April 30, 2007
Citizen Kane and Prince Charles Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:35 PM EST First, please let me correct what might be only a miswording in Alexander Burns’s post. Alexander Burns wrote, “I suppose, by Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Citizen Kane should be liable to the estate of William Randolph Hearst for possible distortions of the man’s character. Maybe Bragg meant, ‘a living historical figure,’ but, in any case, I can’t imagine how unbearably dry such a version of popular culture would be. I’m sure that I’m grateful to Michael Kitchen for offering an enjoyable alternative.” William Randolph Hearst was, of course, very much alive when Citizen Kane opened in 1941 and lived for more than a decade more. As far as I know, he didn’t sue, but I imagine his newspapers did their best to trash the movie, unavailingly to be sure, as it is, as fiction, an unalloyed masterpiece. Who was really wronged by the movie, of course, was his mistress, Marion Davies. She was intelligent and a gifted comedic actress, not at all like the pathetically untalented and dumb-as-a-post character Susan Alexander. And Davies stuck with Hearst through thick and thin. When he got into bad financial trouble she lent him $1 million, not the usual direction of the cash flow between mogul and mistress. (He paid her back.) He also writes, “While the impropriety and moral decay of the British royal family was already on full display in the early 1990s . . .” I cheerfully admit to being a cheerleader for the royal family, but have their improprieties and moral behavior been any worse than that of millions of other British families who do not have to live their lives in goldfish bowls? Or has the recent royal family been any worse behaved than it was in earlier times? Given my choice between the current Prince of Wales and his great uncle, Edward VIII, thanks, but I choose Charles. Edward VII was an often badly behaved Prince of Wales but was an excellent and very popular king. And don’t even mention the “wicked uncles” of Queen Victoria. They wrote the field manual on impropriety and moral decay. I think Foyle’s War is an altogether excellent series, and I highly recommend it. Michael Kitchen is perfect in the leading role.
April 30, 2007
Foyle’s War and Michael Kitchen Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:40 AM EST I enjoyed Fred Smoler’s post this morning on Foyle’s War. I haven’t seen the series, but I am a great fan of its leading actor, Michael Kitchen. His face has been seen only infrequently by American audiences, except perhaps during the actor’s appearance in the James Bond film Goldeneye. I’ll admit that’s where I first encountered him. Reading over Mr. Smoler’s post, it occurred to me that Kitchen has made a rather successful career out of satirizing the British upper crust. In Foyle’s War he may do so only indirectly, as a detective who encounters sacrifice-averse elites. In another, earlier BBC series, however, Kitchen did so more directly and controversially. House of Cards, a BBC trilogy aired during the early 1990s, traces the rise of a fictional Conservative leader, Francis Urquhart, through the ranks of the House of Commons. The first portion of the trilogy, from which the entire series takes its name, was produced as a hypothetical rendering of the leadership contest after Margaret Thatcher’s retirement. In a remarkable instance of life imitating art, the original airing of the series coincided with the Michael Heseltine’s first challenge to Thatcher’s leadership—much, I imagine, to the surprise and joy of the House of Cards producers. Kitchen does not appear in the series until its second installment, “To Play the King,” in which he portrays a newly installed monarch struggling in his role as head of state. I’m not aware of much controversy surrounding Foyle’s War, although that may be a result of my own ignorance. But Kitchen’s portrayal of the unnamed, fictional king created something of a stir due to the character’s uncomfortable similarities to Prince Charles. In addition to having a slim, glamorous, blonde ex-wife, and an overweight, scandal-plagued former sister-in-law, Kitchen’s character also speaks in the same halting, wavering tones as the Prince of Wales. There are veiled suggestions that the king has had improper relationships with other men, as well as with prostitutes. While the impropriety and moral decay of the British royal family was already on full display in the early 1990s, some felt this sly impugning of Charles’s character was too much to tolerate. One Evening Standard contributor, Melvyn Bragg, declared, “If we have a flat portrayal of an historical figure then evidence is needed for any accusations which seek to smear him.” Calling on the show’s author, Michael Dobbs, to eliminate a few offensive lines, Bragg explained, “It is the gratuitousness of the matter which triggers the obstinate question—are you allowed to take any shot you want at a target which you know is simply not going to respond?” Britain’s free speech laws are famously different from those in the United States. Here, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell has stated that public figures cannot sue for emotional distress, or other such offenses, against those who satire them. The more curious of Bragg’s assertions, though, is that it is offensive to portray any historical figure, or even a fictionalized counterpart of a historical figure, in terms not wholly supported by fact. I suppose, by Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Citizen Kane should be liable to the estate of William Randolph Hearst for possible distortions of the man’s character. Maybe Bragg meant, “a living historical figure,” but, in any case, I can’t imagine how unbearably dry such a version of popular culture would be. I’m sure that I’m grateful to Michael Kitchen for offering an enjoyable alternative.
