Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
The Sex Scholar
Decades before Kinsey, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher polled Victorian-era women on their bedroom behavior—then kept the startling results under wraps.
By Kara Platoni
DOING HER PART: Mosher served with the American Red Cross in France during World War I.
In 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford's hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler nearly put it aside, figuring it was a manuscript for one of Mosher's published works, mostly statistical treatises on women's height, strength and menstruation. But instead, he recalls, "I opened it up and there were these questionnaires"— questionnaires upon which dozens of women, most born before 1870, had inscribed their most intimate thoughts.
In other words, it was a sex survey. A Victorian sex survey. It is the earliest known study of its type, long preceding, for example, the 1947 and 1953 Kinsey Reports, whose oldest female respondents were born in the 1890s. The Mosher Survey recorded not only women's sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children and contraception. Perhaps, it hinted, Victorian women weren't so Victorian after all.
Indeed, many of the surveyed women were decidedly unshrinking. One, born in 1844, called sex "a normal desire" and observed that "a rational use of it tends to keep people healthier." Offered another, born in 1862, "The highest devotion is based upon it, a very beautiful thing, and I am glad nature gave it to us."
The survey's genesis—like its rediscovery—was a fortuitous accident. Mosher started it in 1892 as a 28-year-old biology undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin; she had been asked to address a local Mother's Club on "the marital relation" and as a single, childless woman seems to have used data collection to fill gaps in her knowledge. Afterward, Mosher continued conducting surveys until 1920, using variations on the same form and amassing 45 profiles in all. Yet Mosher never published or drew more than cursory observations from her data. She died in 1940, and the survey was entirely forgotten when Degler unearthed it.
"I remember I was so surprised when I first opened it and saw what was there," recalls Degler, 89, the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, emeritus. "I said to the librarian there, 'Did anyone ever use these papers before?' I was sure that they'd been used before. [The subject] was something that was so instantaneously interesting at this point. And they said no, no one ever had looked at any of the papers, and certainly not at that survey. That's one of the great experiences of my life as a historian."
Degler alerted the world to the survey's existence in 1974 by analyzing it in the American Historical Review, concluding that although in the Victorian era "there was an effort to deny women's sexual feelings . . . the Mosher Survey should make us doubt that the ideology was actually put into practice." The survey was a sensation. Degler recalls feminist historians coming to the archives to make copies, and in 1980 it was printed as a book that soon hit college classrooms.
Mosher's survey, says Stanford historian Estelle Freedman, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, was "a goldmine" for scholars. In an era when "the public ideal was that women should be very discreet, if not ignorant, about sexuality," says Freedman, Mosher was "asking very modern questions. She's opening up an inquiry about what is the meaning of sexuality for women." Mosher's survey, like her life, gave poignant testimony to the complex desires of women who were caught between traditional feminine norms and 20th-century freedoms.
Courtesy Stanford University Archives
Born in 1863 in Albany, N.Y., young Clelia had a scientific bent encouraged by her father, Dr. Cornelius Mosher, whom she idolized. He took her on his medical rounds and taught her to love botany and literature. Yet he couldn't bear to let his beloved—and somewhat sickly—daughter attend college, then considered a strain on young women's health. He tried to distract Clelia by helping her set up a small florist shop, but she squirreled away tuition money and off she went.
Mosher's college career was somewhat nomadic. In 1889, she entered Wellesley as a 25-year-old freshman but struggled academically and with ill health. She spent her junior year at the University of Wisconsin, where she conducted her first surveys, and in 1892 transferred to Stanford, enrolling in its second class of students. She received a physiology degree in 1893 and her master's in physiology in 1894, while working as an assistant in the department of hygiene teaching health, physiology and exercise to female students.
Thanks to a steady supply of young female research subjects, Mosher's scholarly aim soon became clear: to prove that women were not inferior to men, and that frailties chalked up to sex were really the effects of binding garments, insufficient exercise and mental conditioning. Her master's thesis, for example, showed that women breathe from the diaphragm, as men do, rather than from the chest, as was believed at the time. She concluded that this so-called biological difference was really due to tight corsetry.
She also began tracking students' menstrual periods, hoping to upend "functional periodicity," the idea that menstruation debilitated women. It was a canny subject choice for an ambitious female investigator. "That was not research that men could do easily, so she definitely claimed an area that was not accessible to men for her own research," says Elizabeth Griego, who wrote her 1983 dissertation on Mosher for an education doctorate at UC-Berkeley and spent most of the early 1980s in the Stanford archives sifting through Mosher's papers. (Griego is now vice president for student life at the University of the Pacific.)
But it wasn't until after 1896, when Mosher had moved on to Johns Hopkins to obtain her MD, that she analyzed her data. Again, she blamed nurture over nature: Painful menstruation, she concluded, was in most cases caused by inactivity, poor muscular development and the very idea of "inevitable illness." Sending girls to bed to dwell upon their discomfort, Mosher wrote, "produce[s] a morbid attitude and favor[s] the development and exaggeration of whatever symptoms there may be." Mosher was not subtle about her motivation for seeking to discredit functional periodicity. "Equal pay for women means equal work; unnecessary menstrual absences mean less than full work," she wrote. Convinced that women should stay active throughout their periods, Mosher even invented abdominal exercises—dubbed "moshers"—to counteract menstrual pain.
‘The skirt, as modified by the vagaries of fashion, has a direct bearing on the health, development and efficiency of the woman. In 1893-96 I made a series of observations on the clothing of ninety-eight young women. The average width of skirt was then 13.5 feet. The weight of the skirt alone was often as much as the entire weight of the clothing worn by the modern girl.’
–Clelia Mosher, Strength of Women (c. 1920)
By the time Mosher received her MD in 1900, there were approximately 7,000 female doctors and surgeons in the United States (almost 6 percent of the total), but they still faced discrimination. Mosher turned down a job as an assistant to a gynecological surgeon when told that men would refuse to work under her. She returned to Palo Alto and opened a private practice, but struggled to get patient referrals from male colleagues or win grants to fund her menstruation studies. In 1910, Stanford offered her an assistant professorship in personal hygiene as the medical adviser for women, and Mosher eagerly returned to academic life. "I think she started out thinking she would like to be a doctor and perhaps a surgeon, but she found the doors closed to her very quickly," muses Griego.
