Cleveland Amory: The Hub of the Universe

Presented to the Club by Roger Linscott in 1999. 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. Photo of Cleveland Amory by Ron Bull for the Toronto Star, used under Toronto Star Photograph Archive License.



The genesis of this paper, such as it is, was a lengthy obituary that appeared in The New York Times shortly before this past Christmas. Its subject was Cleveland Amory, a writer and editor whose tireless work in behalf of animal rights over recent decades had produced several best-selling books and an impressive body of state and federal human legislation.



But before becoming an animal activist in middle age, Cleveland Amory was a social historian, and a very good one at that. His first three books. The Proper Bostonians (published just 50 years ago [1947]), The Last Resorts, and Who Killed Society? were beautifully researched accounts of the mores and foibles of the American upper crust before it began crumbling under the pressure of the mass media and increasing social mobility.



And before that, Amory was an undergraduate at Harvard where – like a number of luminaries before him, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt ’04 – he was president of the Harvard Crimson, the undergraduate daily newspaper. In that role he was something of a mentor to me, who was admitted to the staff as a sophomore when Amory was a senior. He taught me a good deal more about newspapering that I could have learned from any school of journalism.



Our paths last crossed – and only briefly – some 30 years ago. But reading his obituary caused me to ferret The Proper Bostonians out of my library and to discover that it is still a very good read even though the society it depicts – with an insider’s eye, since being born an Amory automatically makes one a Boston Brahmin – has changed considerably with time. My interest in the subject, I should add, is more than academic. My own family, though of yeoman stock with no family ties to the local aristocracy, has lived in and about Boston for many generations, and I have always been fascinated by proper Bostonians as a breed that traditionally has carried insularity to a degree exceeding that of any other local elite in the country. Amory, or course, was not the first to mine that rich field. A wide range of observers, from Henry Adams and Henry James to Lucius Beebe and – most readably, James P. Marquand in The Late George Apley – were there before him. On a considerably more modest level, even I became marginally involved in the endeavor. A year after Amory’s book came out, the New York publishing house of Farrar & Strauss asked my father [Robert N. Linscott] – then an editor at Random House – to put together an anthology of writings by and about Bostonians, from Cotton Mather and Governor Bradford to contemporaries like Marquand and John Dos Passos. Since my father had other fish to fry at the time, while I was writing only a weekly column for the non-defunct New York Herald-Tribune, I ended up doing most of the work and receiving half of the modest royalties earned by the resulting volume, which was called State of Mind: A Boston Reader [1948], and went quietly out of print two years later.



One of the things that made Cleveland Amory’s Proper Bostonians such good reading is its wealth of anecdotes. It opens with one that he correctly says is basic to an understanding of Boston society’s addiction to ancestor worship. In the balmy days of the 1920s, Amory reports, a Chicago banking house asked the Boston investment firm of Lee, Higginson & Company for a letter of recommendation about a young Bostonian they were considering employing. Lee, Higginson could not say enough for the young man. Not only was his father a member of the sainted Cabot family, they wrote; his mother was a Lowell. Farther back his background was a happy blend of Saltonstalls, Appletons, Peabodys and others of Boston’s first families. The commendation to the Chicago firm was given without hesitation.



Several days later came a curt acknowledgement from Chicago. Lee, Higginson was thanked for its trouble. Unfortunately, however, the material supplied about the young man was not exactly of the type the Chicago firm was seeking. “We were not,” their letter declared, “contemplating using Mr. Cabot for breeding purposes.”



In other cities, the social arbiters ask who a person’s parent are. In Boston they traditionally have asked who his grandparents were. Being white Anglo-Saxon Protestants doesn’t in itself open doors to First Family status. Boston Brahmins do have to be WASPs, of course, and they also are expected to have money. But they have to have possessed that money at a particular time in history – specifically in the first several decades of the 19th century – with Boston’s social mold was set. Those who came to Boston before then, in the 17th and early 18th century, and thrived during the Colonial era – such names as Hancock, Gore and Boylston come to mind – never made it to modern First Family status if they happened to have suffered the misfortune of exhausting their wealth before fossilization took place in the early 1800s. Likewise, fortunes that were made after the social gates clanged shut – for example, Eben Jordan’s department store riches, and Andrew Preston’s United Fruit empire – were forever denied Brahmin status. They had missed the boat.



Cleveland Amory’s Chicago anecdote not only illustrates the proper Bostonian’s preoccupation with ancestry – a trait that outsiders have irreverently labelled “grandfather of the brain” – it also illustrates how extraordinarily provincial Boston society became in the 19th and 20th centuries – though proper Bostonians could probably contend that “self-contained” would be a more suitable adjective to use in this context.



Semantics aside, the stories testifying to this insularity are familiar and numerous, though also in some cases, no doubt, apocryphal. One thinks of the Boston lady who drove to California and, when asked what route she took, replied, “Oh, I went by way of Dedham.” Or the denizen of Beacon Hill who, when chided for not traveling more, in some puzzlement asked, “But why should I travel when I’m already here?” In The Flowering of New England, published more than 60 years ago, but still the best book about Boston’s golden era culturally –  that is, the first half of the 19th century, when giants like Hawthorne and Melville and Thoreau and Emerson were making Boston the intellectual hub of America if not, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ celebrated encomium, “the hub of the universe” – Van Wyck Brooks quotes a favorite anecdote told by James T. Fields, a Boston man of letters and a partner in Ticknor & Fields, the city’s pre-eminent book publishing firm of the 19th century. The Fields story was about a Boston man who read the major works of Shakespeare late in life and found them admirable beyond his expectation. “Shakespeare’s work is astonishing,” he declared. “I dare say there are not twenty men in Boston who could have written those plays.”



Such immodesty about Boston’s intellectual – and moral – claims has always been regarded as a characteristic of its aristocracy. “Boston,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder, “has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than any other city of live or dead men.” To which Bronson Alcott, the great social reformer and education pioneer (as well as the father of Louisa May Alcott) added: “There is a city in our world upon which the light of the sun of righteousness has risen…It is the same city from which every pure stream of thought and purpose and performance emanates. It is the city which is set on high. It cannot be hidden. It is Boston.”



Extravagant appraisals like these were not the self-serving hyperbole of local politicians on the make. They were the genuine beliefs of rational and educated Bostonians who felt that they enjoyed the great good fortune to live in a city unique morally as well a culturally. “Principle,” wrote Van Wyck Brooks, “was a reality in Boston. Conscience was a large reality. Everyone knew the story of the merchant who, when one of his ships was overdue, found that he was more anxious about his thoughts than the money he was losing. Was it possible, he asked himself, that he had really grown to love his money more for itself than for its nobler uses? To settle the point in his own mind, he reckoned the value of the ship and cargo and gave the sum to his favorite charity. The story was typical of the Boston merchants who, between 1810 and 1840 alone, established thirty benevolent institutions. Though derided by outlanders as “the codfish aristocracy,” Boston Brahmins did tend to listen closely to the New England Consciousness they had inherited from their Puritan ancestors.



On the down side, of course, this has often tended to produce a degree of smugness bordering on outright self-infatuation – a consequence of which is that a fair number of proper Bostonians have, over the years, declined to join the local cheering section. Probably the most prominent of these dissenters have been in the Adams family, which has always been something of an anomaly in Boston society. On the one hand, it is generally regarded as the first of the city’s First Families, having produced two American presidents (John and John Quincy) plus Charles Francis Adams (who, as Lincoln’s ambassador to the court of St. James, helped save the union by persuading the British not to recognize the Confederacy) plus the eminent historians Brooks Adams and Henry Adams. On the other hand, the Adams family has always tended to exploit its pre-eminence socially by keeping its distance from the rest of the Boston bluebloods – and by speaking its mind about Boston’s insularity quite freely. On this score, my favorite Adams quotation is from a letter Charles Francis wrote some years after his ambassadorial career was over. “In this course of my life,” he said, “I have tried Boston socially on all sides. I have summered it and wintered it, tried it drunk and tried it sober; and drunk or sober, there’s nothing in it save Boston…This is the trouble with Boston – it is provincial…There is no current of fresh outside life everlastingly flowing in and passing out. It is, so to speak, stationary – a world – a Boston world – unto itself.”



Another illustrious, if more plebeian, New Englander, Henry David Thoreau, also spoke disdainfully of Boston, though his objection may have reflected his contempt for cities in general in contrast to his love for rural Concord, 15 miles to the west. “The only room in Boston that I visit with alacrity,” he wrote in his journals, “is the gentlemen’s waiting room at the depot, where I wait for the railroad cars, sometimes for two hours, to get out of town.”



