ALFRED BERNHARD NOBEL
My dynamite will sooner lead to peace Than a thousand world conventions As soon as men will find that in one instant Whole armies can be utterly destroyed, They surely will abide by golden peace.
1801
March 24, day: Immanuel Noble was born. ALFRED NOBEL
1805
Karolina Andriette Ahlsell was born. ALFRED NOBEL HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1827
July 8, Sunday: Immanuel Noble got married with Karolina Andriette Ahlsell. ALFRED NOBEL
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 8th of 7 M / In the Morng Meeting our frd Abigail Robinson & Hannah Dennis were engaged in testimony, & in the Afternoon Father Rodman. — With my wife took tea & set the eveng at D Buffums. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
1833
October 21, Monday: Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden.
2 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1837
Upon his bankruptcy in Sweden, Immanuel Nobel merely relocated to a new engineering workshop he set up in St. Petersburg. ALFRED NOBEL
1847
Giuseppe Mazzini founded the People’s International League.
A civil war, the Sonderbundskrieg, began with an attack by troops of Sonderbund upon the Swiss conservative alliance, and would result in the following year in the transformation of Switzerland into a federal state. It would also result in 86 dead soldiers and 500 wounded soldiers, and the exile of the defeated conservative leader to Italy.
In a scientific journal called L’Institut, the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero announced the invention of “nitroglycerin,” a powerful but unstable new explosive (on a scale of 1 to 100, top-quality 19th-Century nitroglycerin measured at 73). In 1864 Alfred Nobel would devise a way of mass-producing this chemical, rename it “blasting oil,” and begin aggressively marketing it for use in North American, Australian, and European mines. Improper handling and storage –water vapor makes nitroglycerin horribly explosive– would quickly cause a rash of accidental explosions. While this was not a problem for the owners of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Canadian Pacific Railway who saw no problem with having employees use nitroglycerin to build railroads through the North American West because the employees in question were merely gangs of contract Chinese, the risks –at least 600 Chinese died in British Columbia alone– frightened most non-industrial users. To reduce the risk and increase his sales, Nobel would develop several safer explosives and powders. The first would be the “Dynamite Nr. 1” which he would patent in 1866. Dynamite Number 1 consisted of 75% nitroglycerin and 25% kieselguhr, a clay-like diatomaceous soil often used as a packing material. Its relative power index was 62. While this substance had a tendency to “sweat” out drops of pure nitroglycerin, comparatively it was indeed more stable, and would quickly become the standard chemical explosive for the European construction and mining industries.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1854
November 14, Tuesday: A great hurricane struck the region of the Black Sea. The Allied supply fleet had been forced to anchor outside the harbor of Sevastopol because the Russians has strewn the harbor with mines. These mines they had decided to contract for with a Swedish inventor name of Alfred B. Nobel who detonated such mines chemically rather than with an American inventor name of Samuel Colt assisted by another inventor name of Samuel F.B. Morse who detonated such mines electrically. On this date a great hurricane arose, devastating this vulnerably anchored supply fleet, sinking the pride of the French navy, the Henri IV, and destroying the winter supplies of the army ashore (in reaction to this the Emperor Napoleon III would call for the initiation of a national weather forecasting service).
The Concord River rose slightly over the meadows (it would not subside until December 5th). Henry Thoreau wrote the first draft of his “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” lecture as proposed by Asa Fairbanks. Presumably it was at this time that he added material of this nature:
[Paragraph 4] My text this evening is “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
MARK 8:36
So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveller, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.
[Paragraph 10] But when I come a little nearer to the facts, I find commonly that that relation to Nature which had so attracted me in the farmer’s life, exists only in my imagination, and that she is insignificant to him;—that his boasted independence is merely a certain slight independence on the market, and not a moral independence,—that he is a speculator,—not in the old sense of an observer, or contemplator, but in the modern sense which is yet, for the most part, ashamed to show itself in the dictionary, and his speculum or mirror, is a shining dollar. In short, considering his motives and his methods, his life is coarse and repulsive, and liable to most of the objections which have been urged against trade and commerce. What odds does it make whether you measure tape or measure milk? He thinks that he must live near a market. Just as the publisher, when I complain that his magazine is too worldly, tells me that it must have a large circulation. But I think that the must in the case is that
[Paragraph 15] One might sometimes wonder that this class of men do not send up a petition to have five minutes added to the length of human life. [Paragraph 16] This may be enterprising, as we call it, but it is not wise— neither the saints nor the heroes live in such a desperate hurry. [Paragraph 17] It is no better with the old fashioned farmer. I fear that his contentment is commonly stagnation.
[Paragraph 26] What are the mechanics about—whose hammers we hear on all sides—building some lofty rhyme?—or only houses, barns, and woodsheds?
4 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
[Paragraph 46] But why go to California for a text? She is the child of New England, bred at her own school and church. [Paragraph 47] America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought. But surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. Now that the republic—the res-publica—has been settled, it is time to look after the res- privata,—the private state,—to see, as the Roman senate charged its consuls, “ne quid res-PRIVATA detrimenti caperet,” that the private state receive no detriment. [The quotation is from Marcus Tullius Cicero, ORATIONES (Boston, 1831), “Oratio pro Milone,” 26:70. Thoreau altered Cicero’s “respublica” to ‘res-PRIVATA’. Bradley P. Dean has emended what is
[Paragraph 57] Somebody has said that he who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before, is a benefactor to mankind.1 But how much greater a benefactor is he who makes a man grow where no man grew before! [Paragraph 58] Of the West I commonly hear only that the corn grows so much higher than the men. When our explorers discover a country where carrots will grow quite through to the other side of the globe, as some report,2 we think it becomes the chief duty of man to go and tax Nature’s carrot- producing power there to the utmost, and never her man-producing power— to draw out the great resources of that country in the shape of monstrous golden carrots, though we mannikins that raise them should tumble into the holes they come out of, and be lost. [Paragraph 59] Where is the government whose policy it is to satisfy, or even recognize, nay, avoid outraging, the higher wants of our nature? It is the ruling policy of our own government, as every-body knows, to convert man directly into a brute, or a piece of property. We are compelled to say that anything that works that way is a mere pretension.3 Perhaps the government is such. The Secretary of State or of the Treasury is a real person enough, but what a shadow is the Chaplain of the House? Under the present circumstances he is the best chaplain who makes the shortest prayers—because any prayer is out of place there. It is only a wooden gun to scare the devil away. But if the truth were known, he was the inventor of it—he himself suggested it to keep up appearances. 1. Jonathan Swift, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, 1726, “Voyage to Brobdingnag,” Chapter 7. 2.This “report” has not been located. 3.This and the following sentence are interlined on the copy-text manuscript in very faint, hastily- written pencil and are therefore difficult to recover. The readings ‘anything’ and ‘works’ in this sentence, and ‘is such’ in the next sentence must remain conjectural.
[Paragraph 68] In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion! But how do I know what their religion is—and when I am near to or far from it?
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
[Paragraph 100] “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”1
1.MARK 8:36 Bradley P. Dean has emended the manuscript copy-text by supplying the last eight words and the question mark, which were apparently trimmed from the manuscript, and by supplying the quotation marks.
1860
Alfred Nobel had worked with Ascanio Sobrero, inventor of nitroglycerine. Though this substance was ten times stronger that black powder, it was so highly unstable that Sobrero had kept his discovery a secret for a year. Nobel was intrigued with nitroglycerine's potential as a construction tool but knew he had to make it safe to transport and handle. At this point he began experiments on nitroglycerine. He would go on to create an detonator (blasting cap) for it. Though one of his brothers would be killed in an 1864 nitroglycerine accident, Nobel would continue his work to improve the useability of the substance. In 1866 would discover that the addition of kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) would stabilize the substance and makes it moldable into cylinders that would fit into the holes created by the newly invented diamond tipped drill. With Nobel’s dynamite sticks, construction on bridges, tunnels, and other projects could be faster, cheaper, and safer.
