Month: August 2021

Don’t Forget Your Hat

Hats as an essential item of masculine apparel have disappeared so thoroughly that we have forgotten they used to be essential. For many centuries, a man simply did not appear outdoors without a hat. I was reminded of how essential hats were while reading Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s account of his near brush with assassination after the Whiskey Rebellion.

“However, the danger was greater than I had imagined; that night, about eleven o’clock, I was to have been assassinated. The troops had advanced within 20 yards of my door, when an officer, who had been apprised of their intention, and in vain laboured to dissuade them, having run to general Morgan, who was in the house of Neville the younger, and not gone to bed, gave him information. The general and the colonel ran out without their hats, and the general opposing himself to the fury of the troops, said, ‘That it must be through him they would reach me;’ that I had stood my ground; would be cognizable by the judiciary; and let the law take its course.”1

The general and the colonel were in such a hurry that they ran out without their hats. This is how you know it was a desperate emergency. Nothing less would have caused them to neglect their hats, even in the middle of the night.

As late as the 1950s, it was still usual for men to appear hatted outdoors. When George Burns and Gracie Allen moved their show from radio to television, they added a running gag in which men were so flummoxed by Gracie that they would run out of the house without their hats. “Oh! He left his hat,” Gracie would say. “Well, he’ll be back for it.” Then she would open a closet that was filled from floor to ceiling with hats and deposit one more in the collection.

So for anyone who is writing a historical novel, or designing the costumes for a period piece in the theater or movies, here is useful advice: Don’t let your male characters appear outdoors without their hats. They would be terribly embarrassed if you did.

How Will Hays Will Save Motion Pictures

Cartoon by Pittsburgh’s Cy Hungerford, 1922.

In 1922, Will Hays was hired as chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, at a princely salary, with the idea that his political connections would help the movies through the minefield of censorship that was hampering them. Local censorship boards had been set up everywhere, each one full of quirky moralists whose eccentric opinions became law to the industry, so that the same film had to be edited a different way in every jurisdiction. How would Will Hays tackle that intractable difficulty? Since Hays had been Postmaster General and chairman of the Republican National Committee, he was a force to reckon with, and bringing him to the movie business created exactly the right impression: the movies were serious about addressing the problem of clean entertainment, and might be trusted to censor themselves.

We, of course, know how Hays instituted that self-censorship; and, much as movie historians deplore the Hays Code, it had the intended effect. It replaced an impossible hydra of censorship with one uniform standard that made it possible to produce pictures for a national audience. It is interesting, therefore, to see the speculations a movie magazine made at the beginning of Hays’ tenure. At least one of this article’s predictions seems definitely to have come true: “Motion pictures are now wearing their first pair of long pants; in the near future, with the able help of Will Hays, we will not know this infant prodigy in the full maturity of its strength and accomplishment.” When we think of the movies made fifteen or twenty years later under the Hays Code—Citizen Kane, The Philadelphia Story, The Wizard of Oz, The Maltese Falcon, and dozens more you could surely name with a moment’s thought—we must admit that motion pictures had indeed reached the full maturity of their strength and accomplishment.

WILL HAYS?

The motion picture industry passed out of its swaddling clothes by its acquisition of the service of Will Hayes for a period of the next three years.

Mr. Hays, the youthful president maker, and head of the greatest distributing business in the world, Uncle Sam’s mails, brings to the business a capacity for organization that augurs well for the future. His salary will be the tidy sum of $150,000 per annum and while the enemies and self-appointed critics of the industry will make capital of this fact, political and otherwise, by comparison with the salaries of other capable men, it is safe to say that every cent will be earned in this job of coordinating the interests now so widely at variance in a business whose gross turnover per annum is a billion dollars and constitutes the fourth industry in size in the country.

Speculation is rife as to how Mr. Hays will function in his new office; in short, what he will do to improve present deplorable conditions that offer so many opportunities for prejudiced and unfounded attacks on both the people and the products of the industry and how he will do it.

