Happy Birthday to us!

Zócalo Public Square turns eight years old this month, and to celebrate the occasion we’d like to thank you for all your support and fill you in on where we are and where we’re heading.

We’re building out our online presence and have brought on some top-notch talent to do it.

Andrés Martinez, former editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, is now Zócalo’s editorial director. T.A. Frank, who has survived stints at The New Republic and The Washington Monthly, joins us as ideas editor. The inimitable Joe Mathews, author and former political reporter for the L.A. Times, is our new California editor. Megan Greenwell, former Washington Post reporter, is our managing editor.

Since April 2003, Zócalo has been bringing you free, high-quality, intellectual programming, presenting more than 250 events and 500 speakers at every major cultural venue around Los Angeles and beyond. We’re particularly proud to have attracted the most diverse audience of any civic forum in the United States.

Two years ago, we launched our online presence, which included full write-ups of all our events, as well as book reviews and interviews.

Over the past several months, our expanded editorial team has been launching new features like Nexus, our Monday ideas essay; Where I Go, musings on the places where we find connection to people and landscape; and The Voyage Home, stories about returning to our origins, wherever and whenever they might be.

Today, we’re pleased to launch Drinks With …, a feature that allows Zócalo to take a refreshing break with intriguing personalities.

Our online strategy is driven by our original mission of connecting people to ideas and to each other. Our virtual zócalo strives to capture the same sense of community and connectedness that you’ve long enjoyed at our live events. Please keep an eye out for more innovations in the months ahead.

We couldn’t have survived these eight years without your involvement and support. In that spirit, as we move forward, we welcome any and all ideas, suggestions and pitches.

And thanks again.

Gregory Rodriguez
Executive Director, Zócalo Public Square

*Photo by Aaron Salcido

The post Celebrating in Style appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On June 2, 1835, P. T. Barnum and a troupe of performers began their first tour in the United States, though this initial stint was a far cry from the grand, coordinated spectacles of today’s circus shows. Below, in his P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man, A. H. Saxon describes Barnum’s start in showmanship with the discovery of a purportedly 161-year-old woman named Joice Heth.

“If being made for a thing is a divine call to that thing,” Barnum’s last pastor in Bridgeport, the Reverend Lewis B. Fisher, once wrote of his famous parishioner, “then Mr. Barnum was divinely called to be a showman.” But the “call” had not yet come when Barnum moved with his family to New York City, where by his own account he knocked about for several months without finding congenial employment. In the spring of 1835, he opened a small boardinghouse in Frankfort Street. Around the same time he became partner in a grocery store with John Moody, whose grandson was to found the well-known Moody’s Investors Service.

While attending to business at the latter establishment, Barnum learned of the extraordinary opportunity that was to launch him on his career as a showman. And although he somewhat shamefacedly acknowledged in later editions of his autobiography that this was “the least deserving of all my efforts in the show line,” he made no such apology in the original edition. Joice Heth is undoubtedly the most enigmatic episode in Barnum’s entire career, for one is never certain how much he really knew – or chose not to know – in regard to this imposition.

As Barnum tells the story in his autobiography, toward the end of July 1835 he learned from Coley Bartram, a Connecticut acquaintance, that a Kentuckian named R. W. Lindsay wished to sell his interest in an exhibition known as “Joice Heth.” The last was in fact a blind, decrepit, hymn-singing black slave, whom Lindsay had contracted for with her owner, John S. Bowling, also of Kentucky, for a period of twelve months. The great selling point of Joice Heth was that she had reached the astounding age of 161 years and had once been the “nurse” of George Washington! When Barnum first viewed this wonder lying upon her couch in Philadelphia’s Masonic Hall, “she might almost as well as have been called a thousand years old as any other age.” Her withered legs, drawn up, could not be moved; and her left arm, whose hand possessed nails some four inches long, lay across her breast and was equally rigid. Her blind eyes were so sunken that they seemed to be have disappeared altogether; her teeth were entirely gone; and her weight, as reported in bills and other advertising matter, was but forty-six pounds. Yet she could talk, and talk almost incessantly, about her “dead little George” and how she had not only been present at his birth but “raised” him. Besides her store of anecdotes about the “father of our country” and the doings of the “redcoats,” Joice was extremely fond of discoursing on religious topics (she had been belatedly baptized in the Potomac in 1719, at the age of forty-five) and singing ancient hymns, many of which, Barnum writes, “were entirely new to me,” as indeed they must have been to her other auditors. “She retains her faculties in an unparalleled degree,” proclaims a handbill Barnum himself later had printed, “and often laughs heartily at her own remarks.” One suspects old Joice would have felt right at home in Connecticut.