April 30, 2007
Foyle’s War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 AM EST At the recommendation of friend, I’ve been watching Foyle’s War via Netflix. Foyle’s War is (so far) a series of hour-and-20-minute or so episodes of a wartime detective drama, one set in and around Hastings in the spring, summer, and fall of 1940. The detective chief superintendent has a son beginning training as a Spitfire pilot. The first episode begins with the encirclement of the British Army at Dunkirk, and the episode I watched this week, possibly the eighth, is set in October. To a degree, Foyle’s War is simply a British detective series with a romantic setting, to some tastes the most romantic setting of all time, and it is likely that some of its interest consists in watching a few people behaving badly at a moment when most people behaved very well, and to the highest possible purpose. It is even possible that if viewers suffer from the increasingly common voyeuristic perversion of wanting to see through the “myth” of the Finest Hour, Foyle’s War will gratify that taste, too, although to do so they will have to view the show with at best intermittent attention. The series necessarily varies in quality, but it occasionally makes the historical distance it traverses gap wider than I’d thought likely. For example, in the episode I just watched, richer Londoners rent rooms in a country house very recently become an inn. The renters are buying their way out of exposure to the Blitz, and the episode is titled “The Funk Hole,” a phrase that originally meant a dugout or bunker, and when used by infantrymen was affectionate and self-mocking, but has in this new usage become strongly pejorative. A funk is a state of panic or fear, and to call a field entrenchment a place from which one takes refuge from artillery fire in panic or fear is, I think, mild although intricate irony, and does not mean to impeach the moral qualities of soldiers who fail to stand erect in open view while shrapnel bursts around them. Once upon a time, though, it was a source of stigma to even flinch in the proximity of shellfire. Many British troops saw it that way at Waterloo; standards of courage change over time. As for Foyle’s War, it first seemed a little odd to savagely mock as cowards people who’d left a city under bombardment, most of whom were performing no crucial military or economic function, although I was able to work out the logic of the judgment after a minute or two. In 1940 Britain was a deference culture with a very uneven distribution of income, and letting physical safety be rationed by market pricing was probably not the best way to sustain morale, any more than rationing scarce food by price alone. If morale failed, and it might have, since Britain was alone against Hitler in a seemingly hopeless situation, a shameful and likely catastrophic compromise peace was the likeliest alternative. Wartime has not traditionally been seen as the best occasion for letting markets decide the largest possible number of outcomes; children, for example, tended to be seen as the most deserving recipients of scarce milk, and also of scarce (relative) shelter from the Luftwaffe. While buying black-market food was indeed illegal, it was not illegal to buy your way out of the Blitz, but it was not much admired, and ridicule and scorn are, by some very influential theories, ways societies defend themselves against potentially dangerous behavior. On the older theory, elites should make especially visible sacrifices in wartime, and to the extent that they enjoy greatly disproportionate wealth, they should visibly sacrifice a disproportionate amount of it in wartime. Watching Foyle’s War, this suddenly seemed very long ago.
