January 23 is the anniversary of the North Koreans‘ capture of the spy boat, U.S.S. Pueblo, in 1968 — a beginning of a momentous year for bad events. The saga of the Pueblo and its crew, including especially Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher, is of special interest to me because it features a series of some of the grandest, best and most humorously American hoaxes ever perpetrated by imprisoned people against their captors and wardens. This is one of the great Kilroy stories of American history. It should not be forgotten. Especially with the role North Korea plays in contemporary angst, the Pueblo episode should not be forgotten. This is an encore post, with new links added.
1968 brought one chunk of bad news after another to Americans. The year seemed to be one long, increasingly bad disaster. In several ways it was the mark of the times between the feel-good, post-war Eisenhower administration and the feel-good-despite-the-Cold-War Reagan administration. 1968 was depressing.
USN Cmdr. Lloyd M. Bucher (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
What was so bad? Vietnam manifested itself as a quagmire. Just when Washington politicians predicted an end in sight, Vietcong militia launched a nationwide attack in South Vietnam on the Vietnamese New Year holiday, Tet, at the end of January. Civil rights gains stalled, and civil rights leaders came out in opposition to the Vietnam war. President Johnson fared poorly in the New Hampshire primary election, and eventually dropped out of the race for the presidency (claiming he needed to devote time to making peace in Vietnam). Labor troubles roiled throughout the U.S., including a nasty strike by garbage collectors in Memphis. It didn’t help to settle the strike that the sanitation workers were almost 100% African American, the leadership of Memphis was almost 100% white, and race relations in the city were not so good as they might have been – the strike attracted the efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – who was assassinated there in early April. In response, riots broke out in 150 American cities.
It’s not exactly a hoax. It started out as just bad reporting of history.
In his search for an easier route from Spain to China, in which he stumbled into the Americas, Christopher Columbus knew with certainty the Earth is a round ball. The story that he proved the Earth round, or rather than he laid the foundations for Magellan to prove the Earth round, is only a story, mostly devoid of fact. Sailors knew something was up just from their having watched things while sailing on the ocean. One can deduce the ball shape of the planet by watching other ships as they sail away, and sink below the horizon. Were sailors of a more scientific bent, they could have made much of the fact that the guy in the crow’s nest could see a ship moving away — or an island or a continent — for a time longer than those a few dozen feet below, on the deck of the ship.
Long before that a Greek librarian and polymath, Eratosthenes, figured out that the surface of the Earth is curved, deduced that the planet is basically a ball, and calculated very closely how big the ball is, merely by noting the different shadows cast by the sun at the Spring/Vernal Equinox. Carl Sagan used this story way back in his famous PBS series, Cosmos. It’s still interesting, informative and instructive today (surely Texas 9th grade geography teachers use this example all the time, no? 9th grade math teachers? Say, what?).
How did he do it? Wikipedia — as usual — has a good, relatively lay explanation:
Bathtub Art Figure 1: Eratosthenes’ measurement of the Earth’s circumference.
Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth without leaving Egypt. Eratosthenes knew that, on the summer solstice, at local noon in the Ancient Egyptian city of Swenet (known in Greek as Syene, and in the modern day as Aswan) on the Tropic of Cancer, the sun would appear at the zenith, directly overhead (he had been told that the shadow of someone looking down a deep well would block the reflection of the Sun at noon). Using a gnomon, he measured the sun’s angle of elevation at noon on the solstice in his hometown of Alexandria, and found it to be 1/50th of a circle (7°12′) south of the zenith. Assuming that the Earth was spherical (360°), and that Alexandria was due north of Syene, he concluded that the meridian arc distance from Alexandria to Syene must therefore be 1/50 = 7°12’/360°, and was therefore 1/50 of the total circumference of the Earth. His knowledge of the size of Egypt after many generations of surveying trips for the Pharaonic bookkeepers gave a distance between the cities of 5,000 stadia (about 500 geographical miles or 927.7 km). This distance was corroborated by inquiring about the time that it takes to travel from Syene to Alexandria by camel. He rounded the result to a final value of 700 stadia per degree, which implies a circumference of 252,000 stadia. The exact size of the stadion he used is frequently argued. The common Attic stadion was about 185 m,[9] which would imply a circumference of 46,620 km, which is off the actual circumference by 16.3%; too large an error to be considered as ‘accurate’. However, if we assume that Eratosthenes used the “Egyptian stadion”[10] of about 157.5 m, his measurement turns out to be 39,690 km, an error of less than 2%.[11]
Description of Bathtub Art Figure 1:
Syene () is located on the Tropic of Cancer, so that at summer solstice the sun appears at the zenith, directly overhead. In Alexandria () the sun is south of the zenith at the same time. So the circumference of earth can be calculated being times the distance between and .