Instead, Griego says, Mosher found what mattered to her: a living wage, intellectual freedom and access to research subjects. Mosher restarted her menstruation research and completed a study showing that the average height of Stanford's entering female students had increased 1.5 inches in 20 years, a change she attributed to better exercise and comfortable clothing. Mosher became a full professor in 1928, one year before she retired.
Despite the increasing prevalence of professional women, Griego says Mosher was an "intellectual loner." She didn't join women's professional groups or bond with many female academics. (Her Stanford research collaborators were male.) "She was really not very interested in the kinds of things that even faculty women—certainly faculty wives—were interested in," says Griego. "She wasn't interested in teas, she wasn't particularly interested in nurturing or mentoring women. She was really a researcher and she wanted to be accepted for her scientific approach to subjects."
She cut an odd figure on campus, Griego says, in her habitual "mannish suit." In her writings, Mosher railed against fashion: Sewing dainty clothing wasted women's study time; a young girl "making tatting to decorate her clothes or knitting or embroidering while her brother is playing ball" would grow feeble and sedentary.
Mosher never married and had few close relationships, although her mother lived with her on campus. Mosher felt this anomie deeply. A diary entry from 1919 laments: "I am finding out gradually why I am so lonely. The only things I care about are things which use my brain. The women I meet are not so much interested and I do not meet many men, so there is an intellectual solitude which is like the solitude of the desert—dangerous to one's sanity."
TOUGHEN UP: Stanford women, c. 1917, try their strength using a device of Mosher and physiology professor Ernest Martin.
Courtesy Stanford University Archives
Some archival scraps hint at her longing for connection: an unfinished novel whose heroine chooses career over the man she loves, musings on the mother-daughter bond and, the most poignant, a series of letters to an imaginary friend. "I get the sense of companionship and you are spared the boredom of reading them," Mosher wrote impishly in 1921. But in 1926, her tone was more despairing. "Dear 'Friend who never was,'" she wrote, "I have given up ever finding you. I have tried out all my friends and they have not measured up to my dreams."
Mosher's biggest scientific splash also eluded her during her lifetime.
Because it was hidden so long, her sex survey had little influence on her contemporaries, but today it's a valuable historic document that gainsays the stereotype that Victorian women knew little of sex and desired it even less. Granted, it is small and nonrepresentative, favoring well-educated, middle-class white women, and only those willing to disclose intimate matters. Mosher took care to obscure their identities—names and residences were not recorded—but it's likely the group included Stanford faculty and wives, the Mother's Club members from Mosher's Wisconsin days and other women she knew. Of those surveyed, 34 had attended a university or teachers' college. Nine were Stanford alumnae, six from Cornell; other alma maters included Wellesley, Vassar and the University of California. Thirty respondents had worked before marriage, mostly as teachers.
Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they'd gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like "watching farm animals." Yet no matter how sheltered they'd initially been, these women had—and enjoyed—sex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week.
Unlike Mosher's other work, the survey is more qualitative than quantitative, featuring open-ended questions probing feelings and experiences. "She's actually asking these questions not about physiology or mechanics—she's really asking about sexual subjectivity and the meaning of sex to women," Freedman says. Their responses were often mixed. Some enjoyed sex but worried that they shouldn't. One slept apart from her husband "to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse." Some didn't enjoy sex but faulted their partner. Mosher writes: [She] "Thinks men have not been properly trained."
Their responses reflected the cultural shifts of the late 19th century, as marriage became viewed as a romantic union, not just an economic one, and as people began to dissociate sex from procreation, says Freedman. One woman, born in 1867, wrote that before marriage she believed sex to be only for reproduction, but later changed her mind: "In my experience the habitual bodily expression of love has a deep psychological effect in making possible complete mental sympathy & perfecting the spiritual union that must be the lasting 'marriage' after the passion of love has passed away with the years." Wrote another, born in 1863, "It seems to me to be a natural and physical sign of a spiritual union, a renewal of the marriage vows."
‘A great responsibility rests upon us as physicians and teachers of physical training to lead women to ideas of health, to hold out to each one an attainable physical ideal, to teach the mechanism of our wonderful bodies so that she obeys the laws of her body, laws learned so perfectly that they are obeyed automatically.’
–Clelia Mosher, The Relation of Health to the Woman Movement, 1915
Anxieties about unwanted pregnancies are also clear. This was a hot topic during the 19th century, when the marital fertility rate fell by half despite the criminalization of abortion and contraception, Freedman says. At least 30 respondents reported attempting birth control anyway. Many mentioned using douching, withdrawal or the rhythm method; a few had tried a "womb veil" or male condoms.
"My husband and I . . . believe in intercourse for its own sake—we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness," wrote one woman, born in 1860. "On the other hand there are sometimes long periods when we are not willing to incur even a slight risk of pregnancy, and then we deny ourselves the intercourse, feeling all the time that we are losing that which keeps us closest to each other." A woman born in 1862, who felt that without "a strong desire for children" marriage was no more than "legalized prostitution," nevertheless wrote: "I most heartily wish there were no accidental conceptions. I believe the world would take a most gigantic stride toward high ethical conditions, if every child brought into the world were the product of pure love and conscious choice."
So if not all Victorian women scorned sex, why do we think of them as prudish? First, says Freedman, the notion of passionlessness wasn't universal, it was a class privilege, a way for wealthier women to claim respectability that more sexually vulnerable slave, immigrant and working-class women couldn't. "To some extent it's a protection of women from the sense of availability, and in other ways it's a limitation on them and denying their sexuality," Freedman says. Virtue was also a way for women to demonstrate good citizenship—men expressed this in the public sphere, and women in the home.
Also, some historical sources are misleading. As Degler pointed out in his 1974 article, until the Mosher Survey, much information about Victorian sex lives came from health advice books, like those of Dr. William Acton, who wrote in 1865: "The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally." But these books, wrote Degler, designed to urge temperance to young women, were prescriptive rather than de-scriptive: "The so-called Victorian conception of women's sexuality was more that of an ideology seeking to be established than the prevalent view or practice of even middle-class women."
More accurate portrayals of women's lives likely were confined to diaries and letters. Similarly, Griego says, women probably unburdened themselves to Mosher as a well-credentialed female physician. "They wouldn't have responded to just anyone with that confidential information, but her own self-image as a researcher and scientist encouraged them to be honest and factual." Although the survey's size means we can't draw broad conclusions about Victorian life from it, Freedman says, it's still a remarkably telling document, "a lens on a moment of transition."
