Rosie the Riveter and John Muir

This post is part of my ongoing series on National Parks and Monuments.

This past fall, we took a trip to the San Francisco area, and visited these two relatively obscure sites. Both preserve history, and in both cases, this history was a turning point in a significant battle for justice.

Rosie The Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park

As the docents love to inform visitors, this place has the longest name in the entire National Park Service, and yet has the smallest area, in one sense. The park does not own any land, rather utilizing a combination of property belonging to the City of Richmond, and property leased from private holders. In addition, it is spread over several sites on the Richmond waterfront.

The official website is here, and has additional information. 

My Rosie Girls

Even before the United States officially entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it as unofficially participating in the war by supplying Great Britain through the Lend-Lease program. After Pearl Harbor, however, it became necessary to ramp up a huge program of production to supply the needs of the war.

Many able-bodied men either volunteered or were drafted, creating a vacuum. Where would the factories get laborers? How would ships and airplanes and tanks and jeeps get built?

In the case of the Richmond shipyards, there were two significant new sources of labor. The first gave the name to this park. Women enlisted in great numbers. The second is often overlooked. Minorities - particularly African Americans - saw the opportunity to leave low paying service industry jobs and better their quality of life.

In both cases, the new workers faced significant obstacles. For example, the local unions simply would not admit women or minorities. White males only. Realistically, it was only due to the extreme need for workers that the gender and color barriers came down.

One of the best things about this park are the videos. The NPS took the time to interview numerous workers, back when there were many still alive, and learn the individual stories. It was moving to hear the tales of poverty, and lack of housing (nothing like absorbing tens of thousands of new workers in a few weeks), and the ongoing harassment, racism, and sexism that many endured, particularly when they first started working.

There are two things that particularly stuck with me, and I think these are both important to our understanding of the fight for justice then and now.

The first is this: given the opportunity to do “man’s work,” women proved entirely capable. And likewise, minority workers proved that they could do as meticulous work as any white man. Even now, we keep hearing (particularly in certain circles) that whites and/or men are just better at things, from education (hello, Justice Scalia), to engineering and technology. This has always been the preferred approach by those who wish to remain in a bubble and believe that racism and sexism are myths, or at least not real anymore.

The second is related. Often, we tend to think of the Civil Rights Movement and Second Wave Feminism as originating in the 1960s. For those of us who absorbed some poison from Christian Fundamentalism [link], we were told that both movements were morally wrong (if for no other reason than that government shouldn’t tell people not to do racist things) and that they arose from the decline of “true” religion in the 60s.

The truth is quite different, as the stories of the workers in the Richmond shipyards made clear. While the men were away fighting in Europe and the Pacific, women were able to taste financial and social freedom in a way that they had not. As one woman said, no matter how good your marriage is, there is no substitute for having one’s own bank account and income, that you and you alone can manage and spend. To go from a variety of well-paying and fairly prestigious manufacturing jobs back to either domestic work at home or a short list of “women’s” professions (teaching and nursing and maid service, mostly) was no longer acceptable. Thus, Second Wave Feminism’s focus on breaking down employment barriers.

I want to mention something else in this regard. It isn’t as if women neglected the home either. Somebody had to take care of the children, and indeed this happened. Some of the older relatives stepped in, cooperative day-cares were formed at the factories, and schools adapted as well. Likewise, having their own bank accounts didn’t mean an endless spree at Macy’s, but the ability and responsibility to manage the household and its funds. In other words, women didn’t use their freedom to be irresponsible.

But they did realize that they were every bit as capable as men at being in charge, and weren’t happy to be told to go be the little woman and let the big man do the thinking and managing of the purse. So, in a very real sense, it wasn’t the “immoral 60s” that gave rise to Second Wave Feminism. It was World War II, and the opportunities that women tasted.

Likewise, the Civil Rights Movement was birthed in World War II. Although full integration of the armed forces wouldn’t come until later, there still were more opportunities for whites to experience African Americans as equals, rather than lessers.

