Jazz for the Journey

Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the club by James Lumsden on Monday evening, March 23, 2015

Introduction

The brilliant American singer-songwriter, Carrie Newcomer, recently wrote that, “some of us come into this world with a note safety pinned to our shirts saying, ‘This one belongs to the song.’ For us music is as necessary as air or water. We live it, breathe it, drink it, dream it and chase it all our lives. For us there are moments when the song feels like the closest thing we'll ever know in this world to true communion.” Such is the case in my life whether the song starts in hardass rock and roll, gentle acoustic folk song, chant, string quartet, gospel or jazz: I was born to make music – and do not feel complete until “I’ve got the music in me.” (Bias Boshell, “I’ve Got the Music in Me,” 1973 performed by Kiki Dee.)



Knowing this, however, people continue to ask me, “Why are you so focused and concerned about jazz?” Specifically, what drives your current emphasis on a spirituality of jazz? The short answer is found in Ted Gioia’s stirring book, A History of Jazz, where he speaks of jazz as “an art music with the emotional pungency of a battle cry.” (p. 209) But such a brilliant quip only communicates with the cognoscenti– those who already know how to read between the lines of culture and spirit and do their own simultaneous translation – and I am not interested in musical Gnosticism.



Rather, I want to be clear why the music matters – to me – as well as the wider community. So this is one attempt to articulate a context for celebrating jazz: why it matters to me, what is going on with the music as an art form and some of the implications I find in both the sounds and feelings it evokes. The impressionistic jazz pianist, Bill Evans, said, “It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz into an intellectual theorem. It’s not – it’s a feeling.” Then he adds:

My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself  that he would not discover otherwise… a part of yourself you never knew existed. (http://jazz-quotes.com/artist/bill-evans/)

For me – as a person of faith who is also a musician – jazz is a uniquely American cornucopia of challenging contexts that creatively link the world of art to the hustle of the street. It is simultaneously cerebral and sensual. And it is grounded in a life and death struggle to redeem suffering with beauty, spirit and imagination. It is “an art music with the emotional pungency of a battle cry.” Louis Armstrong said, “You blow who you is.” Art Blakey said, “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.” And Dave Brubeck said, “There is a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously, where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.”



Over the years I have discerned three essentials for those who want to appreciate jazz:  syncopation, the rhythm of call and response and improvisation. When players bring their unique gifts, wounds, cultures and discipline to these three commitments, something stunning can take place.  Count Basie said that jazz improvisation is actually classical composition ginned-up to the speed of life. Conversely, traditional composition is improvisation slowed down so that it can be captured and imprinted on a solid page. Jazz guitarist, Bill Frissell, my favorite jazz guitarist, gets it right:  jazz is a place “where anything is possible – a refuge, a magical world where anyone can go, where all kinds of people can come together in safety – and anything can happen. We are only limited by our imaginations.”

Personal Context

In keeping with the importance the musicians of this art form place upon personal expression, let me first note the origins of my own jazz experience before unpacking the essentials of jazz appreciation. I am uncertain about the first jazz song I encountered. It could have been Henry Mancini’s theme song to the 1958 TV show, “Peter Gunn.”

But it might also have been the slightly undercover version of Gershwin’s “I’ve Got Rhythm” that was buried under the magic of America’s first prime time cartoon show, “The Flintstones.” Other early sightings would include “The Stripper “recorded by David Rose in 1958 and released in 1962 by MGM Records; Mancini’s “Theme to the Pink Panther” released in 1964; and Louis Armstrong’s version of “Hello Dolly” in 1964.  These were all pleasant, middle of the road, jazz influenced hits that extended into the 60s the creativity and popularity of jazz that was born in the 40s and 50s.



Clearly my heart was captured by jazz when the British band, Sounds Orchestral, reworked Vince Guaraldi’s 1962 composition, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” into a 1965 Top Ten recording of the same name.

Guaraldi had first composed this tune to flesh out an album based on the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim: "Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus."  Jobim, you may know, was one of the 20th century‘s most important jazz composers. As a Brazilian guitarist who helped popularize bossa nova (“new trend” in Portuguese) he left his mark on jazz masters like Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz and Herbie Hancock. With the staggering success of pop-rock’s “British Invasion,” the musical landscape was ripe for a jazz-meets-Beatlemania sound that combined syncopated rhythms with a melancholy melody. At three minutes and 20 seconds, “Cast Your Fate” evoked a sense of longing, a quest for solitude and a toe tapping familiarity that fit the mood of a nation encountering a cultural revolution. Ten months later, Guaraldi was back in my world with the songs he created for the “Peanuts” special on CBS:  “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” That same year, Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto won a Grammy for their interpretation of Jobim’s “Girl from Ipanema” and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass took the world by storm with “Whipped Cream and Other Delights.”  By 1966, the brilliant Cannonball Adderly – one time side man for Miles Davis and former music teacher from Georgia – had a massively popular hit with Joe Zawinul’s soul jazz masterpiece: “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

Three other early jazz-infused influences shaped my developing tastes including Van Morrison’s early 1970s work on: “Moondance,” “Tupelo Honey” and “St. Dominic’s Preview” – as well as both Herbie Mann and the Modern Jazz Quartet. I loved the soulful, cool sounds of jazz – especially with a groove.  And, truth be told, these early influences still shape my preferences. Over time I’ve matured and ripened, but I have no interest in jazz that aspires to the recital hall or simply strives to recreate the sounds of the 1930s and 40s. Rather, I  agree with journalist Ralph Ellison (author of The Invisible Man, who began his career as a jazz critic for Down Beat magazine) when he insisted that jazz must always keep one foot firmly planted in the world of the dance hall  and the other in the blues:

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically… In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live. (Living with the Music: Jazz Writings)

I need to feel the music I am playing – it needs to be incarnated – not overly abstract or esoteric. My current favorites include the cool geniuses of the 50s – Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk – the playful soul masters of the 60s and 70s – Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell and Dave Brubeck – as well as more contemporary artists of the 21st century like Bill Frisell, Joshua Redman, the Cinematic Orchestra and Esperanza Spalding. And let me note that I am still crazy after all these years about both Gil-Scott Heron and Bud Powell, too.



Now please note that although my preferences and roots are highly subjective, they are essential to state at the start of this analysis.  For in jazz appreciation as in liberation theology, praxis and context are as important as action and reflection.  Such is the gift of post-modern criticism, too:  we are, as Feuerbach said, what we eat.  Our roots shape and define what we see and trust. So at the outset I want to be clear – especially for the jazz critics among us – that my foundation and perspective on jazz begins with pop and blues.  If you were raised on the sounds of Goodman, Dorsey and Ellington, you might start in a different place – and use different audio examples.  Again, let’s be clear:  I know that my subjective influences will shape all that follows.  C’est la vie, c’est la guerre, c’est la jazz.

Three Jazz Essentials

That said, I believe that there are three essential commitments to understanding and appreciating jazz of any era or style: syncopation, call and response and improvisation. The freedom and discipline of jazz requires a playful approach to each – and each essential must be woven into the fabric of the identity of the band (and community) and the soul of the audience. You see, you can’t really play jazz all by yourself. That is called practice – or wood sheddin’ – because jazz needs partners and allies – players and audience – give and take. Allies help us go from the obvious to the innovative. Partners help us learn how to listen and then respond with compassion and creativity. And give and take keeps it real and immediate. Together players and audience spontaneously create touch stones to help us back on track when we lose our way. The community of sound provides nourishment and refreshment so that everyone involved has strength for the journey.



The first insight about syncopation in jazz is that it is essentially a feeling. Dizzy Gillespie wrote in his book To Bop or Not to Bop that jazz is essentially a rhythmic thing – and if you don’t get the rhythm right – then your music won’t swing. Duke Ellington made it explicit: “It don’t mean a thing, if you ain’t got that swing!  So one way of describing syncopation is playing on the offbeat: it is finding and then emphasizing something in the rhythm of the song that is always real but mostly just below the surface. It cuts beyond the obvious and pushes us towards new ways of moving. Syncopation is what you feel when you move or dance to the groove – it is what helps you experience the music with your senses rather than simply notice it or think about it.  What’s more, playing, feeling and honoring the offbeat is how we move from the abstract to the embodied – the place where the idea becomes real – it is how the song becomes useful and meaningful in our everyday lives because it moves us! It touches us. It awakens our senses.



Syncopation starts with the offbeat - and the more you notice the offbeat in jazz, the more you become open to the offbeat in others things like people, spirituality, politics, food, culture and all the rest. The offbeat in jazz is wedded to the blues – and the dance floor – where it began. And while the way syncopation is used in contemporary jazz is increasingly more sophisticated that in the early days, it always reconnects to the offbeat of the blues lest the music lose touch with real people and the pulse of their lives.  So consider these audio examples:

• Most of us start to hear a song with the melody – and that’s a fine place to begin – but the melody in only one dimension. After following the melody, try to feel were the drummer and bass player put the beat. And for the really adventurous, try to tap out the beat with your hand on your leg or table.


