Reedy, Twilight of the Presidency
Posted: August 18, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics, presidents Leave a comment
It’s time to revisit George Reedy, Twilight of the Presidency.
I can’t do better as a summary than this 1970 review by William C. Spragens in The Western Political Quarterly found on JSTOR:
The edition I read is updated for the Reagan administration. Some choice passages:
In talking to friends about the presidency, I have found the hardest point to explain is that setbacks often impel presidents to redouble their efforts without changing their policies. This seems to be perversity because very few of us have the opportunity to make decisions of colossal consequences. When our projects go wrong, it is not too difficult for most of us to shrug our shoulders, cut our losses, and take off on a new tack. Our egos may be bruised. But we can live with that. It is a different thing altogether when we can give orders that can lead to large-scale death and destruction or even to economic devastation. Such a situation brings into play psychological factors that are virtually unconquerable.
Suppose, for example, that a president gives the military an order that leads to the deaths of several soldiers in combat. Can any human being who did such a thing say to himself: “Those men are dead because I was a God-damned fool! Their blood is on my hands.” The likely thought is: “Those men died in a noble cau and we must see to it that their sacrifice was not in vain.”
This, of course, could well be the “right” answer. But even if it is the wrong answer, it is virtually certain to be the one that will be accepted. Therefore, more men are sent and then more and then more. Every death makes a pull out more unacceptable.
Furthermore, when a large amount of blood has been spilled, a point can be reached where popular opposition to a policy will actually spur a president to redoubled effort in its behalf. This is due to the aura of history that envelops every occupant of the Oval Office. He lives in a museum, a structure dedicated to preserving the greatness of the American past. He walks the same halls paced by Lincoln waiting feverishly for news from Gettysburg or Richmond. He dines with silver used by Woodrow Wilson as he pondered the proper response to the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. He has staring at him constantly portraits of the heroic men who faced the same excruciating problems in the past that he is facing in the present. It is only a matter of time until he feels himself a member of an exclusive community whose inhabitants never finally leave the mansion. When stories leaked out that Richard Nixon was “talking to the pictures” in the White House, it was taken by many as evidence that he was cracking up. To anyone who has had the opportunity to observe a president at close range, it is perfectly normal conduct.
(This may be a problem beyond presidents. Do we all have a tendency to double down on our most consequential decisions, even if the results are obviously disastrous?)
The life of the monarch:
As noted, an essential characteristic of monarchy is untouchability. No one touches a king unless he is specifically invited to do so. No one thrusts unpleasant thoughts upon a king unless he is ordered to do so, and even then he does so at his own peril. The response to unpleasant information has been fixed by a pattern with a long history. Every courtier recalls, either literally or instinctively, what happened to the messenger who brought Peter the Great the news of the Russian defeat by Charles XII at the Battle of Narva. The courtier was strangled by decree of the czar. A modern-day monarch-at least a monarch in the White House-cannot direct the placing of a noose around a messenger’s throat for bringing him bad news. But his frown can mean social and economic strangulation. Only a very brave or a very foolish person will suffer that frown.
Some ways in which this effect takes shape:
In retrospect, it is almost impossible to believe that John Kennedy embarked on the ill-fated Bay of Pigs venture. It was poorly conceived, poorly planned, poorly executed, and undertaken with grossly inadequate knowledge. But anyone who has ever sat in on a White House council can easily deduce what happened without knowing 34 THE I any facts other than those which appeared in the public press. White House councils are not debating matches in which ideas emerge from the heated exchanges of participants. The council centers around the president, himself, to whom everyone addresses his observations.
The first strong observations to attract the favor of the president become subconsciously the thoughts of everyone in the room. The focus of attention shifts from a testing of all concepts to a groping for means of overcoming the difficulties. A thesis that could not survive an undergraduate seminar in a liberal arts college becomes accepted doctrine, and the only question is not whether it should be done but how it should be done.
Reedy on White House aides as courtiers, and how Vietnam could’ve happened (he was there!):
Unfortunately, the problem is far deeper than the machinations of courtiers. They do exist in large numbers but most of their energies are absorbed in grabbing for personal favors and building havens of retreat for the future. Generally speaking, they play the role in the White House of the court jesters of the Middle Ages and may even be useful in that they give the chief executive badly needed relaxation. Paradoxically , it is the advisers who are not sycophantic, who are not looking for snug harbors, and who do feel the heavy weight of responsibility who are the most likely to play the reinforcing role. It is precisely because they recognize the ultimacy of the office that they react the way they do.
However they feel, the burden of decision is on another man. Therefore, however much they may argue against a policy at its beginning stages, once it is set they become “good soldiers” and devote their time to making it work.
Those who disagree strongly tend to remain in the structure in the vain hope they can change it coupled with the certainty that they would become totally ineffectual if they left.
This is the bitter lesson we should have learned from Vietnam. In the early days of that conflict, it might have been possible to pull out. My most vivid memories are the meetings early in Lyndon Johnson’s presidency in which his advisers (virtually all holdovers from the Kennedy administration) were looking to him for guidance on how to proceed. He, on the other hand, felt an obligation to continue the Kennedy policies and he was looking to them for indications of what steps would carry out such a course. I will always believe that someone misread a signal from the other side with the resultant commitment to full-scale fighting. After that, all the resources of the federal government were devoted to advising the president on how to do what it was thought he wanted to do.
Reedy on the White House as Versailles:
Sir Thomas Malory seems to have missed the true significance of King Arthur’s Round Table. As long as his knights ate at it every day under King Arthur’s watchful eye and lived in his palace where he could call them by shouting through the corridors, they were his to ensure that the kingdom would be ruled the way he wanted it ruled. Louis XIV did not build the Palace of Versailles as a tourist attraction but as a huge dormitory where he could keep tabs on the nobles who were disposed to become insubordinate if they spent all their time on their own estates. Peter the Great downgraded the boyars whose power rested on their distance from Moscow and brought the reins of government into his own hands by making all the top officials dependent on him. And the Turkish sultans reached the ultimate in the creation of personal force by raising young Christian boys captured in combat as Janissaries who lived solely to defend the ruler.