Erastothenes measured the angle to be 1/50 of a circle and his access to knowledge of the size of Egypt gave a north/south distance between Alexandria and Syene of 5000 stadia. His circumference of the Earth was therefore 250 000 stadia. Certain accepted values of the length of the stadia in use at the time give an error of less than 6% for the true value for the polar circumference.
Tropic of Cancer sign in Western Sahara, placed by trans-Sahara racers, in English and Hungarian Photo: Wikipedia
A fun little exercise, but a remarkable achievement for anyone about 240 years before the birth of of the Biblical Jesus. Syene, now known as Aswan, is on what we now call the Tropic of Cancer (the “tropics” were named by the Greeks, but I am uncertain whether the line had that name in Eratosthenes’s time). The date is probably not important, so much as the observation that the sun was vertical at noon on a given date — and then Eratosthenes’s experiment to see whether that were true in Alexandria, and then his understanding of what that might mean and his work to assemble the data to make the calculations. High school students — heck, junior high school students — should be able to figure all that out today, if they had the basics down. I suspect that knowing this story would be a spur to students to learn the elements of the mystery and how it was solved, and what it might mean for later navigators of the oceans, land and air, for astronomers, for farmers and for mathematics.
I also like this story because it presents a strange conundrum, a paradox about what people know, and what they may reason from the foundation of what they know. Our friend and frequent commenter Morgan, whose blog he calls the House of Eratosthenes. I suspect he thinks himself some latter-day Eratosthenian (“Latter-day Erats?”). He says as much in his blog FAQ:
I’m just like Eratosthenes peeking into a well here, and I don’t know what it means yet.
It’s an entertaining read and more enlightening that one might think from his forays here, so you probably ought to go read the FAQ and the reasons Morgan misbelieves liberals miss out on Eratosthenes’s wisdom. Morgan has an explanation of Eratosthenes and his discoveries which I find too brief to be accurate (and I’m not sure why Morgan finds the name “Beta” to be dubious; being a polymath was not a small thing then, or now; second best in everything means one is first in the All-Around, first in the academic centathlon or millathlon — no mean set of feats at all). I find that funny because, while he makes a pretense and some effort to following Eratosthenes and scientific methods, to me he seems to find science and logic things to run away from, as in our recent discussion where he ends up defending Anthony Watts’s erroneous views because Watts’s critics didn’t link to Watts (see comments in “It’s raining crazy,” and see also Morgan’s own post, which defies explanation). Eratosthenes would find that funny, too, I hope, but not a demonstration of Eratosthenian logic and calculation.
Does anyone doubt where Carl Sagan would be in the debate between the dozen serious scientists and hundreds of political wankers who deny climate change, and the thousands of scientists and good citizens who recognize that it occurs and think we should get on with saving the future?
I hope your flag is already flying today — sun’s up in almost all the U.S.
U.S. Capitol before dawn, January 21, 2013 – flags for the Senate and House not up yet, but the historic five flags of the nation hang ready for the 2nd Inauguration of the 44th President, Barack Obama. Photo from near the Newseum (replacing earlier photo from roof of Newseum, gone into internet ether).
U.S. Capitol before dawn, January 21, 2013 — flags for the Senate and House not up yet, but the historic five flags of the nation hang ready for the 2nd Inauguration of the 44th President, Barack Obama. Photo from the roof of the Newseum.
Courtesy of the Newseum, the front page of the Miami Herald, today — featuring the Martin Luther King, Jr., monument, and the official inauguration of President Barack Obama. 40 years ago, who would have dared guess this front page in a southern newspaper?
I get earnest, interesting e-mail, too. Ben Jealous from the NAACP wrote today:
Ed,
Tomorrow, we pay homage to one of America’s most righteous defenders and promoters of civil and human rights: the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. King was an incredible man who changed the course of American history. He inspired millions to stand up in peaceful protest against discriminatory laws and fought for the greater good of all humanity.
Dr. King’s spirit lives on. After his assassination, millions of people picked up the torch and continued to fight for a better future, carrying our shared movement for social justice into the present day.
Did you take part in marches, rallies, and activist work in the 1950s and 1960s? Tell us about it. Have you heard stories about friends or family members who marched with or met Dr. King? We want to hear them.