The aspiring showman demanded some proof of Joice’s extraordinary age, naturally enough, and Lindsay obliged by showing him a crumbling bill of sale, signed by Augustine Washington and dated 5 February 1727, for a Negro woman named Joice Heth, described as then being fifty-four years old. Further inquiry elicited the information that after being sold by Augustine to his neighboring sister-in-law, Joice had assisted at the birth of “little George” and was the first person to clothe him. In time she became the property of the Bowling family and was taken to Kentucky, where she was left to decay unceremoniously in an outbuilding, no one being aware (apparently Joice was not talking much then) of her true age or connection with the illustrious Washington. It was during a visit to Virginia that the son of John Bowling, while looking over some documents in the Virginia Records Office, quite by chance ran across the 1727 bill of sale and became convinced that the Joice Heth named therein was the same as his father’s slave. The Virginia officials obligingly let him take the bill of sale home with him, and it was this ancient-looking document, framed under glass, that Lindsay now offered as indisputable proof of his exhibit’s remarkable age and history.

Barnum writes that he was satisfied by this story, and immediately plunged into the “show line” with a will and from that moment on rarely looked back. He had finally found his true niche in life – had hearkened to the “divine call,” his pastor might have said.

-Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu.

*Photo courtesy ike4014.

The post How P.T. Barnum Got His Start appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrian traffic on May 27, 1937. It was immediately praised for being the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time of its completion, but more importantly, the bridge came to be regarded as the definitive symbol of the nation’s western frontier. Below, in a piece for Architect, Dan Halpern examines the origins and national significance of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I’d come to San Francisco to work out whether the Golden Gate Bridge, named for the strait that connects the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean, might not be the end of America – its final border, the end of the West. This notion follows if you consider the beginning of the country, naturally, to be the Statue of Liberty. If the country has a beginning and an end, these are surely the two spots.

Yet for an immigrant from the Pacific Rim, surely the Golden Gate is where the country begins, not finishes. Joan Didion knew this, writing in 1982, “The Golden Gate Bridge, referring as it does to both the infinite and technology, suggests, to the Californian, a quite complex representation of land’s end, and also of its beginning.” So the idea is not without problems. All the same, there is clearly some historical sense to the simple metaphor of the West as end, keeping in mind that the American movement westward through the initial stages of the nation’s development is a historical fact, not a point of view. There is a tradition of the West as the nation’s vanguard, the place of youth and revolution, and inasmuch as the bridge represents the place – who, please, goes to San Francisco and buys a postcard of Coit Tower? – the bridge thus also represents the frontier, the furthest reach, the edge.

The next problem in fixing a beginning at the Statue of Liberty and an end at the bridge is that it makes an uneven pair of anchors. The statue is only a monument, and the bridge, 1.7 miles long, is an essential and utilitarian piece of infrastructure as much as it is an icon. It can’t just stand there untouched, but is used every day: Indeed, about 40 million vehicles cross the bridge annually, coming down from Marin County into the city and vice versa. That is to say, the bridge is difficult to make stand still as a simple icon.

The bridge is now in the middle of a $471 million seismic retrofit aimed at making it as safe and strong as possible – that is, better able to move with and dissipate seismic forces – without changing its appearance at all. Phase 1, shoring up the North (Marin) Viaduct, began in 1997 and finished in 2002; the second phase, strengthening the South (San Francisco) Viaduct, finished earlier this year; and the third phase, retrofitting the main span, is expected to continue through 2012. Engineers have replaced all the steel towers, which are up to 150 feet tall, below the south and north approaches to the central span. Pylons and anchorage housing have been strengthened, dampers and stiffeners and bracing installed. “It’s 10 times stronger, but the public doesn’t see any difference,” I was told by Denis Mulligan, chief engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District.

The bridging of the Golden Gate was spurred by the need for an easier commute. By the 1920s, 50,000 commuters a week were coming into the city on ferries, and the number was only increasing. But San Francisco itself, surrounded on three sides by water, had stopped developing after decades of tremendously rapid growth, with no land to expand into, and its future was dependent on access.

As Kevin Starr, the longtime California state librarian and now librarian emeritus, has put it: “San Franciscans were beginning to realize that there was a vast northern and interior empire that had to be integrated into the San Francisco economy and transportation and travel network for San Francisco truly to survive.”

Thus, as early as 1916, the San Francisco city engineer, Michael O’Shaughnessy, began to consult engineers about the possibility of bridging the strait. The typical estimate he received came in at around $100 million, or about $2 billion today, but Joseph Strauss, a Chicago engineer with experience in much smaller projects – his patented design for a bascule bridge, or drawbridge, was used worldwide – proposed to create a bulky cantilever-suspension hybrid for $25 million to $30 million; indeed, his initial cost estimate turned out to be $17 million. (The eventual cost was somewhere between $27 million and $36 million.)

