tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17349694233699272552024-02-08T07:02:24.803-08:00'4Fs, Women and the Grace of God'the OTHER manhattan projectMichael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-25638157536456791322017-11-09T06:25:00.001-08:002017-11-09T06:26:13.716-08:00Emergent HopeMix together - as you surely weren’t supposed to - 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God - and something unexpected is sure to happen.<br />
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Something unexpectedly good - unbelievably good...Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-83947036626753431482017-04-29T01:14:00.003-07:002017-04-29T01:14:47.959-07:00Nazi view of Slavs parallels contemporary Allied view of aboriginalsThe Nazis are best known for killing peoples they felt were actively seeking to harm them and civilization's road to progress.<br />
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Where to begin - or end - the list ?<br />
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Jews, Communists, Romas, socialist trade unionists, partisans.
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Undeservedly less well known are the countless millions they intended to kill who even the fervent Nazis admitted displayed no such acts of hatred.
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Peoples like the tens of millions of disabled they planned to kill under Aktion T4.
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<br />
Or, my subject today, the tens of millions of Slavs they intended to watch starve to death through their Hunger Plan for occupied Soviet territory.
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The Nazis collectively sighed and agreed that their deaths were regrettable - but necessary.
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<br />
Even as inevitable, with civilization simply passively watching as those unfit to survive in the battle of the fittest meet their grisly fate.
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The Nazi inaction were merely helping speed up the inevitable.
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Chillingly, this does not differ a jot or a tittle - intellectually - from how most of the Allied world, before during and immediately after the war years, viewed their own aboriginal ('Native'/'Savage') peoples.
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<br />
Even if (some) members of the Allied Nations sometimes referred to the aboriginals as 'Noble' Savages, they were generally united in seeing the aboriginals' deaths as inevitable in the face of encroaching civilization --- unless they wholeheartedly adopted the White Man's ways and disappeared into the general population.
<br />
<br />
Death by starvation and disease and social disarray (drink) could only be delayed - not stopped - by more food and better housing, medical care and job prospects - so why bother ?
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<br />
No need to actively shoot or gas them - as you would your 'evil' enemies : just a plan of Benign Neglect and letting Nature take her inevitable course.
<br />
<br />
On an ultimately similar scale in terms of numbers affected, was the collective Allied medical decision to deny SBE patients worldwide their only hope for survival (penicillin).
<br />
<br />
This was done on the grounds that wartime efforts to save youthful SBE patients was a misuse of scarce wartime resources, as it was not a disease of military priority.
<br />
<br />
Against this, wartime research on saving youthful Polio patients was allowed to go on on consuming scarce medical resources.
<br />
<br />
Perhaps I hardly need to add that Polio was seen as a disease particularly common among the suburban white Protestant middle class - families very much like those of the Allied medical elite - while Rheumatic Fever and the resulting SBE was seen very much as a disease of poverty - one mostly found among the minorities and the immigrants crowded into inner city tenements.
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<br />
In the end, National Academy of Science Committee (NASC) death panels and NAZI death panels - intellectually - did not seem to differ much ...
