Smart Aleck's Guides: Subversive Study Aids

Fun With Stats

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:21:00 +0000

The other day I read an article that opened with a line that shocked me: "As Obama seeks to become only the second Democratic president since FDR to be re-elected..."

I had to do some quick thinking. Could that be right? Has only one Democratic president been re-elected in the last 65+ years? Is Obama trying to pull off a truly rare feat?

Well, it is true - from a certain point of view. In the last 60+ years, only Bill Clinton has won two elections on the Democratic ticket.

But that IS a fairly selective way of looking at the facts. Two other sitting Democratic presidents won the election as an incumbent - Truman and Johnson were vice presidents who took the office on the death of their successor, so they weren't technically RE-elected. But voters HAD voted for a ticket that they were on in both cases. Johnston didn't try for re-election in '68.

With another way of looking at things, you could actually say that Obama is trying to be something that ought to be easy: seeking to avoid becoming only the second Democratic incumbent to lose a general election since Grover Cleveland. Of all Democratic presidents in the last 120-odd years, the only one who has run for another term and lost was Jimmy Carter. Wilson was re-election, so was Roosevelt (three times). Truman won a full term after taking over upon Roosevelt's death, Kennedy didn't live to run for a second term (if Goldwater had been the GOP nominee, he probably would have won, though, although perhaps not by as big a margin as Johnson did), and Clinton won twice.

Another fun statistical thing: assuming Mitt Romney doesn't ask Jeb Bush to be vice president, he'll be seeking to be the first Republican since Herbert Hoover to win a presidential election without the name Bush or Nixon on the ticket.

Smart Aleck's Guide to Shakespeare: Macbeth

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:06:00 +0000

The Smart Aleck's Guide to Shakespeare: Macbeth

Just 2.99 on
Kindle
or Nook (epub)

Don't have one of those?

Read it on a free Kindle app

for your pc, mac, iPad or phone.

Or a free NOOK app

for pc, mac, iPad, or phone

14.99 for 353 page print edition

Finally - a study guide that doesn't assume you're an idiot! The team that brought you the acclaimed SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY is back with a fantastic new series of "study guides for the smart kids" about Shakespeare - including all the stuff your school board would probably rather you didn't find out about. There's something here for everyone, from middle schoolers trying to get through English class to grad students who've read every play a million times, all WITHOUT resorting to re-writing the plays to include the word "dude." Each illustrated Shakespeare guide contains:

- Complete text of the play, plus detailed summaries and analysis of every scene, with an active Table of Contents and internal links for easy navigation.

- All the info you need about Shakespeare's life, times and language (30k words!), including sections on Elizabethan slang, cheat sheets on how money and nobility worked, the history Shakespeare expected his audience to know, tips on how to survive if you get beamed back to 1593, and a useful essay on the roles of sex, violence, and poop in Elizabethan life and literature - like an Elizabethan version of of What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew.

- Guides to movie versions of the play, the sources Shakespeare used in creating the works, a history of the individual play, guides to controversies about each play that make scholars throw folding chairs at one another, and more.

- Numerous illustrations, many of which contain hilarious mustaches and stupid hats.

- Tangents about the Muppets, Star Wars, or whatever else the staff feels like (we don't let the Texas School Board tell US what to do!)

- A general lack of worksheets, vocabulary words, sentence diagrams, and other stuff that would suck all the life out of the plays.

- A section on Shakespeare's "Lost" plays (with several chances to earn $5).

And a whole lot more. Twice as informative, and ten times as entertaining, as the next leading brand of study guides - Smart Aleck's Guides have the courtesy to assume that their readers are not complete morons to start with. The Smart Aleck Staff is confident that they can help you understand and enjoy Shakespeare without resorting to any cheap tricks to "bring him down to your level." They don't really care if you get a good grade or not, but with one guide, you could end up knowing more about Shakespeare than your teacher!

The MACBETH guide contains:

- The full play, with analysis of each scene

- Character List

-"Whose Macbeth Is It, Anyway?" (or, is the text we have really just Thomas Middleton's attempt to punch up an older Shakespeare play?)

- A section on witches in Shakespeare's day - and ours.

- A piece on the "curse" of Macbeth

- A whole section about the play's connection to Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" to go with our usual speculation about what a Muppet version of MACBETH would be like

- "Who is the Third Murderer?"

- A review of Macbeth from 1610.

- A bit on the debate about whether the "weird sisters" are "witches" or "Fates"

- A "Macbeth Scorecard."