6 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1863
Alfred Nobel performed experiments with nitroglycerin and invented the mercury percussion detonator. Nobel was granted his first patent, for “blasting oil.”
1864
There was an explosion at the Nobel laboratory in Heleneborg, Stockholm in which Emil Nobel and several others were killed.
A Prussian officer, E. Schultz, devised smokeless shotgun shells in which the propellant was nitrated wood pulp, a substance Alfred Nobel would later term “dynamite” (such smokelessness prevented the obscurement of the battlefield).
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
July 15, Friday: Alfred Nobel received a Swedish patent for nitroglycerin to be use in a “blasting cap” — the initial ignitor.
A shipment of 833 Confederate prisoners of war (many captured at the Battle of Cold Harbor) had been brought by Atlantic steamer from Maryland to New Jersey and were being conveyed from Point Lookout, Maryland to newly constructed Camp Rathbun at Elmira, New York, built to house 10,000 detainees for the duration of the hostility. They were being guarded by 128 Union soldiers of the Veteran Reserve Corps. The 18-car train smashed head-on into a coal train on the broad-gauge Erie Railroad 1½ miles west of Shohola, Pennsylvania at a combined impact speed of approximately 30 miles per hour, killing at least 60 who would be disposed of in unmarked graves next to the track.
1866
Alfred Nobel established the United States Blasting Oil Company.
1867
May 7, day: Alfred Nobel obtained a patent for his dynamite in England.
8 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
October 19, day: Alfred Nobel patented kiselguhr “dynamite” in Sweden.
My dynamite will sooner lead to peace Than a thousand world conventions As soon as men will find that in one instant Whole armies can be utterly destroyed, They surely will abide by golden peace.
November 25, day: Alfred Nobel received U.S. patent number 78,317 for dynamite (it would initially be vended as “Nobel’s Blasting Powder”; a few US manufacturers would be able to market competitive products by making minor changes to the composition of the material).
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 9 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1872
September 3, day: Death of Immanuel Nobel, father of Alfred Nobel.
The 34th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s freedom, which we may well elect to celebrate in lieu of an unknown slave birthday.
Here is a Daguerreotype, by an unidentified photographer in the 1850-1855 timeframe.
“It has been a source of great annoyance to me, never to have a birthday.”
10 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1875
Alfred Nobel acquired a house on Avenue Malakoff in Paris. He invented blasting gelatin.
December 11, day: As the emigrant ship Mosel was preparing to depart from Bremerhaven toward New York, it exploded killing 81 and injuring dozens more. Dynamite had been placed in a barrel in order to collect insurance from worthless items the culprit had shipped aboard. He had intended the explosion to occur in mid- ocean and had been aboard a nearby vessel to witness his carnage. Alexander Keith, Jr. (a former Confederate secret agent who had been involved with Dr. Luke Pryor Blackburn in the ineffective 1864 biological warfare plot to send clothes infected with yellow fever to northern cities), went to his suite and put two bullets into his head (lingering for five days, he would offer a confession).
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 11 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1886
May 3, day: At the M’Cormick Reaper factory in Chicago, police attempted to intervene in a fight between employees who were striking for an 8-hour workday and “scab” strikebreakers, and two of the employees were killed.
12 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
May 4: During a protest rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago, about the police killings of the previous day, someone lobbed a bomb and the police opened fire. Many people were injured and there were at least 10 killed, including policemen. Eight of the activists would be singled out for prosecution and convicted of inciting to riot through “inflammatory speeches and publications.” One of the accused men would comment sarcastically to the trial judge that they ought to hang his wife and children with him — since in attending the Haymarket speeches these innocents had been doing exactly as much as he had. Four of these thought criminals would hang and another would commit suicide while awaiting execution.
After passions had cooled and it had come to be recognized that no link had been established between them
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 13 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
and the unknown person who had thrown the bomb, the surviving three eventually would receive full pardons.
When the four men would be hanged, they would be hanged inside all-enveloping white shrouds with hoods, and short ropes would be used so that when they fell their necks would not snap, but they would hang there jerking, swinging from side to side and dying slowly by strangulation.
Those who know something about this sort of thing (I do, since I was trapped inside the Khomeini Revolution in Iran in 1977-1979) know that there is always the possibility of reverse responsibility. That is to say, just as it turned out to be SAVAK, the Shahanshah’s secret police, who were responsible for the Rex Theater tragedy in Abadan in which so many innocent families were burned to death rather than the fundamentalist revolutionaries who were the prime suspects at the time, so also, in the case of the Haymarket incident, it is at least theoretically possible that it was a policeman who threw the dynamite that set off the incident, in an attempt to make the Chicago anarchists more culpable and therefore more vulnerable to police action. That possibility should at least have been the cause to some investigation, and most definitely it was not.
Since we have suicide bombers today and most of them seem to be Moslem, there is a detail of these 19th- Century circumstances to which we now should be paying careful attention. It is that in this American labor
14 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
situation is the origin of the idea of the suicide bomber despite the fact that there were zero Moslems on the scene. Nitroglycerine had been around since the 1840s, and Alfred Nobel had figured out a way to make the substance stable enough to be carried and handled by mixing it with an inert filler material. It was being speculated that if every worker had a few pounds of dynamite in his pocket, every worker would be being treated with respect: dynamite as the great equalizer. In this year, therefore, the wife of Albert Parsons, an anarchist, suggested that since there were always unfortunates who were contemplating drowning themselves, there was a better course that might be made available to them: they be rendered useful to society, and make their deaths meaningful, by becoming suicide bombers. By their death as a sacrifice they could make themselves a force of protest on behalf of justice in an otherwise out-of-all-control labor situation. Perhaps, if enough workers could be persuaded to make themselves suicide bombers, killing themselves in conjunction with the police and capitalists who were oppressing them, she speculated, it would be possible to get the average workweek down from 60 hours to, say, 48 — so that laborers could have some time to feel the sunshine and smell the flowers:
We want to feel the sunshine We want to smell the flowers; We’re sure God has willed it, And we mean to have eight hours.
1887
Alfred Nobel, suffered from angina pectoris, was developing smokeless gunpowder.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 15 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1888
April 12, day: After the death in Cannes of Ludvig Nobel, Alfred Nobel’s elder brother, a Paris newspaper mistakenly ran an obituary they had planned for Alfred, headlined “Le marchand de la mort est mort.” (Would this family’s reputation benefit from a bit of spin doctoring?)
1889
Karolina Andriette Ahlsell Nobel died. ALFRED NOBEL
1890
Alfred Nobel´s French dynamite companies suffered great losses.
1891
Alfred Nobel moved to San Remo, Italy.
16 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1893
Ragnar Sohlman came to be employed as an assistant to Alfred Nobel, who began to draft a will.
1894
Alfred Nobel bought out Bofors, a Swedish iron works and armaments factory.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 17 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1895
In Paris, Alfred Nobel signed his will.
18 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1896
December 10, day: Castle Garden became Manhattan Island’s public aquarium (until 1941). There were some 30,000 visitors on this first day, to view the various fish specimens which had been taken from the waters around the city. (It would only be later that arriving ship captains and yachtsmen would begin to donate interesting and colorful fish from other locales around the world, such as a harbor seal from West India.)
Alfred Nobel died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his house at San Remo, Italy. His will would establish the “Nobel Prize,” which would be awarded first in 1901 and annually thereafter on December 10th.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s drastic rewriting of Boris Godunov by Modest Musorgsky was performed for the initial time, privately, in the Great Hall of St. Petersburg Conservatory.
Nadia Boulanger entered the Paris Conservatoire as a solfège student.
Thème et variations for piano op.73 by Gabriel Fauré was performed for the initial time, in St. James’ Hall of London.
1897
Alfred Nobel’s will was contested by relatives and criticized by politicians. However, the Norwegian Storting (Parliament) did accept the task of awarding the Nobel Peace Prize.
