Beheaded, and the Result Would Be That from 193 to 235 CE Would Go Down in History As the Severan Dynasty (Septimus Severus, Caracalla, Severus Alexander)

JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

355 BCE

Xenophon, Greek general and historian, died. He had, like Plato, been a disciple of Socrates. He had accompanied Cyrus the Younger against Artaxerxes II and, after Cyrus’s death at Cunaxa in 401 BCE, had led his army of 10,000 Greek soldiers to the Black Sea, an expedition recorded in his ANABASIS. His other works include HELLENICA, a history of Greece, and the MEMORABILIA, APOLOGY, and SYMPOSIUM, which contain his recollections of Socrates.

At some point during his life, Xenophon had objected to the use of torture deaths for the nobility, singling out decapitation as the most appropriate fate for errant Greek nobles (Romans also would reserve capitis amputatio for nobler folk). HEADCHOPPING

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

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193 CE

The Roman legions auctioned off the post of Emperor to the highest bidder. Marcus Didius Salvius Julianus bid highest.

After a couple of months he was beheaded, and the result would be that from 193 to 235 CE would go down in history as the Severan Dynasty (Septimus Severus, Caracalla, Severus Alexander). HEADCHOPPING

The Libyan, Septimus Severus, was proclaimed Emperor.

It would take a little time for Septimus Severus to put down all the other would-be Emperors, in the provinces HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

(until 194 CE, when at Byzantium and then at Nicaea and then at Issus the legions of Septimus Severus

defeated the legions of Roman Emperor wannabee Gaius Pescennius Niger; until 197 CE, with the putting down of Roman Emperor wannabee Decimus Clodius Albinus at Lugdunum)

but he would restore the Pax Romana with particular severity (which is to say, with determination combined with ferocity). He would secure his reign until his natural death in 211 CE. The virtues of nobility reputed to Trajan, of culture to Hadrian, of piety to Antoninus Pius, and of philosophy to Marcus Aurelius Antoninus were all lacking in Septimus Severus. There was one thing this guy knew, because he had studied very hard at it, and that was how to keep himself in power — anything else was incidental. This nasty customer would be one of the two Roman Emperors (the other would be Constantius Chlorus) to die at the town of York in Britain (the town was then known as Eboracum).

Mr. Severity doesn’t seem to have considered anything other than hereditary succession despite his having a particularly nasty family jewel, Caracalla, as the family-jewels candidate. His attempt to balance Caracalla HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

with his brother Geta would simply get Geta murderized. Another factor, however, would be the loyalty inspired in the troops to the family, and Caracalla himself would maintain that popularity reasonably well until his inevitable murder. This would set off another brief free-for-all, until loyalty to the Severan family would prevail. The “family,” however, would turn out to be the entirely matrilineal creation of Severus’s sister-in- law, Julia Maesa, who would bring her two grandsons, entirely unrelated to Severus, to the throne. The bizarre Elagabalus (sometimes “Heliogabalus”), styling himself the god of his grandmother’s Syrian solar cult, and then the amiable and reasonably effective Alexander, thus would wrap up the dynasty. Alexander would be offed after the overdue reality check of battle against the newly aggressive Persians. He actually would not be that bad, but evidently would not be great enough for his own troops, who would off not only him but also his mother.

CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES.

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HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1280

There are indications that as early as this year the “Halifax Gibbet,” a head-chopping machine, was put to use in Halifax, England, at executions on market-days. The last beheading with this Halifax gibbet device would take place in 1648. HEADCHOPPING

THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.

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1305

In 1297 a Scot of Welsh descent, Sir William Wallace, had rebelled against English rule in Scotland. After defeating an English army at Stirling Bridge his army was in 1298 defeated at Falkirk. For 7 years Sir William had waged a guerrilla campaign, only to be betrayed in 1305 by Sir John Mentieth and “carried from Westminster to the Tower, and from the Tower to Aldgate, and so through the city to the Elms at Smithfield ... and as an outlaw beheaded.” Committed to the Tower of London on August 22d, he was executed at Tyburn on August 24th. (Actually, rather than being merely beheaded after being brought to a field by St. Bartholomew Hospital, he was first hung until he was almost –not quite– dead. Then, taken down from his noose and tied down, his genitals were lopped off. Then he was disemboweled and his innards were burned before his face, and only then –still apparently alive– was he beheaded.) The body was chopped into quarters to be put on display in cities marking the “four corners” of England (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Berwick, Stirling, and Perth), while the severed head, that having been the customary cure for treason, was impaled on a stake at London Bridge. HEADCHOPPING

Their leader having been inventively chopped into pieces, there was of course a new ordinance for the government of a pacified Scotland. –But, would the Scots become happy campers? Nooo, not exactly.

ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)

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1306

Sir Christopher Seton, captured at St John’s Town, was taken to the Tower of London, hanged, cut down, and beheaded. LONDON

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

September 7, Wednesday (Old Style): Sir Herbert Morham and Thomas Le Boys, who had been guilty of supporting the Scots cause, were beheaded “at the Tower.” Sir Simon Fraser had been captured at St John’s Town and taken to the Tower of London. He was hanged, drawn, beheaded, quartered, and on this day his head went on display on a pike on London Bridge (alongside the year-old trophy taken from the shoulders of Sir William Wallace). BEHEADINGS

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DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1307

April 1, Saturday (Old Style): Head-chopping machines seems to have been utilized in Germany, the British Isles, and Italy prior to the 14th Century, long before they left much of a record. The first presently known evidence of the existence of such a device is the apparatus known to have been employed for the beheading of Murcod Ballagh, near the town of Merton. This depiction of the ceremony is in the British Museum:

(Anybody in his right mind would say that this looks about as close to a guillotine as one would desire to get in Ireland in April on a chilly day — and yet the Dr. Guillotin whose family name now adorns this device would not be born for more than four centuries, and his name would not be suggested for what was known as “the machine” and as “la louisette” and as “le louison” until after the turn of the 19th Century.) HEADCHOPPING

YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’SNOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

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DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1381

June 14, Friday (Old Style): After city people had lowered the drawbridge protecting London Bridge, the revolutionary forces under Wat Tyler captured it and the Tower of London. Books and documents that came into their hands at the Temple and in Lambeth Palace were burned. Wine cellars were broken into at Savoy and other manors.

Chancellor Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury1, and the King’s Confessor, William Appleton, had sought refuge at the Tower of London during the Peasants’ Revolt. On this day the rebels of Kent dragged them, along with Sir Robert Hales and King’s Sergeant John Legg, out and subjected them to a mock trial before beheading, after which the headless corpses were hacked to pieces by the mob (you can still inspect his head, at St Gregory’s church in Sudbury in Suffolk). A 5th individual, Richard Somenour, was likewise treated by this mob, but it is not known whether the rebels had taken him also from the Tower. According to Jean Froissart’s CHRONIQUES, in French on vellum, prepared in Flanders in the late 15th century (Royal MS 18E.I, ff.165v-166, with a polychrome miniature about 4 by 7 inches showing John Ball, labeled, astride a plough horse, preaching to the rebels),

here is how the released minister preached among Wat Tyler’s rebels of Kent (as backtranslated from the 1. William Courtenay became the new Archbishop of Canterbury. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

French version): Ah ye good people, the matters goeth not well to pass in England, nor shall do till everything be common, and that there be no villeins nor gentlemen, but that we may be all united together; and that the lords be no greater masters than we be.

After the rebellion collapsed there would be testimony, presumably biased and exaggerated, that this minister had urged the slaughter of lords and prelates — and for this he would hang at St. Albans.

King Edward III of England (1327-1377) had put up a new gatehouse at the Tower of London, between the Lanthorn Tower and the Salt Tower, and added the Cradle Tower. He had extended the Tower Wharf to the east as far as St. Thomas’s Tower. King Richard II and many of his family and household were forced to shelter in the Tower for a couple of days while more than 10,000 of his rebellious subjects were plundering and burning his royal capital city of London.

The four conditions upon which the revolutionaries were planning to insist, they averred, were as follows: • the abolition of serfdom • the right of everyone to buy and sell like freemen • pardon for any and all past offenses • in the future rents on land would be fixed at a certain sum of money rather than being required in service

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

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King Richard II pledged at Smithfield to make concessions in honor of these demands. In fact he kept his scribes up all night, copying out multiple copies of his Charter for the People:

It wasn’t very sympathetic of him, to keep his scribes up all night like that. What was going to happen next was also going to be not so very sympathetic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1400

The Halifax Gibbet was definitely in use by this point in Halifax, England, for executions on market-days. This head-chopping machine may even have been functioning as early as 1280. The last beheading with this Halifax gibbet would take place in 1648. (We can be assured that present-day inhabitants of Halifax no longer look with favor on the chopping of heads off local criminals, and consider the entire thingie to be a tourist HDT WHAT? INDEX

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attraction and a piece of local culture.)

HEADCHOPPING

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

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1470

October 18, Thursday (Old Style): John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, a past constable of the Tower of London, had been confined in the Tower under charges of extreme cruelty in Ireland. Evidently he felt bad about what he had done, for at his own request, when he was beheaded on Tower Hill, the deed was done for him with not one but three chops of the axe. LONDON HEADCHOPPING

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE OCTOBER 18TH, 1470 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST).

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HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1483

June 13, Friday (Old Style): While the coronation of Prince Edward V as King of England was being prepared by many Lords including his trusted friend William, 1st Baron Hastings, his uncle the Lord Protector Richard, Duke of Gloucester (Richard Plantagenet of the House of York), rushed in or the preparations at the Tower of London and amongst cries of treason had Lord Hastings taken out to the courtyard — and immediately beheaded. HEADCHOPPING

ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY, THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE, IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.

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1484

December 4, Saturday (Old Style): Sir George Browne and Sir Robert Clifford, who had been consigned to the Tower of London for favoring the cause of Henry Tudor, 2d Earl of Richmond, were beheaded on Tower Hill. LONDON HEADCHOPPING

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

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HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1499

November 21, Thursday (Old Style): The last male Plantagenet, Edward, 17th Earl of Warwick, admitted while under trial for treason that after 14 years of imprisonment (he had been held in the Tower of London since the age of 10) he had plotted to escape from prison with and ally himself with a fellow prisoner — the pretender Perkin Warbeck.

November 23, Saturday (Old Style): A conspiracy to help Perkin Warbeck, who had pretended to the throne of Henry VII by attempting to pass himself off as Richard IV, the younger of the two Princes in the Tower, escape from the Tower of London, had been discovered. On this day he was hanged for his treason on the Tyburn gallows outside London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING November 28, Thursday (Old Style): Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick, who had been held since the age of 10 in the Tower of London, was beheaded at the age of 24 at the order of King Henry VII after admitting that he had plotted to escape with and ally himself with a fellow prisoner, the pretender Perkin Warbeck (Edward had been the final male in the name-line of Plantagenet descent).

FINAL EXECUTIONS

the final male in the name-line of Plantagenet con- November 28, 1499 Edward Plantagenet tenders for the throne of England lost his head

June 29, 1520 Moctezuma II Aztec emperor of Mexico

August 29, 1533 Atahualpa, the Inca of Peru garroted on orders of Francisco Pizarro

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

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HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1521

May 17, Friday (Old Style): Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, potential claimant to the English throne, charged with having countenanced prophecies of his own succession to the throne and with having expressed an intention to murder King Henry VIII, was beheaded atop Tower Hill near the Tower of London.

HEADCHOPPERS HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1534

April 21, Tuesday (Old Style): Dr. Edward Bocking, having been found guilty of compassing the King’s death, was taken from the Tower of London and first hanged and then beheaded (wretched excess being the kingly way to do things). LONDON HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1535

June 22, Tuesday (Old Style): King Henry VIII of England had vowed, on hearing that the Pope meant to make Sir Thomas More’s fellow prisoner in the Tower, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, a cardinal, that if a hat arrived there should be no head for it. On this day the bishop was taken from the Tower of London and beheaded on Tower Hill. (He would be canonized by the Catholic Church in 1935.) LONDON HEADCHOPPING

July 1, Thursday (Old Style): On the basis of perjured testimony, Sir Thomas More found himself convicted of treason in London’s Westminster Hall. (Mrs. More had visited him in the Tower of London and reproachfully asked why he was content to remain “in this close, filthy prison, shut up among mice and rats” when he might be merry at their home, but her question was responded to with another question, “Is not this house as nigh heaven as my own?”

July 6, Tuesday (Old Style): Sir Thomas More was taken from the Tower of London and beheaded on Tower Hill. (He would be canonized by the Catholic Church in 1935.) His comment at the block was along the lines of Thoreauvian civil disobedience: LONDON HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

Famous Last Words:

“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853

399 BCE Socrates drinking the hemlock “Crito, I owe a cock to Æsclepius.”

27 CE Jesus being crucified “It is finished.” [John 19:30]

1415 John Huss being burned at the stake “O, holy simplicity!”

May 30, 1431 Joan of Arc being burned at the stake “Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.”

May 4, 1534 Father John Houghton as he was being disemboweled “And what wilt thou do with my heart, O Christ?”

July 6, 1535 Sir Thomas More being beheaded “The King’s good servant, but God’s First.”

1536 Anne Boleyn being beheaded “Oh God, have pity on my soul.”

February 18, 1546 Martin Luther found on his chamber table “We are beggars: this is true.”

July 16, 1546 Anne Askew being burned at the stake “There he misseth, and speaketh without the book” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1536

May 19, Friday (Old Style): In this timeframe Hans Holbein the Younger was painting his only individual portrait of King Henry VIII.

Before her crowning as queen consort, Anne Boleyn, the 2d wife, had stayed in what is now called “Queens House” at the Tower of London, which had been built below the Bell Tower in 1530. When in this year she would be sent to the Tower on a charge of adultery, she would be returned to those prior lodgings. Her trial HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

would take place in the medieval great hall, since demolished, and she would be sentenced to be burned or beheaded as pleased her former husband and the father of her children. After giving birth to a stillborn son, since this pleased the former husband, in front of the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula she was beheaded on this day — and her remains are interred inside that chapel. (The widower would remarry, with Jane Seymour.) HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

Famous Last Words:

399 BCE Socrates drinking the hemlock “Crito, I owe a cock to Æsclepius.”

27 CE Jesus being crucified “It is finished.” [John 19:30]

1415 John Huss being burned at the stake “O, holy simplicity!”

May 30, 1431 Joan of Arc being burned at the stake “Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.”

May 4, 1534 Father John Houghton as he was being disemboweled “And what wilt thou do with my heart, O Christ?”

July 6, 1535 Sir Thomas More being beheaded “The King’s good servant, but God’s First.”

1536 Anne Boleyn being beheaded “Oh God, have pity on my soul.”

February 18, 1546 Martin Luther found on his chamber table “We are beggars: this is true.”

July 16, 1546 Anne Askew being burned at the stake “There he misseth, and speaketh without the book” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1540

In England, there was great heat and drought.

Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, who had modernized the Tower of London’s defenses, was imprisoned there and would soon be beheaded on Tower Hill and his head raised atop a spike of London Bridge.

Lord Leonard Grey, Viscount Grane was taken to the Tower on charges of high treason in Ireland. He would be beheaded on Tower Hill in the following year. LONDON HEADCHOPPING

June 28, Monday (Old Style): Walter Hungerford, the 1st Baron Hungerford of Heytesbury, had been taken to the Tower of London on charges of having procured a person to conjure how long King Henry VIII would live. On this day he was beheaded on Tower Hill. LONDON

July 9, Friday (Old Style): King Henry VIII granted an annulment to Anne of Cleves and would next marry with Catherine Howard (waiting for this annulment had been the only thing that had stood in the way of the execution of Lord Great Chamberlain Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, on a charge of treason).

July 28, Wednesday (Old Style): In England during Summer, there was excessive drought. Wells, brooks and rivers were dried up. The Thames River was so low that the water was saline above London Bridge. Toward the end of summer there came a great mortality over the whole nation because of an epidemic of pestilential ague and blood flux.

Thomas Cromwell, who had been serving as chief minister to King Henry VIII since 1532, had been locked up in the Tower of London on charges of treason. On this day, the day of the monarch’s marriage to Catherine Howard, Cromwell was beheaded on Tower Hill and his head raised atop a spike at London Bridge. LONDON

The botched execution of this Lord Great Chamberlain depicted in “The Tudors” TV series might seem excessive in portraying his neck as being struck again and again with the ax, because all we really know is that HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

the executioner was described as being a butcher, and seemed to observers in the crowd to be drunk. However, these executions could be in fact as dreadful as what “The Tudors” depicted in this case. For instance, in the case of Margaret Pole, the mother of Cardinal Reginald Pole who was the last of the Plantagenet line of kings that had terminated with the death in battle of King Richard III, she would be taken without preparation or warning from her cell in the Tower of London to a private place within those precincts at which a low wooden block had been positioned (she being of noble birth, they did not want to execute her before commoners, though there were about 150 noble witnesses). Dragged to the block screaming, she would refuse to lay her head on it and have to be forced down. As she struggled the executioner’s 1st blow would merely make a gash in her shoulder. He would need a total of 11 strikes with the ax to complete the beheading. The Calendar of State Papers would describe him as a “blundering youth” who “hacked her head and shoulders to pieces.” HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1541

June 28, Tuesday (Old Style)Lord Leonard Grey, Viscount Grane, convicted of high treason in Ireland, was taken from the Tower of London to Tower Hill and beheaded. LONDON HEADCHOPPING

May 27, Friday morning (Old Style): The botched execution of Lord Great Chamberlain Thomas Cromwell depicted in “The Tudors” TV series might seem excessive in portraying his neck as being struck again and again with the ax, because all we really know is that the executioner was described as being a butcher, and seemed to observers in the crowd to be drunk. However, these executions could be in fact as dreadful as what “The Tudors” depicted in the case of Cromwell. In the case of Margaret Pole, the mother of Cardinal Reginald Pole who was the last of the Plantagenet line of kings that had terminated with the death in battle of King Richard III, she was taken without preparation or warning from her cell in the Tower of London to a private place within those precincts at which a low wooden block had been positioned (she being of noble birth, they did not want to execute her before commoners, though there were about 150 noble witnesses). Dragged to the block screaming, she refused to lay her head on it and had to be forced down. As she struggled the executioner’s first blow merely made a gash in her shoulder. He needed a total of 11 strikes with the ax to complete the beheading. The Calendar of State Papers described him as a “blundering youth” who had “hacked her head and shoulders to pieces.” LONDON HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1542

February 13, Monday (1541, Old Style): Catherine Howard, King Henry VIII’s 5th wife and according to him a “very jewel of womanhood,” had during the previous year appointed a former beau as her private secretary. Rumors of an ongoing sexual liaison had spread through the court and the monarch had allowed an investigation to begin. Although the investigators had discovered only that the queen had been engaging in what might be characterized as flirting, but they also dug up old evidence that prior to her marriage to the king, Catherine had allowed her very jewel of womanhood to dally. On this day, outside the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula which Henry had rebuilt a few years before at the Tower of London, she and Jane, Lady Rochford (a party to this), were beheaded. HEADCHOPPING

The Countess of Bridgewater, also held in the Tower on charges of having concealed the Queen’s offenses, would be pardoned and released.

Lord William Howard, Catherine Howard’s uncle, also held in the Tower on charges of misprision of Treason for having concealed a knowledge of his niece’s premarital affairs, would be pardoned.

John Lasels (or Lascelles) had informed Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer of all details of the Queen’s levity. He had been committed to the Tower of London to keep him silent until her execution.2 LONDON

2. Possibly, we may suppose, he was then released, for a man of this name would be executed while the dissenter poet Anne Askew was being tortured in the Tower and then burned at the stake in 1545 by operatives of King Henry VIII. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1547

January 13, Thursday (1546, Old Style): Henry Howard, Early of Surrey was found guilty of treason and condemned to death (his dad, as well).

King Henry VIII signed the letter patent which officially ratified the deed of covenant that had in the previous month granted Bethlehem Hospital (“Bedlam”) to the city of London.

PSYCHOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

January 19, Wednesday (1546, Old Style): Henry Howard was beheaded for treason on Tower Hill at the Tower of London at the age of 29/30 and his son Thomas Howard became heir to the Dukedom of Norfolk.