And if, like me, you weren’t yet born in the 1960s, we want to hear from you, too. Tell us how Dr. King’s work and message has inspired you to fight for civil and human rights today.
Together, we can build a portrait of the impact Dr. King has had on NAACP supporters and America at large. I hope you’ll help us by sharing your story today:
Crowd-sourcing history. Great idea. I hope they get a great product. Why don’t you contribute?
More:
Rosa Parks with Dr. Martin Luther King jr. (ca. 1955) Mrs. Rosa Parks altered the negro progress in Montgomery, Alabama, 1955, by the bus boycott she unwillingly began. Photo from the U.S. National Archives record ID: 306-PSD-65-1882 (Box 93). Source: Ebony Magazine, via Wikipedia
Writing under the pen name Abigail Van Buren, she wrote the world’s most widely syndicated column. The daily readership grew to more than 100 million. The column is now written by her daughter, Jeanne.
What an incredible melange of history in that photo! You can read about Mrs. Phillips at the NPR site, but consider just this photograph:
“Dear Abby” which used to be regular reading in most households in the morning — literally millions of American households. She and her chief competition, “Ann Landers,” could each by herself move the nation, to change habits, to question manners, to change behaviors with vaccinations or new medical procedures, and in a few cases, move legislation through Congress. No one in newspapering or broadcast today has the clout this woman had, but rarely used. Not even Rupert Murdoch with his empire, had so much clout as Dear Abby. (Many of us were surprised to learn later that the women who wrote Dear Abby and Ask Ann Landers were twin sisters — another one of those twists in real history that no one would believe in fiction.)
Isn’t that an early IBM electric typewriter? Our local Fry’s doesn’t stock even electric typewriters anymore, nor could I find one in my last run through Staples and Office Depot (catalog sales, perhaps). IBM probably hasn’t made one 20 years, and not one like that one in at least 40 years — that is not a Selectric.
Dial telephone. Not just a land-line, but an actual, analog, dial telephone. Without seeing any identifying characteristics, we can assume that her telephone provider was the AT&T regional company — unlikely that it was Continental, the only other major provider in the U.S. at the time.
The Yellow Pagestelephone book under the phone. I think even Yellow Pages stopped printing those things; we haven’t had a good update on our white pages in years.
Newspaper syndication meant EVERYONE had access to her columns — no internet. A dime for the local paper, and you had Dear Abby.
The fountain pen in her hand, perhaps for more than just signing letters (what do you say, Office Supply Geek?).
No computer, which in addition to replacing the typewriter, would probably also replace the four-drawer file cabinet in back of her (a locking cabinet, perhaps a HON?)
Is that flowered pattern the wallpaper in the place? They don’t make orchid wallpaper like that any more.
Look at that stack of mail. Each came in an envelope, stamped, for less than 8¢ (1st class rates topped a dime for the first time in 1974). No e-mail; no electronic version to cut and paste from. Each letter to appear in the column had to be retyped on that IBM typewriter. Most high school students today have probably never sent a letter through the mail, and many have never received one, either.
The Newseum didn’t credit the photo, nor say when or where it was taken; I’ve not found more details yet. At the Newseum site, the photo is credited to Phillips-Van Buren, Inc., the company that runs the column. I’m guessing 1970 at the latest, and this may be in the 1960s or even 1950s.
Some of us old timers get future shock just looking at that photo. Can your students date that photo with the clues in it, history teachers? Journalism teachers? (Photos at OzTypewriters suggest this photo could have been made in the 1960s.)
Heck, it may be a 1950s typewriter (do you read German?):
Deutsch: Elektrische IBM-Schreibmaschine aus den 1950er Jahren Lizenz (Photo credit: Wikipedia) (Translated roughly, “IBM electric typewriter from the 1950 license.”)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
This is a press release from NASA, presented here for the record, text unedited except for formatting where necessary, and the deletion of the press office phone numbers (I hope that’s not necessary, but earnest information seekers have links to get the information they seek). Images are inserted from other, related NASA sites.
NASA Finds 2012 Sustained Long-Term Climate Warming Trend
WASHINGTON — NASA scientists say 2012 was the ninth warmest of any year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. With the exception of 1998, the nine warmest years in the 132-year record all have occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the hottest years on record.
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis Tuesday that compares temperatures around the globe in 2012 to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago.
