continued from How I Learned to Hate Andy
Each floor of little plain brick Xavier Hall was a square hallway that went all the way around to connected back on itself. The rooms were all on the outside. On the interior side were windows that opened onto a central well that went from the basement up through the three floors. It was an old building, so one could open the windows and lean out into the interior well. The interior on the ground was not normally accessible to us, and it filled with bits of garbage at times over the semester but otherwise featureless.
The main door had been moved from the street basement level on Prospect Street to face the interior side of the building on the enclosed quadrangle of East Campus. It accessible by a small set of stairs that went up from the cement plaza of the quadrangle to the the first floor of the rooms, at the wet corner of the building facade onto the quadrangle. One accessed the interior with a plastic university id card that was like a computer punch card, which one inserted into the slot in the metallic card reader so that the little light turned green, and the door unlocked. At most times during the day the door was propped open and entry from the quadrangle was on the honor system.
The room where I started out living with John was almost directly inside on the door on the first floor, to the right as one came in, and thus its window faced on the dark narrow space between Xavier and another non-residential campus building to the west along Prospect Street.
Andy B.'s room was in the back of the first floor, along the side of the square that faced south onto the Prospect Street, and thus he had a window that looked out with a fine view across the street and even through the trees to the far Virginia side of the Potomac. I wanted to have that view like that, with sunlight, and I got it soon enough.
Like Pat, Andy---Andy B., that is, or Ohio Andy, the Good Andy, the Andy we liked---had come into the Arts Hall under the banner of music. But he was not an audiophile like Pat. He didn't get his musical enjoyment from large headphones and a turntable of electronica. He cared little for Pop hits. His appreciation of music was classical, the bookish introspective type that came from have learned to play an acoustic stringed instrument, the cello. He didn't bring this instrument with him until the following year, so I didn't see him play it at first, and thus I didn't come to associate him with that instrument until later. But now it seems perfectly in line with his character, to let his thoughts go and to immerse himself in the vibrations of the wooden cello brought into being by his own bowing of the strings, akin to the way Conan Doyle describes the reverie of his famous violin-playing detective.
He was tall and lanky, but without the bass-player solidness of Pat. He was more able to bend like. a reed in the breeze. He was spry, even as one might mistake him as a pure intellectual who shunned extreme physical activity. He wore John Lennon-type glasses for his myopia, and kept a mop of blonde hair. This all seemed normal until he opened his mouth and out came that mid-Atlantic accent in a baritone, that you couldn't place, but which you would never place as coming from Dayton, Ohio.
Like Pat, Andy didn't get along with his roommate, who was Jay, a phlegmatic and stocky-framed young man with a nasal voice that was difficult to appreciate if one listened to it for very long. This conflict between Andy and Jay was a slow boil compare to the emergency situation between Pat and North Carolina Andy. Nevertheless it gathered momentum quickly. Jay's voice was the drone of steady self-monologue spoken to anyone with whom he engaged in conversation. It took Andy a few days to catch on that Jay rarely stopped talking when he was in the presence of somebody else.
To be sure, a lot of the rancor we came to have for Jay---and I think Jay noticed this much more than North Carolina Andy--was driven by Karl, a junior who studied Chinese language the School of Language and Linguistics, who had a single in the room next to Andy and Jay. He was unique among us in being an upperclassman. He had lived in Xavier three years running, which boggled my mind in contemplating that someone would voluntarily keep signing up for this place.
Karl was phlegmatic, stocky and also with his own nasal voice. He was Jewish and from Long Island. He was an out homosexual. He had put a small lavender triangle on the name card on his door. He was the first out gay person I ever knew personally in my life, outside of a couple incoming sophomores in high school, who were in the drama club, and had who shocked the school during my senior year by declaring themselves to be bisexual.
Karl was our revered elder, our placid unmoving fixed point while the rest of us scampered about in our dewy freshman way like newborn calves jumping in a grassy field. We gathered in his room more than any other, since he lived by himself, and it was here that we plotted schemes.
He was at ease talking about his homosexuality in a matter-of-fact way. He never discussed the specifics of his sex life in my presence. But it was fun to hear him describe the geography of the local gay culture in Washington, D.C., and the various neighborhoods that had quietly become the nucleus of an open gay community amidst the otherwise grey and dull offices north of the White House and the State Department. Dupont Circle, the location of one of the nearest stops Orange line metro, had become notorious among those in-the-know as the "Fruit Loop." Likewise nearby Farrragut Square had redubbed with the obvious vulgar play on words.
Pat loved to draw out references from Karl to his gayness which became the subject of Pat's warped sense of humor. New Chinese vocabulary words that Karl learned in his linguistic studies were fair game for gay double-entendres which would make Pat roar with laughter. Karl once volunteered the verb "to penetrate deeply into" as being a good subject Pat's glossary. Pat learned it, reproducing the tones faithfully, so he could sing it along in a parody version he made up of "You Can Feel it All Over," a famous hit by the musician Stevie Wonder.
There was a yet another pairing of mismatched roommates on the first floor of Xavier Hall that would participate the Grand Roommate Switch we would engineer, the two Dans in the corner of the first floor, directly opposite my room, at the east end of the hall where the rooms faced out onto Prospect Street. They were not at each other's throats, but they were as unlike as any two Dans of the same age could be, who were both freshmen at Georgetown, which of course narrows the range of Dans quite a bit.
Dan F. was a chiseled windblown young man from San Diego, not overly tall but solid of muscle and with a squinty gaze. He never spoke above the same steady tone of voice, reflected in the distinct style of Southern California, and influence of a moneyed background, He was the son of a high executive of a regional airline based in San Diego, and he shone with the low-key confidence of his origin and upbringing, that is, in the unpretentious way of that era, dressing in the type of clothes as the rest of us, albeit with a California preppie style. As far as I remember, he came to Georgetown without any special set of possessions his family's money would have afforded him, But in those days, outside of a new expensive automobile---which had been all but forbidden to freshmen to bring---it was difficult to acquire anything that an eighteen year old would want, that could be brought into a dorm room, and which could not be bought with the proceeds of a summer job.
Yet it was startling the first time, to be talking about helicopters in a movie, and to hear him mention that he himself a trained helicopter pilot. It had never occurred to me that someone our age could have accomplished that. That kind of sober competence among youth of his class would became apparent to me over time, and highlighted the material difference in my background from his, that seemed much more real than I imagined. Yet, as I said, the Eighties were egalitarian in a way like no other time in history. It never occurred to me that I lacked anything that would allow to get as far in the world as I cared to, as far as he could, based on my own gumption with the opportunities I had been granted so far. We were all at the same starting line, I figured.
His roommate, the other Dan---I don't remember where he came from--was not a part of our clique as was Dan F., but neither did we spurn him as one of adversaries. Unlike preppie San Diego helicopter Dan, this second Dan was as close to a hippie as one could get in that day. He had long uncombed hair and wore loose clothes, sometimes with a leather vest, that seemed to give him a perpetually unwashed atmosphere. Unlike other music folks in the dorm, he had brought an instrument with him---his acoustic guitar. In the evenings and weekends, during times of obvious leisure among the students, he played it while strolling through the first floor hallway of Xavier in shorts and sandals.