The facts of the situation are that the leading producers and other principals of the business who, in the words of one of them, “have been working at cross purposes and cutting each other’s throats for years” have come together in a friendly arrangement and set up a form of organization similar to that employed by nearly every large industry in existence; namely, a national association which will function like a Chamber of Commerce or National Bankers’ Association. On the larger aspects of the business which effect the weal or woe of all its members, this body with Will Hays as its presiding head will be the court of last resort.

May he find strength to combat and overcome the influence both within and without the industry which today makes [im]possible1 the full realization of the potentialities of the films as a source of clean amusement and a means of popular education.

Motion pictures are now wearing their first pair of long pants; in the near future, with the able help of Will Hays, we will not know this infant prodigy in the full maturity of its strength and accomplishment.

• • •

Legal censorship is already affecting motion pictures in a way that is handicapping the production of good films. Producers throughout the country are buying stories of the most insipid type solely because the cost of screening a comedy or drama even in a most modest way, means the expenditure of many thousands of dollars. With money more than difficult to obtain, no company is able to risk any appreciable sum on pictures which may be utterly ruined by a board of censors whose knowledge is wholly alien to the screen and whose rulings are actuated at times by excessive and almost unbelievable prudery and love of notoriety.

Many standard works have been changed almost beyond recognition simply because producers have feared the result of the censorial imagination and have therefore refrained from presenting scenes vitally necessary to the shadowing of a picture true to life.

It is certain that censorship of this type cannot in any way be conducive to the production of really worthwhile entertainment.

Only by portraying life as it is can the screen hope to progress. If that right is denied the screen cannot survive the mediocrity, banality and artificiality that assails it.

For purposes of self-preservation, the producer is bound to protect himself against loss. Therefore, the public will be the loser. Your favorite theatre will show more and more meaningless stories and your favorite story will come to the silversheet absolutely devoid of the interest it formerly held for you, You can read that same story in print—you can see it on the speaking stage but you can’t spend twenty-five cents at your neighborhood house and see it on the screen.

——Silverscreen, March 30, 1922.

  1. The hurried writer wrote “possible,” but almost certainly meant “impossible.” ↩

What Charles Anthon Looked Like to His Students

An earlier version of this article appeared in Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.

The great classical scholar Charles Anthon had much to do with the high standards of learning in nineteenth-century American universities. His textbooks on the ancient languages were widely admired, and the proof of their utility may be found in the fact that many professors resented them for making the students’ work too easy. Dr. Anthon is also famous in Mormon lore as the Columbia professor who was shown a transcribed “Egyptian” inscription from the Golden Plates and pronounced it a hoax, which has been interpreted in Mormon history as “authenticating” it.

The most famous portrait of Anthon is the one by Mathew Brady:

But here is a previously unknown original portrait from life of the great Dr. Anthon. It has lain undiscovered for a century and a half among the never-circulated books in a university library, but there is good evidence for its authenticity:

The image was found on the dedication page of The Elements of Greek Grammar, by R. Valpy, with additions by C. Anthon. What is our evidence that this is a portrait from life? The book was donated to the University of California in 1873; before that, it had formed part of the library of Dr. Francis Lieber, Professor of History and Law in Columbia College, New York. Since the volume itself is the 1847 edition of a very-often-reprinted work, and since it is the sort of book one would purchase as a student, but not as a professor of law and history (who presumably has already been through his first year of Greek), we may reasonably assume that it belonged to young Francis Lieber when he was a student at that same college, where he would have seen Dr. Anthon every day. Note his elaborately juvenile signature on the same page. The chain of evidence is strong. This is very probably Charles Anthon as he actually appeared to his students.

Was Lady Lytton Insane?

“In 1827,” says Wikipedia’s article on Rosina Bulwer Lytton, “she married Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a novelist and politician. Their marriage broke up, and he falsely accused her of insanity and had her detained in an insane asylum, which provoked a public outcry.”