The two parts of the body would be placed in a magnificent polychromed alabaster tomb at St Michael the Archangel in Framlingham. His widow Frances Howard, (née de Vere), Countess of Surrey would remarry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

January 28, Friday (1546, Old Style): Henry VIII died. Immediately, what this meant was that the headchopping of Henry Howard, Early of Surrey’s father Thomas Howard, 3d Duke of Norfolk for treason, which had been slotted to occur on the following day, would no longer need to take place. The day’s schedule had been freed up for other thingies (GENERAL PRINCIPLE, you cannot betray a monarch who’s dead as a doorknob – or something like that).

[Jonathan Swift would write this marginalia into one of his books: “I wish he had been flayed, his skin stuffed and hanged upon a gibbet. His bulky guts and flesh left to be devoured by birds and beasts for a warning to his successors forever. Amen.”]

This would mean the accession of King Edward VI, ten years of age, under regency. As a sincere Roman Catholic, John Heywood would get into some trouble during this Church-of-England reign, for making an attempt to deny the monarch’s spiritual supremacy — although in the end he will seem to have been induced to offer a public recantation of his denial.

With the death of this monarch, the English Maisters of Defence lost their exclusive control over prices for fencing instruction within the City of London (this would allow the creation of rival schools, the most famous of which would be opened in 1576 by the Italian Rocco Bonnetti).

A pamphlet controversy would be breaking out in England over who should and who should not be informed about political decisions. At this point, however, no one was advocating anything nearly so extreme as that the average person had a right to be –at best– more than cursorily informed about such matters. It was a settled issue, or no issue at all, that the common run of people had no business meddling in politics, that they needed to keep their noses firmly attached to their grindstones. They needed to seem to be uninterested in the affairs of their betters. AN INFORMED CITIZENRY HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1552

January 22, Friday (1551, Old Style)Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Protector, 9th Earl of Hertford, who having lost his office to John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, had plotted to kill him, was beheaded on Tower Hill near the Tower of London along with his wife, and along with his wife’s gentlewomen and menservants falsely accused of treason. (During this year, however, a fellow prisoner in the Tower, Brian O’Connor, who had been held there since 1548, would effect an escape.) HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1564

“The Maiden,” a head-chopping machine based on the Halifax Gibbet, was constructed and used in Scotland. Made of oak, it consisted of a sole beam 5 feet in length into which were fixed two upright posts 10 feet in 1 height, 4 inches broad and 12 inches apart from each other, and 3 /2 inches in thickness, with bevelled corners. These posts were kept steady by a branch at each side which sprang from the end of the sole and is fastened to the uprights 4 feet from the bottom. The tops of the posts were fixed into a cross rail 2 feet in length. The 1 1 block was a transverse bar 3 /4 feet from the bottom, 8 inches in breadth and 4 /2 inches in thickness, and a hollow on the upper edge of this bar was filled with lead. The axe consisted of a plate of iron faced with steel; 1 it measured 13 inches in length and 10 /2 inches in breadth. On the upper edge of the plate was fixed a mass of lead 75 pounds in weight. This blade worked in grooves cut into the inner edges of the uprights, which were lined with copper. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1586

John Arden (or Ardent) became a resident of the Cradle Tower of the Tower of London (he would escape in 1597). Sir Thomas Habington, one of the Babington conspirators suspected of a plot to murder Queen

Elizabeth I and proclaim Mary, Queen of Scots, was released, while Sir Edward Habington was beheaded. HEADCHOPPING LONDON HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1587

February 8, Wednesday (1586, Old Style): In Fotherinhay Castle, at the formal shortening-by-a-head of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (she was 5 feet 11 inches, which even for a man would have been unusually tall), Richard Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough “knelt down on the scaffold steps and started to pray out loud and at length, in a prolonged and rhetorical style as though determined to force his way into the pages of history,” and then after the 2d blow, and her head finally had been quite removed with a sawing motion of the ax blade, cried out “So perish all the Queen’s enemies!” (Clearly, this churchman loved Justice as much as he loved Christ Jesus.)

It has been alleged that Mary’s lips continued to move as if in silent prayer for some 15 minutes after the 2d fall of the ax had all but severed her neck (she having a whole lot to apologize for). It has also been alleged that Mary had been wearing a red wig to mask her prematurely gray head and the executioner, not being aware of this, attempted to pick up the head by its hair — whereupon it fell thump on the scaffold.

Well, the one thing we can be confident of is that such stories will never be allowed to lose interesting detail in the retelling. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

(We may note that this murder by beheading, despite some apparent similarities, has never been compared to the murder by beheading of King Charles I of England, or to the murders by beheading of King Louis XVI of France and his queen Marie Antoinette, and that perhaps this has been because in this case it was the high- born who were murdering by beheading this person of birth privilege, whereas in those subsequent cases it would be totally different for it would be the parliament or the people –which is to say the low-born– who would be murdering by beheading those persons of birth privilege. Being low-born would be, how shall we describe it, a horse of a different color?)

Soon the “regency” period for King James VI of Scotland would be over and, despite having developed some sort of chronic problem with his legs that was causing him to fall repeatedly, injuring himself, he would begin actual rule. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1599

Robert Greene’s THE COMICAL HISTORY OF ALPHONSUS, KING OF ARAGON, COMICAL KING ALPHONSUS

and A PLEASANT CONCEITED COMEDY OF GEORGE A GREEN, THE PINNER OF WAKEFIELD. GEORGE-A-GREEN

Robert Devereux, 2d Earl of Essex arrived in Ireland with an army, only to find himself outmaneuvered by O’Neill. Soon Queen Elizabeth would underscore the fact that this unfortunate English leader had not made adequate use of his head by having him beheaded on the green of the Tower of London.

HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1601

February 25, Wednesday (1600, Old Style): Robert Devereux, 2d Earl of Essex, had been one of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite courtiers. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who had become involved in his conspiracy to kidnap the queen, would save himself by testifying against the earl.

The “Essex Ring” that can now be seen in Westminster Abbey is said to have been given to the earl by Elizabeth with the understanding if ever he were in trouble he could send it to her and she would intercede. However, when from the Tower of London he attempted to return it, either it did not reach her or she ignored it. On this day he was beheaded on the Tower Green.3 LONDON

3. This would turn out to be the final such beheading on the Tower Green, although during 1743 various Scottish deserters would be there executed by firing squad and although, during the world wars, German spies would be being executed in a shed beneath the walls and in the vicinity that had once been the moat. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1604

Publication of Samuel Daniel’s masque THE VISION OF THE TWELVE GODDESSES. After a performance of the play PHILOTAS he was called before the Privy Council to explain why the hero of the play had seemed to resemble Robert Devereux, 2d Earl of Essex, who had on February 25, 1601 been beheaded with an ax on the Tower Green in front of the chapel of the Tower of London, for the treason of having plotted to kidnap Queen Elizabeth.

HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1606

January 31, Friday (1605, Old Style): Guy Fawkes, Robert Keyes, Robert Wintour, Tom Wintour, and Ambrose Rookwood were drawn on a hurdle to the Houses of Parliament and in the Old Palace Yard of Westminster Fawkes was hanged, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered. The others were merely hanged. Father Henry Garnett and Thomas Garnett, also involved in the plot, for the time being remained alive in the Tower of London.

HEADCHOPPING Remember, remember the fifth of November Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes 'Twas his intent To blow up the King and the Parliament Three score barrels of powder below Poor old England to overthrow By God’s providence he was catched With a dark lantern and burning match. Holloa boys, holloa boys, Ring the bells ring Holloa boys, holloa boys, Goda save the King! Hip hip hooray Hip hip horray. A penny loaf to feed ol’ Pope A farthing cheese to choke him A pint of beer to rinse it down HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

A faggot of sticks to burn him. Burn him in a tub of tar Burn him like a blazing star Burn his body from his head Then we'll say old Pope is dead. Hip hip hooray Hip hip hooray LONDON HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1618

October 29, Thursday (Old Style): Sir Walter Raleigh smoked one last pipe of tobacco and, with a little help from a king and a commoner, had his head amputated in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, in London (On the scaffold he ran his finger along the edge of the axe and exclaimed, “’Tis a sharp remedy, but a sure cure for all ills.” With the charge having been treason, after its beheading the body needed of course to be quartered and eviscerated — so perhaps he should have run his finger along the edge of the executioner’s butcher knife as HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

well as along the edge of his axe.)4

HEADCHOPPING

4. When their son Carew would die, the well-traveled head of the father and husband would finally be interred, on the south side of the alter at St. Margaret’s in Westminster, between the son’s body and the body from which since 1618 it had been detached. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

Famous Last Words:

1601 Tycho Brahe unsolicited comment “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”

1618 Sir Walter Raleigh his wife would embalm his head and “Strike, man, strike.” keep it near her in a red leather bag

1649 Charles I the chopper was to wait for a signal “Stay for the sign.” that the king had prepared himself

1659 Friend Marmaduke Ste- unsolicited comments made over the Friend Marmaduke: “We suffer not as evil- venson and Friend Wil- muting roll of a drum intended to pre- doers but for conscience’ sake.” Friend Wil- liam Robinson vent such remarks from being heard liam: “I die for Christ.”

1660 Friend Mary Dyer asked at her execution “Nay, first a child; then a young man; whether they should pray for her soul then a strong man, before an elder of Christ Jesus.” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1648

Sir William Davenant’s London, King Charles his Augusta, or, City Royal, of the founders, the names, and oldest honours of that City.

King Charles I escaped from being held hostage by his own nation’s army, but was defeated in the 2d outbreak of the English Civil War.

Congregationalists assumed control in Parliament and Samuel Pepys would watch as they chopped off the HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

head of his monarch.

HEADCHOPPING

December 30, Saturday (Old Style): The final beheadings by means of the Halifax Gibbet, the head-chopping machine in Halifax, England that had 1st been pressed into service in something like 1280 for public executions on market-days, and had certainly begun by 1400.The last persons to be placed in this machine on this Market Day were Jo. Wilkinson of Sowerby and Anthony Mitchell.

FINAL EXECUTIONS

November 17, 1558 Cardinal Reginald Pole final male of Plantagenet line of British monarchs

Jo. Wilkinson of Sowerby and final beheadings on the famous Halifax Gibbet December 30, 1648 Anthony Mitchell

Martha Corey, Margaret Scott, hanged for witchcraft in the American colonies Mary Towne Estey or Easty, “...what a sad thing it is to see Eight Firebrands of September 22, 1692 Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Hell hanging there” Wilmott Redd, Samuel Wardwell, and Mary Parker HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1649

January 30, Tuesday (1648, Old Style): In case you were wondering: here is an artist’s conception of what a cross- section of the neck of a reigning monarch of Europe might have looked like during the 17th Century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

The extraordinary event of the day, a king having his head severed from his body, was witnessed by thousands of cheering subjects. Not wishing to appear to shiver before the crowd, Charles I had REGICIDE donned two shirts. HEADCHOPPING Famous Last Words:

1601 Tycho Brahe unsolicited comment “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”

1618 Sir Walter Raleigh his wife would embalm his head and “Strike, man, strike.” keep it near her in a red leather bag

1649 Charles I the chopper was to wait for a signal “Stay for the sign.” that the king had prepared himself

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

News of the king’s death on the block at Whitehall would be distributed throughout the realm in reports, ballads and woodcut engravings. The new age of commonwealth would last barely a dozen years. In 1660, Parliament would invite the son of the king they had executed to sit on the throne. In one of the great revisionist reversals of history, the republican heroes of 1649 who had put their names and seals to the king’s death warrant would be regarded in 1660 as regicides. The surviving judges of Charles I would be rounded up and executed in the special manner reserved for traitors: hanging, drawing and quartering (think of Mel Gibson’s fate in “Braveheart”).

Charles the Traitor would become Charles the Martyr. His final writings, EIKON BASILIKE, would be taken as the words of a saint.

His widowed queen consort, Henrietta Maria, had returned her native France in 1644 and thus learned of her husband’s death only several days after the execution. His eldest son would be crowned at Scone, Scotland, in 1651, but would be forced into exile after Cromwell’s Roundheads defeat of the Royalists at Worcester. ENGLISH CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

June 24, Sunday (Old Style): During this year in England there would occur a grand sum total of 1,190 deaths due to the small pox, but only one would be memorialized in a lengthy poem (unless the poem in question wasn’t actually about death due to smallpox, but actually was about regicide and the severing of the neck by use of the ax and block). Johannes Dryden, Scholae Westm. Alumnus contributed UPON THE DEATH OF THE LORD HASTINGS to the LACHRYMÆ MUSARUM / THE TEARS OF THE MUSES: EXPREST IN ELEGIES WRITTEN BY DIVERS PERSONS OF NOBILITY AND WORTH UPON THE DEATH OF THE MOST HOPEFULL, HENRY LORD HASTINGS ... ; COLLECTED AND SET FORTH BY R.B. collection of memorials to the 1st son and heir apparent to Ferdinando Hastings, 6th Earl of Huntingdon with Lucy Davies Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, who succumbed during the ongoing epidemic on this day at the age of 19, on the eve of his wedding to Elizabeth de Mayerne (the body would be placed on July 7th in a tomb at Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire). Dryden had not known Henry Hastings, giving rise to the above surmise that this had amounted to an opportunity for a royalist to lament surreptitiously the recent execution of King Charles I. Must noble Hastings immaturely die, The honour of his ancient family; Beauty and learning thus together meet, To bring a winding for a wedding-sheet? Must Virtue prove Death’s harbinger? must she, With him expiring, feel mortality? Is death, Sin’s wages, Grace’s now? shall Art Make us more learned, only to depart? If merit be disease; if virtue death; To be good, not to be; who’d then bequeath Himself to discipline? who’d not esteem Labour a crime? study, self-murder deem? Our noble youth now have pretence to be Dunces securely, ignorant healthfully. Rare linguist, whose worth speaks itself, whose praise, Though not his own, all tongues besides do raise: Than whom great Alexander may seem less, Who conquer’d men, but not their languages. In his mouth nations spake; his tongue might be Interpreter to Greece, France, Italy. His native soil was the four parts o’ the Earth; All Europe was too narrow for his birth. A young apostle; and, with reverence may I speak it, inspired with gift of tongues, as they. Nature gave him, a child, what men in vain Oft strive, by art though further’d, to obtain. His body was an orb, his sublime soul Did move on Virtue’s and on Learning’s pole: Whose regular motions better to our view, Than Archimedes sphere, the Heavens did show. Graces and virtues, languages and arts, Beauty and learning, fill’d up all the parts. Heaven’s gifts, which do like falling stars appear Scatter’d in others; all, as in their sphere, Were fix’d, conglobate in his soul; and thence Shone through his body, with sweet influence; Letting their glories so on each limb fall, The whole frame render’d was celestial. Come, learned Ptolemy and trial make, If thou this hero’s altitude canst take: But that transcends thy skill; thrice happy all, Could we but prove thus astronomical. Lived Tycho now, struck with this ray which shone More bright i’ the morn, than others’ beam at noon. He’d take his astrolabe, and seek out here What new star ’twas did gild our hemisphere. Replenish’d then with such rare gifts as these, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

Where was room left for such a foul disease? The nation’s sin hath drawn that veil, which shrouds Our day-spring in so sad benighting clouds: Heaven would no longer trust its pledge; but thus Recall’d it; rapt its Ganymede from us. Was there no milder way but the small-pox, The very filthiness of Pandora’s box? So many spots, like næves on Venus’ soil, One jewel set off with so many a foil; Blisters with pride swell’d, which through’s flesh did sprout Like rose-buds, stuck i’ th’ lily-skin about. Each little pimple had a tear in it, To wail the fault its rising did commit: Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife, Thus made an insurrection ’gainst his life. Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin, The cabinet of a richer soul within? No comet need foretell his change drew on, Whose corpse might seem a constellation. Oh! had he died of old, how great a strife Had been, who from his death should draw their life! Who should, by one rich draught, become whate’er Seneca, Cato, Numa, Cæsar, were,— Learn’d, virtuous, pious, great; and have by this An universal metempsychosis! Must all these aged sires in one funeral Expire? all die in one so young, so small? Who, had he lived his life out, his great fame Had swoln ’bove any Greek or Roman name. But hasty Winter, with one blast, hath brought The hopes of Autumn, Summer, Spring, to nought. Thus fades the oak i’ the sprig, i’ the blade the corn; Thus without young, this Phoenix dies, new born: Must then old three-legg’d graybeards, with their gout, Catarrhs, rheums, aches, live three long ages out? Time’s offals, only fit for the hospital! Or to hang antiquaries’ rooms withal! Must drunkards, lechers, spent with sinning, live With such helps as broths, possets, physic give? None live, but such as should die? shall we meet With none but ghostly fathers in the street? Grief makes me rail; sorrow will force its way; And showers of tears, tempestuous sighs best lay. The tongue may fail; but overflowing eyes Will weep out lasting streams of elegies. But thou, O virgin-widow, left alone, Now thy beloved, heaven-ravish’d spouse is gone, Whose skilful sire in vain strove to apply Medicines, when thy balm was no remedy,— With greater than Platonic love, O wed His soul, though not his body, to thy bed: Let that make thee a mother; bring thou forth The ideas of his virtue, knowledge, worth; Transcribe the original in new copies, give Hastings o’ the better part: so shall he live In’s nobler half; and the great grandsire be Of an heroic divine progeny: An issue, which to eternity shall last, Yet but the irradiations which he cast. Erect no mausoleums: for his best Monument is his spouse’s marble breast. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1650

April 30, Saturday (Old Style)The last heads to be severed by the Halifax Gibbet were those of Jo. Wilkinson and Anthony Mitchell of Sowerby, for having stolen a horse from Sandal near Wakefield on April 17, 1650 and then having stolen some yards of russet colored Kersey from tentmakers (such head-choppings had been a feature of market day in Halifax, England since perhaps 1280, and had certainly begun by 1400). HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1662

June 14, Saturday (Old Style): Upon the return of the monarch Charles II, Sir Henry Vane had been imprisoned to await trial for treason. On this day, in the 50th year of his age, with appropriate ceremony, he was beheaded in London.

HEADCHOPPING SIR HENRY VANE THE YOUNGER

“Too dangerous a man to let live.” — King Charles II

He was constantly interrupted by the Sheriff and others while attempting to read his speech, and there being a great blair of trumpets under the scaffold so that he could not be heard, so he needed to hand off the paper to another for preservation. After being allowed to pray he placed his head upon the block and stated “Father, glorify Thy servant in the sight of men, that he may glory Thee in the discharge of his duty to Thee and to his country.” When he stretched out his arms the blow fell. Samuel Pepys had taken a room on Tower Hill so as to be able to observe the event and was considerably disappointed because the press of men on the scaffold interfered with his view of the beheading. Then afterward he went to the Trinity-house for dinner. THIS DAY IN PEPYS’S DIARY THE SPEECH OF VANE HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1685

July 15, Wednesday (Old Style): The head of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (originally named James Crofts or James Fitzroy, he was one of King Charles IId’s numerous bastard sons by various mistresses) was removed for the treason of having led a rebellion, on Tower Hill near the Tower of London, in London.