[Caption to video] NASA’s analysis of Earth’s surface temperature found that 2012 ranked as the ninth-warmest year since 1880. NASA scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) compare the average global temperature each year to the average from 1951 to 1980. This 30-year period provides a baseline from which to measure the warming Earth has experienced due to increasing atmospheric levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. While 2012 was the ninth-warmest year on record, all 10 of the warmest years in the GISS analysis have occurred since 1998, continuing a trend of temperatures well above the mid-20th century average. The record dates back to 1880 because that is when there were enough meteorological stations around the world to provide global temperature data. Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Visualization credit: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio
The average temperature in 2012 was about 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6 Celsius), which is 1.0 F (0.6 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline. The average global temperature has risen about 1.4 degrees F (0.8 C) since 1880, according to the new analysis.
Scientists emphasize that weather patterns always will cause fluctuations in average temperature from year to year, but the continued increase in greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere assures a long-term rise in global temperatures. Each successive year will not necessarily be warmer than the year before, but on the current course of greenhouse gas increases, scientists expect each successive decade to be warmer than the previous decade.
“One more year of numbers isn’t in itself significant,” GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt said. “What matters is this decade is warmer than the last decade, and that decade was warmer than the decade before. The planet is warming. The reason it’s warming is because we are pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat and largely controls Earth’s climate. It occurs naturally and also is emitted by the burning of fossil fuels for energy. Driven by increasing man-made emissions, the level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has been rising consistently for decades.
The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, the first year in the GISS temperature record. By 1960, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory, was about 315 parts per million. Today, that measurement exceeds 390 parts per million.
This map represents global temperature anomalies averaged from 2008 through 2012. Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Visualization credit: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio
While the globe experienced relatively warm temperatures in 2012, the continental U.S. endured its warmest year on record by far, according to NOAA, the official keeper of U.S. weather records.
“The U.S. temperatures in the summer of 2012 are an example of a new trend of outlying seasonal extremes that are warmer than the hottest seasonal temperatures of the mid-20th century,” GISS director James E. Hansen said. “The climate dice are now loaded. Some seasons still will be cooler than the long-term average, but the perceptive person should notice that the frequency of unusually warm extremes is increasing. It is the extremes that have the most impact on people and other life on the planet.”
The temperature analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1,000 meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea-surface temperature, and Antarctic research station measurements. A publicly available computer program is used to calculate the difference between surface temperature in a given month and the average temperature for the same place during 1951 to 1980. This three-decade period functions as a baseline for the analysis. The last year that experienced cooler temperatures than the 1951 to 1980 average was 1976.
The GISS temperature record is one of several global temperature analyses, along with those produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. These three primary records use slightly different methods, but overall, their trends show close agreement.
I’m running behind in listing some of the articles, but since Utah Rep. Rob Bishop first alerted me to the stupidity raging on Rachel Carson‘s reputation, DDT‘s dangers and malaria, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub hosted more than 200 articles on the topics.
Postage stamp honoring Rachel Carson, part of the “20th century environmental heroes” set from the South Pacific nation of Palau, PlanetPatriot image
Overwhelmingly, the evidence is that Rachel Carson was right, DDT is still dangerous and needs to be banned, but malaria still declines, even with declining DDT use.
It seems we need to keep reminding people of this.
The frequently quotable Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., circa 1930. Edited photograph from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Original photo by Harris & Ewing. LC-USZ62-47817. Copyright expired.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., attributed. (see Felix Frankfurter, Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court, Harvard University Press, 1961, page 71.)
I found reference to the quote in a book about eminent economists, through Google Scholar:
Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies
By Michael Szenberg
Published by Cambridge University Press, 1993
320 pages
On page 201, Szenberg refers Holmes’s view of “taxation as the price of liberty.” In a footnote, he points to Justice Frankfurter’s book. The quote is dolled up a little. According to Szenberg’s footnote:
More precisely, he rebuked a secretary’s query of “Don’t you hate to pay taxes?” with “No, young fellow, I like paying taxes, with them I buy civilization.”
Frankfurter is a reliable source. It’s likely Holmes said something very close to the words Friedman used.
Times changed. In 1988 BSA got smart and changed the rules so women could serve as Scoutmasters. Some alert person remembered Pollard’s fight to get recognition a decade earlier. Pollard was asked to sign up officially as the first woman Scoutmaster in 1988, and she did.
Now, I don’t recall why I needed it then, but there is an entire period of history prior to 1980, and for about 20 to 25 years before that, that is missing from internet archives. We need to do a better job of finding non-digital and non-digitized sources of photos, graphics, and other information from post-World War II times, and get them posted on the web, for the sake of history.