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<br />Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-66385440705327566012017-03-14T02:29:00.000-07:002017-03-14T02:30:41.108-07:00'calvinistic' genetic predestination selects the few worthy --- or HGT's 'catholic' transfer of genetic salvation to all ?Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the Canadian who gave humanity the boon of 'public domain penicillin-for-all' in the teeth of fierce opposition from the likes of Sir Alexander Fleming and Sir Howard Florey, was raised well within the long-forgotten atmosphere of fervent Calvinist evangelical missionary efforts that peaked in the very decades of his youth, just before the Great War.<br />
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Calvin's harshly restrictive doctrine of double predestination might seem to sit uneasy with the contrasting universal missionary impulse of offering the Gospel to all everywhere --- but then the workings out of God's will is always remain a mystery to us.<br />
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Here in the real world, indeed, the two conflicting ideas don't always hold together very long and one wonders if this was the case with the young adult Dawson.<br />
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For in the post-Great War convulsion in Western Thought, he is said to have moved away from a belief in the formal religions of his youth.<br />
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(Dawson was raised into a devoutly active Nova Scotian Scottish Presbyterian family, at a time when what today we call 'Mainstream Protestantism' was very strongly evangelical indeed.)<br />
<br />
But his adult scientific activities seem to suggest a quasi-religious move that was more 'sideways' than away.<br />
<br />
People who held strongly that our invisible genetic inheritance is almost everything (and that visible behavior is less 'Free Will' than 'Breeding Will Out') dominated the scientific world in the half century between 1895-1945, the years of Dawson's life.<br />
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So some of us were predestined, by our genetic inheritance alone, to be judged lives fully worthy of life while others of us, equally, are condemned to be judged as lives unworthy of life.<br />
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You can call this urge to cull mere routine Nazi practise --- or conventional Western scientific and conventional thought rarely put into action --- morally the difference hardly matters.<br />
<br />
But Dawson, in pointed contrast, spent his career demonstrating instead that genetic material, far from rigidly moving vertically down from father to son as Darwin's devotees claimed, actually freely roamed the Earth, potentially taken up by all and sundry : what Dawson then called Bacterial Transformation but what we today call HGT , Horizontal Gene Transferring.<br />
<br />
Valuable genes were not for only the very few, the pre-chosen few, but potentially available for all, to take up by their own free will.<br />
<br />
Similarly, wartime Penicillin was not only for the very few worthy of it under wartime conditions or who could afford to pay very high prices for patented 'pure' penicillin in the postwar world.<br />
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In other words, : scarce, expensive, pure penicillin for the pure.<br />
<br />
Instead Dawson advocated abundant impure-but-harmless public domain penicillin for all in the wartime and postwar worlds who needed it to survive serious infection.<br />
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In the end, thanks mostly to Dante Colitti and the American Dr Mom, he beat back Fleming and Florey and their ilk and we got the boon of cheap abundant penicillin for all, which by a sort of Herd Immunity effect, has benefitted 10 billion of us since 1940.<br />
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Dawson's vision was not a very Presbyterian notion, true, but it still encompassed the very essence of the pre-WWI missionary impulse...Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-75674488301049157682017-02-04T00:56:00.000-08:002017-02-04T00:56:10.895-08:00Boyd Woodruff, possibly last of the decision-makers from the early days of penicillin research, dies at 99Possibly the last of the decision making participants from the pioneering days of wartime penicillin (I am talking basically pre mid 1943) has died.
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<br />
There are almost certainly still people alive who were very young patients from the earliest days of penicillin or who merely followed orders while working on some penicillin production line but I do not know who they are.
<br />
<br />
But Boyd Woodruff had a powerful role in the earliest days of antibiotics while still basically an undergraduate - that and his very long life made him a rare living link to events that we know can only know second hand, as history not journalism.
<br />
<br />
I knew he was still alive, still mentally active, knew his phone number and home address since 2005, but I always was too shy to call him and ask him what he recalled personally of Dr Dawson's parallel penicillin efforts.