That the accusation was false is presented as fact, as it usually is when the story of the Lyttons is told. I’ve always accepted it as fact—but now I’ve just read some of Lady Lytton’s own writing.

Without attempting to rehabilitate the personal reputation of Lord Lytton (under any of his constantly shifting names), we can at least suggest that the story is more interesting than the cad-abuses-innocent-woman tale we have heard. The husband was a cad, and probably abusive. But in her own writings, we can see a great deal about the wife. We recognize the type. If she were alive today, she would have a Web site, and there would be twenty thousand words on the front page alone, the entire text centered, in all colors and sizes and bold and italic and underlined and capitals and bold italic underlined capitals and blinking. She has nearly achieved that effect in print in the preface to Very Successful!, a novel first published in 1856—two years before she was committed to the asylum. Like the conspiracy theorist’s Web site, it is full of personal insults, pun-filled name-calling, and vast conspiracies at the highest levels of government against Lady Lytton personally.

There is no question that Edward Bulwer-Lytton (“Bombastes,” as his wife calls him, which will be the name by which I remember him from now on) was a rotten husband. But after reading this preface, I think any candid observer will say that his wife was not normal. In many ways she was brilliant. She had an education that was probably superior to her husband’s, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. But—especially considering that there were no proper scientific standards for measuring insanity—I can’t say that a doctor who declared her insane would have been making an unreasonable diagnosis.

She writes narrative the way she writes prefaces, by the way, with long digressions and barely controlled rage. This would make her novels much more entertaining than the average cheap fiction of her day, and we can understand how the many readers she had entertained were outraged by her husband’s behavior.

NOTICE

TO THOSE WHO WILL UNDERSTAND IT

The job of going all lengths to abuse this work and its Author, in short, of translating right into wrong, and of perverting white into black, is reserved to “My Grandmother’s Gazette, The Literary,” “The Assinæum,” “No Quarterly” or “New Quarterly,” or whatever that leaden production is called, and the other especial myrmidons of that Literary Inquisition, “The GUILT of Literature,” to whom writing scurrilous ANONYMOUS letters to the Author, purporting to be from “Influential Reviewers” (?) is also stringently restricted. For the abuse of such animalculi, the Author is most grateful, as criticism, or what is called such, really does possess Epictetus’s two handles. For example, Scaliger cites the fourth book of Horace as execrable, and Heinsius quotes it as one of the master-pieces of antiquity! Ainsi, consolons nous, quand même? for

“Pulchrum est accusari, ab accusandis.”
[“It’s lovely to be accused by the accusable.”]

All the Author hopes is, that it may turn out to be the same gang of male and female Infamies employed before by the great Literary Bombastes, in the too blackguardly Llangollen Conspiracy, (of which there are such reams of proofs, and such clouds of witnesses,) who have again been employed by him, to feloniously obtain her papers from Lord Lyndhurst’s porter; as she is only awaiting the result of the pretended investigation through the “Circumlocution Office,” and of the Post Office Prig Master General being back-staired a leetle deeper in the affair, to make public the whole of this last iniquity, so utterly disgraceful to all concerned in it, whether as pretended dupes, or cognisant accomplices, as this phase of the dastardly and permanent conspiracy with which she has to contend, once exposed—the rest must naturally follow past the power of perjury or puffery to refute, or of cant and conventionality to vituperate, great as those two bulwarks of vice are in English society. For there is a point of persecution and oppression beyond which even a woman’s legal slave-owner is not, by the law, at least of opinion, permitted to go; or if he does, he must expect that even a wife will share the other earth-worm’s prerogative, and turn, when so trampled on, and that too, without being deterred by any fear of the additional sourdes menées of the fulminating ELOHIM of a not omnipotent, though thoroughly unprincipled, Literary clique on the one side, or those of a routed, ridiculous, disaffected, and demoralised gang of political Bashi-bazouks on the other, as from an intimate and bitter knowledge of the dregs of each, she alike despises, and defies both. But, who, say they, will defend a solitary victim against whom a phalanx of the strong, and a cohort of the “clever” unscrupulous are leagued? The answer is brief, and to them may appear feeble, but they may yet, to their confusion, live to find, that out of such weakness, when too long and too brutally trampled on, springs up a giant’s strength. Tacitus tells us, that under the simplicity of Agricola the Romans failed to discover the great man; and in like manner, under the apparent helplessness and friendlessness of their victims, tyrants often fail to discover, till it is too late, the small, still, unsuspected sources which Omnipotence converts into the flood-gates of Its Retributive Justice, and while exulting in their hitherto invulnerable armour of IMPUNITY, and tauntingly asking their victim, “Who, poor worm, will avenge you?” the worm, when they least expect it, finds a voice to name the Avenger that shall echo, trumpet-tongued through all posterity, the words—