It was the factory experience, however, which was to prove more influential. Prior to the war, opportunities for African Americans were dismal. They were expected to serve in low-paying service industry jobs. Waiter, maid, sharecropper, busboy, gardener, and so on. The better compensated manufacturing jobs were off limits - in many cases by force of the Jim Crow laws.

Just like women, who refused to go quietly back to a subservient status, African Americans tasted better opportunity, and refused to settle for low-paying service jobs, segregation, and humiliation. It is no coincidence that Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. and the others of the Civil Rights Movement would rise not long after the end of the war. The genie was out of the bottle, and change had to come.

We were not able to participate in one particular facet of the park, which is too bad. Alas, the waiting list is six months long. Betty Reid Soskin is the oldest National Park Ranger at 93. She worked in the shipyards, and was one of the rangers who brought the Rosie The Riveter park into being. Her talks are so popular that one literally must sign up far in advance to have any hope. NPR did a bit on her a few years back, which you can read here.

"What gets remembered is a function of who's in the room doing the remembering."

This is so very true, and why it is important to have more than one dominant viewpoint. We need a full spectrum of stories, or we fail to remember.

John Muir National Historic Site

John Muir’s footprints are (literally and figuratively) all over my home state of California, and throughout the majestic Sierra Nevada mountains in particular. Without his efforts, it is entirely possible that Yosemite would be a resort for the wealthy (assuming the mining companies didn’t destroy it), the giant sequoias would have been logged to near extinction, and the conservationist movement would have come a couple of generations too late. It is not an exaggeration to say that the world was changed when Theodore Roosevelt took his legendary hiking and camping trip through Yosemite with Muir. More than anything else, this tipped the balance of power away from corporate mining and logging and toward the fledgling environmental protection movement.

Muir believed that conservation was a matter, not just of personal preference, but of actual justice. As I have grown older, and spent more time hiking and exploring the wilderness of the western United States, I have come to agree with him more and more.

On the one hand, there is the emotional connection. The thought of the basalt columns of Devil’s Postpile National Monument [link] being blasted to build a dam for mining makes my blood boil. (I wrote about that here.) A corporation would have profited for a few years, making a few people rich. Or not, given the high failure rate of mines. Some pretty metal would have been gained, but a natural wonder tens of thousands of years old would have disappeared forever.

This leads to the real reason that conservationism is indeed a justice issue. In any human endeavor, there are costs and benefits. In some cases, the costs and benefits are borne directly. For example, I bear the expenses of my law practice, and gain income from it.

But there are also external costs and benefits. I could argue that by increasing access to justice, I am benefiting even those who do not access my services. On the other hand, I require the killing of a number of trees (lawyers are terrible about this), so the environment suffers as a result. These are the external costs and benefits which are borne, not by me, but by all of humanity.

It is the externalized costs of an endeavor which are the focus of conservationism. A factory owner may pay his or her own costs for the actual physical plant, labor, and materials. But if the factory pollutes the air or water, those costs are not borne just by him, but by everyone who breathes the air or drinks the water. And, if he causes a tree to become extinct because he uses all of its species - even if he “pays” for them by buying them from the landowner, he has cost future generations the chance to benefit from that species.

Needless to say, the problem with external costs is that they are easily ignored in favor of profits. The business (or individual) gains little or nothing from minimizing external costs, and often would incur a significant cost to reduce those externals.

Hence the need for a way of ensuring justice when it comes to external costs. This is my main quibble with the Libertarian mindset, is that unregulated markets lack any means of controlling external costs, so those with the most to gain from despoilation pretty much get free run.

So, in my opinion, Muir was right that conservation is indeed a matter of justice. It protects the rights of those who bear the external costs of industry, and the rights of future generations, against those who would wish to personally profit at the expense of those others.

Admittedly, in some cases this can be a very complex calculation. People need to eat, for example, and land used for agriculture isn’t left untouched. The point is that conservationism and regulation serve to return the external costs back to one(s) reaping the benefits, whether those who profit directly, or those who consume.