Catherine Pollard, first woman Scoutmaster in BSA history; in uniform with Troop 13 of Milford, Connecticut, in 1973 and 1975, unofficially. In 1988, when BSA changed rules, they asked Ms. Pollard to be the first registered Scoutmaster. Scoutmaster Pollard died in 2006.
To the memory of Catherine Pollard, whose bugle called dozens of youth to a lifetime of service, though there were those who thought she shouldn’t be tooting the horn at all.
(Y’all got other photos out there you should be sharing? Send ’em in.)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Capitol building for Connecticut in Hartford; this photo is from the rear of the building, so the U.S. flag is flying correctly on its own right. The building was completed in 1878. The dome is covered in gold. Image from Wikimedia Commons
To avoid political scheming by anti-federalist colony governors, especially Patrick Henry in Virginia, in September 1787 James Madison proposed that the draft constitution be ratified not by legislatures in the colonies, but instead by a specially-called convention of the people of the colony. Connecticut’s convention met first on January 3, 1788, and with six days of discussion and debate, passed a resolution of ratification on January 9.
So by tradition, January 9 is Connecticut’s statehood anniversary. According to U.S. law, citizens and residents of a state should fly their flags on statehood anniversaries.
Hall of Flags in the Connecticut State Capitol Building; photo by the great photo-historian Carol Highsmith, from the Library of Congress collection; the statue is Connecticut’s Civil War Governor, William A. Buckingham (1804-1875), honored for his personal contributions to the equipping of Connecticut’s men fighting in the Civil War;.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Millard Fillmore flash mob commemorating birthday is a snow-smashing success
Published: Monday, January 10, 2011, 6:00 AM
Peter Chen / The Post-Standard More than 50 people followed the dance moves of the Kramer sisters, Miranda, 10, and Lily, 8, Friday at a flash mob in the parking lot of Moravia’s Modern Market. They danced to “Birthday” by the Beatles to celebrate former US President Millard Fillmore’s birthday, which was on Jan. 7, 1800. Fillmore was born in Moravia. The girls are the daughters of The Post-Standard humor columnist Jeff Kramer.
Moravia, NY — You know your legacy is in trouble when your biggest claim to fame is having a bathtub installed in the White House, and even that’s a lie.
So it has always been with Millard Fillmore. Americans remember their 13th president as mediocre, wishy-washy and fat — if they remember him at all.
Still, a president is a president, and for a few minutes this past Friday, even Millard found his posthumous mojo. At least 50 people gathered in his hometown of Moravia for a flash mob birthday boogie choreographed and led by my daughters Miranda, 10, and Lily, 8. The event was organized by me as part of my New Year’s resolution to reach out to techno-savvy young people before one of them remotely shuts off my oxygen.
Everyone was in a great mood. “Happy Birthday, Millard!” the crowd shouted after churning up the slush in the parking lot of Modern Market with a dazzling display of grapevines, sprinklers, funky chickens and more.
Among the celebrants was Mr. Jan Hunsinger, a history/government teacher at Moravia High School. He brought a group of students to be part of the gala, plying them with extra credit.
“Thanks for doing this,” Hunsinger said to me. At least I think he said it. Truth is I didn’t take notes. Note-taking is Old Media (lame) and poor flash mob etiquette. The whole point of a flash mob is to convene en masse as directed by viral media, commit a planned public act and disperse. The last thing you want is some mainstream media dork asking questions like “Can you spell your name for me again?” and “How does this flash mob change your perceptions of Millard Fillmore?”
I also learned that Millard took Peru’s side when American entrepreneurs were stealing that country’s bird droppings for fertilizer. Instead of coming to the aid of the American businessmen, Fillmore insisted that no one should take Peru’s bird turds without Peru’s permission. Peru was deeply grateful, and America gained international cred. A statue of Fillmore was erected in Peru. Predictably, it became obscured by the very substance he had helped to protect.
Caption from the Syracuse Post-Standard; photo by Peter Chen / The Post-Standard – Moravia High School students (left to right) Amy Richards, 16, a junior; Melinda Heath, 16, a junior; Gabrielle Amos, 17, a junior; and Mattea Hilliard, 16, a sophomore, took part in a flash mob in the parking lot of Moravia’s Modern Market on Friday.
That’s all I have to say about Fillmore for now. I’m grateful to him, Moravia, my girls, the nice lady who bought them flowers and to everyone who made the flash mob rock. I’ll close with Fillmore’s inspiring last words, uttered as he was being fed soup.