Courtesy Stanford University Archives
We may never know what Mosher made of her own survey. Her brief introduction merely notes that it provided "a priceless knowledge for a practicing physician and teacher; a background sufficiently broad to avoid prejudice in her work with women." A comment on the era's falling birthrate contains her only analysis: "The maladjustments in marriage occasionally occur at the first consummation of the marital relation. The woman comes to this new experience of life often with no knowledge. The woman while she may give mental consent often shrinks physically. Her slower time reaction deprives her of all physical response, or (2) too often her training has instilled the idea that any physical response is coarse, common and immodest which inhibits proper part in this relation."
Ultimately, Mosher's story is deeply ironic: She was a staunch feminist who remained aloof from sisterhood, a woman who rigorously researched sexuality and marriage yet probably experienced neither, a pioneering scholar who longed for recognition but did not live to enjoy it. Today there is an often well-rewarded place in our society for awkward overachievers, but Mosher struggled her entire life with her ungainly intellect and with being a woman in a man's research world.
"We need people to go before us, and she was certainly a way-shower for a generation that followed her," Griego says. "Even though she was not the kind of person that women of her time wanted to emulate, still she held out the possibility that women could be intellectuals, they could be scientists."
In her own writings, Mosher was acutely aware of her foresight, and of the possibilities that lay ahead for women once sex became less of a secret and gender less of a burden. "Born into a world of unlimited opportunity, the woman of the rising generation will answer the question of what woman's real capacities are," Mosher wrote in 1923. "She will have physical, economic, racial and civic freedom. What will she do with it?"
By Kara Platoni
DOING HER PART: Mosher served with the American Red Cross in France during World War I.
In 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford's hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler nearly put it aside, figuring it was a manuscript for one of Mosher's published works, mostly statistical treatises on women's height, strength and menstruation. But instead, he recalls, "I opened it up and there were these questionnaires"— questionnaires upon which dozens of women, most born before 1870, had inscribed their most intimate thoughts.
In other words, it was a sex survey. A Victorian sex survey. It is the earliest known study of its type, long preceding, for example, the 1947 and 1953 Kinsey Reports, whose oldest female respondents were born in the 1890s. The Mosher Survey recorded not only women's sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children and contraception. Perhaps, it hinted, Victorian women weren't so Victorian after all.
Indeed, many of the surveyed women were decidedly unshrinking. One, born in 1844, called sex "a normal desire" and observed that "a rational use of it tends to keep people healthier." Offered another, born in 1862, "The highest devotion is based upon it, a very beautiful thing, and I am glad nature gave it to us."
The survey's genesis—like its rediscovery—was a fortuitous accident. Mosher started it in 1892 as a 28-year-old biology undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin; she had been asked to address a local Mother's Club on "the marital relation" and as a single, childless woman seems to have used data collection to fill gaps in her knowledge. Afterward, Mosher continued conducting surveys until 1920, using variations on the same form and amassing 45 profiles in all. Yet Mosher never published or drew more than cursory observations from her data. She died in 1940, and the survey was entirely forgotten when Degler unearthed it.
"I remember I was so surprised when I first opened it and saw what was there," recalls Degler, 89, the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, emeritus. "I said to the librarian there, 'Did anyone ever use these papers before?' I was sure that they'd been used before. [The subject] was something that was so instantaneously interesting at this point. And they said no, no one ever had looked at any of the papers, and certainly not at that survey. That's one of the great experiences of my life as a historian."
Degler alerted the world to the survey's existence in 1974 by analyzing it in the American Historical Review, concluding that although in the Victorian era "there was an effort to deny women's sexual feelings . . . the Mosher Survey should make us doubt that the ideology was actually put into practice." The survey was a sensation. Degler recalls feminist historians coming to the archives to make copies, and in 1980 it was printed as a book that soon hit college classrooms.
Mosher's survey, says Stanford historian Estelle Freedman, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, was "a goldmine" for scholars. In an era when "the public ideal was that women should be very discreet, if not ignorant, about sexuality," says Freedman, Mosher was "asking very modern questions. She's opening up an inquiry about what is the meaning of sexuality for women." Mosher's survey, like her life, gave poignant testimony to the complex desires of women who were caught between traditional feminine norms and 20th-century freedoms.
Courtesy Stanford University Archives
Born in 1863 in Albany, N.Y., young Clelia had a scientific bent encouraged by her father, Dr. Cornelius Mosher, whom she idolized. He took her on his medical rounds and taught her to love botany and literature. Yet he couldn't bear to let his beloved—and somewhat sickly—daughter attend college, then considered a strain on young women's health. He tried to distract Clelia by helping her set up a small florist shop, but she squirreled away tuition money and off she went.
Mosher's college career was somewhat nomadic. In 1889, she entered Wellesley as a 25-year-old freshman but struggled academically and with ill health. She spent her junior year at the University of Wisconsin, where she conducted her first surveys, and in 1892 transferred to Stanford, enrolling in its second class of students. She received a physiology degree in 1893 and her master's in physiology in 1894, while working as an assistant in the department of hygiene teaching health, physiology and exercise to female students.
Thanks to a steady supply of young female research subjects, Mosher's scholarly aim soon became clear: to prove that women were not inferior to men, and that frailties chalked up to sex were really the effects of binding garments, insufficient exercise and mental conditioning. Her master's thesis, for example, showed that women breathe from the diaphragm, as men do, rather than from the chest, as was believed at the time. She concluded that this so-called biological difference was really due to tight corsetry.
She also began tracking students' menstrual periods, hoping to upend "functional periodicity," the idea that menstruation debilitated women. It was a canny subject choice for an ambitious female investigator. "That was not research that men could do easily, so she definitely claimed an area that was not accessible to men for her own research," says Elizabeth Griego, who wrote her 1983 dissertation on Mosher for an education doctorate at UC-Berkeley and spent most of the early 1980s in the Stanford archives sifting through Mosher's papers. (Griego is now vice president for student life at the University of the Pacific.)
But it wasn't until after 1896, when Mosher had moved on to Johns Hopkins to obtain her MD, that she analyzed her data. Again, she blamed nurture over nature: Painful menstruation, she concluded, was in most cases caused by inactivity, poor muscular development and the very idea of "inevitable illness." Sending girls to bed to dwell upon their discomfort, Mosher wrote, "produce[s] a morbid attitude and favor[s] the development and exaggeration of whatever symptoms there may be." Mosher was not subtle about her motivation for seeking to discredit functional periodicity. "Equal pay for women means equal work; unnecessary menstrual absences mean less than full work," she wrote. Convinced that women should stay active throughout their periods, Mosher even invented abdominal exercises—dubbed "moshers"—to counteract menstrual pain.