April 28, 2007
Abortion, in the Nineteenth Century and Today II Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:25 PM EST John Steele Gordon was quite right in his appreciation of the notorious Madam Restell’s business acumen. She brought modern marketing techniques to the ancient profession of abortionist by opening branch offices, employing a team of traveling salesman, instituting sliding fee scales, and out-advertising the competition to the tune of $60,000 in 1871. But not all practitioners were as innovative or, more to the point, as skilled. At the turn of the twentieth century, the point when abortion should have become medically safer due to knowledge of antiseptics, an increasing emphasis on bacteriology, and other medical advances, laws criminalizing the procedure drove it underground and made it even more hazardous. Statistics on illegal abortion are, for obvious reasons, rare and unreliable, but one study of 111 convicted abortionists revealed that fewer than a third were physicians or former physicians. Other professions, such as clerks, barbers, and salesmen, were better represented. There is, however, a wealth of anecdotal evidence, and it is chilling. Death was not uncommon. Perforation, tearing, and other “mistakes” had lifelong consequences. Kindness or even civility was rare, though one frequently cited case, harrowing in its physical details, tells of a “kind . . . motherly lady . . . who put her arms around me . . . and . . . said, ‘Honey, did you think it was so easy to be a woman?’” Self-induced abortion took the worst toll. Margaret Sanger ascribed her conversion to the birth-control cause to the death of Sadie Sachs, an immigrant Jewish wife and mother, who succumbed to her second case of septicemia from her second self-induced abortion in a single year. Mrs. Sachs may have been a fictitious or at least dramatically enhanced character, but she did exemplify a trend. By 1900, working-class women were having most of the illegal abortions, but these desperate souls were not only single girls “in trouble.” Overburdened immigrant wives and mothers were risking death to avoid giving birth to another child they could not afford to feed or clothe or care for. Middle- and upper-class women who sought abortions, could go abroad, find a physician who would perform the operation quietly, or even persuade a hospital board of the need for a therapeutic procedure, though the last was growing more difficult to obtain. Hospital boards prided themselves on making therapeutic abortions as difficult as possible. One committee ruled to grant one, then reversed itself when it discovered the woman was unmarried. By the 1940s and ’50s, the rate of therapeutic procedures had declined precipitously. Police experts, on the other hand, listed abortion as the third largest criminal activity in the country after narcotics and gambling, though it did occasionally attract a better class of perp. One properly trained physician in a small town in Pennsylvania estimated that he had performed more than 28,000 abortions during his long career, and another in Baltimore said she had received referrals from 350 doctors in two decades. Nonetheless, competent physicians acting on principle were the exception. Most abortionists were untrained at best and venal and menacing at worst. Too many of the people eager to restrict access to abortion forget or never knew the horrors of a world where abortion was illegal. The Supreme Court can hand down paternalistic rulings. Legislatures can outlaw procedures. But government cannot change human nature. It can only return the nation to the realm of back-alley surgery, shady practitioners, and dire consequences.
April 27, 2007
Madame Restell Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:35 AM EST Ellen Feldman mentions “Madame Restell’s Female Pill,” one of the many supposedly abortifacient products on the market in the nineteenth century. Madame Restell was one of New York’s more colorful and, in some ways, remarkable characters in the Victorian era. Born in England in 1812 (her real name was Ann Trow Lohman), she came to New York in 1831 and was soon advertising herself in the city directory and newspapers as a “female physician and professor of midwifery.” Besides serving as a midwife, she was soon providing contraceptives, performing abortions, and arranging for the quiet adoption of unwanted babies.