Reedy has a great chapter titled “What Does The President Do?”:
A president is many things. Basically, however, his functions fall into two categories. First, and perhaps most important, he is the symbol of the legitimacy and the continuity of our government. It is only through him that power can be exercised effectively-but only until opposition forces rally themselves to counter it. Second, he is the political leader of our nation. He must resolve the policy questions that will not yield to quantitative, empirical analysis and then persuade enough of his countrymen of the rightness of his decisions so that they are carried out without disrupting the fabric of society.
At the present time, neither of these functions can be carried out without the president.
He notes that the idea of the President “working” is confusing:
Despite the widespread belief to the contrary, there is far less to the presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye. The psychological burdens are heavy, even crushing, but no president ever died of overwork and it is doubtful that any ever will. The chief executive can, of course, fill his working hours with as much motion as he desires. The “crisis” days (the American hostages held in Iran or the attempted torpedoing of American navy vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin) keep office lights burning into the midnight hours. But in terms of actual administration, the presidency is pretty much what the president wants to make of it. He can delegate the “work” to subordinates and reserve for himself only the powers of decision as did Eisenhower, or he can insist on maintaining tight control over every minor detail, like Lyndon Johnson.
Presidents on vacation:
It is impossible to take a day and divide it with any sure sense of confidence into “working hours” and “nonworking hours.” But it is apparent from the large volume of words that have been written about presidents that in the past few decades, the only one who seemed able to relax completely was Eisenhower. He was capable of taking a vacation for the sake of enjoying himself, and he disdained any suggestion that he was acting otherwise.
Franklin Roosevelt apparently had little or no time to devote to relaxation. He was notorious for using his dinner hours as a means of lobbying bills through Congress. Once Harry Truman had made a decision he was able to put it out of his mind and proceed to another problem. Furthermore, he too disdained any pretensions of working when he wasn’t. But those who were close to him made it clear that he really didn’t know what to do with himself when he took a holiday. His favorite resort was Key West, Florida, where he would “go fishing” but he would hold a rod only if someone put it in his hands, and about all he really enjoyed was the sunshine and the opportunity to take long walks.
John Kennedy was described as a “compulsive reader” who could not pass up any written document regardless of its relevance to his problems or its contents. Many of his intimates reported that any spare time would find him restlessly prowling the White House looking for something to read. Lyndon Johnson anticipated with horror long weekends in which there was nothing to do. He usually spent Saturday afternoons in lengthy conferences with newspaper reporters who were hastily summoned from their homes to spend hours listening to Johnson expound the thesis that his days were so taken up with the nation’s business that he had no time to devote to friends.
The real misery of the average presidential day is the haunting knowledge that decisions have been made on incomplete information and inadequate counsel. Tragically, the information must always be incomplete and the counsel always inadequate, for in the arena of human activity in which a president operates there are no quantitative answers. He must deal with those problems for which the computer offers no solution, those disputes where rights and wrongs are so inextricably mixed that the righting of every wrong creates a new wrong, those divisions which arise out of differences in human desires rather than differences in the available facts, those crisis moments in which action is imperative and cannot wait upon orderly consideration. He has no guideposts other than his own philosophy and intuition, and if he is devoid of either, no one can substitute.
Reedy summarizes something Robert Caro goes into some detail about (how did an obscure Texas congressman obtain power?):
The office is at such a lonely eminence that no standard rules of the political game govern the approaches to it. Johnson told fascinating stories about the tactics he had used, while still a member of the House, to extract favors from FDR. He made a practice of driving Roosevelt’s secretary, Grace Tully, to the White House every morning. This gave him an opportunity to drop words in her ear, give her memoranda knowing she would pass them on to the “boss,” and learn personal characteristics that he could exploit at a later date. He once filed away in his memory the knowledge that Roosevelt was passionately interested in the techniques of dam construction. A few months later, he wangled his way into the White House with a series of huge photographs of dams that had been supplied to him by an architectural firm in his home district. Roosevelt became so absorbed in comparing the pictures that he absentmindedly okayed a rural electrification project that Johnson wanted but that had been held up by the Rural Electrification Administration for a couple of years.
None of this makes me very sanguine about either Presidential candidate, but over here at Helytimes we consider it better to look truth in the face, best we can, no?
Martin Anderson, a Reagan aide, endorsed the book in a Miller Center interview:
There’s a wonderful book called The Twilight of the Presidency by Reedy. You ever read that?
Young
George Reedy.Anderson
In which he says, If you try to understand the White House—most people make the mistake, they try to understand the White House like a corporation or the military and how does it look, with the hierarchy. He said, The only way to understand it, it’s like a palace court. And if you can understand a palace court, then you understand the White House. I think that’s probably pretty accurate. But those are the things that happen. So anyway, I didn’t go back. So I missed Watergate.Asher
Darn.
Paul’s Case by Willa Cather
Posted: August 17, 2024 Filed under: writing Leave a commentNew York has certainly inspired its share of coming-to-the-city adventures. One of the most striking is a short story by Willa Cather called “Paul’s Case,” which first appeared in The Troll Garden in 1905. Paul, a high school student in Pittsburgh, is gawky and awkward, with a “certain hysterical brilliancy” in his eyes. A fantasist and a dreamer, he is hopelessly out of sync with the life around him—but he has neither the graces nor the gifts that might enable him to escape from the constricting middle class life on suburban Cordelia Street, where he lives with his father, a widower, and there is nothing but “the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a home permeated by kitchen odours.” Paul comes alive only in the evenings, when he works as an usher at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall, wears a uniform that makes him feel handsome, guides elegant people to their seats, and listens to the music and experiences a “zest for life.” Paul is not exactly a music lover; it’s the enveloping glamour of the theater that holds him. He loves to visit backstage with the artists; “the stage entrance of the theater was for Paul the actual portal of Romance.”
But Paul’s father, a dim figure constantly urging on his son the example of more enterprising young men, becomes increasingly enraged by his son’s behavior. He pulls him out of the school he barely seems to be attending, forbids the theater to employ him or to let him through the door, and puts him to work at the offices of Denny & Carson. And suddenly Cather jumps forward, to Paul sitting on a train. He has stolen a thousand dollars in cash that he was supposed to deposit in the bank for his employer, and he is on his way to New York.