1898
Agreements were entered into between the Alfred Nobel Foundation and the Prize Awarding Institutions. Basically it was “Yeah, OK, we’re all gonna cooperate and spend the money.”
1899
DuPont was incorporated in Delaware. This company that had been making dynamite since 1880 now controls more that 90 percent of U.S. dynamite and gunpowder production. Where did this weird idea come from, that the business of killing people in explosions was supposed to have something to do with the awarding of science prizes? — forget that Nobel Prize noise.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 19 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1900
The Charter of the Nobel Foundation was approved by the Swedish Government.
ALFRED NOBEL
20 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1901
December 10, day: The 1st Nobel Prizes were awarded. The recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize were Jean Henry Dumont, the Swiss founder of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, the founder of the International League for a Permanent Peace. ALFRED NOBEL
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 21 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1905
Bertha von Suttner was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
ALFRED NOBEL
Professor Robert Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for investigations and discoveries concerning the disease tuberculosis. Now your child, if your child does not bore easily, can play an educational game in which the steps leading up to the discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis are rehearsed.
1906
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to US President Theodore Roosevelt, a swashbuckler had never hid the swash of his buckle. In THE ROUGH RIDERS in 1899, his account of the aggression which led to the establishment of the permanent US naval facility on Cuban soil at Guantanamo Bay, he had described an engagement with the enemy: “By this time we were all in the spirit of the thing and greatly excited by the charge, the men cheering and running forward between shots, while the delighted faces of the foremost officers, like Captain C.J. Stevens, of the Ninth, as they ran at the head of their troops, will always stay in my mind.” How such a man could be considered suitable for a peace prize is, of course, beyond comprehension — unless the sort of peace they had in mind was the peace of the grave.
22 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1914
No Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this year — there seemed no-one to hand it to.
Harry S Truman was appointed road overseer in the southern half of Washington Township, Missouri.
1915
The Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded — this year likewise there wasn’t anyone to hand it to.
A revised version of the manifesto of the Vorticist movement, Blast.
Harry S Truman was appointed postmaster in Grandview, Missouri. He suffered losses in an investment in a zinc-mining venture.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 23 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1916
A National Park Service was created, with jurisdiction over Mount Rainier National Park.
No Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in this year — there wasn’t anyone to hand it to.
24 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1917
A Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Red Cross.
Upon migrating from a farm in flattest Kansas to Seattle WA, Friend Floyd Schmoe glimpsed Mount Rainier. This was the year in which the Paradise Inn was formally opened to the public, and here is a photo that had been taken during March 1917 with the new construction under 27 feet of snow:
At about this point, Elbert Russell received the PhD from the University of Chicago. It was within the period of my early teaching at Earlham that I began to write moralizing stories, which literary form I developed later in chapel talks and in the “Parson Stories.” It was after my return from Chicago University that I did my best work in this form. After I went to Woolman School I wrote a few, but the inspiration of the college chapel was lacking. When I finally went to Duke University, I had ample opportunity to speak in the University Chapel, but the freedom and intimacy of a small college chapel were lacking, and I put my best efforts in developing the literary form of the sermonette, which finally resulted in two books of Chapel Talks. The Parson Stories were never published in book form.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 25 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1918
The minister (!) at the Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island resigned from his post at this Quaker- funded school in order to enlist in the US military (!) and take part in World War I. (Meine Gott, whatever happened to the Quaker Peace Testimony? –Nowadays there happens to be a plaque at the school to honor its students who got killed while attempting to kill the enemy, but happens not to be any plaque to honor any student who had sought to honor our Peace Testimony.)
Friend Floyd Schmoe, a Conscientious Objector, agreed to join a Red Cross ambulance unit serving at the front in France but never to touch a weapon of any kind. After the armistice but while German armies still occupied Eastern Europe, the Hoover Commission sent him to assist in delivering a trainload of food and clothing to refugees inside Poland. Upon his return to Kansas he would get married with his high school sweetheart, Friend Ruth Pickering, a pianist.
No Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in this year — there wasn’t anyone to hand it to (the Red Cross having already been the recipient, in the previous year). THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
26 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 27 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1919
June: After years of conflict, the Nobel festival resumed. No Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in this year, not because there wasn’t anyone to give it to, but obviously because all the people it might have been given to had been ruled out or vetoed for sensitive reasons: Keir Hardie and Bertrand Russell in Britain; the French Socialist leader, Jean Jaures, who was assassinated for his hostility to the conflict; the German Socialist member of parliament, Karl Liebknecht, who voted against war credits in the Reichstag and declared that “a patriot was an international blackleg,” and his colleague Rosa Luxemburg, who was imprisoned for her fiery anti-war speeches; and the unknown Russian duo, Lenin and Trotsky, who had convened a European conference in the Swiss town of Zimmerwald to oppose the war, obviously were objectionable as recipients of any prize.
But, will there now be a return to normalcy? Will conflict be no more? Will no more dynamite ever explode anymore, anywhere? WORLD WAR I
ALFRED NOBEL
Well, even if there were no dynamite, we’d still be blowing up! During this month, Lord Rutherford, one of those inquisitive types, was busily transforming some nitrogen atoms into oxygen atoms — a first step toward understanding how to suddenly release large quantities of energy without making use of the chemical bond. ATOM BOMB
Brace yourselves, folks, what goes ’round gonna be comin’ ’round. WORLD WAR II
28 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1920
December: US President Woodrow Wilson, the architect of the Treaty of Versailles that had brought World War I to its sad conclusion, was the unanimous choice of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. –Isn’t it a pity that no member of the committee had read John Maynard Keynes’s THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE, in which the economist was predicting that as a result of the terms of this treaty all hell was going to break loose again? –Isn’t it a pity that no member of the award committee was paying attention to Sigmund Freud?
1925
Annie Russell Marble’s THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS IN LITERATURE (NY: D. Appleton and Company).
1932
Annie Russell Marble’s THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS IN LITERATURE 1901-1931 (NY: D. Appleton and Company).
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 29 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1934
May: Harry S Truman filed as a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.
Gertrude Stein plumped for Führer Adolf Hitler to be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany,” she wrote in the New York Times Magazine. “By driving out the Jews and the democratic and left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany.” ANTISEMITISM “We have made an end of denials of the Deity and the crying down of religion.” — Adolf Hitler, October 1933 WORLD WAR II GERMANY
30 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1936
There were purges in the Soviet Union. The joke in the Politburo was that you were perfectly safe as long as you were shorter than “Stalin.”1
Führer Adolf Hitler forbade Germans to receive Nobel Prizes. Eugene O’Neill received a Nobel Prize.
ALFRED NOBEL WORLD WAR II
1. At five foot four, Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, Mr. Steel, stood two inches shorter than Napoleon.
5’ 4”
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 31 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1937
Clinton J. Davisson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, for his demonstration of the wave nature of matter.
ALFRED NOBEL
Werner Heisenberg was catching some flak inside Germany from the deutsche Physik crowd, as a physicist who was “enslaved to Jewish physics,” the sort of theorizing typical of that Jew, Albert Einstein, obviously wrong stuff such as quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. Winning a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 had not safeguarded him from being accused of being a “White Jew.” He was under attack in, for instance, Das Schwarze Korps, the newspaper of the Schutzstaffel. What to do about this? He wrote to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, demanding that this top Nazi either defend him, or join his accusers. His mother visited Himmler’s mother, with the same plea. Herr Himmler ordered a thorough investigation the conclusion of which was that Heisenberg was a loyal German with only loyal German ideas (this would not prevent Heisenberg from being passed over for promotion at the university).
1938
Senator Harry S Truman helped draft the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938.
The 1st Volkswagen was assembled by hand with an air-cooled rear engine in Nazi Germany, and the cornerstone of a new factory was put into position. This people’s car would not go into production for another decade — but eventually, delayed somewhat by a major war, some 18,000,000 would be being driven around.