• We’ll start with Cannonball Adderly’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” – it feels like the blues or Black gospel – it has a steady back beat. Can you feel it?


• Now try the wild rhythms of Turkey that Dave Brubeck learned while in the Army in his masterpiece: “Blue Rondo a la Turk.”

Syncopation, for the jazz musician, is a way to bring our personal off beats up to the surface so that we can follow its unique groove in a playful way. This is the first commitment.



The second is the rhythm of a call and response. Because jazz has its roots in New Orleans – a place saturated in the experience of the African American slave church – it is not surprising that a lot of songs take up the structure, rhythm and ebb and flow of a slave preaching event. Here’s the background: on the Sabbath a lay preacher would share a reading from the Scriptures by memory and then offer his or her insights while the gathered congregation encouraged greater truth and passion by offering shouts of joy or sorrow, words of hope and encouragement -- even correction and sometimes songs, too.



Much the same thing happens in a great deal of jazz where first the piano plays a tune and then the trumpet responds to the call. Or a vocalist sings a riff and the band plays back a response. Or the drummer makes a sound and then leaves a silent hole as a response that pushes the song into greater creativity.



This call and response, rhythm and sound structure in jazz is not only grounded in the African American church tradition – even the most secular jazz artists use it – but is also a uniquely American principle in our democracy. Winton Marsalis, director of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, is explicit on this point: the call is given and the players and community are asked to respond as equals. There is no hierarchy in the call and response groove. There is patience, of course, and timing and beauty; but all who hear the call can respond with encouragement, correction or challenge.



Marsalis likes to say that it is not coincidental that America’s only true musical art form, jazz, should also mirror our democratic aspirations.  At the heart of American democracy, he says, we not only play with syncopation, we honor the call and response rhythm of a balanced life.  First we learn to listen – then we learn to wait rather than react – and then we respond but only if we have something creative or interesting to say.  Jazz call and response is not about filling the space with selfish noise, but honoring what the traditions started by sharing your own unique gift. Like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie before him, Marsalis is a profound ambassador for both jazz and democracy: listening, waiting and refusing to merely react are crucial to both.



That’s why jazz musicians insist that the key discipline to playing well and creatively with others begins with listening. They understand that because anything is possible in a song, they do not sound off first – they do not rush to fill the silence – nor do they insist on their own way before the call is even offered. And God forbid they walk all over someone else’s playing and improvisation. First, they listen for the call.  Jazz cats call this waiting and listening honoring the tradition. It involves lots of practice in private and then lots of patience on the band stand. Nobody likes a bully or a braggart when you’re blowing tunes – so listening is primary. One writer put it like this:



Contingency – the possibility that things could be other – is not a thing to be minimized, feared, controlled, resisted or eliminated in jazz. Jazz musicians play with it, on it and off it. They embrace it. It is what brings a heightened anticipative tension to every performance – among and between the players – and between the players and the audience. No one is quite sure where things are going to go… (because the call and response) of the unknown is embraced and entered into.

Waiting allows a given call the room to mature; it gives the response the space needed for discernment, too. And then after enough listening – and some authentically sacrificial waiting and discernment – the people want to hear back from you – but not in a reactionary way. What the jazz response requires is for you to share your own unique gift to the song creatively and beautifully. 

Jazz believes that we all have something special to offer even if we don’t yet know what it is. Simultaneously, it insists that nobody wants to hear you simply repeat another’s gift: your response to the call must be unique; it must honor the tradition and then make it new and beautiful. Here are two examples:

• Listen to how John Coltrane plays with this principal in “Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. First he states the old way – honors it – and then makes it new.


• Art Blakey actually captures the tradition’s call and the congregation’s response with his arrangement of Bobby Timmon’s classic: “Moanin’.”

First there is syncopation – the swing – then there is call and response – listening, waiting and creating something unique and new out what is old.



Then there is improvisation which marries these first two commitments into a playful third. Duke Ellington used to say that improvisation is composition in the moment; some cats do it in their studio, others on the bandstand. But all types of composition require a great deal of private practice.  Jazz artists call this “wood-shedding “where you work out the kinks in private.” Wynton Marsalis insists, however, that you never play jazz in the wood shed. Jazz is always played in a group for an audience.  And in that group you listen and respect one another, give and take and respond to what’s happening in each moment and then try to help everyone involved make the best music possible – including the audience.



Bill Frissell put it like this: more than any other type of music, jazz is a place “where anything is possible – a refuge, a magical world where anyone can go, where all kinds of people can come together in safety – and try anything they want and nobody gets hurt.  It’s a place where anything can happen together and we are only limited by our imaginations.”



That is what keeps the music fresh and fun and always real. Jazz theologian Robert Gelinas writes that:

Improvisation is what allows jazz to exist in a continual state of renewal.  In jazz, the same old song seems like a new song every time it is performed because it is a music of traditions and freedom. Much of the fun comes from hearing how new artists will take old standards and make them fresh as they add their own voices… (for) in jazz improvisation is expected… when you take the stage, you are there, in part, to take the risk of composing in the moment – and that is one truth about improvisation. (Finding a Groove, p.33) 

Let me unpack this last essential before sharing a musical example:

• First, improvisation is not standing up and playing whatever you want to however you want whenever you want – that is chaos – and it is selfish.  In jazz, what you compose on the spot has to fit and move with the flow.  The jazz artists of the 50s hated the Beat Poets like Ginsberg and Kerouac mostly because these poets didn’t practice. They didn’t work out their kinks in private. They thought improvisation was license to say and do whatever they felt like, but improvisation is never selfish or chaotic.


• Second, improvisation is not unbridled freedom without awareness of the consequences; rather, it is “the desire to make something new out of something old” coming from two Latin words – im and provius – meaning “not provided or not foreseen.” (Gelinas, p. 33)


• And third, improvisation plays with form treating it with respect but never becoming trapped by its limitations.  Think of what the masters of Be-Bop did to the Great American Song book of the 40s and 50s.  First they mastered the old form – that’s the respect.  Then they changed the tempo - or extended the bridge ad infinitum – or inverted the harmonies in non-traditional experiments – there’s the freedom. Chord substitutions and structural transformations can shift the feel and sound of a song dramatically. 

One scholar put it like this:

Improvisation requires creativity for jazz is not about copying but about creating – and creating not just one time but every time.  Improvisation is about playfulness and curiosity, experimentation and adventure… all within the boundaries of tradition and freedom.  (It is reputed that the great Louis Armstrong – one of the art form’s true geniuses – said, “Look we ALL do ‘do re me’ but YOU have to find the other notes for yourself.”  

You have to improvise. So here’s an example by the vocalist Measha Bruggergoman:

• She takes a tune from the new American song book, Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and plays with it.


• Notice how she changes both honors the original but adds her own unique chord substitutions and melody alterations to make it a folks song into a sophisticated work of art.

Conclusion

These three distinct but inter-related commitments – syncopation, the rhythm of call and response and the playful in the moment composition of improvisation – each try to make something new from out of an older tradition:



Jazz presses forward into a new future, offering an intercultural horizon of hope.  The racial and cultural difference and blending typical of jazz culture also points to the possibility of a racially and ethnically reconciled community.  The musical “creolization” does not fit the black-white binary that served the interest of the status quo and in that jazz is subversive.  (Hetzel, p. 17) Jazz points us towards the possibilities of life – personally, artistically, spiritually and politically – and that is an exciting way to live. As the Hebrew prophets made clear: without a vision, the people perish.  Jazz helps me discern the possibilities for vision in real time in a way that is respectful, beautiful and democratic. And that’s why I love it.

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Never On Sunday: A visit to one of the Club's antecedants

"The Dinner Party" by Henry Sargent, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, April 27, 2015

A few years ago, Ann and I were wandering through Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts when we noticed a handsome painting of a group of 18 men at what was clearly a nineteenth century dinner table, attended by two man servants. We jokingly commented that it looked like an historical version of our Monday Evening Club.

Well, be careful about speculation! Some research showed that the painting was of a dinner meeting of Boston’s Wednesday Evening Club.  The artist was Henry Sargent, a Boston artist who was born in 1770 and died in 1845. The painting was done in 1821.  Sargent’s paintings are known for giving intimate glimpses of Boston’s homes in the early 19^th century and this painting certainly does.

All this, of course, then led to curiosity about the Wednesday Evening Club of Boston – and that is the subject of my talk tonight for it is a fascinating look at our forebears and the similarities with our Club that make for what seemed to me to be a captivating story.