Strauss spent the following years working to raise the money and the support necessary for the bridge, promoting the idea to every community in Northern California that would listen to him. In 1921, he hired Charles Ellis, an academic and engineer, to run the staff of his company and oversee the project, and in 1923 representatives of 21 Northern California counties met to come to an agreement to form the Association of Bridging the Gate, which would become a special district of the state in that same year, created in order to raise money to fund the bridge, largely financed by bridge bonds. The district was officially formed in 1928, with six counties ultimately joining, and in 1930 they voted in a $35 million bond issue, pledging the value of their property and assets against the bridge. The bridge, thus, would not belong solely to San Francisco but to a set of Californian communities, existing as its own entity.

“In the midst of the Great Depression – what a tremendous leap of faith!” Mulligan said, sitting in a conference room in the district offices, which are located yards away from the toll booths at the base of the city side of the bridge. “Because voting in – voting in meant they bet the farm. Literally. They put up their homes, farms, factories as guarantees for the bonds. So the vote meant for 30 years afterward this obligation was mentioned in your deed. Nobody thought it could sustain itself. But it did.”

–Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu

*Photo courtesy yuzu.

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More than 100 years after the first World’s Fair in 1851, the 1964/1965 New York World’s Fair opened on April 22, 1964. Like its predecessors, the fair, masterminded by planner Robert Moses, showed off the latest technological innovations. And appropriately for its time, the fair boosted for world peace and cross-cultural acceptance, debuting none other than Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” attraction. But the fair’s ambitions may have been too high. Below, from an article in American Heritage magazine, John Steele Gordon explains how the event turned into something of a disaster.

It had no fewer than three official themes, the remarkably clunky “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe,” the less than original “Peace Through Understanding,” and the more or less meaningless “A Millennium of Progress.” Its symbol was the Unisphere, which still can be seen at Flushing Meadows Park, where the fair was held. It wasn’t even an official world’s fair, and most major countries boycotted it. It was a financial disaster.

Officially, the New York World’s Fair of 1964 and 1965 celebrated the 300th anniversary of the British capture of New York from the Dutch in 1664. Unofficially, it celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fondly remembered 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, which had featured the Futurama exhibit by General Motors, Billy Rose’s Aquacade, and the parachute jump that was later moved to Coney Island. The 1939-40 fair had ostensibly celebrated the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington as President in 1789. That was a good excuse, but the real reason was to get rid of a gigantic eyesore in the heart of the borough of Queens, the Corona Dumps. By making the dump the site of the World’s Fair, it was reasoned, New York City could use the profits to create a park after it closed. Unfortunately the fair lost money and was able to pay back only about 33 percent of what had been invested in it. The park remained unfinished.

The prime mover behind the 1939-40 World’s Fair, Robert Moses, the city parks commissioner, decided to try again. A gifted executive (and a born bureaucrat, with a genius for gaining control of the levers of power), Moses was also imperious and prickly about public relations. The corporation formed to run the fair (headed by Moses at a salary of $100,000, at a time when New York’s mayor earned $40,000) issued $35 million in six percent bonds, and New York City gave the fair $24 million for park improvements. Both sums were to be paid back out of profits. To ensure those profits, it was decided to charge rent for exhibition space and to run the fair for two years.

These decisions violated the rules of the Bureau of International Exhibitions, headquartered in Paris. Moses went to Paris and asked the BIE to sanction the New York fair anyway. When it wouldn’t, he went to the press and bad-mouthed the BIE. In retaliation, the bureau wrote its member states (most large nations, although not the United States) and asked that they not participate.

As a result there were only 36 foreign pavilions at the “world’s” fair, most of them hosted by small nations. One of the smallest nations, however, Vatican City, cut no corners and sent over Michelangelo’s Pietà, the only time the priceless statue has ever left Italy. To fill the gap, many American states agreed to participate. The Wisconsin Pavilion featured – what else? – the “world’s largest cheese.”
The backbone of the fair, however, were the exhibits of American corporations, with General Motors creating a new Futurama, this one predicting the world of 2064, AT&T demonstrated a “Picturephone,” a long-anticipated technology that never caught on. The surprise hit of the fair was at the Beigian Village Pavilion, where Belgian waffles were introduced to what turned out to be a highly receptive American audience.

Robert Moses would not allow the amusement area to have any of the honky-tonk, sideshow atmosphere (Norman Bel Geddes’s nude Crystal Gazing Palace, for instance) that had proved so popular at the 1939 fair. As a result it had little public appeal, and its major shows closed early with heavy losses.

The success of the exhibition was predicated on the attendance of 70 million people. But the reviews in the press, hostile to Robert Moses, were mostly negative and by the close of the 1964 season only 27 million had come to the fair. This was very bad news, indeed, and worse immediately followed. The fair had taken in much money in advance ticket sales for both the 1964 and 1965 seasons. But through a gross accounting error, these revenues were counted as income only for 1964. This gave the illusion of plenty of money on hand, and the fair spent freely.

