November 15, 2005
The Golden Age of Jurisprudence Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:25 AM EST Being a judge wasn’t always a glamorous job. Denis Tilden Lynch, in his 1929 biography of Martin Van Buren (An Epoch and a Man), describes the conditions in rural New York in the early nineteenth century, when Van Buren was starting out as a lawyer: “Minor actions were tried before justices of the peace, who generally held court in a tavern; and here the blindfolded goddess functioned in most primitive fashion. . . . A bottle of whiskey was usually on the table of counsel ‘to be used as the trial progressed, whenever it should be necessary to solve an intricate question.’ Levi Beardsley, a distinguished counsel of the day, and the one-time President of the New York State Senate . . . recalls a sitting where ‘a crowd assembled, and as usual, took sides with the parties; but in this instance, were nearly unanimous for one of the parties, and in opposition to the justice, who, they thought, favored the wrong party.’ During the trial, some of the spectators, who were drinking ‘freely at the bar of the county tavern,’ resolved that they would show their contempt for judicial authority in a manner to make the judge the laughing stock of the county if he rendered a verdict in keeping with his unjust rulings. He did. “After court adjourned, those who had drunk long and copiously formed a circle around his honor, and ‘commenced urinating on him from every direction.’ When this unpopular judge realized what was happening to him [our editor, Richard F. Snow, asks: “How long could this have taken?”] ‘he set up an outcry and escaped from the crowd, but brought actions of assault and battery against the perpetrators, which in due time the defendants settled, by paying costs and making suitable amends to the distinguished jurist.’”
November 11, 2005
The Best and Wurst Street Food Posted by Claire Lui at 02:15 PM EST Last night I attended the first annual Vendy Awards, which recognized the best street food in New York. The event also served as a benefit for the Street Vendor Project, whose mission is to advance economic justice and civil rights for street vendors. (First, full disclosure. My boyfriend, Adam Kuban of Slice, a pizza blog, was one of the judges.) As someone who has always been a fearless street eater, ignoring the wimpy and fearful protests of my weaker-stomached friends, I loved tasting the chow of the four finalists: the Best Halal, Dosa Man, the Dragon, and Hallo Berlin, all cooking their goodies out of their carts in a long, narrow warehouse. And eating my chicken sausage (little mustard, no ketchup, $4 from Hallo Berlin) and drinking my guava juice ($1.25 from Dosa Man), I started thinking about how anonymous cart vendors are. Often we refer to them by their product rather than by name (“Oh, the kebab guy on the corner is good”), a symptom of the fast-food quality of our lives and meals. Though many of the cart vendors have an encyclopedic memory of their regular customer orders, I suspect that they too remember us, their customers, with mnemonics, such as: “Annoying brunette likes tea with milk, no sugar,” or “Ugly sweater guy likes his chili with no cheese.” I have a standing order at almost every cart where I eat with any regularity, and I wonder how much neighborhood knowledge and gossip is contained within the minds of the various cart vendors. Unsurprisingly, these observers of our daily eating habits are almost always immigrants and have been for centuries. Nancy Ralph, another one of the judges and director of the New York Food Museum pointed out that the first street vendors in New York were probably Germans who sold hot potatoes from carts beginning as early as the 1640s. Later, in the 1800s, oysters were sold raw and freshly picked off the shore, a delicacy today that was then considered nothing more than a pedestrian staple. Ralph mentioned that during the 1880s in New York, almost 800 million oysters were processed annually, making them the nineteenth-century equivalent of today’s pretzel or flabby hot dog. Today, New York is one of just a handful of American cities (Philadelphia’s lunch trucks with their hoagies and cheese steaks come to mind) where one can choose from a varied selection of street food. With our large pedestrian population, New York is probably the ideal American metropolis for selling the street foods so popular in other countries. (Even Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the impresario of fancy restaurants, embraces street food with Spice Market, his restaurant that serves upscale variations of Asian street foods. Appetizers there can cost a whopping $14, ideal for street-food lovers who wish to munch in a more genteel environment rather than loitering next to a fire hydrant.) Unsurprisingly, these men, like many street-food sellers of yore, struggle with heavy ticket fines for legal infractions and the pressure to keep selling enough food to turn a profit no matter what the weather. After the announcement of the winner (Hallo Berlin, aka the Wurst Street Cart, beat out the other three contestants by two points to claim the trophy), the event took on a distinctively union flavor, with instructions that we all hold hands and yell “Vendor Power!” and “Si se puede!” (“Yes, we can”), giving the thing a Norma Rae-esque vibe. All in all, an interesting event, and a reminder that street foods represent so much of American history in each bite. Someone said to me recently, “For each new immigrant group, the language is the first to go, and the food is the last.” Street vendors bring a taste of home to recent immigrants while introducing new foods to the American vernacular. Who knows? Just as yesterday’s oysters became today’s hot dogs, tomorrow’s dosas will give way to something still unknown to the American palate.