‘The skirt, as modified by the vagaries of fashion, has a direct bearing on the health, development and efficiency of the woman. In 1893-96 I made a series of observations on the clothing of ninety-eight young women. The average width of skirt was then 13.5 feet. The weight of the skirt alone was often as much as the entire weight of the clothing worn by the modern girl.’
–Clelia Mosher, Strength of Women (c. 1920)
By the time Mosher received her MD in 1900, there were approximately 7,000 female doctors and surgeons in the United States (almost 6 percent of the total), but they still faced discrimination. Mosher turned down a job as an assistant to a gynecological surgeon when told that men would refuse to work under her. She returned to Palo Alto and opened a private practice, but struggled to get patient referrals from male colleagues or win grants to fund her menstruation studies. In 1910, Stanford offered her an assistant professorship in personal hygiene as the medical adviser for women, and Mosher eagerly returned to academic life. "I think she started out thinking she would like to be a doctor and perhaps a surgeon, but she found the doors closed to her very quickly," muses Griego.
Instead, Griego says, Mosher found what mattered to her: a living wage, intellectual freedom and access to research subjects. Mosher restarted her menstruation research and completed a study showing that the average height of Stanford's entering female students had increased 1.5 inches in 20 years, a change she attributed to better exercise and comfortable clothing. Mosher became a full professor in 1928, one year before she retired.
Despite the increasing prevalence of professional women, Griego says Mosher was an "intellectual loner." She didn't join women's professional groups or bond with many female academics. (Her Stanford research collaborators were male.) "She was really not very interested in the kinds of things that even faculty women—certainly faculty wives—were interested in," says Griego. "She wasn't interested in teas, she wasn't particularly interested in nurturing or mentoring women. She was really a researcher and she wanted to be accepted for her scientific approach to subjects."
She cut an odd figure on campus, Griego says, in her habitual "mannish suit." In her writings, Mosher railed against fashion: Sewing dainty clothing wasted women's study time; a young girl "making tatting to decorate her clothes or knitting or embroidering while her brother is playing ball" would grow feeble and sedentary.
Mosher never married and had few close relationships, although her mother lived with her on campus. Mosher felt this anomie deeply. A diary entry from 1919 laments: "I am finding out gradually why I am so lonely. The only things I care about are things which use my brain. The women I meet are not so much interested and I do not meet many men, so there is an intellectual solitude which is like the solitude of the desert—dangerous to one's sanity."
TOUGHEN UP: Stanford women, c. 1917, try their strength using a device of Mosher and physiology professor Ernest Martin.
Courtesy Stanford University Archives
Some archival scraps hint at her longing for connection: an unfinished novel whose heroine chooses career over the man she loves, musings on the mother-daughter bond and, the most poignant, a series of letters to an imaginary friend. "I get the sense of companionship and you are spared the boredom of reading them," Mosher wrote impishly in 1921. But in 1926, her tone was more despairing. "Dear 'Friend who never was,'" she wrote, "I have given up ever finding you. I have tried out all my friends and they have not measured up to my dreams."
Mosher's biggest scientific splash also eluded her during her lifetime.
Because it was hidden so long, her sex survey had little influence on her contemporaries, but today it's a valuable historic document that gainsays the stereotype that Victorian women knew little of sex and desired it even less. Granted, it is small and nonrepresentative, favoring well-educated, middle-class white women, and only those willing to disclose intimate matters. Mosher took care to obscure their identities—names and residences were not recorded—but it's likely the group included Stanford faculty and wives, the Mother's Club members from Mosher's Wisconsin days and other women she knew. Of those surveyed, 34 had attended a university or teachers' college. Nine were Stanford alumnae, six from Cornell; other alma maters included Wellesley, Vassar and the University of California. Thirty respondents had worked before marriage, mostly as teachers.
Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they'd gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like "watching farm animals." Yet no matter how sheltered they'd initially been, these women had—and enjoyed—sex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week.
Unlike Mosher's other work, the survey is more qualitative than quantitative, featuring open-ended questions probing feelings and experiences. "She's actually asking these questions not about physiology or mechanics—she's really asking about sexual subjectivity and the meaning of sex to women," Freedman says. Their responses were often mixed. Some enjoyed sex but worried that they shouldn't. One slept apart from her husband "to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse." Some didn't enjoy sex but faulted their partner. Mosher writes: [She] "Thinks men have not been properly trained."
Their responses reflected the cultural shifts of the late 19th century, as marriage became viewed as a romantic union, not just an economic one, and as people began to dissociate sex from procreation, says Freedman. One woman, born in 1867, wrote that before marriage she believed sex to be only for reproduction, but later changed her mind: "In my experience the habitual bodily expression of love has a deep psychological effect in making possible complete mental sympathy & perfecting the spiritual union that must be the lasting 'marriage' after the passion of love has passed away with the years." Wrote another, born in 1863, "It seems to me to be a natural and physical sign of a spiritual union, a renewal of the marriage vows."
‘A great responsibility rests upon us as physicians and teachers of physical training to lead women to ideas of health, to hold out to each one an attainable physical ideal, to teach the mechanism of our wonderful bodies so that she obeys the laws of her body, laws learned so perfectly that they are obeyed automatically.’
–Clelia Mosher, The Relation of Health to the Woman Movement, 1915
Anxieties about unwanted pregnancies are also clear. This was a hot topic during the 19th century, when the marital fertility rate fell by half despite the criminalization of abortion and contraception, Freedman says. At least 30 respondents reported attempting birth control anyway. Many mentioned using douching, withdrawal or the rhythm method; a few had tried a "womb veil" or male condoms.
"My husband and I . . . believe in intercourse for its own sake—we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness," wrote one woman, born in 1860. "On the other hand there are sometimes long periods when we are not willing to incur even a slight risk of pregnancy, and then we deny ourselves the intercourse, feeling all the time that we are losing that which keeps us closest to each other." A woman born in 1862, who felt that without "a strong desire for children" marriage was no more than "legalized prostitution," nevertheless wrote: "I most heartily wish there were no accidental conceptions. I believe the world would take a most gigantic stride toward high ethical conditions, if every child brought into the world were the product of pure love and conscious choice."
