Sunday round-up 15 December 2024
Birthday wishes to Don Johnson, Paul Simonon and Michelle Dockery, while we remember the death of Sitting Bull and the premiere of Gone With The Wind
Note: we’re doing something a little different this week (don’t panic: change is incremental). As Christmas rushes towards us, the television schedules take on a character of their own, so for a degree of variety I have replaced this week’s viewing recommendations with musical ones. And they say the revolution is dead.
Felix dies natalis, as we never learned to say in Latin class, to today’s merry band among whom are numbered musician, songwriter, producer and very canny entrepreneur Dave Clark (85), political science legend and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex Sir Ivor Crewe (79), actor, celebrity husband and father and eternally Mr Miami Vice Don Johnson (75), director, screenwriter, broadcaster and lover of cinema Alex Cox (70), former Solicitor General for England and Wales and one-time shadow cabinet member Sir Oliver Heald (70), outgoing Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and multimillionaire Senator Mark Warner (70), Clash bassist Paul Simonon (69), actress, singer-songwriter and forever Supergirl Helen Slater (61), comedian, actor and preponderant annoyance Paul Kaye (60), irrepressible jockey and restaurateur Frankie Dettori (54), actor Adam Brody (45), actress and sublime deliverer of the c-word Michelle Dockery (43) and actress and OG nepo baby Maude Apatow (27).
“If you hadn’t been dead we’d have baked you a cake” to sexually adventurous, family-murdering-and-marrying kithara enthusiast and generalised wrong ’un Emperor Nero (AD 37), architect and engineer Gustave Eiffel (1832), oil tycoon and plutocrat J. Paul Getty (1892), athlete, Olympic gold medallist and barrister Harold Abrahams (1899), pioneer of modern architecture Oscar Niemeyer (1907), host of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair and conservative Republican dairy farmer Max Yasgur (1919), designer of the world’s most famous submachine gun Uziel Gal (1923), novelist, playwright, poet and titan of Irish letters Edna O’Brien (1930) and journalist and anti-apartheid activist Donald Woods (1933).
The ghost dance
Today in 1890, at 5.30 in the morning, 39 police officers and four volunteers arrived at the home of Hunkpapa Lakota chief Sitting Bull on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota with orders to arrest him. James McLaughlin, the US Indian agent at Fort Yates on the reservation, was anxious that Sitting Bull, an influential figure in the Ghost Dance movement, might escape and instigate conflict with the authorities elsewhere, so he instructed an Indian agency policeman, Lieutenant Henry Bullhead, himself a Lakota also named Bull Head, to make the arrest.
Bull Head had the house surrounded and demanded Sitting Bull’s surrender, but the chief noisily played for time, allowing others in the camp to awake and converge on the scene. Bull Head told Sitting Bull he was to accompany him to Fort Yates to see McLaughlin, after which he would be free to return, but Sitting Bull refused. When the police made to take him by force, an inevitable series of events unfolded. The other Lakota were outraged and a man named Catch-the-Bear shouldered his rifle and shot Bull Head, who, perhaps simply as a reflex, fired his revolver into Sitting Bull’s chest between the 10th and 11th ribs. Another policeman, Red Tomahawk, then shot Sitting Bull in the head. He fell to the ground and died some time between 12 noon and 1.00 pm; he was somewhere in his mid-50s. A fight broke out in which six policemen were killed, two more, including Bull Head, dying later, while seven other Lakota and two horses died at the hands of the police.
Two weeks after Sitting Bull’s death, another Lakota leader, Spotted Elk, chief of the Miniconjou, and his followers were escorted by a detachment of the 7th Cavalry Regiment from Porcupine Butte to Wounded Knee Creek on the White River, where they made camp. The following day, 29 December, the commanding officer of the 7th Cavalry, Colonel James W. Forsyth, surrounded the camp and attempted to disarm the Lakota of their remaining weapons. Gunfire broke out, and the soldiers did not hold back: when the encounter was over, as many as 300 Lakota were dead, men, women and children. Twenty-five United States soldiers were killed and 39 wounded, six of whom died of their injuries. Nineteen were awarded the Medal of Honor for their part in the Wounded Knee Massacre.
The editor of a local newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, a 34-year-old writer and reported named L. Frank Baum, concluded on 3 January 1891:
The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.
Baum would go on to write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Stop the cavalry
On this date in 1917, an armistice was agreed between the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria on one side and the newly established but as-yet-unnamed Russian republic of the Bolsheviks on the other. It was effectively the end of the First World War on the Eastern Front, although fighting resumed briefly and sporadically in the first months of 1918 before the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March. The negotiating delegations were led by Major-General Max Hoffmann, the Prussian officer who was Chief of Staff for the Central Powers, and a leading member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Adolph Joffe. The Russian delegation of 28 had been chosen to represent the social spectrum of those supporting the revolution, but at the last moment someone realised there was no peasant representative, so one was enlisted on the street as the delegates made their way to the railway station.