- A section of stupid hats from various productions of the play.

- "The Shakespeare Capers Vol. 1: Foul is Fair" (a hard-boiled detective story starring "Duke" Stratford, private eye, which has nothing to do with the play).

100 Years Ago This Month...

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:36:00 +0000

Women's suffrage activists spent the Spring of 1912 trying to get their "plank" onto the platform of a national party in advance of the coming election. And they got it, in a roundabout way: Roosevelt lost the nomination of the GOP, but became the nominee of the Progressive (Bull Moose) party - and took the women with him. Women's suffrage was a plank in the platform (which is fascinating to read today) and Jane Addams, Chicago's own secular saint, seconded his nomination at a riotous convention.

The platform said:

Equal Suffrage

The Progressive party, believing that no people can justly claim to be a true democracy which denies political rights on account of sex, pledges itself to the task of securing equal suffrage to men and women alike.

This support was not what lost the election for Roosevelt - more likely, it's simply the fact that he was a third party candidate (though he DID come in second, beating out the Republicans). And women voting was in the constitution eight years later, after continuing as a "state-by-state" issue for a few years. It's very interesting to think of all this in context of the President's announcement today that he's in favor of same sex marriage.

We wave our Bull Moose party banner high at Smart Aleck HQ, right above our "Nixon Resigns" newspaper that you can see in some of Adam's dust jacket photos. And our "Hipster Bert" Muppet.

Lord Buckley's Hipster Edition of Marc Antony's Funeral Oration

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:41:00 +0000

We here at the Smart Aleck's Guide normally try to refrain from re-writing Shakespeare into modern slang - it's usually a cheap trick to "bring The Bard down to your level" and demeans us both. And, anyway, our attempts at "modern" slang usually just make things sound like you're reading the instructional manual to a skateboard-themed video game from 1990 (we were very gnarly in 1990).

But sometimes someone DOES rewrite Shakespeare just for laughs, and the results are fantastic. Case in point: Lord Buckley, his royal hipness, rewriting Marc Antony's speech from Caesar. "Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies: knock me your lobes. I come to lay Caesar out, not to hip you to him..."

A Muppet Julius Caesar

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:20:00 +0000

In each of our Shakespeare guides, we take a break midway through analyzing each scene to speculate about what a Muppet version of the play would be like. Here's an excerpt from Julius Caesar guide:

This is a question that comes up every time we work on a new play: who would play which role in a Muppet version?

This is especially tricky for this play - it doesn’t have much comic relief (except for right at the beginning, with the cobbler, which, being right at the start, isn’t really comic relief so much as a comic intro). Also, nearly every character is a dignified Roman statesman. Sam the Eagle is the only logical choice for pretty much every character except for the soothsayer (Gonzo, Fozzie and Bunsen Honeydew could all work here). Maybe they could have Wade and Wanda, the old-school singers from season one of The Muppet Show, as Caesar and Calpurnia. Piggy as Portia seems obvious, but it would sure work - she has the same mix of strength and apparent mental instability as Portia.

If we were hired to write the script for A Muppet Julius Caesar, we wouldn’t have much of the actual play in it. We’d do a big backstage story in which Sam the Eagle is trying to mount a very serious production of this immortal play, and, for some reason, thought that Fozzie could be trusted to play the role of Brutus with all due gravity (he’ll try his hardest, but fail). Kermit will work hard to be a good Mark Antony, but Gonzo, who is to be Caesar (Romans thought a big, hooked nose was a sign of esteem), feels that the play is missing something and rewrites it to include a lot more special effects, dancing chickens, spectacular stunts.

As Caeser, he’ll miraculously survive being stabbed twenty-three times (while whistling a medley of hits from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) (ta-da!), and the play would go downhill from there, presumably ending with a big song and dance number (we suggest Billy Joel’s “When in Rome”) that includes enough pyrotechnics to blow up the theatre. Hail Caesar!

Smart Aleck's Guide to Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:01:00 +0000

The Smart Aleck's Guide to Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

Just 2.99 on
Kindle
or Nook (epub)

Don't have one of those?

Read it on a free Kindle app

for your pc, mac, iPad or phone.

Or a free NOOK app

for pc, mac, iPad, or phone

14.99 in print

- Complete text of the play, plus detailed summaries and analysis of every scene, with an active Table of Contents and internal links for easy navigation.

- Numerous illustrations, many of which contain hilarious mustaches and stupid hats.