Time Magazine made Führer Adolf Hitler its “Man of the Year” and wrote an appreciative profile of Der Führer. There was a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in honor of Hitler’s birthday. In Britain, the editor of the London Times, Geoffrey Dawson, had no doubt that an Anglo/German deal was vital for world peace. Hitler was presenting his invasions as defensive and humanitarian operations that were being necessitated by the threat posed to the 3rd Reich at home or to ethnic Germans abroad by evil locals in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, etc. Gertrude Stein had been plumping for Hitler to be the recipient. “I say
32 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany,” she had written in the New York Times Magazine during May 1934. “By driving out the Jews and the democratic and left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany.” ANTISEMITISM
Hitler wasn’t the only guy who was doing national unity and the suppression of internal dissent during this period. When, a few years later, German troops would occupy the town of Vinnitsa in Russia, they would find any number of mass graves full of the corpses of Kulaks, small landowners, each one shot in the neck as an “enemy of the people” for not having embraced the collectivization policies of Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, known as “Stalin.” Local Ukrainians would tell them that from 1938 until their arrival the trucks had been coming and going day and night, bringing these Kulaks from NKVD prisons.
Having attended the University of Denver for several years, George Mills Houser matriculated at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
The Nobel Peace Prize committee’s “Short List” for the gold medal was headed by Führer Adolf Hitler as civilization’s bulwark against Bolshevism — and by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as the East’s proper response to Western imperialism — but in the end the good folks in Norway would “chicken out” and award their humongous prize less controversially, to the Nansen International Office for Refugees (Office International Nansen pour les Réfugiés), a soon-to-be-dispensed-with agency of the League of Nations.
ALFRED NOBEL
Pearl “John Hedges” Sydenstricker Buck also received a Nobel. CHINA
1947
The New England Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends expressed concern that the Moses Brown School and the Lincoln School in Providence, Rhode Island, although supposedly, nominally, they were under its care, were racist establishments that were not in fact extending this Quaker educational opportunity to “children of all races.”
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 33 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
By the mid-1950s, most Friends schools in the East had admitted at least a few African American students, and in some cases a substantial number had gained admittance. In 1958 Friends Select and Westtown were the two Friends Schools with the most African American students. Friends in New England, however, appear to have lagged behind. In 1947 New England Yearly Meeting expressed its concern that Moses Brown and Lincoln School in Providence, Rhode Island, two schools under the yearly meeting’s care, should include “children of all races in their school family”; six years later another minute suggested that the schools were then ready to do so. Still, in 1957 the yearly meeting continued to question whether Friends and their schools were “clear of discrimination.” Ten years late the meeting created a seventeen- member committee, including heads of the yearly meeting’s schools, to further “the meeting’s concern to meet the needs of more students from disadvantaged and minority groups” and to raise funds for scholarships. By the 1960s several African Americans had been admitted to Moses Brown School.2
Former war prisoner and convicted felon John R. Kellam was accepted as worker for the American Friends Service Committee –which was queerly unprejudiced against him3 although they were well aware of his record of draft dodging– in a project called PennCraft:
I had been working for the American Friends Service Committee in its subsidiary called Friends Service, Incorporated, helping coal miners who wanted to build their own homes in their spare time, when they were only partly employed and had been completely unemployed earlier when their fathers built a group of stone houses in the farm adjoining the one that I had gone out to manage. I had only eight homesteaders building their houses, homesteading families. There were fifty in the original
2. Page 332 in Donna McDaniel’s and Vanessa Julye’s FIT FOR FREEDOM, NOT FOR FRIENDSHIP: QUAKERS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL JUSTICE (Philadelphia: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 2009). 3. This was a special year for the American Friends Service Committee. Not only were they receiving Friend John as an employee, but also they were receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. ALFRED NOBEL
34 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
group, six and a half times as many. It was a place called PennCraft. I worked at PennCraft for subsistence wages and I did truck driving, materials delivering, building techniques teaching, technical and administrative accounting, and later on some land subdivision surveying. I was accounting for dollars spent on materials and manhours of labor that were exchanged by the various homesteaders working on each others houses at times, keeping two sets of books. Manhours and dollars. The capital for that whole project had been originally contributed by the owners of the big idle coal mines and the mine workers union. They put in equal amounts and the Service Committee made this project out of it where the miners borrowed the cost of the materials, did their own labor, built their own houses and paid off for the materials over time on a contract per deed basis and eventually when they made their last payment, we delivered their deed, meaning that they were the sole owners of the property that they had created. Well, fresh out of prison, after a very short time with the National Council for Prevention of War, I was told that the Friends Service Committee was looking for a new project manager at PennCraft. They had a young fellow just starting who within two or three weeks felt overwhelmed by his job so much that even with just a suitcase to carry, leaving a small trunkfull of stuff behind, he went out on the highway and hitchhiked all the way to his home in Minnesota, without notice to anybody. He was made almost sick by his job because it was just too much. I had more technical information about building included in my architectural training, even though I had never had any responsibility on a building job. The only practical experience I had ever had was from climbing all over new construction and watching the workmen, talking with them and seeing how they did things. This, along with talking sometime with the designing architect, was the only practical supplement to my theoretical design, mathematics and mechanical studies in college. Anyway, I went to PennCraft knowing that this other fellow had left that way. When they hired me, they got in contact with him and said that his successor had been acquired and would show up at a certain date. Would he, therefore, knowing that he would not be expected to continue, with that assurance, would he then be willing to come back for a week or two and help to break me in to the job? I would be otherwise just as ignorant of what I was facing as he had been. With his help, I would be more likely to be able to continue for as long as needed at PennCraft. So he did come back and, incidentally, he did pick up his trunk! He stayed with me for just one week. It was the minimum time that he’d had to promise! Maybe ten days, maybe two weeks, but he wasn’t sure of that. So I had to learn as fast as possible how to pick up his loose ends. I found, just as he had been, as soon as I realized what was pending, what was facing me, I felt as if I was forty days behind in my work on the first day! He had had that same feeling, so I wondered whether I would really be able to stick to it. But then I had my whole family out there so I had to stick with it no matter how difficult it was. Also
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 35 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
I knew that I could go through a difficult experience. There was an FBI man who came to PennCraft where I was working later on after I had been out of prison a couple of years. He showed his badge and I recognized FBI on it and he asked me if we could talk in some place that wasn’t as open as at this barn where some fellow homesteaders were using materials and equipment. So we went up to the house. On the way I told him that with respect to his own official duties there was nothing I could say that could help him. The only thing that I could think of to say that would be constructive and helpful was that I felt he would be a lot happier if he would quit that kind of a job and get into something useful where he wouldn’t be adversarial with people, or bothering them as they were trying to live their lives, as if they were criminals. It seemed to me that he would be much better off in any other kind of occupation. I said, “Weren’t you ever interested in something else almost as much as you are in this?” “I’d studied a while for the ministry.” “Oh, that would have been wonderful! Why settle for so much less?” Maybe he wasn’t too good at it! According to the congregation! Anyway, as an official of the FBI, ever since I became aware of how outrageously the FBI could go astray from the truth, under oath, in court, to lie about a defendant, there hasn’t been an FBI man since that has been worth the time of day off my watch. But as a person, I said, “I respect you and I wish you could have a happier life than you could possibly have had with this job.”
I still didn’t know the worst about J. Edgar Hoover. When the whole press of the country acknowledges the sort of a defective
36 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
guy he was, even in that position, and how he had lists of enemies and people he’d like to find a way of putting in jail, without caring in advance what they might have done that was contrary to law, I couldn’t have respect for that kind of official so corrupted. Hoover wasn’t so much of a misfit during the war as he was in peacetime, because the first casualty of war is the truth. One of the best tools in warfare is deception. You’re trying to deceive the enemy even if it means deceiving your friends first, having them unwittingly tell the enemy things that are not so.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 37 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
October 26, day: The Nobel Peace Prize for 1947 was awarded jointly to the American Friends Service Committee and the British Friends Council for their relief work in Europe after World War II. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
In the face of raids from Pakistan, Maharajah Hari Singh. the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, ceded his lands to India. The mostly Moslem province was admitted into India, provoking outrage in Pakistan.