Fortunately, for us, a committee of Club members was appointed in 1857 to “consider all and sundry matters appertaining to the interests of the Club,” and much of the following comes from this committee’s report.  

As originally instituted in 1777, the Club consisted of nine members, all bachelors in their twenties. 

Three were from each of the professions of Law, Medicine, and Divinity.

The founding members in 1777 were as follows (and I include them because several of the names are familiar). The lawyers were Israel Keith, Thomas Dawes and George Minot. The physicians were Thomas Welsh, Nathaniel Appleton, and William Greenleaf. And the clergy were John Eliot, John Bradford, and William Greenough.  John Quincy Adams, Charles Bullfinch, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were later members.

Thomas Dawes, entering the Club as a lawyer, was of particular interest to me because, of course, of Henry L. Dawes, a founding member in 1869 of our Club.  I was not able to trace the family connection but I strongly suspect it exists. Thomas Dawes (and my house is just off Dawes Avenue in Pittsfield) was a patriot who fought in the Revolution.  His house was plundered by the British when they evacuated Boston in 1776. After the war he lived next door to John Adams and he worked primarily as an architect and designed many notable Boston buildings. He also held several state government positions and was a good friend of John Hancock.

The first expansion of the Club was about 1800 with the addition of three Merchants. Then in 1830 or so two or three other gentlemen were added whose occupations did not fit any of the categories.  They were called Gentlemen at Large. In 1836 there was another enlargement by adding one to each of the occupational categories, as well as the at-large, for a total of 20 members. It was noted by the Committee in 1857 that there had never been a strict adherence to the membership rule so that by 1857 there were 23 members.

When it first began in 1777 the Club met year round, but with the introduction of the railroads bringing increased travel and the custom of spending the summer in the country, meetings were suspended in July and August.

The meetings were weekly, starting on the third Wednesday in October and continuing until the Wednesday preceding the last Wednesday in May, with approximately thirty meetings a year.

The assignment of weeks was alphabetical, but hosts could exchange with each other for more convenient dates.  The custom also was that the host could invite one or two friends.

The Committee also noted that graduation from Harvard College was originally a condition of membership and that this condition was once considered “as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians.” But the Committee’s report goes on to note “this condition was originally intended to intimate simply that the Club should be composed of persons of education and generous culture; and as Harvard College was at the time of founding of the Club the chief, almost the only, source of this culture to the people of this community, the condition took this form. But this relation between Harvard College and our community no longer exists. Our city has become more metropolitan, the place where a large portion of the talent and culture of New England concentrates. Through the growth of our city there may be frequent inducements to disregard this membership condition in the future.”

The report goes onto say “If in the ranks of professional distinction and literary culture the sons of Harvard cannot hold their own in this community, it is not desirable that they should hold it in this Club by an exclusive condition.  Your Committee therefore thinks this condition should be suffered to sink into oblivion, should, in fact, be considered extinct.” So there! (Yale must have felt encouraged.)

The Committee of 1857 next turned its attention to the question of adding new members since “we can easily name a number of distinguished or agreeable gentlemen (I’m not sure that’s an either/or proposition) whom it would be pleasant to have associated with us.” Furthermore the Committee wanted the Club to be large enough so there would be fifteen to eighteen at every meeting. But there was no interest in making so large as to “lose its harmony of spirit and character, and the feeling of intimate acquaintance and strong personal regard now produced by its limited number.”

The final recommendation concerning membership was to enlarge the Club to twenty-five. Without altering the character of the Club this would enable the adding of two or three gentlemen “in the meridian of life, whom we should be glad to have associated with us, and also to do what is perhaps more necessary – to increase the youthful element in the Club by the election of gentlemen who are, by a score of years or more, the juniors of the present members.”

So far as meetings went, this diligent Committee carefully specified that “the person at whose house the Club meets shall be expected to be ready to receive at half-past eight o’clock; and the supper, which shall be simple and without meats, may be served at any time after half-past nine, and is always to be served by ten o’clock.”

Thus ends the report of the 1857 Committee, but further research at the Boston Public Library (and a thank you to the librarians there) turned up a report written by the Club’s then secretary, Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, about the Club’s Centennial Celebration in 1877.

Lothrop was a noted New England clergyman – a Harvard graduate, thank heavens, pastor for forty-two years of the Brattle Square Church in Back Bay Boston. He was also a member of the Boston School Committee for thirty years.

Incidentally, the Brattle Square Church began in 1698 as Congregationalist. It moved into a new building in 1772 designed by our architect friend Thomas Dawes. John Hancock gave one thousand pounds toward its construction. Early parishioners included John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, John Adams, and Abigail Adams. (Clearly these instigators of the American Revolution were close acquaintances.) The Church became Unitarian in 1805 and dissolved in 1878.

The connectedness among all these people is fascinating and the temptation to keep researching and digressing goes on and on.

But, back to the Club’s Centennial celebration in 1877.

In thinking about an appropriate commemoration it was found difficult to find a theme because the Club “has not aimed at action or influence outside of itself, and has done nothing but give a large amount of pleasure to its members and no small increase of that intellectual improvement which comes from intercourse with intelligent and cultivated minds.”

It was noted that members, past and present, included one President of the United States (John Quincy Adams), two Ambassadors to the Court of St. James, one Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (Holmes), four other noted court justices, two members of the Senate, and four members of the U.S. House of Representatives – one of whom was speaker, two speakers of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and three Mayors of Boston.

One of the first questions to be settled was the date for the celebration. The first meeting of the Club had been June 21, 1777, according to the diary of John Quincy Adams. However, June 21, 1877, would fall on a Thursday which in the Committee’s words would “do violence, so far as the day of the week is concerned, to the whole history, usage, and name of the Club.

It also seemed inconvenient to celebrate in June when so many would be away from the City for the summer, particularly since Harvard’s graduation in 1877 did not fall close to June 21.

So, with marvelous practicality it was decided that there probably had been some weeks of preparation before the first meeting and therefore it would be reasonable to consider May as the real beginning of the Club and have the celebration in that month.

Having imaginatively resolved that weighty question, attention turned to the mode of celebration.

There was thought of a dinner at the Parker House or some other hotel with a prominent member as speaker to furnish the “intellectual and literary treat of the occasion.” That idea was speedily abandoned.

To quote from the report: “A dinner of thirty or thirty-five gentlemen [obviously no women] is of necessity rather stiff and formal, not to say sometimes a very stupid and tiresome affair, affording little liberty or opportunity for any real free, unconstrained social intercourse, and is therefore entirely incongruous and out of harmony with the habits, customs, and usages of this Club at ordinary meeting. It was felt that the members of this Club, if they found themselves seated at a long table with a magnificently variegated bill of fare before them would feel, as a Club, so queer and strange and out of place, that they could not possibly have a good time together.”

So it was decided that the Centennial meeting would be held at the home of their member Nathaniel Thayer, 70 Mt. Vernon Street. (He was a noted banker, railroad developer, and philanthropist – Thayer Hall at Harvard is one example of his generosity.)

Guests were to assemble punctually at eight o’clock. After fifteen minutes for gathering, there would be a member to speak from each of the traditional membership categories in the Club.

Half an hour would be given to each with the understanding that “however entertaining, instructive, or eloquent, the person designated to speak may be, he is not to occupy the whole of the half hour, but much so restrain himself as to leave eight or ten minutes so that others might put in a word if the spirit prompts.”

After the speeches the guests adjourned to Mr. Thayer’s dining room where, our faithful secretary noted, “it was soon determined that the ice cream had not melted, not the oysters grown cold, though it was a full hour beyond our usual time for partaking of these refreshments.”

And so this Club whose existence had spanned that of the United States, and whose members had significantly participated in the major events from the Revolutionary War, to the writing of the Constitution, to the War of 1812, the Abolitionist Movement, through the Civil War celebrated its one-hundred years.

The celebration was summarized by the secretary thusly: “Everyone who had been present felt it had been a goodly gathering, and cherished the conviction that they had been loyal to their ancestry, had done justice to the memories of the founders and fathers of their association, and had launched the Club upon its second century under auspices whose quickening influences would bear it onward to the close of the century, making it in the future, as in the past, an honorable and useful element in the social life of Boston.”

And the odd postscript to this talk tonight is that reasonably diligent research has found no further reference anywhere to the existence of the Club.

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La Moria Grandissima: the Black Death of the 14th Century

Presented to the Club by David T. Noyes on Monday evening, Dec. 1, 2014

Current news reports are filled with alarms of the Ebola virus. In the recent past, we have been warned about SARS, AIDS, Mad Cow Disease, Lyme disease, and multiply drug resistant bacteria such as MRSA. But tonight, I’d like to take you back 670 years to the mid fourteenth century to the most infamous scourge of all time—La moria grandissima. This is what the medieval Europeans called the Great Mortality, medieval Muslims named the Year of Annihilation, and modern history refers to the Black Death.