Another Concord skeptic of the same era, incidentally, was Rockwood Hoar, who served as United States attorney general under President U.S. Grant and whose most famous aphorism made bold to question the moral probity of some of the pious holders of great Boston wealth. Borrowing from the “good, better, best” comparative adjectives that school children of the era were required to recite endlessly, Mr. Hoar declared that “the three stages of the enterprising Yankee are to get on, to get honor, and to get honest.”



While wallowing about in Bostonian anecdotal materials – of which there is a virtually inexhaustible supply – I cannot resist the temptation to digress for just a few moments from my main theme to mention that in the process of developing a remarkable degree of insularity, the Boston aristocracy earned a deserved reputation for both eccentricity and wit. I cite but two of many examples. Among the amiable eccentrics was Sarah Palfrey, spinster daughter of the eminent historian. She is generally accorded the honor of being the first Boston woman to ride a bicycle, an activity she took up with great zeal in her late 70s. She painted vigorously, spoke four languages fluently, and published poetry in Latin as well as in English. At the age of 88, in her final illness, she took up the study of Hebrew with great intensity. When asked why, she replied: “I do not expect to be in this world much longer. When I die, I wish to be able to greet my Creator in his native tongue.”



My other footnote to Boston wit and wisdom, also a woman, involved Helen Choate Bell, whose father Rufus Choate was one of Boston’s richest and ablest lawyers of the late 19th century. Most of her witticisms – widely quoted during her 30-year reign as a queen of Boston society – have not survived the test of time very well, but there is one that I particularly like still. “The automobile,” she declared back in the early days of motoring, “will soon divide mankind into two classes – the quick and the dead.”



There are two institutions above all others that proper Bostonians have traditionally regarded with particular reverence: The Boston Symphony Orchestra and Harvard University.



“The day of days for the Proper Boston woman,” wrote Cleveland Amory (and it’s still almost as true today) “comes 26 times a year – every Friday all winter – at ‘symphony.’ Here she blossoms in all her glory, for Symphony – one never speaks of “the” symphony but always just as “Symphony” – is not only culture with a capital “C” but is also society with a capital “S.” Friday afternoons assume the aspect of holy days dedicated to the classics and to a vast craning of necks to be certain that the Hallowells and the Forbeses are in their accustomed stalls.”



To be a true Symphony patron one must be a “Friend” of the orchestra – in other words, a contributor to its annual deficit, as well as a regular attender at the concerts. For many years Major Henry Lee Higginson (whose descendants include Sally Begley here in Stockbridge and who founded The Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881, made up the deficits himself, but he was finally persuaded to share the privilege with others of Boston’s best. Ever since the major gave in, Boston’s First Families have thrown their Yankee citation to the winds, loosened their purse strings and vied for the soul-satisfying distinction of digging deep for culture. So great was their zeal – when I was a child, from a very musical but unanointed family – that my mother and I used to stand in line on the Symphony Hall steps on Fridays – sometimes for more than an hour – in the hopes of getting two of the so-called “rush seats” in the balcony that were made available to non-subscribers.



The other institution traditionally revered by all proper Bostonians – Harvard University – is not within the city limits, of course, though Cambridge is closer to Beacon Hill and the Back Bay than are such outlying Boston boroughs such as Dorchester and Roxbury. In any event, Harvard has historically been the only thinkable place for Boston bluebloods to send their sons, and its undergraduate club system has always been a feeder for the social clubs of Boston, just as a seat on the Harvard Corporation, the University’s self-perpetuating governing body, has always been the most prestigious honor to which a Boston Brahmin can aspire.



There is indeed a feeling among a few proper Bostonians that even the Deity is very cognizant of the university’s crucial importance. Some sign of this was given on the final day of Harvard’s Tercentenary Celebration in 1936 by Bishop William Lawrence, then the state’s most eminent Episcopal divine. It was pouring rain that day and the Bishop, then at the age of 86, was observed by a friend in an automobile to be splashing his way across Harvard Square without even the protection of an umbrella. The friend begged him to enter his car and avoid such unnecessary exposure. The Bishop refused. “The Lord,” he said sharply, “will not allow me to take cold on Harvard’s 300th birthday.”



Another anecdote reflecting Harvard’s inseparability from Boston society involved Edmund Quincy, a 19th century leader who could speak with authority both as a mayor of Boston and a former Harvard president. It pleased him on occasion to tap his well-thumbed copy of the Harvard Alumni Directory and declare: “If a man’s in there, that’s who he is. It he isn’t, who is he?”



Finally, there is the story that goes back to the first decade of this century when William Howard Taft was serving as President of the United States. A visitor to Harvard sought to see the late A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of the university. Having been called to the nation’s capital on a matter of business, Lowell could not be seen, according to his secretary. “The President is in Washington,” she said, “seeing Mr. Taft.”



Like most of the social phenomena I have written about in this paper, the special relationship between Harvard and the Boston aristocracy has changed rather markedly over the past half-century – as has the character of the aristocracy itself. Harvard, like all other highly selective colleges, now draws its students from as broad a base as possible, both geographically and socially. Being the scion of a First Family is no longer a ticket of admission, nor is a diploma from Groton or St. Marks or Exeter. In my day, three-quarters of Harvard’s freshmen came from private schools. Today the proportion is more like one-quarter.



As long ago as 1960, Harvard’s then President Nathan Pusey made these points concisely in a verbal exchange that, in a way, addressed the whole changing world of social elites in general and Boston’s in particular.



The occasion was a Harvard 25th reunion banquet which Dr. Pusey, after delivering a routine speech to the Class of 1925 [sic –1935?] graduates and their wives, solicited questions from the audience. The first question came from an alumnus whose unsteady manner indicated that he had probably consumed a bit more than his share of the pre-dinner cocktails, but it also came from his heart.



“Dr. Pusey,” he said. “Let me tell you a story about a man who came to this country more than 300 years ago on the Mayflower, the Mayflower. His son went to Harvard, and in due time that son grew up and had a son of his own, and that son went to Harvard, and then, years later, that man had a son of his own and that son went to Harvard…”And so the question went on through a dozen more generations until, to the audience’s enormous relief, the unsteady questioner came to his closing line. “…And now, that man has a son and he can’t get into Harvard. What I want to know, Dr. Pusey, is what are you going to do about that?”



Dr. Pusey though for a moment. “I’m afraid,” he finally said, “there is probably nothing we can do about that. The Mayflower isn’t running anymore.”*

_______

* Editor’s note: A variation of this story has Pusey saying, “Well, we can’t send him back. The Mayflower doesn’t run anymore.”

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Who says life has to be fair? The rise and fall of broadcasting’s Fairness Doctrine

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, January 14, 2019, by Brad Spear



The headline in the Saturday, December 22 Washington Post article said it all, “‘This Is Tyranny of Talk Radio Hosts, Right? ‘: Limbaugh and Coulter Blamed for Trump’s Shutdown of Portions of the Federal Government.” Here we are 23 days later, and the “partial shutdown” of the federal government continues.



Two days before, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and conservative podcaster Ann Coulter separately ridiculed the President over a compromise that had been reached with Senate Democrats to avoid a government shutdown by partially funding the construction of a wall at the Mexico-US border. Upon hearing the ridicule, Mr. Trump suddenly reversed his position, thereby closing the federal government on Friday, December 21. According to the Post article, CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin was quoted as saying, the reason for the President’s reversal of position was because Limbaugh and Coulter “had questioned his manhood.”



Have these two pillars of right-wing talk radio always had such sway over the nation’s affairs? The answer is “no;” at least not until the repeal in 1987 of a longtime tenant of American broadcasting: the Federal Communications Commission’s “Fairness Doctrine.”



As a graduate student at Syracuse between 1973 and 1974, I and my classmates in the graduate program spent many an hour in class learning the niceties of the (then current) Fairness Doctrine…along with the significance of the personal attack rule (and the right of broadcast reply) that arose from a judicial ruling known as the Red Lion case and the equal time provision accorded qualified political candidates in Section 315 in the amended version of the Federal Communications Act of 1934. But rather than focus on dry case law and an examination of a section of a federal act no longer in effect, I’d rather turn your attention to the birth, the life, the death and the current impact that the Fairness Doctrine has had over the years.



Wireless radio (and its offspring, television, delivered over the air, via cable, satellite, or streamed over the internet) is barely 120 years old. Guillermo Marconi, with the backing of the British Royal Post Office, began transmitting wireless messages over a 12-mile span of British countryside in 1897.



By the early 1920s radio broadcasting had developed in earnest worldwide. In 1927 Congress made a fateful determination: like publicly owned grazing lands out West, the entire radio spectrum within the confines of America’s borders was the property of the American people. And the administration of this public property through the issuance of time-limited broadcast licenses was given over to an entity dubbed the “Federal Radio Commission.”