Finally it dawned on the fair corporation and the press that there would be little money in the till to cover 1965 operating expenses. By borrowing from the city and raising ticket prices, the fair avoided the supreme embarrassment of bankruptcy. A last-minute surge in attendance (which totaled 52 million over the two seasons) in the final weeks of the fair also helped stave off absolute disaster. But the fair was unable to repay its bondholders or the city.

Many earlier American world’s fairs, such as the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, and even the New York fair of 1939-40, won a permanent place in the American folk memory. The 1964-65 fair has been largely forgotten, except perhaps as a prime example of what went wrong with New York City in the 1960s and 1970s.

–Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu

*Photo courtesy Thom Watson.

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The McDonald brothers were not restaurant men by training or background, and in the tradition-bound food service business, that may have been something of a prerequisite to igniting a revolution in the trade. Restaurants are typically family businesses, and industry traditions are passed down through families established in the business.

The brothers were not bound by such traditions. There were not long out of high school when they left their native New Hampshire and moved to California in 1930 in search of a new opportunity – anything that promised a better fate than had befallen their father. A foreman in a shoe factory, the Depression had taken away the only job he ever had. The shoe factories and cotton mills of New Hampshire were closing, and California offered a fresh start in new trades.

Not surprisingly, the McDonalds looked for the obvious opportunity first – in Hollywood. They landed jobs pushing sets around for Hollywood movies, primarily one-reelers of slapstick comedian Ben Turpin. Intrigued with the potential of a brand-new industry, the brothers opened a movie theater in Glendale. But in four years of operation, they never made enough money to pay the $100 monthly rent on the theater, and only regular concessions from the landlord kept them in business. But the brothers never ceased looking for better entry-level business opportunities, and they found it in the form of a new service that was taking California by storm – the drive-in restaurant.

The year was 1937, and already Californians were beginning to develop their extraordinary dependence on the automobile. Some independent operators in southern California were just beginning to capitalize on the trend by building restaurants that catered to the drive-in customer. Thus, when the McDonald brothers opened their tiny drive-in just east of Pasadena, they stumbled onto the cutting edge of the food service business and into the company of operators who were fascinated with speed of service and carryout service and who were only a few years away from franchising. Though clearly in the carhop drive-in family, the first McDonald’s was a modest effort, even by drive-in standards. While Dick and Mac cooked the hot dogs (not hamburgers), mixed the shakes, and waited on customers seated on a dozen canopy-covered stools, three carhops served patrons parked in the lot.

This led to the much grander drive-in that the McDonalds opened in 1940 at Fourteenth and E streets in San Bernardino, about fifty miles east of Los Angeles. An erstwhile orange grove capital and onetime center of Seventh Day Adventism, San Bernardino in the 1940s was becoming a working-class boomtown, and one of the chief beneficiaries was the McDonald’s drive-in.

No one would have suspected from looking at it that this would be the birthplace of a new generation of restaurants. With just six hundred square feet of space, it was a fraction of the size of the more fashionable drive-ins in Los Angeles. It had a strange shape for a restaurant – octagonal – and the slightly slanted, roof-to-counter windows that ran around the front half of the building violated a basic rule of restaurant design by exposing the entire kitchen to the public. There was no inside seating, but several stools were placed on the outside along the side counter. The exterior walls below the counter were made of stainless steel.

But it was nothing if not an attention-getter, and by the mid-1940s it was the town’s number one teenage hangout. A staff of twenty carhops served the 125 cars crowded into the lot on weekend evenings. The brothers’ twenty-five-item menu featured beef and pork sandwiches and ribs that were cooked in a barbecue pit stocked with hickory chips that the McDonalds had delivered from Arkansas. If the drive-in looked strange by food service standards, its cash register spoke a language that all restaurateurs understood: annual sales regularly topped $200,000.

Their tiny drive-in had catapulted the McDonalds into the ranks of the San Bernardino’s newly rich. Each year the brothers split $50,000 in profits, and they suddenly found themselves on a social par with the local establishment – the Guthrie family, which published the Daily Sun; the Stater brothers, who ran the largest supermarket chain; and the Harrises, who owned the big department store. They even moved into one of the city’s largest houses, a $90,000, twenty-five-room mansion atop a hill just northeast of town.

By 1948, the McDonalds had achieved greater wealth than they had dreamed was possible a decade earlier when they built a tiny hamburger stand with borrowed lumber. But the McDonald brothers were beginning to feel some competitive pressure. When they had opened at Fourteenth and E streets, their was the only drive-in in town, but by 1948 there were imitators. More important, Dick and Mac discovered that the drive-in concept they had helped to pioneer had serious economic flaws. Drive-ins had become identified as a source of low-priced food and yet were burdened by an increasingly high-cost, labor-intensive format.