Arriving in the city, Paul buys expensive clothes, fine luggage, “silver mounted brushes and a scarf-pin” at Tiffany’s. He takes a luxurious suite at the Waldorf, and for a few days he exults in his sitting room, which he fills with flowers, in the perfectly appointed bathroom, in the elegance of the hotel dining room, in carriage rides up Fifth Avenue. He knows that it will only be a matter of days before his crime is discovered and he is tracked down. All over New York, the snow is falling. Paul’s “chief greediness,” Cather writes, “lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense of power.” As soon as he “entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music,” he was “lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all sufficient.” He exults in “the glare and glitter about him.” He is cosseted in a magical world. And when he is down to his last hundred dollars, he knows the game is up. He leaves New York, lies down on a train track in New Jersey, and lets the end come.
In Cather’s story, New York is less a place that a person can actually inhabit than a kind of luxurious illusionist’s trick, centering on the Waldorf and the city avenues, and united by the snow that softens the views out the windows and carpets everything. In “Paul’s Case” New York is not a living city so much as it is a fantasy, a stage set.
from this great 2001 essay, “The Adolescent City,” by Jed Perl.
The pages in Balzac’s Lost Illusions in which the young writer Lucien Chardon comes to Paris and wanders through the overwhelming elegance of the city constitute one of the greatest descriptions in all of literature of the tidal pull of urban life, with its intoxicating strangeness. Visual artists have generally shied away from such a theme, which necessitates unfolding, multiplying revelations, though there are a few exceptions, the greatest of which is probably Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s vast City of Good Government, painted on a wall in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1338-1339. Here relations between the city and the country center around the gate of Siena, where elegant aristocrats going out for a day of hunting pass country yokels coming into town with their livestock.
Photo shoot
Posted: August 13, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
observed in LA
The Didion Breakfast
Posted: August 13, 2024 Filed under: food 1 Comment
source. sometimes I consume the fruit and coffee breakfast.
somewhere in an old book I read a lengthy 19th century style description of how people in the tropics need to have a languid, light breakfast of fruits and sweets for their constitutions to function properly in the climate. Do places have appropriate breakfasts?
Coach Nick Saban having two Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies for breakfast every morning (“what you do every day matters”), that’s another breakfast that sticks in the mind.
I Cover The Waterfront
Posted: August 10, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Here’s the opening:
Chapter One: The Damned and the Lost
I have been here so long that even the sea gulls must recognize me. They must pass the word along about me from generation to generation, from egg to egg.
Former friends of mine, members of my old university class, acquaintances my own age, have gone out to earn their 6000 a year. They have become managers, they have become editors, they have become artists. Yet here am I, what I was six years ago, a waterfront reporter.
True, I am called a good waterfront reporter in this city, as if the humiliation were not already great enough in itself. I shudder at the compliment, yet should feel fortunate in a way that so far I have escaped the word veteran. When I am called not only the best waterfront reporter but also the veteran waterfront reporter, then for sure all hope is dissolved. And I need look ahead then, only to that day when the company presents me with a fountain pen and a final check.
I am nearing 28, and should I by accident be invited to a home where literature is discussed, or styles, or Europe, the best I could do would be tocrawl into the backyard. There I could sit tossing pebbles into the fountain until the hostess found me out. If she compelled me to come back into the house and join the conversation, my topics would have to be of swordfishing, or of lobstering, or of hunting sardines in the dark of the moon, or of fleet gunnery practice, or of cotton shipments. The predicament has passed beyond my control. I am one of those creatures who remain permanent, who stay in one place, that successful men on returning home may see for the happiness of comparison. I am of the damned and the lost, and yet I do know more than I did six years ago when I first came here, a graduate in liberal arts.
Six thousand a year. That was 1932, using the BLS inflation calculator that’s $131,821.68 today. Further investigation into the existential mystery of San Diego led me to this one.
Max Miller was waterfront reporter for San Diego’s third best newspaper in the 1930s. He worked out of a studio above the tugboat office. He remembers meeting the passengers from the big ocean liners:
He remembers Charles Lindbergh, before he was famous:
He remembers breaking some tough news:
How that one ends:
I Cover The Waterfront became a song, and a movie apparently not really based on the book.
[Miller] lived most of his life at 5930 Camino de la Costa in La Jolla, just south of Windansea (from his hillside home, he could hear the Point Loma lighthouse foghorn).
Zillow estimates that house would now cost around $16 million.
The San Diego Reader (oxymoron?)has the gossip on Miller:
But Morgan has a different interpretation. “I Cover the Waterfront was widely said among publishers to have been rewritten by a very beautiful literary agent in New York who was in love with Max at the time,” says Morgan. “It was a nasty allegation, but it was a better book than any he wrote subsequently. I tend to believe the rumor of the publishing trade.”
It’s possible. It’s also possible he was traumatized by World War Two. His title for his book about La Jolla, The Town With The Funny Name, doesn’t seem particularly inspired (is it really that funny a name? Right here in California we have Needles, Weedpatch, etc.) Or maybe he just had one good one in him.
they work well until they catastrophically come off the rails
Posted: August 8, 2024 Filed under: business Leave a commentKEN GRIFFIN: “I don’t know what that moment will be, when there is an auction that goes awry, or when the markets become dislocated. Financial markets, generally speaking, work very well until they catastrophically come off the rails. You don’t necessarily get a lot of warning that there’s about to be a big event. The crash of ’87 is a great case study. That day, I woke up, I was in my dorm room trading then, and the stories of the day were about a small skirmish in the Middle East, of frankly no consequence, and the health of First Lady Nancy Reagan. And yet, we ended that day with the stock market down twenty-some percent, and a number of American financial institutions literally on life support or near death. It happened in one day. One day. There was no big story that morning that would make you think that that day might of been the end of the U.S. capital markets as we knew them. There was no warning. And so I worry that the debt crisis may have a similar construct. That there’ll simply be a day where a major auction fails, and then you see a panic start to brew in the Treasury market. And the question will be, how fast will the Fed intervene? What panic will that induce? Because government intervention under duress often creates more panic. And then do we see a flood of treasuries coming back into the market from holders around the world?