The talks had begun in Brest-Litovsk on 30 November. The city had been burned to the ground when the Russians had retreated in 1915 but was the headquarters of the Supreme Commander in the East, Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria. The enforced abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March and the collapse of the imperial state meant that the Bolsheviks had no motivation to remain at war with the Central Powers—indeed, the German government had assisted Vladimir Lenin’s journey from Zürich to St Petersburg in April 1917. Meanwhile Germany saw the opportunity to end the war on two fronts as a godsend, while Austria-Hungary was hard-pressed against Italy to the south.
The cessation of hostilities was seismic for the war as a whole: Ben Elton and Richard Curtis were writing for comic effect but there was a force behind the eponymous officer in Blackadder Goes Forth exclaiming that the armistice meant “three-quarters of a million Germans leaving the Russian Front and coming over here with the express purpose of using my nipples for target practice”. The United States had entered the war in April 1917 but it was taking time for American soldiers to cross the Atlantic in significant and potentially decisive numbers. The German high command therefore knew that any chance of victory, or even a favourable settlement, lay in a swift and telling blow. The armistice on the Eastern Front liberated nearly 50 German divisions by the spring of 1918, and General Erich Ludendorff, the Chief Quartermaster General, planned a major offensive in the West, without involving the Chief of the Great General Staff, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, or the civilian government.
Operation Michael began on 21 March 1918 near Saint-Quentin on the Somme, the hinge between the British and French armies. After a huge five-hour artillery barrage which saw more than 3.5 million shells fired, the German 2nd, 7th, 17th and 18th Armies emerged through the fog and smoke and shattered the Allied front line, eventually advancing 40 miles, but it came at an horrendous cost: there were 40,000 German casualties on the first day alone, and Ludendorff’s forces could not sustain that level of loss, while American reinforcements meant the Allies would only grow stronger. In August, the pendulum swung back and the Allies began the Hundred Days Offensive. The end was not far off now.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn
Today in 1939, Gone With The Wind premiered at Loew’s Grand Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. The David O. Selznick-produced four-hour epic tale of the Confederate experience during the American Civil War, adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s equally titanic novel of 1936, was directed by Victor Fleming and starred Clark Gable as the charming but cynical gambler and rogue Rhett Butler and the lambent Vivien Leigh, only 26, as Scarlett O’Hara, a sharp but self-centred heiress. The film is now perhaps more talked about that watched, and it certainly required a degree of commitment: it runs to 221 minutes, but for initial audiences that swelled to nearly 240 minutes with overture, intermission, entr’acte and exit music. It has also dated badly in the 85 years since its release, particularly in its depictions of slavery and race in the South, though I would humbly hesitate to agree with Professor David Reynolds in comparing it to D.W. Griffith’s unapologetically racist The Birth of a Nation (1915). Artistically, it is still breathtaking, and Gable and Leigh remain a cracklingly brilliant duo; 30 other actresses tested for the role of Scarlett O’Hara, including Tallulah Bankhead, Ellen Drew, Paulette Goddard, Susan Hayward, Lana Turner and Diana Barrymore, but, if you want my opinion, Vivien Leigh is mesmerising, pitch-perfect and luminous. She won an Oscar for her performance, one of eight the film took at the 12th Academy Awards in February 1940.
The premiere told its own tale of America’s story of race, however: Hattie McDaniel, outstanding as Mammy, the former slave employed at Tara, was not allowed to attend, nor were any of her fellow black actors, because of Georgia’s strict laws on segregation which prevented them from sitting with their white co-stars. Hearing of this, Gable, furious, threatened to boycott the event but it was McDaniel who persuaded him to attend.
McDaniel was nominated for and (deservedly) won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, beating co-star Olivia de Havilland, and was the first African-American to achieve the feat. The ceremony, on 29 February 1940, was held in the Cocoanut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with Bob Hope as host for the first time (there would be 18 other instances), and it was for the first time filmed. Frank Capra, then President of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, sold the rights to Warner Bros. for $30,000 and cinematographer Charles Rosher supervised the filming. Gone With The Wind had been nominated in 13 categories, winning in eight, which caused Hope to say to Selznick at one point, “David, you should have brought roller skates”.
Although Hattie McDaniel won an award, she and her escort, F.P. Yober, were made to sit at a segregated table by the wall, joined by her (white) agent, William Meiklejohn. The Ambassador Hotel strictly speaking did not allow black patrons but admitted McDaniel as a “favour” to Selznick. After the ceremony, the rest of the cast went on to a nightclub which also had a colour bar. The last word, however, should go to McDaniel. Resplendent in a turquoise gown and white gardenias, she accepted the award and spoke of her pride and thanks in a speech which even the hard-edged gossip columnist Louella Parsons called “one of the finest speeches ever given on the Academy floor”.