Bothered by such trends, the brothers nearly decided to sell their drive-in and open a different hamburger restaurant in one of the new strip shopping centers that would soon spread throughout America’s burgeoning suburbs. But just before they were about to execute their plan, the brothers reacted to the risks inherent in a venture that took them beyond their relatively limited expertise. By studying their sales receipts for the previous three years, they found that fully 80% of their business was generated by hamburgers. They could no longer justify the attention they lavished on their barbeque pit. “The more we hammered away at the barbeque business, the more hamburgers we sold,” Dick recalls.

The discovery led to a complete overhaul of the McDonald’s drive-in – and the beginning of a revolution food service. Like other drive-in operators, the McDonalds had been grappling with ways to increase volume by improving speed. Now they decided to make speed the essence of their business. “Our whole concept was based on speed, lower prices, and volume,” says McDonald. We were going after big, big volumes by lowering prices and by having the customer serve himself. My God, the carhops were slow. We’d say to ourselves that there had to be a faster way. The cars were jamming up the lot. Customers weren’t demanding it, but our intuition told us that they would like speed. Everything was moving faster. The supermarkets and dime stores had already converted to self-service, and it was obvious the future of drive-ins was self-service.”

–Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu

*Photo courtesy ChicagoGeek.

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Born April 7, 1860, Will Keith Kellogg was responsible for radically changing the way Americans eat breakfast. With his older brother Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, he invented the first breakfast cereal, an early version of today’s Corn Flakes, which sold more than one million cases in its first three years and earned his hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, the title of “cereal city.” In The Original Has This Signature: W.K. Kellogg, Horace B. Powell recounts the Kellogg brothers’ accidental invention of cereal flakes.

When the Kellogg brothers produced the first precooked flaked cereal in 1894, they had no idea they were inventing a breakfast food. The phrase itself was unknown. What was being sought was a more digestible substitute for bread.

A sanitarium patient brought to Dr. Kellogg one day a sample of a new health food, a shredded wheat, which had been sent to her by a friend in Denver. The food appeared to promote the flow of saliva in the mouth and gastric juices in the stomach and thus was more readily digestible than bread. So interested was the doctor in the product that he made a special trip to Denver to see the innovator, one Henry D. Perky, a lawyer. The two compared notes on food experiments and Perky promised to send one of his shredding machines to Battle Creek. However, this machine never arrived and its lack, plus an evolving conclusion that a shredded food was not the solution to his problems, caused the Doctor to announce: “We’ll invent a better food.”

This was an inventor who could call his shot. In an interview years later, he said that the idea of flaking wheat by compressing it came to him in a dream. Dream or not, his first efforts in the kitchen of his own home proved a failure. He did not succeed in producing individualized flakes and he turned to Will Kellogg for assistance in the experiments.

“He sent over a sample of boiled wheat,” Mr. Kellogg later related, “and wanted me to make something like it, but he did not know just the length of time to boil it. My instructions from him were to boil a quantity for fifteen minutes, another for twenty, twenty-five, and thirty, and up to one hour.

“These experiments I did in the kitchen of the sanitarium, on the range, at night, when I had finished my other work. After it was boiled, the Doctor took it to another part of the basement where there was a set of smooth roller which had been used to grind Granola.” These rolls, as Mr. Kellogg recalled them, were eight inches in diameter and about twenty-four inches long. Dr. Kellogg fed the wheat into the hopper at the top and it was Will Kellogg’s duty to squat down underneath the rolls and scrape the sticky and gummy dough off the rolls with a chisel. After one or two nights of this, Mr. Kellogg suggested that the scraping could be done better by a large knife, such as those used in book binderies and printing offices. He obtained a pair of worn-out knives and, with some aid, fastened them to the lower side of the rollers, weighting them so that they pressed firmly against the rolls and scraped off the dough. The experiments continued for some time without success. Then on a Thursday or Friday, a batch of wheat was cooked for some additional tests to be run that day. Other duties intervened, however, and nothing was done until Saturday night. Although by then, the cooked wheat had become decidedly moldy, the two brothers decided to run it through the rollers to see what would happen. Much to their surprise, it came out in the form of large, thin flakes, each individual wheat berry forming one flake!

There happened to be a fire in the kitchen range. The flakes were baked and come out crisp and tasty, if one overlooked the slight moldiness. It was some time before the Kellogg brothers unearthed the reason for their accidental success. They had inadvertently stumbled upon the principle of “tempering.” To equalize the moisture throughout the wheat, the Kelloggs after considerable experimenting learned to temper the cooked wheat by letting it stand for several hours in a tin-lined bin. This eliminated the moldiness.

“For some reason,” Mr. Kellogg later summarized, “the Doctor thought best to take the flakes after they had been nicely formed, put a sieve over a barrel and break the flakes up and rub them to pieces. It was my own suggestion that the flakes be allowed to remain whole and be served that way.” Mr. Kellogg prevailed and flaked foods were born.