Bloomberg Live (YouTube) – May 14, 2024. That’s from Santangel’s Value Links.
Reminded of McMurtry on stampedes and crowd behavior.
Lyn Alden had this:
In the United States, there has been quite a big gap between haves and have-nots with this fiscal and monetary mix. Those who don’t have much assets, like mainly a house, have been largely locked out of owning assets. Meanwhile, those who have assets and who have locked in those low rates, are generally in great shape, save for the fact that many of them are now kind of “stuck” in their existing home. And since the top 50% of consumers spend a lot more than the bottom 50% of consumers, the fact that the top half is doing pretty well has been a strong engine for overall consumption.
strong engine for overall consumption.
Gats
Posted: August 4, 2024 Filed under: food, the California Condition Leave a comment
saw someone on X (formerly “Twitter”) raise the old red flag of The Great Gatsby isn’t that good actually so I took it off the shelf.
That’s how it starts. (Struck me that my edition, the one we read in school I believe, has no introduction foreward or any of that bog you down scholarly junk at the front.* Your enjoyment of classic books will improve we believe if you always skip those and plunge right in. You can always come back later.)
If you’re like me you first read this book in school. It is a great summer book. It’s even set at the seaside.
Been meaning to document some items from Sheilah Graham’s The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps now is the time. Their relationship was tumultuous:
I knew that “Portrait of a Prostitute” was also a drunken commentary. He must have written it on the photograph after the first of our two bad quarrels in 1939 when he was drinking so heavily. We had struggled for his gun, I had slapped him—the first person in his life ever to do so-and as I walked out, I had delivered a harsh exit line, “Shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn’t raise myself from the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.”
When they met:
When I first met Scott on July 14, 1937, neither of us was looking for a relationship of such intensity. He had too many other responsibilities. I was engaged to the Marquess of Donegall-who died recently-and planning a New Year’s Eve wedding to be followed by a honeymoon cruise around the world. Part of the unwritten marriage contract was that I would give Don an heir as soon as possible, and a doctor had told him that the swaying of a ship was conducive to pregnancy.
Zelda:
To hold Scott on a string when the engagement was off and to continue to make him jealous, Zelda invented an “engagement” to the famed golfer Bobby Jones. Scott always believed that she had promised to marry Mr. Jones. He told me this with conviction. But when Andrew Turnbull was writing his biography of Scott, he questioned the golfer, who denied even knowing Zelda.
later:
I think their lives also suffered from Zelda’s increasing desperation as to what to do with herself. She had no idea of being a wife shortly after they were married Scott discovered all his dirty shirts piled up in a closet-and, although she tried in the times of sanity, still less of being a mother
Scott’s diet:
When I think now of the abuse that Scott inflicted on himself, it’s a miracle that he lived as long as he did. Aside from his drinking there was, drunk or sober, the incessant smoking and also the reliance, when not drinking, on coffee and dozens and dozens of bottles a day of Coca-Cola. He would line up the Cokes all around the walls of his office at M-G-M and announce, “I’ll drink these up, and when they’re gone I’ll go back to beer.” Dr. Richard Hoffman, who had examined him in New York, told my Beloved Infidel collaborator, Gerold Frank, that Scott drank-both the liquor and the Cokes-be-cause he had the reverse of diabetes, an insufficiency of sugar in the blood. Is this true for all who drink unwisely?
This is when they were healthy:
For the first time for both of us, we were leading average lives, working by day, reading or walking in the evening after the same dinner prepared for us every night by our shared housekeeper, a thin T-bone steak (at 35 cents a pound!), a baked potato, peas, and a grapefruit jelly.
…
I would not have wanted to examine Scott’s inside, with not only all the above but also the strange food that he ate-sometimes just fudge and crab soup, in that order. He was eating a little more in that last year, lots of cookies, candy, and cake to compensate for the sugar in the alcohol.
But there were nice times too:
lunches at the elegant Vendome Restaurant in Hollywood, at the Brown Derby in Hollywood or in Beverly Hills, and our dancing in the evenings, particularly in the first year, at the Trocadero. Scott danced the collegiate style of the time-heads close together, rears at a thirty-three-degree angle.
Looking back, I marvel at what a full, active life we had. We also went away together for weekends, especially in the first two years before Scott was so hard up—to Santa Barbara, La Jolla, Del Monte, Monterey, over the south U.S. border into Mexico, and to the San Francisco Fair. I loved those long drives with Scott, even though he drove at twenty to twenty-five miles an hour.
“Del Monte,” a resort in Monterey that now belongs to the Navy. Monterey on the old roads before the 5 is about 331 miles away. At twenty five miles an hour that trip must’ve taken like thirteen hours. And that’s if you don’t stop every hour for more Cokes.
*in writing that sentence I got to wondering what those obstacles the Germans and their various conscripts) set up on the D-Day beaches were called. You know the ones I’m talking about? Turns out they are called hedgehogs.
What is San Diego?
Posted: July 30, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
From time to time fortune takes me down the coast to the city of San Diego, and I’m always left a little stumped. What is this place? What is distinctly San Diego? If it has a bent it is slightly to the right, somewhat fratty/military. Top Gun, Navy SEALs. Retirees. IPAs (although those are everywhere now). The California burrito. What else? We’re talking about the eighth most populous city in the United States. Pleasant living is on offer for sure, sunshine and surf. The people that like it love it. But what does it have to show for itself?
Here’s the WPA guide to California on the city, as it was circa 1939:
SAN DIEGO (0-822 alt., 147,995 pop.), the oldest Spanish settlement in California, is in the extreme lower left-hand corner of the United States. Although only 16 miles north of the Mexican boundary, it is completely American. Its landlocked natural harbor is headquarters for the Eleventh Naval District, for marine and coast guard bases, and home port for a fleet of tuna clippers and fishing smacks manned by Portuguese and Italian fishermen.
The city has much of the easygoing spirit of Spanish days, and people dress and live for comfort. Life moves at a modulated pace, particularly because of the large number of retired and elderly persons.