“The nourishment is palatable,” he said. Then he died.
Here’s hoping that somewhere up there in that great bathtub in the sky, Millard — happily stuffed with palatable nourishment — was looking down on us last Friday and smiling.
Jeff Kramer’s humor column runs Mondays in CNY. E-mail him at jeffmkramer@gmail.com.
Fillmore wasn’t a total washout as President, contrary to his reputation. Among other things, he was the guy who dispatched Commodore Perry to Japan, to open that reclusive nation to trade, and to stop them from executing random sailors from America washed up on their shores. In a direct way, we might say Fillmore was responsible for World War II in the Pacific — once awakened to the thrills and advantages of international trade, Japan went after it with a vengeance, and then after empire. That is to say the opening of Japan was momentous; history and commerce would never be the same again, in the Pacific.
And that quote, “The nourishment is palatable.” Fillmore probably didn’t say that. Even in death his words get little respect. The story of Fillmore’s death in the New York Times mentioned that he had been ill, and that at what turned out to be his last meal, some soup, Fillmore had said it was okay. The paper reported that Fillmore had said that the nourishment was palatable. Someone, later, put quotes around the reporter’s words, and made them Fillmore’s. You’d think someone would remember him for the Peruvian guano remarks instead, no? (Gee, I’m not sure Mr. Kramer described that episode accurately.)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Statue of President Millard Fillmore, a Buffalo native, on southeast corner of the administration building of the University of Buffalo. Photo credit: Wikipedia
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) [Monday, January 7, 2013] – The University at Buffalo is celebrating one of its Founding Fathers. Monday would be Millard Fillmore’s 213th birthday, and to mark the occasion, UB helped host a ceremony at the former president’s grave site.
A wreath from the White House was placed at the grave sit, to honor the former leader for his services to the nation and western New York.
After his presidency, Fillmore returned to Buffalo, New York, and a life of good citizenship. He founded the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, for example. And though he himself was about a third-grade dropout, and though he refused an honorary degree from Oxford because he said no man should get a degree he can’t read (it was in Latin), he founded what is now the University at Buffalo.
Birthday celebration for President Millard Fillmore in Summerhill, New York; caption from the Auburn, New York, Citizen: Sue Stoyell, treasurer of the Cayuga-Owasco Lakes Historical Society, serves a slice of Millard Filmore’s birthday cake to Roger Stoyell during a celebration of Fillmore’s 213th birthday Sunday at the town hall in Summerhill.
There was music:
Fillmore’s 213th birthday bash in Summerhill, New York; photo by Michelle Bixby, Auburn Citizen: From left, John Davis, Ron Van Nostrand and Don Watkins, three of the seven members of the band “Flock of Free Range Children,” entertain attendees of Millard Filmore’s 213th birthday celebration Sunday at the town hall in Summerhill.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Her report is very solid, even though brief. Utah history is nothing if not a convoluted path to statehood through what amounted to a civil war, the Mexican War, the discovery of gold in California, the transcontinental railroads, mining and immigration, Indian wars, old west shootouts, rampant environmental destruction with sheep grazing and mineral extraction and smelting, union strife, astonishing agricultural applications, and a lot of books written from tens of thousands of Mormon pioneer journals — Mormonism appears to be impossible without ink and paper and time to write.
Go read her story.
What caught my eye was the George W. Reed photograph of the Salt Lake City Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the LDS, or Mormon church. The Temple and the Tabernacle, also in the photo, both have their own unique architectural histories, and quirks that make them noteworthy purely from architecture. (This George W. Reed should not be confused with the Civil War Medal of Honor winner, George W. Reed)
Reed was an early photographer for newspapers in Salt Lake City, and he took some wonderful photos for posterity. He was also a founder of the leading non-Mormon paper in the state, The Salt Lake Tribune. At points in its history, it’s been known as an anti-Mormon paper. The University of Utah’s library holds about five dozen of his photos in their collection, indexed electronically if not quite available yet; there Reed is described:
A pioneer in the development of Utah newspapers, George Reed was originally employed by the Deseret News and in 1871 helped in establishing the Salt Lake Tribune. His photographs include nineteenth century views of Salt Lake City, individuals at Reed’s Avenue home, Wasatch Resort in Little Cottonwood Canyon, and a photograph of the American flag hung on the Salt Lake Temple in 1896 to commemorate Utah’s statehood.
