Quote of the Day (William Carlos Williams, on “The Fiery Demon That Possesses the World”)

“Whether or not the fiery demon that possesses the world is going to destroy us or give us a new birth I cannot say. All we know is that only a few years ago we were too smug in our beliefs touching the ultimate triumph of man’s coming humanity to man. We now know, hit or miss, that love is far more remote a power than we suspected, that it is a difficult master and that if we expect to realize it in any part we must labor with all our zeal toward its realization.”—William Carlos Williams, letter to Harvey Breit, January 25, 1940, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, edited by John C. Thirlwall (1957)

Once again this past week, we had a glimpse of “the fiery demon that possessed the world” in the person of the murderous Nidal Malik Hasan. Twenty years after Francis Fukuyama, surveying the end of the Cold War, hopefully anticipated “the end of history,” Hasan—in the grip of an all-encompassing ideology as much as mental illness—demonstrates that we have indeed been overly confident about “the ultimate triumph of man’s coming humanity to man.”

We should not leap to any policy conclusions regarding the Fort Hood massacre until we have fully investigated the long train of circumstances that brought Hasan to that point. But at least for now, as we see how the military psychiatrist rejected the tenets of his own healing profession in favor of an ideology of centuries-old grievances, it is apparent, just as the poet Williams observed the consequences of Hitler’s hatred spread like a stain across Europe nearly 70 years ago, that “love is far more remote a power than we suspected.”

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Fallon, Noting a “Sesame Street” Milestone)

“Happy 40th birthday to Sesame Street. It’s getting so old, it’s now brought to you by the letters A,A,R, and P.”—Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, November 4, 2009

Mr. Fallon is claiming, of course, that the beloved public television institution is getting long in the tooth. As you can tell from the accompanying image, I have discovered incontrovertible proof of this!

Quote of the Day (Ralph Richardson to Co-Star Katharine Hepburn)

“I say, you’re a very attractive woman!”—Ralph Richardson, star of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, after dancing with co-star Katharine Hepburn at the film’s wrap party, quoted in A. Scott Berg, Kate Remembered (2003)

Richardson made his comment in 1962, but you can get an idea what he was talking about 20 years before, in this iconic image from Woman of the Year—the first film Katharine Hepburn (whose centennial is today) made with her most frequent co-star (and offscreen lover), Spencer Tracy. The latter film’s director, George Stevens, was a former beau, and you get a sense, in this truly masterful still, of what he—and Ralph, and Spencer—saw in her.

This is the first shot Tracy’s everyman sportswriter has of globetrotting columnist Tess Harding, and he’s impressed. There she is, drawn up to her full height, almost feline in her chic attire, but also almost ferocious with that imperious gaze, as if to say, “Can you handle me? Are you sure?” And the angle of her arms demonstrates, despite the film’s final bow in the direction of male chauvinist contemporary mores, that any relationship between the two would be on her terms.

This shot is a heady mix of intelligence and glamour. What it doesn’t convey is playfulness—a side of the actress that came out best in her prior work with Cary Grant as well as other scenes in her nine films with Tracy.

Tess Harding was reportedly based on columnist Dorothy Thompson, but with her chic allure, Hepburn transformed what was on the written page into the archetype of a new professional woman that would not appear full force in America’s workplaces until three decades later. Even so, there was nobody like Kate the Great before; there has been nobody like her since.

This Day in Art History (MOMA Opens Doors—and Eyes, to New Forms of Expression)

November 8, 1929—Only 10 days after the stock market crashed, eviscerating at one stroke the ability of New York’s monied class to act as patrons and the capacity of the middle class to pay for anything besides essentials, the Museum of Modern Art opened to something astounding: an audience receptive to its innovative mission of extending art outside the traditional forms of painting and sculpture to newer forms such as photography.

The exhibit in the 5,000-sq.-ft. rental space on the 12th floor of the Heckscher Building, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street (four locks north of its current location), attracted such crowds to its exhibit featuring Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh that other tenants in the building had trouble getting to their elevator.

One of the newer art forms, of particular interest to me, is film. Alfred H. Barr (in the image accompanying this post), the 27-year-old who became the museum’s first director, appointed Iris Barry, one of the founders of London’s Film Society, to be the first film librarian to be part of a museum in the 1930s.