The downtown area, dominated by a group of tall buildings, is small for a city of this size; Broadway, the main artery, runs from the waterfront due east and divides the city into distinct sections. Although liners no longer call at the port Max Miller wrote of in I Cover the Waterfront, freighters and tramp steamers dock here regularly. Tuna clippers bring in big hauls of huge fish, and sport fishing parties return with catches of yellowtail, barracuda, and swordfish. Navy shoreboats run between ships at anchor and the piers.
South of Broadway many plain buildings of the 1870’s and gingerbread structures of the 1890’s are still in use. Markets and grocery stores along Twelfth Avenue display fruit and vegetables in pyramids and cascades. Third, Fourth, and Fifth Avenues have taverns with three-piece jazz bands, shooting galleries, inexpensive movies, hamburger stands, pawn shops, and small hotels.
Balboa Park’s giant green square begins just north of the business district. North and northwest of the park are the newer residential districts, and to the west is Middletown, a narrow segment extending from the bay to the low hills, occupied by Italian fishermen and airplane factory employees. Old Town, site of the original Spanish settlement, is northwest of Middletown. It has some fine adobe buildings, fringed with rose bushes and flowers, but most of the land is occupied by small houses and auto courts.
Most of San Diego’s inhabitants, apart from the shifting Navy personnel, are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the East and Middle West. Many are retired; ten percent of all retired U. S. Navy officers live in San Diego.
In the Logan Heights district, south and east of downtown along the curved southern shore, sprawl San Diego’s Mexican and Negro communities, with Mexican restaurants vending tamales and tacos, and with chicken palaces and big ovens where Negroes barbecue meat.
About 10,000 Mexicans, most of them clinging to their own language and customs, live in this district; they are employed mainly as day laborers and cannery workers. The 4,500 Negroes are mostly manual or domestic workers. The Japanese colony, of about 1,000 persons, is in this area also; some in huts on stilts over the water. About 5,000 Portuguese fisherman, who live on the bay side of Point Loma, form a distinct group preserving its own customs. Italian fishermen mingle more generally with the community.
The site of San Diego was visited in 1539 by Father Marcos and his followers, from the desert side, in their search for the “Seven Cities of Cibola”; in 1542 by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese explorer in the service of Spain, who spent six days in the harbor; and sixty years later by Sebastian Vizaíno, merchant navigator charting the coast for Spain.
In 1769 Governor Portola, with Franciscan friars and soldiers, established a mission and presidio here. The English sloop Discovery, engaged in scientific research, visited San Diego in 1793, and in 1803 the Yankee-owned Lelia Byrd, caught while smuggling otter skins, fought a cannon duel with the battery of Ballast Point.
…
During the Mexican regime, San Diego took on more color. “The beautiful señoritas danced their picturesque dances at the balls which followed bull-fights and cock-fights.” Many Spanish families, on bad terms with the Mexican governor, assisted the Americans in their conquest. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the town came peacefully under American rule.
In 1850 the present Old Town was incorporated as a city. The site of the present city was called New Town, or “Davis’s Folly” for William Heath Davis, who first built there. Alonzo E. Horton, for whom New Town was named “Horton’s Addition,” profited more than he.
From 1867 to 1872 New Town grew steadily; then a fire wiped out Old Town’s business district, and New Town became the city’s center.
In 1885 the Santa Fe Railroad laid tracks into San Diego and made it a transcontinental terminus. Two years later it had 40,000 residents, but the boom collapsed, and by 1890 there were only 17,000. Since 1910 its population has doubled about every decade.
Aircraft is the only large-scale industrial plant. Fishing and canning San Diego’s 335 factories are mostly small enterprises; Consolidated are basic sources of income. A large lumber mill handles timber rafted in from the Northwest.
San Diego was an open-shop city until the strong wave of unionization in the early thirties; during the bitter “Free Speech Fight” of 1912 radical headquarters were raided and radicals ordered out of town.
Depressions have touched lightly on San Diego.
The colorful fishing fleet days are over, although there are still some 150+ commercial fishing vessels.
San Diego is a place that isn’t “certified,” to borrow from Walker Percy—there are fewer templates or cultural expectations for what your life must be like here, compared to LA or New York, for example. As Armantrout went on to say, “In my mature years I have come to appreciate the blankness of this town. When I step on the street in San Diego, I am not stepping onto a set; I am not stepping into a play, my own or anyone else’s.” In her work, the ersatz dailiness of ordinary life in San Diego—bills, television shows, illness, reading, advertisements, children—is maybe the best portrait of the city one could make, and certainly a guide for maintaining a vibrant life of the mind here.
from this piece on literary San Diego by Patrick Coleman.
Maybe (in fact certainly) I’m overthinking it. San Diego is a normie heaven, and that’s it. We need a city to absorb surplus bro energy and mellow it in the Southern California sun, which object San Diego achieves. To ponder what it might mean is very un-San Diego. Just crack a cold one or pop an edible, put on the game and vibe out.
And what are we even talking about here? New Orleans produces culture and also absurd murder rates. LA is LA but did San Diego have anything on the scale of the 1994 riots or the O.J trial? What is character but atrocity, debacle, chaos sanded by time?
In recent years my visits to San Diego have been for Comic-Con. 130,000 people descend on the San Diego Convention Center (2.6 million square feet) and surrounding blocks. This might seem fringe or marginal, it was at one time, but now we’re talking about the most popular movies in the world, billion dollar corporate products.
a fraction of a fraction of the whole, the scale is difficult to grasp. The size of it humbles the aircraft carriers docked across the bay.
Perhaps it is the very blankness of San Diego that allows the city to absorb Comic Con. You can attend Comic Con without being in “San Diego” in any real way. There’s nice weather, you’re near the water, but essentially you’re in one giant hotel without distinction.
Near the Comic Con zone is a massive Dole shipping and processing facility:
In the past I’ve been impressed with the San Diego Museum of Art, that has a possible Bosch or Bosch workshop.
This year I ventured as far as Little Italy to Vino Carta, where Jeff Fischer was pouring wines. You’re on India Street there and under the landing path of planes to San Diego’s airport, it’s kind of fun as they descend just over your head. On the rec of a local I had some very fine tacos from Tacos El Gordo, a line down the block, Bourdain kind of place. The adobada was recommended but I’m off the pork at the moment.
