactured and shipped from the Derby factory.  But as time went on, more and more of the content of the American-made Rolls Royces came from American sources.



By 1921, the Silver Ghost had grown in power and speed.  The engine had evolved from four to six cylinders, displacing 460 cubic inches, and making 80 horsepower.  It boasted a top speed of 70 miles per hour, the likes of which only a sports car like a Mercer Raceabout or Stutz Bearcat could attain before the war.



In 1925, the Springfield manufacturing facility made significant changes in the cars they were producing.  Unlike their British cousins, their engines now featured valve covers.  They adopted the use of drum headlights, sturdy American electrical components, and tubular bumpers.  But the most radical development was creating a car with the steering wheel on the left.  Even the mighty Rolls Royce, which had stubbornly resisted the move for four years, would finally bow to American tastes. 



Yes, many of Rolls Royce’s American customers engaged a chauffeur to maintain and drive their vehicles.  But the percentage of cars termed “self-drivers,” in which the owner him- or herself operated the automobile, was far greater than in Britain, and the figure was growing.  Having a steering wheel on the right-hand side, with a floor-mounted gearshift on the right blocking access to the driver’s seat (as was the practice in Britain), was now considered by American “self-drivers” an impediment to entry.



The year 1925 also saw two important corporate developments for Rolls Royce, one affecting their Springfield facility and the other affecting their factory in Derby.  In America, Rolls acquired the Brewster Coachbuilding Company, enabling the seven factory-owned showrooms in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, Hartford, and Troy, New York, and the sixteen independently owned dealerships around the country, to offer a standard line of bodies ranging from roadsters to sedans to sedancas, the classic chauffeur-driven design which cosseted passengers in closed comfort while the driver sat in the open, unprotected from the elements.



In Derby, 1925 saw the introduction of the Rolls Royce “New Phantom,” a model meant to supersede the Silver Ghost, which had been in production since 1905.  It was a thorough modernization, introducing an overhead valve, in-line six cylinder engine that was capable of producing 113 horsepower, mated to a newly designed three-speed transmission, and stopped by servo-assisted four wheel brakes.



It would be two more years until the tooling would become available to have Springfield begin the manufacture of “New Phantoms.”  But when they arrived in 1927, they were greeted with great acclaim.  A Phantom could run at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour.



With the booming American economy, the Springfield plant was producing 12 automobiles a week, and the public was clamoring for more.  They were now commanding $20,000 apiece.



But 1928 saw a weakening of demand.  American manufacturers like Packard, Deusenberg, and Cadillac were producing comparably powerful and equally luxurious cars at a much lower price.  Twelve automobiles per week drooped to nine per week.



Competition in Europe was equally fierce.  Rolls Royce on the continent was being chased by Hispano-Suiza, Mercedes-Benz, Bugatti, and Isotta-Fraschini.  By 1928, the “New Phantom,” introduced just three years earlier, was being eclipsed.  To counter their competition, in early 1929 Rolls introduced an ultra-high tech and thoroughly more sophisticated model dubbed the “Phantom II.”



And then the market crashed.



The nine-per-week production rate of Springfield “New Phantoms,” now termed “Phantom I’s”, dropped to just under three a week, and before long, it went down to less than one per week.



The estimated cost of re-tooling the Springfield factory to produce the Phantom II was thought to exceed one million dollars, and the demand for cars that cost $20,000 a piece had collapsed.  It was clear that given the state of the American economy, Rolls Royce would never recover the expense.



The factory closed its doors in 1931 and was soon sold, but the company honored the last 200 orders for their cars. By 1935, these cars had their coachwork installed on Long Island and were delivered to their customers. 



Today the factory still stands, and is visible from Interstate 290, a stretch of superhighway connecting I-91 to the Massachusetts Turnpike.  It houses Tite-Flex, a division of Smiths Tubular Systems, and its red brick walls have been painted white.  Ten years ago in a freak windstorm, the Tite-Flex sign was blown off the building, revealing the distinctive Rolls Royce logo that had been painted onto the brick surface in 1921.





Act Three:  Ask the man who owns one



There were many notables who owned the cars manufactured in the Springfield Rolls Royce factory.  Former President Woodrow Wilson owned one, as did the Guggenheims and the Bloomingdales.  But arguably the most famous owner of a Springfield Rolls was a fictional character invented by F. Scott Fitzgerald.



Jay Gatsby, the central figure of the novel The Great Gatsby, owned a 1922 Silver Ghost, a cream colored car that Daisy Buchanan was driving back to East Egg when she struck and killed Myrtle Wilson.



The most notable owner of a Springfield Rolls, however, was a fellow by the name of M. Allen Swift of West Hartford, Connecticut.  In 1928, Allen Swift was given a brand new Phantom Roadster by his father as a graduation gift.  Over the intervening years he put 170,000 miles on the car, driving it until October 2005, when Swift passed away at the age of 102.



When he died, Mr. Swift’s Rolls Royce, along with a donation of $1,000,000, went to the Springfield Museums, where today it stands proudly as the centerpiece of a museum display devoted to Springfield’s history as a center of automobile and motorcycle manufacturing.



M. Allen Swift, by the way, owned and operated his Springfield Rolls for more than 77 years. This is the longest amount of time any human being has ever owned and operated an automobile purchased new.





Act Four:  The Satan’s Kingdom Rolls Royce



Given Mr. Swift’s example, it appears that once you own a Springfield Rolls Royce, you become reluctant to part with it.  With the help of the current president of the Modern Car Society of the Rolls Royce Owners Club, a chap named Michael Gaetano of Hopkinton, Massachusetts, I’ve been able to track down that Silver Ghost I saw in the woods 32 years ago.



No longer green, it’s now red, but it’s still owned by the same fellow, John Parker III of North Stonington, Connecticut.  Sadly, his wife, Amy Morgan Parker, passed away in 2008 at the age of 77.  John bought his 1921 Springfield Silver Ghost in 1970, and last September he won best in class at the 44th Annual Bennington Antique and Classic Car Show.  As you’ll see from the picture I’m passing around, he's clearly proud of the fact that "Yes! They built them here."



Photo by Glenn Franco Simmons, used under Creative Commons License

Read More