So if not all Victorian women scorned sex, why do we think of them as prudish? First, says Freedman, the notion of passionlessness wasn't universal, it was a class privilege, a way for wealthier women to claim respectability that more sexually vulnerable slave, immigrant and working-class women couldn't. "To some extent it's a protection of women from the sense of availability, and in other ways it's a limitation on them and denying their sexuality," Freedman says. Virtue was also a way for women to demonstrate good citizenship—men expressed this in the public sphere, and women in the home.
Also, some historical sources are misleading. As Degler pointed out in his 1974 article, until the Mosher Survey, much information about Victorian sex lives came from health advice books, like those of Dr. William Acton, who wrote in 1865: "The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally." But these books, wrote Degler, designed to urge temperance to young women, were prescriptive rather than de-scriptive: "The so-called Victorian conception of women's sexuality was more that of an ideology seeking to be established than the prevalent view or practice of even middle-class women."
More accurate portrayals of women's lives likely were confined to diaries and letters. Similarly, Griego says, women probably unburdened themselves to Mosher as a well-credentialed female physician. "They wouldn't have responded to just anyone with that confidential information, but her own self-image as a researcher and scientist encouraged them to be honest and factual." Although the survey's size means we can't draw broad conclusions about Victorian life from it, Freedman says, it's still a remarkably telling document, "a lens on a moment of transition."
Courtesy Stanford University Archives
We may never know what Mosher made of her own survey. Her brief introduction merely notes that it provided "a priceless knowledge for a practicing physician and teacher; a background sufficiently broad to avoid prejudice in her work with women." A comment on the era's falling birthrate contains her only analysis: "The maladjustments in marriage occasionally occur at the first consummation of the marital relation. The woman comes to this new experience of life often with no knowledge. The woman while she may give mental consent often shrinks physically. Her slower time reaction deprives her of all physical response, or (2) too often her training has instilled the idea that any physical response is coarse, common and immodest which inhibits proper part in this relation."
Ultimately, Mosher's story is deeply ironic: She was a staunch feminist who remained aloof from sisterhood, a woman who rigorously researched sexuality and marriage yet probably experienced neither, a pioneering scholar who longed for recognition but did not live to enjoy it. Today there is an often well-rewarded place in our society for awkward overachievers, but Mosher struggled her entire life with her ungainly intellect and with being a woman in a man's research world.
"We need people to go before us, and she was certainly a way-shower for a generation that followed her," Griego says. "Even though she was not the kind of person that women of her time wanted to emulate, still she held out the possibility that women could be intellectuals, they could be scientists."
In her own writings, Mosher was acutely aware of her foresight, and of the possibilities that lay ahead for women once sex became less of a secret and gender less of a burden. "Born into a world of unlimited opportunity, the woman of the rising generation will answer the question of what woman's real capacities are," Mosher wrote in 1923. "She will have physical, economic, racial and civic freedom. What will she do with it?"
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Packing the Supreme Court
With Justices for All
By ALAN BRINKLEY
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
By Jeff Shesol
Illustrated. 644 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95
In 1937, a few months after his landslide re-election to a second term, Franklin Roosevelt set out on one of the boldest and most dangerous courses of his presidency. The conservative Supreme Court had already struck down a series of New Deal programs. Roosevelt feared that the mostly aged justices would go on to destroy the rest of his legislative achievements before he would have a chance to make any new appointments. As a result, he proposed a “reform” of the courts that would, among other things, have added an additional justice to the Supreme Court for every current justice over the age of 70. It became the most controversial proposal of his presidency — so much so that it nearly paralyzed his administration for over a year and destroyed much of the fragile unity of the Democratic coalition.
Jeff Shesol (the author of “Mutual Contempt,” an account of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy) is not the first to chronicle what became known as the “court-packing” controversy, but “Supreme Power” is by far the most detailed — and most riveting — account of this extraordinary event. Shesol provides a revealing portrait of the “nine old men,” as opponents of the court described them. At the same time, he presents in great detail Roosevelt’s own anguish over what he considered the court’s reactionary views. Both sides of the controversy were the products of deep conviction. The court was on a mission to combat what the justices viewed as a great danger to the basic principles of American democracy. The White House was on its own mission to save not just the New Deal, but also its restoration of the nation.
Within the Roosevelt administration, the proposal to enlarge the court seemed eminently reasonable. There was no constitutional bar to expanding the number of justices. All other measures — constitutional amendments, legislative remedies, mandatory retirements and similar proposals — seemed far more radical and far less likely to succeed. Court packing seemed the most moderate and cautious of the paths available — but still, they realized, a tremendously risky one.
Both the court and the White House paid a considerable price for their insularity and secrecy. The justices, of course, were isolated by design. But the White House and the Justice Department created their own insularity, pursuing their goals with such surprisingly successful secrecy that they gave few people, even within the administration, the opportunity to warn Roosevelt of the dangers he faced. Shesol recounts these miscalculations on both sides with particular skill.
And the dangers, it quickly became clear, were much greater than Roosevelt and his advisers had imagined. It was not surprising that the court-packing controversy would arouse the rage of the right, which already detested Roosevelt and the New Deal and believed the White House was building a dictatorship. More startling to the president was the outrage from within his own party — even among many staunch progressives — and the lukewarm loyalty he received even from those who agreed to support him. Many opponents of the proposal shared Roosevelt’s dismay at the court’s conservatism, but tampering with the institution seemed even to many liberals to represent excessive presidential power and a threat to the Constitution.
The justices of the Supreme Court were as sharply divided in the 1930s as they often seem to have become in the 21st century. Five of them (George Sutherland, James McReynolds, Willis Van Devanter, Pierce Butler and Owen Roberts) were largely opposed to the New Deal measures they were asked to consider. Four others (Louis Brandeis, Harlan Fiske Stone, Benjamin Cardozo and, somewhat precariously, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes), mostly supported the New Deal. In 1937, when the court-packing fight began, most of the justices had been on the bench for well over a decade, and none had been appointed during Roosevelt’s first four years. Hence the president’s frustration, and his belief that the court had become out of touch with the realities of the time.
During the first months of controversy, the likelihood of success, given the huge Democratic majorities in Congress, seemed high, despite the ferocity of the opposition. But gradually the president’s position eroded — a response to growing opposition and to the resentment of what many considered Roosevelt’s duplicity in proposing what he claimed to be court “reform” rather than what many people considered naked political pressure. In July 1937, the court proposal died in the Senate, by now undefended even by the White House and unlamented by most of the public. It was widely described as the most devastating defeat Roosevelt had ever experienced.