Recall that towards the end of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the kid ends up in San Diego. Here are some excerpts, which we put down towards the project of assembling a literary anthology of San Diego:
As he was crossing the plaza toward the little mud cabildo he encountered Toadvine and Webster newly released. They were wildlooking and they stank. The three of them went down to the beach and sat looking out at the long gray swells and passing Brown’s bottle among them. They’d none of them seen an ocean before. Brown walked down and held his hand to the sheet of spume that ran up the dark sand. He lifted his hand and tasted the salt on his fingers and he looked downcoast and up and then they went back up the beach toward the town. They spent the afternoon drinking in a lazarous bodega run by a Mexican. Some soldiers came in. An altercation took place. Toadvine was on his feet, swaying. A peacemaker rose from among the soldiers and soon the principals were seated again. But minutes later Brown on his way back from the bar poured a pitcher of aguardiente over a young soldier and set him afire with his cigar. The man ran outside mute save for the whoosh of the flames and the flames were pale blue and then invisible in the sunlight and he fought them in the street like a man beset with bees or madness and then he fell over in the road and burned up. By the time they got to him with a bucket of water he had blackened and shriveled in the mud like an enormous spider. Brown woke in a dark little cell manacled and crazed with thirst.
a bit later:
They reached San Diego in the dead of night and were directed to the alcalde’s house. This man came to the door in nightshirt and stockingcap holding a candle before him. Glanton pushed him back into the parlor and sent his men on to the rear of the house from whence they heard directly a woman’s screams and a few dull slaps and then silence.
…
They left them bound and gagged and rode out to visit the grocer. Three days later the alcalde and the grocer and the alcalde’s wife were found tied and lying in their own excrement in an abandoned hut at the edge of the ocean eight miles south of the settlement. They’d been left a pan of water from which they drank like dogs and they had howled at the booming surf in that wayplace until they were mute as stones. Glanton and his men were two days and nights in the streets crazed with liquor. The sergeant in charge of the small garrison of American troops confronted them in a drinking exchange on the evening of the second day and he and the three men with him were beaten senseless and stripped of their arms. At dawn when the soldiers kicked in the hostel door there was no one in the room.
A return:
It was evening of the following day when they entered San Diego. The expriest turned off to find them a doctor but the kid wandered on through the raw mud streets and out past the houses of hide in their rows and across the gravel strand to the beach. Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Down-shore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back.
He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea’s black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach. He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
Teddy Blue
Posted: July 29, 2024 Filed under: cormac, Texas, the American West Leave a comment
I’ve been working my way through Larry McMurtry’s short syllabus for understanding the cowboy of the 19th century. Teddy Blue’s memoir is vivid:
A Yankee cowboy:
Conversation with a chippie:
(Gilt Edge appears to be no more).
strong phrase:
Reminded of Cormac McCarthy: I’d know your hide in a tanyard. Teddy weighs in on cowboy songs:
I like the version by Suzanne Vega.
First look at Common Side Effects
Posted: July 27, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, art, comedy, drugs, film, hely, how to live, pictures, plays, screenwriting, story, the world around us, Wonder Trail Leave a commentFor the past couple of years I’ve been working on this animated show I co-created with the great Joe Bennett. Even adjusting for my personal bias, I believe it came together in an amazing way and will be an incredible show. Coming in 2025.
Everyday life in the Holy Roman Empire
Posted: July 27, 2024 Filed under: Switzerland Leave a comment
Ever since I saw this map while working through the history of Switzerland and the Savoy I’ve been wondering what the deal was with the Holy Roman Empire. Peter Wilson’s book, The Holy Roman Empire, is a fantastic introduction and I hope to write up something about it once I finish its many hundreds of surprisingly compelling pages.
Wilson adds to Voltaire’s quip that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire by pointing out that it didn’t even call itself the Holy Roman Empire. What happened was: the vacuum left after the Roman empire bothered everybody, especially because there should be a guy who was in charge of like Christendom. In the year 800, Pope Leo II declared that Charlemagne was like the new Roman emperor. For the next few hundred years, there was a delicate game between the Pope and whoever could gather the right combo of force and legitimacy and political support to get himself named the Emperor. The Emperor would travel around – a stop at Charlemagne’s spot in Aachen was mandatory. The Empire itself was quite fractured but seems to have held together pretty well.
I put my search for a good Holy Roman Empire book to Twitter and user Max S. recommended this one:
It’s a dense one, and I haven’t consumed all of it, but there are some vivid snapshots of life in this era. The world post the calamitous 14th century:
The career of Tommy Platter:
And a different path:
a smart roundup on witch trials, which we’ve considered before:
Agree that witch trials will never yield their secrets to the historian’s tools. Anyway: pleasing way to pass some time in a lethargic summer in Hollywood.
letters, LRB
Posted: July 18, 2024 Filed under: London Leave a comment
The letters are the real reason to subscribe to The London Review of Books. Reading English magazines and papers is stimulating, your brain has to work just that little bit harder to try and penetrate the layers.
What?
Posted: July 18, 2024 Filed under: beer, business Leave a comment
That’s from ValueLine. I’m long Diageo (Guinness has been popular for 250+ years and possesses pricing power, observe how few people buy the cheaper competitor Beamish) but I’m not seeing how putting on a VR helmet will help people experience tequila? Who is the dope here, Apple, Diageo, both? Feels degrading and cheap for both sides.
Amazing punchline
Posted: July 18, 2024 Filed under: Ireland Leave a commentTo this Harper’s review of the collected letters of Seamus Heaney:
Heard Seamus Heaney read from Beowulf once at Harvard, there were only about twenty people there, it was rad. His letters are none of my business. I guess I would read this one:
Ed Ruscha at LACMA
Posted: July 10, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, art history Leave a comment
The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1968
photo taken in Ireland, 1962:
Sigourney
Posted: June 29, 2024 Filed under: actors Leave a commentThe debate was so distressing that I started clicking around and landed on PBS where they were showing an episode of Doc Martin guest starring… Sigourney Weaver?
Very soothing!