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<br />
Sigh....Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-30013049004758757702017-01-10T04:50:00.001-08:002017-01-10T04:50:56.869-08:00did Pfizer boss John L Smith and penicillin pioneer Dr MH Dawson EVER actually meet ?I have found no evidence, <i>yet</i>, that the two people most responsible for making penicillin WWII's only 'Good News Story' ever actually met in person -- or even ever talked over the phone.<br />
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Despite working only a few miles apart in New York City!<br />
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Communicated by letter yes - at least once - for sure.<br />
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But communication indirectly - via a least two highly trusted confidants - many times.<br />
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Dawson's closest co-worker, Dr Gladys Hobby, seemed to have hit it off with Pfizer personnel from the very start.<br />
<br />
After all, in the almost-all alpha male world of 1940s science she definitely stuck out : young, pretty, very smart and perhaps most importantly, charming in a way the sometimes frank and often passionate Dawson never could be amongst the alpha crew.<br />
<br />
She was hired by Pfizer in late 1943.<br />
<br />
As one of the four in America with the longest experience with natural penicillin, she could offer highly experienced advice on Pfizer's plans to greatly expanded <i>natural</i> penicillin production in early 1944.<br />
<br />
Dr Hobby continued to teach part time at Columbia and to stay in close contact with Dawson and his post-Hobby penicillin team.<br />
<br />
The first person from Pfizer to ever lay eyes upon Dawson and his pioneering penicillin research was a fellow Canadian and a senior employee very near the top of the Pfizer technical staff : John L Davenport.<br />
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Davenport was a native of Owen Sound Ontario and a 1929 graduate of University of Toronto chemical engineering, forced by the onset of the Depression to seek research employment outside of his native land - just as Dawson had had to do about the same time.<br />
<br />
Davenport and Dawson thus had much in common, 1920s Canadian immigrant scientists in the research world of wartime NYC, and Davenport was probably Dawson's most reliable conduit with Pfizer between mid 1941 and late 1943.<br />
<br />
Pfizer boss John L Smith, himself a childhood immigrant from Germany, undoubtedly admired Dawson's highly moral stance on penicillin and his unceasing hard work despite the physical pain from his terminal illness.<br />
<br />
But he also probably thought Dawson's unceasing demands for the Allies to ramp up natural penicillin - <i>now !</i> - to be that of the typically impractical university research scientist.<br />
<br />
Though in truth, Dawson <i>had</i> earlier built a pilot plant sized penicillin operation inside his hospital, in his "spare" time - shaming all of Big Pharma, Pfizer included, in the process.<br />
<br />
So the pair were a lot more alike than both might admit.<br />
<br />
I believe that John L - a shy, demanding and taciturn boss - probably welcomed Davenport and Hobby doing what didn't come easy to him by being the personal link between his thinking and that of Dr Dawson...Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-86036508840553860912016-12-17T00:03:00.002-08:002016-12-17T00:34:44.680-08:00The Potemkin Presidency : the power of the Big Lie remains timelessAt the very least, this generation of school kids will no longer have to gape in disbelief as to how so many people were unwilling to believe Hitler's often repeated blood-curdling racist threats and so willing to con themselves into believing he was just saying them to help 'swing a deal' that would satisfy German demands over Versailles and placate its neighbours.<br />
<br />
For they have the billionaire President-to-be Donald Trump before them : assembling the richest and most right wing Cabinet ever in American history, all the while claiming he is out for the ordinary six pack working stiff.<br />
<br />
An American patriot --- or Putin's Poddle ?<br />
<br />
Hard on the Chinese ---- or a willing-to-cut-them-a-sweet-deal Manchurian Candidate?<br />
<br />
The Trump family has made it to the top by fabricating fake golfing and vacationing Potemkin Villages*, and by fabricating Fake News <i>and</i> Fake Political stances : fake, fake, fake : and a new generation of gullible parents and grandparents swallow it wholesale, in 2016 as in 1936 ....<br />
<br />
*Scottish political boss Alex Salmond becoming <i>his</i> generation's Neville Chamberlain when he got down on his knees to swallow that particular Big Whopper.Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-3790663146881199502016-12-11T05:04:00.001-08:002016-12-12T02:22:37.663-08:00Viola Desmond triumph will boost Kellie Leitch campaign<h3>
why we all failed to predict the triumph of the TRUMP counter reaction to Obama's moves towards greater tolerance </h3>
<div>
<br />
I won't go as far as to call it a law of political science ----because I don't believe such 'laws' can exist ----- but generally, we can say that for every official gesture towards greater tolerance there is almost always a massively angry, if sullenly quiet, popular counter-reaction from about half of the population.</div>