Anyway, Muir eventually settled down and got married, and raised a couple of daughters. He bought a place near what is now Martinez, California, east of the Bay. When his in-laws died, his wife inherited the house and property nearby, which the Muirs then moved to. The current park contains these lands and the old mansion.

We spent a day there, hiked the hills named for Muir’s daughters, and explored the house. It was fun to see the old photos of the Muir girls, who seemed to inherit their father’s outdoor preferences. Not nearly as staid as one might have thought from the outfits - but quite a bit like my own vigorous girls.

This picture, though, is one that says so much. The sequoia tree (on the left) was planted by Muir himself about 100 years ago. Perhaps 2000 years from now, it will be as big as the giants in the Sierras.

But whatever the fate of the tree, Muir’s legacy lives on in the National Park system, which is dedicated to Muir’s passion for preserving the natural wonders of the world so that all of us, present and future, can share them.

For more, here is the official website for John Muir National Historic Site. 

Sadness and Happiness by Robert Pinsky

Source of book: I own this.

This year, my wife found a “used” copy of The Figured Wheel, the collection representing Robert Pinsky’s poetry from 1966 to 1996. I say “used,” because I am not at all sure it had been read before. We find books like that pretty often, and it makes me sad. But at least this one found a good home.

In England, at least once upon a time, it was a big deal to be Poet Laureate. And people actually knew who you were, and cared. Not so much in the United States, at least since Robert Frost in 1958-1959. Quick, try to name one since then. (English teachers are disqualified. Sorry.) My guess would be that most would say, “Maya Angelou.” And that would be incorrect, because, whatever her merits as a poet, she never made Poet Laureate. A few like myself might vaguely remember Richard Wilbur, Gwendolyn Brooks, or Billy Collins. And some might at least know that Juan Felipe Herrera is the current appointee.

Oh well, it is probably just yet another symptom of the decline in the popularity of poetry in general. (And no, it isn’t that modern poetry is boring. Almost nobody reads the classics anymore either.) 

Anyway, Robert Pinsky was Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000, and like many who received that honor, he used his position to promote poetry. He founded the Favorite Poem Project, where people wrote in their favorites - and many made videos of themselves reciting those poems. It’s worth a visit.

In my opinion, for what it is worth, I think that Robert Pinsky is a first-class reader of poetry, and pretty darn good at selecting and explaining poems too. I kicked off my Poetry Project on this blog by reading the anthology he put together, Essential Pleasures, which is a truly outstanding introduction to a wide range of poetry.

I also read his translation of Dante’s Inferno, which I loved. He took an interesting approach of preserving the terza rima form and the meaning, but splitting the original stanzas.

This was the first time I actually sat down and read more than one of his poems at a time. Sadness and Happiness is his first collection, published in 1975. It is divided into a few sections, including the final poem, a longer work entitled “Essay on Psychiatrists,” which, among other things, discusses mental health in light of Euripides’ The Bacchae. (It was actually pretty good, if literarily nerdy.)

Here are a few poems and lines that stood out to me:

Ceremony For Any Beginning

Against weather, and the random

Harpies--mood, circumstance, the laws

Of biography, chance, physics--

The unseasonable soul holds forth,

Eager for form as a renowned

Pedant, the emperor's man of worth,

Hereditary arbiter of manners.

Soul, one's life is one's enemy.

As the small children learn, what happens

Takes over, and what you were goes away.

They learn it in sardonic soft

Comments of the weather, when it sharpens

The hard surfaces of daylight: light

Winds, vague in direction, like blades

Lavishing their brilliant strokes

All over a wrecked house,

The nude wallpaper and the brute

Intelligence of the torn pipes.

Therefore when you marry or build

Pray to be untrue to the plain

Dominance of your own weather, how it keeps

Going even in the woods when not

A soul is there, and how it implies

Always that separate, cold

Splendidness, uncouth and unkind--

On chilly, unclouded mornings,

Torrential sunlight and moist air,

Leafage and solid bark breathing the mist.