It seems it took Jack Ketch, official headchopper, some five to eight blows to get the head entirely severed (sources differ as to the precise number of strokes). On this coin we can see that the severed head, with considerable artistic license, is spouting blood from its mouth, almost as if it were trying to tell us something. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows:

I went to Lond[on] to see Dr. Tenisons Library, returned in the Evening: This day was Monmoth brought to Lond[on] examin’d before the King to whom he made greate submission, accknowledg’d his seduction by Fergusson the Scot, whom he named the bloudy Villain: thence sent to the Tower, had an enterview with his late Dutchesse, whom he received coldly, having lived dishonestly with the Lady Hen: Wentworth for two years; from obstinatly asserting his conversation with that debauched woman to be no sin, seing he could not be perswaded to his last breath, the Divines, who were sent to assist him, thought not fit to administer the holy Communion to him: for the rest of his faults he professed greate sorrow, and so died without any apparent feare, would make use of no cap, or other circumstance, but lying downe bid the fellow do his office better than to my late Lord Russell, & gave him gold: but the wretch made five Chopps before he had his head off, which so incens’d the people, that had he not ben guarded & got away they would have torne him in pieces: He made no Speech on the Scaffold (which was on Tower-hill) but gave a paper (containing not above 5 or 6 lines) for the King, in which he disclaimes all Title to the Crowne, accknowledges that the late King (his Father) had indeede told him, he was but his base sonn, & so desire‘d his Majestie to be kind to his Wife & Children: This relation I had from the Mouth of Dr. Tenison Rector of St. Martines, who with the Bishops of Ely & Bath & Wells, was one of the divines his Majestie sent to him, & were at the execution: Thus ended this quondam Duke, darling of his Father, and the Ladys, being extraordi[na]rily handsome, and adroit: an excellent souldier, & dauncer, a favorite of the people, of an Easy nature, debauched by lust, seduc’d by crafty knaves who would have set him up onely to make a property; tooke this opportunity of his Majestie being of another Religion, to gather a party of discontented; failed of it, and perished: He was a lovely person, had a vertuous & excellent Lady that brought him greate riches & a HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

second Dukedome in Scotland; Was Master of the Horse, Gen. of the K[ing] his fathers Army, Gent[leman] of the Bed chamber: Knight of the Garter, Chancellor of Camb: in a Word had accumulations without end: Se[e] what Ambition and want of principles brought him to. He was beheaded on Tuesday the 14th July: His mother (whose name was Barlow, daughter of some very meane Creatures) was a beautifull strumpet, whom I had often seene at Paris, & died miserably, without anything to bury her: Yet had this Perkin ben made believe, the King had married her: which was a monstrous forgerie, & ridiculous: & to satisfie the world the iniquitie of the report, the King his father (if his Father he realy were, for he most resembled one Sidny familiar with his mother) publiquely & most solemnly renounced it, and caused it to be so entred in the Council booke some yeares since, with all the Privy Counsel[o]rs attestation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1691

May 16, Saturday (Old Style): In New-York, Captain William Kidd and the grass widow Sarah Bradley Cox Oort applied for a marriage license. This was 2 days after the sudden and mysterious death of her husband John Oort — his body had hardly had a chance to grow cold. There were rumors, of course, but nothing provable, so William and Sarah and Sarah’s two daughters would be able to settle into domesticity. The privateer captain thus came into possession of grand properties overlooking the Hudson River, and the promise of a family box pew in Trinity Church when that structure would be erected in 1698.

PIRACY Having been duly condemned to be hanged “by the Neck and being Alive their bodyes be Cutt downe to Earth and Their Bowells to be taken out and they being Alive, burnt before their faces,” Jacob Leisler and his son- in-law Jacob Milborne were led to the gallows, which had been erected on the execution levels near the New- York City Hall, and hanged in a cold rain for treason before what seems to have been the largest crowd assembled in the colony to that date (6 others had been reprieved). Before being strangle-hung and then beheaded “halfe dead,” Leisler explained that his objective had been merely to protect the New York colony from popery. ANTI-CATHOLICISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1720

November 16, Wednesday (Old Style): In Sweden, Maria Ersdotter Dullfjär, widow of the military furir Nils Dullfjär who had died in 1718, gave birth to a male infant that was weak. On the following day a priest would be called to the farm to baptize it and would learn that the birth had been several years after the death of its mother’s husband. Maria’s mother would inform the priest that the father was corporal Albrekt Nilsson Dullfjär, a 24- year-old former stepson whose mother had been the 1st wife of Maria’s husband, and then Maria herself confessed to this. Before becoming willing to baptize the infant the priest would oblige Maria to repeat her confession before her relatives and repeat it again before 3 other witnesses (note that this record does not contain information as to the name given to the baptized infant). Both Maria and Albrekt would be found guilty of incest and sentenced to death in keeping with LEVITICUS 20:11 (it is to be noted that the pair were not related by blood, but were merely in-laws — at that time in that place, such a sexual involvement was considered to fall within the prohibition found in this sacred scripture). After this sentence would be confirmed by the high court, Maria and Albrekt would be decapitated together on July 19, 1721 (note that this record does not indicate whether the infant had by the date of its mother’s execution been weaned, nor indicate what would become of it later).

At Port Royal on the island of Jamaica, Captain John Rackam and 8 of his pirate crew were condemned and hanged. The corpses of the captain and 2 others would hang in chains as a warning. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

5 THE ADVENTURES AND EXECUTION OF CAPTAIN JOHN RACKAM

This John Rackam, as has been reported in the foregoing pages, was quarter-master to Vane’s company, till the crew were divided, and Vane turned out of it for refusing to board a French man-of-war, Rackam being voted captain of the division that remained in the brigantine. The 24th of November 1718, was the first day of his command; his first cruise was among the Carribbee Islands, where he took and plundered several vessels. We have already taken notice, that when Captain Woods Rogers went to the island of Providence with the king’s pardon to such of the pirates as should surrender, this brigantine, which Rackam commanded, made its escape through another passage, bidding defiance to the mercy that was offered. To the windward of Jamaica, a Madeira-man fell into the pirate’s way, which they detained two or three days, till they had their 5. THE PIRATES OWN BOOK, OR AUTHENTIC NARRATIVES OF THE LIVES, EXPLOITS, AND EXECUTIONS OF THE MOST CELEBRATED SEA ROBBERS, by Charles Ellms (Portland: Published by Sanborn & Carter; Philadelphia: Thomas, Comperthwait, & Co., 1837. This would be republished in 1842 by A. and C.B. Edwards of New-York & Philadelphia, and in 1844 in Portland by Sanborn & Carter, and in 1855 by A. and C.B. Edwards of New-York, and in 1924 by Marine res. of Massachusetts, and in 1996 by Random House of New York.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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market out of her, and then they gave her back to the master, and permitted one Hosea Tidsel, a tavern keeper at Jamaica, who had been picked up in one of their prizes, to depart in her, she being bound for that island. After this cruise they went into a small island, and cleaned, and spent their Christmas ashore, drinking and carousing as long as they had any liquor left, and then went to sea again for more. They succeeded but too well, though they took no extraordinary prize for above two months, except a ship laden with convicts from Newgate, bound for the plantations, which in a few days was retaken, with all her cargo, by an English man-of-war that was stationed in those seas. Rackam stood towards the island of Bermuda, and took a ship bound to England from Carolina, and a small pink from New England, both of which he brought to the Bahama Islands, where, with the pitch, tar and stores they cleaned again, and refitted their own vessel; but staying too long in that neighborhood, Captain Rogers, who was Governor of Providence, hearing of these ships being taken, sent out a sloop well manned and armed, which retook both the prizes, though in the mean while the pirate had the good fortune to escape. From hence they sailed to the back of Cuba, where Rackam kept a little kind of a family, at which place they stayed a considerable time, living ashore with their Delilahs, till their money and provisions were expended, and they concluded it time to look out for more. They repaired their vessel, and were making ready to put to sea, when a guarda de costa came in with a small English sloop, which she had taken as an interloper on the coast. The Spanish guard-ship attacked the pirate, but Rackam being close in behind a little island, she could do but little execution where she lay; the Dons therefore warped into the channel that evening, in order to make sure of her the next morning. Rackam finding his case desperate, and that there was hardly any possibility of escaping, resolved to attempt the following enterprise. The Spanish prize lying for better security close into the land, between the little island and the Main, our desperado took his crew into the boat with their cutlasses, rounded the little island, and fell aboard their prize silently in the dead of the night without being discovered, telling the Spaniards that were aboard her, that if they spoke a word, or made the least noise, they were all dead men; and so they became masters of her. When this was done he slipped her cable, and drove out to sea. The Spanish man-of-war was so intent upon their expected prize, that they minded nothing else, and as soon as day broke, they made a furious fire upon the empty sloop; but it was not long before they were rightly apprised of the matter, when they cursed themselves sufficiently for a company of fools, to be bit out of a good rich prize, as she proved to be, and to have nothing but an old crazy hull in the room of her. Rackam and his crew had no occasion to be displeased at the exchange, as it enabled them to continue some time longer in a HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

way of life that suited their depraved minds. In August 1720, we find him at sea again, scouring the harbours and inlets of the north and west parts of Jamaica, where he took several small crafts, which proved no great booty to the rovers; but they had but few men, and therefore were obliged to run at low game till they could increase their company and their strength. In the beginning of September, they took seven or eight fishing boats in Harbour Island, stole their nets and other tackle, and then went off to the French part of Hispaniola, where they landed, and took the cattle away, with two or three Frenchmen whom they found near the water-side, hunting wild hogs in the evening. The Frenchmen came on board, whether by consent or compulsion is not certainly known. They afterwards plundered two sloops, and returned to Jamaica, on the north coast of which island, near Porto Maria Bay, they took a schooner, Thomas Spenlow, master, it being then the 19th of October. The next day Rackam seeing a sloop in Dry Harbour Bay, stood in and fired a gun; the men all ran ashore, and he took the sloop and lading; but when those ashore found that they were pirates, they hailed the sloop, and let them know they were all willing to come on board of them. Rackam’s coasting the island in this manner proved fatal to him; for intelligence of his expedition came to the governor by a canoe which he had surprised ashore in Ocho Bay: upon this a sloop was immediately fitted out, and sent round the island in quest of him, commanded by Captain Barnet, and manned with a good number of hands. Rackam, rounding the island, and drawing round the western point, called Point Negril, saw a small pettiaga, which, at the sight of the sloop, ran ashore and landed her men, when one of them hailed her. Answer was made that they were Englishmen, and begged the pettiaga’s men to come on board and drink a bowl of punch, which they prevailed upon them to do. Accordingly, the company, in an evil hour, came all aboard of the pirate, consisting of nine persons; they were armed with muskets and cutlasses, but what was their real design in so doing we will not pretend to say. They had no sooner laid down their arms and taken up their pipes, than Barnet’s sloop, which was in pursuit of Rackam’s, came in sight. The pirates, finding she stood directly towards them, feared the event, and weighed their anchor, which they had but lately let go, and stood off. Captain Barnet gave them chase, and, having advantage of little breezes of wind which blew off the land, came up with her, and brought her into Port Royal, in Jamaica. About a fortnight after the prisoners were brought ashore, viz. November 16, 1720, Captain Rackam and eight of his men were condemned and executed. Captain Rackam and two others were hung in chains. But what was very surprising, was the conviction of the nine men that came aboard the sloop on the same day she was taken. They were tried at an adjournment of the court on the 24th of January, the magistracy waiting all that time, it is supposed, for evidence to prove the piratical intention of going aboard the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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said sloop; for it seems there was no act or piracy committed by them, as appeared by the witnesses against them, two Frenchmen, taken by Rackam off the island of Hispaniola, who merely deposed that the prisoners came on board without any compulsion. The court considered the prisoners’ cases, and the majority of the commissioners being of opinion that they were all guilty of the piracy and felony they were charged with, viz. the going over with a piratical intent to John Rackam, &c. then notorious pirates, and by them known to be so, they all received sentence of death, and were executed on the 17th of February at Gallows Point at Port Royal. Nor holy bell, nor pastoral bleat, In former days within the vale. Flapped in the bay the pirate’s sheet, Curses were on the gale; Rich goods lay on the sand, and murdered men, Pirate and wreckers kept their revels there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1738

May 28, Sunday (Old Style): Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was born at Saintes. The story has it that the infant’s mother had gone into labor while watching the torture execution of a man on the wheel. LA GUILLOTINE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1782

June 13, Thursday: Anna Göldi or Göldin, the final person in Europe to be executed for witchcraft, was beheaded in Glarus Canton, Switzerland almost 300 years after Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger’s MALLEUS MALEFICARUM (THE WITCH HAMMER) had been endorsed by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Cologne and a decade before Philippe Pinel’s reforms in mental treatment at the Bicêtre asylum.6 PSYCHOLOGY

FINAL EXECUTIONS

Mary Hickes and her 9-year- hanged as witches in Huntingdon, England July 28, 1716 old daughter Elizabeth

Anna Göldi or Göldin final person in Europe to be executed for witch- June 13, 1782 craft, beheaded in Glarus Canton, Switzerland

hanged and then burned at the stake in front of March 18, 1789 Christian or Catherine Murphy Newgate Prison in England for having coined false money

(It would seem that what actually happened in this case was that she was the maid of a Dr. Johann Jakob Tschudi who had been taking advantage of her sexually, and she had threatened to expose this illicit sexuality.)

6. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1784

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier served as the head for a royal commission that included Benjamin Franklin (“and, ironically,” avers Stephen Jay Gould, “Dr. Guillotin, whose ‘humane’ invention would end Lavoisier’s life”7) investigating and refuting the claims of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer about the role of animal magnetism in the cure of disease by entrancement (otherwise known as Mesmerization).

FRANZ MESMER

LA GUILLOTINE Brossard de Beaulieu painted a portrait of Lavoisier with a Leyden Jar, to be exhibited at the Salon of 1785.

In his role as Historiographe de France, Jean François Marmontel began to prepare a history of LA RÉGENCE DU DUC D’ORLÉANS, covering the period from the death of King Louis XIV to 1721.

7. Professor Gould is quite mistaken in regard to the irony of this. Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s invention was not invented by Dr. Guillotin, either then or later. The device in question had already been in documented existence, at least since early in the 13th Century, and it had already a name, and it would be renamed in revolutionary France with the name of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin only in mockery of him — simply because he had pleaded before the assembly for the use of some method of execution that would be quicker and would involve less pain and humiliation than the inventive and imaginative methods of execution that had been usual before his time. What humanely and suddenly truncated the life of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, without torture and without humiliation as recommended by the humane Dr. Guillotin, was the fact that he had been a tax-farmer and such tax-farming had in the revolutionary period quite gone out of favor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Headchopping “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1789

October 10, Saturday: On the 2d day of the French Assembly’s debate about the Penal Code, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin submitted a humanitarian proposal which included a recommendation that death, without the accompaniment of torture and by means of head-chopping, should become the sole and standard form of capital punishment in modern France. HEADCHOPPING FRENCH REVOLUTION, I FRENCH REVOLUTION, II

December 12, Saturday: Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin for the 2d time presented his humanitarian proposals. There was nothing in any of his proposals that might produce ridicule in our modern context: • He proposed that, in general, offenses of the same kind ought not to be punished by different varieties of penalty. • He proposed, specifically, in the case of the penalty of death, that the punishment be carried out in the same manner whatever the nature of the offence of which the individual had been accused. Any such condemned person should be decapitated by means of some simple and sure and invariant mechanism. • He proposed that the body and head of a person whom they had executed should upon request be handed over to his family for a normal burial, with no reference made on the register as to the nature of that person’s demise. • He proposed that in view of the personal character of crime, no punishment of a guilty person was to involve any discredit in regard to his family at large. In no case should the estate of any condemned person be confiscated. The honor of those belonging to him should be in no way impugned, and they should continue to be no less admissible to any kind of profession, employment, and public function. No one would be allowed to reproach a citizen with any punishment that had been imposed on one of his relatives. Whosoever ventured to do so ought publicly to be reprimanded by the judge, and this reprimand should be posted upon the offender’s door and at the public pillory for a period of 3 months. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1791

June 3, Friday: The French Assembly approved a text providing that “Every person condemned to the death penalty shall have his head severed.” Guidon, a carpenter who constructed scaffolds, was authorized to build the first head-chopping machine, but, his price proving to be much too high, the order would be placed with a German maker of harpsichords, Tobias Schmidt. LA GUILLOTINE HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1792

April 10, Thursday: The procureur général syndic, Roederer, reached an accord with Tobias Schmidt, a German maker of harpsichords, for a price of 960 francs to cover the cost of devising the first head-chopping machine, which sum moreover was to provide for a leather bag for the proper disposal of the severed head. HEADCHOPPING LA GUILLOTINE

April 11, Friday afternoon: A head-chopping machine had been constructed per a description by Antoine Louis,8 a member of Académie Chirurgical, as a refinement on an Italian head-chopping apparatus, and had been set up in the Cour du Commerce, rue Saint-André-des-Arts, where Tobias Schmidt, the maker of this prototype, had his harpsichord workshop. This location was just opposite the printing office in number 8 where Marat had Ami du Peuple printed. The blade was not yet the oblique one now so familiar, but was straight or curved like the blade of an ax. The operation of the beheading machine was tried on the necks of sheep and calves. HEADCHOPPING LA GUILLOTINE

April 15, Tuesday: At Bicêtre, France, the first test of the new head-chopping machine was conducted on fresh human corpses at a combination hospital, prison, and old folk’s home. After three pieces of human remains had been divided into six pieces of human remains, the apparatus was deemed to be producing its desired result. HEADCHOPPING LA GUILLOTINE

April 19, Saturday: The carpenter Guidon, who usually made scaffolds, went to Bicêtre, France to fix a newly conceived blade into position on the head-chopping machine. HEADCHOPPING LA GUILLOTINE

April 21, Monday: The improved head-chopping machine was again tried out at Bicêtre, France. Three more fresh corpses had been carefully selected from the military hospital, this time of three really well-built individuals, who had died suddenly and whose necks had not become thin. HEADCHOPPING LA GUILLOTINE

8. Initially, until the bloodthirsty French got carried away with their derision of anyone who would have the decency to ask for mercy for a condemned person, this head-chopping machine would be known as the “machine” or as “la louisette” or as “le louison” rather than as the “guillotine.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 25, Friday: At the Place de Grève (now Place Hotel de Ville), Charles-Henri Sanson, the man who would be beheading King Louis XVI, allowed the blade of the new French killing machine to sever for the 1st time the neck of a living French subject, one Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier who had been a highwayman, and neither God nor king filed any noticeable objection.9 LA GUILLOTINE THE LAST VICTIM HEADCHOPPING

May 5, Saturday: The architect Giraud submitted a report requested by Roederer. The report said: “Although well conceived in itself, has not been perfected to the fullest possible extent. The grooves, the tongues and the gudgeons are in wood; the first should be made in brass, the others of iron; the hooks to which are attached the cords holding up the mouton are only fixed with round-headed nails; they should be fixed with strong nuts and bolts.” LA GUILLOTINE HEADCHOPPING

August 21, Tuesday: The first French head-chopping machine was installed at the Place du Carroussel, where it would remain until May 7, 1793, with interruptions such as for the beheading of Louis Capet, who had been King Louis XVI of France, at what is now known as the Place de la Concorde. I simply do not know, at what point it began to be generally referred to as “la louisette” or as “le louison” (the French apparatus in question actually having been devised by a Dr. Antoine Lewis, as a refinement on a prior Italian head-chopping device) rather than as the “machine,” but it assuredly was not know as the guillotine, in mockery of the doctor who had pled for greater humanity in French public executions, prior to the turn of the 19th Century. HEADCHOPPING

9. They say there’s no such thing as progress — but every year we kill you a new way. Notice how these new techniques are always innovated by use of a “thin edge of the wedge” ploy: in the first instance, the person who is executed is one who manifestly deserves such treatment, someone with whose worthiness to be offed no-one could dare to disagree, but soon we will be chopping down, in addition to blokes like this, a king and queen who never were actual highway robbers and whose cases for clemency were somewhat more problematic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1793

January 21, Monday (the 1st of Pluviose in the Year One): In Paris, at what is now known as the Place de la Concorde, Louis Capet, who had been King Louis XVI of France, became a victim of the new improved “machine.” HEADCHOPPING LA GUILLOTINE I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I Pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.

Louis’s neck was thick and the blade needed to be drawn back up and again released for the severing to be complete.

The entire corpse would be reduced by quicklime to nothingness, to ensure that there would never be any claim that anyone was in possession of a relic (due to the doctrine of the divine right of kings, Louis had been posturing for awhile as a Christ figure more or less in the manner in which Timothy McVeigh would starve himself in order to gain the appearance of a victim while awaiting federal execution in Terre Haute). THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS

Who would have guessed? The cross-section of the neck of this French monarch of the 18th Century, Louis, turned out to seem rather more similar than not in appearance to the cross-section of the neck of the English HDT WHAT? INDEX

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monarch of the 17th Century, Charles: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The event would be commemorated with a medallion:

FRENCH REVOLUTION, I FRENCH REVOLUTION, II

As of 2012 there are plans afoot to construct a £180,000,000 “NapoleonLand” theme park on the Montereau- Fault-Yonne site, just south of Paris, of the Emperor Napoléon I’s final meaningless victory — and here is an artist’s rendition of what that theme park may come to look like: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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M. Yves Jego, who is backing this project, hopes to have construction work underway in 2014 and an opening date during the Year of Our Lord 2017. The theme park is charted to include a museum, a hotel, shops, restaurants, and a congress. One of the exhibits is being planned as a reprise of this beheading of King Louis XVI that had taken place in the Place de la Concorde,10 and also they are scheming to enable visitors to “ski” around frozen corpses of soldiers and horses on a “wintry” slope.