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, fellow members of the motion picture industry and honoured guests: this is one of the happiest moments of my life, and I want to thank each one of you who had a part in selecting me for one of their awards, for your kindness. It has made me feel very, very humble; and I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel, and may I say thank you and God bless you.
Watch it. If you don’t choke up even a little bit, I can’t help you.
High days and holy days
A relatively muted festal day as we approach Christmas. Today is the feast of St Valerian (AD 377–AD 457), Bishop of Abbenza, who was martyred by the Vandal king Geiseric for refusing to surrender the sacred vessels of his church; of St Mesmin (d AD 520), Abbot of Micy near Orléans who supposedly fought and defeated a local dragon; of St Drostan (7th century AD), a Scottish-Irish monk who was a companion of St Columba and became the first Abbot of Old Deer in Aberdeenshire; of St Virginia Centurione Bracelli (1587-1651), a Genoese aristocrat who took a vow of celibacy after she was widowed and founded a community dedicated to Our Lady of Refuge to tend the poor and sick of Genoa; and of St Maria Crocifissa Di Rosa (1813-55), a nun from Brescia who looked after the poor and founded a home for mute and deaf women.
For those who speak it, today is Esperanto Book Day, marking the birth in 1859 of L.L. Zamenhof, the Ashkenazi Jewish physician and linguist who invented the language. The people of Alderney in the Channel Islands commemorate Homecoming Day, as today in 1945 the population which had been evacuated before the German occupation in 1940.
Factoids
Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s first significant chief minister, was intellectually and politically brilliant and in many ways a modern man of his era, but he bore some traces of the ecclesiastical abuses associated with the mediaeval period, including pluralism. He was Archbishop of York from 1514 until his death in 1530 but for most of that time was an absentee bishop for one other diocese as well. If you have ever visited Durham Cathedral—and you should, it’s stunning—then congratulations! You have visited at least once more than Wolsey ever did, despite the fact he was Bishop of Durham from 1523 to 1529.
In a political culture which increasingly prizes novelty and offers politicians a short shelf life, we should offer a polite round of applause to Frederick Richard Penn Curzon, 7th Earl Howe, the Shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Lords. He has been a Conservative frontbencher, in government and opposition, since May 1991, when John Major appointed him as a Lord in Waiting, a government whip in the upper house, when he was 40 years old. Since then he has served as—ready?—Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence, Shadow Minister of Health, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health, Minister of State for Defence, Deputy Leader of the House of Lords and Shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Lords. He recently celebrated 40 years in the House of Lords and is serving on the front bench for his tenth Leader of the Conservative Party.
Lord Howe succeeded his second cousin, the 6th Earl Howe, a Royal Navy officer whose service included three years (1942-45) aboard HMS Howe, named after his ancestor Admiral of the Fleet Earl Howe (1726-99). The current earl’s father, George Curzon, also served in the Royal Navy, seeing action during the First World War, but then pursued a career in acting: he played the title role in the 1935 mystery Sexton Blake and the Bearded Doctor, as well as the sequels Sexton Blake and the Mademoiselle (1935) and Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938). Curzon appeared in several films by Alfred Hitchcock and had a small role in one of the greatest of all war films, The Cruel Sea, as, appropriately for his family, “Admiral at Party”.
I am not for a moment suggesting that she did so, but the daughter of the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Princess Sophie of Hohenberg, could have gone to the cinema to see The Hunt for Red October. The submarine classic was released in the United States on 2 March 1990, and in West Germany and Austria on 9 August 1990. Sophie died on 27 October 1990, aged 89, in Thannhausen in Styria. Her two younger brothers had died in 1962 (Maxmilian, Duke of Hohenberg) and 1954 (Prince Ernst of Hohenberg), both having spent some time imprisoned in Dachau under the Nazis. They were memorably described as the first orphans of the First World War.
Vice-Admiral Viscount Nelson is entombed in a grand sarcophagus in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, where he was given a state funeral on 9 January 1806. He had been shot and killed months earlier, during the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, and was given what was then the grandest and most elaborate non-royal funeral in British history. The congregation numbered 9,000 and included King George III’s third son, the Duke of Clarence and St Andrews (later William IV). However, the elaborate black marble sarcophagus had originally been commissioned by Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (see above) and made in 1529 by Benedetto da Rovezzano, then appropriated after Wolsey’s fall by Henry VIII. But the King had also not used it, instead being buried alongside Jane Seymour, his third wife, in a vault in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The tomb was moved in pieces from Westminster to Windsor in 1565 but parts were then sold to raise money during the period of the Commonwealth. It was nearly 300 years before it came to be used for its intended purpose. At least it still went to an East Anglian: Wolsey was born in Ipswich in Suffolk, while Nelson was born in Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk.