 | | Mme Restell’s Fifth Avenue mansion. |
It was a brisk and lucrative business to say the least, and Mme Restell was obviously a highly competent businesswoman at a time when “businesswoman” was an oxymoron. By 1864 she was doing so well that she built a grand mansion on Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street (just across 52nd Street from where Cartier’s is today). This was north of the main area of development on Fifth Avenue at the time, but as development reached the lower fifties, no one would build next to her because she had become so notorious. One has to admire her so openly sticking it in the eye of the New York society that both scorned her, loudly, and utilized her services, very quietly.Vilified in sensationalist newspapers and by such people as the obnoxiously self-righteous Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (it might have been called more accurately the New York Society for Butting into Other People’s Business), she was often arrested and spent time in the prison on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. Facing yet another trial in 1878, she committed suicide, much to Comstock’s ill-concealed satisfaction. She left an estate valued at between $600,000 and $1,000,000. That might not have put her on the Forbes 400 List, had it existed then, but it made Mme Restell a very, very rich woman.
April 26, 2007
Abortion, in the Nineteenth Century and Today Posted by Ellen Feldman at 05:50 PM EST I followed with fascination last week’s debate in the wake of the Supreme Court ban on intact dilation and extraction abortions, and while I agree with Josh Zeitz’s arguments, I concede that John Steele Gordon was right about advertisements for female remedies. Warnings that women should not take the product if pregnant because it was sure to produce miscarriage, a common disclaimer in nineteenth-century ads, were intended as not-so-subtle guarantees that the product was an abortifacient. By midcentury such products had become big business in America. During a single week in 1845, the Boston Daily Times advertised Madame Restell’s Female Pill, Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills, Dr. Monroe’s French Periodical Pills, and Dr. Melveau’s Portuguese Female Pills. In addition to disingenuous warnings against taking the cure if pregnant, code words were also common. “Portuguese” pills signified an abortifacient while “French letter” or “French remedy” usually meant a contraceptive device, which was also illegal. Despite the glossy ads, commercial abortifacients were as ineffectual and dangerous as the widespread homemade brews. But the high price—some Portuguese pills sold for five dollars a box—lured many retailers and even reputable pharmaceutical firms into the trade. By midcentury, surgical abortion had also become commercialized and highly visible. The Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City, a lurid 1870 account by the pseudonymous George Ellington, deplored the many female abortionists in the city, most of the “poorer class” and “of foreign birth or extraction,” as well as the tonier “doctor” abortionists, who ran private hospitals and whose knowledge of family skeletons sometimes gave them entrée into the best society. Given the number and variety of practitioners, it was no wonder that abortions could be procured for as much as five hundred dollars or as little as five. “The luxury of an abortion is now within the reach of the serving girl,” wrote one male moralist with a peculiar conception of the good life. By the 1840s, abortions had become common not only for unwed girls “in trouble” but among married women, and not just any married women but white, Protestant, native-born married women of the middle and upper classes. While many husbands were accomplices, even instigators, other white, Protestant, native-born men were outraged. Immigration was on the rise. Catholics were not only taking up residence, they were producing broods of offspring, while native-born women were committing “racial” suicide. One group of men also had a vested interest, and therein lies the story of the first abortion revolution that criminalized the procedure in America. As late as 1800, not a single jurisdiction in the United States had a statute on abortion. By 1900 every state in the Union had an antiabortion law except Kentucky, where state courts managed to criminalize it in practice. More than any other segment of nineteenth-century America, including the clergy, who remained remarkably silent on the subject, regular physicians were responsible for the change. The term “regular physicians” is difficult to define. In 1846 a group seeking to characterize what they were could list only what they were not, a spectrum of specialties ranging from homeopaths to clairvoyants. The phrase generally referred to practitioners who subscribed to the principles of what later became scientific medicine and had some training in the nation’s better medical schools, as opposed to for-profit diploma mills. In an era when anyone who claimed to heal could hang out a shingle, and doctors were often seen as menaces to society, regular physicians had to find a way to distinguish themselves from the hordes of uneducated quacks and self-promoting snake oil salesmen. And since many of the latter had practices devoted, if not limited, to abortion, one of the first and most lucrative specialties in American medical history, the solution was obvious. By prohibiting abortion, regular physicians would, in a single stroke, promote their professional standing, protect their incomes, and encourage the practice of good medicine. The last was not a mere afterthought. Regular physicians were frequently summoned to try to save women who had been maimed and butchered by incompetent practitioners. The irony is that a century later physicians spearheaded a second and reverse revolution. In the mid-1960s, when several California doctors performed therapeutic abortions on women who had been exposed to rubella, a disease that can cause severe birth defects in babies, a Catholic physician on the State Medical Board committed what had been until then an unthinkable breech of medical etiquette and ethics. He brought charges against them. A few years later, Dr. Jane Hodgson, who terminated the pregnancy of another mother who had contracted German measles, became the first physician in American history to be tried and convicted for performing a therapeutic abortion in a hospital. By demanding clarification of the law and a statute that would protect them, which California passed in 1967, physicians helped set in motion America’s second abortion revolution. In view of last week’s ruling, a third revolution may be in the making. If the courts continue to limit access to abortion, and women are forced to turn to back-alley quacks, will reputable physicians step forward again?