But he was not in fact a hippie. In those years, hippies did not exist, at least not in Washington, D.C.. They had been banned from the culture for several years. So when Guitar Dan walked through the halls playing one of the old counterculture anthems, he did so mockingly, in scorn of that earlier era of starry-eyed idealism, to make us all laugh at it with him, singing Good morning, starshine. The earth says hello!
Certainly helicopter Dan complained of the weirdness of his throwback roommate. His nose was probably the most offended sense, as he sometimes wondered his roommate took regular showers. But Dan F. was the type would naturally seek to change rooms of his own accord. He would quietly bear the burden in stoic reserve until he could arrange better accommodations at a convenient later date, which he did when he signed onto the Great Roommate Switch.
The last two members of our circle were the female component---Vanessa and Trina, who lived in the second floor room almost directly above me and John.
They were both from somewhere in the Northeast. Vanessa was from New York or New Jersey I think. She was curvy and ample of figure, but without crossing into the realm of obesity for that era. She had a husky voice that spoke of cosmopolitan experience, and could project a come-hitherness even while speaking in normal conversation. Trina was the opposite in frame---thin and waiflike, with a round pixie face and freckles that seemed like permanent sparkles on her cheeks. Her brilliant eyes spoke of living in an ethereal realm of delight in all that New York City could offer to a pretty young woman. Her art was dance. She had held an internship with a famous ballet company there, and she had many tales of what professional ballet dancers were like backstage. It was the kind of New York-only experience that inflamed a hopeless envy in me, that I was already behind in life in some way.
They were the only roommate pairing who gone along well and had no desire to switch. One thought of one and the other together. They even pushed their separated beds together in their room to make one big giant sleeping platform for the both of them. One day coming into the room I found them on the bed between Pat and Dan F., all fully clothed and innocent, yet evocative of a lurid move from the 1960s. It seemed like the perfect natural configuration for the four of them.
There were others involved in the drama that would play out, notably two Resident Assistants (RAs) who lived in the dorm, one male and one female, and who be our link to the university residence department during the negotiations and demands that followed.
There was also of course Father Tom, the Resident Jesuit (Rez Jez, as they called them), who was the priest who was assigned to live in the dorm with the students. Many of the dorms, such as New South where Charles lived, had one per floor. We had Father Tom for all three floors of the Arts Hall. He was, I think, in late Twenties or in his Thirties, with a phlegmatic body without being overweight. He was affable, and was friendly with the students when he met them coming or going, and he seemed to be on our side in general, but one had the sense that he didn't care to be bothered by us very much, He had his business elsewhere, which is typical of priests of his order. He had gone to seminary Omaha, which I thought was interesting, but in seemed of little interest on his part to talk about it.
He was a beer drinker. Dan F. once saw him coming back from Weissmuller's Grocery ("Johnny Weismuller's" as Pat called it), which was across the street from East Campus, and carrying nothing but a six pack of his favorite lager.
Monday, August 31, 2020
Watching: CBS News Election Night Coverage Nov 3, 1964
We've been watching lots of old convention speeches and election night broadcasts on Youtube lately, using Chromecast to put them on the television set.
Last night we watched the three-and-half hour Youtube video below of the CBS national coverage of the 1964 Election night picking up at 6:30 P.M. eastern and going to 2:00 A.M. (with breaks for local coverage, and also the late local news, so it does not cover all the clock time).
It was all in black and white of course. Wikipedia, citing what seem like authoritative references, tells me that the CBS Evening News made its first broadcast in color on Aug 19, 1965, and went permanently to color on Jan 31, 1966.
Anchoring the broadcast was Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) at his finest, and in his prime. At the beginning of the broadcast, he explains that this year will be a great advance in election reporting over last time, for several reasons.
One reason was the creation of the NES, the Network Election System, in which the broadcast networks pooled their resources in cooperation with state and local officials to create a unified system of election reporting.
The other reason was the introduction of the IBM Vote Projection Analysis (VPA) which CBS would use during the broadcast to make early projections of races before they are officially declared as won (presumably by local election officials).
The VPA would focus on key precincts to make an early forecast of the final percentages. There is a great shot of the IBM 7000-series mainframe computer in the election studio, running the brand new System/360, the landmark operating system which gave us the business boom of Sixties. The entire broadcast has the audio-feel of being inside a room with big old computers (a few seconds of the broadcast will tell you what I mean).
Just like today, the states of Indiana and Kentucky closed their polls early, and counted their votes quickly to be among the first states declared.
At the beginning of the broadcast, the VPA had already projected Johnson as the winner in Kentucky. For much of American history after the Civil War, Kentucky was the ultimate swing state, in the true sense of actually swinging back and forth between the two parties like a coin flip. It was the ultimate border state---Southern in geography and culture, but birthplace of the nationalist Whig Party, which evolved into the Republicans.
In 1960 Nixon had won Kentucky for the Republicans, so when Johnson won it back for the Democrats, it was not a fantastic sign for Goldwater, but as a coin-flip state, it didn't really matter.
But then the IBM VPA quickly projected Johnson as the winner in Indiana, which Nixon had carried handily, and which Goldwater was counting on heavily in his stragtegy (along with Texas, Ohio, and California).
Within a half hour the VPA projected Johnson carrying Ohio as well. It was over very quickly, but it took the rest of the evening to prove the early signs and projections of were true. Few anticipated the magnitude of the landslide.
Illinois put Johnson over the top well before midnight. Goldwater was a jerk and did not come out to give a concession speech at all that evening, even at 2 a.m. He was holed up in the Camelback Inn in Phoenix. He had his running mate Congressman Miller come out and give a short friendly speech saying that as VP candidate, he couldn't really say anything until Goldwater spoke. Miller was retiring from politics altogether after that night. Surrounded by his family, he clearly didn't care at all about having lost.
By midnight as well, CBS knew this election was not only a big victory for the Democrats, but that it was a realignment election.
Vermont went Democratic for the first time in its history. On the flip side, CBS reported Georgia went Republican for the first time in its history.
Cronkite was the anchor (assisted by back-up like Roger Mudd), but the grand old man of CBS back then was Eric Sevareid (1912-1992), the senior cBS correspondent who was allowed to talk about anything he wanted, as Cronkite himself joked, while introducing him. It was he who came out when the evening was ripening to declare that extremism had failed. The hate groups (he used that term) had been turned back.
Sevareid was the oldest on the set, but he was the only one who could have walked off that set and onto one of the major cable t.v. news networks today and been perfectly at home. I felt like I had just watched modern news broadcasting being born.
Sevareid announced that the we were int a new era primarily because of the creation of a new voting block. the first time such a true voting block had existed in the history of the country, where 99% of the people in the block voted the same way. In this case it was the Negroes, as they called them. It made Black Americans instantly into the most powerful voters in the country, because they all voted the same. We have lived in that political era since then.