The purpose of this commission, first and foremost, was to assign frequencies and allocate transmission power limits that would prevent one station interfering with the reception of a distant station on the same frequency. This recognition of the technical limitations of the medium established an important principal: that of scarcity.



In the beginning the Federal Radio Commission had no charge toward reviewing the content of programming, other than reviewing during the license renewal process after the fact the performance of the licensee in presenting programming that served the public’s “convenience, interest, and necessity.”



With the advent of the Roosevelt Administration in 1932, Congress in 1934 transformed the Federal Radio Commission into the Federal Communications Commission. One of the FCC’s first actions was to respond to a federal court finding that the Mayflower Broadcasting Corporation of Boston had failed to serve the public’s interest through the broadcast of nothing but conservative viewpoints on issues of public importance. According to the first chairman of the FCC, radio’s dependence upon the sale of advertising as its sole source of support was causing the medium to become overly commercialized and biased toward business-friendly conservative viewpoints.



As a result, the FCC issued the “Mayflower Doctrine,” which required broadcasters “to allot a reasonable amount of time to…controversial issues and…to seek (and) provide…all responsible shades of opinion.” It also went on to prohibit radio broadcasters from issuing editorials. The radio industry howled and insisted that the Mayflower Pronouncement was a violation of statutory prohibitions against censorship. But it stuck.



The second world war came, and the FCC policies and practices became nearly unassailable. By war’s end the American public had been exposed to the power and influence that government-produced domestic media had had on pre-war Germany. Josef Goebbels’ polished single-point-of-view manipulation of Germany’s radio and film industries contributed to the loss of millions of lives.

Regardless, the broadcasters began to push back, insisting that the Mayflower Doctrine was an infringement of their First Amendment rights. Defenders, on the other hand, considered it a necessary safeguard for society.



After three years of unrelenting industry pressure, the FCC agreed to hold hearings on the legitimacy of the Mayflower Doctrine. In late March and early April of 1948, forty-nine witnesses appeared to testify either for or against the doctrine. The FCC waited over a year to issue a subsequent ruling. In June of 1949, the Mayflower Doctrine was repealed.



However, not long thereafter the FCC issued a report entitled In the Matter of Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees. The report led the FCC to reaffirm its authority to protect the public’s “convenience, interest, and necessity” through both the medium of radio and the growing new medium of television. In early 1950, the FCC established the Fairness Doctrine, which required radio and television broadcasters to present issues of controversial importance and have all sides fairly represented in their presentation (akin to the Mayflower Pronouncement). But the Fairness Doctrine went on to grant broadcasters the right to editorialize for the first time, so long as editorials were identified as such.



In reviewing the renewal applications of broadcasters every three years, the FCC determined whether the licensee had been proactive and had exercised good judgment in selecting representatives from all sides in the presentation of controversial issues. After all, the stated purpose of the Fairness Doctrine was to stimulate fair debate and to help create a well-informed electorate.



Over the next 35 years the Doctrine and other practices of the FCC were the subjects of considerable debate at the Congressional level. The National Association of Broadcasters, an interest group representing both radio and television owners, grew wealthy as their constituents grew wealthy. The question of deregulating the whole of American industry arose in earnest during the Carter administration, and broadcasting was part of the discussion, as well.



And along came the Reagan Administration.



Ronald Reagan had risen in the 1940s as a B-movie leading man. A confirmed Democrat, he served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, one of the film community’s labor unions, from 1947 to 1952 and again for another eight months from 1959 to 1960. During that same period, he served as a public spokesman for General Electric, for his film career was in decline. He left the Democratic Party in 1962, declared himself a conservative Republican, and worked diligently to support the presidential run of Barry Goldwater in 1964. When that failed, he succeeded the Old Ranger as the host of a TV western anthology series, “Death Valley Days.” After only a year, he left the show to run for governor of California. There he succeeded, serving in that capacity from 1967 to 1975.

When Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter’s re-election bid in 1980 and became President of the United States, he brought to the White House a sizeable group of supporters who had made their individual fortunes in the booming California real estate business. One of the first places the effect manifested itself? At the FCC of all places.



Before the Reagan Administration (as mentioned earlier) a broadcast license required renewal every three years. In addition, there were limits on the number of radio and television licenses any entity could own: 5 AM and 2 FM licenses, and 5 VHF (channels 2 to 13) and 2 UHF (channels 14 to 83 — and an entity could own only 1 TV license, 1 AM license, and 1 FM license in any market). At the time the income from these licenses, strategically located in in the nation’s top 10 markets, provided enough revenue to underwrite the cost of CBS, NBC, and ABC’s network functions, including their national and international news operations.



Before the advent of the Reagan Administration, trying to sell a broadcast license required a considerable commitment of time and resources; it was a lawyer’s field day. The sale of Hartford’s WTIC-AM and FM and its VHF television license by the Travelers Insurance Company in 1974 to the Washington Post broadcast division required three years to complete: one year for the television license to be sold to the Post, and another two years for the AM/FM license to be transferred (at the FCC’s insistence) to a locally controlled entity known as the 1080 Corporation.



The FCC under Reagan in 1981 reduced the amount of time and expense required to sell a broadcast license to roughly six months, which introduced a “real-estate” style of property speculation that had characterized the boom years of the California real estate business: buy a run-down station, fix it up, build its audience, sell it at a considerable profit, and enjoy the capital gain. With Reagan’s FCC raising the TV and Radio ownership cap to 12, so long as the total national viewership of the 12 TV stations did not exceed 25% of the national audience, building wealth through capital gains has been the name of the game in broadcasting ever since.



The Reagan FCC also in 1981 lengthened the time a television license could be held from three to five years and the length of time an AM or FM radio license could be held was stretched to seven years. Later, during the Clinton Administration in 1996, both TV and radio licenses were lengthened to eight years.



Today the FCC does not limit the number of TV stations a single entity may own nationwide so long as the stations collectively reach no more than 39% of all US TV households. An entity can own more than one TV station in a market so long as 8 independently owned stations remain after the combination is made.



In those markets with at least 20 independently owned “media voices,” full power radio and TV stations, the cable system in the market, and a major newspaper, any entity can own either two TV stations and six radio stations or one TV station and seven radio stations. Smaller markets have smaller ownership caps.



And radio-only ownership restrictions are similar and based on a sliding scale that varies by the size of the market. For instance, in a market of 45 or more stations (Boston, the tenth largest market is home to 45 commercial and non-commercial AM and FM signals), a single entity can own up to eight stations (with neither AM nor FM ownership exceeding 5).



With the advent of digital television broadcasting and HD radio on both AM and more widely on FM, each broadcast license is now capable of generating up to three sources of programming on radio and up to 7 on TV. While ownership has become more concentrated, the capacity of each medium has expanded considerably.



Throughout the Reagan Administration, broadcasters began to lobby for the dissolution of the Fairness Doctrine. With their newly expanded licensing periods, a sense of entitlement began to develop among broadcasters and the license renewal process by a more laissez faire FCC became less feared. The nation’s passion for deregulation had firmly taken hold at the FCC, which in 1985 issued an order raising two significant questions: would the marketplace become sufficiently competitive with the anticipated development of cable-only television services (consider outside the purview of the FCC) to permit the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and had previous enforcement of the doctrine actually chilled rather than encouraged free speech?



The FCC noted that as media outlets of any sort proliferated, the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine as applied to the scarcity of broadcasting outlets was becoming increasingly suspect. Was the enforcement of content fairness and balance with one among many new voices not subject to license renewal, a service or disservice to the general public?



Reagan’s FCC also examined the effect of Fairness Doctrine enforcement on the behavior of radio and television broadcasters. Under previous administrations most cases had concentrated on whether broadcasters had failed to present all valid viewpoints on a controversial issue. The Reagan Administration contended that broadcasters had figured out a way to beat the system. You wouldn’t suffer the expense of having to defend your license if you simply avoided raising controversial issues in the first place. Was the enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine having a detrimental effect on the amount of time dedicated to the coverage of controversial issues?



Raising these issues at the FCC led John Dingell, a Democratic representative from Michigan, and Fritz Hollings, a Democratic senator from South Carolina, to introduce legislation in their respective chambers that would codify into law the basic provisions of the Fairness Doctrine.



In response the FCC declined to repeal the Fairness Doctrine in 1985, electing instead to wait for further guidance from Congress. The Dingell-Hollings bill eventually passed both the House and the Senate in early 1987 and landed on President Reagan’s desk in late June. He promptly vetoed the measure, stating he considered the Fairness Doctrine unconstitutional. Neither the House nor the Senate could muster the votes necessary to override the veto.