Much of the blog you’re reading now—in particular, my obsession with all manner of movie minutiae—owes its very existence to the scholarly interest in film as a serious art form fanned into being by Barr and Barry.

Now you know who to blame for this!

Quote of the Day (Bishop Edward Fitzgerald, on Catholic Schools)

“We were ordained to teach catechism not to teach school. If we know that children are learning the catechism it is enough.”—Edward Fitzgerald, Bishop of Little Rock, addressing the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1884, quoted in Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History From Colonial Times to the Present (1992)

The image accompanying this post is of my alma mater, St. Cecilia High School, of Englewood, N.J. Nearly a quarter-century ago, it, like hundreds of other Catholic schools, succumbed to changing demographics and increasingly unfavorable financial trends that have dramatically transformed the Church in the United States over the past four decades.

Over 1,300 parochial schools have closed since 1990 alone, with 300,000 students displaced, according to a fine piece by John DiLulio Jr. in the November 9, 2009 issue of America Magazine. (St. Cecilia’s Interparochial School—the elementary school--thankfully, remains open, for those of my readers who are wondering.)

Tomorrow marks the 125th anniversary of the beginning of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, the largest assemblage of Roman Catholic bishops, I have read, since the Council of Trent in the 16th century. The Plenary Council met for a month to pass measures related to a host of issues, including youth, doctrine, the role of secret societies, and music in worship. But one-fourth of their measures dealt with education.

It’s a fair bet to say that St. Cecilia’s—and its counterparts in parishes all over the country—wouldn’t have come into being at all if not for its blunt debates and prayerful deliberations.

For probably the next 90 years, down to when I passed through the parochial school system, the life of just about every American Roman Catholic was affected by the convocation that met in Baltimore’s Basilica of the Assumption. If you yourself did not pass through the schools, someone crucial in your life—a parent or parish priest—had. Moreover, as I will argue presently, the vitality of parishes often drew on the need to operate the schools.

But I doubt if anyone, outside of clergy or church historians, realizes all that transpired 125 years ago in Baltimore.

Above all, the growth of the parochial school system assumed irresistible momentum because of what was decided there. Bishop Edward Fitzgerald’s viewpoint, quoted above, was by no means a solitary one in this group. These days, with a thousand and one financial pressures impinging on the Church and its prelates, it’s also one you’re bound to hear voiced far more often than ever before.

I recommend DiLulio’s short piece, entitled “The Five M’s,” which prescribes the elements needed to preserve the 7,250 parochial schools still in existence: “mission, market, money, millennial and miracle.”

CCD, the straw that the American hierarchy has grasped, was supposed to provide at least a stopgap measure in transmitting Catholic values. At best, it’s been an imperfectly implemented noble experiment; at worst, it threatens to reduce the understanding of Catholic youth about their religion to the rough state of affairs that obtained when Archbishop John Hughes of New York set about building New York’s parochial school system in the 1840s.

One half of the difficulties facing Hughes is embodied in the one-sentence rejection of the larger native-born American Protestant population recalled by succeeding generations of Irish-American Catholics: “No Irish need apply”—crisp verbal shorthand evoking the hostile environment awaiting immigrants in the 1840s. But the other half of the problems stemmed from the lack of actual knowledge the new immigrants possessed of their faith--ignorance that would make them prey to proselytizers in their new land.

Hughes, writes novelist-essayist Peter Quinn, understandably strove to equip his churches with “the discipline and organization needed to survive in a hostile and brutally competitive environment.” When the New York state government stiff-armed his calls for aid to Catholic schools and greater respect for the sensibilities of Catholic students, he set about, with all the considerable energy this church chieftain could muster, building a separate school system for the children of his flock.

The Third Plenary Council, meeting some 20 years after Hughes’ death, pushed to the forefront the movement he spearheaded, through these measures:

* calling for the establishment of parish schools;
* setting out the pastor’s obligation for these'
* detailing the parish’s obligation to support these schools;
* obliging parents to send their children to Catholic schools.