I’m particularly fond of the first three lines of the second stanza. One of those “moments” in poetry that are unforgettable.

Sadness and Happiness is also a section within the book, consisting of a long poem in multiple sections - but only one long sentence, which goes on for nine pages. Not that it is formless, though. It is divided into quatrains, with a rhythmic structure that is almost a tetrameter, but not quite regular in its feet. The language itself is carefully chosen (Pinsky has a great feel for sounds and pacing), and one thought bleeds into the next in a carefully arranged transition. And sadness and happiness intermingle throughout the poem, in a succession of images, One line that stood out in this one was this:

...happiness

like the sex-drowsy saxophones

rolling flatted thirds of the blues

over and over, rocking the dulcet

rhythms of regret, Black music

which tumbles loss over in the mouth

like a moist bone full of marrow;

The Blues, tumbling loss over in the mouth. Pinsky plays saxophone, and writes well when it comes to musical matters.

Or this one:

...It is true, wonder

does indeed hinder love and hate,

and one can behold well with eyes

only what lies beneath him -

so that it takes more than eyes

to see well anything that is worth

loving;

Another poem I liked is this one:

Library Scene

To P.S.

Under the ceiling of metal stamped like plaster

Under the ceiling fan, in the brown luster

Someone is reading, in the sleepy room

Alert, her damp cheek balanced on one palm,

With knuckles loosely holding back the pages

Or fingers waiting lightly at their edges.

Her eyes are like the eyes of someone attending

To a fragile work, familiar and demanding —

Some work of delicate surfaces and threads.

Someone is reading the way a rare child reads,

A kind of changeling reading for love of reading,

For love and for the course of something leading

Her child’s intelligent soul through its inflection:

A force, a kind of loving work or action.

Someone is reading in a deepening room

Where something happens, something that will come

To happen again, happening as many times

As she is reading in as many rooms.

What happens outside that calm like water braiding

Over green stones? The ones of little reading,

Or who never read for love, are many places.

They are in the house of power, and many houses

Reading as they do, doing what they do.

Or it happens that they come, at times, to you

Because you are somehow someone that they need:

They come to you and you tell them how you read.

This poem was written for a professor of Pinsky’s, who as a child read every single book in the one-room library in her small town. She later became a librarian of that library, before going on to teach English. I cannot help but think of the librarians I know, and their quest to teach the art and love of reading.

Another great one is “Daughter,” presumably written about Pinsky’s own daughter, young at the time. It is too long to quote, but I’ll give a little idea here:

I

She thinks about skeletons,

Admires their symmetry,

Responding with fear

To the implied movement

And the near-absence of expression.

In the museum

Of natural history

She pressed up close

To the smaller ones;

But shook, studying the tall

Scaffolding of dinosaurs

From the next room.

Back home, sitting in the john

With the door open

She claims to see, in a mirror

Down the dark hall, her own.

And that’s how a lot of the poem goes, with Pinsky capturing the bizarrity of small kids, with their strange leaps of logic and imagination, their issues with bodily fluids, relationships, and lack of filters. As one of my own daughters did at one point, his lists the family members in order of age, “declaring that we will die in the same order.”

Pinsky writes well in both traditional and modern forms, and his poems can swing from thoroughly modern references to Greek mythology without missing a beat. That is one of the things I find fascinating about him, is that he loves and embraces the old - his analysis of Elizabethan poems is enlightening  - but he can write adeptly in the new forms and aesthetic as well. Between the analysis, the poems, the translations, and the Favorite Poem Project, I can say that I believe Robert Pinsky has done as much as anyone else since my high school days (shout out to Mr. Collins, English Lit!) to foster my love and appreciation for poetry. I know that the Poet Laureate position has limited influence, but in my heart, I hope that the present and future laureates will be able to reach at least a few like me, and open our hearts and minds to a world where less means more, and words are allowed to dance. 