Among other things, that evening was probably the first time that most Americans saw and heard the name George Bush, who was announced as the Republican vying to unseat U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough from Texas. Bush was a Republican trying to buck the Johnson ticket Democratic tide in Johnson's home state of Texas. He lost andYarborough kept his seat. It was mentioned how Yarborough, in his victory speech, had taunted Bush as an out-of-stater who now ought to go back where he came from.
By covering their various speeches, CBS all but declared Michigan Governor George Romney and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to be the (non-extremist) future of the Republican Party. Romney had just won re-election. He had spoken out against Goldwater at the convention in San Francisco. We looked for Mitt on stage but did not see him.
Rockefeller, who had all but denounced Goldwater at the convention, and who now seemed vindicated on all counts, spoke during the appearance of U.S. Senator Keating from New York, who lost his re-election bid as U.S. Senator from New York, pulled down in the anti-Republican tide in New York because the party had swung to the western extremists.
Rockefeller was at his prime that night too. It would have seemed obvious to anyone that he would be President at some point, or at least would be the Republican nominee. He was competent and telegenic, appearing completely in control even amidst the defeat his party and the incumbent Senator.
No one brought up Richard Nixon the entire night except in mentioning comparisons to the previous election in 1960. Nixon had been declared politically dead in 1962 when he lost his bid to be California Governor, following up his Presidential loss. By 1964, it seemed he had demoted himself right out of presidential politics.
Another highlight was Lyndon Johnson being interviewed from his headquarters in Austin while wearing a radio headset.. If you imagine Lyndon Johnson in that kind of get-up, you know how weird the image was. No president would do such a thing now. Johnson was very calm and matter of fact. He barely gave any emotion to the idea of apparently winning the election (it was still unofficial). He was a man for the crowd in a convention hall, not for that kind of setting. There was something charming in his lack of consciousness of how strange he looked on television wearing a radio headset.
The keynote of the evening was at the very end, just before 2 A.M. Eastern Time, in the victory speech by the person who had unhorsed Keating from the U.S. Senate---New York State's new Senator-elect Robert F. Kennedy (who had overcome charges of being a carpetbagger, having moved to New York State just to run for the Senate). He spoke from the ballroom of the Statler Hilton in New York.
As he always did, in that kind of intimate setting, Kennedy dominated the room. Johnson might have been elected president, getting a four-year term in his own right, but everyone assumed that Robert Kennedy was the real future of the Democratic Party.
Standing behind Kennedy on the crowded stage, his tall stature sticking above the others like a king on a chessboard, directing others around him with tight hand gestures, was a curious figure, a man of seventy-five with aged lined face and the weight of deep responsibility on him like a shadow.
Kennedy turns and thanks him very quickly into his speech as being essential to his victory, especially as Kennedy did not really live in New York, and had no political experience there (my word's not Kennedy's).
The man behind him that he thanked was the former N.Y. governor, Averell Harriman, whom Rockefeller had unseated from the governor's mansion six years earlier in 1958. Harriman was an heavyweight as it got. In his day, Harriman had stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the Teheran Conference that had had organized the outlines of the world after World War II. Now he was standing behind Robert Kennedy.
Kennedy thanks him specifically for being the driving force behind the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The adoption of the Test Ban Treaty had been one of achievements of the Kennedy Administration that Johnson had played up his television commercials and speeches. It was a primal pitch appealing to mothers that from 1964 forward, their children could grow up free of radioactive contamination from the atmosphere. Harriman acknowledged Kennedy's thanks for this great achievement with a formulaic nod and then went about his business surveying the stage to make sure he an everyone else there was positioned correctly around Kennedy.
It must have been a nice little revenge for Harriman against Nelson Rockefeller, his longtime younger rival, to have orchestrated winning back that Senate seat for the Democrats. But it would have been a small satisfaction, only one item among many Harriman would have been orchestrating, at least in his mind, at that very moment. Electoral glory revenge was not the kind of thing that drove Harriman, except in the way all men want to win every contest. Everyone knew Harriman had deeper concerns on his mind (like making sure the world didn't destroy itself). Everyone knew he played the game on a higher level than anyone else who had appeared that evening, newscaster or politician, even Lyndon Johnson.
The IBM VPA did amazingly well, as it happened. Cronkite pointed out late in the broadcast that they had nailed the final percentage of the vote in Kentucky almost exactly.
Following up, there's about an hour left of CBS coverage from that evening to watch in a separate video, picking up at 3 a.m. Eastern. It includes Humphrey's VP victory speech. Might watch it tonight.
Last night we watched the three-and-half hour Youtube video below of the CBS national coverage of the 1964 Election night picking up at 6:30 P.M. eastern and going to 2:00 A.M. (with breaks for local coverage, and also the late local news, so it does not cover all the clock time).
It was all in black and white of course. Wikipedia, citing what seem like authoritative references, tells me that the CBS Evening News made its first broadcast in color on Aug 19, 1965, and went permanently to color on Jan 31, 1966.
Anchoring the broadcast was Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) at his finest, and in his prime. At the beginning of the broadcast, he explains that this year will be a great advance in election reporting over last time, for several reasons.
One reason was the creation of the NES, the Network Election System, in which the broadcast networks pooled their resources in cooperation with state and local officials to create a unified system of election reporting.
The other reason was the introduction of the IBM Vote Projection Analysis (VPA) which CBS would use during the broadcast to make early projections of races before they are officially declared as won (presumably by local election officials).
The VPA would focus on key precincts to make an early forecast of the final percentages. There is a great shot of the IBM 7000-series mainframe computer in the election studio, running the brand new System/360, the landmark operating system which gave us the business boom of Sixties. The entire broadcast has the audio-feel of being inside a room with big old computers (a few seconds of the broadcast will tell you what I mean).
Just like today, the states of Indiana and Kentucky closed their polls early, and counted their votes quickly to be among the first states declared.
At the beginning of the broadcast, the VPA had already projected Johnson as the winner in Kentucky. For much of American history after the Civil War, Kentucky was the ultimate swing state, in the true sense of actually swinging back and forth between the two parties like a coin flip. It was the ultimate border state---Southern in geography and culture, but birthplace of the nationalist Whig Party, which evolved into the Republicans.
In 1960 Nixon had won Kentucky for the Republicans, so when Johnson won it back for the Democrats, it was not a fantastic sign for Goldwater, but as a coin-flip state, it didn't really matter.
But then the IBM VPA quickly projected Johnson as the winner in Indiana, which Nixon had carried handily, and which Goldwater was counting on heavily in his stragtegy (along with Texas, Ohio, and California).
Within a half hour the VPA projected Johnson carrying Ohio as well. It was over very quickly, but it took the rest of the evening to prove the early signs and projections of were true. Few anticipated the magnitude of the landslide.