- Tangents about the Muppets, Star Wars, or whatever else the staff feels like (we don't let the Texas School Board tell US what to do!)

- A general lack of worksheets, vocabulary words, sentence diagrams, and other stuff that would suck all the life out of the plays.

- A section on Shakespeare's "Lost" plays (with several chances to earn $5).

The CAESAR guide contains all of this, plus sections on Rome 101, Latin Words to Know, a script for a peer pressure skit starring Brutus (you could talk that guy into anything if you used the word "noble" enough), Lupercalia (party naked!), ancient Roman graffiti, and more!

Romeo's Stupid Hats

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:23:00 +0000

When one goes combing through historical photos and paintings, one runs into a lot of stupid hats. We found enough while researching the history book to make it a running gag - and we found just about as many in depictions of Romeo and Juliet. Here are a couple:

A fez tops this illustration of Romeo in which he looks like a goth Ronald McDonald. We'd LOVE to see a version of this play with Ronald as Romeo and Birdy the Early Bird as Juliet. Mayor McCheese can be the prince. Mack Tonight can be brought back to be Mercutio, and that "professor" guy could be the friar.

German painter Karl Becker showed Romeo in a feathered hat - most stupid Romeo hats involve feathers. Romeo here is a dead ringer for a young "Weird Al" Yankovic. Al can pull off a poodle hat - but can he handle this one?

Get the full guide for more Stupid Romeo Hats!

Swearing in Romeo and Juliet

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:36:00 +0000

You know how sometimes people act like Shakespeare was a wild, crazy, sleazy guy in order to make kids think he's hip? We here at the Smart Aleck's Guide remember a time when a guy came into our high school to promote Shakespeare and told us that the works were originally full of swear words that editors just left out.

The guy struck as a little desperate. Attempts to "bring Shakespeare down to your level" are generally about as lame as attempts to "make history come alive." If you really want to understand Romeo and Juliet, shouldn't you have your teacher organize a big sword fight in the middle of your local downtown? (If you don't have one of those, use Wal Mart).

Some of the details of Shakespeare's life can be pieced together, but what kind of guy he was is sort of in dispute. You can argue that he was "Wild Bill" Shakespeare, who partied hard, carried on affairs with people of both genders, and got in a lot of fights. He was a theatre person, after all, and just about ever reliable "personal anecdote" we have about him is about him being a smart aleck. But you can also, from the same evidence, argue that he was a good, upstanding man who took care of his family, and was about as sober as anyone was in those days (when weak ale was safer to drink than water). He never went to jail, after all, and never killed anyone, so far as we know (unlike a couple of his fellow playwrights).

Still, WERE there swear words in his plays?

We can think of at least a couple of examples. There're some awfully naughty sex puns hidden between the lines (ask your teacher to explain the "thus she makes her great Ps" joke in Twelfth Night at your own risk), but Shakespeare didn't really use the dreaded S word or the word turd, so far as we know (unlike Ben Jonson).

There were SOME words changed, though - in some cases, when we have more than one early versions of the text, the various versions are greatly different. Some say that this represents Shakespeare's own revisions, and some say it was the printers either screwing things up or cleaning them up. In most cases, you could make an argument either way (though suggesting that Shakespeare ever revised anything himself is the kind of thing that will still get some academics to bean you with a folding chair).

And Romeo and Juliet features one clear example of a swear word that got cleaned up. In Act 2, Scene 1, Mercutio gives a talk about Romeo and Rosaline, Romeo's previous crush, whom he thinks Romeo is out looking for.
This is how it appears in the first quarto, as well as in most modern text:

                  If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
    Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
    And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
    As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
    Romeo, that she were, O, that she were
    An open et cetera, thou a poperin pear!

The word here is in the last line, where the text says "O, that she were an open et cetera, thou a poperin pear." It's the "et cetera" that seems to be wrong - based on the meter, there are a couple of extra syllables in that last line.

Anyway, there are three texts of Romeo and Juliet - two "quarto" versions (copies about the size of a modern paperback that were sold in Shakespeare's lifetime) and the one in First Folio, the "boxed set" of Shakespeare's plays that came out a few years after he died. The first quarto says "open et cetera." The second quarto and the folio say "Open or," which fits the meter, but doesn't make any sense.

No scholar dared to say it until well into the 20th century, but the "real" word here is clearly "arse," the British version of the dreaded a-word. It's fairly obvious, given that Mercutio was just talking about medlars, a kind of fruit that was commonly known in Shakespeare's day as an "open arse" because, well, it sort of looked like an open butt. See?