10. Since this is the last thing in good taste, can I have the FreedomFries concession? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Famous Last Words:

1681 Headman Ockanickon of the Mantas are the “Leaping Frogs” “Be plain and fair to all, both Indian the Mantas group of the Lenape tribe and Christian, as I have been.”

1692 Massachusetts Bay being pressed to death for refusing to “Add more weight that my misery colonist Giles Corey cooperate in his trial for witchcraft may be the sooner ended.”

June 17, Joseph Spaulding just before his head was removed by a “Fight on, brave boys, they fall like 1775 British cannonball atop Breed’s Hill pigeons!”

1777 John Bartram during a spasm of pain “I want to die.”

1790 Benjamin Franklin unsolicited comment “A dying man can do nothing easy.”

1793 Louis Capet, being beheaded in the Place de la Con- “I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my King Louis XVI of corde charge; I Pardon those who have occasioned France my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.”

1793 Jean-Paul Marat reviewing a list of names “They shall all be guillotined.”

1793 Citizen Marie Antoinette stepping on the foot of her executioner “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 17, Wednesday: Alexander Mackenzie reached the Bella Coola River at Friendly Village. CANADA

In France, this was the 28th of Messidor in the Year One. The National Convention decided to eliminate all feudal dues without compensation. Charlotte Corday d’Armont became a victim of the “machine,” because of her having stabbed to death Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub. An assistant lifted her served head and slapped its cheek, which, it is reported, blushed — for this impropriety, François le Gros would need to serve three months in prison. HEADCHOPPING Famous Last Words:

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

“The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853

1681 Headman Ockanickon of the Mantas are the “Leaping Frogs” “Be plain and fair to all, both Indian the Mantas group of the Lenape tribe and Christian, as I have been.”

1692 Massachusetts Bay being pressed to death for refusing to “Add more weight that my misery colonist Giles Corey cooperate in his trial for witchcraft may be the sooner ended.”

1777 John Bartram during a spasm of pain “I want to die.”

1790 Benjamin Franklin unsolicited comment “A dying man can do nothing easy.”

1793 Jean-Paul Marat reviewing a list of names “They shall all be guillotined.”

1793 Citizen Marie Antoinette stepping on the foot of her executioner “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.” ... other famous last words ...

This would-be nun’s headless corpse was then carried to a nearby hospital in order for the authorities to be able to determine in relative privacy whether or not this person had been “virgina intacta.” (If Corday had not been a virgin, of course, then her political act would have been further invalidated. Although the sketch made of her private parts by a medical student has since disappeared, we know that the consensus of this medical report indeed was that this young woman on her way to becoming a nun had been still virginal.) THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 16 (the 24th of Vendemiaire in the Year One): Publication of works by Jan Ladislav Dussek was announced in The Times of London (these were the Sonata for piano, flute and cello C.94 and the Rondo for piano C.95). The French Revolutionary Calendar: • 1. Vendémiaire (vintage) = September • 2. Brumaire (mist) = October • 3. Frimaire (frost) = November • 4. Nivôse (snow) = December • 5. Pluviôse (rain) = January • 6. Ventôse (wind) = February • 7. Germinal (seed) = March • 8. Floréal (blossom) = April • 9. Prairial (meadow) = May • 10, Messidor (harvest) = June • 11. Thermidor (heat) = July • 12. Fructidor (fruits) = August

“Publication of Universal Praise,” an anthem by William Billings, was advertised in Boston’s Columbian Centinel.

French troops halted the Austrian advance at Wattignies south of Lille.

Nine months a widow, the corpse of her husband having been reduced to nothingness by means of quicklime, Citizen Joséphe Jeanne Marie Antoinette Habsburg Bourbon, a German noblewoman who had been the queen of the French, also took a ride in an open cart to become a victim of the “machine” in the Place de la Révolution (Place de la Concorde) of Paris. She would say to the crowd “Farewell, my children, forever — I go to your Father,” but those would not be her final words. HEADCHOPPING Famous Last Words:

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1681 Headman Ockanickon of the Mantas are the “Leaping Frogs” “Be plain and fair to all, both Indian the Mantas group of the Lenape tribe and Christian, as I have been.”

1692 Massachusetts Bay being pressed to death for refusing to “Add more weight that my misery colonist Giles Corey cooperate in his trial for witchcraft may be the sooner ended.”

June 17, Joseph Spaulding just before his head was removed by a “Fight on, brave boys, they fall like 1775 British cannonball atop Breed’s Hill pigeons!”

1777 John Bartram during a spasm of pain “I want to die.”

1790 Benjamin Franklin unsolicited comment “A dying man can do nothing easy.”

1793 Jean-Paul Marat reviewing a list of names “They shall all be guillotined.”

1793 Citizen Marie Antoinette stepping on the foot of her executioner “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

The event would be commemorated with a medallion: HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1794

April 5 (the 16th of Germinal in the Year Two): George Jacques Danton, who had been a leader of the Revolution, became a victim of the “machine.” HEADCHOPPING Famous Last Words:

1794 George Jacques Danton he had been convicted of not having “Show my head to the people. made adequate use of the guillotine It is worth seeing.”

1798 Giovanni Casanova having spent his life collecting sequen- “I have lived as a philosopher and died tially and in tandem 132 pubic scalps as a Christian.”

1799 George Washington fearing being buried alive (a common “’Tis well.” fear for that period), he was being heartily reassured by his physician

1806 Charles Dickinson he was dueling with Andrew Jackson “Why have you put out the lights?”

1809 Thomas Paine his physician asked whether he wished “I have no wish to believe on that subject.” to believe Jesus to be the son of God ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

May 8, Thursday: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who had been born in 1743-1794, had disproved the phlogiston theory, naming oxygen and discovered its importance in respiration and combustion. Here was a guy, I may opinion, who really knew how to think. His last letter: “I have had a fairly long life, above all a very happy one, and I think that I shall be remembered with some regrets and perhaps leave some reputation behind me. What more could I ask? The events in which I am involved will probably save me from the troubles of old age. I shall die in full possession of my faculties.” Lavoisier was obliged to watch as the head of his father-in-law, Jacques Alexis Paulze, fell into the basket, before he himself stepped up to the machine that had come to be known as the Guillotine. His brain was then deprived of its oxygenated blood supply.

(He had indicated an intention to blink as long as he could after the decapitation — but no blinking was observed.)

March 12, Saturday: Some men endeavor to live a constrained life, to subject their whole lives to their wills, as he who said he would give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off, — but he gave no sign.

Theodore Dwight spoke before “The Connecticut Society, for the promotion of freedom and the relief of persons unlawfully holden in bondage,” in Hartford, Connecticut: ... The injustice of it has been generally, if not uniformly acknowledged; and the practice of it severely reprobated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

But when the question of total abolition has been seriously put, it has met with steady opposition, and has hitherto miscarried, on the ground of political expediency - That is, it is confessed to be morally wrong, to subject any class of our fellow- creatures to the evils of slavery; but asserted to be politically right, to keep them in such subjection.... In this state indeed, and with the sincerest pleasure I make the remark, in consequence of the small number of slaves, the advancement of civilization, and the diffusion of a liberal policy, the situation of the Negroes is essentially different. Exposed to few severe punishments, and indulged in many amusements, compared with what is found in most other countries, they are here flourishing and happy. But even here they are slaves. The very idea embitters every enjoyment. SLAVERY ABOLITIONISM

June 9, Monday (the 20th of Prairial in the Year Two): The head-chopping machine now famous as the guillotine was set up temporarily at the Place de la Bastille. HEADCHOPPING

William Bartram was visited by some strollers, who tried to joke with him about those alligators he had allegedly fought.

William became noticeably nonresponsive and distant.

June 11 (the 22nd of Prairial in the Year Two): The head-chopping machine now famous as the guillotine was moved again, this time to the Barrière du Trône (now the Place de la Nation). HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

July 28, Monday: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1st poems appeared in the Morning Chronicle.

In revolutionary Paris this was the 10th of Thermidor of the year Two. Maximilien de Robespierre, previously one of the dudes who was sending people off to get their heads lopped, became a victim of the head-lopping machine now famous as the guillotine. HEADCHOPPING

Headchopping “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1795

October 8, Thursday: A warrant for arrest was issued for Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1800

At about the beginning of the new century Henry Sanson, son of Charles-Henri Sanson, succeeded his father as the beheader of Frenchmen. Soon the apparatus the French were employing, previously referred to as “la machine,” or as “la louisette” or “le louison” in honor of its designer, would be being referred to instead as “la guillotine,” in honor of the doctor who had recommended the mercy of death by decapitation for commoners HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

as opposed to what had been more usual, death by torture.

English felony trials of the period lasted on average less than nine minutes, from the presentation of the accused to the court to the judge’s verdict of guilt or innocence. During the opening decade of the 19th Century there would be in England a move to conduct hangings inside the Newgate prison, so they would be away from public view, or just outside that prison’s Debtor’s Door, so as to avoid all the ceremony and all the sensationalism attending the procession to Tyburn, which was felt to be not only bad for the morals of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

masses of common people, but also an opportunity for pickpockets and general riotous assembly.

For these private hangings at the prison, the condemned person would be hanged just after 8AM after being HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

hurried through their morning devotions, confession and absolution — which might indeed be “short shrift.”

Throughout the 18th Century the day of a person who was to be either hanged or pilloried had begun at Newgate with devotions at 8AM; the procession would assemble in the court of the prison and probably wouldn’t leave the gates before 9AM, and the cart wouldn’t reach Tyburn before 9.30 or 10.00. If the condemned was a very popular figure and the processional route was packed with onlookers it would take much longer: as much as 3 hours has been recorded. The actual pillorying or hanging likely would take place at about mid-morning, 10.30 or even later.

For example, on Monday, 9 May 1726, when Catherine Hayes had been due to be strangled and burnt HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

(as would be dramatized in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel CATHERINE), the day began with three sodomites, Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin, and Thomas Wright, being taken along packed streets in a cart to Tyburn where they were suspended on the “triple tree” (Tyburn gallows was a big triangular affair with 3 cross-beams) and hanged at the same time. They had to be left hanging for a minimum of half an hour, for if they were cut down too early and happened to survive, they would have been entitled to walk away free men, having fulfilled their sentence of being hanged). In the meantime, Catherine Hayes was kept tied to her stake awaiting being burned for the murder of her husband. Before the hangman, Richard Arnett, could strangle her with a rope as was customary, the flames had reached his hands and he was forced by the heat to let go of the rope. The spectators were horrified by her screams as she struggled to kick away the burning faggots. They then watched as her eyes melted in their sockets. It required three hours for her body to be reduced to ashes and, in the meantime, three more felons arrived in another cart to be hanged. Such mass executions as these were quite popular, and the wealthier spectators could afford to sit in the viewing stands specially erected to accommodate them. On this particular occasion, the stands collapsed under the weight of 150 spectators, six of whom were killed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

CATHERINE, which Thackeray would write under the pseudonym Ikey Solomons, would appear in FRASER’S MAGAZINE, serialized from Volume XIX, Number CXIII (May, 1839) to Volume XXI, Number CXXII (February, 1840). The concluding chapter would describe her execution but would make no mention of the hangings of the sodomites just minutes before; the entire description of Catherine Hayes’s execution would be omitted from all subsequent editions of the novel.

WOMEN HANGED IN ENGLAND DURING 1800

Date Name Place of execution Crime

29/01 Mary Connor Cork Murder (Gallows Green)

17/03 Mary Thorpe York Castle Murder

12/04 Sarah Bailey York Castle Forgery

23/04 Sarah Lloyd Bury St Edmunds Stealing in a dwelling house

31/07 Ann Mead Hertford Murder

23/08 Elizabeth Johnson York Castle Uttering forgery

18/10 Mary Lloyd Boughton Forgery (Cheshire) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1814

May 26, Thursday: Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin died of a carbuncle in his shoulder. His family would have to change its name because of the popular story that it had been he who had invented the guillotine apparatus being used for decapitation. (Actually, all Dr. Guillotin had done was ask that prisoners be done to death in a more human manner than hanging. Guillotine-like apparatuses actually date back to 1200 in Italy, and to the 1500s in Edinburgh, Scotland. The French apparatus in question actually had been devised by a Dr. Antoine Lewis, as a refinement on an Italian beheading device, and had therefore for a time been known as “la louison.”)

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 26 of 5 M 1814 / Amos Peasly was at Meeting his Service was uncommonly lively & edifying & Powerful. indeed I do not think for power I ever heard any thing to exceed it - I have no Doubt many were sensibly edified & those who were in allmost a lifeless state had their feelings greatly quicknened In the last Meeting (Monthly) considerable buisness was transacted in good harmony - Geo Dennis & Jos Wilbour Dined with us & Uncle & aunt Thurston & Eliz Freeborn took tea - In the eveng took a pleasant Walk round the Point with Br D Rodman — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1815

January 21, Saturday: Horace Wells was born in Hartford, Vermont.11

The assembled leaders in Vienna attended a requiem mass in St. Stephen’s Cathedral organized by Talleyrand, for Louis XVI on the 22d anniversary of the monarch’s execution. The requiem was conducted by Antonio Salieri. LA GUILLOTINE

From this date until March 9th, Lord and Lady Byron would be at Seaham, home of Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 21st of 1st M 1815 / I have heard many speak of their satisfaction & edification at being at James Meeting last evening This eveng rode to Portsmouth with David Williams & lodged at Cousin Z Chases RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

11. Wells’s drug experiments on himself would, on January 24, 1848, bring about his death. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1816

At about this point Joseph Deibler, the first Deibler to be working executions in France, emigrated from Germany. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1817

November 7, Friday: The hanging and then beheading for treason of 3 laborers, Jeremiah Brandreth, Isaac Ludlam, and William Turner, who had been detected in Luddite activities (that is, had been incited to lead the Pentrich Rising). In “An Address to the People on The Death of the Princess Charlotte,” Percy Bysshe Shelley would proclaim this to be a greater tragedy for the nation than the unexpected death of Princess Charlotte Augusta Hanover of Wales on the previous day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

These would prove to be the final beheadings by ax in Britain.

FINAL EXECUTIONS

final British woman to be executed for coining August 18, 1809 Susan Grant during the 19th Century

Jeremiah Brandreth, Isaac beheaded by ax in England for Luddite activities November 7, 1817 Ludlam, and William Turner

final woman to be publicly hanged in New-York July 9, 1819 Rose Butler and buried in Potters’ Field (Washington Square) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE NOVEMBER 7TH, 1817 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST). —IN PARTICULAR DID ANYBODY RECOGNIZE ON THIS DAY THAT THESE THREE WOULD BE THE FINAL BEHEADINGS? DID ANYBODY ON THAT SCAFFOLD GO “YOU KNOW, AFTER WE CHOP OFF YOUR HEADS WE WON’T BE DOING THIS ANYMORE, EVER?”

Headchopping “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1819

March 23, Tuesday: Karl Ludwig Sand, a Bavarian theology student at the University of Jena, gained entry to the home of the reactionary diplomat and dramatist August Freidrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue, author of the GESCHICHTE DES DEUTSCHEN REICHES VON DESSEN URSPRUNGE BIS ZU DESSEN UNTERGANGE denouncing liberalism, civil liberties, and constitutions that had been thrown into the bonfire of the student bookburning at the Schloss Wartburg on October 18, 1817, and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest while the man’s 4-year- old son watched from the nearby nursery room (after several failed attempts to commit suicide by stabbing himself, Sand would be beheaded). HEADCHOPPING

Karl Theodor Christian Friedrich Follen’s friendship with Sand would bring him under suspicion as an accomplice. Follen was able to destroy some letters linking him with Sand and would be acquitted due to lack of evidence. He would, however, be dismissed from the University of Gießen and would need to relocate, to Paris. There he would meet Charles Comte, son-in-law of Jean Baptiste Say and founder of the Censeur, a publication which he defended until he chose exile in Switzerland instead of imprisonment in France. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1820

April 3, Monday: Day Three of Scotland’s “Radical War”: In a wide area of central Scotland, work at the looms stopped. There was a march on the Carron Company ironworks, by a small group, to seize weapons, but this was prevented by Hussars. Prisoners being taken to the Greenock jail by the militia were freed by local people. There was never any doubt of the outcome, and the identified leaders of these actions would be hanged and then beheaded, while others would be sentenced to transportation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 1, Monday, “May Day”: Arthur Thistlewood and four other of the “Cato Street” conspirators who had intended to assassinate the entire English cabinet were hanged low and allowed to choke to death –and allowed to hang for half an hour to ensure death– and placed in their coffins and beheaded by an anonymous man (some say a surgeon) with a knife. The audience for this had begun to gather at 4AM, to position themselves for optimal viewing. Favored viewpoints on rooftops and balconies had changed hands for from 2s. 6d. to 3 guineas. Théodore Géricault would immortalize the occasion in his drawing “Public Hanging in London.”

According to the account published in The Times on May 2d, when Thistlewood was brought to the scaffold, he announced to the assembly that he hoped the world would consider him a man sincere in his endeavors. When Tidd was brought forward he ran up the ladder, and as the crowd cheered him he cheered back at the crowd, and bowed to the far corners of the square. When James Ing was brought forward, it appeared that he had donned an old butcher’s coat so that his executioner would not have the benefit of his good clothes. The crowd gave him huzzas and he responded by bowing and singing “Give me Liberty or Give me Death.” Brunt preached that a military government was trying to run the country. Each head in turn was held up before the crowd with the recitation “Here is the head of a traitor.” (As the severed heads were held up, there was a great deal of booing and hissing. The assembly was shouting “God Bless” at the prisoners, and “murder” at the executioner. The authorities were prepared for anything, with banners at the ready bearing the warning inscription THE RIOT ACT HAS BEEN READ. The treason executions of this May Day would be the final such public performances to be enacted in England.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE 1ST TUESDAY IN MAY WAS THE ANNUAL “MUSTER DAY,” ON WHICH ALL THE ABLEBODIED WHITE MEN OF A TOWN WERE SUPPOSEDLY REQUIRED TO FALL INTO FORMATION, WITH THEIR PERSONAL FIREARMS, TO UNDERGO THEIR ANNUAL DAY OF MILITARY TRAINING AND MILITIA INDOCTRINATION.

May 20, Monday: Karl Ludwig Sand was beheaded in Mannheim for the murder of August von Kotzebue. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

June 6, Tuesday: Queen Caroline traveled from Dover to London with ever increasing crowds along the way cheering her on. In London while she stayed at the house of Alderman Matthew Wood, supporting crowds would for two days surround the house.

The saddler Louis Pierre Louvel was sentenced to the guillotine for the assassination of Charles Ferdinand d’Artois, Duc de Berry. HEADCHOPPING

June 7, Wednesday: Louis Pierre Louvel was guillotined for the assassination of Charles Ferdinand d’Artois, Duc de Berry. HEADCHOPPING

Karl Theodor Christian Friedrich Follen had come under suspicion as an accomplice, and would flee to Switzerland (he would teach for awhile at the cantonal school at Coire and at the University of Basel while Prussian authorities continued to solicit Swiss authorities to deliver him unto their tender mercies, until both he and Charles Comte would be forced again to flee, in Follen’s case to the United States of America).

September 8, Friday: There having been a protest march in Scotland involving a march from Glasgow toward the Carron Ironworks for the purpose of the securing of weapons, and two of the leaders of said march, weavers, having been taken into custody, on this day in Stirling the march leaders Andrew Hardie and John Baird were hanged then beheaded for their “Radical War” treason before a crowd of some 2,000. Sheriff of Stirling Ranald MacDonald had stipulated that they would not be allowed to make political speeches from the platform, but had consented that they might speak upon the Holy Scripture. Baird made a brief speech ending in “Although this day we die an ignominious death by unjust laws our blood, which in a very few minutes shall flow on this scaffold, will cry to heaven for vengeance, and may it be the means of our afflicted Countrymen’s speedy redemption.” Hardie then commented that “our blood [being] shed on this scaffold ... for no other sin but seeking the legitimate rights of our ill used and down trodden beloved Countrymen,” and the Sheriff interrupted his speech. He quickly concluded by asking those present to “go quietly home and read your Bibles, and remember the fate of Hardie and Baird.” (This punishment for treason would be removed from the statute books in 1947.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1827

Summer: The Reverend Edward Thompson Taylor was a popular preacher at Methodist camp meetings.