Illinois put Johnson over the top well before midnight. Goldwater was a jerk and did not come out to give a concession speech at all that evening, even at 2 a.m. He was holed up in the Camelback Inn in Phoenix. He had his running mate Congressman Miller come out and give a short friendly speech saying that as VP candidate, he couldn't really say anything until Goldwater spoke. Miller was retiring from politics altogether after that night. Surrounded by his family, he clearly didn't care at all about having lost.
By midnight as well, CBS knew this election was not only a big victory for the Democrats, but that it was a realignment election.
Vermont went Democratic for the first time in its history. On the flip side, CBS reported Georgia went Republican for the first time in its history.
Cronkite was the anchor (assisted by back-up like Roger Mudd), but the grand old man of CBS back then was Eric Sevareid (1912-1992), the senior cBS correspondent who was allowed to talk about anything he wanted, as Cronkite himself joked, while introducing him. It was he who came out when the evening was ripening to declare that extremism had failed. The hate groups (he used that term) had been turned back.
Sevareid was the oldest on the set, but he was the only one who could have walked off that set and onto one of the major cable t.v. news networks today and been perfectly at home. I felt like I had just watched modern news broadcasting being born.
Sevareid announced that the we were int a new era primarily because of the creation of a new voting block. the first time such a true voting block had existed in the history of the country, where 99% of the people in the block voted the same way. In this case it was the Negroes, as they called them. It made Black Americans instantly into the most powerful voters in the country, because they all voted the same. We have lived in that political era since then.
Among other things, that evening was probably the first time that most Americans saw and heard the name George Bush, who was announced as the Republican vying to unseat U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough from Texas. Bush was a Republican trying to buck the Johnson ticket Democratic tide in Johnson's home state of Texas. He lost andYarborough kept his seat. It was mentioned how Yarborough, in his victory speech, had taunted Bush as an out-of-stater who now ought to go back where he came from.
By covering their various speeches, CBS all but declared Michigan Governor George Romney and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to be the (non-extremist) future of the Republican Party. Romney had just won re-election. He had spoken out against Goldwater at the convention in San Francisco. We looked for Mitt on stage but did not see him.
Rockefeller, who had all but denounced Goldwater at the convention, and who now seemed vindicated on all counts, spoke during the appearance of U.S. Senator Keating from New York, who lost his re-election bid as U.S. Senator from New York, pulled down in the anti-Republican tide in New York because the party had swung to the western extremists.
Rockefeller was at his prime that night too. It would have seemed obvious to anyone that he would be President at some point, or at least would be the Republican nominee. He was competent and telegenic, appearing completely in control even amidst the defeat his party and the incumbent Senator.
No one brought up Richard Nixon the entire night except in mentioning comparisons to the previous election in 1960. Nixon had been declared politically dead in 1962 when he lost his bid to be California Governor, following up his Presidential loss. By 1964, it seemed he had demoted himself right out of presidential politics.
Another highlight was Lyndon Johnson being interviewed from his headquarters in Austin while wearing a radio headset.. If you imagine Lyndon Johnson in that kind of get-up, you know how weird the image was. No president would do such a thing now. Johnson was very calm and matter of fact. He barely gave any emotion to the idea of apparently winning the election (it was still unofficial). He was a man for the crowd in a convention hall, not for that kind of setting. There was something charming in his lack of consciousness of how strange he looked on television wearing a radio headset.
The keynote of the evening was at the very end, just before 2 A.M. Eastern Time, in the victory speech by the person who had unhorsed Keating from the U.S. Senate---New York State's new Senator-elect Robert F. Kennedy (who had overcome charges of being a carpetbagger, having moved to New York State just to run for the Senate). He spoke from the ballroom of the Statler Hilton in New York.
As he always did, in that kind of intimate setting, Kennedy dominated the room. Johnson might have been elected president, getting a four-year term in his own right, but everyone assumed that Robert Kennedy was the real future of the Democratic Party.
Standing behind Kennedy on the crowded stage, his tall stature sticking above the others like a king on a chessboard, directing others around him with tight hand gestures, was a curious figure, a man of seventy-five with aged lined face and the weight of deep responsibility on him like a shadow.
Kennedy turns and thanks him very quickly into his speech as being essential to his victory, especially as Kennedy did not really live in New York, and had no political experience there (my word's not Kennedy's).
The man behind him that he thanked was the former N.Y. governor, Averell Harriman, whom Rockefeller had unseated from the governor's mansion six years earlier in 1958. Harriman was an heavyweight as it got. In his day, Harriman had stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the Teheran Conference that had had organized the outlines of the world after World War II. Now he was standing behind Robert Kennedy.
Kennedy thanks him specifically for being the driving force behind the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The adoption of the Test Ban Treaty had been one of achievements of the Kennedy Administration that Johnson had played up his television commercials and speeches. It was a primal pitch appealing to mothers that from 1964 forward, their children could grow up free of radioactive contamination from the atmosphere. Harriman acknowledged Kennedy's thanks for this great achievement with a formulaic nod and then went about his business surveying the stage to make sure he an everyone else there was positioned correctly around Kennedy.
It must have been a nice little revenge for Harriman against Nelson Rockefeller, his longtime younger rival, to have orchestrated winning back that Senate seat for the Democrats. But it would have been a small satisfaction, only one item among many Harriman would have been orchestrating, at least in his mind, at that very moment. Electoral glory revenge was not the kind of thing that drove Harriman, except in the way all men want to win every contest. Everyone knew Harriman had deeper concerns on his mind (like making sure the world didn't destroy itself). Everyone knew he played the game on a higher level than anyone else who had appeared that evening, newscaster or politician, even Lyndon Johnson.
The IBM VPA did amazingly well, as it happened. Cronkite pointed out late in the broadcast that they had nailed the final percentage of the vote in Kentucky almost exactly.
Following up, there's about an hour left of CBS coverage from that evening to watch in a separate video, picking up at 3 a.m. Eastern. It includes Humphrey's VP victory speech. Might watch it tonight.
Friday, August 28, 2020
Reading: The Fountainhead (1943)
By the time I finished it, I hated Atlas Shrugged, but I thought to be fair to Ayn Rand (1905-1982), I'd read her other acknowledged masterpiece, The Fountainhead, which she wrote before Atlas Shrugged.
I'm 128 pages in out of about 600. So far it's far better book. Much easier to read.
Of course I started off mostly liking Atlas Shrugged as well, but so far in The Fountainhead I'm not seeing any of the warning signs I say early in that story, so I am more hopeful I will like the story, and not detest the characters I am supposed to like. One definitely sees patterns in Rand's characters, however. I'm suspicious that the suffering-for-love's-sake female character is going to be punished the way Rand punished a similar character in Atlas Shrugged.
Of course I started off mostly liking Atlas Shrugged as well, but so far in The Fountainhead I'm not seeing any of the warning signs I say early in that story, so I am more hopeful I will like the story, and not detest the characters I am supposed to like. One definitely sees patterns in Rand's characters, however. I'm suspicious that the suffering-for-love's-sake female character is going to be punished the way Rand punished a similar character in Atlas Shrugged.