The regulations at the FCC pertaining to the Fairness Doctrine stayed on the books unenforced from that day forth. Today the regulations no longer exist. They were swept off the books by a larger effort during the Obama Administration to decommission regulations at all federal agencies that were no longer being enforced.



From time to time, voices in Congress will raise the cry, “Bring back the Fairness Doctrine!” Questions worth pondering: do we need a new iteration of the Fairness Doctrine? Has our current marketplace of ideas become so skewed and riven with strife to merit such a move?



Since the Reagan Administration, I have long thought that we needed a new Fairness Doctrine, one applied to all media voices that depended upon the people’s spectrum to deliver its programming (even though cable delivered programming has long been exempt from FCC oversight, the entire cable delivery system, from TV studio to your living room television, utilizes terrestrial microwave and C or Ku band satellite transmission, all FCC licensed components, and all subject to renewal on a regular basis).



But late last fall, while watching an MSNBC evening broadcast by Rachel Maddow and thinking about the topic of this paper I’m delivering tonight, a thought struck me: the model of Maddow’s presentation is so very close to that of her radio antithesis, Rush Limbaugh. There was Rachel, making some point that I agreed with (I’m certain of it), but where was the counterpoint?

Right wing broadcasting, despite their claims to the contrary, attracts a remarkably small audience. An evening of prime-time programming on Fox New Channel attracts an average audience of 2.42 million viewers; the average audience for an hour-long episode of “Wait, Wait; Don’t Tell Me” on public radio every weekend is over six million listeners. Fox News Channel, it appears, is a notably small giant among midgets.



Likewise, the weekly audience for Rush Limbaugh, the radio commentator whose visceral reaction to Trump’s compromise with House Democrats led to the shutdown of the federal government, is 13 million. The weekly audience for NPR’s Morning Edition? 13 million.



Maybe Reagan’s FCC was right. The proliferation of channels might obviate the need for a new Fairness Doctrine.



Also, consider the fact that most of our media resources are slowly gravitating to a single, unregulated means of delivery, the internet. Given the global reach of the internet, soon it will be nigh unto impossible to regulate content. At this very moment, the signal of a locally broadcast right-wing radio station from any given market is competing over the internet with a direct feed from London of the BBC World Service. Correspondingly, the internet streaming of the TV signal for Fox News Channel is competing with the streamed signal of RT (Russia Today).



Given the political divisions that exist in the United States today and given the Republic Party’s historical animosity toward the Fairness Doctrine, the notion of reinstating the doctrine through either regulation or legislation is little more than a wishful fantasy.



There are measures, however, that might stimulate more balanced coverage both in the short and in the long run. Return to the ownership limitations of an earlier era: one owner per station per market, either TV or radio, and a maximum of five radio stations and and/or five TV stations nationwide. Given recent technical developments in digital TV and HD radio broadcasting, each TV station has the potential of broadcasting seven video signals, and each radio station has the potential of broadcasting three audio signals. Just how many stations in each market controlled by one owner is enough? Decentralize the program decision-making by reducing the concentration of ownership. The Rush Limbaughs will still be there, but many more station programming executives will have to be convinced to broadcast the program.



Also reduce the length of the license period for both TV and radio to the original three years, and in doing so, at license renewal time require the licensees to demonstrate that they have been operating their broadcast station in the public’s convenience, interest, and necessity.



The broadcast industry will certainly oppose such measures. But expanding the marketplace of ideas is something both political parties have supported in the past. The NAB, the lobbying arm of American commercial radio and TV broadcasters, wields considerable political clout. But as alternative sources of content arise, the NAB’s influence will no longer be what it once was.

American radio and TV’s contribution to our politically divided electorate won’t be staunched by reinstating the Fairness Doctrine but by busting up the concentration of media ownership. More programming decision makers are needed in our increasingly interconnected media environment, not fewer — all in the name of the public’s convenience, interest, and necessity.



Photo Credit: Scales of Justice by Michael Coghlan, used under Creative Commons License.

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The most hated man in America

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, March 4, 2019 by Martin C. Langeveld



During much of the time between the two World Wars, if you had asked an average person on the street, or the average journalistic pundit, who they considered to be the most hated person in America, ranking high among the possible answers would have been the name of Grover Cleveland Bergdoll. But why?



Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, the playboy scion of a Philadelphia family of beer brewers with German roots, was born in 1893. After the Wright brothers set up their first school for airplane pilots, at Huffman Prairie near their home base of Dayton, Ohio, Grover enrolled in April, 1912 and became one of the first 119 people who learned to fly there. Once proficient, he purchased from the Wrights a 40-horsepower Model B flyer, for the sum of $5,625 (nearly $150,000 in 2019 dollars). (The young man, just 18 years old and a student at the University of Pennsylvania, had been receiving a $5,000 allowance annually since he was 15.) The Model B was the first Wright plane to have wheels, enabling it to take off on its own rather than with the catapult system used until then.



Within a few months, Grover was entertaining large crowds in Philadelphia by making exhibition flights. At the time, flying was quite a hazardous pursuit. In 1910, the Wright Brothers had assembled a team of nine expert exhibition pilots to demonstrate their planes around the country — by the end of 1912, six of the nine had been killed in airplane crashes. But Grover was not only fearless but highly proficient. While still working to qualify for a pilot’s license in the spring of 1912, he was offering rides to friends, buzzing crowds, reaching altitudes of 2,000 feet, and staying aloft as long as 34 minutes. That summer, with a passenger on board, he flew from the suburban air field to Philadelphia’s downtown City Hall, circled the statue of William Penn atop its dome three times, and flew low over a westbound train for 22 blocks before revving his engine and passing it. In August, he flew from Philadelphia to Atlantic City, reaching altitudes over 7,000 feet, the first flight between the two cities. After more flights, in September, just five months after his first lessons, Grover passed the necessary trials and was awarded a pilot’s license. He was the 169th person in the U. S. ever to receive one.





Meanwhile, and even before getting into aviation, Grover had owned some fast automobiles and was known for his reckless speeding and risk-taking on the road. By late 1912, the same year he bought an airplane and became a pilot, he had some 30 arrest warrants outstanding for various driving offenses. In December, he got into a serious accident, was arrested, brought to trial, and eventually sentenced to three months in jail, in the process demonstrating considerable disdain for the legal process and continuing to drive even though his license had been revoked. He would go on, over the next few years, to wreck several more cars, both on the public highways and on a closed-course track in San Francisco where he was practicing for a motorcar race.



His continuing reckless behavior — what I’ve described only scratches the surface of his exploits — caused his brother Charles to go to court to have Grover declared insane, in order to prevent him from getting control of a $900,000 inheritance. But Grover’s mother Emma, quite a battle-axe herself, stood by him and eventually mother and son prevailed after a sensationalized trial. Charles was so disgusted he legally changed his name from Bergdoll to Brawn in order to disassociate himself from the family.



By this time, 18 months after the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife had been assassinated in Sarajevo, the European powers were embroiled in the Great War, but the United States had been sitting out the conflict. While Britain and France were America’s natural allies, there was considerable support in the U. S. for the Central Powers, particularly among the German-Americans, including Grover and his mother Emma.



Shortly after the war began, Grover visited the German Consul in Philadelphia and offered his services as an aviator for Germany, including the use of the Wright Model B. He was told that as a citizen of a neutral country he could not enlist in the German armed forces, and moreover, that the U. S. would certainly not permit the shipment of his airplane. Perhaps more interested in getting into military flying than in supporting Germany, Bergdoll later offered his flying services to General John J. Pershing when Pershing led an expedition into Mexico to pursue the revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had attacked a U.S. border town. But he was told Pershing would not be using airplanes.



Following the sinking of the Lusitania and continued harassment of U.S. shipping by German U-boats, the U. S. declared war against Germany in April, 1917. Within weeks, the Selective Service Act was passed, requiring the registration of every man between the ages of 21 and 30. Grover, now 23, duly registered, listing his occupation as “farmer and manufacturer of automobile parts” — the latter an allusion to the Bergdoll Motor Car company, an enterprise launched by his brothers that had closed up shop by then. The “farmer” part was derived from a 24-acre field owned by Grover, where he supposedly grew beans. Being a farmer, it was thought incorrectly, might qualify a man for an exemption.



In August, Grover was summoned to appear at the local draft board for a physical, but failed to show up. Instead, he withdrew a substantial sum of cash from his bank account and disappeared. The draft board listed him as a deserter.