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And having an united quietly sullen half of the population on your side is more than enough to get yourself elected -- just ask President-to-be <b>Donald</b> <b>Trump</b>.<br />
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So the news that the face of a "mixed-race" "colored" "woman" "divorcee" "convict" is about to be placed on Canada's $10 bill, instead of the face of the white Anglo Saxon Queen, will only play into the hands of Canada's own 'Donela Trump', Conservative party leadership candidate <b>Kellie Leitch</b>.<br />
<br />
Few historians or journalists, unfortunately, will accept this as fact.<br />
<br />
We historians and journalists are typically too busy celebrating the advances in tolerance that led to the 1965 passage of the Democratic Party's <b>Voting Rights Act</b> , designed to ensure the right of Blacks to vote, to notice the determined reaction against it by white racists.<br />
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One that in turn led to their quiet but wholesale move to the Republican Party --- the party once led by Lincoln, oh He who freed the Blacks.<br />
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This in turn led to the highly anti-tolerant presidency of Ronald Reagan and onward to today's Trump victory.<br />
<br />
I am a historian of WWII, but was born in late 1951 and so I first learned of the war years through the decided jaded prism of such late Fifties works as 1959's "<b>The Long and the Short and the Tall</b>".<br />
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So much so that when I was taught, in the very early sixties, with endlessly uplifting celebratory civics-oriented school books written back in 1949, they already felt to ten year old me as being from some incredibly distant and foreign-feeling era.<br />
<br />
The generation of historians and journalists before my own were generally born between 1935 and 1945.<br />
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So raised were their young impressionable selves in a constant bath of war and post war propaganda about the noble Allies that, despite very strong personal efforts to be particularly tolerance-oriented, they generally failed to see that WWII represented not merely a move towards greater tolerance.<br />
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That it also led to a quiet but massively popular counter-reaction against that official encouragement of racial and religious tolerance.<br />
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Between about 1941 till about 1956, years, their minds would have been filled to the brim with propaganda claiming/lying that the Allied fight against the Axis was all about nobly defending the rights of all to live free of fear and oppression.<br />
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When in actual fact, almost all Allied nations only got involved in fighting Hitler when they themselves were directly attacked.<br />
<br />
And we know now that most newspaper readers in the Allied countries, in the early war years of 1939-1942, would indeed have had access to detailed accurate reports of the murders of millions of Jews and Slavs in Eastern Europe.<br />
<br />
Given the huge amount of wartime government and elite institutional support for racial and religious tolerance, these historians, the initial assumption might be to expect less, not more, prejudice
against Jews and Blacks during the war years.<br />
<br />
But in fact, archival evidence of public polling in the UK and the USA suggests that prejudice against the Jews rose not fell during those years!<br />
<br />
This prejudice amongst so many voters is the real reason why Allied politicians did nothing to rescue Europe's Jews from certain death.<br />
<br />
In those same war years, Allied White prejudice against their own Black and Latino population led to violent riots and lynching murders.<br />
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<h3>
Now : hard evidence from Canada's own Roseland Theatre</h3>
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<br /></div>
Polling (and rioting) was less extensive in Canada but what I think we younger war historians born after the propaganda bath can do is add some fresh insights to a particularly well documented case of wartime era prejudice.<br />
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One that involved two very brave Black women from Nova Scotia, <b>Carrie Best</b> and <b>Viola Desmond</b>.<br />
<br />
Very briefly, in late 1941, New Glasgow's <b>Roseland</b> <b>Theatre</b> instituted a new policy wherein Blacks had to sit up in the balcony, away from the white patrons - failure to do so would result in their arrest and imprisonment --- nominally for evading one cent in provincial taxes due!<br />
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Early in 1942, Mrs Best deliberately tested the policy, got arrested along with her son James, and was convicted.<br />
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In 1946, Viola Desmond, not knowing of the policy, accidentally ended up in the white section with the cheaper black ticket but then spontaneously refused to leave despite the threat to be arrested.<br />
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She was violently arrested, jailed and convicted.<br />
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She fought it to the NS Supreme Court and lost.<br />
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This week, her face was put on the forthcoming new Canadian $10 bill - the first woman other than the Queen to be featured on Canadian currency and the first Black too.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Emergent Modernity</h3>