But how devastating was the defeat? In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, a 1937 case contesting a minimum wage law in Washington State, Owen Roberts voted with the liberals to sustain the law. (Only one year earlier he had joined the conservatives in voting down another minimum wage law.) Over the following months, Roberts continued to vote mostly with the liberals. And beginning in mid-1937, a number of conservative justices retired, providing the president with the opportunity to appoint several new justices who transformed the ideological balance of the court.
Shesol does not engage directly with the scholarly debate over whether the court-packing controversy was responsible for the shift in the court’s behavior. The traditional story, supported by some of the leading historians of the New Deal, maintains that the pressure from Roosevelt persuaded Roberts, and perhaps others, to shift positions. Other historians — mostly legal scholars — argue that the court-packing fight had little or nothing to do with the court’s shift, that it represented instead a slow and steady evolution of constitutional law that long preceded the controversy. But even without taking an explicit stand, Shesol suggests a plausible argument that falls somewhere between these two interpretations.
One of Shesol’s many important contributions to an understanding of this controversy is his powerful description of the extraordinary opprobrium the court confronted as it began to overturn New Deal measures in 1935. Indeed, it was the deep unpopularity of the court that helped embolden Roosevelt to challenge it in 1937. In those first years of the New Deal, Shesol suggests, the conservative justices were stunned by the boldness and, they thought, radicalism of the New Deal; their opinions seemed to reflect their alarm and caused them to take positions even more conservative than they had in the recent past. Two years later, similarly stunned by the criticism they were receiving, the justices began to slowly back away from their most conservative views. Roberts’s shift occurred even before Roosevelt announced his court-packing plan; but that does not mean that the political furor played no role in his decision.
Shesol also draws attention to a more mundane but nevertheless considerable factor in the shift of the court. In 1937 Roosevelt supported, and Congress approved, a bill to assure retired justices that they would continue to receive their judicial salaries even after retirement. The absence of such benefits had deterred some aged justices from retiring; once the pensions were assured, several of them resigned.
“Supreme Power” is an impressive and engaging book — an excellent work of narrative history. It is deeply researched and beautifully written. Even readers who already know the outcome will find it hard not to feel the suspense that surrounded the battle, so successfully does Shesol recreate the atmosphere of this great controversy. There are many ways to explain what become known as the “Constitutional revolution of 1937,” but Shesol’s book is — at least for now — the most thorough account of this dramatic and still contested event.
Alan Brinkley, the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University, is the author of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.”
By ALAN BRINKLEY
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
By Jeff Shesol
Illustrated. 644 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95
In 1937, a few months after his landslide re-election to a second term, Franklin Roosevelt set out on one of the boldest and most dangerous courses of his presidency. The conservative Supreme Court had already struck down a series of New Deal programs. Roosevelt feared that the mostly aged justices would go on to destroy the rest of his legislative achievements before he would have a chance to make any new appointments. As a result, he proposed a “reform” of the courts that would, among other things, have added an additional justice to the Supreme Court for every current justice over the age of 70. It became the most controversial proposal of his presidency — so much so that it nearly paralyzed his administration for over a year and destroyed much of the fragile unity of the Democratic coalition.
Jeff Shesol (the author of “Mutual Contempt,” an account of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy) is not the first to chronicle what became known as the “court-packing” controversy, but “Supreme Power” is by far the most detailed — and most riveting — account of this extraordinary event. Shesol provides a revealing portrait of the “nine old men,” as opponents of the court described them. At the same time, he presents in great detail Roosevelt’s own anguish over what he considered the court’s reactionary views. Both sides of the controversy were the products of deep conviction. The court was on a mission to combat what the justices viewed as a great danger to the basic principles of American democracy. The White House was on its own mission to save not just the New Deal, but also its restoration of the nation.
Within the Roosevelt administration, the proposal to enlarge the court seemed eminently reasonable. There was no constitutional bar to expanding the number of justices. All other measures — constitutional amendments, legislative remedies, mandatory retirements and similar proposals — seemed far more radical and far less likely to succeed. Court packing seemed the most moderate and cautious of the paths available — but still, they realized, a tremendously risky one.
Both the court and the White House paid a considerable price for their insularity and secrecy. The justices, of course, were isolated by design. But the White House and the Justice Department created their own insularity, pursuing their goals with such surprisingly successful secrecy that they gave few people, even within the administration, the opportunity to warn Roosevelt of the dangers he faced. Shesol recounts these miscalculations on both sides with particular skill.
And the dangers, it quickly became clear, were much greater than Roosevelt and his advisers had imagined. It was not surprising that the court-packing controversy would arouse the rage of the right, which already detested Roosevelt and the New Deal and believed the White House was building a dictatorship. More startling to the president was the outrage from within his own party — even among many staunch progressives — and the lukewarm loyalty he received even from those who agreed to support him. Many opponents of the proposal shared Roosevelt’s dismay at the court’s conservatism, but tampering with the institution seemed even to many liberals to represent excessive presidential power and a threat to the Constitution.
The justices of the Supreme Court were as sharply divided in the 1930s as they often seem to have become in the 21st century. Five of them (George Sutherland, James McReynolds, Willis Van Devanter, Pierce Butler and Owen Roberts) were largely opposed to the New Deal measures they were asked to consider. Four others (Louis Brandeis, Harlan Fiske Stone, Benjamin Cardozo and, somewhat precariously, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes), mostly supported the New Deal. In 1937, when the court-packing fight began, most of the justices had been on the bench for well over a decade, and none had been appointed during Roosevelt’s first four years. Hence the president’s frustration, and his belief that the court had become out of touch with the realities of the time.
During the first months of controversy, the likelihood of success, given the huge Democratic majorities in Congress, seemed high, despite the ferocity of the opposition. But gradually the president’s position eroded — a response to growing opposition and to the resentment of what many considered Roosevelt’s duplicity in proposing what he claimed to be court “reform” rather than what many people considered naked political pressure. In July 1937, the court proposal died in the Senate, by now undefended even by the White House and unlamented by most of the public. It was widely described as the most devastating defeat Roosevelt had ever experienced.
But how devastating was the defeat? In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, a 1937 case contesting a minimum wage law in Washington State, Owen Roberts voted with the liberals to sustain the law. (Only one year earlier he had joined the conservatives in voting down another minimum wage law.) Over the following months, Roberts continued to vote mostly with the liberals. And beginning in mid-1937, a number of conservative justices retired, providing the president with the opportunity to appoint several new justices who transformed the ideological balance of the court.