The secretary of the draft board, John P. Dwyer, was a neighbor of the Bergdolls, and quite familiar with Grover’s history of reckless driving and run-ins with the law. There was also a story, told years later, that Dwyer’s children had gotten into a cherry tree on the grounds of the Bergdoll mansion, and that Grover had spanked the kids. Supposedly, when Dwyer showed up to protest, Bergdoll said, “You get off my property or I’ll hit you, too.” Dwyer was the editor of the Philadelphia Record, and used the power of the press to single out Grover in particular, even though he was one of many no-shows.



Through his mother, Grover offered to return from hiding if he would be permitted to enlist as a flight instructor, but the draft board refused to entertain any special treatment. To complicate matters, Grover’s brother Erwin decided to defy his own draft board and joined his brother on the lam (but surrendered soon after). Under the rules in place at the time, refusing to show up for induction meant that Grover was automatically inducted into the Army. This happened on August 13, 1918, just a few months before the end of the war.



Three million men, about 11 percent of the eligible pool, had failed to register for the draft or refused to be inducted. With hundreds of thousands of men now serving in the trenches or in support roles, naturally there were efforts to round up the so-called “slackers.” But Grover was singled out for pursuit and notoriety, because of his wealthy background, his prior recklessness on the road and run-ins with police, and his status as a fugitive. His “most hated” reputation was getting under way. “Wanted” posters featuring him as “a notorious draft evader and deserter” were distributed nationwide. Philadelphia authorities began receiving postcards from him, and after this fact was publicized, postcards began arriving from all over the country, many likely sent by sympathizers, leading police into some dead-ends.



Grover eluded his pursuers for more than a year before being caught at home in Philadelphia, where Emma had evidently sheltered him and Erwin for extended periods.  The drama of the arrest included Emma holding off the authorities for a time with a .38-caliber revolver, which led to her own arrest as well. A “veritable arsenal” of weapons was discovered in the house, it was reported.



Since Grover had been inducted into the army in absentia, he was turned over to military authorities to be court-martialed for desertion, and incarcerated at Fort Jay on Governors Island, New York. He hired a top-talent team of lawyers, but after much legal wrangling he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. This transfer was stalled using a variety of appeal tactics, and then in the middle of this maneuvering, Grover made a startling claim to his defense team: during his time as a fugitive, he had buried $150,000 in gold coins on a farm in Hagerstown, Maryland. He asked the lawyers to get the Army authorities to permit him to travel to that location, under guard, retrieve the coins and deposit them in a bank. Otherwise, he feared, someone else might find them during his imprisonment.



While the legal team had its doubts about the story, they managed to convince the Army brass at Fort Jay to permit an expedition. Grover would be required to cover all costs. Two sergeants, John O’Hare and Calvin York, were assigned to guard Grover during the trip, which was to take no more than five days. Grover’s attorney David Gibboney would meet the group in Philadelphia and then travel with them essentially as tour guide, because the sergeants were not even told about the destination or the gold. John Hunt, commandant of the disciplinary barracks, told the sergeants not to handcuff Grover — he didn’t want to attract public attention to the group as they traveled by train to Philadelphia, where they would use a Bergdoll automobile to proceed to Hagerstown. To further camouflage the mission, Grover was issued an actual army uniform. The result quickly turned into an episode worthy of the Keystone Cops (the original silent film episodes of which had ended just a few years earlier, in 1917).



Meeting the group at the Philadelphia train station were the attorney, Gibboney, Grover’s friend Eugene Stecher — a mechanic who would be driving the car, a Hudson — and James Romig, a family friend who, incidentally, had met up with Grover several times while he was a fugitive. As they set out, the Hudson immediately started acting up, “knocking to beat the band.” It was decided that rather than risking the trip to Hagerstown, they would head for the Bergdoll mansion in West Philadelphia, where repairs might be made.



There, the sergeants became houseguests. They enjoyed lunch, then dinner, and then Romig suggested going out for some entertainment, so they all went to the Gayety Theatre and took in a burlesque show. On the way home from there, they decided to stop at a saloon. (Prohibition had gone into effect during Grover’s court-martial, but speakeasies were not hard to find.) After a few drinks, they headed back to the mansion and went to bed, Grover sharing a room with O’Hare, who somehow was able to sleep with one eye shut and keep a watch on Grover with the other.



Not long after their arrival, Grover slipped a note to Stecher indicating that he intended to escape, and wanted Stecher to go with him. Stecher confided this intention to Emma, who said, “For Christ’s sake, go with him. If you don’t go with him, he is going to shoot one of those fellows,” meaning the sergeants. This threat had some credibility, because Emma was still known to keep numerous weapons around the house. While Stecher continued to tinker with the engine, Grover, Romig and the sergeants played pool in the third-floor billiards room. After lunch, a bottle of gin appeared in the room. While Sgt. O’Hare was a teetotaler, Sgt. York took a sip from time to time. Grover entertained the group for a time by reading from a book of Shakespeare’s poems. Finally at some point, Grover entered the adjacent bathroom. Apparently, this bathroom had a second door into a bedroom, from which, unseen by the pool players, he made his way downstairs and out to the garage, where Stecher had the Hudson running. Perhaps, there was never anything mechanically wrong with it to begin with. The sergeants and others present discovered soon enough that Grover wasn’t in the bathroom anymore, but wasted time searching the mansion instead of alerting police; then they called Gibboney, Grover’s attorney, who suggested that maybe Grover had just gone out for a ride with Stecher to check out how the car was running. By the time the authorities were alerted, considerable time had passed, and roadblocks were ineffective. The pair had gotten clean away.



Grover’s original period as a fugitive and his arrest, trial and conviction had garnered plenty of press attention, and this new escape and disappearance made even more headlines and inspired editorial writers throughout the country.  “Wanted” posters went up again; various sightings, from Boston to Florida to Texas, were reported but proved spurious.



In reality Grover and Stecher were heading northwest, toward Minnesota. They didn’t bother with disguises and continued driving the same car, only replacing the Pennsylvania license plates with a pair purchased at a junkyard in Indiana. When they arrived at the border town of St. Vincent, Minnesota, they put the car in storage at a garage, and asked the garage owner where they might buy some whiskey. He suggested a pub on the Canadian side, and provided them with convenient  directions for skirting the customs post on the main road. Once in Canada, they bought train tickets to Winnipeg, where they began to make plans to travel to Germany by steamship. With the benefit of some lax procedures on the part of the Winnipeg steamship agent and local authorities, they managed to obtained Canadian passports under false names. They continued by train to Montreal, where they got their passports endorsed by the Belgian, Swedish and Swiss consulates, and on July 7, 1920, they embarked for Europe on the Canadian Pacific steamship Victorian, bound for Liverpool. From there, they traveled to London by train, and obtained more passport endorsements from the German and Dutch consulates, crossed the North Sea on a Dutch ferry, and took a train into Germany, where they made their way to the village of Eberbach, located between Frankfurt and Stuttgart. This was the birthplace of Grover’s mother Emma, and still the home of numerous sympathetic relatives.



Meanwhile, of course, there were repercussions for all who played a role in permitting the escape. The sergeants, York and O’Hare, were tried but acquitted by the army. The Fort Jay commandant Col. John Hunt, was also tried and acquitted, but then immediately retired from duty. Three of Grover’s lawyers, including Gibboney, were found by a grand jury to be not criminally liable, but they were censured for arranging the expedition. Grover’s brother Erwin, who had also resisted the draft and joined Grover during his first period on the lam, was court-martialed, found guilty of desertion, and sentenced to four years at Fort Leavenworth. There would be no treasure hunting expeditions for him. Emma, Romig, Grover’s brother Charles Brawn, and two family friends were put on trial for helping Grover escape. They were all found guilty, with Brawn, Emma and Romig convicted on the most serious charges. They could have drawn long prison terms, but ultimately were all just issued hefty fines, totaling $23,000 for the five. Although Emma at first swore that she’d go to prison rather than pay up, she soon paid the full $23,000 covering all five defendants.



While Grover was settling down in Eberbach, sustained by funds wired by Emma, the U. S. House of Representatives set up a special committee to examine the entire affair. Over a period of three weeks in the spring of 1921, they heard from many of the players, including military officials, lawyers for the Bergdolls, and Bergdoll family members. Occasionally, committee members as well as newspaper editorialists and the American Legion would focus on Grover’s name, saying that referring to him as Grover Cleveland Bergdoll besmirched the name of the president, and that they should just call him Grover or G. C. Some even suggested that he should be forced to change his name. Toward the end of the hearings Emma deflated this entire idea when John H. Sherberne, special counsel for the committee, inquired, “Mrs. Bergdoll, how did you happen to name Grover for a former President of this country, who was perhaps best known for his warlike spirit?” Emma replied, “He was not a warlike spirit, he was a draft dodger himself. Grover Cleveland was a draft dodger in the Civil War, and paid $200 fine for a man.” (Recall that it was possible during the Civil War for a man to pay a substitute to serve in his place when he was drafted.)