First, some definitions. The incidence of a disease is the number of new cases of a disease that occur over a defined time period. An epidemic, then, is defined as occurring when the incidence of a disease escalates beyond what would normally be expected in a given population.  The term pandemic means that a given disease has extended to more than one continent.



There are Common Source Epidemics, usually coming from a contaminated water or food source. This was the case of the cholera outbreak seen in Haiti after the catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake in January of 2010. Or many of you may recall the Pittsfield, Massachusetts “Beaver Fever” Giardiasis outbreak over the three months beginning November, 1985 through January of 1986, when there were 703 confirmed cases of the disease originating from the contaminated City reservoir. (As an aside, Harold Hutchins did a paper of the same title that year—but, true to Monday Evening Club tradition, the subject turned out to be a discussion of the pre-American Revolution trapping industry in the upper Midwest!)



But, the topic tonight is Host-to-Host Epidemic. These are infections that are transmitted from person to person—either directly (such as the common Flu) or through a vector. A vector is an organism that serves as the intermediary, transmitting agent of the pathogen (such as mosquitoes, fleas or ticks).



The reservoir is the organism that sustains a pathogen for the long term. In this case, consensus is that the Plague originated amongst marmots living along the steppe in Central Asia in what is now Kazakhstan, the Gobi desert of China and the northern Himalayas. Marmots are related to prairie dogs and are part of the squirrel family. They burrow and live in underground nests. They weigh 6 to 15 pounds and their fur is widely prized for its use in making warm, attractive clothing.



Enter the vector.  In this case it’s the Indian rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopsis.  As with mosquitoes, only the female bites the host and can spread the infection. This flea seems to prefer rodents, which is why it so easily spread from the marmot population to the ubiquitous Black rat, Rattus rattus. But as the local domestic rat community dies off, the fleas’ alternative become whatever warm blooded mammal is in the vicinity.



The black rat likely first evolved in India, sometime before the last Ice Age, 2.6 million years ago. It can weigh four to twelve ounces and has incredible powers of reproduction. It is also know for its agility. It can jump three feet from a standing position, fall from a height of fifty feet without injury, scale a vertical wall, and squeeze through a hole as small as a quarter of an inch. The word rodent derives from the Latin verb, rodere, meaning “to gnaw.” Rattus can eat its way through lead pipe and adobe brick.



And what makes the flea such a vicious and effective vector? In an uninfected flea, the blood it withdraws from its host goes directly to its stomach, satisfying its hunger. But in an infected flea, plague bacteria build up in the foregut, producing a blockage. This means that no blood is reaching the stomach so the flea, chronically hungry, bites constantly. Because undigested, infected blood can’t get through the blockage in the foregut, the flea proceeds to vomit plague contaminated blood as it bites one host after another, thereby spreading the disease. Considering that fleas can jump several feet, the rapidity of the spread of infection is easily explained.



Also, this flea can survive for six weeks off a host—on clothing or food shipments for example—long enough to travel hundreds of miles by sea or overland.



It is also interesting to note that there are over thirty-one different flea species capable of transmitting plague. (By comparison, of all the mosquito genera, only the Anopheles is capable of transmitting Malaria).



Of course, not all diseases become epidemics. As old hosts die off or become immune, the microbe requires new hosts to continue reproducing. It’s possible, then, that in a small town everyone could acquire the disease in such a short time that the process could die out. Historical records seem to indicate that in human populations, the critical mass is about 250,000 people. Thus major epidemics do not seem to occur until cities expand to this density.



Plague is caused by a rod shaped Gram negative bacterium—Yersinia pestis.  It is so toxic that as little as one organism can result in infection.  It has been said to be able to kill most mammals, including camels and lions. But there are also a number of animals resistant to the infection including black bear, skunk and coyote. Most of the time Yersinia pestis and the rodent kingdom live in a state of uneasy coexistence. Animals continue to get sick and die, but there are enough partially resistant rodents to sustain the bacterial population in the community. This phenomenon is termed enzootic.



There are three human manifestations of plague:

A bubo

1. Bubonic Plague is the most common. Within a two, to six day incubation period, the classic bubo, which is a large rapidly expanding growth, appears. A bite in the lower extremities will likely result in the bubo appearing in the groin. Upper-body bites will result in buboes under the arms or on the neck. These can be quite large, severely painful, and physically deforming. Often, victims described hearing a squishing, gurgling sound coming from the bubo as though some alien life form were alive within them.



The buboes may spontaneously rupture and then drain an especially foul smelling fluid. Medieval chroniclers referred to this as the stench of the Black Death.



Contemporary accounts also describe agitation, confusion, staggering gait, high fever and delirium.



This form of plague, if untreated, carries a mortality of 60 percent. The few survivors were quite fortunate in having an immune system capable of handling the bacteria.

Blackened feet of a victim

2. Septicemic Plague occurs when the bacteria proceed to the blood stream. Under these conditions, the blood vessels break and leak blood under the skin turning it deep purple or black--hence the origin of the term “Black Death.” These were known as “God’s tokens” because their appearance meant the victim had developed a fatal case of plague. The untreated mortality for this form of the disease is 100 percent and usually occurs within three to seven days.



3. Pneumonic Plague is the most virulent form of the disease. As the victim begins coughing a bloody froth, the aerosol droplets are highly infectious directly from person to person, avoiding the need for any vector at all. This form carries a 100 percent mortality rate as well—often within hours of developing the cough.



Common nursery rhymes, which have been handed down through the centuries reflected the times:

Ring around the rosies,
A pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes!
We all fall down.

Rosies refer to rosary beads—an effort to ask for divine intervention against the disease. Posies suggest the need for flowers to mask the terrible smell. Ashes were all that was left of a burnt corpse. And to fall down, of course, meant to die.



The mystery of what causes plague was finally discovered in 1894 during a reemergence of the disease in China (sometimes referred to as the Third Pandemic).  Alexandre Yersin, for whom the bacterium is named, was a protégé of Louis Pasteur. He was sent to Hong Kong at the request of the French government to investigate the disease outbreak. He was the first to identify that: “the pulp of the buboes always contains short, stubby bacilli." And perhaps as importantly, he discovered that the same bacteria were present in rodents, thereby outlining, for the first time, a possible method of transmission.

             

So, let’s set the stage for early 14th century. Sometime around 800, Europe entered what’s known as the “Little Optimum”—a period of global warming. Average temperatures increased by over one degree Celsius. Warm weather turned even marginal farmland to productive use. England and Poland became wine-growing countries.  As agricultural productivity increased, living standards rose, and populations increased dramatically. Between 1000 and 1250 the population of Europe tripled. The Continent contained at least 75 million people. It would take four to five hundred years for parts of Europe to regain those population levels following the catastrophe of the Black Death.



Furthermore, as populations grew, trade flourished.  In the year 1000, an Italian merchant had virtually no chance of doing business in England. By 1280 a trader could travel a reconnected European land route through Flanders or through Germany to the Baltics. Or, by water via Gibraltar, to the busy port of London. From the bustling ports of the two rival sea powers of the time, Venice and Genoa, merchant vessels travelled to Alexandria, Aleppo, and Tyre (southern Lebanon), searching for sugar, camphor, ivory, ebony, wax, ambergris, or muslin.



Genghis Kahn, whose name translates as “Emperor of Mankind,” had conquered China and Central Asia in the previous century. His children and grandchildren inherited the Mongol Empire for the Tartars, including all of China, most of Russia, Central Asia, Iran and Iraq. They set up a communications network consisting of messengers capable of traveling 100 miles a day for weeks on end and slower commercial caravans and armies marching to and fro across vast distances. These maneuvers helped to hold this vast empire together.



The recently publicized exploits of Marco Polo informed Europeans of opportunities for buying treasured goods imported via the Silk Road trade route to the Far East. Thus, merchants were inspired to sail through the Bosporus, and on to the Crimean peninsula in southern Russia so as to have access to caravans bringing goods from the cities of Samarkand, Merv, and the emerald city of Hangchow.



But early in the 14th century, the weather changed dramatically throughout the Continent and Asia. Known as the “Little Ice Age”, this change created hardship conditions including scarcity of food resources throughout Europe and central Asia. It is generally thought that what is now referred to as the Black Death, originated near Lake Issyk Kul, Kyrgyzstan, which was a bustling trading center along the route to China. This hypothesis suggests that the Tartar herdsmen were forced out of their traditional pastureland by the climate change in a desperate search for new grazing land. They found themselves on the northern steppe, exposed to the endemic marmot population with its plague carrying bacteria. From the herdsmen, the plague would have spread to Arab, Italian, or Central Asian merchants, Tartar soldiers, or Chinese laborers.