British troops withdrew from Iraq.
Four Democratic senators and about 30 film industry notables made a nationwide broadcast called “Hollywood Fights Back.” Led by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it attacked the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee, denying that there was Communist infiltration in American films and questioning “the right of Congress to ask any man what he thinks on political issues.” UNAMERICANISM
October 31, Friday: The American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia received a cablegram from Norway informing it that the Nobel Peace Prize for 1947 had been awarded jointly to the Committee and to the British Friends Service Council.
38 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
“It is not by chance that the American union is in the state in which by far the greatest number of bold, sometimes unbelievably so, inventions are currently taking place. The achievements of a thousand racially questionable Europeans cannot equate with the capabilities of a thousand racially first-rate Americans.” — Adolf Hitler, 1928
December: A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology:4 • Three scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William “Hush Baby Your Daddy Is A Rich White Man” Shockley of the Bell Laboratories, demonstrated their new invention, the point-contact transistor amplifier, that would soon be renown as “the transistor”: [A] group of physicists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories has made a profound and simple finding. In essence, it is a method of controlling electrons in a solid crystal instead of in a vacuum. This discovery has yielded a device called the transistor (so named because it transfers an electrical signal across a resistor). Not only is the transistor tiny, but it needs so little power, and uses it so efficiently (as a radio amplifier its efficiency is 25 per cent, against a vacuum tube’s 10 per cent) that the size of batteries needed to operate portable devices can be reduced. In combination with printed circuits it may open up entirely new applications for electronics.
December 10: In the auditorium of the University of Oslo, Gunnar Jahn, Director of the Bank of Norway, awarded the diplomas and medals of the Nobel Peace Prize. After his speech, Miss Margaret A. Backhouse, representing the British Friends Service Council, and Professor Henry J. Cadbury, representing the American Friends Service Committee, which shared the prize, responded with brief speeches of acceptance. The Nobel Peace Prize for 1947 by Gunnar Jahn Chairman of the Nobel Committee The Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament has awarded this year’s Peace Prize to the Quakers, represented by their two 4. Nowadays Nobel Laureate Shockley makes his sperm available, through a special Southern California sperm bank, for the proliferation of fresh generations of genius bastard — true fact, as photos of such offspring have appeared here in the press.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 39 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
great relief organizations, the Friends Service Council in London and the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. It is now three hundred years since George Fox established the Society of Friends. It was during the time of civil war in England, a period full of the religious and political strife which led to the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell - today we would no doubt call it a dictatorship. What then happened was what so often happens when a political or religious movement is successful; it lost sight of its original concern: the right to freedom. For, having achieved power, the movement then refuses to grant to others the things for which it has itself fought. Such was the case with the Presbyterians and after them with the Independents. It was not the spirit of tolerance and humanity that emerged victorious. George Fox and many of his followers were to experience this during the ensuing years, but they did not take up the fight by arming, as men customarily do. They went their way quietly because they were opposed to all forms of violence. They believed that spiritual weapons would prevail in the long run - a belief born of inward experience. They emphasized life itself rather than its forms because forms, theories, and dogmas have never been of importance to them. They have therefore from the very beginning been a community without fixed organization. This has given them an inner strength and a freer view of mankind, a greater tolerance toward others than is found in most organized religious communities. The Quaker movement originated in England, but soon afterwards in 1656, the Quakers found their way to America where they were not at first welcomed. In spite of persecution, however, they stood fast and became firmly established during the last quarter of the century. Everyone has heard of the Quaker, George Fox, who founded Philadelphia and the colony of Pennsylvania. Around 1700 there were already fifty to sixty thousand Quakers in America and about the same number in England. Since then the Quakers have lived their own lives, many of them having to suffer for their beliefs. Much has changed during these three hundred years. Outward customs, such as the dress adopted by the early Quakers, have been discarded, and the Friends themselves now live in a society which is outwardly quite different from that of the seventeenth century. But the people around them are the same, and what has to be conquered within man himself is no less formidable. The Society of Friends has never had many members, scarcely more than 200,000 in the entire world, the majority living in the United States and in England. But it is not the number that matters. What counts more is their inner strength and their deeds. If we study the history of the Quakers, we cannot but admire the strength they have acquired through their faith and through their efforts to live up to that faith in their daily life. They
40 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
have always been opposed to violence in any form, and many considered their refusal to take part in wars the most important tenet of their religion. But it is not quite so simple. It is certainly true that the Declaration of 1660 states: “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end and under any pretence whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world.” But that goes much further than a refusal to take part in war. It leads to this: it is better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice. It is from within man himself that victory must in the end be gained. It may be said, without doing injustice to anyone, that the Quakers have at times been more interested in themselves and in their inner life than in the community in which they lived. There was, as one of their own historians has said, something passive about their work: they preferred to be counted among the silent in the land. But no one can fulfill his mission in this life by wanting to belong only to the silent ones and to live his own life isolated from others. Nor was this attitude true of the Quakers. They too went out among men, not to convert them, but to take an active part with them in the life of the community and, even more, to offer their help to those who needed it and to let their good deeds speak for themselves in appealing for mutual understanding. Here I can only mention some scattered examples which illustrate such activity. The Quakers took part in creating the first peace organization in 1810 and since then have participated in all active peace movements. I would mention Elizabeth Fry,5 John Woolman,6 and other Quakers active in the fight against slavery and in the struggle for social justice. I would mention the liberal idealist John Bright,7 his forty-year fight against the principles of war and for the principles of peace, his opposition to the Crimean War,8 and his struggle against Palmerston’s9 policies. Many other examples could be mentioned to show how their active participation in community work, in politics if you prefer, increased during the nineteenth century. Yet it is not this side of their activities - the active political side - which places the Quakers in a unique position. It is through silent assistance from the nameless to the nameless that they have worked to promote the fraternity between nations cited in the will of Alfred Nobel. Their work began in the prisons. We heard about them from our seamen who spent long years in prison during the Napoleonic Wars.10 We met them once again during the Irish famine of 1846-1847. When English naval units bombarded the Finnish coast during the Crimean War,11 the 5. Elizabeth Gurney Fry (1780-1845), English Quaker philanthropist and minister interested in prison reform. 6. John Woolman (1720-1772), American Quaker preacher and abolitionist. 7. John Bright (1811-1889), English statesman and orator; of Quaker stock; member of Parliament (almost continuously 1843- 1889). 8. The Crimean War (1853-1856): Russia vs. Turkey, England, France, and Sardinia. 9. Henry John Temple Palmerston (1784-1865), English statesman; in office almost continuously from 1809 to 1865 as secretary of war, foreign secretary, home secretary, or prime minister. 10. Napoleonic Wars: 1803-1815. 11. Finland was a Russian grand duchy at the time of the Crimean War.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 41 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
Quakers hurried there to heal the wounds of war, and we found them again in France after the ravages of the 1870-1871 war.12 When the First World War broke out, the Quakers were once more to learn what it was to suffer for their faith. They refused to carry arms, and many of them were thrown into prison, where they were often treated worse than criminals. But it is not this that we shall remember longest. We who have closely observed the events of the First World War and of the inter-war period will probably remember most vividly the accounts of the work they did to relieve the distress caused by the war. As early as 1914, the English Quakers started preparation for relief action. They began their work in the Marne district in France and, whenever they could, they went to the very places where the war had raged. They worked in this way all through the war and when it ended were confronted by still greater tasks. For then, as now, hunger and sickness followed in the wake of the war. Who does not recall the years of famine in Russia in 1920-1921 and Nansen’s appeal to mankind for help? Who does not recall the misery among the children in Vienna which lasted for years on end? In the midst of the work everywhere were the Quakers. It was the Friends Service Committee which, at Hoover’s13 request, took on the mighty task of obtaining food for sick and undernourished children in Germany. Their relief corps worked in Poland and Serbia, continued to work in France, and later during the civil war in Spain14 rendered aid on both sides of the front. Through their work, the Quakers won the confidence of all, for both governments and people knew that their only purpose was to help. They did not thrust themselves upon people to win them to their faith. They drew no distinction between friend and foe. One expression of this confidence was the donation of considerable funds to the Quakers by others. The funds which the Quakers could have raised among themselves would not have amounted to much since most of them are people of modest means. During the period between the wars their social work also increased in scope. Although, in one sense, nothing new emerged, the work assumed a form different from that of the wartime activity because of the nature of the problems themselves. Constructive work received more emphasis, education and teaching played a greater part, and there were now more opportunities of making personal contact with people than there had been during a time when the one necessity seemed to be to supply food and clothing. The success achieved among the coal miners in West Virginia provides an impressive example of this work. The Quakers solved the housing problems, provided new work for the unemployed, created a new little community. In the words of one of their members, they succeeded in restoring self-respect and confidence in life to men for whom existence had become devoid of hope. This is but one example among many.