<br />
But something immediately struck me odd when I looked into her story this morning.<br />
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New Glasgow has always had a large Black population and its Roseland, built in 1913, was relatively unique for a small town movie theatre in having a balcony, thus allowing seating to be easily divided between different types of customers.<br />
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It could have been segregated almost thirty years earlier than when it first was, in late 1941.<br />
<br />
That December, the nominally independent owner of the theatre, Norman W Mason. gave way to complaints from (some) white customers and began segregation of seating.<br />
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I say 'nominal' because no 'independently owned movie house' that ran conventional fare was ever truly independent --- they were really always under the thumb of the big studios and distributors who controlled the popular conventional films.<br />
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So Mason made his decision to segregate despite knowing that almost all of his movies came from studios or distributors controlled by Jews with strong ties to Eastern Europe.<br />
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A place where in mid November, barely a month earlier, newspapers all throughout the West had reported that 52,000 baby, children, elderly and adult Jews had been mass murdered in Kiev.<br />
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A place where the mass segregation of Jews from Gentile had proceeded these mass killings.<br />
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A situation that Winston Churchill himself, in a radio broadcast in August 1941 ( same month as the Atlantic Charter was released) had publicly condemned in the strongest possible terms : "whole districts exterminated, scores of thousands murdered in cold blood."<br />
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But Mason, correctly, greatly feared the wrath of (some) of his working class customers far more than that of these wealthy powerful Jews.<br />
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<h3>
Constance Backhouse did the heavy lifting</h3>
<br />
Now I did none of the heavy lifting, weary weeks and months in archives amid dusty papers, done by scholars like <b>Professor Constance Backhouse</b>, to establish the details of the Best-Desmond story.<br />
<br />
Instead, aware of the general tendency for a popular counter-reaction against official moves towards greater tolerance and being more oriented to the details of the war years than historians approaching these events through a legal and human rights prism, I immediately exclaimed, "August 1941 !!!!!!<br />
<br />
The August 1941 FDR-Churchill declaration in Argentia Newfoundland, now called <b>The Atlantic Charter</b>, that promoted human rights for all as the supposed major war aim of the Allies.<br />
<br />
Based on my recent experience following the American presidential election, I figured that a lot of Canadian whites in 1941 wouldn't have liked their government's highly reluctant decision to grant (in principle only) Jews, Blacks, Orientals and women the right to be regarded as fully human.<br />
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Further, I knew that the combination of coal mines and steel industry, unique to the New Glasgow area in Canada, made it a key site for that country's vital war industries.<br />
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(The father of my book's subject, <b>Dr Martin Henry</b> <b>Dawson</b>, was from the New Glasgow area and worked in its first heavy industry, coal-fired steel railways.)<br />
<br />
Whites, all through the Allied world, didn't want healthy fit young Blacks fighting in military combat roles. But then when healthy fit young Whites left their jobs doing the hard work frequent in heavy industry to fight in combat roles, who had the physical strength take their place back home in those vital war industries ?<br />
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Generally not women and older White men.<br />
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Suddenly seeing healthy young fit black youths taking well paying safe jobs on the Home Front while their own sons risked death overseas made many Whites very unhappy.<br />
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This, despite the fact that it was their own racial prejudices against 'Coloreds fighting in White Man's War' that created this double bind for young black men.<br />
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The Atlantic Charter, announced only a month or two before the move from some White patrons to segregate the Roseland, might have been the last straw.<br />
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That is what I mean by <b>Emergent Modernity</b> : an new era and a new atmosphere that allows for the freer intertwining of information in public, one that leads to a more complex reality and a more complex (<i>accurate</i>) insight into that reality.<br />
<br />
Reading an article about the Roseland Theatre on that great free source of information, <b>Wikipedia</b>, led me to Constance Backhouse and her article on Carrie best's earlier effort to de-segregate the Roseland.<br />
<br />