And so the rise of the Mongol Empire and the burgeoning development of the global trading economy, allowed Y pestis to overcome the vast distances and small populations that had previously provided a firewall to its global spread. Each oasis resting spot for caravans likely had a supporting cast of fleas and rats attracted by the abundance of foodstuffs needed to satisfy hundreds of travelers and their horses



From here eastbound travelers could pick up the fast road to China (an eight to twelve month trek); westbound travelers found their way back home via Caffa (now Feodosiya) on the Crimean peninsula.



In 1266, when the Genoese first arrived in southern Russia, Caffa was a small fishing village. Eighty years later, seventy to eighty thousand people called Caffa home. Items for trade included silks from Central Asia, Sturgeon from the Don River, slaves from the Ukraine, timber and furs from the Russian forests to the north. The deep water port was perfectly situated to take advantage of the burst of globalization. And the legendary Genoese mariners were happy to provide the skills required to bring these goods to the West. The port of Caffa was held under a grant from the Mongols.



This arrangement was highly advantageous to the Mongols as it provided a direct link to Italy’s largest commercial center and encouraged trade across all corners of their vast empire. However, tensions and disagreements were a common feature of the commercial relationship, arising predominantly from their religious differences. The Italians were devoutly Christian and the Mongols had been practicing Islam since the 1200s. Furthermore, the Mongols considered the Genoese haughty, proud, and duplicitous.



In 1343 at the Crimean town of Tana, on the mouth of the Don River, tensions turned to violence. A fight broke out between locals and the Italians that left one Muslim dead. Faced with the threat of execution by the Mongols, the Italians fled to Caffa. Here they were given sanctuary. The people of Caffa refused to let the Tartars in and, in the face of such defiance, the Mongols decided to lay siege to the city.



By 1346, the first reliable accounts of plague appear in Russian reports on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Within a year the disease arrived at the Crimean Peninsula. When the Tartar army suddenly found itself succumbing to this strange, new disease in huge numbers, it resorted to catapulting the infected corpses into the besieged city, in what is thought to be the first incidence of germ warfare! It was written that: “rotting corpses tainted the air, poisoned the water supply and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one man in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army.”



By the spring of 1347 the dying and decimated Tartar army faded back into the hillsides, leaving the remaining, living Genoese finally free to sail from the harbor of Caffa, bringing the pestilence of the Black Death with them. Europeans had no way to know that they stood on the edge of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history.



Any ship leaving the Crimea had to pass through the Dardanelles and stop at Constantinople—the wealthiest city in Christendom. Thus, sometime in the early summer of 1347, the plague bearing Genoese arrived in the harbor. By the fall of that year there were reports that the city was becoming emptier and emptier as the number of graves increased. Some contemporary estimates suggest that 90 per cent of the city population perished. Royalty was not immune — Ioannes IV, the Byzantine emperor, lost his 14-year-old son to the disease.



From here the plague followed the trade routes. One strain swung northward through Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. A second went southward toward Egypt and the Middle East. A third found its way to Cyprus. And a fourth to Sicily, which is where Plague enters the historical record in Europe.



A local Franciscan Friar, Michele da Piazza, wrote: “In October 1347 twelve Genoese galleys put into the port of Messina.” Apparently, nothing about the vessels seemed suspicious. But almost immediately people began to fall ill. And in ways that no one in Messina had ever seen before. Friar Michele described: “a sort of boil…the size of a lentil, erupted on the thigh or arm, then the victims violently coughed up blood, and after three days of incessant vomiting for which there was no remedy, they died. And with them died not only everyone who had talked to them, but also anyone who acquired, touched, or laid hands on their belongings”.



Messina quickly expelled the Genoese, but it was too late. The contagion had been set loose. These merchant ships were captained by men of innate greed who had personal financial stake in the cargoes they were carrying. And so, despite holds full of dead and dying sailors, their ships continued to sail from port to port selling their wares—spreading disease along the way.



It was the Venetians who developed the process of quarantine—derived from the Italian word for forty. They made ships stay in a restricted area of nearby islands for forty days as a means of clearing their crew for arrival. Of course, forty was a completely made up number and probably derived from multiple biblical references.



It took all of two months for the disease to travel the eighty-one kilometers from Pisa to Florence where the Black Death is well described. One author wrote: “such was the multitude of corpses that huge trenches were excavated in the churchyards in which the new arrivals were place by the hundreds, stored tier upon tier like ships’ cargo till the trench was filled to the top.” Another described the pattern as layering bodies like layering cheese on lasagna. In an age when nothing moved faster than the fastest horse, the Black Death spread throughout the entire European Continent in just a few years.



Sometime in the summer of 1348, the plague jumped the English Channel from Calais to Weymouth, either by soldiers returning from the Hundred Years War or with the aid of commercial shipping vessels. By the following year, half of the English population had perished.



As the plague spread eastward across France, Germany and Switzerland in the summer of 1348, people began to believe that the mortality was a Jewish plot. Christians claimed they were dying because their wells were being contaminated with Jewish plague poison. Plague was not a vengeful act of God or of infected air, but of an international Jewish conspiracy aimed at achieving world domination.



Between the summers of 1348 and 1349, huge numbers of Jews were exterminated. Some were marched into public bonfires, others burned at the stake. Still others were beaten to death or stuffed into empty wine casks and rolled into the Rhine. In some localities, killings were preceded by show trials, but often Jews were killed simply as a preventative measure.



As we have seen so many times over the centuries, blameless, innocent Jews became scapegoats because of superstition, ignorance and fear.



Multiple factors contributed to the rapid spread of the Black Death.



The Great Famine, the collective name for the crop failures associated with the dramatic weather changes of the early 1300s, was devastating throughout the region.  A half million people died of starvation in England, and 10 to 15 percent of the population of Flanders and Germany succumbed for lack of food. Thus young children from this era, who did survive, would have been in their forties and fifties at the time of the Black Death. Their immune systems, likely permanently impaired by the poverty of their nutrition, made them much more susceptible to the disease.



Population centers were producing much more garbage than they could dispose of. The situation was exacerbated by the influx of peasants forced off surrounding countryside by crop failures and loss of pastureland. They brought their livestock with them adding to the unsanitary conditions. Pigs, cattle, chickens, goats, and horses roamed city streets as freely as they did the countryside. Workers in outdoor slaughterhouses would simply pour the blood and offal of their carcasses into the gutters of the city streets where they plied their craft. Of course, this led to an explosion in the population of black rats.



Another urban polluter was the full chamber pot. No one wanted to walk down two flights of stairs, especially on a cold or rainy night. Medieval citizens were supposed to shout: “Look out below!” three times before draining the pots contents out the window. The stench of the city streets was notorious.



Personal hygiene was likewise a contributing factor to the spread of plague. The Greeks considered cleanliness a virtue, and the Romans thought hygiene so important that their public baths looked like temples.  Yet, somehow, early Christians considered bathing a vice. St. Benedict said: “To those who are well, and especially the young, bathing shall seldom be permitted”. Saint Francis of Assisi considered God’s water too precious to squander on bathing. Undressing and changing clothing were also infrequent. One can imagine how easy it was for fleas to thrive under these circumstances.



Yet another factor underlying the spread of plague was war. Few centuries have been as violent as the fourteenth. In the decades before the plague, the Scots were killing the English; the English, the French; the French, the Flemings; and the Italians and the Spanish — each other! In those savage decades, the nature of battle grew bloodier, civilians were attacked more frequently and property destroyed more routinely — all helping to make the medieval battlefield and soldier more efficient agents of disease. Larger armies produced larger concentrations of dirty men and debris, which, in turn, attracted larger populations of rats and fleas.



Not only did the plague seem to strike out of nowhere, but it caused death on a scale that no one had ever seen, no one had ever even imagined was possible. Death not in the hundreds or thousands — but in the hundreds of thousands — in fact millions. Today the Earth’s population is 7.1 billion. The equivalent loss of life calculates to 2.8 billion people! Or, more parochially, the current population of Berkshire county is 130,000 people — so the equivalent loss of life would be 52,000 people dead in this county alone!



According to the Foster Scale, a measure of human disaster similar to the Richter Scale, the medieval plague is the second greatest catastrophe in recorded history. Only World War II produced more death, physical destruction, and emotional suffering says the Canadian Harold D. Foster, the inventor of the scale. Harvard historian David Hebert Donald also ranked the Black Death high on the list of history’s worst catastrophes. However, the greatest tribute to the destructiveness of plague comes from the Atomic Energy Commission which used the medieval pestilence to model the consequences of all-out global nuclear war. According to the commission’s Cold War-era study of thermonuclear conflict, of all recorded human events, only the devastation of the Black Death comes the closest to mimicking “nuclear war in its geographical extent, abruptness of onset, and scale of casualties.”