12. The Franco-Prussian war (July 19, 1870-January 28, 1871). 13. Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), president of the U. S. (1929-1933); during and after World War I headed U. S. food administration and war relief commissions. 14. Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
42 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
The Second World War did not strike the Quakers personally in the same way as did that of 1914. Both in England and in the U.S.A. the conscription laws allowed the Quakers to undertake relief work instead of performing military service; so they were neither cast into prison nor persecuted because of their unwillingness to go to war. In this war there were, moreover, Quakers who did not refuse to take an active part in the war, although they were few compared with those who chose to help the victims of war. When war came, the first task which confronted them was to help the refugees. But the difficulties were great because the frontiers of many countries were soon closed. The greater part of Europe was rapidly occupied by the Germans, and the United States remained neutral for only a short time. Most of the countries occupied by the Germans were closed to the Quakers. In Poland, it is true, they were given permission to help, but only on condition that the Germans themselves should choose who was to be helped, a condition which the Quakers could not accept. Nevertheless, they worked where they could, first undertaking welfare work in England and after that, behind the front in many countries of Europe and Asia, and even in America. For when America joined the war, the whole Japanese-American population, numbering 112,000 in all, of whom 80,000 were American citizens, was evacuated from the West Coast. The Quakers went to their assistance, as well as opposed the prevailing anti-Japanese feeling from which these people suffered. Now, with the war over, the need for help is greater than ever. This is true not only in Europe, but also and to the same degree in large areas of Asia. The problems are becoming more and more overwhelming - the prisoners who were released from concentration camps in 1945, all those who had to be repatriated from forced labor or POW camps in enemy countries, all the displaced persons who have no country to which they can return, all the homeless in their own countries, all the orphans, the hungry, the starving! The problem is not merely one of providing food and clothing, it is one of bringing people back to life and work, of restoring their self-respect and their faith and confidence in the future. Once again, the Quakers are active everywhere. As soon as a country has been reopened they have been on the spot, in Europe and in Asia, among countrymen and friends as well as among former enemies, in France and in Germany, in India and in Japan. It is not easy to assess the extent of their contribution. It is not something that can be measured in terms of money alone, but perhaps some indication of it may be given by the fact that the American Committee’s budget for last year was forty-six million Norwegian kroner. And this is only the sum which the American Committee has had at its disposal. Quakers in all countries have also taken a personal and active part in the work of other relief organizations. They have, for instance, assisted in the work of UNRRA15 in a number of places such as Vienna and Greece.
15. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was established in 1943 to aid areas freed from the Axis powers; it was discontinued in Europe in 1947 and its work taken over by the FAO and the IRO.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 43 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
Today the Quakers are engaged in work that will continue for many years to come. But to examine in closer detail the individual relief schemes would not give us any deeper insight into its significance. For it is not in the extent of their work or in its practical form that the Quakers have given most to the people they have met. It is in the spirit in which this work is performed. “We weren’t sent out to make converts,” a young Quaker says: “we’ve come out for a definite purpose, to build up in a spirit of love what has been destroyed in a spirit of hatred. We’re not missionaries. We can’t tell if even one person will be converted to Quakerism. Things like that don’t happen in a hurry. When our work is finished it doesn’t mean that our influence dies with it. We have not come out to show the world how wonderful we are. No, the thing that seems most important is the fact that while the world is waging a war in the name of Christ, we can bind up the wounds of war in the name of Christ. Religion means very little until it is translated into positive action.”16 This is the message of good deeds, the message that men can find each other in spite of war, in spite of differences in race. Is it not here that we have the hope of laying foundations for peace among nations, of building it up in man himself so that the settling of disputes by force becomes impossible? All of us know that we have not yet traveled far along this road. And yet - when we witness today the great willingness to help those who have suffered, a generosity unknown before the war and often greatest among those who have least, can we not hope that there is something in the heart of man on which we can build, that we can one day reach our goal if only it be possible to make contact with people in all lands? The Quakers have shown us that it is possible to translate into action what lies deep in the hearts of many: compassion for others and the desire to help them - that rich expression of the sympathy between all men, regardless of nationality or race, which, transformed into deeds, must form the basis for lasting peace. For this reason alone the Quakers deserve to receive the Nobel Peace Prize today. But they have given us something more: they have shown us the strength to be derived from faith in the victory of the spirit over force. And this brings to mind two verses from one of Arnulf Överland’s17 poems which helped so many of us during the war. I know of no better salute: The unarmed only can draw on sources eternal. The spirit alone gives victory. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
16. The translation of this passage is taken from The Friends’ Quarterly (April, 1948) 75. 17. Arnulf Överland (1889-1968).
44 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1948
T.S. Eliot received a Nobel Prize. Gee, and I didn’t even know they offered one for Antisemitism!
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 45 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1952
Professor Selman Waksman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Here you can see Professor Waksman hard at work in 23-year-old grad student Albert Schatz’s basement lab (a dangerous place the good professor had never visited), actively pretending to discover Streptomycin, the 1st antibiotic active against the terrifying Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
46 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
In this year Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy would refer to Secretary of Defense George Catlett Marshall, who would be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, as a traitor for having “lost China,” and call for the impeachment of President Harry S Truman as not only a “son-of-a-bitch” but also an inebriate. He would aver, falsely, that Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson had been endorsed by the American Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. By claiming, falsely, that he had flown 32 missions during World War II, the Senator would collect for himself a Distinguished Flying Cross.18
Senator McCarthy’s MCCARTHYISM, THE FIGHT FOR AMERICA, which was largely composed by his bride Jean Kerr McCarthy with the help of J.B. Matthews and Ruth Matthews.
Reinhold Niebuhr’s THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY (Charles Scribner’s Sons).
“A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 18. This medal has been awarded some 83 times, to folks such as Charles Lindbergh.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 47 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952, Chapter 7 READ THE FULL TEXT
1954
Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry:
1962
The Arizona statute against miscegenation was repealed.
48 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
John Steinbeck received a Nobel Prize.
ALFRED NOBEL
1964
At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, at the request of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the FBI tapped the telephone of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hey, hey, LBJ! A Yale University psychology professor, Stanley Milgram, published experimental data showing that cruelty is usually a function of people obeying orders or reacting to peer pressure rather than a characteristic unique to sadists. Indeed, follow-on studies would establish that 60-80% of the population would grudgingly engage in personally distasteful levels of violence whenever directly ordered to do so by someone in authority, with middle-aged males being somewhat more likely to disobey authority than adolescent males or females of any age. (No wonder they retire middle-aged men from the military!)
According to this study, the habit of obedience to a leader, plus an evil leader, is in and of itself adequate to produce disaster:
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 49 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
“I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.” — Adolf Hitler
Mario Savio orated that “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”19
The FBI obtained a tape of Martin Luther King, Jr. having sex, and sent a copy of this tape along with an anonymous note to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, suggesting that the Reverend King commit suicide.