It's always interesting to see how various productions will do this line. An early 80s BBC version actually has Mercutio say "et cetera," but he pauses before saying it and indicates his nether regions, so you know he's using it as a euphemism (the best part of that version is a young Alan Rickman as Tybalt...it's amusing to imagine him adding "Potter!" to the end of lines, as in "Peace? I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee...POTTER!"). The 1996 version with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio had Mercutio go ahead and say the a-word. Most versions we've seen just leave this whole part altogether.

This is the kind of stuff we talk about in our Shakespeare guides. The first one, a guide to Romeo and Juliet, is out now:

Smart Aleck's Guide to Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:15:00 +0000

Full-length illustrated ebook
Only $2.99

available editions:

kindle

nook

(ibooks edition coming
soon)

Don't have one of those?

You can read it on a free Kindle app

for your pc, mac, iPad or phone.

Or a free NOOK app

for pc, mac, iPad, or phone

363 page Print edition available
for 14.99

Finally - a study guide that doesn't assume you're an idiot! The team that brought you the acclaimed SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY is back with a fantastic new series of "study guides for the smart kids" about Shakespeare - including all the stuff your school board would probably rather you didn't find out about. There's something here for everyone, from middle schoolers trying to get through English class to grad students who've read every play a million times, all WITHOUT resorting to re-writing the plays to include the ford "dude." Each illustrated Shakespeare guide contains:

- Complete text of the play, plus detailed summaries and analysis of every scene, with an active Table of Contents and internal links for easy navigation.

- All the info you need about Shakespeare's life, times and language (100+ pages!), including sections on Elizabethan slang, cheat sheets on how money and nobility worked, the history Shakespeare expected his audience to know, tips on how to survive if you get beamed back to 1593, and a useful essay on the roles of sex, violence, and poop in Elizabethan life and literature - like an Elizabethan version of of What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew.

- Numerous illustrations, many of which contain hilarious mustaches and stupid hats.

- Tangents about the Muppets, Star Wars, or whatever else the staff feels like (we don't let the Texas School Board tell US what to do!)

- A general lack of worksheets, vocabulary words, sentence diagrams, and other stuff that would suck all the life out of the plays.

- A section on Shakespeare's "Lost" plays (with several chances to earn $5).

Smart Aleck's Guide to Romeo and Juliet: Contents

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:56:00 +0000

As a sort of preview, here're the contents to the new guide:

PART 1: SHAKESPEARE 101

INTRODUCTION:

Shakespeare: Was He "Wild Bill" or "William the Bard?"

Sex, Violence and Poop: Elizabethan Life

Your Life, 1593

Earls, Dukes, And Other People Who Were Allowed To Kick You

Elizabethan Money

The Theatre Scene

Wild Bill's Rowdy Pals

The History That Everyone Knew Back Then

What Did Shakespeare Look Like?

Lost Plays (Or: Wanna Make Five Dollars?)

Was Shakespeare Gay?

Was Shakespeare a Racist?

Wasn't Shakespeare Someone Else?

Tips on Reading Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Language

Glossary

Scholar Wars

What's So Great About Shakespeare?

Some Shakespearean Movies

Some Shakespeare Books

PART 2: ROMEO AND JULIET

Parental Advisory

Introduction

What Happens in Romeo and Juliet

Characters

The Source : Or, Hope You Guys Like Couplets!

Mercutio: Gay Atheist Spy?

Romeo and Juliet Through the Years

Movie Versions

AND NOW, THE PLAY

Act 1, Prologue and Scene 1:

End of Act Discussion Questions

Act 2: Prologue and Scene 1

Act 4: Scenes 4 and 5

END OF PLAY QUESTIONS

WHO SHOULD SUE WHO?

Romeo and Juliet Scorecard

Conclusion

Notes

How Many Soldiers Died in the Civil War?

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:34:00 +0000

Getting actually body counts for any battle, war, or disaster is just about impossible - no two sources ever have the same figure. And most of the time, when you REALLY dig into the sources, you find that the methods they used to get that number in the first place were sort of odd. It turns out now that the standard number of Confederate deaths in the Civil War - somewhere over 250,000 - was based partly on an estimate that assumed the same proportion of confederate soldiers had died of disease as Union soldiers had. This number was about as close as they could probably come a hundred years ago, but it's not exactly fool proof.