A pioneer in Utah journalism, George W. Reed was born in London, England, on April 7, 1833. He emigrated to Utah in 1862 and became manager of the Deseret News, a position he held until 1871 when he founded the Salt Lake Tribune. In 1882, after a decade at the Tribune, Reed sold his interest in the paper to P. H. Lannan. He married Elizabeth Tuddenham in 1866 and passed away December 1, 1909.
The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah, draped with a U.S. flag in 1896, commemorating the completion of Utah’s statehood campaign when President Grover Cleveland declared Utah a member of the Union. Photo by George W. Reed; Reed worked for the Deseret News, and helped found the Salt Lake Tribune. I do not know whether this photo was published in either paper. From the George W. Reed Collection, University of Utah Libraries.
But we hear the protests: The U.S. Flag Code did not exist in 1896! How can that be a violation of a code that did not exist?
That’s right, too.
That is an indication that the traditions of flag display that some people get riled up about, that many people think we should amend the Constitution to protect, are new inventions more than old traditions. Flag code violations are legion by well-meaning citizens celebrating the flag and patriotism, and rare by anyone with any malignant motives.
After a 49-year fight for statehood, through wars with the U.S., fighting with the U.S. forces in Mexico, the administrations of several presidents and 25 different U.S. Congresses, and pledges to change the rules of the church to ban polygamy and put that ban in the state constitution, the people of Utah, especially the Mormon officials, were not trying to insult America by displaying the flag incorrectly. Somebody said ‘fly the flag from the Temple,’ and some engineer or custodian got it done. By 1896, most of the First Amendment litigation done in the U.S. had involved whether Mormons could keep their marriage policies (Mormons lost). There was no intent to violate any rule of separation of church and state — nor would that be considered a violation today. Churches may fly the nation’s flag with all the approval that suggests; it’s the government which may not fly a church’s flag.
Finally, there is no grand story in the flag’s being flown backwards. It’s just one of those historical footnotes that mark the changing mores of the times, in this case, for standards of how to fly the U.S. flag.
Perhaps Utah history textbooks should make note of the day the U.S. flag was flown, backwards, to honor statehood.
South entrance (main) to the Utah State Capitol, with U.S. and Utah flags flying on the single flag poll, and the snow-dusted Wasatch Mountains in the background. Utah State Law Library photo.
Utah joined the Union on January 4, 1896. It had been a 49-year slog to statehood for Deseret, the Mormon settlement in the Desert. The size had been pared down, so it would not be the biggest state, incorporating parts of what is now Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado and New Mexico. New capitals had been tried and cast aside (Fillmore, Utah). Democratic Party rule was broken when LDS church authorities went door-to-door, calling every other family to the Republican Party, and party parity. The Mormon Church abandoned polygamy, and adopted a state constitution that gave the vote to women.
Significant gains against malaria could be lost because funding for insecticide-treated bednets has dropped, and malaria parasites appear to be developing resistance to the pharmaceuticals used to clear the disease from humans, while insects that transmit the parasites develop resistance to insecticides used to hold their populations down.
African bedroom equipped with LLINs (insecticidal bednets) Photo: YoHandy/Flickr
Insecticidal bednets have proven to be a major, effective tool in reducing malaria infections. Careful studies of several different projects produced a consensus that distributing the nets for free works best; people in malaria-infected areas simply cannot afford to pay even for life-saving devices, but they use the devices wisely when they get them. Nets often get abbreviated in official documents to “LLINs,” an acronym for “long-lasting insecticidal nets.”
Generally, the report is good news.
Dramatic facts emerge from the report: The “million-a-year” death toll from malaria has been whacked to fewer than 700,000, the lowest level in recorded human history. More people may die, and soon, if aid does not come to replace worn bednets, distribute new ones, and if the drugs that cure the disease in humans, lose effectiveness. Many nations where the disease is endemic cannot afford to wage the fight on their own.
Links in the Fact Sheet were added here, and do not come from the original report — except for the link to the WHO site itself.
Malaria is a preventable and treatable mosquito-borne disease, whose main victims are children under five years of age in Africa.
The World Malaria Report 2012 summarizes data received from 104 malaria-endemic countries and territories for 2011. Ninety-nine of these countries had on-going malaria transmission.
According to the latest WHO estimates, there were about 219 million cases of malaria in 2010 and an estimated 660,000 deaths. Africa is the most affected continent: about 90% of all malaria deaths occur there.
Between 2000 and 2010, malaria mortality rates fell by 26% around the world. In the WHO African Region the decrease was 33%. During this period, an estimated 1.1 million malaria deaths were averted globally, primarily as a result of a scale-up of interventions.