***

Because I had to include a reading example. I enjoy Elizabeth Bishop, and Pinsky reads her poetry with a simplicity, but with a perfect sense of cadence and phrase. You can hear both the line breaks and the sentence breaks, but neither overpowers the language itself.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach

Source of book: Borrowed from the library.

I am an unabashed Mary Roach fan. Maybe because I have a thing for strong women with dry wit. (Hey, I married one!) Perhaps it is because she picks peculiar topics, then find interesting historical and scientific twists on them.

I previously reviewed Gulp, which is all about the alimentary canal. It was hilarious, although not for the weak of stomach. (See what I did there?) I also, a few years back, read Bonk, which is about sex. Well, sort of, and in a way that one would not necessarily expect. I decided at the time not to review it, because I wasn’t sure how friends and family would react. I guess I am a bit older, and less likely to care, because I wish now that I had written about it back then. Suffice it to say that Roach went some crazy places with it, and wrote about it all with an acerbic and deadpan style that was way too much fun. 

In Spook, Roach takes on the idea of the afterlife and the soul. She is a lapsed Catholic, and a natural skeptic. (I am a natural skeptic, but a devout Protestant, which makes me really fun at dinner parties…) In the course of this book, she visits India (to explore alleged instances of reincarnation), examines “ectoplasm,” recounts experiments aimed at weighing the soul, enrolls in Medium School, goes ghost hunting with cameras and recording devices, and pokes around in an old legal case in which a ghost makes an appearance. Along the way, she delves into the nature of electricity and the scientific revolution of the 1800s, millennia-old sexist views of the origin of life, and meets some really odd people. In other words, typical Mary Roach.

A few highlights are worth mentioning. In one chapter, she explores “infrasound,” that is, sound waves below the range of human hearing. In some cases, apparently, strong infrasound at the right frequency can cause phantom apparitions in peripheral vision. Thus, some areas that seem to be “haunted” have infrasound as a factor. (The effect doesn’t occur in everyone, though.) Roach notes the internet rumors that there are infrasound “weapons” that the government won’t tell you about, and asks one expert about them. Apparently, the attempts to create such a weapon were not successful. But that doesn’t stop her from imagining a use for one:

I used to have a neighbor who shoots high-decibel Eagles songs out his windows, causing nausea and extreme annoyance at a fraction of the cost. I’d have loved to get my hands on a retaliatory infrasound blaster.

The entire chapter on Medium School is pretty funny. Roach describes one session as follows.

Our tutor speaks to us for about fifteen minutes, but actual take-home instructions are thus far few. They amount more or less to this: Expand your energy. “Push out your energy, fill the room with your power.” It seems to be something you just try to do. I try, I really do, but I have no idea where my energy is located or how to control its size or direction. I notice I’m moving my ears.

Energy enters into a more scientific discussion as well. The theory is this: the difference between a living consciousness and a dead body must be something quantifiable, and not just metaphysical, like a disembodied soul. At minimum, consciousness is information, and information requires energy to exist. So, one of the more legitimate researchers interviewed has the idea of trying to enclose something living in order to determine if this indeed can be measured. Past researchers have tried to do this for dying humans, but this proved problematic for practical as well as ethical reasons. So, Roach naturally has a question for the researcher, which she asks at exactly the wrong time.

I realize I forgot to ask him what kind of organism he’s planning to put inside. The dessert arrives, a massive custard download held vertical by wafer shelving.

“So what goes in it?” I’d been assuming a lab mouse.

“Banana pudding, mostly.”

When I get back home and I look at Nahum’s twenty-five-page “Proposal for Testing the Energetics of Consciousness and Its Physical Foundation,” I will picture a plate of banana pudding in a box.