But this is ancient history, I hear you saying. The Black Death couldn’t repeat itself. We have vaccinations for such deadly diseases as Yellow Fever, Measles, Anthrax, and Influenza. Small Pox has been eradicated from the planet (except for the reserve samples held by the CDC in Atlanta and the Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow—oh, and the six vials of virus accidentally discovered unprotected at the NIH this past summer). Yet, we continue to squander antibiotics thereby promoting resistant bacteria. Might we someday not have any effective drugs to treat such infections? And just suppose, that as the unheard-of-before AIDS virus emerged in 1980, that it could be transmitted by a mosquito. Or imagine that the Ebola virus mutates so that it can be transmitted by airborne particles like the common cold. This is really nothing more than Darwin’s evolution in action. It’s certain to happen sometime—will Medical Science be up to the challenge before it’s too late?



Material for this essay was derived from the following sources:

The Great Mortality by John Kelly

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

Plague and Peoples by William McNeill

Viruses, Plagues, and History by Michael Oldstone

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The Great Commoner: William Jennings Bryan and the US presidential campaign of 1896

Presented to the Club by Roger B. Linscott (date of presentation unknown — sometime in the 1960s or 1970s). Roger was, for many years, the associate editor of The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield's daily newspaper. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing in 1973, and died in 2008 at the age of 88, having been a member of the Club since 1950. We are indebted to Roger's daughter, Wendy Lamme, for a treasure trove of Roger's Monday Evening Club papers.



This paper is principally the story of a political campaign. But no member of the Club need tremble for fear that our unwritten injunction against political topics will be breached. Just as a statesman has been defined a dead politician, so can history be pictured as the politics of yesterday. The presidential campaign I propose to discuss is not the one that engaged our attentions so thoroughly last fall, but rather a campaign far enough removed in time to be labeled history rather than politics — so far removed, in fact, that no person here tonight is old enough to have known at first hand the enormous flood of passion and prejudice which it unleashed throughout the land.



To me, the presidential contest of 1896 has always seemed the most exciting of all our presidential campaigns, and in many respects the most significant as well. It drew a dividing line through the nation's history; it marked the last stand of agrarianism against an inexorably rising industrialism; and it marked the dramatic emergence of an arresting new personality bursting like a meteor on the American scene. This political meteor was, of course, William Jennings Bryan — Bryan the Boy Orator, the Great Commoner, the young crusader from the prairies of Nebraska who, in one magnificent flight of oratory, expressed so powerfully the dissatisfaction of the economically disenfranchised that he was catapulted overnight from obscurity to fame and, very nearly, into the White House.



It is difficult for us today to understand the tremendous impact that Bryan made upon America in that fateful year. Our judgment of him is too heavily weighted by his later follies and failures. He lived too long; he talked too much; he ran for president too often; he embraced too many foolish causes. When he finally died in 1925, it was in Dayton, Tennessee, where he had just suffered his last and most ignominious defeat, in the celebrated Scopes trial, at the hands of Clarence Darrow. His pathetic attempt to defend Bible Belt fundamentalism against the forces of scientific progress had destroyed what standing he still had with the new generation. H. L. Mencken spoke for most of the intelligentsia when, on the day after Bryan's death he wrote: "He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming halfwits. His whole career was devoted to raising those halfwits against their betters, that he himself might shine."



But the Bryan of 1896 was not a tired old man battling vainly against enlightenment. He was a dazzling new star in the political firmament, a popular messiah whose appearance was hailed by his fanatical followers as something very akin to a second coming of Christ — a spokesman for millions of Americans who had no other spokesman. Vachel Lindsay caught the electrifying spirit of his emergence when he wrote: "Prairie avenger, mountain lion, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan / Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun / Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West." Pitted against the combined forces of respectability — the businessmen, the educated, the monied, the influential — he conducted single-handedly the most spectacular political campaign in U. S. history. And defeated though he was, the bulk of the populist ideas he espoused eventually became the law of the land.



One cannot begin to understand the passions that were aroused by the 1896 presidential campaign without first understanding the bitter political and economic conditions that gave rise to them. For many of us, this understanding is impeded by the persistence of the myth of the Gay Nineties. Gaiety there was for many Americans — for those who were favored by economic circumstances. It was the decade when the introduction of the pneumatic tire brought the bicycle craze into full flower, when the clean-cut drawings of Charles Dana Gibson were establishing the "Gibson Girl" as the American ideal, when Weber and Fields were convulsing audiences on Broadway and DeWolf Hopper was reciting "Casey at the Bat" up and down the land. It was the decade when "robber barons" of American industry were building fortunes beyond the dreams of avarice — when the Vanderbilt mansions (one of them a three million dollar replica of the Chateau de Blois) occupied six blocks on Fifth Avenue — when steel magnate Charles Schwab was building a Riverside Drive chateau with 75 rooms and 40 baths while Clay Frick was preparing to top them all with a Fifth Avenue castle costing 17 millions. It was the decade when Mrs. William Astor was emerging as the unquestioned empress of New York society, aided by her social prime minister Ward McAllister, who once said that "a fortune of only a million dollars is respectable poverty" and who originated the term "The 400" to describe the number of persons who could comfortably be accommodated in Mrs. Astor's house.



But for many if not most Americans, the 1890s were far from gay. In the teeming slums of the big cities, on the marginal farms of the South and the West, it was a decade of grinding poverty, intensified by the worst economic depression the nation had ever known. Politically, it was a decade of extremism and discouraging bitterness. Throughout large areas of the nation there was a rising feeling of unrest, of deep irritation and dissatisfaction — a mood of discontent fed partly by the passing of the frontier (which had been a safety valve in the past) partly by the oppressive policies of the increasingly powerful trusts and monopolies, and partly by the mounting gap between extremes of wealth and poverty. The business depression which had begun in 1892 was so far advanced by the end of the following year that some 15,000 [corporate] bankruptcies involving liabilities of nearly one-half billion dollars had taken place. In the South and the West there was a wave of bank failures; and in the cities and mill towns a demoralized horde of nearly four million persons looked futilely for work.



Closely linked to these economic miseries in the public mind, if not in fact, was the money question, which had been simmering for a quarter-century and was now ready to boil over. It came to a head as an issue between the free coinage of silver and the single gold standard; but this was merely what showed above the surface. More basically, it was a battle of geographic sections and economic classes; a contest for power between the agrarian South and West against the industrial East. In the broadest terms, it was another chapter, indeed the final chapter, in the historic tug-of-war between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian concepts of government.



Essentially, the money question was an issue of deflation versus inflation, of hard money versus soft. It became an issue of gold versus silver simply because the amount of currency the government could issue under a gold standard was limited by the amount of gold available to redeem the paper money. Between 1860 and 1890 world gold production, for various reasons, remained steady; but during the same period the population of the United States doubled. This meant that the number of dollars in circulation, on a per capita basis, dropped precipitously, a fact which pushed prices down and interest rates up. This worked to the advantage of the creditor classes, who had dollars to lend or contracts payable to them in dollars. It worked to the disadvantage of the debtor classes by making it harder for them to get dollars with which to pay their debts. In the classic example of the period, the Western farmer who obtained a $5,000 mortgage immediately after the Civil War was borrowing the equivalent of 2,500 bushels of wheat — but when it came time to pay it back he had to produce 5,000 bushels because of the increase in the value of the dollar. The mortgage-holder in the East had lent him a 50-cent dollar and received back a dollar worth twice as much.



In short, the farmers and debtors felt that the shortage of gold produced a situation in which there was too little money to go around. The solution they proposed was the free, unlimited coinage of silver, which they felt would increase the supply of money without risking reckless inflation of the sort that might result from printing greenbacks unsecured by bullion of any kind. In this, quite naturally, they were supported by the silver mine owners of the West, whose production was increasing by leaps and bounds and who wanted the government as a customer. It was a peculiar alliance but an effective one. The farmers gave fervor to the silver cause, and the miners gave the financial backing.



In 1873, before silver agitation became strong, Congress had demonetized silver by passing a coinage act which failed to provide for the continued production of silver dollars. Although this was later pictured as the "Crime of '73," perpetrated by "the gold conspiracy," it stirred little controversy at the time. By 1878, however, the silver miners needed to expand their market, and in that year they pushed through the Bland-Allison Act requiring the U. S. Treasury to mint at least two million dollars worth of silver a month. When this failed to increase the money supply appreciably, stronger measures were demanded; and by 1890 the stage was set with a cynical deal by which Western Republicans agreed to support high tariffs if their Eastern colleagues would line up with silver.



The result was the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which ordered the Treasury to buy 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month, paying for them with treasury notes which could be redeemed in either gold or silver at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury.