The best thing so far is that Rand is much more conservative as a story-teller in sticking close to historical reality. She sets the story in 1922 specifically, and we feel like we are in the real New York of that era, and not an alternate reality (in which Lincoln didn't build the Union Pacific, or something weird like that) or in which the laws of physics are different than our own.
The thing that really bugs me about Rand in this book, however, is something that also bugged me in Atlas Shrugged. It's this: Rand makes judgments of taste in art which she considers as absolute. Each man and woman must live in freedom, but that freedom is supposed to converge on appreciation of certain expressions of art that Rand considers valid, and to shun ones that she considers as invalid. It's a deep contradiction in her world view, if you ask me, which is perhaps why Randians come across as severe know-it-alls while thumping you on the head about personal liberty.
To make it worse, her critique of architecture settles squarely on the genius of modernism, both its raw form, but also in its explicit discarding of tradition and the past. All forms of past architecture are invalid to her.
Can one think of a more deleterious attitude than this, which creates the god-awfulness of the Twentieth Century modern city, which feels soulless, and inspires only the desire to escape?
Yes I get that maybe we had to "forget" traditional forms for a while, to break free. But now everything Rand said about the cult of Classical-Gothic-Renaissance in vogue in architects of her era is now what one says about modern architecture, namely that's an Emperor Has No Clothes cult of mutual adoration among so-called architectural artists who give each other awards even though the public hates their work and wishes to tear it down and replace it with something more amenable to human usage (that happens to feel Classical or day one say it, Medieval).
The thing that really bugs me about Rand in this book, however, is something that also bugged me in Atlas Shrugged. It's this: Rand makes judgments of taste in art which she considers as absolute. Each man and woman must live in freedom, but that freedom is supposed to converge on appreciation of certain expressions of art that Rand considers valid, and to shun ones that she considers as invalid. It's a deep contradiction in her world view, if you ask me, which is perhaps why Randians come across as severe know-it-alls while thumping you on the head about personal liberty.
To make it worse, her critique of architecture settles squarely on the genius of modernism, both its raw form, but also in its explicit discarding of tradition and the past. All forms of past architecture are invalid to her.
Can one think of a more deleterious attitude than this, which creates the god-awfulness of the Twentieth Century modern city, which feels soulless, and inspires only the desire to escape?
Yes I get that maybe we had to "forget" traditional forms for a while, to break free. But now everything Rand said about the cult of Classical-Gothic-Renaissance in vogue in architects of her era is now what one says about modern architecture, namely that's an Emperor Has No Clothes cult of mutual adoration among so-called architectural artists who give each other awards even though the public hates their work and wishes to tear it down and replace it with something more amenable to human usage (that happens to feel Classical or day one say it, Medieval).
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Reading: Sarrasine (1830)
I just downloaded this for Kindle. It is a novella written by Balzac as part of his 91-volume loose collection Comédie Humaine about life in Post-Restoration France, with overlapping storylines to make a Balzacian Universe.
Since I read Père Goriot in an old used hardbook, for this one I will allow myself the digital version, which turned out to be free. If it fails as a reading experience, I look for the hard back version.
Balzac had been writing for a decade but he still had not made it big when he wrote this. He had only gotten his first works in print. Sarrasine was one of the very first, and along with some others, he would group Sarrasine among his works he called "Scènes de la vie privée" (Scenes of Private Life).
Making it big would require another year, until 1831. He was living in Paris and spent time in the salons of Madame Récamier. (1777-1849)
Since I read Père Goriot in an old used hardbook, for this one I will allow myself the digital version, which turned out to be free. If it fails as a reading experience, I look for the hard back version.
Balzac had been writing for a decade but he still had not made it big when he wrote this. He had only gotten his first works in print. Sarrasine was one of the very first, and along with some others, he would group Sarrasine among his works he called "Scènes de la vie privée" (Scenes of Private Life).
Making it big would require another year, until 1831. He was living in Paris and spent time in the salons of Madame Récamier. (1777-1849)
A native of Lyon, she was the only child of Jean Bernard, the King's counsellor and a notary, and his wife, the former Julie Matton. Her father became, in 1784, the receiver of finance. She was educated at the Couvent de la Déserte in Lyon briefly, after which her family moved to Paris. The name "Juliette" came about as a diminutive of "Julie".[3] Beautiful, accomplished, and with a love of literature, Récamier was described as shy and modest by nature. [WP]Selection (p 5):
Have you ever met one of those women whose startling beauty defies the assaults of time, and who seem at thirty-six more desirable than they could have been fifteen years earlier? Their faces are impassioned souls; they fairly sparkle; each feature gleams with intelligence; each possesses a brilliancy of its own, especially in the light. Their captivating eyes attract or repel, speak or are silent; their gait is artlessly seductive; their voices unfold the melodious treasure of the most coquettishly sweet and tender tones...To love one of those omnipotent sirens is to stake one's life, is it not? And that, perhaps, is why we love them so passionately! Such was the Comtesse de Lanty.
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Anno Domini: The Marriage of Theophanu and Rufus
If you ask me, one of the fun questions of history involves the issue of the continuity of the western calendar.
Specifically, by what grounds do we assert the calendar we use today, that tells us we are in the year 2020, reflects the correct number of years that have passed since Antiquity?
Or equivalently, how do we know that our Common Era is the same as the original Anno Domini that was invented by Dionysius Exiguus (who discovered he was in 525)?
How do we know 2000 years have passed since the year we now call AD 20?
Or to narrow it down a bit, how do we know that after Dionysius Exiguus did this calculation, that 447 years elapsed until the very fascinating event below?
525 -- Anno Domini, Dionysius Exiguus
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?
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972 Apr 14 -- Marriage of the niece of the Eastern Roman Emperor John I Tzmiskes (fourteen-year-old Theophanu [Θεοφανώ]) to co-emperor of the West and son of Western Emperor Otto I the Great (sixteen-year old Otto II [Otto Rufus (the Red)]) in Rome, performed by Pope John XIII,. The Pope crowns Theophanu as Western Empress.
Specifically, by what grounds do we assert the calendar we use today, that tells us we are in the year 2020, reflects the correct number of years that have passed since Antiquity?
Or equivalently, how do we know that our Common Era is the same as the original Anno Domini that was invented by Dionysius Exiguus (who discovered he was in 525)?
How do we know 2000 years have passed since the year we now call AD 20?
Or to narrow it down a bit, how do we know that after Dionysius Exiguus did this calculation, that 447 years elapsed until the very fascinating event below?
525 -- Anno Domini, Dionysius Exiguus
.
?
.
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| Theophanu was escorted to Rome for her wedding by a delegation of German and Italian churchmen and nobles. Her uncle John I Tzimiskes had overthrown his predecessor Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas in 969. |
972 Apr 14 -- Marriage of the niece of the Eastern Roman Emperor John I Tzmiskes (fourteen-year-old Theophanu [Θεοφανώ]) to co-emperor of the West and son of Western Emperor Otto I the Great (sixteen-year old Otto II [Otto Rufus (the Red)]) in Rome, performed by Pope John XIII,. The Pope crowns Theophanu as Western Empress.