The Bergdoll saga now settled into a long stalemate that was to last nearly two decades. Eberbach was not in territory occupied by the Allies, and in the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany, extradiction was out of the question. This didn’t prevent at least two attempts to kidnap Bergdoll and return him to American custody.



In the first of these, in 1921 two American soldiers stationed at the American occupation force’s headquarters in Coblenz, Carl Naef and Franz Zimmer, took it upon themselves to travel to Eberbach, where they tracked down Grover and Stecher as they happened to be driving a young engaged couple to meet their wedding party at the railroad station. Stecher managed to gun the car to a getaway, but shots were fired at them and the prospective bride was shot in the hand. A crowd of citizens and police surrounded the kidnappers, who were arrested, brought to trial and jailed, later to be released. A few years later, in 1923, another kidnap attempt, again unsuccessful, was organized by one Sergeant Corliss Hooven  Griffis. This time, Grover was better prepared, and managed to get six shots off at two of Griffis’s co-conspirators when they attacked him at a hotel. One was killed, another seriously wounded, and Grover received a head wound requiring five stitches. Grover was held blameless by the German government, which was rightfully concerned by both kidnap attempts on its sovereign soil by U.S. citizens. Griffis and three of his co-conspirators were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms by a German court. Two of them were also fined two trillion marks — this was during the German post-war period of hyperinflation — which converted to about 50 cents American for each. After a few months, an American petition with more than two million signatures, including 19 state governors, 117 members of Congress, and 208 mayors was presented for the release of Griffis. The German government relented and expelled the prisoners without pardoning them. Griffis was welcomed home by New York’s mayor and a crowd of thousands.



Meanwhile the US was moving toward concluding a final peace treaty with Germany. As this was being crafted, some Congressmen demanded a clause requiring Germany to return any draft evaders, a provision aimed squarely at Grover’s rendition. In the end, a specific extradiction clause was omitted, but the treaty did specify that “nothing herein contained shall be construed to terminate the military status of any person now in desertion from the military or naval service of the United States, nor to terminate the liability to prosecution and punishment under the Selective Service Law,” a provision certainly meant to cover Bergdoll. Meanwhile, under laws providing for the seizure of property of “enemy aliens,” Bergdoll assets valued at more than $800,000 were seized. The national convention of the American Legion in 1921 passed a lengthy resolution demanding that the government do all in its power to secure the return of “Grover C. Bergdoll, a notorious service slacker,” adding that “his escape and the failure to apprehend this arch slacker will remain a blot upon the war records of this nation until judgment is done.” At the same time, of course, the government was still doing virtually nothing to pursue the hundreds of thousands of other, less flamboyant cases of draft evasion that had happened during the war.



In 1926, during an elopement to Leningrad, the 33-year-old Grover married Berta Franck, who was 18 at the time. Over the years, they would have seven children together.



By 1939, war clouds were again emanating from Germany, and Grover, now 46 years old, concluded that facing justice in the United States was preferable to having his family spend the war in Germany. Over the years, Grover had actually managed to enter the United States twice for expended stays totaling seven years, never being caught. The second of these stays began in 1935, with the entire family hiding in plain sight at the Bergdoll mansion in Philadelphia. They returned to Germany in 1938; Grover informed officials at the American consulate in Stuttgart in early 1939 that he intended to surrender without conditions, and the entire family then returned to the U. S. for good. While Grover was traveling home, efforts were made in Congress to craft legislation that would strip citizenship from deserters and exclude them from entry into the country under certain circumstances. Again this was aimed purely at Grover, but Grover’s lawyers managed to delay action on the measure long enough for Grover to arrive in New York City, which made the legislation moot. Upon arrival, Grover was taken into custody and jailed back at Fort Jay on Governors Island. After another court-martial, he was sentenced to finish his original prison term plus three more years for the escape and long evasion of justice, and issued a dishonorable discharge from military service. With time off for good behavior, he was released about five years later, in 1944, despite further protests from veterans’ organizations.



Grover died in 1966 at the age of 72. His later years were not free of drama. His son Alfred, in 1948, repeated his father’s refusal to be inducted. He was sentenced to five years in Lewisburg Prison (where, incidentally, he befriended the accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss). Of course Alfred’s case occasioned renewed coverage of his father’s saga. Later, Grover became abusive of his family, including Berta. They separated and divorced; he began to exhibit more and more psychotic behavior, and was committed to a psychiatric hospital where he spent his final few years. He had lived his entire life on the proceeds of the estates of his grandparents and parents, and never worked seriously for a living. He left his still-substantial estate to his daughter Katharina, whom he had grown to favor toward the end of his life, and provided just $20 each to his other estranged children and his wife. Katharina quickly arranged for the will to be voided, so that an equalized distribution could be made among Berta and all the children. Berta died in 2001 at the age of 93.



Despite voluminous documentation deriving from the various trials, Congressional inquiries, correspondence, and an unpublished biography penned by Alfred, the son who dodged the draft himself, it is difficult to fully understand what motivated Grover to go on the lam for so long and to frequently thumb his nose at the authorities pursuing him. Given his institutionalization late in life, it is certainly possible that a psychiatric condition, such as an antisocial personality disorder, was present early on. Much of his behavior is consistent with such a diagnosis. But other factors may also have influenced him. His German heritage may have played a role in not wishing to take up arms. He occasionally suggested he was a conscientious objector, and it’s possible that this was influenced by Emma during his youth, but he never made a formal claim of conscientious objector status. But at the end of the day, Grover continued to flaunt the authorities for decades during which he could have could have resolved his problems at any time and avoided the problems he continued to put his family through.



Grover’s airplane, the Wright brothers model B, had been placed in storage before his first disappearance. In the 1930s, it was discovered by a group of aviation enthusiasts, and Grover agreed to donate the plane to them. It was fully restored, flown once more in 1934, and then put on display in the Aviation Hall of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia — one of just eight surviving Wright brothers planes.



Now a full disclosure: my son Dirk Langeveld wrote a book called “The Artful Dodger,” a biography of Grover from which I have derived the bulk of the facts in this paper.

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E = mc2: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences

INTELLIGENCE — Photo by David Bruce, used under Creative Commons License. (Inscription carved by Roger Babson at Dogtown Common, Gloucester, Massachusetts, about 1930)

Presented to the Club by David Noyes on Monday evening, November 26, 2018



NEWS FLASH from the front page of the Boston Globe May 21, 2018:



“Massachusetts ponders hiring a computer to grade MCAS essays. Each year, students generate more than six million essays requiring a small army of graduate students, educators, and other professionals to read and score them — a laborious task that takes most of the summer. In an effort to speed up the delivery of the MCAS results to schools and families, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is exploring the option of replacing human test scorers with a computer program. This technology would help the state deliver the results in the summer instead of the fall so that schools could analyze the results and make any necessary adjustments before the school year begins. “



Yes, that’s correct. It’s possible that no human eye would ever see a student’s effort. Can you imagine the Board of Trustees of the Nobel Prize Committee submitting their choices for the Literature Prize to the same algorithm!



Last year Martin gave an intriguing, thought provoking, yet somehow, disquieting presentation about Artificial Intelligence. Tonight, I would like to discuss: Native Intelligence.



I can distinctly remember being in seventh grade, studying what was then called “New Math”. (To this day, I really can’t explain what was “new” about it) We had a two-inch thick paper back workbook with lessons, examples, and problems to be solved. I can even remember our teacher — Mrs. Mansfield. She was spry, agile, and always impeccably dressed. But we took turns guessing what color her otherwise naturally white hair was going to be on Monday morning. Sometimes it had a slight pinkish tone — other times a blue pattern. Once, I recall her head having a distinct green halo.



I soon discovered that I had a knack for this subject and relished the challenge. But I was also struck by how non-universal that experience was. For the first time, I recall being mystified that another student struggled to understand a concept which seemed so obvious to me.



And, at the same time, I fumbled with saxophone lessons and reading music. Too late, I discovered as a high school freshman, that the exam process for high school band was a three-minute solo performance, (in front of the rest of the band, no less), of the John Phillips Souza march we were currently practicing in preparation for football halftime festivities. WOW, how embarrassing! Also, a freshman was always chosen to be the band secretary — whose requisite duties involved making sure every player had the correct music, in the correct order of performance — a thankless job if ever there was one. And, by tradition, the position generally was bestowed upon the worst performer. In this case—yours truly.