“Moi! vous dis-je, çe moi, plus robuste que moi!”
[“Myself, I tell you, that myself that is stronger than myself!”]

It is further recommended to Bombastes, (by way of a salutary, and above all, an economical change, which has great charms for him,—a saving grace being the only one that he possesses,) that he should try to believe in God, instead of in spirit-rappers! who have already so shamefully deceived him; as they positively assured him that his victim’s death was to come off last June twelvemonths; whereas she, the semi-immortal wretch, can assure him on far better authority, that there is not the least chance (always barring accidents, or sudden good fortune, such as her brain being turned by a widow’s cap!) of her dying these thirty years. So although he has changed the venue from the Pykes and Gettings—sent to scrape acquaintance with, and administer little Palmeric anodynes to her—to spies of the he-Barnes breed, sent down to “Spread-Eagles” and other pot-houses, to make tender inquiries about her health, and ask if she is not dropsical!!! (Scarcely, considering that from Bombastes’ ceaseless conspiracies, ever since he turned his victim and his legitimate children out of their home, to make way for his then mistress, Miss L——a D——n, the munificent four hundred a year,—minus the Income-tax!!!—which he allows her from his own costly vices and superfluities, has been reduced to a hundred and eighty! so that she is compelled to write in order to meet the expenses his persecutions entail upon her,—she, having no Platonic or other pensions from any one,—which deprives her of the means of having any beverage but water, and that has never yet, even among modern discoveries, been accredited for its dropsical tendencies.)

Now, it would be far better and infinitely more prudent to curtail this terrible expense of ceaseless espionnage of the lowest and most blackguardly description, and not, in order to meet it, deduct the Income-tax from the beggarly pittance he allows his victim, and which she has always such a hard struggle to obtain. Yea, verily! this would be better and wiser, that is, more politic, than even telling those great bought-and-sold donkeys, “Free and Independent Electors;” or those bacon-fed tools, the Agriculturists, (whom it is really cruel to cram with more Bacon, though he was a lord,) that it was “that great protestant princess, Queen Elizabeth, who was the first that gave the English people the bible!” as the startling novelty of this piece of information by no means atones for its total deficiency of truth, any more than the pecuniary remuneration the “Spread-Eagle” spy may receive, will at all compensate to him for that rough handling he is likely to meet with if he persists in his honorable mission; as the place where his victim now is, being, as it were, a penal settlement, where Assizes are held and Judges congregate, there are many there, determined vigorously to expose any continuation of this dastardly, dirty work. Let Bombastes be warned, then, in time, and let him remember that “Furor fit læsâ, sæpius patientia” [“Patience too often abused turns to rage”] and exposure is the only defence against, or cure for, such dastardly villainy,—a villainy, which to those who are neither silly Misses, nor unprincipled Profligates, may certainly be easily accounted for, but will scarcely be excused by that bundle of bare-faced plagiarisms, steeped in brothel-philosophy, which he calls his works!