Even in the best of times, this last requirement was never really filled. At a point when parishes could still rely on low-cost nuns to operate parochial schools, probably no more than one-third of Catholic parents sent their children there. Still, it’s inconceivable that the parochial school system—part of the larger network of church institutions parallel in those years to those in secular society—could have assumed the dimensions it eventually did without those decrees.

Is it really such a surprise that knowledge of key Church teachings can vary dramatically from students exposed several hours a day, several days a week versus those in a program lasting only about an hour, with uncertain ongoing commitments from student and even parents?

According to the 1977 post-Vatican II document from the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education (SCCE), L’Ecole Catholique (The Catholic School): “The integration of faith and life is part of a lifelong process of conversion until the pupil becomes what God wishes him to be. Young people have to be taught to share their personal lives with God. They are to overcome their individualism and discover, in the light of faith, their specific vocation to live responsibly in a group with others.”

Ah, there’s the rub—that implicit rebuke to “individualism,” perhaps the dominant philosophical strain of American life, one that, if anything, has only gathered gale force since the 1960s.

The SCCE is shrewd in taking note of that tendency, but in other ways, I think, this document remains wanting. There is this sentence, for instance: “From the economic point of view the position of very many Catholic schools has improved and in some countries is perfectly acceptable.” I’m not sure which countries the authors had in mind, but whatever was true in 1977 would undoubtedly have to be sharply revised now.

But there is another aspect of Catholic schools that the report, in its laudable focus on the effect on youth, shortchanges: the impact on the larger faith community.

Pastors may understandably groan at the economic burden of a Catholic school (after all, they didn’t become priests to become accountants and managers), but the effort to maintain the school draws on the talents and energy of a parish in a way that nothing else can. Families come to know each other far more closely than they would otherwise.

Did Archbishop Hughes guess that when he advocated “to build the school-house first, and the church afterward”? Probably not, but it emerged as a happy consequence of his position.

Bishop Fitzgerald was unafraid to buck prevailing opinion (he was one of only two bishops to vote against the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1869), but even he came around to the need for schools under his jurisdiction. By his silver jubilee as bishop in 1892, 31 schools had been built or were under construction in the Little Rock diocese.

Nowadays, of course, so much has changed. The hostility to Catholicism so prevalent in the 19th century no longer obtains, one argument runs. Why maintain parochial schools at all, particularly when anywhere from one-fifth to one-fourth of its students are not even Catholic?

Supporters of the system—including those in the Church hierarchy—point out, rightly, that the closure of so many parochial schools will leave displaced minority students at an extreme disadvantage with so many substandard public schools. But another constituency will be—and, I believe, already has been—affected by school openings: parishes themselves.

In the future, if parishioners will need to make an overwhelming commitment in money and energy in maintaining elementary and high schools, pastors and archbishops will need to give up something of their own that may be harder to yield: autonomy in overseeing them.

Catholic schools are facing an environment of unprecedented challenges, but that does not mean they are inevitably part of the American Church’s past. That should not discourage or deter anyone. The Church has endured two millennia, but only by confronting problems with the same level of reflection, hope and courage required in this instance.

This Day in WWII History (Stalin’s James Bond Executed in Tokyo)

November 7, 1944—Thousands of miles from the eastern half of the country he had saved with critical intelligence coups, Soviet spy Richard Sorge—often considered the most important espionage agent of the 20th century—was executed in Tokyo for masterminding a ring that penetrated the highest levels of the Empire of the Rising Sun.

Executed along with the Soviet for his part in the ring was Hotsumi Ozaki, believed to be the only Japanese citizen sentenced to death during the war on treason charges.

Russians are fascinated with Sorge for obvious reasons; the Japanese, because they are still stunned that a foreigner was able to ferret out secrets from their paranoid, authoritarian government of the time. Aside from military and intelligence historians, however, Americans have not paid much attention to him.

I believe Sorge’s life and career merit more extensive attention, because a) it answers a number of questions on how WWII worked out the way it did, and b) one of his chief contacts was an American woman who was charged—controversially at the time, credibly in retrospect—with being a foreign operative.