Turns out Sigourney is good friends with Doc Martin actress Selina Cadell:
I loved Selina as soon as we met in that London pub. We stayed in touch the old-fashioned way after that first summer in London, sending letters and postcards. When I found out I’d got the part of Ripley in Alien, I phoned my parents and then Selina. I was thrilled that I was going to be filming in London.
When you have a friend who’s also an actress, but is as generous and as well-balanced as Selina, then you can call them up and tell them about a great job. There were plenty of friends I wouldn’t have been able to call, because their first instinct would’ve been, “Why am I not getting a movie?” But I knew she’d be happy for me.
And:
I said, “Are you kidding? I’d love to!” They sent messages via Selina asking if I’d appear in series seven and again in series eight. Of course I did! I made Avatar rework their schedules so I could be here.
People expect me to behave in a grand manner, but it’s not like I’m John Travolta. Having a cameo in Doc Martin is a dream job for me. Cornwall is the most beautiful place. I’ve read every novel about it I can and I watch Poldark on my iPad.
…
I admire you British: when things get tough, you reach for humour. Not firearms. I’d love to live closer to Selina, but however far away she might be, she is always with me. When I’m working I start each day by listening to a tape she recorded for me ten years ago. She tells me how to relax, how to catch my breath. It’s my safe place.
Source. Would Sigourney run?
Stompin’ at the Savoy
Posted: June 29, 2024 Filed under: music, UK Leave a commentWhen you are in Annecy, France you are in the department of Haute-Savoie, just above the department of Savoie. The counts of Savoy and the House of Savoy were a whole scene, and the Savoy is “a cultural-historical region in the Western Alps,” as Wiki tells us.
Situated on the cultural boundary between Occitania and Piedmont, the area extends from Lake Geneva in the north to the Dauphiné in the south and west and to the Aosta Valley in the east.
The Savoy does not include the city of Geneva itself. During an event known as the Escalade, in December 1602, the Savoyards attacked Geneva, but were repelled.
(Supposedly) the late night cooks caught the sneaking Savoyards and dumped boiling pots of stew on them and alerted everybody.
Although the armed conflict actually took place after midnight, in the early morning on 12 December, celebrations and other commemorative activities are usually held on 11 December or the closest weekend. Celebrations include a large marmite (cauldron) made of chocolate and filled with marzipan vegetables and candies wrapped in the Geneva colours of red and gold… Teenagers tend to throw eggs, shaving cream, and flour at each other as part of the celebration. The high school students parade together by first going to “conquer” each other and end up in the central square of the old town after walking through the rues basses to the plaine de Plainpalais and back.
On the sleepless cook does history turn, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So ended Savoyard expansion and Geneva stayed independent.
The first count of Savoy was Humbert I:
Humbert is the progenitor of the dynasty known as the House of Savoy. The origins of this dynasty are unknown, but Humbert’s ancestors are variously said to have come from Saxony, Burgundy or Provence.
That’s as far back as we can get on Savoy. As Bob Dylan says:
But that pedigree stuff, that only works so far. You can go back to the ten-hundreds, and people only had one name. Nobody’s gonna tell you they’re going to go back further than when people had one name.
In 1860 the Duchy of Savoy became part of France in a deal where France agreed to support unifying Italy. By then the House of Savoy was the royal family of Italy, and they kept on until 1946. Since then they’ve fallen rather hard, I recommend this wikpedia section, The House of Savoy Today. Vanity Fair article type stuff. Maybe Princess Vittoria is the current heiress, I dunno, it gets mixed up with the cousins. Suffice to say that the House of Savoy is at a low ebb in their thousand year journey.
The word Savoy associates in my mind to “Stompin at the Savoy” and The Savoy Hotel. How did this word spread?
Stompin’ at the Savoy took its name from the Savoy Ballroom, which was once at 596 Lenox Avenue in Harlem.
(those images from the Savoy Ballroom wiki)
That Savoy took its name from the famed London hotel:
Built by the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte with profits from his Gilbert and Sullivan opera productions, it opened on 6 August 1889. It was the first in the Savoy group of hotels and restaurants owned by Carte’s family[a] for over a century. The Savoy was the first hotel in Britain to introduce electric lights throughout the building, electric lifts, bathrooms in most of the lavishly furnished rooms, constant hot and cold running water and many other innovations. Carte hired César Ritz as manager and Auguste Escoffier as chef de cuisine; they established an unprecedented standard of quality in hotel service, entertainment and elegant dining, attracting royalty and other rich and powerful guests and diners.
(Then Ritz and Escoffier left in a scandal, they were stealing booze and semi-embezzling. Ritz of course would go on to have his own chain, that also generated music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNFffHQOXMc
)
The London hotel was called Savoy because it was on the location of the Savoy Palace. Eleanor of Provence married King Henry III in 1236. He was 28, she was maybe 12.
Wiki tells us:
she was very much hated by the Londoners. This was because she had brought many relatives with her to England in her retinue; these were known as “the Savoyards”, and they were given influential positions in the government and realm. On one occasion, Eleanor’s barge was attacked by angry Londoners who pelted her with stones, mud, pieces of paving, rotten eggs and vegetables.
One of these Savoyards was her uncle Peter, who was granted some land where he built Savoy Palace:
The Savoy was the most magnificent nobleman’s house in England. It was famous for its owner’s magnificent collection of tapestries, jewels, and other ornaments. Geoffrey Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales while working at the Savoy Palace as a clerk.
It was destroyed in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1351. Later on the site was built Savoy Hospital:
Later this area became a little precinct:
There was a chapel there, Savoy Chapel:
In 1912 it was the scene of a suffragette wedding between Victor and Una Duval. The wedding was attended by leading suffragettes and the wedding caused much debate because the bride refused to say “and obey”, despite the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
And nearby D’oyly Carte built the Savoy Theatre and the Savoy Hotel.
And there we have some history of “Savoy” as a concept. Once again a cultural and historical puzzle that’s come up in our travels has been followed towards the source, with illuminating new stories and details that have enriched our experience of life. We’ve shared it with you, the reader, and hope you’ve found it edifying.