“The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.” (Karl Marx)
“In the new age of French chaos, hard right and left call the shots”: strictly speaking from the week before rather than this past week, an elegant if downbeat essay in The Times by Agnès Poirier analysing the current travails of France’s political community and the inability of the institutions of the Fifth Republic to accommodate them. As she points out, while exact descriptors have varied over the years, the Constitution of 1958 which inaugurated the Fifth Republic made an assumption of two major ideological blocs in the National Assembly, left and right, and the success of Emmanuel Macron and his La République En Marche! (as it was then called) in 2017 simply shattered that assumption. In the 2012 legislative elections, only two parties, the Union for a Popular Movement and the Socialist Party, won above 100 seats, and the next largest conventional party, the Greens, scored 17; this summer, three parties or alliances were into the 100s and the Republicans won 39. It’s a different landscape, and one without an obvious remedy.
“How to get from the me to the we society”: I reserve judgement on this piece from The Financial Times, but I like the energy and restless enthusiasm of Andy Haldane, now Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts but previously the Bank of England’s Chief Economist and, with Michael Gove, one of the intellectual godfathers of “levelling up”. I like the expansive and textured idea of “social capital” and the potential to capture so many indicators of quality of life which cold economic statistics miss, but I wonder how it would or will translate from theory to practice. Food for thought, nonetheless.
“Scruton and the roots of modern conservatism”: an enjoyable long read by Dan Hitchens in The Critic, tracing the intellectual development and influence of the late Sir Roger Scruton from philosophical salons hosted by Conservative MP Sir Hugh Fraser in the early 1970s to his emergence as perhaps the most prominent right-wing British thinker of recent times. I’m not a slavish disciple of Scruton but he is thought-provoking and often true, and Hitchens tells an important story well and sympathetically (though I think he underestimates Thatcher). A good read as the right of politics tries to find its lodestar.
“‘Judgment is the price of being creative’: Rory Sutherland and Rick Rubin in conversation”: a cracklingly imaginative and entertaining dialogue from The Spectator’s festive edition which pairs advertising legend Sutherland and massively influential and versatile music producer Rubin to talk about, well, anything and everything, but essentially the creative spark and how we think. Regular readers will know I’m a signed-up Rory fan and he doesn’t disappoint, drawing brilliant and quirky insights from the man who helped the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC become famous and gave country icon Johnny Cash his majestic, poignant musical coda. Enjoy it as much as they obviously did.
“Javier Milei: Argentina’s Darwinian disruptor”: the President of Argentina, who recently marked a year in office, makes himself an easy target for lampoon and as a result has been dismissed by many as an extremist destined to fail. However, as journalist and speechwriter Ian Birrell maps out for UnHerd, his radical free-market, small-state approach to Argentina’s deep-seated economic woes may be starting to bear some fruit. The country remains plagued by high poverty rates and almost-nonexistent growth, but Milei seems to have begun reining in rampant inflation and restoring some stability to the banking system. Early days, but the world is watching closely.
“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” (Tom Waits)
Van Morrison, “And The Healing Has Begun” (1979): the ever-truculent Belfast Cowboy at his grudgingly sweet, romantic best, singing a long, rambling love song of infinite tenderness. Gruff he may be but his soul burns fierce, and literally no-one else could style out telling a potential paramour, “Yeah, I got some, take some sherry/You want a drop of port?”
The Divine Comedy, “A Lady of a Certain Age” (2006): Ulsterman Neil Hannon, son of bishop and alumnus of Portora Royal School (see also H.F. Lyte, O. Wilde and S. Beckett), is dry, witty, clever and erudite, but this combines all of those qualities with brittle, heartbreaking sadness and genteel decline. Sipping Camparis with David and Peter… sigh.
The Cure, “Pictures of You” (1989): probably dismissed as commercial by dedicated goths, but this sprawling seven-minute romance was inspired by Robert Smith looking at photographs of his wife Mary. Compelling guitar riff and just very, very lovely.
Lindisfarne, “Clear White Light” (1970): anthemic Geordie rock beloved of my late parents, originally written by Alan Hull in the band’s early folk-rock rise but a staple at live concerts. Even if (like me) you’ve never actually been to a Christmas Lindisfarne gig at the City Hall in Newcastle, turn this up loud enough and you’ll begin to think you might have.
Runrig, “Loch Lomond” (1988): another pounding concert favourite from the giants of Celtic rock, a traditional folk tune made into a stadium-filling heartswell of identity. Runrig sometimes verged on the preposterous, and supplied the House of Commons with their dour keyboard player Pete Wishart as a Scottish National MP from 2001 (where he remains), but this strikes a chord deep in anyone with roots north of the border.
Let me kiss off that falling Tear…
… as John Gay wrote, we only part to meet again. How true, how true. We shall, and perhaps sooner than you think.