Ian Fleming once said that the spy he created, James Bond, had nothing on the real-life adventures of British operative Sidney Reilly. I would argue that Sorge’s career was even more consequential than Reilly’s.

There is the astounding nature of the secrets he passed along to Stalin, for instance:

* He not only predicted that Adolf Hitler would violate the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact by invading the U.S.S.R., but predicted when this would occur.

* He predicted that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.

* He predicted that, instead of pushing toward Siberia, Japan would move south, toward French Indo-China.

In his professional capacity, Sorge slipped as easily across geographic borders as identities. In fact, the two were linked. Though born in 1895 in Azerbaijan—at the time, part of Czarist Russian—he was the child of a cross-national marriage between a Russian woman and her German mining engineer husband.

What was not permeable was Sorge’s devotion to Communism. Though some might argue it was practically his birthright (an uncle served as secretary to Karl Marx), he became devoted to the cause in earnest during the closing days of WWI, when forced convalescence because of a war wound while fighting for Germany led him to read the works of Mark more seriously.

While still a German national, Sorge joined the Comintern (Communist Party International). By 1930, he made his way to Shanghai, where, under cover as an editor for the German publication Frankfurter Zeitung, he was actually gathering intelligence for a planned Communist revolution. There, he made the acquaintance of future conspirator Ozaki through a mutual acquaintance: Agnes Smedley, an American journalist, novelist, feminist—and triple agent.

Yes, triple agent. Smedley started out working for Indian nationalists before moving on to Soviet Communists, then Chinese Communists. In Shanghai, she supplied Sorge—normally skeptical of the value of female operatives—with detailed information on Japanese and German military intentions and capabilities. She also began a romantic relationship with him.

Now, this sounds like James Bond stuff. So does the rest of his life from here on: After a short time spent re-establishing contacts in Berlin for the sake of his cover story, he was transferred to Japan, where Ozaki—not just a public intellectual but a friend of Japan's premier—started supplying him with documents about the regime. For good measure, Sorge slept with the wife of the German ambassador.

All of this sounds like heady stuff. But, as W. Somerset Maugham noted in his semi-autobiographical fictional work on his own spying career, Ashenden: “The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless."

Think of the time spent away from home. Think of all the time spent hand-holding some of the most miserable pieces of humanity, people willing to sell out their country for the sake of money, women, or just simply revenge.

Sorge had additional frustrations. That war injury, for instance, bothered him enough that he took to drinking to get over it. That, in turn—combined with anxiety about escaping the attention of authorities—led him to behavior that became increasingly erratic, such as riding around wildly drunk on the streets of Tokyo late at night on his motorcycle.

Ultimately, it wasn’t this that tripped him up, however, but the manner in which he transmitted his messages. According to Ruth Price’s The Lives of Agnes Smedley, the former mentor-lover of the American began using his transmitter too frequently. Japanese intelligence got wind of it, captured and arrested Sorge and Ozaki, grilled them incessantly about their work (in the course of which Sorge disclosed that Smedley was “a member of the Comintern headquarters staff”), and possibly tortured them before putting them to death.

Stalincouldn’t comment on Sorge’s situation, but he’d learned at last to appreciate his agent's tidbits of information. It wasn’t always this way. In June, faced with mounting hints from military associates that Hitler might invade the Soviet Union, Stalin disagreed:

“There’s this bastard who’s set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June. Are you suggesting I should believe him, too?”

The "bastard"--Sorge--turned out to be right, of course. Stalin still didn’t automatically accept Sorge’s report about Japanese troop movements, but this time he confirmed it with a local operative. That enabled the Soviet dictator to redeploy troops to counter Hitler’s thrust into the Russian interior.

Stalin even passed on Sorge’s tip about Pearl Harbor to American intelligence. Unfortunately, American defense chiefs didn’t believe him, so the report never got in the hands of U.S. commanders in the Pacific.

The full nature of Sorge's exploits weren't revealed until 20 years after his death, when he was declared a hero of the Soviet Union. Stalin could not reveal very much during his lifetime--after all, he had disregarded the warning about Hitler's invasion, plunging his country into a horrifying mess.