Even though these early Granose flakes had little in common with the light, delicate flakes produced in the Kellogg plant today, for they were tough and rather tasteless since salt was the only flavoring, they were immediately popular with the sanitarium patients and showed a steady growth in sales until they were crowded out of the market by more aggressive imitators.

On May 31, 1894, Dr. Kellogg filed an application for a patent on “flaked cereals and process of preparing same.” At first the new food was supplied only to patients, but as the mail orders began to come in from former sanitarium visitors, Granose was put up in ten-ounce packages selling retail at fifteen cents a package.

During the closing years of the nineteenth century, Dr. Kellogg’s food business expanded almost in spite of itself. Because of medical ethics, the Doctor refused to allow his name to be associated with the foods. Ultraliberal in many of his attitudes, the Doctor was a conservative in business matters and was opposed to large-scale national advertising. These restrictions chafed at the innate and developing business talents of Will Kellogg:

“I recall having offered a suggestion that, in my opinion, if given the opportunity, the food company would develop in such a manner that the sanitarium would be only a side show as to the magnitude of the food business. I confess at the time I little realized the extent to which the food business might develop in Battle Creek.”

–Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu

*Photo courtesy minusbaby.

The post Inventing Breakfast appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Born in Prussia on April 1, 1815, Otto von Bismarck went on to become the first chancellor of Germany and the mastermind behind its unification. Known for his ruthless but brilliant politics, Bismarck was lionized almost instantly upon his death, but his role in European history has undergone critical reassessment since the reunification of Germany 20 years ago. Below, in Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor, Volker Ullrich explores the myths and realities surrounding Bismarck’s legacy.

Many people felt that Bismarck’s death marked the end of an epoch. After 1898, Bismarck monuments sprang out of the ground like mushrooms. They showed the founder of the Reich as a statesman in uniform, complete with pickelhaube, jackboots and saber – a knight in armor, a sort of King Arthur of the Reich, gazing into the far distance with a grim expression.

The Bismarck myth rapidly lost touch with the real historical figure. Behind the monumental image of the ‘Iron Chancellor’, the defining characteristic of his foreign policy since the mid-1870s was lost from view – namely Bismarck’s sense for moderation and restraint arising form the insight that the German Reich could only be preserved if it defined itself as ‘saturated.’ Time and again he warned that the first priority was to secure “what we have laboriously achieved under threat of armed attack by the rest of Europe.” It was a message that even towards the end of his rule was heeded less and less… The young generation, anxious to follow the seductive call for ‘world politics’, felt that his policy of pursuing balance in order to assure the peace was out of date.

Bismarck became, after his death, the figurehead of an overheated nationalism into whom vague imperialistic longings could be projected. In the process, one of his key maxims was forgotten: that politics should always remain the ‘art of the possible’, or as he sometimes also expressed it, ‘a science of the possible’. In everything that Bismarck planned and carried out as a politician, he had adapted seamlessly to prevailing situations, calculating how best to take advantage of them to achieve his ends. He had a greater influence than any other man on the fate of Germany and Europe in 19th century, yet he was always conscious of the limits to his political actions. ‘One thing you learn thoroughly in this business is that you can be as clever as anyone in this world, and still at any moment you may find yourself walking in the dark like a child,’ he wrote. This was not false modesty – Bismarck never suffered from a lack of self-confidence – but an expression of his deep-seated skepticism when it came to the very notion of planning and making history. ‘One cannot oneself create anything; one can only wait till one hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then leap forward and seize hold of the hem of his coat – that is all.’

And it was a great deal! The ability to wait for the decisive instant, taking advantage of a uniquely favorable moment with determination – this was a skill Bismarck brought to the point of perfection. That is why he was once described, not without reason, as a ‘genius of the present’.

It is one of the striking contradictions that characterize Bismarck’s life’s work and make him such a fascinating politician that though he did so much to shape his times, he was filled with a lasting feeling of impotence against the great forces by which history is shaped. ‘ For a man cannot create and direct the current of time,’ he lectured even after his fall, ‘he can only travel down it and steer, with more or less experience and skill; he may be shipwrecked, or run aground, or he may come into safe harbors.’

Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu

*Photo courtesy izaeus | argazkiak.

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After a wildly successful eight year run, “All in the Family” aired its 200th episode on March 4, 1979. By then, the show had irrevocably changed the image of the American family, but creator Norman Lear initially faced challenges from network censors who feared the show was too politically charged and producers who viewed the show as a marked departure from the popular family sitcoms of the 1960s. Below, in Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change 1968-1978, Josh Ozersky comments on the beginnings of “All in the Family” and its most unforgettable personality, Archie Bunker.