Shesol does not engage directly with the scholarly debate over whether the court-packing controversy was responsible for the shift in the court’s behavior. The traditional story, supported by some of the leading historians of the New Deal, maintains that the pressure from Roosevelt persuaded Roberts, and perhaps others, to shift positions. Other historians — mostly legal scholars — argue that the court-packing fight had little or nothing to do with the court’s shift, that it represented instead a slow and steady evolution of constitutional law that long preceded the controversy. But even without taking an explicit stand, Shesol suggests a plausible argument that falls somewhere between these two interpretations.
One of Shesol’s many important contributions to an understanding of this controversy is his powerful description of the extraordinary opprobrium the court confronted as it began to overturn New Deal measures in 1935. Indeed, it was the deep unpopularity of the court that helped embolden Roosevelt to challenge it in 1937. In those first years of the New Deal, Shesol suggests, the conservative justices were stunned by the boldness and, they thought, radicalism of the New Deal; their opinions seemed to reflect their alarm and caused them to take positions even more conservative than they had in the recent past. Two years later, similarly stunned by the criticism they were receiving, the justices began to slowly back away from their most conservative views. Roberts’s shift occurred even before Roosevelt announced his court-packing plan; but that does not mean that the political furor played no role in his decision.
Shesol also draws attention to a more mundane but nevertheless considerable factor in the shift of the court. In 1937 Roosevelt supported, and Congress approved, a bill to assure retired justices that they would continue to receive their judicial salaries even after retirement. The absence of such benefits had deterred some aged justices from retiring; once the pensions were assured, several of them resigned.
“Supreme Power” is an impressive and engaging book — an excellent work of narrative history. It is deeply researched and beautifully written. Even readers who already know the outcome will find it hard not to feel the suspense that surrounded the battle, so successfully does Shesol recreate the atmosphere of this great controversy. There are many ways to explain what become known as the “Constitutional revolution of 1937,” but Shesol’s book is — at least for now — the most thorough account of this dramatic and still contested event.
Alan Brinkley, the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University, is the author of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.”
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Monopoly--Amazing History !!!
(You'll never look at the game the same way again!)
Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British Airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape...
Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful and accurate map, one showing not only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of 'safe houses' where a POW on-the-lam could go for food and shelter.
Paper maps had some real drawbacks -- they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.
Someone in MI-5 (similar to America 's OSS ) got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads, and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever.
At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.
By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CARE packages', dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war.
Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were regional system). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.
As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add:
1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French currency, hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!
British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission, how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set -- by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square.
Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets.. Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war.
The story wasn't declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.
It's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail' Free' card!
I realize most of you are (probably) too young to have any personal connection to WWII (Dec. '41 to Aug. '45), but this is still interesting.
Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British Airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape...
Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful and accurate map, one showing not only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of 'safe houses' where a POW on-the-lam could go for food and shelter.
Paper maps had some real drawbacks -- they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.
Someone in MI-5 (similar to America 's OSS ) got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads, and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever.
At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.
By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CARE packages', dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war.
Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were regional system). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.
As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add:
1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French currency, hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!
British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission, how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set -- by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square.
Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets.. Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war.
The story wasn't declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.
It's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail' Free' card!
I realize most of you are (probably) too young to have any personal connection to WWII (Dec. '41 to Aug. '45), but this is still interesting.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
The Golden Touch
Banker J. P. Morgan rescued the dollar and bailed out the nation
By John Steele Gordon
On February 5, 1895, the Jupiter of American banking, J. P. Morgan, took the train from New York to Washington to see the president. He had no appointment but came to discuss matters of grave national interest. The crash of 1893 had thrown the country into deep depression, exposed a schizophrenic monetary policy, and now the nation’s gold standard stood on the brink of collapse.
The origin of the crisis lay more than two decades earlier, when Congress had decreed a return to the gold standard, which had been abandoned during the Civil War. (The gold standard effectively restrains inflation by requiring that a nation anchors its currency to gold at a set price.) In 1878 Congress passed the Bland-Allison Act, which ordered the Treasury to buy the silver then pouring out of Western mines in ever increasing amounts, at market price and to coin it at a ratio to gold of 16 to 1.
In 1878 the market price of silver was indeed close to the 16-to-1 ratio. But as silver output continued to swell, it dropped to about 20 to 1 by 1890. In that year Congress passed the Sherman Silver Act, requiring the government to buy even more bullion, 4.5 million ounces a month, and coin it, still at 16 to 1. This policy guaranteed inflation, favored by the poorer areas of the country, such as the South and, of course, the silver-rich West.
Anyone who knew Gresham’s law (“bad money drives out good”) could have predicted what happened next. With silver worth one-twentieth the price of gold in the marketplace but declared to be 25 percent more when coined into money, people began to spend the silver and hoard the gold.
With the government running big surpluses in the prosperous late 1880s and early 1890s, the effect of this monetary policy was masked. But when the crash of 1893 rolled in, bringing deep depression, the trickle of gold out of the Treasury became a flood. By early 1895 bets were being taken on Wall Street as to exactly when the Treasury would run out of gold and default. Two bond issues were sold to replenish the Treasury’s gold supply, but the gold just cycled out again. Congress, with many free-coinage-of-silver members, refused to authorize another issue. That’s when the deeply alarmed Morgan traveled to Washington in early February.
President Grover Cleveland at first refused to see him, but Morgan replied, in his best imperial manner, “I have come down to see the president, and I am going to stay here until I see him.” Cleveland saw him the next morning.
By early 1895 bets were being taken on Wall Street as to exactly when the Treasury would run out of gold and default
Cleveland, his attorney general, and the secretary of the Treasury all still hoped that they could persuade Congress to float another bond issue and thus avoid the embarrassment of having the gold standard rescued by the very symbol of Wall Street. A telephone call from New York informed them that the New York Subtreasury had only $9 million worth of gold left in its vaults. Morgan informed them that he knew of $12 million in drafts that might be presented at any moment. Cleveland’s back was up against the wall.
“What suggestions have you to make, Mr. Morgan?” he asked.
Whereupon Morgan made an extraordinary offer: he and the Rothschilds, the two most powerful forces in international banking at that time, would purchase 3.5 million ounces of gold in Europe in exchange for 30-year gold bonds. (Morgan had uncovered a forgotten Civil War-era statute that allowed the Treasury to issue bonds in exchange for coin.) He also guaranteed that the gold would not flow back out of the Treasury, at least for a while.