As for Smedley, she died in the United Kingdom in 1950, after fleeing from the U.S. because of accusations by Major General Charles A. Willoughby that she was involved with Communist espionage. For years, friends such as Margaret Sanger and Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union believed her to be a martyr to red-baiting.

It wasn't until Price was researching her biography--particularly in the late 1980s, when she interviewed aging Chinese and foreign expatriates in China--that the full extent of Smedley's involvement with Sorge's ring began to be understood. The end of the Soviet empire made availability Smedley's Comintern files, furthering confirming that involvement.

Song Lyric of the Day (“Happy Days Are Here Again”)

“Happy days are here again

The skies above are clear again

So let's sing a song of cheer again

Happy days are here again.”—“Happy Days Are Here Again,” lyrics by Jack Yellen, music by Milton Ager (1929)

Arguably the jauntiest tune of the Great Depression was copyrighted on this date in 1929, a week and a half after the stock market had experienced its great crash. “Happy Days Are Here Again” was created by a pair of collaborators who were deeply unhappy with each other, only to see their song embraced by a country in desperate need of hope. It was almost as if America believed that, by singing that happy days had come back already, it would do so.

Jack Yellen and Milton Ager had already written “Ain’t She Sweet?”, but at this point in their relationship they weren’t exactly sweet on each other. They thought they had wrapped up work already on Chasing Rainbows, the kind of musical that Hollywood was embracing in its typical lemming-like fashion after a hit (in this case, The Jazz Singer), when they were told by MGM production head Irving Thalberg (the inspiration for Monroe Stahr, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon) that they needed to come up with another song.

Yellen and Ager dashed off this ditty in a half hour, ensuring that they’d see as little as possible of each other. After all that, the studio deep-sixed Chasing Rainbows for several years, it was so bad. But the songwriters decided to make lemon out of lemonade.

George Olson tried it out with his orchestra on Black Thursday, when the stock market shook to its foundations. To his amazement, diners at the Hotel Pennsylvania began singing along (albeit sardonically) with the vocalist.

A few days later, on Black Tuesday, the Casa Loma Orchestra recorded it at the OKeh recording studio on Union Square in New York. Two miles to the south, on Wall Street, stockbrokers were losing their minds and ordinary Americans their life savings.

Yellen and Ager’s hit became the theme song for the 1932 Presidential campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Of the two major-party candidates, FDR (in the accompanying photo, in a characteristic pose of the time) was the one more temperamentally suited to employ it.

President Herbert Hoover (or, as H.L. Mencken termed him, “Lord Hoover”) was the last person who could have used this song—and not just because the economy cratered on his watch. As a relentlessly methodical engineer, he was utterly humor-challenged. The only place he ever looked happy was in a stream, fishing.

In contrast, FDR understood the implicit appeal of the song: a willing suspension of disbelief. After his devastating bout with polio, perpetuating the illusion of vigor was how he functioned at all in politics. Sure, people had read about his struggle, but his aides ensured (with the help of a respectful, even quiescent, press) that photos of him in a wheelchair would be rare.

Before he could grow the economy, he had to urge Americans to act with the same confidence he displayed, against all rational belief.

I’m sure that some Republican President, at some time since then, has become associated with a popular song (after all, Eisenhower and Nixon were advised by such shrewd media advisers as the actor Robert Montgomery and Roger Ailes, future ringmaster of Fox News). But for the life of me, I can’t think of one right now.

Aides to several Democratic Presidents, on the other hand, have shrewdly chosen campaign themes for their bosses:

* “High Hopes,” for John F. Kennedy (no doubt with input from Frank Sinatra, who sang the Sammy Cahn-Jimmy Van Heusen Oscar-winning song in the Frank Capra film, A Hole in the Head, then performed it again, with slightly rewritten lyrics by the composers, for his good friend).
* “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” for Bill Clinton, even though, according to the President’s speechwriter (and—full disclosure!—my college friend) Mike Waldman, in his memoir POTUS Speaks, many on the staff didn’t like the Fleetwood Mac tune.
* “Inside of You” was the official theme song of Barack Obama’s campaign, but I’m more partial to “The Rising” and “Working on a Dream,” by Bruce Springsteen. (I can’t see how any future President can improve on a tune by The Boss, can you?)