November 10, 2005
More on TR Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:00 PM EST When Teddy Roosevelt became President, in September 1901, the dirty work in the Philippines had already been done and the resistance had largely been suppressed. (The resistance, by the way, was fighting to establish a native constitutional government, something TR resolutely refused to permit.) As detailed by Mark C. Carnes in American Heritage in September 1998, the rebellion, which had been characterized by frequent atrocities on both sides, was ended through the resourcefulness of one man, Col. Frederick Funston. Early in 1901 American troops captured a rebel courier carrying secret dispatches from Emilio Aguinaldo, the rebel leader. As Carnes writes, Funston’s "interrogation of the courier was successful. (It was later said that Funston had subjected him to the ‘water torture,’ an effective new aid to military intelligence whereby several gallons of water were forced down the throat of a suspect, whose painfully distended belly was then beaten with logs. Funston would say only that he had interrogated the courier ‘forcefully.’) For whatever reasons, the courier confirmed that Aguinaldo had written the dispatches and revealed that Aguinaldo’s secret redoubt was at Palanan, an inaccessible village in remote Luzon." When decoded, the dispatches showed that Aguinaldo expected the courier to send reinforcements. So Funston dressed some pro-American locals in rebel uniforms, disguised himself and other American officers as captured prisoners, and got the party admitted to Aguinaldo’s camp. At an opportune moment, they pulled out weapons and started firing, grabbed the rebel general, and carried him to a waiting Navy vessel. Carnes continues: "Weeks later, after being subjected to intense pressure from U.S. military officials, Aguinaldo renounced the Filipino revolution, swore allegiance to the United States, and called on his followers to do likewise. Most did, and the Philippine-American war was over." And what was the reaction of Vice-President Roosevelt to Funston’s adventure? "I take pride in this crowning exploit of a career filled with feats of cool courage, iron endurance and gallant daring."
November 9, 2005
An Exclusive Interview with the Un-Famous One Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 03:00 PM EST With two months to go before Morrow publishes our book, I am getting nervous about plans for a book tour. So far I haven’t heard a thing. The book is Parish Priest, a biography of Father Michael McGivney. The coauthors are Douglas Brinkley and me. Doug is famous, you see, and rightly so, with two bestsellers of late, Tour of Duty, which is about John Kerry, and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, which is about D-Day. He is also on television quite often as a commentator. I’m not quite as famous, I admit. Though I do command a certain following at the DeWitt, New York, Barnes & Noble. Last Friday I called the publicity person at the publishing house. He confirmed that there indeed are plans to send Doug to a couple of cities. He said there are no plans to send me anywhere. I am not at all certain he knows who I am. Not even the DeWitt Barnes & Noble. It’s only a quarter-mile from my house. I could walk there, if it would save the company expense money. A person who does not have a complex could get a complex. Albeit, Doug is more famous than I am. Granted, he’s nicer, too. But I can contribute something to publicity. One time at a book-convention signing party, I had a longer line than Roger Ebert. Doesn’t that count for something? I telephoned our literary agent today and tried to cheer myself up by asking about the full-page ads that are planned for The New York Times and other big papers. It always does my heart good to think about those. I am going to have them framed and put up on the wall. I shall be immortal in my guestroom. What a coincidence: The agent had just seen the dummies for the ads, so he told me. They forgot to include my name.
November 9, 2005
Nonsense on Stilts, Part III Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:40 PM EST The third item on our list of historical magic acts concerns Alger Hiss. He occasioned some discussion here a couple of weeks ago, as a sidelight to a news story that seemed important at the time. The immediate question had to do with whether Hiss was the Soviet agent known as "Ales" in some decrypted messages. David Lowenthal, carrying on an argument begun by his late brother John, says that Hiss was not Ales; you can scroll down on this blog for a link to his paper. Others, notably John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, say that Hiss was Ales. You can read a brief summary of their argument at http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Articles/
Professors%20of%20Denial.htm and some more recent notes on the case at http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page43.html (see the last few links) I will freely admit that I don’t know anywhere near enough about this particular question to support or oppose either side on the facts. Their arguments are full of sentences like "The new KI not only combined the human intelligence arms of the former MGB and GRU, it also combined the MGB’s Fifth (cipher) Directorate with the GRU’s cipher arm to form the Seventh Department of the KI" and "There are 92 names in five clusters––the so-called ‘Karl’, ‘Redhead’, ‘Tambourine’ or ‘Buben’, ‘Sound–Myrna’, and ‘Berg’–’Art’ groups." I would just as soon try to resolve a dispute between two astrophysicists. Anyone who wishes to wade through all the documents is welcome to do so. For the rest of us it’s a matter of which historian or group of historians you trust more. And on that score it’s worth noting that John Lowenthal, David’s brother, who performed most of the research on which David’s paper is founded, was a longtime Hiss acolyte who had even acted as his lawyer. As late as 1980 he made a film that asserted Hiss’s innocence, and by all accounts he went to his grave still believing in it. Here see yet another example of the historian’s license to assume away inconvenient facts. You don’t need the Venona transcripts to know that Hiss was a Communist spy. You don’t need the decades of evidence accumulated by historians since he was exposed. All you need is the prothonotary warbler and the pumpkin papers to know that Hiss was a lying sack of garbage. In fact, the warbler alone is enough for that. As I say, it’s still possible that the Lowenthal boys are correct and Ales was not Hiss. A stopped clock is right twice a day and a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while and all that. To be sure, the historians on both sides know lots more about this case than I do. But Jerry Falwell knows a lot more about the Bible than I do, yet that doesn’t compel me to accept his interpretation. For those of us without the time to spend learning Russian and poring over archives, it comes down to which side you trust. For me, John Lowenthal’s high-handed lifelong dismissal of something that is blindingly obvious to any rational person calls his judgment and impartiality into serious question. So I know which side my money is on.
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