Louis Agassiz grew up in the Vaudois region of Switzerland where many followers of Pierre Waldo (the “Waldenses”), had holed up during the Middle Ages. The Agassiz family could trace its Protestant past back into the 13th Century in the canton of Vaud adjacent to Fribourg. His father was the 6th in an unbroken succession of pastors, and in all likelihood little Louis had remote ancestors who had attempted to lead a life like that of Jesus — but you know how it is, religions deteriorate badly with time and need to be perpetually renewed, the transformation rule for creating from a religion of peace and humility one of aggressive self- legitimation being simple: “wait a couple generations.” Clearly, little Louis’s well-reared parents had little to offer their son by the way of true religious council, for during the summer of 1827 he was left to extrapolate his life’s religion from the pages of Lorenz Oken’s LEHRBUCH DER NATURPHILOSOPHIE and –in the mode of his time and place– portray this religion as science much as Professor E.O. Wilson does today. “Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

The core of this scientistic religion of the self-worship of the white man as the highest form of existence was the attitude that inferior forms of life were but “persistent fœtal states.” A worm would be seen as merely a man who had been incapable of growing a backbone —a woman as merely a man who had failed to mature a penis —an ape as merely a Negro that had not had the moxie to shed its body hair and stand tall —etc. This is because God has ordained that all creatures strive to fulfil one final and perfect type, the white human male who can “get ’em down and hump ’em,” and master the sciences, and dissect frogs, and hack other humans to pieces with his saber. All very satisfying, and guaranteed to make your life work for you (if you happen to be a white man, and happen to be willful enough to enable yourself to go for such shit).12 THE SCIENCE OF 1827

The Congregationalist Reverend Josiah Brewer (1796-1872) of Massachusetts was spending a pleasant summer in the midst of a vineyard on a very fruitful hill in Constantinople, renting at the residence of a Greek family that had formerly had the responsibility of educating the female children of the Seraglio. There, without the presence of a single male Turk, the little girls had been taught chiefly singing and dancing — until the father and two eldest sons of this Greek family had, for some offense given to the Sultan by a friend of the family, had their heads chopped off. After the headchoppings their habitations had been stripped as usual of anything of value. The only members of this Greek family who were left on the premises were the female members, who needed to support themselves with the produce of their vineyard, and with the rent of their houses to this visiting missionary family. CONSTANTINOPLE IN 1827

12. OK, do it if you must, but don’t come around here angling for respect. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1836

Pierre-François Lacenaire, having been found guilty of murder, was condemned to be executed by decapitation. He agreed to take part in an experiment having to do with the nature of human consciousness. If, at the guillotine, after the chopping, he was able to do so, he would close one eye while holding the other open. –Although the head was carefully watched during the decapitation, no such signal became evident. (Henry Thoreau would write, in his journal in 1853, of “he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign.” Thoreau might, however, have been referring not to this case but to that of Lavoisier.) HEADCHOPPING

February 16, Tuesday: Verdicts were handed down in the attempted assassination during the previous July of King Louis-Philippe of France (three of the defendants were sentenced to the guillotine and one to 20 years imprisonment, while a 5th was acquitted). HEADCHOPPING

February 19, Friday: Joseph Fieschi, Pierre Morey, and Theodore Pepin were guillotined for their part in the attempted assassination of King Louis-Philippe of France during the previous July. Hours before his head was to be removed Pepin revealed his membership in a hitherto unknown radical republican group, the “Societe des Familles.” HEADCHOPPING

Joyce Heth, the elderly slave woman Phineas Taylor Barnum had been exhibiting under a pretense that she had been our illustrious founding father George Washington’s wet-nurse, died.

Prime Minister Mendizabal ordered closure of all monasteries and convents in Spain.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 19th of 2 M 1836 / I have had this morning to look a little over my past life & to commemorate the goodness & many mercies of Kind Providence towards me — I hope I shall never distrust his power nor despair of his goodness & mercy - for many times when it looked as if all resources were coming to an end, something has opened, whereby I was enabled to look a little ways a head - I am now writing of temporal prospects, for tho’ at this time I have nothing to elate, but rather to depress my feelings -yet as way has always singularly opened I can but feel a faith in the Power of God who has so wonderfully opened the way for me to live comfortably & even respectably among men — & even if I should be brought to more narrow limits - may I endure the privation as becomes a Man & a Christian - he knows what is HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

best for us, & deals kindly even with his rebellious Sons - but I know it will not do - it is not safe to presume on his mercy, & yet continue in rebellion & disobedience - he requires a cheerful a willing & yet as pure offering & that of the Whole heart My heart is humbled under a Sense of the many Mercies I have received while I write this - much much more presenting to view than I have mind to relate at this time — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

June 25, Saturday: The Liberator.

Just at the gate of the Tuileries palace, disabled 25-year-old former infantry officer Louis Alibaud discharged his cane gun at a carriage carrying King Louis-Philippe of France (the bullet lodged deep in an oaken beam above the monarch’s head and the assailant was immediately taken into custody — it made sense to this disabled young anarchist that he had the same right to the French monarch’s life as Brutus had had to the life of Julius Caesar). HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

July 11, Monday: Louis Alibaud was guillotined for having fired upon King Louis-Philippe on June 25th as his carriage was entering the Tuilleries palace. HEADCHOPPING

Antonio Carlos Gomes was born in Campinas, Brazil, son of a bandmaster. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1843

Nicolas Roch, grandson of Antoine Roch, replaced François Desmorets as beheader at Lons-le-Saulnier. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1847

Clément Sanson was dismissed as the beheader of Frenchmen, and his assistant Louis Deibler took over this function. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1849

Jean-François Heindreicht succeeded Charles Andre Ferey as a beheader of Frenchmen. HEADCHOPPING

March 4, Sunday: The Austrian Reichstag sitting at Kremsier (Kromeriz), Moravia was by imperial order dissolved. A new constitution for the Austrian Empire was sanctioned by the emperor, declaring it to be an indivisible monarchy with common administration. Istria was made a crown land.

Lewis Cass, defeated as the Democratic presidential candidate, returned to the US Senate.

President James Knox Polk’s term ended on this day and, since his Veep had already resigned and Zachary Taylor was refusing to take the oath of office on the Sabbath, technically the President of the United States of America was the President Pro Tem of the Senate. David Rice Atchison wisely slept late this day, then hung around in his Senate office chamber, taking a long nap there. (That’s greatly superior to the day that, Ronald Reagan having been capped, General Alexander Haig declared himself to be in command at the White House! The tombstone of this David Rice Atchison would read “President of the U.S. one day.” — The tombstone of this General Alexander Haig should already read “In command at the White House one day.”)

What the President-Elect did do on this day in Washington DC was turn out his war horse “Old Whitey” to pasture on the White House lawn. As soon as Monday arrived and he deigned to take the oath of office, he would be President of the United States of America and eat broccoli only if he wanted to, until July 9, 1850. Of course, with the change in the office of President of the United States from a Democrat a Whig, the jobs of all previous Democratic appointees, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne as the Surveyor of the Salem Custom House, became exceedingly insecure, for embroidered on the chest of Old Zach’s inauguration suit in red letters was the motto “to the victor belong the spoils”:13

[SEE NEXT SCREEN]

LA GUILLOTINE HEADCHOPPING 13. Never mind, for the friends of the Hawthornes, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, would take up a subscription for their support. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

THE SCARLET LETTER: A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship – to adopt the tone of “P.P.” — was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is essential, in order to a complete estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration. His position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to observe the bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency –which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours– to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me –who have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat– that this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and because the practice of many years has made it the law of political warfare, which unless a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them generous. They know how to spare when they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off. In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side rather than the triumphant one. If, heretofore, l had been none of the warmest of partisans I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and shame that, according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining office to be better than those of my democratic brethren. But who can see an inch into futurity beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

June 11, Monday: The three kings of the Dreikönigsbund (Prussia, Saxony, Hanover) called on all German states to participate in elections for a German parliament to ratify the Unionsverfassung announced on May 28th.

According to pages 82-83 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), there are excellent reasons why the alternate title for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s new novel THE SCARLET LETTER was THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: Predictably, the American press drew careless comparisons between the European revolutions and the American political scene. When Zachary Taylor began his series of political appointments in the spring and summer of 1849, they were reported in the Democratic papers as terrorist acts, as symbolic beheadings of Democratic party members. Some seven times in May and June, for example, the Boston Post printed, in conjunction with the announcement of a political appointment and removal, a small drawing presumably of General Taylor standing beside a guillotine, puffing a cigar, surrounded by heads (presumably of Democrats) at his feet. One of these drawings appeared on June 11th, and on the following day, a letter to the editor appeared objecting to Hawthorne’s removal from the Salem Custom House. “This is one of the most heartless acts of this heartless administration,” the anonymous writer declared. “The head of the poet and the scholar is stricken off to gratify and reward some greedy partizan!... There stands, at the guillotine, besides the headless trunk of a pure minded, faithful and well deserving officer, sacrificed to the worst of party proscription, Gen. Zachary Taylor, now President.” As Arlin Turner has pointed out, this letter was probably a source of Hawthorne’s beheading metaphor; however, behind the reference were two years of revolutionary events in Europe, two years of revolutionary rhetoric and imagery.

HEADCHOPPING Actually, the entire issue over Nathaniel’s dismissal as Surveyor of the Salem Custom House was an issue of classification. Was Hawthorne to be considered as a “political,” or as a “non-political,” employee? The Whigs who dismissed him were alleging that since he had been writing political articles for the Democrats, and since they believed that he had been discriminating against Whig employees in favor of Democratic employees in matters of salary at the Custom House, and since he had they believed then been requiring these Democrat employees to contribute a portion of their inflated salaries to the support of the party — he had in effect made himself into a political employee and could have no complaint in being treated as one.14 HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

THE WHOLE THING WAS STUPID BECAUSE SALEM WAS ALREADY WELL ON ITS WAY TO BEING NO PORT AT ALL HAVING ALREADY HAD ITS LUNCH EATEN BY THE BUSTLING PORT OF BOSTON

14. I’m not saying they were right, but I am saying that they had an argument which it has become quite impossible for us now to evaluate on its merits.

Writers who are known to have supplemented their authorial income by serving in addition as revenue agents: the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson, Robert Burns, Geoffrey Chaucer, Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. (Not to mention, according to MATTHEW 9:9, the author of the gospel according to Matthew.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

June 12, Tuesday: In accounting for the reasons why the new novel THE SCARLET LETTER would appear bearing an alternate title THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: The Boston Post had been printing, in conjunction with each announcement of a political dismissal of a Democrat and appointment of a Taylor supporter, a small woodblock presumably depicting President Zachary Taylor puffing on a cigar with his hand on the pull-rope of a guillotine, while a pile of Democratic heads accumulates at his feet. One such drawing had appeared in the previous issue and today an anonymous letter to the editor objected to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s removal as Surveyor of the Salem Custom House as “one of the most heartless acts of this heartless administration.”15

A PORT THAT IS NO LONGER A PORT NO LONGER NEEDS A CUSTOM HOUSE HOW UNFAIR TO OUR BUSY WRITERS! The letter glossed the event as a poet and scholar being decapitated in order to gratify and reward some greedy partizan. “There stands, at the guillotine, besides the headless trunk of a pure minded, faithful and well deserving officer, sacrificed to the worst of party proscription, Gen. Zachary Taylor, now President.” —We are given to imagine, somehow, that a headless torso is standing next to the President of the United States of America, or, more likely, that an incoherently enraged letterwriter has made implicit reference to the woodblock in that previous day’s issue. HEADCHOPPING

(This letter is so poorly written that I can hardly believe that Hawthorne himself might have submitted it.);

15. In regard to the Custom House of his introduction, Hawthorne alleged to his friend Horatio Bridge that there had been “the greatest uproar that had happened here since witch times.” William Lee (1771-1851) had been the permanent inspector of the Custom House and the model for “the father of the custom house” of the narrative. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1850

March 16, Saturday: An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal: CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL ISSUE OF MARCH 16

Waldo Emerson delivered “The Superlative in Literature, Manners, and Races.”

According to page 79 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), there are distinct markings of sexist politics to be discerned within the novel published on this day by Ticknor and Fields, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, THE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

SCARLET LETTER; OR,THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR:16

theabsorbingcontemplationofthescarletletterthestoryentitled“THESCARLET LETTER”taleof“TheScarletLetter”thescarletletterandeventoucheditwithher fingerthewearerofthescarletlettertakethescarletletteroffthescarletletterthre waluridwearerofthescarletletterfingeronthescarletletterthescarletletterflam ingonherbreastthescarletletteronherbreastornamentthescarletletterwhichitwas herdoomtowearthescarletletterthescarletletterthescarletletteronHester’sbos omgazemightneveroncebefixeduponthescarletlettertouchedthescarletletterthe scarletletterthescarletletterendowedwithlifethescarletletterthewomanofthe scarletletterthelikenessofthescarletletterthescarletletterthewearerofthesca rletletterherchildandthescarletletterlinesofthescarletletterthatdecoratedthem aternalbosomthescarletletteronherbosomthescarletletteronherbreastherfingero nthescarletletterlookuponthescarletletterasthetokenthescarletletterThesca rletletterhadnotdoneitsofficeThescarletletterburnedonHesterPrynne’sbosom“Ih avelefttheetothescarletletter”Iwhomthescarletletterhasdisciplinedtotruthunder thetortureofthescarletletterasforthescarletletter“Mother”saidshe“whatdoesthe scarletlettermean?”investigationsaboutthescarletletterthescarletletterHema deastepnigheranddiscoveredthescarletletterthescarletletterthescarletletterT hescarletletterwasherpassportthescarletletterthescarletletteragainthescarl etletterbrought“Lookyourlastonthescarletletteranditswearer!”thescarletletter thescarletletterenvelopeditsfatedwearer“Thymotherisyonderwomanwiththesca rletletter”hadoftenheardofthescarletletterthescarletletterinthemarketplaceHe againextendedhishandtothewomanofthescarletletterLothescarletletterthesca rletletterthemiddaysunshineonthescarletletterwearerofthescarletletterThesto ryofthescarletlettergrewintoalegendrecluseofthescarletlettertheabsorbi

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16. A claim of copyright has been made for THE SCARLET LETTER in 1962, for FANSHAWE and THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE in 1964, for THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES in 1965, and for THE MARBLE FAUN in 1968, by Ohio State UP. (We presume that those ostensibly appropriative and global copyright claims could actually have covered not more than whatever value was added to the works by that press at that time, such as their reformatting and pagination and suchlike.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

Near the end of THE SCARLET LETTER, Hawthorne in a summary tells us about Hester’s eventual change of heart, about how she at last forsook radicalism and recognized that the woman who would lead the reform movements of the future and establish women’s rights must be less “stained with sin,” less “bowed down with shame” than she. This woman must be “lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy.” More than one reader has correctly surmised that this ending to the novel constitutes a veiled complement to Hawthorne’s little Dove, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and a veiled criticism of Margaret Fuller — radical, advocate of women’s rights, and subject of gossip because of her child and questionable marriage. Hawthorne’s ambivalent feelings toward Fuller indeed informed this and other parts of the novel, and although a number of women have been discussed as models for Hester, including Anne Hutchinson, Ebe Hawthorne, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Fuller seems to have served in this capacity most provokingly. As Francis E. Kearns has pointed out, a number of parallels exist between Fuller and Hester: both had the problem of facing a Puritan society encumbered by a child of questionable legitimacy; both were concerned with social reform and the role of woman in society; both functioned as counselor and comforter to women; and both had children entitled to use the armorial seals of a non-English noble family. A more important parallel, which Kearns does not mention, is that for Hawthorne both women were linked to the figures of Liberty and Eve, that is, to the ideas of revolution and temptation, which lie at the heart of the novel. For certain sure the benevolent Boston presence of George Stillman Hillard and the benign influence of Waldo HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

Emerson, among other notables, had been immortalized in Hawthorne’s preamble “The Custom-House”:

THE SCARLET LETTER: Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; BROOK FARM after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the WALDO EMERSON Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau ELLERY CHANNING about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that LONGFELLOW I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. BRONSON ALCOTT Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some HENRY THOREAU measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

[INSERT COMMENTARY ABOUT DECAPITATION HERE]

This “psychological bondage” book offered its appreciative audience a heroine who learns, finally, after much anguish, that as a woman her best game plan is to accept the cards society has dealt her, suffer passively, endure numbly, and wait, wait and hope for a better day, and that anything else she might try always makes her lot less bearable. To be silent and no bother, and maintain sexual purity, that constitutes female courage. Had slaves formed a reading market in that era, the author could easily have authored a companion volume about a black man who learns, finally, after much anguish, that as a slave his best game plan is to accept the cards society has dealt him, suffer passively, endure numbly, and wait, wait and hope for a better day, and that anything else he might try always makes his lot less bearable. To be silent and no bother, and polish shoes, that constitutes slave courage. Then, of course, the author could have created a grand synthesis, in a tale of a female slave who learns, finally, that her role as female and her role as slave quite reinforce one another.... To use a 19th-Century phrase, “women and Negroes.” Do you get the idea I actively dislike this romance? No, I HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

actively dislike the mentality of its author Hawthorne. The best thing I have seen on this subject was written by Jean Fagan Yellin:

Where Hiram Powers had distanced an enchained white woman in space and called her a Greek Slave, Nathaniel Hawthorne distanced an enchained white woman in time and called her Hester Prynne.

Clearly, anyone who is bonded to (or in bondage to — it’s much the same, isn’t it?) such a person has a tough row to hoe (you note I cast this suggestion in the present tense — it’s still the case). In particular Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, who had witnessed slavery while living for an extended period in her youth on a sugar plantation in Cuba, had a tough attitudinal row to hoe, being married to such an author-tarian. Sophia could have hardly become an active abolitionist like her sisters Mary and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Her solution? –Sophia went for denial, and refused to give credence to various unsettling reports such as that some slave women had to strip to the buff on the auction block (“which I am sure is an exaggeration for I have read of these auctions often and even the worst facts are never so bad as absolute nudity”). Then she also capable of ignoring the BOOK OF JOB in her BIBLE long enough to suppose that a good and benevolent God providentially “makes up to every being the measure of happiness which he loses thro’ the instrumentality of others” — so that it really is of no consequence how we treat each other. And then she could attempt to “lose myself in other subjects of thought,” embracing a sophisticated version of the Emersonian HDT WHAT? INDEX

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trick of resignation. She makes herself sound like a Minnesotan!17

Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Waldo Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Henry Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of George Stillman Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Bronson Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

As of mid-century, with the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER, it is clear that the

17. We may well note that although Henry Thoreau would have a copy of Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER in his personal library, he would cross out the reference to that item — indicating that the volume was no longer present (we infer that either the volume was lost, or given away). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

figure of Uncle Sam had become a fixture of our American imagination:

THE SCARLET LETTER: In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf – but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood – at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass – here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of Uncle Sam’s government, is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this very moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later – oftener soon than late – is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1851

July 19, Saturday: It was being reported in the gazettes that in England a determined effort was being made to convert everyone to Mormonism.

On November 20th, 1850, because he had been determinedly living beyond his means, Count Hippolyte Visart de Bocarmé had needed to invite his well-to-do one-legged young brother-in-law Gustave Fougnies to dinner at his château of Bury, Belgium and poison him (previously, using a false name, the count had consulted a professor of chemistry and had conducted experiments on cats and ducks to verify that the sort of alkaloids present in Nicotiana tabacum would indeed induce death, and had prepared two wine bottles containing concentrated nicotine). On this day the count was taken to the guillotine in one of the squares of Mons –the blade, at the convicted man’s request, having been freshly sharpened– and his head was neatly taken off.