My own interest and knowledge led to adding three small but new insights to this ongoing effort to examine the Roseland story from all angles.<br />
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Firstly, that the effective boss of the Canadian Odeon' chain's Roseland in November 1946 was still Paul Nathanson, himself Jewish and well aware that the segregation of Jews from Gentiles in his grandparents' Eastern Europe was the forerunner to the Holocaust.<br />
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Secondly, that in 1941 there was growing resentment in the Roseland's catchment area over Blacks taking up traditional high paying White jobs, due to the war.<br />
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Thirdly that the 'tolerance-towards-Blacks-promoting' Atlantic Charter was fresh in the news when the patron-originated movement to segregate the Roseland began.<br />
<br />
This new take on an old news story from seventy five years ago is the sort that might have reminded recent US election observers that Obama's efforts to promote greater tolerance was bound to lead to a fierce counter reaction from the half of every society that prefer to hate, rather than love, their fellow members of humanity...Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-68414750478055118632016-12-01T18:03:00.001-08:002016-12-01T18:05:19.850-08:00a team of two 4Fs & a woman, working unfunded in three little rooms, couldn't possibly be worth 'a hill of beans', not set against the bigness of WWIIBut then you never know, do you ?<br />
<br />
Because ten billion of us already, since 1940, have led healthier happier lives because of those three's dogged efforts eventually inspiring a lot of others to join in.<br />
<br />
Emergent Modernity is all about an interconnecting humanity, that even when it is open to anything and everything, is still always unexpectedly surprised....Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-19187048341420029232016-11-29T08:19:00.001-08:002016-11-29T08:19:46.424-08:00Music on the radio Dawson's chief pleasure as he worked at nightRadio was much much bigger than movies in the supposed golden age of movie theatres.<br />
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Kids with lots of energy and undemanding jobs may have felt differently but many an adult with tired feet and a tired tongue from a tasking job wanted nothing more than peace and quiet and the chance to curl up in a nice comfy chair under a good light and read while listening to soothing music on the radio.
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<br />
Early evening after supper was actually prime time for the top shows that usually demanded your full attention - variety comedy shows and dramas but always in urban areas one station found a ready market for less talk and more music.
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<br />
If he worked late at the lab, his need for some music was perhaps a bit livelier : dance music of a moderate sort, to keep him alert in the quiet dark silence ....
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-50326726467836395732016-11-29T05:21:00.001-08:002016-11-29T05:43:41.308-08:00imagining the typical thoughts of typical people<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Imagining the particular thoughts of particular individuals is not something historians can do and still be regarded as historians.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But imagining the possible typical thoughts of typical types of people is something historians do all the time --- and <i>must</i> do all the time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Science knows of many similar situations in its own line of work ---- for the scientists can never predict the behavior of a single gas molecule or when exactly a particular radioactive atom will split, but they can predict the typical behavior of trillions of gas molecules or trillions of radioactive atoms.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Pollsters do somewhat the same at the other end of the scale --- interviewing a few thousand carefully representative individuals for their particular opinions will let them predict the probable behavior of millions of others rather like them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If we read of the reactions of many hundreds of typical doctors, patients, familes, administrators to a new diagnosis of terminal SBE disease, we can successfully imagine what a typical doctor might say to a typical new patient, if not what Dr Henry Dawson did say to this particular new patient on this or that particular day.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Historians gain such insights by simply sitting down and doing the bull-hard work of plowing through hundreds of books and articles and thousands of pages till they develop a feel for the consensus on how America generally viewed SBE in the early 1940s, for example.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It forces a historian to become a narrow specialist because they lack the relatively ready and easy access to current reality that the journalist automatically enjoys.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I can't imagine in writing another book beyond this one on the story of wartime penicillin - for in my own way - I am a perfectionist and can't imagine ever having quite enough facts to feel I can truly tell the tale accurately and completely.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It must always be a work in constant progress...