Alexis Smith. 1942
Photographer: Bob Landry
Charles Wesley Smith on Libraries and the Spirit of the Northwest
Have you heard of Charles Wesley Smith? Neither have I. He was some obscure librarian in Seattle around the 1900s. He contributed a piece to the Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh General Meeting of the American Library Association titled ”Library Conditions in the Northwest.” The meeting was held in Portland, Oregon on July 4–7, 1905.
He talks, predictably, about libraries in the American Northwest: Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the then territory of Alaska, and the Canadian province of British Columbia. The piece starts off rather flowery, with phrases like “To this conference on the Pacific many of its members and most of its officers have come as far westward as Columbus sailed westward from the Pillars of Hercules” and quotations of the poems “Columbus” by Joaquin Miller and “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant. He eventually gets into the nitty gritty of numbers, libraries at universities, laws regarding libraries, and so on.
The final section of his piece, “The future,” returns to the puffy language of the introduction. And while he does eventually talk about the future of building libraries in the Northwest, he begins with a paean of libraries as “man’s crowning effort to fulfill that ‘higher law’ of human evolution which bids each individual begin where all his predecessors left off.” I thought it was a pretty powerful statement; the public library is one of our noblest and most important ideas, ever.
Here are all ten paragraphs of that section, courtesy of Google Books:
I don’t think I have seen this shot of Gene Tierney before.
(Source: valentinovamp, via turhansbeycompany)
Léon Bakst: Supper, 1902
Mother Maybelle Carter: Wildwood Flower - from Mother Maybelle Carter (1973, Columbia)
This is a really interesting old LP recorded in February 1973 at the House of Cash in Hendersonville, Tennessee, with a formidable cast of musicians, including Fred Carter Jr. on electric guitar, Pete Drake on pedal steel, Charlie McCoy on harmonica and of course Mother Maybelle on autoharp and guitar.
Many of the tracks, including this one, feature in-studio banter between Mother Maybelle and the other musicians, with so much joking and relaxing you get the feeling they were shuffling into the kitchen between songs for turkey sandwiches and beers.
On this track, Mother Maybelle says she’d “like to try to do it” on her autoharp first, before starting in with her guitar. Well she tries it on her autoharp alright. Nails it, is what she does. Then she begins picking a mean guitar, and the rest of the guys join in. This is like country music instrumentation 101. Study it. Mother Maybelle really was something else.
(via yerdarlingdaily)
Activists today…
In any war there have always been a few brave folks who have chosen to be freedom fighters or members of the resistance - even in Nazi Germany this was the case…
Today we celebrate the heroine of The White Rose resistance group, Sophie Scholl (May 9, 1921 - 1943, execution by guillotine), who along with other members of the group, including her brother Hans urged Germans to passive resistance against the Nazi regime.
Sophie helped distribute pamphlets and sermons, expressing anti-Nazi sentiments and arguments. In February 1943 the group was caught pamphleteering at the University of Munich and rapidly sentenced to death and executed.
Sophie said at the end: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action.”
Photo of Sophie Scholl, 1941
It’s too bad that the public declaration to the Axis that the Allies would only accept an unconditional surrender stopped most forms of resistance. But while the Scholl siblings and the White Rose are the most commonly remembered as a flame of resistance, there were others:
The Edelweiss Pirates, young men who refused to join the Hitler Youth were far less political in nearly all ways, but the authorities feared what they could bring. They weren’t a mature resistance with clear aims, but they were met with severe consequences when caught, most members were sent to labor camps and concentration camps in an effort to “restore them to productive ways” for their lack of judgment. However, a Edelweiss group in Cologne, Germany took active roles in internal resistance by sheltering deserters of the Wehrmacht and plastering anti-Hitler graffiti across the city. When the members of this sect were caught in November of 1944, they were executed as an example.
There were the Swing Kids, Swing-Jugend, and the German churches themselves who actively and publicly fought against Hitler’s policies of euthanasia towards the mentally and physically ill. As a result of the public backlash from the German people thanks to the Church’s vocal opposition, Hitler discontinued the euthanasia programs in August 1941. This is the rare example where the Nazi regime was forced to change policy as a result of the mobilization of public opinion.
There are too many victims of the Reich and too few who risked their lives to speak out against it. They all deserve to be remembered.
Driving Instructor by Bob Newhart from the album “The Button Down Mind Of Bob Newhart” (1960, Warner Brothers).