To the displeasure of the Belgian audience of thousands, Lydie Victoire Josèphe Fougnies, countess of HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

Bocarmé, who had been a full participant in the murder and subsequent destruction of evidence, had been presumed to have been under duress (one may doubt that she even attended at the event of the demise of her husband). HEADCHOPPING

July 19, Saturday: Here I am 34 years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many instances that I may say I am unborn. There is the instinct for society –but no society. Life is not long enough for one success. Within another 34 years that miracle can hardly take place. Methinks my seasons revolve more slowly than those of nature, I am differently timed. I am –contented. This rapid revolution of nature even of nature in me –why should it hurry me. Let a man step to the music which he hears however measured. Is it important that I should mature

DIFFERENT DRUMMER

as soon as an apple tree? Ye, as soon as an oak?18 May not my life in nature, in proportion as it is supernatural, be only the spring & infantile portion of my spirit’s life shall I turn my spring to summer? May I not sacrifice a hasty & petty completeness here –to entireness there? If my curve is large –why bend it to a smaller circle? My spirits unfolding observes not the pace of nature. The society which I was made for is not here, shall I then substitute for the anticipation of that this poor reality. I would have the unmixed expectation of that than this reality. If life is a waiting –so be it. I will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. What were any reality which I can substitute. Shall I with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over myself though when it is done I shall be sure to gaze still on the true etherial heaven –far above as if the former were not –that still distant sky oer arching that blue expressive eye of heaven. I am enamored of the blue eyed arch of heaven I did not make this demand for a more thorough sympathy. This is not my idiosyncrasy or disease. He that made the demand will answer the demand. My blood flows as slowly as the waves of my native Musketaquid –yet they reach the ocean sooner perchance than those of the Nashua. 18. William M. White’s version is:

Methinks my seasons revolve more slowly Than those of nature; I am differently timed. I am contented.

This rapid revolution of nature, Even of nature in me, Why should it hurry me?

Let a man step to the music which he hears, However measured. Is it important that I should mature As soon as an apple tree? Aye, as soon as an oak? HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

Already the golden-rod is budded, but I can make no haste for that.

July 19, Saturday: 2 Pm The weather is warm & dry –& many leaves curl. There is a threatening cloud in the SW. The farmers dare not spread their hay. It remains cocked in the fields. As you walk in the woods now a days the flies striking against your hat sound like rain drops. The stump or root fences on the Corner road remind me of fossil remains of mastodons &c exhumbed and bleached in sun & rain. To day I met with the first orange flower of autumn– What means this doubly torrid –this Bengal tint– Yellow took sun enough –but this is the fruit of a dogday sun. The year has but just produced it. Here is the Canada thistle in bloom visited by butterflies & bees The butterflies have swarmed within these few days especially about the milkweed’s. The swamp pink still fills the air with its perfume in swamps & by the causeways –though it is far gone. The wild rose still scatters its petals over the leaves of neighboring plants. The wild morning glory or bind-weed with its delicate red & white blossoms– I remember it ever as a goblet full of purest morning air & sparkling with dew. showing the dew point –winding round itself for want of other support– It grows by the Hubbard bridge causeway near the Angelica. The cherry birds [Cedar Waxwing Bombycilla cedrorum] are making their seringo sound as they flit past. They soon find out the locality of the cherry trees. And beyond the bridge there is a golden rod partially blossomed. Yesterday it was spring & to-morrow it will be autumn– Where is the summer then? First came the St Johns wort & now the golden rod to admonish us. I hear too a cricket amid these stones under the blackbery vines –singing as in the fall. Ripe blackberries are multiplying. I see the red-spotted berries of the small solomons seal in my path. I notice in the decayed end of an oak post that the silver grain is not decayed –but remains sound in thin flakes alternating with the decayed portions, & giving the whole a honey-combed look.– Such an object supramundane –as even a swallow may descend to light on –a dry mullein stalk for instance – – I see that hens too follow the cows feeding near the house like the cowtroopial [Brown-headed Cowbird Molothrus ater] –& for the same object. They cannot so well scare up insects for themselves. This is the dog the cowbird uses to start its insect game I see yellow butterflies in pairs pursuing each other –a rod or two into the air & now as he had bethought himself of the danger of being devoured by a passing birds he descends with a zig zag flight to the earth & the other follows. The black hucklberries are now so thick among the green ones that they no longer incur suspicion of being worm eaten. When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living –some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity –I thought often & seriously of picking huckleberries –that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice. So little capital it required –so little distraction from my wonted thoughts I foolishly thought– While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions I thought of this occupation as most like theirs. ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way which I might carelessly dispose of –so to keep the flocks of king Admetus– My greatest skill has been to want but little. I also dreammed that I might gather the wild herbs –or carry evergreens to such villagers as love to be reminded of the woods & so find my living got. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles. & though you trade in messages from heaven –the whole curse of trade attaches to the business. The wind rises more & more The river & the pond are blacker than the threatening cloud in the south– The thunder mutters in the distance– The surface of the water is slightly rippled– Where the pads grow is a light green border– The woods roar. Small white clouds are hurrying across the dark blue ground of the storm – which rests on all the woods of the South horizon But still no rain now for some hours as if the clouds were dissipated as fast as they reached this atmosphere. The barberry’s fruit hangs yellowish green– What pretty covers the thick bush makes so large & wide & BARBERRY drooping. The Fringilla juncorum19 sings still in spite of the coming tempest which perchance only threatens The wood chuck is a good native of the soils. The distant hills side & the grain fields & pastures are spotted yellow or white with his recent burrows –and the small mounds remain for many years Here where the clover has lately been cut, see what a yellow mound is brought to light! Heavily hangs the Common Yellow lily Lilium Canadense in the meadows– In the thick alder copses by the causeway side I find the Lysimachia hybrida. Here is the Lactuca Sanguinea with its runcinate leaves –tall-stem & pale crimson ray. And that green stemmed one higher than my head resembled the last in its leaves –is perchance the “tall lettuce or Fire weed. Can that fine white flowered meadow plant with the leaf be a Thalictrum?

19. Thoreau could not have intended here the bird then known as Fringilla or F. or linaria (Common Redpoll Carduelis flammea), for this record is for the month of July and that bird winters in Concord and summers in the far north. He must have intended the bird then known as juncorum (Field Sparrow Spizella pusilla). So, can anyone explain why he wrote Fringilla juncorum, other than as a mere slip of the pen? HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1853

Nicolas Roch, grandson of Antoine Roch and the guillotinist at Lons-le-Saulnier, succeeded Henri Ganier as head-chopper at Amiens. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1854

April 4, Tuesday: A week after declaration of war, Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka left Paris for Russia.

The 2d Regiment of Dragoons under Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke defeated the Jicarilla Apaches at the canyon of Ojo Caliente.

The police raided a fandango house on Pacific Street between Stockton Street and Dupont Street in San Francisco, and arrested 11 men and 14 women under this municipality’s new anti-prostitution ordinance (evidently these people were suspected of having been up to no good). CALIFORNIA HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

Joseph Tussaud returned to London with a head-chopping machine that he had procured from Clément Sanson. This “guillotine” was to become a part of Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks.

HEADCHOPPING

Henry Thoreau spent all day surveying an Acton woodlot belonging to Abel Hosmer near the railroad and the road to Stow, Jessie Willis, George Wright, Joel Conant, (?) Adams, Asa Parker and the area just west of the Damon Mill land. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/58a.htm

An article by John Russell Bartlett appeared in the New York Herald, on pages 5 and 6, entitled “The Aboriginal Semi-civilization of the Great California Basin, with a Refutation of the popular theory of the Northern Origin of the Aztecs of Mexico,” on the migration of Aztecs and the distribution of Native Americans in the Great Basin region, from which Thoreau would copy into his eighth Indian Notebook.

American and English ships began to land forces at Shanghai to protect American interests during Chinese civil strife. This would continue until June 17th. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1856

April: It would appear that Miss Mary Moody Emerson was back in Concord again at this point, settled by Elizabeth Sherman Hoar in the “Deacon Brown” house — for we date this remark in Waldo Emerson’s journal to approximately this month:

Monochord. Mary Moody Emerson cannot sympathize with children. I know several persons whose world is only large enough for one person, and each of them, though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood’s poem, guillotine the last but one. ’Tis A’s [Alcott’s] misfortune, & T’s [Thoreau’s].

HEADCHOPPING The biographer Phyllis Cole would explain the meeting between Waldo’s petite Aunt Mary and Henry Thoreau as follows: Back in Concord a year and a half later, Mary gave Thoreau the attention across generations that she had no way of giving Dickinson. Once more he recorded the event in his journal. “Talking with Miss Mary Emerson this evening, she said, ‘It was not the fashion to be so original when I was young.’ She is readier to take my view –look through my eyes for the time– than any young person that I know in this town.” Mary endorsed his high valuing of simplicity, even at the expense of his own mother. Holding court at the “Deacon Brown” house the same year, she shut her eyes while conversing with her old friend Cynthia Thoreau in protest against the long yellow ribbons on her cap. “I did not wish to look upon those ribbons of yours,” she explained, “so unsuitable at your time of life and to a person of your serious character.” Perhaps others in the room challenged her to defend the more “original” oddities of her own apparel. EMILY DICKINSON CYNTHIA DUNBAR THOREAU HDT WHAT? INDEX

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DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1857

January 19, Monday: At the Place de la Roquette in Paris, the head of one M. Provost proved to be easy to remove:

HEADCHOPPING

William T. Sherrard, appointed as sheriff in the Kansas Territory, seriously threatened and menaced Governor John White Geary for having refused to sign his appointment. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

January 19. A snow-storm with very high wind all last night and to-day. Though not much snow falls (perhaps seven or eight inches), it is exceedingly drifted, so that the first train gets down about noon and none gets up till about 6 P. M.! There is no vehicle passing the house before 2 P. M.! A fine dry snow, intolerable to face. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1860

Use of the guillotine ceased in the Papal States near Rome, and in the kingdoms of Piedmont and Bourbon Naples. (You don’t suppose, do you, that they might have come, after due reflection, to think of this sort of activity as somewhat inconsistent with the spirit of Jesus Christ?) HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1870

Leon Berger, an assistant beheader and a carpenter, would over the next couple of years improve and develop a new head-chopping apparatus. Among his improvements would be a spring system, to stop the mouton at the bottom of the grooves, and a lock or blocking device placed at the lunette. He would also pioneer a new release mechanism for the blade. All subsequent apparatuses would be per his redesign.20 HEADCHOPPING

20. Never trust anything that has moving parts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1871

When the posts of the regional head-choppers were abolished, Jean-François Heindreicht became the 1st beheader for all of France. One of his assistants was Louis Deibler. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1872

Nicolas Roch, grandson of Antoine Roch, had become at this point the beheader at Paris itself. Over the years of his career, he would have five assistants, among them Leon Berger, Henri Ganier, and Jules-Henri Desfourneaux. HEADCHOPPING

In this year or the previous year, “The Apotheosis of War,” by Vassili Vereshchagin (1842-1904), a painting which now hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow:

Since this painting has on occasion been used to illustrate the Armenian Genocide of the 1920s in Turkey, it should be recorded here that the painting was prior, and imaginative, and that there is no such connection. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1877

December 17, Monday: Jules-Henri Desfourneaux was born at Bar-Le-Duc. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1878

Nicolas Roch installed a wooden shield that would mask the blade of the guillotine from the sight of an approaching victim (this novelty would in the next year be removed, when Roch died and was replaced by Louis Deibler). HEADCHOPPING

Mrs. James wrote to the Historical Society of Connecticut, asking that they return to her possession the three trophy items that allegedly had been seized by Alderman at the site of his killing of Metacom, that allegedly had come to be her private property through purchase followed by a chain of inheritance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1879

Nicolas Roch, the beheader at Paris, died and was replaced by Louis Deibler, who tore off the wooden shield which Roch had installed to mask the blade of the guillotine from the sight of an approaching victim. During this year an attempt was made to elicit a reaction from the freshly severed head of the murderer Prunier, but the results were negative. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1880

When, three hours after the decapitation of the rapist and murderer Menesclou, a doctor pumped blood from a living dog into the severed veins of the neck, the lips were observed to tremble, and the eyelids to twitch. Although the head seemed to onlookers to be about to speak, the lips formed no words. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1898

December: At the urging of Estrada-Palma, El Partido Revolucionario Cubano, the Cuban Revolutionary Party, founded by José Martí, was dissolved.

Louis Deibler abdicated as the beheader of the French, in favour of his son Anatole Deibler. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1899

January 2, Monday: Anatole Deibler carried out his 1st beheading of a Frenchman. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1900

July 28, Saturday: In Zurich, Albert Einstein received his diploma from the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule.

In New Haven, Connecticut, Louis Lassing invented the hamburger.

In Beijing, the Roman Catholic Xu Jingcheng, formerly the ambassador to Russia, Germany, Austria, and Holland, was decapitated at Caishikou Execution Grounds for having positioned himself in opposition to the Boxer faction of the Imperial Court, and the head was placed on display. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

The editors of the United States Investor asserted that the US had “made a grand mistake when we promised to give the Cuban people independence. The promise ought to be broken because it is our interest to break it.”

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Headchopping HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1905

June 28, Wednesday: When the murderer Languille was decapitated at 5:30AM, Dr. Beaurieux cried out his name. He would allege that the freshly severed head then opened its eyes and focused on him for a few seconds, then closed its eyes, so he cried out his name once more and the eyes again opened and closed, but the 3d time he cried out the man’s name, nothing was observed. Can you believe that? HEADCHOPPING

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1909

January: Jules-Henri Desfourneaux made his debut as an aide at French beheadings, his introduction to this profession being by way of a grand uncle, Edouard Mathieu Desfourneaux, who had himself been an aide to Heidenreich. Another relative, Leopold Desfourneaux, would be an aide to Anatole Deibler. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1922

Henri-Desiré Landru, a serial wife-killer, became yet another victim of a serial killer, the guillotine. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

1932

May 7, Saturday: At the Santé prison, André Baillard was granted clemency as the assistants of Anatole Deibler were in the process of strapping him to the bascule — now there’s something that’d raise the hairs on the nape of your neck! HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1933

February 27, Monday: A young Dutch socialist, Marinus van der Lubbe, a member of a tiny Communist splinter group opposed both to Stalin and to the German Communist Party, was found wandering dazed near the burning German Reichstag building. He would be accused of having committed this arson as a protest against Nazism, despite the greatest difficulties in putting together a crime scenario in which one person acting alone could conceivably have started, without any accelerants, all those simultaneous blazes in various parts of the building. On January 10, 1934 in Leipzig his head would be chopped off with an ax but that would do nothing to resolve the controversy — which has persisted ever since. HEADCHOPPING

Having become involved in the Communist Party of the United States, Edward Dahlberg would be going to Germany at the point at which Adolf Hitler was coming to power after this torching of the Reichstag (this event being for Hitler in Germany what the Twin Towers attack would become for George W. Bush in America — the golden moment that begged to be seized).

After establishing his credentials by being beaten by a Nazi officer who had either had too much to drink or disliked Communists or perhaps both, Dahlberg would return to Greenwich Village and be offered a commission to write a book on some anti-Nazi theme. This would be published under the title THOSE WHO HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PERISH and would be the 1st book of its kind to reach the public eye in the United States.

WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1934

January 10, Wednesday: On February 27, 1933 a young Dutch socialist, Marinus van der Lubbe, had been found wandering dazed near the burning German Reichstag building. He had been accused of having committed this arson as a protest against Nazism. On this day in Leipzig, his head was chopped off with an ax. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1939

February: In this month God, who has a sense of humor, struck the executioner of the French, Anatole Deibler, with a heart attack, in the métro station, as he was setting off for Rennes, to truncate a man named Pilorges, and his life was cut off. HEADCHOPPING

In this month our poet Robinson Jeffers composed for us a poem: Nerves You have noticed the curious increasing exasperation Of human nerves these late years? Not only in Europe, Where reasons exist, but universal; a rope or a net Is being hauled in, a tension screwed tighter; Few minds now are quite sane: nearly every person Seems to be listening for a crash, listening... And wishing for it, with a kind of enraged Sensibility. Or is it that we really feel A gathering in the air of something that hates Humanity; and in that storm-light see Ourselves with too much pity and the others too clearly? Well: this is February, nineteen-three-nine. We count the months now; we shall count the days. It seems time that we find something outside our Own nerves to lean on.

The poet was already beginning to arrive at his concept “inhuman” — which eventually he would use to name his peculiar philosophical attitude as that of Inhumanism. (He had not read Thoreau and thus had no idea that he was merely echoing the life philosophy of another poet. During his life, no-one would ever alert him to this fact.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“It appears to me that to one standing on the heights of philosophy mankind & the works of man will have sunk out of sight altogether. Man is altogether too much insisted on. The poet says the proper study of mankind is man– I say study to forget all that –take wider views of the universe– That is the egotism of the race. What is this our childish gossipping social literature – mainly in the hands of the publishers? When the poet says the world is too much with us –he means of course that man is too much with us– In the promulgated views of man –in institutions –in the common sense there is narrowness & delusion. It is our weakness that so exaggerates the virtues of philanthropy & charity & makes it the highest human attribute– The world will sooner or later tire of philanthropy –and all religions based on it mainly. They cannot long sustain my spirit. In order to avoid delusions I would fain let man go by & behold a universe in ROBINSON JEFFERS which man is but as a grain of sand– I am sure that my thoughts which consist or are contemporaneous with social personal connections – however humane are not the wisest & widest –most universal– What is the village –city state –nation –aye the civilized world – that it should so concern a man? It is a comfortable place to nestle no doubt & we have friends – some sympathizing ones it may be, & a hearth, there – but I have only to get up at midnight – aye to soar – or wander a little in my thought by day – to find them all slumbering– Look at our literature what a poor puny social thing seeking sympathy– The author troubles himself about his readers – would fain have one before he dies.– not satisfied with defiling one another in this world, we would all go to heaven together.– To be a good man (that is a good neighbor in the widest sense) is but little more than to be a good citizen. Mankind is a gigantic institution – it is a community to which most men belong. It is a test I would apply to my companion – can he forget man? Can he see this world slumbering? I do not value any view of the universe into which man & the institutions of man enter very largely & absorb much of the attention– Man is but the place where I stand & the prospect (thence) hence is infinite. it is not a chamber of mirrors which reflect me –when I reflect myself –I find that there is other than me. man is a past phenomenon to philosophy – the universe is larger than enough for man’s abode. Some rarely go outdoors – most are always at home at night – very few indeed have stayed out all night once in their lives – fewer still have gone behind the world of humanity –seen his institutions like toad-stools by the way-side. Now the author stands too near his printer. He corrects the proofs.” –Thoreau’s JOURNAL, April 2, 1852

June 17, Saturday: In the final head-chopping to take place in public in France, Eugen Weidman, who had murdered 6 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

times, became a victim of the guillotine outside the prison at Versailles.

FINAL EXECUTIONS

22-year-old black American hanged in public in Owensboro, Kentucky before a crowd of 20,000 August 14, 1936 Rainey Bethea including more than 200 visiting sheriffs and depu- ties; last person publicly executed in the USA

June 17, 1939 Eugen Weidman public execution by guillotine, at Versailles

German spy executed by firing squad at the Tower August 15, 1941 Corporal Josef Jakobs of London

June 24, Saturday: George Verhaghen committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

According to a new law state head-choppings were no longer to be conducted in public, but were to take place in Paris within the yard of the Santé prison. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1941

December 8, Monday: Croatia declared war on the United States and the United Kingdom. Soviet forces retook Tikhvin, southeast of Leningrad. Führer Adolf Hitler announced the suspension of military operations against the Soviet Union due to severe weather conditions.

A German policy of killing Jews by gas was put into effect. 700 Jews from Kulmhof (Chelmo), northeast of Lodz, were taken by van (with the exhaust system hooked into the van) to a nearby wood. By the time they arrived, they were dead. From this day on, Jews from the surrounding district were daily transported to Kulmhof for the same purpose. This was the first death camp to begin operations. The region would be emptied of its 360,000 Jews. ANTISEMITISM

This was the day on which the US Pacific fleet had been ordered to steam out of Pearl Harbor to seek battle engagement with the Japanese fleet, but the hulls of many capital vessels of this US fleet were resting on a bed of mud in the warm shallow waters of Pearl Harbor, awaiting recovery and salvage efforts, and oil slicks were glistening upon the surfaces of these waters. On the California seacoast, the 4th Interceptor Command spotted two formations of enemy planes near San Francisco, heading toward Los Angeles.

After Japanese soldiers made a quick lunch of the defenses of the British crown colony of Hong Kong, Governor Mark Young was restricted to his quarters in the Peninsula Hotel. British civilians were rounded up and some 20,000 Chinese per month would be deported to the mainland.