I used to read that the aptitude for Math and Music went hand-in-hand, but not so in my case.



All of which brings me to a discussion of the theory of multiple intelligences.



This proposal was first introduced as a radical concept in 1983 by Howard Gardner, in his book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.



Gardner is best known in educational circles for this theory — a critique of the notion that there exists but one human intelligence that can be assessed by standard aptitude testing. He is currently the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981 and a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2000. Many teachers, school administrators, and special educators have been inspired by Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences as it has allowed for the idea that there is more than one way to define a person's intellect. Thirty-eight years after the book was written, the theory is still enthusiastically, but not universally, embraced.



As John Maynard Keynes, the famous Nobel economist said: “The real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones”.



At the end of the 19th century, France passed a law mandating education for children ages six to fourteen. Amongst others, Alfred Binet was appointed to the Commission for the Retarded. The task was to develop a test that would provide data to distinguish those children who could benefit from remedial help. With the aid of a young medical student, Theodore Simon, in 1905 a new test for measuring intelligence was introduced — the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale. German psychologist William Stern then used the test to create the well known IQ — the tested mental age divided by the chronological age times 100.

Then in 1916, Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford University, created a version for use in the United States and it became known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. The U.S government recruited Terman to oversee the use of the IQ test for military recruiting for World War I. The recruits were given group intelligence tests which took about an hour to administer. Testing options included Army Alpha, a text-based test, and, Army-Beta, a picture-based test for nonreaders. (Parenthetically, I find it astounding that in 1916, there were so many illiterate men). 25 percent could not complete the Alpha test. The examiners scored the tests on a scale ranging from "A" through "E".

Recruits who earned scores of "A" would be trained as officers while those who earned scores of "D" and "E" would never receive officer training. After the war Terman and his colleagues pressed for intelligence tests to be used in schools to improve their efficiency. With administration to over 1.7 million recruits, and with the backing of the government, the Stanford-Binet test became widely accepted across the country. In part, the excitement about testing was that intelligence was now quantifiable — just as easy as measuring one’s height or weight.

Unfortunately, the test was also advanced by those in the Eugenics movement. Given the perceived importance of intelligence and with new ways to measure intelligence, many influential individuals, including Terman, began promoting controversial ideas to increase the nation's overall intelligence. These ideas included things such as discouraging individuals with low IQ from having children and granting important positions based on high IQ scores.

Throughout the remainder of the twentieth Century, countless people have pursued the best way of defining, measuring, and nurturing intelligence. IQ tests are only the tip of the cognitive iceberg. Such tests as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the American College Test, the Miller Analogies Test, the Graduate Record Exam, etc., are all based on technology originally developed to test intelligence. Even assessments that are focused on measuring achievement (as opposed to aptitude) strongly resemble traditional tests of intelligence.



Gardner admits that the pressure to determine who is intelligent and to do so at the earliest possible age is not likely to disappear anytime soon. But he says that the standard testing for college acceptance, gathers a homogeneous collection of “SAT minds”. And his theory presents a radically different view of the mind, recognizing many different cognitive strengths, and contrasting cognitive styles. He asks the question: “Why does the contemporary construct of intelligence fail to take into account large areas of human endeavor?”



Gardner defines intelligence as a biophysical potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture. This skill allows one to approach a situation where there is a goal to be obtained and to locate the best route to that goal. The problem might be anticipating a move in chess, creating a musical score, repairing a car, or running a successful political campaign.



Gardner, using a set of eight criteria, defines seven intelligences:



1. Musical Intelligence



Musical intelligence entails the skill in the performance, composition, or appreciation of musical patterns.



Think in our local place and time: Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma, John Williams, James Taylor. Enough said!



2. Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence



Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence entails the potential of using one’s whole body or parts of the body to solve problems.



So include any of the dancers at Jacob’s Pillow, but especially choreographer Martha Graham whose dramatic and expressive performances defined artistry in movement. “Dance is the hidden language of the soul”, she once told the New York Times.



But also, include your favorite mechanic, electrician, or plumber.



Or, consider Roger Clemons, arguably the best pitcher of his generation. But, if you ever heard him speak, you knew he should stick to his day job!



Of course this particular intelligence, most readily translates into financial gain. Lebron James’s new contract will pay him a record $500,000 per game. But even the bench players will make the minimum yearly salary — $1.3 million. For Baseball the minimum is $545,000. For Hockey it’s $650,000. By comparison, the principal oboe player for the Boston Symphony Orchestra was paid $270,000 in 2017.



But, I can’t resist my favorite sports salary story: Babe Ruth was negotiating his salary with Col. Jacob Rupert, owner of the New York Yankees, in 1930, at the height of the Depression. Ruth was told his demand for $80,000 per year was outrageous, since President Hoover was making $75,000. Ruth replied: “What the hell does Hoover have to do with it? Besides, I had a better year than he did!”



3. Logical-Mathematical Intelligence



Logical-mathematical intelligence involves the capacity to analyze problems logically, carry out mathematical operations and investigate issues scientifically. Mathematicians and scientists define this intelligence.



This area of intelligence is the foundation of current IQ testing. In gifted individuals the process of problem solving can be remarkably rapid. And, perhaps, a solution is discovered even before its step-by-step proof is articulated.



For instance, Einstein could imagine and postulate the existence of gravitational waves rippling through the fabric of space-time in 1916, but it would be a full century before LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) could confirm their existence.



4. Linguistic Intelligence



Linguistic intelligence involves sensitivity to spoken and written language, the ability to learn languages and the capacity to use language to accomplish goals. Lawyers, speakers, writers, poets are among the people with high linguistic intelligence.



The written expression of language is brought to us by our favorite authors. And so, readers interpret and enjoy text using their linguistic intelligence.



One of my favorite Maya Angelou quotes: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”



5. Spatial Intelligence



Spatial intelligence features the potential to recognize and manipulate patterns of wide space (such as pilots), as well as patterns of more confined areas (including artists, architects, and sculptors).



Even with the advent of GPS making map reading skills obsolete, this is the intelligence required to drive a car. Although I see advertisements indicating parallel parking, perhaps the most difficult part of the road test for obtaining a driver’s license can be done automatically by pushing a button!



Spatial problem solving is required for playing chess. The visual arts use of space falls into this category of intelligence. Think of our member Norman Rockwell. And, sadly, the now absent Calder mobiles from the Berkshire Museum! Calder once said that when all goes well, “a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise”.



6. Interpersonal Intelligence



Interpersonal Intelligence is the capacity to notice distinctions among others — in particular, contrasts in moods, temperaments, motivations, and intentions. A skilled adult can read the desires of others, even when they might not be apparent. This highly honed skill appears in religious or political leaders, salespeople, teachers, therapists and, yes, even parents.



7. Intrapersonal Intelligence



Intrapersonal intelligence is the knowledge of the internal aspects of oneself—access to one’s own feelings, one’s range of emotions and the ability to draw on that as a means of guiding one’s own behavior.





Since the publication of his book delineating these seven intelligences, Gardner fully expects that other intelligences could be entertained. In subsequent books he has discussed whether Naturalist Intelligence, Spiritual Intelligence, and Existential Intelligence meet his criteria. Although when asked if there is cooking intelligence, humor intelligence, or sexual intelligence, he facetiously replies: I can recognize only the intelligences that I possess”.



Despite describing the independence of these seven intelligences, Gardner acknowledges that nearly every cultural role requires several intelligences. Dance, for instance, requires bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and spatial intelligence. Politics demands interpersonal skill, linguistic and logical aptitude (OR maybe not!).



We are familiar with the John F. Kennedy quote from April 29, 1962 given at a gathering honoring seven Nobel Prize winners:

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Kennedy continued: “Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet”



Gardner suggests that there is a long-standing bias towards testing; after all, for most of us in Western Society, intelligence is a capacity that can be measured by a set of short questions and answers. Gardner asks: “Couldn’t the same method be used to assess a new approach to intelligences?” However, the challenge of measuring someone’s understanding of him or her self or other people does not lend itself to measurement with a short-answer instrument — similarly with bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. Can a person express him/her self effectively in public? Can a person remember his/her way around a place, visited a while ago? Faced with an important decision, can a person reflect on previous experience and make a good decision? These capacities are central to intelligence and yet do not lend themselves to brief assessments. Gardner proposes a host of computer simulations that could be constructed, but realizes the impracticality of such evaluations for general use.