In effect, Morgan was offering to act as the nation’s (otherwise nonexistent) central bank, insulating the Treasury from market forces. And it worked. The bonds sold easily in both Wall Street and London, and Morgan and the Rothschilds, using a full battery of foreign exchange techniques, bolstered the dollar, keeping the gold in the Treasury.
Morgan’s rescue of the dollar, despite intense criticism from the Left, changed the country’s economic mood, and a strong recovery from the depression began. The next year the 36-year-old William Jennings Bryan would win the Democratic nomination with a promise that the moneyed classes “shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” It was one of the most famous speeches in American history, but his far less eloquent opponent, William McKinley, trounced him by running on a slogan of “sound money, protection, and prosperity.”
The election proved to be the start of the revival of Republican dominance in American politics that would last until 1932.
—John Steele Gordon, author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004), writes about economic history for the Wall Street Journal.
By John Steele Gordon
On February 5, 1895, the Jupiter of American banking, J. P. Morgan, took the train from New York to Washington to see the president. He had no appointment but came to discuss matters of grave national interest. The crash of 1893 had thrown the country into deep depression, exposed a schizophrenic monetary policy, and now the nation’s gold standard stood on the brink of collapse.
The origin of the crisis lay more than two decades earlier, when Congress had decreed a return to the gold standard, which had been abandoned during the Civil War. (The gold standard effectively restrains inflation by requiring that a nation anchors its currency to gold at a set price.) In 1878 Congress passed the Bland-Allison Act, which ordered the Treasury to buy the silver then pouring out of Western mines in ever increasing amounts, at market price and to coin it at a ratio to gold of 16 to 1.
In 1878 the market price of silver was indeed close to the 16-to-1 ratio. But as silver output continued to swell, it dropped to about 20 to 1 by 1890. In that year Congress passed the Sherman Silver Act, requiring the government to buy even more bullion, 4.5 million ounces a month, and coin it, still at 16 to 1. This policy guaranteed inflation, favored by the poorer areas of the country, such as the South and, of course, the silver-rich West.
Anyone who knew Gresham’s law (“bad money drives out good”) could have predicted what happened next. With silver worth one-twentieth the price of gold in the marketplace but declared to be 25 percent more when coined into money, people began to spend the silver and hoard the gold.
With the government running big surpluses in the prosperous late 1880s and early 1890s, the effect of this monetary policy was masked. But when the crash of 1893 rolled in, bringing deep depression, the trickle of gold out of the Treasury became a flood. By early 1895 bets were being taken on Wall Street as to exactly when the Treasury would run out of gold and default. Two bond issues were sold to replenish the Treasury’s gold supply, but the gold just cycled out again. Congress, with many free-coinage-of-silver members, refused to authorize another issue. That’s when the deeply alarmed Morgan traveled to Washington in early February.
President Grover Cleveland at first refused to see him, but Morgan replied, in his best imperial manner, “I have come down to see the president, and I am going to stay here until I see him.” Cleveland saw him the next morning.
By early 1895 bets were being taken on Wall Street as to exactly when the Treasury would run out of gold and default
Cleveland, his attorney general, and the secretary of the Treasury all still hoped that they could persuade Congress to float another bond issue and thus avoid the embarrassment of having the gold standard rescued by the very symbol of Wall Street. A telephone call from New York informed them that the New York Subtreasury had only $9 million worth of gold left in its vaults. Morgan informed them that he knew of $12 million in drafts that might be presented at any moment. Cleveland’s back was up against the wall.
“What suggestions have you to make, Mr. Morgan?” he asked.
Whereupon Morgan made an extraordinary offer: he and the Rothschilds, the two most powerful forces in international banking at that time, would purchase 3.5 million ounces of gold in Europe in exchange for 30-year gold bonds. (Morgan had uncovered a forgotten Civil War-era statute that allowed the Treasury to issue bonds in exchange for coin.) He also guaranteed that the gold would not flow back out of the Treasury, at least for a while.
In effect, Morgan was offering to act as the nation’s (otherwise nonexistent) central bank, insulating the Treasury from market forces. And it worked. The bonds sold easily in both Wall Street and London, and Morgan and the Rothschilds, using a full battery of foreign exchange techniques, bolstered the dollar, keeping the gold in the Treasury.
Morgan’s rescue of the dollar, despite intense criticism from the Left, changed the country’s economic mood, and a strong recovery from the depression began. The next year the 36-year-old William Jennings Bryan would win the Democratic nomination with a promise that the moneyed classes “shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” It was one of the most famous speeches in American history, but his far less eloquent opponent, William McKinley, trounced him by running on a slogan of “sound money, protection, and prosperity.”
The election proved to be the start of the revival of Republican dominance in American politics that would last until 1932.
—John Steele Gordon, author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004), writes about economic history for the Wall Street Journal.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
1906 San Francisco Street Car filmed 4 days before the 06 earthquake
This is well worth viewing and filmed 4 days before the '06 earthquake.
You'll appreciate the research that it took to date this film so be sure
to read this first.....
Here's a neat opportunity to enjoy some time travel. The film is
from a streetcar traveling down Market Street in San Francisco, four
days before the big earthquake/fire that destroyed the area. You
can clearly see the clocktower at the end of the street at the
Embarcadero wharf that's still there... The quality & detail is
great, so be sure to view it full screen.
The film, was originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn
with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly when
it was shot. From New York trade papers announcing the film showing
to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows indicating
time of year & actual weather and conditions on historical record,
even when the cars were registered (he even knows who owned them and
when the plates were issued!).
It was filmed only four days before the quake and shipped by train to NY for
processing. Amazing but true!
You'll appreciate the research that it took to date this film so be sure
to read this first.....
Here's a neat opportunity to enjoy some time travel. The film is
from a streetcar traveling down Market Street in San Francisco, four
days before the big earthquake/fire that destroyed the area. You
can clearly see the clocktower at the end of the street at the
Embarcadero wharf that's still there... The quality & detail is
great, so be sure to view it full screen.
The film, was originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn
with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly when
it was shot. From New York trade papers announcing the film showing
to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows indicating
time of year & actual weather and conditions on historical record,
even when the cars were registered (he even knows who owned them and
when the plates were issued!).
It was filmed only four days before the quake and shipped by train to NY for
processing. Amazing but true!
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