Let’s all listen to Stompin’ At The Savoy, we’ll go with the version by… Art Tatum:
Quality data and Hapsburg AI
Posted: June 27, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, business Leave a comment
That’s from the June 7 issue of ValueLine. I subscribed after I saw this clip:
Not even sure what year that’s from.
Quality has been on my mind.
Quality … you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others … but what’s the betterness? … So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?
As the guy says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. At the Smithsonian you can see Pirsig’s motorcycle:
I was at See’s Candy the other day:
Recently I read this book:
There are some interesting case studies (although they skew a bit Euro):
Will AI ever produce something of “quality”? I have yet to see it.
June 25-26
Posted: June 26, 2024 Filed under: America, the American West, Uncategorized 3 CommentsLt. James Bradley led a detachment of Crow Indian scouts up the Bighorn Valley during the summer of 1876. In his journal he records that early Monday morning, June 26, they saw the tracks of four ponies. Assuming the riders must be Sioux, they followed these tracks to the river and came upon one of the ponies, along with some equipment which evidently had been thrown away. An examination of the equipment disclosed, much to his surprise, that it belonged to some Crows from his own command who had been assigned to General Custer’s regiment a few days earlier.
While puzzling over this circumstance, Bradley discovered three men on the opposite side of the river. They were about two miles away and appeared to be watching. He instructed his scouts to signal with blankets that he was friendly, which they did, but for a long time there was no response. Then the distant men built a fire, messages were exchanged by smoke signal, and they were persuaded to come closer.
They were indeed Crow scouts: Hairy Moccasin, Goes Ahead, White Man Runs Him. They would not cross the river, but they were willing to talk.
Bradley did not want to believe the story they told, yet he had a feeling it was true. In his journal he states that he could only hope they were exaggerating, “that in the terror of the three fugitives from the fatal field their account of the disaster was somewhat overdrawn.”
The news deeply affected his own scouts. One by one they went aside and sat down, rocking to and fro, weeping and chanting. Apart from relatives and friends of the slain soldiers, he later wrote, “there were none in this whole horrified nation of forty millions of people to whom the tidings brought greater grief.”
There were no literate survivors to the “last stand” event of June 25, 1876, so we have no firsthand written accounts. What happened was pieced together first from a sort of crime scene investigation. Later, interviews with participants were done, but cultural and linguistic gaps remained. Thomas Marquis, who lived among the Northern Cheyenne and knew many of them, wrote a book whose conclusions were so shocking it couldn’t be published in his lifetime.
Later, art, illustrations, apparently by eyewitnesses emerged, much of it quite vivid.
How about this:
or this:
Those found in:
What was this war about, anyway?:
Geneva Conventions (Swiss History Part Seven)
Posted: June 9, 2024 Filed under: Switzerland 1 CommentI believe this will conclude our unit on the history of Switzerland. Here you can find Part One about pre-Switzerland to the Dark Ages, Part Two about the Bernese chronicles, Part Three about founding myths like William Tell and the Rütli oath, Part Four about the various leagues up to the Congress of Vienna, Part Five about Steinberg’s Why Switzerland, and Part Six about Calvin/Cauvin’s Geneva.
Henry Dunant was a thirty one year old Swiss businessman who was trying to arrange some deals in French-held Algeria. He was running into problems, the land and water rights were all a jumble. So he came up with a plan:
Dunant wrote a flattering book full of praise for Napoleon III with the intention to present it to the emperor, and then traveled to Solferino to meet with him personally.
Napoleon III, Emperor of France, was in a war with Austria at the time. Dunant arrived on the evening after a massive battle. There were something like 40,000 dead and wounded people around.
No one was helping them.
Shocked, Dunant himself took the initiative to organize the civilian population, especially the women and girls, to provide assistance to the injured and sick soldiers. They lacked sufficient materials and supplies, and Dunant himself organized the purchase of needed materials and helped erect makeshift hospitals. He convinced the population to service the wounded without regard to their side in the conflict as per the slogan “Tutti fratelli” (All are brothers) coined by the women of nearby city Castiglione delle Stiviere. He also succeeded in gaining the release of Austrian doctors captured by the French and British.
When he got home, he wrote up a book called A Memory of Soferino, in which he described what he saw and set forth the idea that a neutral organization that could help the wounded in war would be valuable.
On February 7, 1863, the Société genevoise d’utilité publique [Geneva Society for Public Welfare] appointed a committee of five, including Dunant, to examine the possibility of putting this plan into action. With its call for an international conference, this committee, in effect, founded the Red Cross.
That’s from the Nobel Prize website; Dunant won the first ever Nobel Peace Prize.
A year after the founding of the Red Cross, the government of Switzerland invited all European countries as well as the US, Mexico and Brazil to a conference where they agreed on the first Geneva Convention “for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field”. They met in the Alabama room of Geneva’s city hall. Now, why was it called the Alabama room? Because that’s where an international tribunal met to work out the Alabama Claims, an international dispute between the US and the UK regarding grievances over Confederate raiders, including the Alabama, which were built in the UK and used against the US.
The Alabama.
So, Geneva already had a rep as a place for international meetings.
As for Dunant, he went bust. Says Nobel Prize.org:
After the disaster, which involved many of his Geneva friends, Dunant was no longer welcome in Genevan society. Within a few years he was literally living at the level of the beggar. There were times, he says, when he dined on a crust of bread, blackened his coat with ink, whitened his collar with chalk, slept out of doors.
For the next twenty years, from 1875 to 1895, Dunant disappeared into solitude. After brief stays in various places, he settled down in Heiden, a small Swiss village. Here a village teacher named Wilhelm Sonderegger found him in 1890 and informed the world that Dunant was alive, but the world took little note. Because he was ill, Dunant was moved in 1892 to the hospice at Heiden. And here, in Room 12, he spent the remaining eighteen years of his life. Not, however, as an unknown. After 1895 when he was once more rediscovered, the world heaped prizes and awards upon him.
Despite the prizes and the honors, Dunant did not move from Room 12. Upon his death, there was no funeral ceremony, no mourners, no cortege. In accordance with his wishes he was carried to his grave «like a dog»3.
The Red Cross calls me just about every day about giving blood. I’ve got to do that again.
Helytimes 