Since the Department was well aware that transmitting the information in this way would bring it to the
19. “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”: “If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.… If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
50 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
attention of Coretta Scott King, it would appear that the intention was not to induce King’s suicide but to cause King’s wife to bring pressure to bear on him to abandon their civil rights struggle. In this year, when the Kings traveled together to Europe to claim the Nobel Peace Prize, the Department attempted to sabotage the receptions in the Reverend King’s honor. (Although at this time in the USA, civil rights leaders were being assassinated, and although the FBI was receiving information as to death threats being made against the Reverend King, and although passing information as to these death threats might conceivably have induced King to tone down his civil rights visibility, nevertheless J. Edgar Hoover curiously decided to withhold such information from him and from his wife and from his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It sure makes you wonder, especially when you read that just prior to killing King, the assassin James Earl Ray had received funding and assistance from a “Raoul” in Canada who seems at one time to have served as an FBI informant.)
1968
Yasunari Kawabata became the 1st Japanese to win a Nobel (the prize was in literature).
ALFRED NOBEL
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 51 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1973
The US Congress enacted a War Powers Act which would soon be being ignored by presidents both of the Republican and of the Democratic persuasion. A joint Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho — who would indignantly repudiate an award that was being given also to a man of the likes of Kissinger.
In this year of great hypocrisy there would be no Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League.
1978
War in Lebanon, as Israel invaded in an attempt to evict the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
A joint Nobel Peace Prize went to former Israeli terrorist Menachem Begin and an Egyptian leader who would promptly be assassinated by Islamists, Anwar al-Sadat.
At the Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League Peace Awards went to David Berkingoff and Prafulla Mukerj.
52 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1979
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mother Teresa.
The United States Army published Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Channon’s concept piece THE FIRST EARTH BATTALION. The presumption in this curious book was that by the 1990s our soldiers would have become so involved in peacekeeping operations than armed conflict would have taken a back seat. The author presumed a global communication system that he termed “The Net.” When the possibility of an armed conflict arose, our soldiers would parachute down and form themselves “in a long line facing each opposing army. The EARTH BATTALION satellite above beamed this image to the globe. The earth watched as this potential catastrophy [sic] awaited the conscience of one of the two army leaders to set. For they would have to bloody the EARTH BATTALION people in their path before they could attack — and the world would know” (I don’t have any idea why they didn’t award Channon the Nobel Peace Prize). The global communication system the book described was ARPANET (the word “internet” had already been coined, in about 1973), the military precursor for the present internet. The Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency had established
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 53 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
that system to provide military personnel and contractors with a communications system that was so massively redundant that it might continue to function even under the conditions of a general nuclear exchange.
The Environmental Protection Administration developed a radiation dose standard of 25 mrem to the whole body, 75 mrem to the thyroid, and 25 mrem to any other organ of an individual member of the public (in 1981 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would incorporate these EPA standards into its regulations, and all nuclear power plants must now meet these requirements; it has been determined that the amount of radiation to which I was subjected while working at night as a “jumper” at the General Electric Test Reactor in 1976 was five times too high to be safe for me to have absorbed — that is, that looking at the thing in retrospect, I should never as a “jumper” have been subjected to more than 1.0 rem/year).
54 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1989
October 5, day: The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
The Bush administration admitted that it had been involved in the botched coup attempt of October 3d in Panama.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, the evangelist Jim Bakker was convicted on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. He would do hard time.
Anniversary, the third portion of Three Occasions for Orchestra by Eliott Carter, was performed for its initial time, in Royal Festival Hall, London. This marked the completion of the first performance of the entire Three Occasions for Orchestra.
1993
A joint Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk.
1994
A joint Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin.
Friend Floyd Schmoe had been a nominee for this year. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
Kenneth L. Carroll’s “George Fox and America” in NEW LIGHT ON GEORGE FOX 1624-1691, PAPERS BY TWELVE BRITISH AND AMERICAN SCHOLARS, edited by Michael Mullett (York, England: Ebor Press, 59-68).
1996
Friend Floyd Schmoe was again nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 55 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
1997
For the 4th time Friend Floyd Schmoe was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
56 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
2002
December: The shortlist of proposals to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for this year included a proposal to award the prize to Hamid Karzai, the untested puppet ruler of Kabul, Afghanistan, and a proposal for a joint award to US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair — but the committee had been overwhelmed by 43,000 protest letters from all over the world. Therefore it was former US President Jimmy Carter who received the Nobel Peace Prize from the hands of the unassuming bicycling monarch of Norway.20
Bear in mind that it had been during this president’s administration that the CIA had begun to allow the killers who were running death squads in Argentina to train Nicaraguan Contras in Honduras. Bear in mind that it had been during the Carter years that millions in aid and riot equipment had been given to the Salvadorian military, and that US personnel had trained Salvadorian officers in Panama. Bear in mind that it had been during the 20. Historical Marker erected in 1986 at the Old Train Depot, Plains GA: PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER From this depot in 1975, James Earl Carter, Jr. launched a two-year campaign for the presidency of the United States. At first an unknown referred to as “Jimmy Who,” Carter was inaugurated as America's 39th President on January 20, 1977. James Earl Carter, Jr. was born October 1, 1924, in Plains. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and married Rosalynn Smith in 1946. After seven more years of naval service he returned to run a family agribusiness. In 1962, Jimmy Carter was elected to the Georgia Senate and in 1970, became Governor. As governor, he reorganized state government, reformed the budgetary process, improved race relationships, health care, education, and environmental quality. Notable achievements of his presidency (1977-1981) were based on the values he considered most important “...human rights, environmental quality, nuclear arms control, and the search for justice and peace.” Successes included the resolution of the Panama Canal issue, signing the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the Camp David accords and peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, normalizing relations with China and reorganization of the federal government. This Depot and surrounding historic district symbolize the culture of this small rural community which produced a highly respected international leader. 129-9 GEORGIA HISTORIC MARKER 1986
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 57 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
Carter years that special envoy Richard Holbrooke had gone to South Korea and given US backing to the military so that it could crush workers and students who were demanding democracy, the result being that about 3,000 South Korean protesters were killed during March 1980. Bear in mind that it had been under Carter that the covert CIA operation in Afghanistan had begun, that would lead to the creation of the mojahedin and would give the green light for Saudi religious, ideological and financial intervention to begin under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. Bear in mind that it had been Carter who had re-armed Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge after they had been defeated by the Vietnamese. Bear in mind that it was Carter who released William Calley, who had officered a mass murder at My Lai. Bear in mind that it had been during the Carter administration that support and weaponry had been provided for the Indonesian military dictatorship after its brutal occupation of East Timor. Bear in mind that it had been while Carter had been leading us that the righteous Christian right had arisen in America. Bear in mind that it had been under Carter that financial help had been solicited from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International while this outfit was calmly cheating its depositors. Bear in mind that it had been Carter who had been phoning the Shahanshah of Iran to congratulate him on the way he was leading his nation toward democracy and freedom, while he was having his troops shoot down women and children in the streets and while his political prisons were crammed with torturers and torturees. –Obviously, we were not awarding this man the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 because of his conduct of his administration during the late 1970s, because his conduct in office had been simply clueless. The men of evil had walked right past him, while he postured righteously this way and that way. –No, this guy is now being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because, after he had left the government service, he has made himself into the best damned ex-president this world has ever seen or may soon see again.
Jimmy, you’re OK — or at least, you’re OK now even if you weren’t OK back when we needed for you to be not only as innocent as the doves but also as cunning as the vipers.
In the wake of Jose Padilla’s May arrest, the Washington Post warns that the Bush administration “is developing a parallel legal system” without the protections “guaranteed by the ordinary system.” When Padilla is finally charged four years later (minus the chilling “dirty bomb’ allegations made by Attorney General John Ashcroft on American TV), his attorneys vow to take the case to the Supreme Court. “Americans need to wake up,” former Reagan official Paul Craig Roberts later writes. “The only danger to Americans in Iraq is the one Bush created by invading the country. The grave threat that Americans face is the Bush administration’s police-state mentality.”