When the Panic of 1893 gripped the nation, Democratic President Grover Cleveland blamed it primarily on this law, which had shaken the confidence of many business interests in the monetary system and thus induced them to convert their assets into gold. Accordingly, the President called Congress into special session that summer and demanded the act's unconditional repeal. By adroit use of his patronage powers to win over wavering votes, the President had his way. The Washington Post termed it "a great personal victory for President Cleveland against the most formidable obstacles," and the New York Times pictured his "iron firmness" as all that saved the nation from fiscal ruin. But the victory irreparably alienated the silver wing of his party; and he was denounced as a tool of Wall Street by many who felt the panic was a bankers' plot against silver.



(On the very day the President called Congress back to Washington his immense personal courage was demonstrated by a dramatic episode that did not become a matter of public record until after his term ended. A few days earlier, a growth in the roof of his mouth had been diagnosed as malignant by the White House physician, and an immediate operation was decided upon. Because Vice-President Adlai E. Stevenson was a silverite, any knowledge of the President's grave condition would have caused incalculable panic in the money market; and so, with only a handful of persons privy to the secret, Cleveland went to New York and boarded a friend's yacht, ostensibly for a pleasure cruise. While the boat steamed at half-speed up the East River on June 30, two of the nation's ablest surgeons removed the entire upper left jaw, replacing it — after a second operation some weeks later — with a vulcanized rubber jaw so efficient that neither his appearance nor speaking ability were impaired by the ordeal.)



The repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was a victory for the conservative "hard money" forces, but it worked no economic magic. The panic continued, and the drain on the nation's gold reserves became more alarming than ever. The drain had begun under Harrison's administration, partly due to the demand for gold to be sent abroad to meet unfavorable trade balances resulting from the prohibitively high McKinley tariffs. It had been augmented by the fact that holders of silver certificates issued under the Sherman Act were demanding that they be redeemed in gold. By the time Cleveland took office, the gold reserve had dwindled well below the $100 million level established by custom, and by the end of 1893 it was down to $75 million. To make matters worse, when the President and his Secretary of the Treasury, John S. Carlisle, tried to meet the situation by selling bonds for gold, the purchasers of the bonds simply cashed in treasury notes and drew out gold with which to pay for their subscriptions.



Before the crisis passed, the gold reserve had dipped as low as $41 million. Worse, in the eyes of many Democrats, the Cleveland administration had been forced to go three times to the New York bankers, principally the house of Morgan, to sell its bonds. To the silver men in the party, such traffic with the money-changers of Wall Street was intolerable.



As if this were not enough for the overburdened president, the federal surplus which had caused concern four years earlier had become a deficit which caused even more concern. And when the Cleveland administration sought to bolster federal revenues with a two percent tax on incomes above $4,000, the tax was declared unconstitutional by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court. Senator Sherman spoke for most Republicans in contending that the court had saved the nation from "socialism, communism and devilism," but to millions of less favored Americans it seemed [as expressed in a New York World editorial] "another victory of greed over need."



[Editor's note: Linscott wrote a marginal note on the paper at this point: "Joseph Choate, Stephen Field. David Brewer gave the decision." Presumably he paused here to make an ad lib aside to the Club about the Berkshire County connections involved in the case. Joseph H. Choate, the New York attorney who argued the case against the tax before the Supreme Court, built a summer residence in Stockbridge called Naumkeag, renowned for its gardens, and is buried in the Stockbridge cemetery. Stephen Field, a Supreme Court justice appointed by Abraham Lincoln, was one of the nine children of David Dudley Field, a Congregationalist minister in Stockbridge. And a fellow justice, David Josiah Brewer, was Stephen Field's nephew.]



If 1893 was bad, 1894 was worse. Unemployment reached a new high; bread lines lengthened; farm prices continued a downward spiral; strikes were frequent and generally fruitless. From the West came pathetic little armies of "commonwealers" and hoboes in search of an outlet for the grievances, and at times they engaged in disorders with police and local officials. To Washington, also, came "Coxey's Army," a ragged assembly of unemployed who marched east from Ohio under the leadership of "General" Jacob S. Coxey, a man of considerable means who was regarded as a radical eccentric for proposing that public works be undertaken to relieve unemployment and restore purchasing power. His "army," numbering nearly as many reporters as unemployed, was generally regarded in the press as more comic than significant; and when they arrived in Washington, Coxey and his lieutenants were promptly jailed for walking on the Capitol lawn and displaying banners without a permit. But the desperation that this pathetic army reflected was widespread, and talk of civil war was even heard. In Colorado, Governor Waite was quoted as saying "I am prepared to ride in blood up to my bridles."



[Editor's note: The following three paragraphs are crossed out by Linscott on the typescript, presumably to reduce the paper to a reasonable speaking length, but are given here in the interest of continuity and supplementing the historical details:



[Barely a week after the arrest of "General" Coxey, the mounting class antagonism boiled over again with singular bitterness, this time at the Pullman Palace Car Company's "model" company town of Pullman, Illinois. The trouble originated with the refusal of Mr. [George] Pullman to listen to employees' grievances, but it soon became a far-flung battle between the Railway Managers' Association and the American Railway Union, an organization of 100,000 workers headed by the able and dedicated Eugene V. Debs. In every state and territory, Debs' men paralyzed transportation by refusing to handle Pullman cars, and in Chicago mobs seized and burned hundreds of cars. Finally, when the strikers derailed a mail train in defiance of a court injunction obtained through the efforts of U. S. Attorney General [Richard] Olney (a former railroad counsel) President Cleveland sent an Army regiment into Chicago over vigorous protests from John P. Altgeld, the liberal governor of Illinois. After further disorders Debs was jailed for contempt of court, order was slowly restored, and the strike was broken.



[Today it is apparent that Cleveland was ill-advised in the Pullman crisis by Olney, who was more interested in breaking the strike than in protecting private property. At the time, however, the President was solidly backed by the nation's press, which echoed approvingly his contention that "if it takes the entire army and navy of the United States to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered." Nonetheless, the fact that the strike was defeated by an unprecedented use of court injunctions, and by perverting the Sherman Anti-Trust Act into an anti-labor act, caused deep concern among liberal and labor elements.



[Together with the general economic and fiscal dislocation, this helped produce a devastating Republican sweep in the mid-term elections of 1894. The rout vindicated Speaker [Thomas B.] Reed's jubilant prediction a few months earlier that "the Democratic mortality will be so great next fall that their dead will be buried in trenches and marked 'unknown' — till the supply of trenches gives out."]



The succeeding winter, when the panic reached bottom, was the blackest of all — indeed the blackest since the Civil War. To a friend, the burdened President wrote: "Mrs. Cleveland and the babies are well. God be praised for that! I often think that if things should go wrong at that end of the house, I should abandon the ship."



[Editor's note: A full page, covering the 1894-1895 period, is missing from the typescript at this point, presumably also crossed out and discarded by Linscott in the interest of time, along with a few lines crossed out on the next page that deal with the resolution of the Venezuelan crisis of 1895.]



Such was the desperate situation in the election year of 1896. As the time for conventions approached, the central question was whether the silver Democrats would desert to the Populists, who had polled an astonishing vote of one million and one-half in the mid-term elections, or whether they would take over control of the party and run their own kind of Democrat. By the time the convention was held in Chicago, it was evident that the silverites rather than Cleveland's "sound money" wing would be in charge. The farmers of the South and West, flashing silver badges and carrying silver banners, took control from the opening gavel and held it. Cleveland and his followers were outsiders looking in.



But the silverites at the convention needed more than an issue; they needed a candidate, and none seemed to be at hand. What the silverites must have, commented the New York World on the eve of the convention, "is a Moses. They have the principle, they have the grit, they have the brass bands and the buttons and flags, they have the howl and the hustle, they have the votes and they have the leaders so-called. But they are wandering in the wilderness like a lot of lost sheep because no one with the courage, the audacity, the magnetism, and the wisdom to be a real leader has yet appeared among them. The opportunity is here; the man is lacking."



Less than 12 hours after this statement was published, the silverites' "Moses" appeared on the scene in one of the most dramatic episodes of American political history.



William Jennings Bryan had come to the convention with no national following whatever. He was not even the darkest of dark horses. His private notion that he might become the Democratic standard-bearer would have been deemed ludicrous if he had expressed it aloud. At the age of 36 — only one year older than the minimum prescribed for the presidency by the Constitution — he was a political unknown — a small-town lawyer and editor who had served one term in Congress from Nebraska and who had nothing more than a local reputation in his home state as a fluent speaker on the silver issue. Indeed, as a member of a contested delegation, he had experienced considerable difficulty even obtaining a seat at the convention.