Norman Lear was a man of liberal sensibilities who sympathized with the movement against the war, and agreed with critics who felt that television was one great missed opportunity. Discussing the show in retrospect many years later, Lear described the context of what would become ‘All in the Family’’s debut. “I didn’t know this when I started with All in the Family, but that show was the first to make social issues integral to evening television sitcom. … We followed a whole bunch of shows like Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, Green Acres, and other shows of the ‘60s. They were all fine shows but you would think by watching them that America had no blacks, no racial tensions, that there was no Vietnam.”

The nostalgic theme music of All in the Family is not merely scene-setting. Archie Bunker’s a relic of the past, the show reassures its audience. Archie is a creature of the past, lingering into the present as an unquiet spirit, a ghost who has outlived the era that created him. Norman Lear knows that. You and I, the audience, know it. Mike and Gloria know it. Even Edith, for all of her servility, knows it. The only one who doesn’t know it is Archie, and it is this very indomitability of the character, and Carroll O’Connor’s gifted rendering of it, that elevates him above traditional TV heavies and bigots. They “learn their lesson” at the end of every episode. That Archie never learns his lesson is the source of his great iconic power. He was the Sisyphus of the hardhats, constantly attempting to roll Meathead, Gloria, Edith, Norman Lear, his neighbors, the scriptwriters, and the political climate of the 1960s generally back up the hill of vanished time.

This cultural power of Archie went a long way toward earning the show its fabulously wide audience (by the 1974-75 season, an average episode was viewed by a fifth of the total population). But the real key was that the older, put-upon Americans whom Archie represented enjoyed him far more than they might have been expected to, given his full-time status as butt and buffoon. “What’s great about that show,” a railroad worker told Life Magazine “is that it is biased. What I mean is, it’s just like you feel inside yourself. You think it, but old Archie, he says it, by damn.” Consider this exchange, from the first episode, “Meet the Bunkers.” “I just want to learn how to help people,” Mike tells Archie, explaining why he is studying sociology in college.

Archie: Your mother-in-law and me is people. Help us and go to work!
Mike: I know what’s bothering you. You’re upset because I was nailing you on that law and order thing.
Archie: You was nailing me?
Mike: Yeah, that’s right, and now I’m going to tell you something. I know I promised, Gloria, but I feel I got to say this. You know why we have a breakdown of law and order in this country, Archie? Because we got poverty, real poverty. And you know why we got that? Because guys like you are unwilling to give the black man, the Mexican American, and all the other minorities their just and rightful hard-earned share of the American dream!
Archie: Now let me tell you something. If your spics and your spades want their share of the American dream, let them go out and hustle for it, just like I done.

The tension between Mike and Archie’s language mirrors their political positions. The sentiment that Archie is voicing here, however, is not so easily dismissed. Because the show drew on reality for its conflict, rather than on plot contrivances (as in traditional “situational comedies”), the conflict is charged, animated from within. The twilight of “the American dream” was no joke. And what may have made Archie even more appealing was the lengths to which his makers loaded the deck against him.

–Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu

*Photo courtesy wallyg.

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January 28 marks the Feast Day of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Roman Catholic priest who authored Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles, shaping Catholic Church and philosophy for centuries to come. Below, writing on a different subject in Commentary on Sentences, Aquinas explores the issue of “whether knowledge is higher than love.”

In all things there is a twofold perfection: one by which the thing subsists in itself, the other by which it is related to other things. And in material things each one is limited and bounded insofar as it has one determined form through which it is merely one species; and also through a power directed to those things proportionate to it, it has an inclination and order as has a heavy thing toward its center. In both ways, however, immaterial things have a certain infinity because they are somehow all things insofar as the essence of the immaterial thing is the exemplar and likeness of all things either by act or by potentiality, as happens in angels and souls; in this way they have knowledge. Likewise they also have an inclination and order to all things, and in this way they have will, by which all things are pleasing or displeasing either by act or potentiality. And by this they participate in some immateriality, which allows for knowledge and will. Whence animals know insofar as they receive the species of sensible things immaterially in the organs of the senses, and they are inclined to different things through the sensible tendency according to the intentions spiritually perceived from things. It is therefore evident that knowledge pertains to the perfection of the knower by which in himself he is perfected; however, the will pertains to a thing’s perfection by its relation to other things. And likewise the object of the knowing power is the true, which is in the soul, as the philosopher says: ”The object of the tending power, however, is the good, which is in things, as already said.”

Therefore the knowing power can be compared to the tendency in three ways. First, in respect to order, and in this way the cognitive power is naturally prior because the perfection of anything in itself is prior to its perfection as related to another. Second, as to capacity, and by this they are equal, because the knowing power is related to all things, and so too is the tendency, whence they also are mutually inclusive insofar as the intellect knows the will and the will seeks and loves those things pertaining to intellect. Third, they can be compared according to excellence and rank; and so they are to each other as transcending and transcended, because if the intellect and the will are considered as well as those things pertaining to them as certain properties and accidents of that in which they are, then the intellect is more excellent and so are those things related to it. If, however, they are considered as capacities, i.e., as ordered to acts and to objects, then the will is more excellent, and so are those things related to it.