Let's assume this event is correctly dated (by year*) in our current 2020 calendar.
(1000 years before April 1972*)
*That our April 14 in 2020 may not line up exactly with the fourteenth day of the month April in 972 AD, but some other day in April perhaps, is in known feature. It happens on a small scale year by year because of leap year. But even with other calendar adjustments since the Middle Ages, this amount of offset is always by less than a month in the calendar. What we are concerned with is the number of solar years that have passed between two year-dates.
How do we know this year-counting sequence is correct during the gap in recorded western history?
There are no reliable continuous records in the Western or Eastern Roman Empire covering this gap.
There are no reliable historical chroniclers during this gap.
Anno Domini was not widely used until much later.
How did they keep count in a reliable way?
Who would have been able to do that?
How can we be certain that they got it right?
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| Western Emperor Otto II in 985. |
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
On Balzac
I finished reading a translation of Père Goriot a couple weeks ago. It took me six months to read it, even though it is only 250 pages.
I'd had a used hard-bound copy that I acquired years ago. It sat on my shelf for years and then last year it decided it needed to be read. So I read it.
Short summary: Balzac (1799-1850) is amazing. Everything about his writing thwarted my expectations of what he was doing. He sets up story lines that you think will occupy the rest of the book, and then he resolves them in the next two pages, and you are left wondering what the book is about. Who are these characters and what are they doing?
You wonder like that, and you get two thirds of the way through the book, and then---bam---suddenly you know what the story is about. The characters that he has been setting up for all those pages were a gathering storm that erupts out into stories of consequence for the characters, that you probably did did not anticipate in the first fifty pages.
Balzac timeline:
1799 May 20 -- born Honoré Balzac in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France
1819 -- begins writing while living alone at in the rue Lesdiguières in Paris.
1829-1848 -- La Comédie humaine, generally viewed as his magnum opus. multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration (1815–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848). a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life
1834-35 -- Père Goriot (part of La Comédie humaine)
1850 Aug 17 -- died in Paris. age 51.
I'd had a used hard-bound copy that I acquired years ago. It sat on my shelf for years and then last year it decided it needed to be read. So I read it.
Short summary: Balzac (1799-1850) is amazing. Everything about his writing thwarted my expectations of what he was doing. He sets up story lines that you think will occupy the rest of the book, and then he resolves them in the next two pages, and you are left wondering what the book is about. Who are these characters and what are they doing?
You wonder like that, and you get two thirds of the way through the book, and then---bam---suddenly you know what the story is about. The characters that he has been setting up for all those pages were a gathering storm that erupts out into stories of consequence for the characters, that you probably did did not anticipate in the first fifty pages.
Balzac timeline:
1799 May 20 -- born Honoré Balzac in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France
1819 -- begins writing while living alone at in the rue Lesdiguières in Paris.
1829-1848 -- La Comédie humaine, generally viewed as his magnum opus. multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration (1815–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848). a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life
consists of 91 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 46 unfinished works (some of which exist only as titles). It does not include Balzac's five theatrical plays or his collection of humorous tales1830 -- Sarrasine (part of La Comédie humaine)
1834-35 -- Père Goriot (part of La Comédie humaine)
1850 Aug 17 -- died in Paris. age 51.
Deconstruction: Act Two (Final)
What a deep dive into history that was. It was quite an indulgence on my part. That was barely nothing of the real threads of human history, of course.
But a thread it is. Having a thread---any thread---turns out to be of great importance in the constructing the story. As you obtain more things, you can attach them to the thread you have made.
That should be enough material to chew on for Act Two of Deconstruction. It might take the form of many streaming video series seasons, exploring the nooks and crannies of the past of human history.
We ourselves can be characters in the story. Inasmuch as I dwell on myself, it is to highlight the ordinariness of my life.
Act Three--I'm not sure what that is yet. Will be taking a break from it at the very least, and it will come to me when it is ripe to be understood.
But a thread it is. Having a thread---any thread---turns out to be of great importance in the constructing the story. As you obtain more things, you can attach them to the thread you have made.
That should be enough material to chew on for Act Two of Deconstruction. It might take the form of many streaming video series seasons, exploring the nooks and crannies of the past of human history.
We ourselves can be characters in the story. Inasmuch as I dwell on myself, it is to highlight the ordinariness of my life.
Act Three--I'm not sure what that is yet. Will be taking a break from it at the very least, and it will come to me when it is ripe to be understood.
Modernity Phase III -- Consciousness is an Illusion
Modernity Phase II (to 1807) (Discovery of the fundamental estrangement of consciousness from the world outside of itself) : Kant, Hegel 1807 -- The Phenomenology of the Spirt (consciousness fundamentally alienated from the world)
Modernity Phase III (1867--present) (Discovery of the essential inauthenticity of consciousness, that consciousness is determined by factors outside of itself. See "School of suspicion" (1965) below)
1. Marx -- consciousness determined by historical/material factors
2. Nietzsche -- consciousness determined by passions
3. Freud -- consciousness determined by the unconscious
Fry suggests adding the 4th "hermeneut of suspicion"
4. Darwin ? -- consciousness determined by biological processes
1818 May 5 -- Birth of Karl Heinrich Marx, Trier, Prussia, German Confederation
1844 Oct 15 -- Birth of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in Röcken, Saxony, Prussia
1848 Feb -- The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx
1856 May 6 -- Birth of Sigismund Schlomo Freud, Freiberg in Mähren, Moravia, Austrian Empire
(now Příbor, Czech Republic)
1859 Nov 24 -- On the Origin of Species, Darwin
1867 -- Das Kapital, Vol. I, Marx
1872 -- The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche
1873 -- Of Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,Nietzsche
1873 -- Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche
1876 -- Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche
1878 -- Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche
1881 -- The Dawn of Day, Nietzsche
1882 -- The Gay Science, Nietzsche
1883 -- Death of Marx
1883-1885 -- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche
1886 -- Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
1887 -- On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche
(1888 -- Nietzsche's Last Year of Lucidity)
1888 -- The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche
1888 -- The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche
1888 -- Ecce Homo,Nietzsche
1888 -- The Antichrist, Nietzsche
1888 -- Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Nietzsche
1891 -- On Aphasia, Freud
1895 -- Studies on Hysteria, Freud
1899 -- The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
1900 -- Death of Nietzsche
1904 -- The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud
1905 -- Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, Freud
1905 -- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud
1907 -- Delusion and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva, Freud
1910 -- Leonardo da Vinci, a Memory of His Childhood, Freud
1910 -- The Will to Power, notes by Nietzsche published posthumously
A basic element in Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the "will to power" (der Wille zur Macht), which he maintained provides a basis for understanding human behavior—more so than competing explanations, such as the ones based on pressure for adaptation or survival.As such, according to Nietzsche, the drive for conservation appears as the major motivator of human or animal behavior only in exceptions, as the general condition of life is not one of emergency, of 'struggle for existence.