US Marines and other Allied nationals were interned at Shanghai, Beijing, and Tientsin.

Striking Force, Asiatic Fleet (Rear Admiral W.A. Glassford) departed Iloilo, Philippine Islands for Makassar Strait, Netherlands East Indies.

The river gunboat Wake (PR-3) was surrendered to Japanese at Shanghai after an attempt to scuttle it failed (The Wake would be the sole United States ship to surrender during this war).

The Potomac River Naval Command, with its headquarters at Washington DC, and the Severn River Naval Command, with its headquarters at Annapolis, Maryland, were established.

The SS President Harrison, en route to evacuate US Marines from Chingwangtao, China, ran aground at Sha Wai Shan, China, and was captured by the Japanese.

Japanese aircraft bombed Guam, Wake, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Philippine Islands. Extensive damage was inflicted on United States Army aircraft at Clark Field, Luzon, Philippine Islands.

Japan interned US Marines and nationals at Shanghai and Tientsin, China.

A United States naval vessel was sunk by a horizontal bomber: the minesweeper Penguin (AM-33), near Guam in the Marianas Islands. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

Japan invaded Thailand, which capitulated.

Japanese troops landed unopposed at Victoria Point, the southern tip of Burma.

Japanese landed on Bataan Island north of Luzon, Philippine Islands, and on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula. (At some point during their occupation of the Philippines, on Luzon, 14 Filipino resistance fighters would be forced to surrender because they ran out of ammunition. Other POWs were required to dig 14 foxholes for them and were then executed. These resistance fighters were forced into the foxholes and earth shovelled around them and stamped down, until only their heads and necks were above ground, so that the Japanese officer could use them for his sword practice. Some of the soldiers having defecated onto banana leaves, shit was stuffed into their mouths with considerable hilarity before the officer drew his sword. HEADCHOPPING

The Chelmno death camp near Lodz, Poland opened for business.

In a conversation with Rosenman, one of his speechwriters, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke of Führer Adolf Hitler as his first target, and “feared that a great many Americans would insist that we make the war in the Pacific at least equally important with the war against Hitler.” He was, however, saying nothing of the sort to the American people.

Instead we were receiving, on this day that will live in infamy, a lie that would send more than 16 million US citizens to war: TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES: Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -a date which will live in infamy- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that Nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to the Secretary of State a form reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hit of war or armed attack. It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes HDT WHAT? INDEX

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it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government had deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending through out the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our Nation. As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces - with the unbounded determination of our people - we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December seventh, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire. — Franklin D. Roosevelt DECLARATION OF WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The British declared war upon Japan. Declarations of war upon Japan were issued by Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, the Free French, and Panama. Mexico, Colombia, Belgium, and Egypt did not declare war, but did sever diplomatic relations with Japan. (The USSR would neither declare war upon Japan nor sever diplomatic relations, until that nation lay prostrate and devastated in the very last moments of the hostilities.) WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Pearl Harbor I Here are the fireworks. The men who conspired and labored To embroil this republic in the wreck of Europe have got their bargain, — And a bushel more. As for me, what can I do but fly the national flag from the top of the tower, — America has neither race nor religion nor its own language: nation or nothing. Stare, little tower, Confidently across the Pacific, the flag on your head. I built you at the other war’s end, And the sick peace; I based you on living rock, granite on granite; I said, “Look, you gray stones: Civilization is sick: stand awhile and be quiet and drink the sea-wind, you will survive Civilization.” But now I am old, and O stones be modest. Look, little tower: This dust blowing is only the British Empire; these torn leaves flying Are only Europe; the wind is the plane-propellers; the smoke is Tokyo. The child with the butchered throat Was too young to be named. Look no farther ahead. II The war that we have carefully for years provoked Catches us unprepared, amazed and indignant. Our warships are shot Like sitting ducks and our planes like nest-birds, both our coasts ridiculously panicked, And our leaders make orations. This is the people That hopes to impose on the whole planetary world An American peace. (Oh, we’ll not lose our war: my money on amazed Gulliver And his horse-pistols.) Meanwhile our prudent officers Have cleared the coast-long ocean of ships and fishing-craft, the sky of planes, the windows of light: these clearings Make a great beauty. Watch the wide sea; there is nothing human; its gulls have it. Watch the wide sky All day clean of machines; only at dawn and dusk one military hawk passes High on patrol. Walk at night in the black-out, The firefly lights that used to line the long shore Are all struck dumb; shut are the shops, mouse-dark the houses. Here the prehuman dignity of night Stands, as it was before and will be again. Oh beautiful Darkness and silence, the two eyes that see God; great staring eyes. — Robinson Jeffers

At the home of Helen Clarke Grimes, in Spragueville near Smithfield northwest of Providence, Rhode Island, as in many homes in America, the radio was being kept constantly on, not for the soap operas that filled the daytime airwaves, but for the sporadic news flashes about the war situation. Helen made notes for her diary: Dec. 8 — This Monday morning we face a turquoise and coral sunrise with the sick realization that we are at war, and that the radio bulletins are not something by Orson Welles. We had turned the radio off at eleven o’clock last night, worn dull by hours of incessant listening, and were about to go to bed when Charlie and Harriett who had spent the day at his mother’s, came home with two copies of the War Extra. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

We talked until twelve, soberly with no fine frenzy to fire us. Constance and Oliver phoned, but there was nothing to say. It is 8AM and the news is pouring in over the radio. Hongkong has been bombed, and there is a report of 200 casualties suffered at Singapore. Ford Wilkins in Manila says there has been no violence in that city as yet. He tells of Japanese landing on some parts of the Phillipines, of the round-up and internment of Japanese in Manila; of the evacuation of Manila, and of a naval battle reported in the Pacific. A Washington commentator says our losses are far more serious (in Hawaii) than given out. Hangers have been flattened, planes destroyed, there has been torpedo damage — altogether a heavy naval defeat. At night the lights burned in embassy windows along Massachusetts Avenue [in Washington DC]. In Providence, the State Guard has been mobilized, and roving guards placed at industrial plants, at the airport, and along the waterfront. On the West Coast few went to bed last night, excitement running high the thoroughfares crowded. Charles Collingwood in a report from London, speaks of grey parliament buildings, and of Churchill in his black Homburg hat. Arthur Crock, in writing of the American reaction in the “N.Y. Times,” says one can almost hear national unity clicking into place. This is a grim day. Here, in one of the smallest communities in the smallest state in the union, the stark branches of the apple trees are bleak and cold against a lowering sky. Mother is having an asthma attack. Twelve o’clock noon — The sun is out, the sky a thin wash of blue. Japanese planes are only forty miles from Manila. 12:30 — President Roosevelt spoke to the joint session of House and Senate, a short address of five hundred words, at the end of which he asked “that Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday Dec. 7th, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.” The “President Pierce” reported to have been torpedoed, was the first dollar liner on which Oliver sailed to the Orient. A news flash breaks into a concert of chamber music to tell of an air raid now in progress over Manila. 2:30 — The Phillipines direct. At 1:30 a terrific air attack had begun over Manila. It is thought that twenty-five American bombers have been destroyed. As the announcer broadcasts there is the sound of Japanese planes overhead. An N.B.C. announcer on the roof of an eight story building reports a great fire which is destroying the gasoline supply dump on Nichols Field, a base airfield in the heart of Manila. He is panting from his run up eight flights of stairs, the elevator boy having deserted his post. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The stars were shining over the city and a bright moon rides directly over head. Galvanized iron rooftops stand out like mirrors, the black-out rendered futile by the moon. 3:30 PM — Prime Minister Churchill has delivered a solemn speech in a tired, husky voice. 4:30 PM — The tires of the news boy’s bicycle grit on the gravel as he wheels up to the door. There is a thud as the “Providence Bulletin” hits the door. Its headlines have no power to shock those already benumbed by the radio. 9:35 PM — There is a report from the “San Francisco News Chronicle” that fifty unidentified planes have been sighted flying from the south west toward San Francisco. The city is blacked-out to a depth of ten miles. 10:00 PM — An air raid siren is blowing in San Francisco. All radio stations but one are off the air. Planes are said to have been seen off the Golden Gate. The man in the street is wondering if this is an air raid test or the real thing. A copy of the November “Atlantic Monthly” lies on the table, the back page given over to a vacation ad: “Hawaii. Standing two thousand miles out in the gentle latitudes of the South Pacific ...” San Francisco motorists are driving without headlights. The all-clear signal has been given. False alarm or practice work-out? 11:00 PM — A summary of to-day’s events — and so ends the first day of this war. We go to bed wondering why, when for months there has been a strong possibility of war with Japan, our forces were caught napping. Will close this with two lines from Shakespeare. King John, I think. “For when you should be told they do prepare The tidings come that they are all arrived.”

It goes on: “O where hath our intelligence been drunk? Where hath it slept?” Oh, where indeed! HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1942

January 15, Thursday: Senator Harry S Truman’s Truman Committee presented its 1st Annual Report to the Senate. This would help induce President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to replace his Office of Production Management with a new, more powerful War Production Board.

American-British-Dutch-Australian Supreme Command was established. Field Marshall Sir Archibald Wavell, British Army assumed supreme command of all forces in area, while Admiral T.C. Hart, United States Navy had command of the naval forces under Field Marshall Wavell.

Japanese forces attacked a new Allied (Britain-India-Australia) defense line along the River Muar, Malaya, eventually forcing further retreat.

Jawaharlal Nehru succeeded Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as head of the All-India Congress Party.

The initial batch of United States servicemen arrived in Britain (“overfed, oversexed and over here”).

Singapore surrendered to the Japanese. The 130,000 British and Indian prisoners of war would be sent to labor on the Burma-Siam railway.

Singapore’s Princess Alexandria Hospital was being guarded by a detachment of Gurkha troops. When commanded by a Japanese officer to lay down their arms, their NCO replied that this was a civilian hospital, not a military target. The Japanese gave an order and his men killed 24 of the Gurkhas. They then entered the hospital and began to slaughter its patients, which included a number of survivors from the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. The doctors and medical orderlies were killed, and the nurses were raped and then killed.

The Japanese made a determined effort to exterminate the entire Chinese population of Singapore, and managed to kill 9,000-12,000. After interrogation by the Kempetai the ethnic Chinese were obliged to hand over all their personal possessions, rings, watches, jewelry, money, etc., before being forced onto captured British lorries and driven to the Tanjong Pagar Wharf and beheaded.

HEADCHOPPING

This went on for 12 days while boats from Singapore Harbour brought more and more Chinese civilians to that execution site. In the Geylang district, 3,600 Chinese were herded into the grounds of the Teluk Kurau English HDT WHAT? INDEX

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School and interrogated by the Kempetai. At the completion of interrogation, in groups of 200, they were taken by truck to the crest of a hill off Siglap Road and shot, beheaded, or bayonetted. One person present within the Teluk Kurau English School grounds that day would survive to tell the tale. In another such action, 700 Chinese were taken to an area just east of Changi where mass graves had already been dug, and the heads of these victims were piled up in a waiting lorry and during that night would be installed on bamboo stakes around and about Singapore. (A British military court would sentence Lieutenant-General Takuma Nishimura, commander of the Japanese troops in Singapore, to life imprisonment, but an Australian Military Court would then try him for other crimes and he would be hanged on June 11, 1951.) WORLD WAR II

In case you wondered, this is what the cross-section of the human neck, revealed by this interesting practice, actually looks like: HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1943

February 9, Tuesday: Organized Japanese resistance on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands ended when General Patch’s Cape Esperance envelopment force joined with the force making the western advance. XIV Corps headquarters announced that the Allies had secured the island of Guadalcanal.21

The Japanese had captured Ambon Island from the Australians. Two circular pits were dug, about five meters apart, six meters in diameter and three meters in depth, in a wooded area near the Laha airstrip. Soon after 6PM a group of Australian and Dutch prisoners of war were brought to the site with their arms tied securely behind them. The first prisoner was pushed to his knees at the edge of a pits and Warrant Officer Kakutaro Sasaki enacted the initial Samurai-sword beheading. The eager crew-members of a Japanese minesweeper that had been blown up by a mine in Ambon Bay a few days earlier were allowed to perform the next four beheadings. HEADCHOPPING

As dusk descended, the Japanese needed to point their battery torches at the necks of their victims so they could see where to strike. Meanwhile, at the other pit, the men of a Dutch mortar unit were being similarly processed. In all on this evening, 55 Australian and 30 Dutch soldiers were beheaded. (The details of this would be revealed by a civilian interpreter, Suburo Yoshizaki, who had been attached to the Kure No.1 Special Navy

21. The American boys who had died in the long battle for Guadalcanal had not, of course, died in vain. By sacrificing their lives they had enabled the US to portray the struggle in the Pacific Ocean region as one long resistance to Japanese aggression, rather than allowing it to be portrayed as one war of aggression initiated by Japan followed by a period of peace followed by another war of aggression initiated this time by the United States of America. They had given their lives to seize and hold for us the moral high ground.

(If you suppose I couldn’t possibly have meant what I wrote above, please read the paragraph again — and this time allow the thought to sink home. The island of Guadalcanal was a mere token serving for us no easily determined military or logistic purpose.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Landing Party, at that time stationed on Ambon.) A few days later, on February 24th, in the same wooded area, another such group execution/sword practice event would be taking place.The SS Henry R. Mallory, a 6,063- WORLD WAR II

ton American ex-passenger liner built in 1916, was part of a 69-ship North Atlantic convoy, SC-118, bound for the British Isles, when it was torpedoed by U-boats U609 and U625.

Of the 494 passengers and crew on board the Mallory, including 381 US troops, 34 armed guards, 2 civilians and 77 crewmen, 270 died. 224 floaters were collected 4 hours later, some by the Coast Guard cutter Bibb, 3 of whom soon died, and others by the destroyer Ingham, 2 of whom soon died. (U609 would later be sunk by the French escort corvette Lobelia, and the 46 inside it would die. Kapitän-Leutnant Hans Benker’s U625 would be destroyed on March 10, 1944 by depth charges from a Canadian Sunderland flying boat, and the 53 inside it would die.)22

22. That those who live by the sword will die by the sword is of course a mere rule of thumb, so there have been some notable exceptions — but as rules of thumb go this one seems fairly accurate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

February 16, Tuesday, 6.57PM: Professor Mildred Elizabeth Fish-Harnack was beheaded at the Plötzensee Prison in Berlin on personal order of Führer Adolf Hitler (her German husband had already been strangled and hung from a meat hook). This would be the only time an American woman would be executed for treason during World War II. (The couple had been part of a resistance organization that had passed information to the United States and the USSR, and had painted “Down with Hitler” on walls. Her final words, allegedly, were “Und ich hatte Deutschland so geliebt.” By September all 51 members of the German “Red Orchestra” group would be dead, 2 by suicide, 8 by hanging, and 41 by guillotine.)

February 22, Monday: Immortality for chorus by John Ireland to words of Crompton was performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of the BBC originating in Bedford.

The Red Army took Sumy, 300 kilometers east of Kiev.

Saudi Arabia broke relations with Italy.

The German offensive in Tunisia was halted by British and American forces north of Qasserine.

Vidkun Quisling ordered the mobilization of the entire civil population of Norway for public works projects in support of the military.

Bulgaria agreed to deport 11,000 Jews from Bulgaria, occupied Greece, and Yugoslavia to Treblinka. ANTISEMITISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie Scholl, 22 years of age, who like Professor Mildred Elizabeth Fish-Harnack had been implicated in the “White Rose” student movement at München University, were likewise guillotined. Sophie’s crime had been the sentence “Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie.” The bodies of the Scholls would be buried outside München, in the Perlach Forest Cemetery.

The Battleship Iowa (BB-61) was commissioned at New York, New York.

German Submarine U-606 was sunk by US Coast Guard cutter Campbell (PG-32) and Polish destroyer Burza in the North Atlantic, at 47 degrees 44 minutes North, 33 degrees 43 minutes West. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

HEADCHOPPING DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN

1944

November 30, Thursday: The Gloeden family, a husband and wife and the wife’s mother, had helped shelter in their flat some people who were being sought by the Nazis, and had been arrested by the German Gestapo and of course tortured. On this day, at the Plotzensee Prison in Berlin, the 3 were guillotined at 2-minute intervals (we don’t know who got to go 1st and who had to wait until last). HEADCHOPPING WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1945

August 19, Sunday: A Japanese delegation in Manila was informed of the terms of their surrender as dictated by General Douglas MacArthur.

Near Hankow in northeast China, a civilian group of Chinese managed to capture 26 Japanese soldiers. They beheaded the initial 4, then tied 4 to posts and shot them in the back of the head, then broke and crudely amputated the arms and legs of the next 4, and cut off the hands and feet of 4 and stuffed their genitals into their mouths.

Then with the remaining 10, they gouged their eyes and used them for bayonet practice. (Were these dudes trying to prove that Chinese can be as inventive as Japanese?) HEADCHOPPING

The war being over, the American newspapers revealed that there had been in January 1945, while John R. Kellam was in the Toledo jail awaiting his big day in court, a possibility that Japan might surrender before the A-bomb, a possibility upon which then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had simply refused to follow up. The following appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington DC Times Herald, on page 1: WORLD WAR II BARE PEACE BID U.S. REBUFFED 7 MONTHS AGO ------BY WALTER TROHAN Chicago Tribune Press Service Washington, D.C. Aug. 19 - [1945] Release of censorship restrictions in the United States makes it possible to announce that Japan’s first peace bid was relayed HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to the White House seven months ago. Two days before the late President Roosevelt left for the Yalta conference with Prime Minister Churchill and Dictator Stalin, he received a Japanese offer identical with the terms subsequently concluded by his successor, President Truman. The Jap offer, based on five separate peace overtures was relayed to the White House by Gen. MacArthur in a 40-page communication. The American commander, who had just returned triumphantly to Bataan, urged negotiations on the basis of the Jap overtures. All Acting for the Emperor

Two of the five Jap overtures were made thru American channels and three thru British channels. All came from responsible Japanese, acting for Emperor Hirohito. President Roosevelt dismissed the general’s communication, which was studded with solemn references to Deity, after a casual reading with the remark, “MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician.” The MacArthur report was not taken to Yalta. It was preserved in the files of the high command, however, and subsequently became the basis of the Truman-Attlee Potsdam declaration calling for surrender of Japan.

News Kept Secret

This Jap peace bid was known to THE TRIBUNE soon after the MacArthur communication reached here. It was not published, however, because of THE TRIBUNE’S established policy of complete cooperation with the voluntary censorship code. Now that peace has been concluded on the basis of the terms MacArthur reported, high administration officials prepared to meet expected congressional demands for explanation of the delay. It was considered certain that charges would be hurled from various quarters of congress that the delay cost thousands of American lives and casualties, particularly in such costly offensives as Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It was explained in high official circles that the bid relayed by MacArthur did not constitute an official offer in the same sense as the final offer, which was presented thru Japanese diplomatic channels in Bern and Stockholm for relay to the four major allied powers.

War Lords Feared

No negotiations were begun on the basis of this bid, it was said, because it was feared that if any were undertaken the Jap war lords, who were presumed to be ignorant of the feelers, would visit swift punishment on those making the offer. It was held possible that the war lords might assassinate the emperor. Officials said Mr. Roosevelt felt that the Japs were not ripe for peace, except for a small group, who were powerless HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to cope with the war lords, and that peace could not come until the Japs had suffered more. The offer, as relayed by MacArthur, contemplated surrender of everything but the person of the emperor. Japanese quarters making the offer suggested that the emperor become a puppet in the hands of American forces.

Full Surrender Offered

Jap proposals in the MacArthur communication contemplated: 1. Full surrender of Jap forces on sea, in the air, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries. 2. Surrender of all arms and munitions. 3. Occupation of the Jap homeland and island possessions by allied troops under American direction. 4. Jap relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea and Formosa, as well as all territory seized during the war. 5. Regulation of Jap industry to halt present and future production of implements of war. 6. Turning over of Japanese the United States might designate war criminals. 7. Release of all prisoners of war and internees in Japan proper and in areas under Japanese control.