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-90753965877447887452016-11-29T04:02:00.000-08:002016-11-29T04:41:21.608-08:00Dal Medical Library is my best friend<span style="font-size: medium;">If we see a fly-on-the-wall documentary regarding the thirty six hour visit of a major European president to President Clinton ; a documentary film in which we see Clinton charm the visiting VIP publicly but then privately tells his aides, "Oh God, he just never stopped talking !!", we are likely to feel we have gotten an accurate account of the visit, based on what we already know about the public and private Clinton.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">But we can't really imagine an equally successful <i>historical </i>documentary about FDR's conduct of WWII --- for several important reasons.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">Firstly, the cinema-verite technology did not exist in WWII. Secondly FDR was a far, far more secretive personality --- even to his closest family and aides.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">But most importantly, a two or three hour documentary can hardly cover a six year long, world wide, effort that directly involved billions of participants.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Wartime penicillin was also a six year long world wide effort but one that, at least until its very late stages, no one saw as important enough to record all its contemporary events and personalities in minute detail.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">But taking a hint from George Bernard Shaw and others, I still think I can boil it down to a libretto for a two and half hour 'spoken drama, with background radio music' in two dozen scenes ---- because I will add, as deep backstory, lengthy supporting bios of each new character, institution and process following upon each new scene.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">About 400,000 hand crafted words (and a few thousand hand drawn <b>typical</b> images) in total (with some images being of my imagined lead sheets for the drama's <b>typical</b> background radio music.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">I seek to emphasize 'typical' because while usually I can't say for sure that any one character in the American side of the wartime penicillin drama listened to this one of the big American radio networks on this or that day, we can say with great certainty that a typical urban American in that period did listen, at least briefly, to all the big networks on each day of the war.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Similarly while we don't usually know how individual patients, families, front line medical staff and back room administrators in Dr Dawson's hospital reacted to each new diagnosis of 'terminal SBE', we know from hundreds of accounts in later medical memoirs and contemporary medical journal articles how people very like them typically reacted.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">That is where the extensive medical library at my city's Dalhousie University Medical School, one of the oldest in Canada, is so useful.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">It allows me to go well beyond the details we do know of at each of the twenty five or so major turning points in Dr Dawson's wartime penicillin quest, those scenes involving major decisions, crisis, opportunities, victories,defeats.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">I can fill in those meagre details with how typical people reacted in similar circumstances --- that is what historians do - conjecture freely, but based on wide and deep reading of all the available general evidence, to help fill in for missing <i>particular</i> evidence....</span>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-84082306581433035142016-11-29T03:44:00.001-08:002016-11-29T08:33:41.374-08:00Robert E Hoyt loses as Official Histories (and their arse-licking sycophants) 'disappear' more people than Argentina's Dirty War ever didIt now seems clear that the Washington bureaucratical fallout cum panic from Robert E Hoyt's early 1943 decision to stop making DIY penicillin for Frank Queen's patients at Bingham military hospital led directly to the decision to bring in the WPB (War Production Board) into the penicillin story.<br />
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The WPB made the vital - and highly moral - decision to stop treating penicillin as a secret and limited use weapon of war and to make it available to all in the world in need, as part of an Allied charm offensive.<br />
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But Hoyt's role was totally written out of the official histories commissioned by these same panicked bureaucrats --- and by all accounts of wartime penicillin written by historians guilty of exchanging too many bodily fluids with those same official histories.<br />
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There is no point at all at making all those expensive trips to the big official archives if all your research is still guided by the 'invisible hand' of the assumptions lying behind those official histories.<br />
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What is the point of historians if they display the groupthink of boys-on-the-bus journalists ?<br />
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Thanks be to God, that the hegemony is never perfect.<br />