New studies raise the estimated number of dead by about 20% - the total number of deaths has gone from about 600,000 to 750,000, according to this nifty article by the New York Times.

Deeeementia!

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:59:00 +0000

We are pleased to find that Dr. Demento has been playing a couple of tracks by the staff band, The Back Row Hooligans. . Here's one of the songs, inspired by a line in one of the end-of-chapter quizzes:

Our Very First iBook

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:39:00 +0000

There's a new edition of The Smart Aleck's Guide to Grave Robbing available on the ibook store today! Newly formatted just for iPads, with more colorful illustrations. We had some trouble convincing them that this was a text book. Most likely, we'll continue to do guides in both kindle/nook format and ibook editions, which will be a bit more dynamic and colorful. Shakespeare guides (and others!) are still in production, but we've gotten in a bit over our heads taking other assignments around here. Adam has at least three Chicago history/ghostlore books to write this year, and possibly as many as five!

Poopsmith: The Career for You

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 04:49:00 +0000

While working on our Shakespeare guides, we jotted down a list of Elizabethan job titles. A couple of officials in Shakespeare's day were The Master of Revels (whose job was to make sure that the plays didn't offend anyone - they could be naughty, but not too blasphemous or political) and The Keeper of the Heads (whose job was to keep an eye on the traitor's heads displayed on London Bridge). When we were thinking of "Elizabethan Jobs We'd Like To See," one that came up was "Her Majesty's Royal Poopsmith."

This WAS a real job, though - the official title of one to dug up latrines was "gong farmer." "Gong" was from an old-fashioned word that meant "to go." The pay was low, and gong farmers couldn't live too close to others.

Nice to have something to fall back on if head-keeping doesn't work out.

Romney and Co. Eat Money

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:37:00 +0000

Something we threw together here at HQ with a photo of Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital guys that was in the Boston Globe:

A take off of a famous Nixon poster distributed by Kennedy supporters:

Really, we think the Romney shot is the more damning of the two. The Nixon shot just happens to show him looking kind of sleazy - it's not really much better than making fat jokes about Governor Christie. The Romney one is similar, in that the Mephistopholes look on his face is probably just a coincidence, but what's going on in the picture re-enforces the image of Romney as "that upper management meatball that everyone in the company thinks is incompetent." You can just picture him leaning over your cubicle and saying "What are you working on?" now and then, until the day he comes by and says, "Hi, Adam. Can you come by my office in a little bit for a little sit-down? That'd be great."

History shows that "experience" is not a great indicator of who will be a good president and who won't. Frankly, we've only had a handful who were all that great to start with, so there's no way to pick out a pattern of what sort of background a good president should have (and one can assume that it varies by era, anyway - different kinds of people are needed for different times). Many have been governors or military men, but many of those have also really sucked as president. Lincoln was a country lawyer and a former junior house nobody when he was elected. Eisenhower was a pretty good president who had military experience, but without enough political experience even to have declared which party he was in before the election. Grant was a great general whose experience didn't end up translating well. Herbert Hoover was one of the most successful and respected men in the world when he was elected - he was an organizational genius. Both parties wanted to nominate him at various times. But his policies didn't translate as well as they seemed like they would.

What happened with Borders books (the late, lamented chain store that actually carried our book) is an example of why we here at HQ don't think being a good business man means you'd be a good president. Borders tried to make next quarter look better by gradually lowering selection, focusing more on big-ticket items, and spending less on in-store events and entertainment at most locations. These moves cut back on costs and put the focus onto products with better margins, but after a few years of these cuts, they didn't have much of a company left. We can make our budget look better as a country by cutting back on spending on education, infrastructure, fire prevention, police, etc - but after a few years of it, how's the country going to look? You can't just lay people off to streamline the country. You can stop spending money on educating, feeding, or insuring them, but you'll still have to deal with them. They'll still be your citizens. It's not like firing them, where they're out of sight and out of mind once they're out the door.

Then again, in the interest of being fair and balanced, maybe now is the time for a business man to take the reins and turn the ship around. It'd be one hard message to sell, what with all the anti-corporate sentiment going around and all, but maybe Mitt can find a way to turn the above photo into a net positive.

Ron Paul and the Beatnik Party of 1960

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:09:00 +0000

A friend of mine once observed that when you take the "extreme right" and the "extreme left," the versions that the mainstream wings of the party generally try to ignore, they're not much different from each other. Ron Paul's people wouldn't have much to do with the Beatnik Party of 1960, but, really, Paul reminds me of them quite a bit.