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill is fired after disagreeing with Bush’s policies on tax cuts. He later says that unseating Saddam Hussein was Priority One just days after Bush’s inauguration. The Washington Post reports on America’s alleged use of torture to interrogate detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.
58 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
2004
Marnie Clark edited LIVES THAT SPEAK: STORIES OF TWENTIETH CENTURY QUAKERS (Quaker Press of Friends General Conference; The Religious Education Committee). This book profiles 8 men and 8 women who responded to problems and challenges of our time with courage and creativity and caring.
The Quakers recognized are:
•STEVE ANGELL: TRUSTING LEADINGS (by Johanna Anderson) • ELISE BOULDING: WORLD PEACEMAKER (by Mary Lee Morrison) • CALHOUN GEIGER: QUIET COURAGE (by Carol Passmore) • GORDON HIRABAYASHI: IDEALISM IS REALISM (by Marnie Clark) • FAY HONEY KNOPP: LIGHTING DARK CORNERS (by Liz Yeats) • BILL KREIDLER: WIN-WIN SOLUTIONS (by Liz Yeats) • SIGRID LUND: DARING TO SAY “NO” (by Marnie Clark) • MARLENE AND STEVE PEDIGO: GROWING INTO URBAN MINISTRY (by Marlene Pedigo) • BARBARA REYNOLDS: FRIEND OF THE HIBAKUSHA (by Beth Parrish) • DAVID RICHIE AND WORKCAMPS: “WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE” (by Carol Passmore) • BAYARD RUSTIN: NONVIOLENT CRUSADER (by Marnie Clark) • FLOYD SCHMOE: 105 YEARS OF ZEST AND SERVICE (by Marnie Clark) • CAROL REILLEY URNER: FIND A NEED AND ACT ON IT (by Barbara Robinson) • GILBERT WHITE: USING SCIENCE TO HELP PEOPLE (by Gilbert White; adapted by Jeanette Baker) • SIGNE WILKINSON: CARTOONS WITH A SERIOUS MESSAGE (by Signe Wilkinson and Beth Parrish) • VIOLET ZARU: HOPE IN A REFUGEE CAMP (by Beth Parrish)
This volume also includes QUAKER NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS (by Barbara Robinson). THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 59 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
Meanwhile, Friend Levi Coffin of North Carolina became a character in a book for children: Historical Quaker figure inspires children’s book 3-29-04 By Jim Schlosser Staff Writer News & Record
Hallie’s father warned her not to meddle in other people’s business, especially not the business of slavery. The 12-year- old disobeyed, and later confessed to Levi Coffin, a Quaker in Hallie’s Indiana community, “I meddled.” “Thank thee, child,” Coffin replied, grateful that she had. The incident takes place in 1839 in the new children’s book A GOOD NIGHT FOR FREEDOM, written by Barbara Olenyik Morrow and published by Holiday House Books in New York. Hallie is fictional, but the book’s other main characters — Coffin; his wife, Catherine; and two runaway slave children, Margaret and Susan— were real. Morrow, who lives in Auburn, Ind., made a quick trip to Greensboro recently to see where Levi Coffin grew up in a Quaker community, known then as New Garden and now as Guilford College. Coffin and many other Quakers from Guilford County moved to the free state of Indiana in the first three decades of the 19th century. They could no longer tolerate living in North Carolina, where slavery was legal. Coffin settled in 1826 in Newport, Ind., where he prospered as a dry-goods merchant. Wealth didn’t lessen his social activism. His house became a major station on the Underground Railroad, a network of hiding places that runaway slaves, with help from white sympathizers, used to escape to the North and Canada. “He had so much to lose,” Morrow says of Coffin. “The slave catchers were always threatening him. You have to admire him. He could have lived a comfortable life.” In writing her book, Morrow took some literary license by placing Susan and Margaret in the Coffin home. No documents indicate they ever sought refuge there. But Morrow’s research found the girls really did run away from Tennessee in 1839 and headed for Canada. A reward of $1,200 was offered for their capture. Residents of Newport, Morrow says, had long suspected that the Coffin’s two-story, red-brick home harbored runaway slaves. Slave hunters came occasionally and threw rocks at the house and threatened Coffin and his wife. Morrow decided the house —still standing and open for tours in Fountain City, Ind., formerly Newport— was an ideal setting for a children’s story about a terrible period in American history. In the book, Hallie discovers the two slave girls in the basement of the Coffins’ house when she went there to deliver butter. She doesn’t tell her father about the encounter, but quizzes him about a poster she had seen offering a reward for the girls. She
60 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
asks him: If he had the chance to help them, what would he do? He says he’s opposed to slavery, but federal law forbids hiding slaves. The law is the law, he says, and “we’re not meddlin.” “Later, slave hunters come to the Coffin house, break windows and demand the Coffins produce the slave girls. Hallie, who had been in the house with Margaret and Susan, runs to the rock throwers. She fibs that earlier that day she had seen the runaways go up the road, cross a pasture and enter the woods. The slave hunters take off in pursuit. Coffin, who had been listening to Hallie, breathes easier. History regards Coffin as the father of the Underground Railroad. In 1819 while still living in Guilford County, Coffin, his cousin, Vestal Coffin, and other Quakers are said to have boarded the first “passenger” on the railroad, a local slave named John Dimrey. Morrow was curious if Coffin is as underrated in Guilford County as she believes he is in Indiana. The federal government has designated the Coffin house a National Historic Landmark. But, Morrow said, “if you asked the average person in Indiana, only one in 10 would be able to say what the Coffins contributed to American history.” The result would probably be the same here, although occasional news stories appear about Levi and Vestal Coffin, and Vestal’s son, Addison Coffin. A state historic marker to Levi Coffin stands on the Guilford College campus. Another marker commemorates the Underground Railroad. When Coffin left for Indiana, Vestal and Addison Coffin remained in New Garden to work the Underground Railroad from the southern end. They were assisted by a courageous slave named Saul, who gathered intelligence about abused slaves who might need help. The railroad stayed busy. On one night alone, Morrow says, 17 runaways knocked at the Coffin door. “Can you imagine, you get up from bed and 17 people are at the door?” she says. “You stoke the fire, fix food and set out sleeping pallets. “What an inconvenience! The Coffins also had their own five children to look after, and he had to get up and go to work the next day. I’m just struck by their sense of decency and humanitarianism.” Morrow was an editorial writer for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette until 1987, when she left to write books. The first was about famous cars made or associated with Auburn, Ind. — the Cord, the Auburn and the Duesenberg. Another was about famous Indiana literary figures, including James Whitcomb Riley, remembered for the poem with the line, “When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.” Recently, Morrow decided to try fiction and went looking for a subject. She knew the Underground Railroad had been active in her part of Indiana. Auburn had a house that had been a depot. A local historian gave her a tour of the house. She became fascinated and wanted to know about the Underground Railroad. “I kept coming across Levi and Catherine Coffin,” she says. Her book is doing well in Indiana, she says. Newspapers have interviewed her. She has signings at books stores in Fort Wayne and elsewhere. She would love for “A Good Night for Freedom” to reach a North Carolina audience. On her trip here, she carried with her “Reminiscences of Levi Coffin,” published in 1876
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 61 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
before his death the next year. When Coffin was a 7-year-old in Guilford County, he came upon slaves in chains. “That really made an impression on him,” says Morrow, who is considering writing a biography about Coffin. “It was in Guilford County, from that horrific experience and from his Quaker training, that made him the person he became.” Morrow believes the dilemma Hallie faced in 1839 —to meddle or not to meddle— speaks to children in 2004. “Maybe an elementary school child sees bullying going on,” she says. “The middle school child sees cheating going on. The high school student sees drugs and theft going on.” I hope the child asks, “At what point do I meddle and say to myself, ‘I have to stand up and do the right thing.’”
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 2013. 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: May 12, 2013
62 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
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, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 63 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ALFRED NOBEL ALFRED NOBEL
Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which 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 your requests with
64 Copyright Austin Meredith