1913 -- Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, Freud
1915-17 -- Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud
1920 -- Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud
1921 -- Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud
1923 -- The Ego and the Id, Freud
1926 -- Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud
1926 -- The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud
1927 -- The Future of an Illusion, Freud
1930 -- Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud
1933 -- New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud
1939 -- Moses and Monotheism, Freud
1939 Sept 23 -- Death of Freud
1965 -- Freud and Philosophy, Paul Ricœur (1913-2005). introduces the School of suspicion.
 |
Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur, 27 February 1913 – 20 May 2005) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. He came from a family of devout Huguenots (French Protestants), a religious minority in France |
"School of suspicion" (French: école du soupçon) (also dubbed hermeneutics of suspicion in secondary literature) is a phrase coined by Paul Ricœur in Freud and Philosophy (1965) to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the three "masters of suspicion".
(Rita Felski): "[Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche] share a commitment to unmasking 'the lies and illusions of consciousness'; t
They are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths ...
Ricoeur's term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields."
Jacques Derrida was an assistant to Ricœur during the time this was published (early 1960s
Modernity Phase II -- Estrangement
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| Horatio, Hamlet, and the ghost (Artist: Henry Fuseli, 1789) |
Modernity Step 1: Questioning the Authority of Consciousness
1599-1601 -- Hamlet, Shakespeare
1605-1615 -- Don Quixote, Cervantes
1637 -- Discourse on the Method, Descartes
Modernity Step 2: Discovery of the Fundamental Estrangement of Consciousness from the World
1739-41 -- Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume.
Considered by many to be Hume's most important work and one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy.
a classic statement of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Hume also offers a skeptical theory of personal identity.
Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon
Hume introduces the famous problem of induction, arguing that inductive reasoning and our beliefs regarding cause and effect cannot be justified by reason; instead, our faith in induction and causation is the result of mental habit and custom. [WP]
Title page of the 1781 edition. Kant would later say that reading Hume "woke him from his dogmatic slumber."
1781 -- Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, Kant,
the unknowable noumenon is often identified with or associated with the unknowable "thing-in-itself" (in Kant's German, Ding an sich).1787 -- Critique of Pure Reason, second edition, Kant
1788 -- Critique of Practical Reason, Kant
1789 -- Beginning of the French Revolution
1790 -- Critique of Judgment, Kant
1793-94 -- The Terror 1804 -- Napoleon is crowned Emperor
1806 -- Napoleon invasion of Prussia
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| Hegel was putting the finishing touches to this book as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on October 14, 1806, in the Battle of Jena on a plateau outside the city. On the day before the battle, Napoleon entered the city of Jena. |
1807 -- The Phenomenology of the Mind/Spirit, Hegel. (Geistes="of the mind" or "of the spirit").
Spirit/Mind is the protagonist of this literary work, which is a history of consciousness
[one commentaor] famously interpreted the work as a Bildungsroman that follows the progression of its protagonist, Spirit/Mind, through the history of consciousness, a characterization that remains prevalent among literary theorists.
two distinct German terms: Entfremdung (‘estrangement’) and Entäußerung (‘externalization’) both originated in this work [source]
Monday, August 24, 2020
1974 -- We Have Seen Christendom Die
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With his hypnotic gaze, disarming smile, and dramatic delivery, Archbishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979) was deemed a natural for television. Airing opposite NBC's highly popular Milton Berle show on Tuesday nights, Sheen was the only person to be competitive with Berle. Sheen drew as many as 10 million viewers each week. For this work, Sheen twice won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality, and was featured on the cover of Time Magazine."The combination of travel, the study of world religions and personal encounter with different nationalities and peoples made me see that the fullness of truth is like a complete circle of 360 degrees. Every religion in the world has a segment of that truth." --Sheen |
With the shutdown back on last, Father Mike in Duluth has resumed live streaming Mass again from the student chapel (see video below).
It's a remarkable time in the history of the Church. For the first time in history, it is possible to fulfill the obligations of weekly Mass attendance without actually being physically present.
Father Mike's sermon mentioned the famous Catholic-American preacher Bishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979), who was famous in Pop Culture from the 1940s until his death (see this 1956 Fulton Sheen appearance as mystery guest on What's My Line.). Sheen was highly conscious of the need for the Church to use modern mass media to connect to people, and he was willing to make himself a Pop Culture figure in order to achieve this goal.
Father Mike, in explaining the state of the (Catholic) Church today, drew on Sheen's assertion that we have arrived in civilization at the End of Christendom. It seems to be a reference to something Sheen said in address called The Fourth Great Crisis in the Church. One can listen to the address, but the date and circumstance of the recording is not something I have found. Given other things people say about, I'm guessing it was part of a cassette tape ministry in 1974 or after, that Sheen made had retired from radio and television broadcasting, when he was at least 78 years old.
“Christendom is economic, political, social life as inspired by Christian principles. That is ending — we’ve seen it die. Look at the symptoms: the breakup of the family, divorce, abortion, immorality, general dishonesty.”
Overall I think Father Mike's celebration of Mass this week makes the best "Introduction to Catholicism" I could possibly imagine, especially for American Protestants. It's also a good explanation of what Sheen meant by the "the End of Christendom".
Highly recommend giving it the time to watch:
Highly recommend giving it the time to watch:
1889 -- Completing of St. Mary's Cathedral in Peoria.
1895 May 8 -- Peter John Sheen (later Fulton Sheen) born in Illinois.
Sheen was born in El Paso, Illinois, the oldest of four sons of Newton and Delia Sheen. His parents were of Irish descent, tracing their roots back to Croghan, County Roscommon, Connacht.
Though he was known as Fulton, his mother's maiden name, he was baptized as Peter John Sheen. As an infant, Sheen contracted tuberculosis. After the family moved to nearby Peoria, Illinois, Sheen's first role in the Church was as an altar boy at St. Mary's Cathedral.
1913 -- Sheen graduates with valedictorian honors from Spalding Institute in Peoria. He then attends St. Viator College in Kankakee, Illinois, and Saint Paul Seminary in Minnesota.
1919 Sept 20 -- 24 y.o. Sheen is consecrated a priest in Diocese of Peoria.
1922 -- The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot.
1923 -- Sheen wins the Cardinal Mercier Prize for International Philosophy, establishing his repuation as theologian. He earns at appointment teaching at the Catholic University of America.
1924 -- Sheen pursues graduate studies in Rome, earning a Sacred Theology Doctorate.
Sheen was the assistant to the pastor at St. Patrick's Church, Soho Square in London for a year, while teaching theology at St. Edmund's College, Ware, where he met Ronald Knox.1925 -- Sheen publishes his first book, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy
1926 -- Sheen is asked by the Bishop of Peoria to take over St. Patrick's parish in Peoria. After nine months he returns to Catholic University, where he teaches philosophy until 1950
1929 -- Sheen gives speech in French at the National Catholic Educational Association, encouraging teachers to "educate for a Catholic Renaissance" in the United States.
1930 –1952 -- The Catholic Hour, NBC Radio, hosted by Sheen. I have seen conflicting dates for the run of Sheen's NBC radio program, but he was on the air at least by 1930 and went to television by 1952.