But if it is asked which of these is absolutely of higher rank, it must be answered that some things are superior to the soul and some are inferior, whence although through will and love a man is somehow drawn into the very things willed and loved, through knowledge, however, conversely, things known are through their likenesses made into the knower. In respect to those things that are above the soul, love is nobler and higher than knowledge, whereas in respect to those things that are beneath the soul, knowledge is more important. Whence also it is good to know many things that it would be evil to love.

Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu

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In one fell swoop of a pleated skirt, the drab and practical fashions of the war years were replaced with the fanciful silhouettes of upside-down flowers. Gone were boxy wool suit jackets, short fabric-saving skirts, and chunky wedge-heeled walking shoes. In their place appeared low-cut bustier tops, tightly cinched waists, long flowing skirts, and high heels. The hourglass shape – what Dior called the “figure 8” – was back, achieved with the help of meticulous tailoring that incorporated stiff bone corsets, taffeta linings, and plenty of padding around the hips.

At the end of the fashion show, stunned audience members leapt to their feet in applause, then crowded around the timid 42-year-old couturier to offer congratulations. “It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian,” gushed the influential editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Carmel Snow. “Your dresses have such a new look.” Snow’s famous pronouncement stuck and, in a world anxious to forget the hardships of wartime, the style revolution that came to be known as the New Look was a smash success.

In no time at all, a bevy of famous beauties were spotted in their new Diors – glamorous Hollywood stars including Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, and Olivia de Havilland, and such well-known trend setters as the Duchess of Windsor and Argentina’s Eva Peron. Within three short months, Christian Dior originals had crossed the Atlantic to the best American shops. Soon afterward, low-cost interpretations of his most popular dresses were on racks at almost every department store.

But not everyone was favorably impressed. Times were lean, and many people were angered by the designer’s excessive use of scarce materials (one popular New Look skirt required 17 yards of fabric to construct, instead of the standard three). In England, where cloth rationing was still in place, voices were raised in moral outrage against Dior over such indulgences. And in a famous incident captured on newsreels for the world to see, a group of dowdy Paris housewives became so enraged at the sight of several women sporting new Dior dresses that they tore the clothes right off their backs. Women who refused to be seen in outdated frocks but who weren’t rich were often forced to take matters into their own hands: “Anything you had from before was totally out of style,” remembered Francoise Giroud, then-editor of French Elle. “All around Paris, women were ripping down their curtains to run up new outfits.”

In the United States, some 300,000 Dior detractors joined the Little Below the Knee Club, a nationwide effort to preserve America from the ankle-sweeping New Look, while a group of tapped-out men in Georgia formed the League of Broke Husbands, determined to “hold that hemline.” Women protested against the way the uncomfortable new fashions constricted their ability to move – evening dresses could weigh as much as 60 pounds and were so tight and stiff their wearers complained they were unable either to dance in them or comfortably sit. And a California woman’s misadventures in a Dior-inspired skirt gave the term “fashion victim” a literal meaning. “As she alighted from a bus,” Time magazine warned readers, “her new long, full skirt caught in the door. The bus started up and she was forced to run a block before the bus stopped and she was freed.”

Normally an anxious man, Dior managed to appear nonplussed as he responded to criticism in the press: “The magazine identified the couturier as “a timid, middle-aged insignificant-looking Frenchman…who would be instantly picked by anyone familiar with whodunits as the character least likely to be suspected. M. Dior.” The magazine continued, “looks extraordinarily like a Kewpie doll, is short, round, bald; wears dark, dowdy, unpressed suits, office-worker ties and shirts and pointed shoes.”

Christian Dior’s humble appearance belied a privileged upbringing in Paris and Granville, a small resort town on the coast of Normandy. Born January 21, 1905, he was the second of five children of a wealthy, upper-middle-class fertilizer manufacturer named Alexandre Dior and his highly image-conscious wife, Madeleine. By most accounts it was a happy childhood, even though Christian, who was a quiet and delicate child, appeared vastly different from his hardier siblings. Rather than join in their rough-and-tumble games, he preferred to follow his aloof mother, whom he adored, around the family property. In a bid for her attention, he spent long hours helping Madeleine as she indulged in her passion for gardening and beautifying their homes.

Though Dior’s New Look fashions would later be touted as revolutionary, they actually call to mind the tightly corseted Belle Epoque dresses that his mother wore on those happy days spent in her gardens. As Dior biographer Marie-France Pochna notes, “In his heart of hearts, in the depths of his soul, Madame Dior was present in every fold, in every yard of fabric unfurled by the designer in his yearning for ‘le temps perdu.’ She was both his critic and his inspiration.”

—Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu.

*Photo courtesy superciliousness.

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