Colleges and Universities have tried for decades to discern the “whole” person in their admissions process. Have you been following the story of the high-stakes case accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans? A group calling itself Students for Fair Admissions brought suit against Harvard for excluding Asian Americans based solely upon race. Harvard had fought the release of its proprietary admissions process, but ultimately had to reveal its secrets to the Court. The plaintiffs contend that Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research found that Asian-Americans would comprise 43 percent of an admitted class if admissions officers considered only academic qualifications and should make up 26 percent of the class even when extracurricular activities and personal ratings are considered. Yet, Asian-Americans only made up 19 percent of admitted students for the year being evaluated — 2013. The Justice Department has weighed in saying that Harvard’s reliance on personal traits — such as kindness, leadership, and courage (in other words an attempt to measure something other than SAT scores), hurts Asian-American students who often receive lower interview scores from Admissions officers than other applicants. On campus, it has forced students to confront uneasy and intensely personal questions about racial diversity, privilege, and their place at an Ivy League institution. Unlike previous affirmative action lawsuits that hinged on whether a race-conscious admissions process benefitted black and Hispanic students, while hurting white students; this case pivots on a minority — Asian-American applicants.  Stay tuned.



Of course, it is tempting to think of particular intelligences as good or bad; and it is undoubtedly better to have more of certain intelligences than to lack them. However, no intelligence is, in itself, moral or immoral. Intelligence can be put to either a constructive or destructive use.



Before he became the Unabomber, Ted Kaczinski was a gifted mathematician. He went to Harvard on scholarship at age 16 and, in 1967, became the youngest assistant professor of mathematics ever at the University of California, Berkeley. But mathematics was unimportant to him, he later said. It was just a game he was good at. Indeed, he fiercely resented his mother’s insistence that he was a genius. In 1969, Kaczynski abruptly fled academia.



Sixteen bomb attacks, killing three people and injuring 23, were ultimately attributed to him. Tracking him was one of the longest and most expensive manhunts in FBI history. Kaczynski’s bombs were handcrafted, impossible to trace, and became more sophisticated and deadly with time. He carried out this cold trail of terrorism for sixteen years. If not for the actions of his brother David, the Unabomber might still be a fugitive and active bomber.



At trial the government sought the death penalty, breaking an agreement made with David Kaczynski to forgo it. Ultimately, Ted Kaczynski pleaded guilty rather than insanity in order to avoid being labeled as mentally ill; and received four life sentences. In a report for the 50th reunion of his class at Harvard, Kaczynski gave his occupation as “prisoner.” Under “awards,” he listed his life sentences.



And, in the category of the misuse of Interpersonal Intelligence, we are all too familiar with the sexual abuse scandals embroiling elite Prep schools, athletic programs such as USA Gymnastics, and The Boy Scouts of America. Most recently, this past summer a Pennsylvania Grand Jury wrote a searing report that Bishops and other leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years, persuading victims not to report the abuse and law enforcement not to investigate.



The report found more than 1,000 identifiable victims, and is the broadest examination yet by a government agency in the United States of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The report said there are likely thousands more victims whose records were lost or who were too afraid to come forward.

“Despite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability,” the grand jury wrote. “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”

The grand jury said that while some accused priests were removed from ministry, the church officials who protected them remained in office or even got promotions. Church officials followed a “playbook for concealing the truth,” the grand jury said, minimizing the abuse by using words like “inappropriate contact” instead of “rape”; and not informing the community of the real reasons behind removing an accused priest.

“Tell his parishioners that he is on ‘sick leave,’ or suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion.’ Or say nothing at all,” the report said.

Constructive and positive use of intelligences does not happen by accident. Deciding how to deploy one’s intelligence is a question of values.



Human beings possess a range of capacities and potentials that can be put to productive use. Individuals need to understand and subsequently deploy their multiple intelligences in productive ways in varying societal roles. Even though intelligence testing is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future, and standard testing of the full gamut of intelligence is not feasible, what matters is the use of intelligence to carry out tasks for the greater good. Accordingly, we should be assessing people’s intelligence by how successfully they carry out valued tasks; or, to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: “I admire it when I see it.”

_______________



Material for this essay was derived from several books by Howard Gardner, including: Frames of Mind, Intelligence Reframed, and Multiple Intelligences. Also, The Boston Globe, The Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, and works my Maya Angelou. 

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Rabbi Harold I. Salzmann, Rabbi Emeritus at Temple Anshe Amunim, Pittsfield, Mass.

The Monday Evening Club has lost its longtime member and secretary-treasurer, Rabbi Harold Salzmann. Here is his obituary. He had been a member of the Club since 1955.

Rabbi Harold  I. Salzmann, 96, died peacefully on Tuesday September 25, 2018 at Mt. Carmel Care Center in Lenox. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1922, Rabbi was the son of Bernard Leopold and Rae (ne Busch) Salzmann. The son and grandson of traditional rabbis trained in the religious schools of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today’s Slovakia), as a youth he received a very thorough training in Biblical Hebrew and Talmud-Torah studies. Eager to explore newer avenues in Jewish thought, Rabbi Salzmann pursued his rabbinical studies in the Reform Movement at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he was ordained in 1950. Throughout his life, he continued his scholarship in theology and as a teacher who trained bar and bat mitzvah children as well as adults. An amateur historian, he collected antique postcards of the Berkshires, possessed a wealth of knowledge about the postal service of British Mandate Palestine, and had begun to write a history of the Jewish community of the Berkshires before his death.

Before joining the US army as a  chaplain at the rank of Second Lieutenant (and later an Army Reserve Captain), he and his wife Audrey (ne Pastor) whom he married in 1950, held a pulpit in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His time as a chaplain for the Western Area Command took him to Germany and Belgium; in Luxembourg, he took part in a dedication ceremony to honor General George Patton.  Turning down a full time commission in the US Army, he returned to civilian life in 1954. He frequently remarked that it was the natural beauty of the Berkshires and his ability to be active in both Jewish and secular life that made him turn down other job offers at larger congregations in New York and Rhode Island.

Over the past 64 years, Rabbi Salzmann dedicated his life to building his Reform Jewish community in Pittsfield. He raised funds and along with the Temple board, engaged an architect to design and to build the new synagogue that is currently home to Congregation Anshe Amunim on Broad street in Pittsfield. The Temple’s membership grew and gained new financial stability through the generosity of congregants who shared his vision. Although he retired early, he remained active as the emeritus rabbi, often stepping in to replace his younger colleagues to conduct services, funerals and weddings.  The Temple honored both the Rabbi and his wife, recently renaming the religious school in their honor. Nationally, he was recognized by his alma mater, the Hebrew University of Cincinnati, with an honorary doctorate in 1975.

At least in equal measure, Rabbi devoted himself to the civic life of the Berkshires, as a citizen and one of its most dedicated religious leaders. Shortly after coming to Pittsfield, he became a member of the Rotary Club. In 2012, fellow Rotarians  recognized his many decades of service to Rotary and the community with the Paul Harris Award.  One of the longest serving members of the clergy in the Berkshires, he delivered more invocations at parades and high school graduations than any other rabbi, priest or minister in the county.  Active in many other capacities in the city and county, from the board of trustees of the Berkshire Medical Center to the committee that restored the World War I memorial in Veterans’ Park on South St.  A longtime member of the Berkshire Clergy Association, he embodied the civic spirit of the Kennedy-era. In addition to his love of collecting books and stamps, he remained the secretary-treasurer of the Monday Evening Club whose members included his dear friend, Norman Rockwell, well into his 90s.

Rabbi Salzmann is survived by his wife and rabbinical partner, Audrey, with whom he would have celebrated their 68^th wedding anniversary on October 8, 2018; a daughter, Dr. Ariel Salzmann of Kingston, Ontario Canada, a son, Joshua Salzmann of London, UK. and five grandchildren Zachary (and his partner Carrie), Francesca, Asher, Natasha and Jordan. The Salzmann family wishes to express their gratitude to our extended Berkshire mishpacha, Jewish and non-Jewish, who frequently visited rabbi as his health declined as well as to express our thanks to the nurses, aides, and staff of Mt. Carmel for the high quality of care and many kindnesses they showed him in his final months of life.

Salzmann, Rabbi Harold, age 96, Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Anshe Amunim, died Sept. 25, 2018 Funeral services will be held FRIDAY, Sept. 28 at Temple Anshe Amunim at 12:00 Noon with Rabbi Liz, P.G. Hirsch, spiritual leader of the Temple, and Rabbi Josh Breindel, spiritual leader of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Mass., officiating. Burial will follow in the  Pittsfield Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations in Rabbi Salzmann’s memory may be made to the Southern Poverty Law Center through the Devanny-Condron Funeral Home which has been entrusted with his care.

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