On the second night of the convention, however, he managed to get himself included in a list of four delegates scheduled to speak on the money question as part of the debate on the party platform. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for. Fully aware that this was his challenge to greatness, he contrived to be the last of the four speakers.  It was a sweltering June night in Chicago, and the smoke-filled convention hall was jammed with nearly 20,000 noisy, milling delegates and spectators. But as Bryan rose to speak, something in the handsome young orator's manner sent a thrill through the sweating mob. The shouting suddenly subsided as his remarkably rich and resonant voice filled the huge hall.



"Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Convention," he began, "I would be presumptuous indeed to present myself against the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened if this were a mere measuring of abilities, but this is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty — the cause of humanity."



In mellifluous, strikingly balanced phrases — phrases that he had tested time and time again at free silver meetings in grange halls and at country crossroads throughout Nebraska — Bryan then proceeded to document the grievances of the farmers and the working man, evoking a crescendo of cheers with each new sentence, until finally he threw down the challenge: "We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!"



And then came the famous, superbly conceived peroration: "If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."



It was not a great speech in the sense of being an orderly intellectual exposition. It was not a well-reasoned statement of the case for bimetallism. It was pure oratory, pure emotion. But its effect was tremendous. As one of the more perceptive observers, correspondent Harry Thurston Peck, described it, "He spoke with the utmost deliberation, so that every word was driven home to each hearer's consciousness, and yet with an ever-increasing force, which found fit expression in the wonderful harmony and power of his voice. His sentences rang out, now with the accent of superb disdain, and now with the stirring challenge of a bugle call . . . The leaderless democracy of the West was leaderless no more. Throughout the latter part of his address, a crash of applause had followed every sentence; but now the tumult was like that of a great sea thundering against the dikes. Twenty thousand men and women went mad with irresistible enthusiasm.



Such as the effect of the Cross of Gold speech, one of the great orations of American history. This was no trumped-up demonstration of the sort that commonly features political conventions. When the oration was over, it was three-quarters of an hour before the wild, hysterical crowd could be brought under control. The man and the hour had met; Bryan's nomination was assured.



The Republicans, meanwhile, had met with sublime confidence at a convention dominated by Marcus Alonzo Hanna, the Cleveland coal and iron baron who was the closest thing America has ever had to a national political boss. A personification of big business in politics, Hanna had found the perfect protégé in his friend, William McKinley, whom he had saved from bankruptcy some years earlier and who was now serving as governor of Ohio after a Congressional career distinguished by his advocacy of higher protective tariffs. Blunt and rigorously practical, Hanna had been grooming McKinley for the presidency since 1890, billing him as "the advance agent of prosperity" and sending him about the country in a private railroad car to show himself to the people and to the Republican bosses. For his part, McKinley was an apt pupil, a man of high personal principle and statesmanlike manner who, in the words of William Allen White, went about "like a bronze statue determinedly looking for his pedestal." All told, Hanna spent more than $100,000 of his own money on the grooming, and it proved to be money well spent. At the Republican convention, McKinley was nominated on the first ballot and backed by a platform unalterably opposed to the free coinage of silver.



It is hard to convey the intensity of the presidential campaign which followed. The money problem — or the "battle of the standards" as it was promptly dubbed — was the most emotionally charged issue since slavery, and it cut ruthlessly across party loyalties. Silver Republicans walked out of their party's convention; "sound money" Democrats formed a party of their own; even the Prohibitionist Party split into hostile gold and silver camps. To the gold-standard advocates, it seemed almost a question of the survival of private property. To the silverites, it was a modern version of Christ against the money changers, of God against Mammon.



"It was a fanaticism like the Crusades," William Allen White later wrote in describing the free silver movement. "Indeed the delusion that was working on the people took the form of religious frenzy. Sacred hymns were torn from their pious tunes to place to give place to words which deified the cause and made gold — and all its symbols, capital wealth, plutocracy — diabolical. For the thousands who assembled under the schoolhouse lamps believed that when their cause won, the millennium would come by proclamation. They sang their barbaric songs in unrhythmic jargon with something of the mad faith that inspired martyrs going to the stake."



At first the Republicans were sublimely confident that McKinley would carry the day. Despite the zealousness of the silverites, Bryan's obstacles appeared insurmountable. The Democratic Party had been split down the middle, with Cleveland and most of its eastern leadership opposed to Bryan. The business community, the press, the clergy, the voices of respectability everywhere, were solidly behind the Republican "sound money" cause. But as the disquieting reports of Bryan's popular support spread eastward, the conservatives began to become alarmed. Confidence gave way to fear, and fear to blind hatred in what became the most bitterly fought campaign since Jackson's time. Bryan became, in the eyes of panicky conservatives, a communist, an anarchist, and worse.



"Probably no man in civil life succeeded in inspiring so much terror, without taking life, as Bryan," reported the Nation magazine. In New York, the money capital, he was scathingly villified in the press and from the pulpit. The Tribune described him as "that wretched, rattle-pated boy, posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness . . . apt at lies and forgeries and blasphemies and all the nameless iniquities of his campaign against the Ten Commandments." The Rev. Thomas Dixon called him a "slobbering demagogue whose patriotism is all in his jawbone" while another prominent New York cleric, the Rev. Charles Parkhurst, declared: "I dare, in God's pulpit, to brand his doctrines accursed and treasonous." The Rev. Cortland Myers of the Baptist Temple in Brooklyn charged that the Democratic platform was "made in Hell." Theodore Roosevelt pictured Bryan and his followers as being philosophically "in hearty sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves and fought one another with stone-headed axes and ate the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros." And when Bryan was labelled by his admirers as the "boy orator of the River Platte," Republican Senator Foraker drew howls of glee from his audiences by describing the River Platte as "six inches deep and six miles wide at the mouth."



If the election had been held in the summer of 1896, Bryan probably would have won. But by early fall, the aroused and badly frightened Republicans had marshaled far more money and manpower than had ever been seen in a presidential campaign before. Mark Hanna set up headquarters in New York and systematically tapped banks, insurance companies, railroads and trusts for campaign contributions on an unprecedented scale. The larger banks were assessed one-quarter of one percent of their capital funds; Standard Oil alone contributed $250,000; and the total amount raised to fight Bryan was estimated at upwards of seven million dollars. McKinley himself waged what the correspondents labeled as a front-porch campaign, remaining at his house in Canton, Ohio, and addressing scores of delegations which came to see him, their fares paid by the Republican campaign committee. But his efforts were supplemented by an army of some 18,000 Republican campaign speakers whom Hanna sent swarming across the country to denounce Bryan and proclaim the McKinley pledge of "the full dinner pail." All told, more than 100 million pieces of campaign literature were sent out in the Republican cause; and on the Saturday before the election, the campaign came to a climax with a "sound money" parade in New York in which 150,000 businessmen, civic leaders and clergymen marched up Broadway in black hats and coats. Factory workers in scores of communities found slips in their pay envelopes reading: "If Bryan is elected, don't come back to work. The plant will be closed."



Against this solid array of money and respectability, the Democrats had no weapon but Bryan himself. He was a man of severe limitations, neither widely read nor a clear thinker; but his magnetism, his courage and his passionate belief in the wisdom of the common people enabled him to command immense personal loyalty. Without adequate funds, with scarcely a major newspaper on his side, he carried the entire burden of the campaign on his shoulders, traveling 16,000 miles back and forth across the country and making as many as 36 speeches in one day. All told, he addressed some five million people.



It was an extraordinary performance in many ways, spectacular in American political history — but it was not enough to overcome the enormous odds. On election day, the populous Northeast, with its preponderance of electoral votes, stood fast for sound money and Republicanism. Considering the obstacles he faced, however, Bryan's total of 6.5 million votes against McKinley's 7 million was a remarkable tribute to his personal appeal and his inexhaustible energy; indeed, it has been estimated that an additional 50,000 votes, properly distributed, could have put him in the White House. That this did not happen is testimony to the fact that industrialism was too firmly in the American saddle to be dislodged.



"For 100 years," wrote Henry Adams, "the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and backward between the two forces. The issue finally came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, for once and for all, in favor of a capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery." In the person of Bryan, Jeffersonian agrarianism had made its last stand and lost.



But the memory of that last stand lingered on to become something approaching an American legend. Men now in middle age," wrote Henry Pringle a generation later, "still recall some weird night in a Kansas or Nebraska boyhood when, well toward midnight, they waited in tingling excitement on the fringe of the crowd which packed the station plaza. The train roared in, as a hastily assembled band played Sousa's new march, 'El Capitan,' and from the back platform a man with longish black hair began to speak. Men grown old still sit in crossroads grocery stores, listening to the radio, and telling of the giants who once lived: Blaine, perhaps, and Foraker of Ohio, and McKinley and Roosevelt. They had heard them all — but Bryan, only 36 years old, Bryan had been the greatest."

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