1939 -- Francis Spellman becomes Archbishop of New York, serving until 1967.
1946 -- Archbishop Spellman of New York made a cardinal.
1947 Jan 26 -- "Signs of Our Times" Archbishop Fulton Sheen radio broadcast on NBC. This seems to be a widely shared episode by Sheen on Youtube.
(7:56) In the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, [the Antichrist] will have one great secret which he will tell to no one: he will not believe in God. Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counter-church which will be the ape of the Church, because he, the Devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the Antichrist that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ."
1940 Mar 24 -- World's first televised religious service? Easter mass broadcast on experimental television station in Washington, DC. by Sheen.
While at Catholic University of America, Sheen celebrated an Easter Sunday Mass in 1940 that was one of the first televised religious services. During the sermon, telecast on experimental station W2XBS, Sheen remarked "this is the first religious television in the history of the world. Let therefore its first message be a tribute of thanks to God for giving the minds of our day the inspiration to unravel the secrets of the universe."1948 -- Communism and the Conscience of the West, published by Fulton Sheen
1951 -- Sheen named Auxillary Bishop in the Archdiocese of New York.
1952 Feb –Apr 1957 -- Life is Worth Living, television series featuring Sheen.
On February 12, 1952, he began a weekly television program on the DuMont Television Network, titled Life Is Worth Living. Filmed at the Adelphi Theatre in New York City, the program consisted of the unpaid Sheen simply speaking in front of a live audience without a script or cue cards, occasionally using a chalkboard.
It ran on the DuMont Television Network from February 12, 1952, to April 26, 1955, then on ABC until April 8, 1957, featuring the archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. Similar series, also featuring Sheen, followed in 1958–1961 and 1961–1968.
The series consisted of Sheen speaking to the camera and discussing moral issues of the day, often using blackboard drawings and lists to help explain the topic. When the blackboard was filled he would move to another part of the set, and request one of his "angels" (one of the TV crew) to clean the blackboard.
The show, scheduled in a prime time slot on Tuesday nights at 8:00 p.m., was not expected to challenge the ratings giants Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra, but did surprisingly well.1952 Apr 14 -- Fulton on the cover of Time, as the "First televangelist". (link) The graphic behind him has a golden United Nations graphic superimposed over a red cross of St. George.
1953 Feb 3 -- Sheen wins Emmy for Most Outstanding Personality at 5th Primetime Emmy Awards, at the Hotel Statler in Los Angeles, California, hosted by Art Linkletter.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Sheen was notable for early efforts seeking common ground with Christians from non-Roman churches, whether Eastern or Protestant. He occasionally celebrated Byzantine Divine Liturgy, with papal permission awarding him certain bi-ritual faculties.
Sheen accepted the award saying, "I feel it is time I pay tribute to my four writers – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John."
When Sheen won, Milton Berle quipped, "We both work for 'Sky Chief'", a reference to Berle's sponsor Texaco.1953 Feb -- Sheen denounces Stalin on television,saying "Stalin must one day meet his judgment." Stalin dies within a week.
One of his best-remembered presentations came in February 1953, when he forcefully denounced the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin. Sheen gave a dramatic reading of the burial scene from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, substituting the names of prominent Soviet leaders Stalin, Lavrenty Beria, Georgy Malenkov, and Andrey Vyshinsky for the original Caesar, Cassius, Marc Antony, and Brutus. He concluded by saying, "Stalin must one day meet his judgment." The dictator suffered a stroke a few days later and died within a week (Mar 5 1953).
1955-56 -- The Honeymooners, CBS television
1956 -- Fulton Sheen appearance as mystery guest on What's My Line.
1957 -- End of Sheen's first television program. Forced off the air because of Sheen refused to pay the Archdiocese for powdered milk that it had obtained free from the government (see WP page)?
According to the foreword written for a 2008 edition of Sheen's autobiography, Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen, Catholic journalist Raymond Arroyo wrote why Sheen "retired" from hosting Life is Worth Living "at the height of its popularity ... [when] an estimated 30 million viewers and listeners tuned in each week." Arroyo wrote that "It is widely believed that Cardinal Spellman drove Sheen off the air."[
Arroyo relates that: "In the late 1950s the government donated millions of dollars' worth of powdered milk to the New York Archdiocese. In turn, Cardinal Spellman handed that milk over to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith to distribute to the poor of the world. On at least one occasion he demanded that the director of the Society, Bishop Sheen, pay the Archdiocese for the donated milk. He wanted millions of dollars. Despite Cardinal Spellman's considerable powers of persuasion and influence in Rome, Sheen refused. These were funds donated by the public to the missions, funds Sheen himself had personally contributed to and raised over the airwaves. He felt an obligation to protect them, even from the itchy fingers of his own Cardinal."
Spellman later took the issue directly to Pope Pius XII, pleading his case with Sheen present. The Pope sided with Sheen. Spellman later confronted Sheen, stating, "I will get even with you. It may take six months or ten years, but everyone will know what you are like."1961 -- The Fulton Sheen Program debuts on television (runs until 1968).
1966 Oct 21 -- Fulton Sheen named Bishop of Rochester.
1967 Jul -- Sheen denounces the Vietnam War.
1967 Dec 2 -- Death of Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York.
1968 -- Latest date that Sheen is regularly on broadcast television, on The Fulton Sheen Program.
1969 -- Sheen resigns as Bishop of Rochester.
1970 -- Sheen made the Archbishop of the titular see of Newport, Wales.
This ceremonial position gave him a promotion to Archbishop and thus helped to allow Sheen to continue his extensive writing. Archbishop Sheen wrote 73 books and numerous articles and columns.1972 -- Sheen appearance at Crystal Cathedral, a Protestant mega-church.
Sheen often commended Protestant devotion to Bible study: "The first subject of all to be studied is Scripture, and this demands not only the reading of it, but the study of commentaries. ...Protestant commentaries, I discovered, were also particularly interesting because Protestants have spent more time on Scripture than most of us."1974 -- Sheen starts cassette tape ministry
1974 ? -- Sheen proclaims the End of Christendom.In September 1974, the Archbishop of Washington asked Sheen to be the speaker for a retreat for diocesan priests at the Loyola Retreat House in Faulkner, Maryland. This was recorded on reel-to-reel tape, state of the art at the time.Sheen requested that the recorded talks be produced for distribution. This was the first production of what would become a worldwide cassette tape ministry called Ministr-O-Media, a nonprofit company that operated on the grounds of St. Joseph's Parish, Pomfret, Maryland. The retreat album was titled, Renewal and Reconciliation, and included nine 60-minute audio tapes.
1979 Oct -- Pope John Paul II visits New York, embracing Sheen
On October 2, 1979, two months before Sheen's death, Pope John Paul II visited St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and embraced Sheen, saying, "You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus Christ. You are a loyal son of the Church."1979 Dec 9 -- Death of Fulton Sheen at age 83, following open heart surgery at Lennox Hill Hospital in Manhattan
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