April 26, 2007
Kryptonite Found! Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 AM EST The BBC’s web site had an odd little story yesterday: Someone has found kryptonite at the bottom of a mineshaft in Serbia. If you spent own your childhood at the bottom of Serbian mineshaft, you may not recall kryptonite, but if you spent it anywhere else, you will recall that this mineral was the detritus of the planet Krypton, home world of Superman, and the only thing that could endanger the Man of Steel. When as a smallish boy I switched my loyalties to Spiderman, I thought one of the great mysteries of mass culture was why anyone had ever been furiously absorbed by Superman comics, although I had to admit that I had never met anyone who hadn’t been, however briefly. After jumping ship, I decided that the problem with the comic was that an invincible hero was peculiarly unlikely to generate dramatic interest. The mortal heroes of the Iliad are inevitably more heroic than the immortals can ever be, because they can die, and my guess is that this dramatic defect in the premise of Superman comics produced the necessity for kryptonite. The presence of kryptonite, which in its original version was fatal to Superman, usually glowed a virulent green (although it was originally red, when it first appeared in the comic in 1949, and in 1950 it was at one point purple). Since kryptonite seemed to be the only source of danger to Superman, the plots of the comics were either furiously dull or involved kryptonite, and were hence pretty repetitive. The authors must have realized this, for they duly produced a second version of kryptonite, which was red and had unpredictable although invariably transient effects, but these, too, palled, and DC comics introduced gold kryptonite, which permanently suppressed Superman’s powers and was hence an almost unusable plot device. Various plots, however, involved a less permanent effect of this kind, and I remember a preteen literary critic sneering at a comic book I was reading and venturing the sardonic surmise that its plot would be “the day Superman lost his powers.” He may not have been alone in this attitude, for the authors of the comic series soon provided kryptonite in a number of other colors with different effects, most of which appeared after I stopped reading: white, blue, black, and so forth. The BBC story is, of course, less startling than its headline suggests. The newly-discovered mineral at the bottom of that Serbian mineshaft is sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide, which turns out to be remarkably close to the formula for kryptonite as described in one of the Superman movies, although apparently the stuff in the movie also contained some fluorine, which the new mineral does not. A scientist searching the Web for any substance resembling the Serbian find was astonished to discover the reference to the formula for kryptonite, and a whimsical little color story was born. The lovely title of Thomas Disch’s history of American science fiction—The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of—points out how much of the future was imagined in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, but Superman comics, which came along at the end of that decade, did not, to the best of my knowledge, predict much that actually came to pass, and kryptonite is no exception. But the BBC story, surely not primarily intended for a U.S. audience, may suggest how wide an empire even our most rubbishy and obsolete mass cultural productions still command. An old saw, I think eighteenth-century, held that if you could make all the ballads, you would not care who made the laws. That is not true, but neither is it pure nonsense—and when weighing up what it might mean, we should remember that we have made better and more haunting ballads than the ones about the Man of Steel.
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