The intersection of science and what we might now find to be superstition (such as the Spiritualists, or any number of fringe ideas encountered in the search for the soul) is quite interesting. As recently as 100 years ago, it was genuinely believed possible that science may detect the soul or prove the afterlife. Roach points out that electricity and magnetism (and their relationship) were once as disembodied and spooky as ghosts, and it would have been natural to assume that they may interact. And both seemed to be close to witchcraft in their own way. Now, in the era where electronic devices are no better understood, but so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable, it may seem strange to think of Bell and Edison in the same light as seances and “animal magnetism,” but at the time, this wasn’t strange at all. It was the dawning of a new world, and anything could indeed happen.

Another bit really struck me as interesting as well. My kids have had the egg and sperm talk since they were pretty small, as part of our science curriculum. We take it for granted that this is how sexual reproduction takes place. But this was not in fact known until 1875, when a biologist named Oskar Hertwig actually saw egg and sperm meet. Think about that for a moment. It is only in the last 140 years that we actually knew that both male and female gametes were required to make offspring.

It is hard to overstate just how revolutionary this was. As Roach points out, for most of human history, it was believed that the male planted a seed in the female, which grew into offspring. In some cases, it was said that there was a “homunculus,” a tiny human, in semen, which then developed into a child. The female was just fertile ground for the child to grow, not an equal contributor to the formation of the child.

This was a big deal, because the near-universal belief, from Aristotle on down, was that women were congenitally inferior to men, a lesser form of being. Thus, the “greater” could not come from “lesser.” That is, a male child could not result from the inferior female. It would have to come solely from the mother.

The ovum’s main shortcoming as the vessel of humanity was that it derived from the woman, who was in those days (more) universally considered a second-class organism. “If ovism was the true system of reproduction, God was sending us a mixed message,” writes [Clara] Pinto-Correia [in her book, The Ovary of Eve]. “He had locked us inside perfection. And then he had locked perfection inside imperfection.”

In other words, the discovery (again, a mere 140 years ago) that males take half of their genetic material from females changed everything.

This digression is in the context of another significant issue: when does the body gain a soul? This is not a small question, as it bears on the question of abortion, just as the question of when the soul leaves the body is important to the question of when to cease medical treatment.

Roach doesn’t go into this that deeply, other than to note that a zygote can split into twins up to 14 days after fertilization, raising the question of whether (if you follow the Catholic position on ensoulment) the soul would then have to split in two. Roach does miss the opportunity to ask what happens when a zygote, instead of developing into one or more fetuses, becomes a Hydatidiform Mole, which few, if any, would argue has a soul at all. (See the tale of Anne Hutchinson on my review of The Scarlet Letter for a real life example.) Further discussion would require a post of its own, but I will just say that the claim that science has settled the discussion of ensoulment (by “confirming” that the soul enters at fertilization) is not really supportable by the evidence, despite what certain political groups would have you believe.

I’ll end on a more humorous note. Back in the 1800s, Homeopathy was actually considered a legitimate form of medicine - just like bleeding and other barbaric practices not then known to be harmful. Thus, those who were trained in Homeopathy and then went on to search for proof of the afterlife were not crazy, but more or less within the mainstream. As part of the investigation, Roach reads some of A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica, the bible for homeopathy at the time (and now, for that matter.) She found the list of symptoms to be amusing, such as “dreams of horses” and “odor before the nose, like herrings or musk.”

But the best was this one: “Agnus castus causes… ‘feeble erections’ and - it almost goes without saying - “great sadness.” (Sorry, her snark about sex makes me laugh every time.)

Throughout, Roach does her best to remain unbiased and open to ideas. She is a skeptic, but realizes that, and does her best to remain objective. Proof is required for her, obviously, but she does not dismiss out of hand plausible ideas and experiments. Her approach is one that I wish more people would adopt when exploring ideas, because some fail to demand verifiable evidence when it comes to testable theories, while others will not listen to any level of proof which contradicts their own hypotheses.

I suppose Mary Roach is probably an acquired taste, but I find her stuff rather amusing, and a good excuse to delve further into ideas, history, and science.