In fact the idea that the Japanese would never surrender had been little more than an American wartime myth, and rather than being a piece of useful realism had constituted the primary obstacle to negotiation toward a Japanese surrender. How do we know this? Well, we can trust the attitude of the Sinologist George Edward Taylor of the University of Washington on this one, because he was a cold warrior on the inside and anything but a bleeding-heart liberal — he would become a Nixonian reactionary and support the Vietnam War on the campus of the University of Washington. Questioning the wisdom of using atomic weapons against Japanese civilians to end the war in the Pacific, it appears, had not been a position reserved for the softhearted: before the dropping of the atom bombs there had been embedded conservative members of the military-intelligence community, international men of intrigue, hawks, who had viewed this as an unnecessary atrocity. During WWII Taylor worked with Rand Corporation, with the Department of State, and with other articulations of the revolving door of American intelligence institutions private and public. As the Deputy Director for the Far East of the Office of War Information, he supervised a small army of anthropologists who were, basically, weaponizing anthropology against the Japanese. It was Taylor’s team that crafted the leaflets dropped from airplanes on Japanese soldiers and civilians. His team of government anthropologists had access to 5,000 diaries seized from captured and killed Japanese soldiers and studied such documents carefully for clues as to Japanese behavior tendencies. At the beginning of the war Taylor had viewed his psychological warfare programs as a means of ending the war by helping the Japanese overcome all the cultural obstacles preventing their surrender, but as the war progressed and it became abundantly clear that the American side would triumph he began to see his job as being one that needed to be done at home: he needed to convince US civilian and military leaders that they did not in order to end the war need to engage in any acts of genocidal annihilation. He came to perceive the War Department and the White House as in the grip of racist stereotypes of maniacal Japanese soldiers and citizens fighting to the death, and he and his staff began to struggle against this domestic attitude as a prime obstacle to peace. In the typescript of a speech that he probably delivered in 1944, we find him arguing that “If we accept, as we must, the view that Japanese soldiers, in spite of their indoctrination, are as human as other troops, we shall be the less surprised at the mounting evidence of their very human reactions HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to defeat. We are taking more and more prisoners. Two years ago it would have been very unusual for 60 men to allow themselves to be picked up out of the water when their transport had been sunk. In New Guinea and Burma stragglers are coming in out of the jungles to surrender without a struggle. We have known for a long time that many Japanese officers have been evacuated from indefensible positions and that their reaction on places such as Attu, where escape was impossible, was not to fight to the last man.” Such thinking would be ignored by the War Department and White House. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted on including the demise of the Japanese Emperor as part of America’s demand for unconditional surrender, and it was not until after this man had collapsed and died that the government was able to communicate a more relaxed position on this point to the Japanese. A May 11, 1945 communication intercept being studied inside the US government had supported the attitude of Taylor and others at the Office of War Information that the Japanese military were ripe for surrender: “Report of peace sentiment in Japanese armed forces: On 5 May the German Naval Attaché in Tokyo dispatched the following message to Admiral Doenitz: ‘An influential member of the Admiralty Staff has given me to understand that, since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable.’” To this communication intercept, someone in US military intelligence had appended the following: “Previously noted diplomatic reports have commented on signs of war weariness in official Japanese Navy circles, but have not mentioned such an attitude in Army quarters.” A July 20, 1945 communication intercept had revealed that Japanese Ambassador Sato was advocating a Japanese surrender providing that the United States would assure the Japanese that the “Imperial House” would remain in existence. Like many others, regardless of how hawkish they were, Taylor would come to consider that what President Harry S Truman’s decision to use of nuclear weapons probably had to do with was “scaring the hell out of the Soviet Union,” and that the idea of saving American lives during an invasion of the Japanese homeland islands was a mere cover story that of course the American public would readily buy into in order to avoid the thought that we had committed a war atrocity.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

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August 9, Thursday: Soviet forces launched a major offensive against the Japanese in Manchuria, immediately breaching defenses. 1,000,000 Red Army troops were thrown into the battle.

After flying around over another city for half an hour waiting for a break in the clouds, our silver airplane had gone to try to hit one of its secondary targets, the oldest Japanese port city, Nagasaki, with its American POW camp. “Fat Man,” our other atomic bomb, the implosion-mechanism Plutonium239 bomb that had been so eagerly sponsored by John von Neumann, missed its target by 1.9 miles and was utterly inefficient at its task of converting matter into energy, damaging no portion of its industrial target area but detonating directly above the largest Christian cathedal in the Far East. Oops!

Why, I bet nobody ever told you that! Did anyone tell you that this was another down day for Professor Albert Einstein? TIMELINE OF EXPLOSIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Masahito Hirose was a junior high school student when he watched the white mushroom cloud rise above Nagasaki. He lost a cousin in the blast, and later an aunt would die a slow and painful death while bleeding from her nose and gums. Now, in the Year of Our Lord 2011, he is 81 years of age and subsequent to the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, he has begun to inquire “Is it Japan’s fate to repeatedly serve as a warning to the world about the dangers of radiation?”

I do not know how many grams of Pt239 were packed into the wedges of the Nagasaki bomb, or what the efficiency of the device should have been. All I can tell you is that of the amount used, which at an impossible 100% efficiency could have been as little as 5 kilograms, almost all of it was simply vaporized, and only approximately one gram was converted into the entire energy of the explosion. The energy from conversion of one gram of this matter is, however, equal to the energy released by the explosion of 18,000,000,000 grams (20,000 tons) of ordinary military-grade TNT. The energy from this one gram of Pt239 killed almost instantly about 250 Japanese soldiers, about the same number of American prisoners of war, and approximately 70,000 noncombatant men, women, and children.

Why, I bet nobody ever told you that after the detonation device we had used on the Hiroshima bomb had failed to create more than a flash-bang of radiation, the entirely different detonation device we used on the Nagasaki bomb also failed to create more than a flash-bang of radiation. In neither city did they even so much as leave a hole in the ground. But, of course, as we went back to the drawing boards, our spin-doctors would scream SUCCESS and SUCCESS despite the fact that we had succeeded only in producing something like 1% or less of the slaughter and destruction that we had been scheming! (The initial bomb set off by North Korea well over half a century later would be a squib like this, and we would chortle and mock.)

Flight report and operations order indicate that Bomber 44-86292, the Enola Gay, flew as the weather plane HDT WHAT? INDEX

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on this second atomic mission.

A headline in The New Republic read “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” The blast at Nagasaki did not alter the outcome of the war for the Japanese had already determined to surrender, but since we had managed to test both our devices under real war conditions, the US would have a better basis for determining whether to continue production at our Tennessee Valley facility, or at our Hanford facility. General Leslie “Can’t Drive a Spike With a Tackhammer” Groves, facing a congressional committee, would offer that in his opinion dying of radiation poisoning, as was happening in the surviving civilian populations in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki HDT WHAT? INDEX

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areas, must be relatively “a very pleasant way to die.”23The Enola Gay exhibit now provides us with outright

WORLD WAR II

half-truths such as that “special leaflets” were “dropped on Japanese cities,” warning their civilians to evacuate. (“Well then, I suppose that if anyone got poisoned by the radiation, it must have been their own fault. Gosh, knowing that makes me feel a whole lot easier about the whole thing.”) This Smithsonian exhibit carefully neglects to inform us that it was only after Tokyo had been destroyed by conventional firestorming, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed by nuclear devices, that we had begun to drop any such leaflets! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Russia of course chose this opportunity to declare war on Japan. What fun! Aircraft from fast carrier task forces of the Third Fleet (Admiral W.F. Halsey) attacked airfields and shipping in northern Honshu and Hokkaido, Japan.

Battleships and cruisers (Rear Admiral J.F. Shafroth) bombarded industrial targets at Kamaishi, Honshu, Japan.

Battleship, cruiser, and destroyers bombarded Wake Island.

United States naval vessels damaged: • Destroyer John W. Weeks (DD-701), accidentally by United States naval gunfire, off Honshu, Japan, 35 degrees 0 minute North, 143 degrees 0 minute East

23. Jonathan Kwitny has raised some hypothetical questions in the pages of the LA Times Book Review section for August 6, 1995 (page 10). What, he asks, would be the impact on us were we to find out certain things about our history as a nation:

But what if Gen. Eisenhower, Gen. MacArthur, Adm. Leahy, Gen. Bradley, and Adm. Nimitz –the top American brass in World War II– had all believed Japan would surrender in mid-1945 without our dropping atom bombs, and without an American invasion of Japan? What if Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, a Cold War hawk, agreed, and so did hawkish press tycoons Henry Luce and David Lawrence, and even Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay (of “Bombs Away With Curtis LeMay” fame when he ran for vice president on the George Wallace ticket)? What if a commission to study the bombings appointed by President Harry S Truman1 and directed by cold warrior Paul Nitze also thought the bombing unnecessary to obtain Japanese surrender? What if even President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson in the weeks before the bomb was dropped had embraced in writing every significant argument against the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, and ordered that the bomb not be dropped on civilian populations? What if Gen. Marshall, the future secretary of state, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who invented the bomb, had said it needn’t be dropped on civilian populations? What if Truman-friendly historian Herbert Feis, who was given exclusive access to the diaries, records and people, concluded that “There can hardly be a well-grounded dissent from the conclusion … Japan would have surrendered if the atomic bombs had not been dropped … and even if no invasion had been planned”?

1. No period after the S because, like “Truman,” it doesn’t stand for anything. See pages 150-151 of Lifton and Mitchell’s HIROSHIMA IN AMERICA: FIFTY YEARS OF DENIAL (NY: E.F.Dutton & Sons, 1995). Kwitny’s recitation of these True Facts ends with the observation that as of the 50th anniversary of our destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we “might want to ponder whether indiscriminate killing and maiming so many Japanese civilians dishonored rather than honored the brave American servicemen who truly won the war in combat. But until now [with the late publication of THE DECISION TO USE THE ATOMIC BOMB by Gar Alperovitz by Knopf, 847 “exceptionally large” pages, and HIROSHIMA IN AMERICA by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, 425 “more imaginative” pages], we haven’t been allowed such luxury.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Destroyer Borie (DD-704), by Japanese Kamikaze, off Honshu, Japan, 37 degrees 21 minutes North, 143 degrees 45 minutes East

Japanese naval vessels sunk: • Minesweeper #33, by carrier-based aircraft, off northern Honshu, Japan, 38 degrees 26 minutes North, 141 degrees 30 minutes East •Frigate Amakusa, by United States and British carrier-based aircraft, off northern Honshu, Japan, 38 degrees 26 minutes North, 141 degrees 30 minutes East •Frigate Inagi, by carrier-based aircraft, off northern Honshu, Japan, 38 degrees 26 N, 141 degrees 30 minutes East HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The US Army issued General Order #65, honoring a brave, or stupid, 2d Lieutenant for his bravery, or stupidity:

CITATION: 2d Lt. Murphy commanded Company B, which was attacked by 6 tanks and waves of infantry. 2d Lt. Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to prepared positions in a woods, while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, 1 of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from 3 sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2d Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad which was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued the single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack which forced the Germans to withdraw. His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. 2d Lt. Murphy’s indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction, and enabled it to hold the woods which had been the enemy’s objective. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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That had happened not recently but near Holtzwihr, France back on January 26th. In March Lieutenant Audie Leon Murphy had been called to Nancy, France by order of the 3rd Infantry Division Commander, Major General John “Iron-Mike” O’Daniel, and put on ice awaiting an appropriate occasion to make use of his record of exploits. On this day, while we were dropping the other shoe on Japan, General O’Daniel presented to 1st Lieutenant Murphy the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star.

After “Iron Mike” had pinned the medals on Audie’s uniform, he pulled out of his pocket a Congressional Medal of Honor. Without handing it over, O’Daniel showed the medal to Audie and advised him that General Alexander Patch, the 7th Army Commander, would soon pin it on his chest at a separate ceremony.24

Somebody please assure me that this was just a coincidence, that it wasn’t intended to distract us from the atrocity against civilians that we had just perpetrated at Nagasaki!

24. As we probably are all aware, Audie Murphy went on to become a Hollywood star. His first role would come in a film released in 1949 by Allied Artists, titled “Bad Boy.” In 1950 he would sign a star-system contract with Universal-International, and over a 15-year period he would act in 26 Universal Studio films, 23 of them “westerns.” His 1949 autobiography TO HELL AND BACK would of course be a best seller. He would play himself in a film biography released by Universal-International in 1955. “To Hell and Back” would hold the record as that studio’s highest grossing picture, until 1975 when its boxoffice record would be surpassed by the movie “Jaws.” He would earn more than $3,000,000 in those years, in an era in which a million dollars was not small change, but he had drug-dependency problems and loved to play the horses. He would gamble most of the money away. Over Audie’s 25- year period in Hollywood, he would act in a total of 44 feature films. (For some reason, the Oscar would ever elude him.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 11, Saturday: Speaking for the Allies, United States President Harry S Truman responded to the Japanese message of the previous day. They would allow the Emperor to remain on the throne only if he ensured the surrender of all Japanese military forces and then subjected himself to the supreme Allied military commander. The form of the government for Japan would be one that would be chosen by the people themselves. The President ordered a halt to atomic bomb production until further notice.

At a crematorium on Kyushu in Fukuoka, eight US airmen were beheaded.

United States Destroyer Mcdermut (DD-677) was damaged by naval gunfire in the vicinity of the Kurile Islands, at 49 degrees 30 minutes North, 155 degrees 1 minute East. Soviet naval forces bombarded southern Sakhalin Island.

Friend Agnes Carol Zens Kellam wrote from Washington DC to her husband, Friend John R. Kellam, who was being held in a federal penitentiary for having refused to participate in the killing: My Dearest: Still no signs of Junior’s debut. I think he’s waiting till the war’s over and people stop officially murdering each other. I hope that news comes any minute now, although I shan’t celebrate “victory” — It’s been too horribly costly. I don’t know what it will mean to the two of us personally and the others in our positions — that depends, I guess, on how vindictive our government is. Yesterday, the boy next door had his radio on listening to the “man in the street” program, from various large cities all over the U.S., on the Japanese surrender offer. I surely was surprised at the many bloodthirsty people who said we should continue fighting until the “Japs” surrendered unconditionally, or until all were killed, and the emperor bagged for a war criminal. I heard only one lady (I didn’t listen to the whole program) who had a son fighting in the Pacific, say that we should accept the surrender terms, and as for the emperor, why, in the words of Jesus, “What is that to thee? Follow thou me.” ... As I look out of my window and see the beauties of God all around I am made to wonder why is there so much sin in this beautiful land. The tall stately hollyhocks are lovely in all their different colors and the roses have been lovely with their pink, red and yellow clusters and this morning I can see the gladiolus begin to throw out their long spirals in all colors.... Well, darling, I guess thy eyes are getting tired, not to mention the poor censor’s. [This letter amounted to six pages, typed single-space.] If this comes back, I’ll send it to thee piece- meal, unless I’m in the hospital. But I haven’t had any letter- writing instructions from Lewisburg. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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All my love to thee, Thy Cary WORLD WAR II

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

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1947

May 9, Friday: The final men to be executed through electrocution in Massachusetts were Edward Gertson and Philip Bellino. Their electric chair is not on display (tastes about this sort of think have obviously changed somewhat since the gallows used to turn off house burglar Samuel Smith had been placed on display in the Concord courthouse in 1800), but a photo would be taken of it in a storage room at the state prison in Walpole in 1974:

FINAL EXECUTIONS

General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower ordered Private Edward Donald his execution by firing squad for desertion during January 31, 1945 “Eddie” Slovik World War II by his own unit, the 28th Infantry Division, in a small town in northeast France

Edward Gertson and Philip last to be electrocuted in Massachusetts May 9, 1947 Bellino

7 leaders of the Nazi SS such hanged in Landsberg Prison, München as the final June 7, 1951 as Oswald Pohl, Otto batch of German war criminals executed by the Ohlendorf ... United States

Since 1820, in the British Isles nobody had been being drawn and quartered for treason. At this point such a punishment was removed from the legal code. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1951

January 1, Monday: In France, beheader Jules-Henri Desfourneaux died. With the post of beheader at Bourreau vacant, there would be more than 400 applicants for the job of beheader at Bourreau — nice work if you can get it. André Obrecht would be chosen to be the new beheader of the French at Bourreau. HEADCHOPPING

Communist Chinese Forces and North Korean Forces began a major offensive along the 38th Parallel. KOREAN WAR

The announcement came from Buckingham Palace that William Walton was to be made Knight Bachelor. Later, Walton would write to his father-in-law: “I should never have accepted the knighthood, only I wanted to make Sue a lady.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1956

June 19, Tuesday: President Gamal Abdel Nasser ended press censorship and martial law in Egypt (this had been the rule ever since the revolution of 1952).

President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia spoke to an audience in Dynamo Stadium, Moscow, saying the split with the USSR was over and a mutual understanding had been reached.

Two Algerian terrorists were guillotined by French authorities in Algiers. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1957

Albert Camus participated with Arthur Koestler in a symposium RÉFLEXIONS SUR LA PEINE CAPITALE and wrote REFLECTIONS ON THE GUILLOTINE (RÉFLEXIONS SUR LA GUILLOTINE). A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge. It is a quasi-arithmetical reply made by society to whoever breaks its primordial law. That reply is as old as man; it is called the law of retaliation. Whoever has done me harm must suffer harm; whoever has put out my eye must lose an eye; and whoever has killed must die. This is an emotion, and a particularly violent one, not a principle. Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. If murder is in the nature of man, the law is not intended to imitate or reproduce that nature. It is intended to correct it. Now, retaliation does no more than ratify and confer the status of a law on a pure impulse of nature. We have all known that impulse, often to our shame, and we know its power, for It comes down to us from the primitive forests. COLDBLOODED MURDER HEADCHOPPING

July 25, Thursday: A policeman had been murdered, and a man who we suppose was probably innocent of this crime, Jacques Fesch, on this day got his head chopped.25 HEADCHOPPING

25. It’s something known in the legal profession as “irreversible error.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1970

At Madame Tussaud’s in London, a plastic toy “Aurora” guillotine was made available for sale to interested children:

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In this year Pogo, a possum’s possum, declared “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1972

November 28, Tuesday: Martial law was lessened in South Korea, enough to allow schools and universities to reopen.

The Irish Republican Army began a new offensive with rocket attacks in Belfast, Londonderry, and at the border with the Irish Republic.

In the Santé prison in France at 4:45AM, Roger Bontemps and Claude Buffet, who had during a mutiny at the Clairvaux prison slain guard Guy Girardot and nurse Nicole Comte, were walked toward the guillotine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1976

Marcel Chevalier, the last beheader of Frenchmen, succeeded André Obrecht. He would serve until the 1981 abolition of the death penalty. HEADCHOPPING

July 28, Wednesday: The most deadly earthquake of the 20th Century centered in Tangshan, China, registering 7.8 on the Richter scale. Some 242,000 perished.

Great Britain severed diplomatic relations with Uganda, the 1st time with a Commonwealth country.

At the Beaumettes prison in Marseilles, the head of 22-year-old Christian Ranucci was severed from his body. HEADCHOPPING

July 29, Thursday: David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz scored his initial kill, 18-year-old Donna Lauria. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1980

January 9, Wednesday: The US suspended all shipments of technology and machinery to the Soviet Union. Australia announced that it would in several ways suspend cooperation with the Soviet Union: it would bar Soviet scientific vessels from its ports, terminate scientific and cultural exchange, and refuse direct flight routes to Australia to the Soviet airline, Aeroflot.

Saudi Arabia beheaded 63 Mahdists who had taken part in an attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca during the previous autumn. Of those executed, 22 were from countries such as Egypt, South Yemen, Kuwait, Yemen, Sudan, and Iraq, but 41 were Saudis. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1981

September 2, Wednesday: Philippe Maurice, who had been sentenced to be separated neatly into two pieces of meat at the guillotine, was granted the privilege of living the remainder of his life as one piece of meat, in prison, by President François Mitterand — in France, which had decided that it owed it to itself to become a civilized nation, the death penalty was being abolished. HEADCHOPPING

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

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1987

July 25, Saturday: A Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church alleged that Jacques Fesch, who had had his body divided neatly into two pieces thirty years before on this day, had probably been innocent of the murder of a policeman, the crime for which he had been condemned. He did not plead for President François Mitterand to put the pieces of this man back together — but he did plead for the President of France to give this man back his honor. HEADCHOPPING

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: September 27, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DR. JOSEPH-IGNACE GUILLOTIN HEADCHOPPING

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.