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David Rothman, author of the acclaimed "Strangers by the Bedside", an account of how bioethics has changed bedside medicine, never seems to have read wartime penicillin's official histories nor any of the dozens of historians who have followed their lead too closely.<br />
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Thank God for that, amen !<br />
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Because he went to Washington's archives and read the same letters from Dr Frank B Queen (a close friend of the all-powerful OSRD medical boss Dr Newt Richards) that all other historians had read ------ and reported what was there (what was <i>all</i> there) --- not just the portion that supported the official histories' version of the truth.<br />
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Penicillin was hardly the focus of Rothman's book, but based on his few hints that suggested a totally different explanation for how the WPB came to be involved, I gathered what few dollars I had and hurried down to those same Washington archives to dig up all that I could.<br />
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I am now suspecting that the path lab employed Hoyt read Henry Dawson's mid 1942 talk about his own DIY efforts making homebrew natural penicillin before the American Physicians Association annual general meeting in St Louis and that this inspired him and informed his early DIY penicillin efforts in Bingham Utah.<br />
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I am now researching ways to confirm that or at least to be able to suggest its very high probability...Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1734969423369927255.post-32585509923227233012016-11-28T04:22:00.002-08:002016-11-29T04:11:18.557-08:00the libretto to a hospital drama, with background radio musicA <b>melodrama</b> (melo-drama), it is worth remembering, was originally any sort of spoken word drama with background instrumental and vocal music off.<br />
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By '<i>off'</i>, I mean the music comes from no one visible in the drama in the role of a singer or musician, providing both the music and being part of the spoken word drama itself.<br />
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Instead the music source is either totally invisible (and in fact inaudible to the actors) or it comes in quietly, from a distant and almost invisible source -- one (barely) audible to the actors because while it is contained within the world of the drama it is not really a part of the main stage interaction.<br />
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(Exactly the way all non-musical film and television dramas are 'scored' since they began, in fact.)<br />
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If in the original melo-drama sometimes the heightened speech, at moments of very strong emotion, sounded a lot like a sort of stage talk-singing set against the background music (off), that effect was deliberate - the whole point of having the Background music on constant standby.<br />
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New York City during WWII was living at the very height of the Golden Age of Radio, a time well before TV or the Internet.<br />
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All of NYC's workplaces seemed to have someone with very dear relatives in the war zone, so it was natural that all those workplaces also had half hidden/barely audible cheap little table sets, tuned to a big station with great overseas news correspondents (and great music).<br />
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The moment a news flash came along, up went the volume and the whole workplace strained to hear the glad or grim news.<br />
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The rest of the time, those little radios functioned as a constant quiet backdrop to the wartime dramas of high tension and high emotion also going on in those workplaces ---- as well as overseas.<br />
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One can argue - indeed I <i>do</i> argue - that the intense drama going on in a little lab, office and ward at Columbia-Presbyterian's Floor G during the war had at least as big an impact on all ten billion of us since 1940 as anything FDR or Hitler ever did.<br />
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There the dying Dr Dawson's tiny team, pursuing his vision of "<i>Natural</i> penicillin for <i>All </i>", fueled by Agape love and powered by 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God, defied their own bodies and their own Allied governments to deliver one of humanity's greatest ever boons.<br />
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Yes they all got very emotional --- for they were always dealing with life and death, on both the intimate personal level and the mass international level --- and yes they had quiet little clandestine table radios on in the background.<br />
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So, 'a hospital drama with radio music' that rather like the famous "<b>Little Red Lighthouse</b>", just down the hill from Floor G, proved a bright beacon of hope to a world in trouble.<br />
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And in its totally massive and unexpected success, well beyond even Dawson's wildest hopes, it proved a textbook example for our postwar era of the hope that the ethos of Emergent Modernity can bring to <i>our </i>troubled world....Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0