Funding situation
International disbursements for malaria control rose steeply during the past eight years and were estimated to be US$ 1.66 billion in 2011 and US$ 1.84 billion in 2012. National government funding for malaria programmes has also been increasing in recent years, and stood at an estimated US$ 625 million in 2011.
However, the currently available funding for malaria prevention and control is far below the resources required to reach global malaria targets. An estimated US$ 5.1 billion is needed every year between 2011 and 2020 to achieve universal access to malaria interventions. In 2011, only US$ 2.3 billion was available, less than half of what is needed.
Disease burden
Malaria remains inextricably linked with poverty. The highest malaria mortality rates are being seen in countries that have the highest rates of extreme poverty (proportion of population living on less than US$1.25 per day).
International targets for reducing malaria cases and deaths will not be attained unless considerable progress can be made in the 17 most affected countries, which account for an estimated 80% of malaria cases.
The six highest burden countries in the WHO African region (in order of estimated number of cases) are: Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique and Cote d’Ivoire. These six countries account for an estimated 103 million (or 47%) of malaria cases.
In South East Asia, the second most affected region in the world, India has the highest malaria burden (with an estimated 24 million cases per year), followed by Indonesia and Myanmar. 50 countries are on track to reduce their malaria case incidence rates by 75%, in line with World Health Assembly and Roll Back Malaria targets for 2015. These 50 countries only account for 3% (7 million) of the total estimated malaria cases.
At present, malaria surveillance systems detect only around 10% of the estimated global number of cases. In 41 countries around the world, it is not possible to make a reliable assessment of malaria trends due to incompleteness or inconsistency of reporting over time.
This year, the World Malaria Report 2012 publishes country-based malaria case and mortality estimates (see Annex 6A). The next update on global and regional burden estimates will be issued in December 2013.
Malaria interventions
To achieve universal access to long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs), 780 million people at risk would need to have access to LLINs in sub-Saharan Africa, and approximately 150 million bed nets would need to be delivered each year.
The number of LLINs delivered to endemic countries in sub-Saharan Africa dropped from a peak of 145 million in 2010 to an estimated 66 million in 2012. This will not be enough to fully replace the LLINs delivered 3 years earlier, indicating that total bed net coverage will decrease unless there is a massive scale-up in 2013. A decrease in LLIN coverage is likely to lead to major resurgences in the disease.
In 2011, 153 million people were protected by indoor residual spraying (IRS) around the world, or 5% of the total global population at risk. In the WHO African Region, 77 million people, or 11% of the population at risk were protected through IRS in 2011.
The number of rapid diagnostic tests delivered to endemic countries increased dramatically from 88 million in 2010 to 155 million in 2011. This was complemented by a significant improvement in the quality of tests over time.
In 2011, 278 million courses of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) were procured by the public and private sectors in endemic countries – up from 182 million in 2010, and just 11 million in 2005. ACTs are recommended as the first-line treatment for malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly Plasmodium species that infects humans. This increase was largely driven by the scale-up of subsidized ACTs in the private sector through the AMFm initiative, managed by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Drug and insecticide resistance
Antimalarial drug resistance is a major concern for the global effort to control malaria. P. falciparum resistance to artemisinins has been detected in four countries in South East Asia: in Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam. There is an urgent need to expand containment efforts in affected countries. For now, ACTs remain highly effective in almost all settings, so long as the partner drug in the combination is locally effective.
Mosquito resistance to at least one insecticide used for malaria control has been identified in 64 countries around the world. In May 2012, WHO and the Roll Back Malaria Partnership released the Global Plan for Insecticide Resistance Management in malaria vectors, a five-pillar strategy for managing the threat of insecticide resistance.
You were perceptive. You noted there is no call from malaria fighters for more DDT, nor for any change in DDT policy. This is a report from medical personnel, from public health experts, the real malaria fighters. It’s not a political screed.
India to see decrease in malaria cases: WHO (thehindu.com) – India remains the world’s largest manufacturer and user of DDT; were DDT the panacea cynical critics and hoaxsters claim it is, India would not have 24 million malaria infections each year; India has the highest rate and highest total of malaria cases in Asia
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
) is located on the Tropic of Cancer, so that at summer solstice the sun appears at the zenith, directly overhead. In Alexandria (
) the sun is 
south of the zenith at the same time. So the circumference of earth can be calculated being 
times the distance 
between 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