In 1960, a group of beatniks gathered in New York to build a platform and nominate a candidate as the Beatnik Party's nominee for president.

One attendee was Joffre Stuart, a 34-year-old poet from Chicago who had been featured in "Howl," Allen Ginsberg's epid beatnik poem. Ginsberg described him as a man

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
    behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
    and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
    place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
    F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
    eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
    prehensible leaflets,

Leaflets were always Joffre's thing. He still passes them out today - at the 2007 Bughouse Square debates, which serve as a reunion for old Chicago bohemia, he was passing out leaflets promoting the idea that 9/11 was the result of a conspiracy by "Jewish chauvanists."

Back in 1960, the party convention fell into two factions - responsible and irresponsible - Stuart became the leading voice of the irresponsible beatniks. They opposed actually nominating someone at all. "Like, only squares really nominate someone," said Stuart. Eventually, they agreed to allow for someone to be nominated, on the condition that the candidate not be bound to the platform. After all, as Stuart noted, "only finks play to win."

The beatniks then set about coming up with a platform. A few things were eventually agreed on: they were for peace with all nations (because "all beatniks are cowards"), and opposed to atomic energy, sex laws, work (the cry of "abolish work" was heard loud), and, of course, squares.

No official slogan was picked, though several were bandied about, such as "We have nothing to lose, we're already beat!" and "Trust us with the peace - we're too cowardly to fight."

When it came time to pick a nominee, Stuart raised his hand. "Is there a bastard in the house?" he asked. He felt that since this was an ANTI-candidate, a bastard would be appropriate.

About four people raised their hands. All but one, the hand of Jimmy the Greek, eventually dropped when Stuart asked them to be honest.

"All right!" said Stuart. "I nominate Jimmy the Greek!"

The convention went through four ballots - making it, in the words of one reporter, "the only convention of the year that wasn't rigged." Senator Kennedy was one of seven men on the first ballot - he tied with Jimmy the Greek at three votes - but it was then ruled that only people present could be nominated.

Votes were then confined to Jimmy the Greek, Tom Condit, "Big Bill," or WIlliam Lloyd Smith, owner of Maury's Beatnik Bookstore in Chicago, who was representing the responsible wing. After a bitter floor fight, the nomination went to Smith.

Smith selected Stuart as his running mate, which made for a balanced ticket - not geographically, since both were from Chicago, but in terms of race (Smith was white, Stuart black) and responsibility. Smith was a "responsible" sort, or, anyway, he seemed to be. "Bill knew more about politics than I did," Stuart said years later. "But he was a total anarchist."

His two part plan for the county was something to behold: as President, his first act would be to dissolve the government. His second would be to resign.

Not even Republican VP candidate Barry Goldwater, who was well known for anti-federal government posturing, could top that.

Nearly 50 years later, I ran into Stuart in Bughouse Square. Up until about 1960, Bughouse Square, on the lower North side of Chicago, used to be a popular place to go to make speeches. On nights when the weather was good, upwards of 3000 people would cram into the park to heckle the soapbox orators, which ranged from hobos to famous lawyers and politicians of the day. The park is quiet now, but once a year the adjacent Newberry Library hosts "The Bughouse Square Debates," where they sort of re-enact the park from its glory days.

Having long been familiar with the park from its appearances in novels by Daniel Pinkwater, and having more than a passing familiarity with bohemian Chicago history, I went in 2007 with an audio recorder to make a podcast, and figured Stuart for a regular old-timer. I asked him who he remembered from the park, and he mentioned Bill Smith. I asked if that was the guy who ran for President, and Stuart grinned. "Yes, he did! And I was the vice presidential candidate. Or anti-candidate, anyway….we were a blip on the history of electoral politics."

The official topic that day was immigration, and Joffre's own brief speech was a little tour de force. "The framing of the question is false!" he declared. "The borders which separate us from one another were created by an illegal war brought on by the people who brought my significant ancestors over from Africa….down with the state! Revolution!" He shouted the last word with a flourish.

Had Joffre been running for president that day, he could have vaulted to the front of the primary opinion polls - particular if it was one of those years where the only "not-frothing-at-the-mouth" candidates were too boring for anyone to get excited about them.

But as soon as he finished talking, he went right back to handing out leaflets alleging that 9/11 was the result of a conspiracy of "Jewish chauvinists."

It's difficult now for me not to compare Joffre to Ron Paul. His anti-government logic was tight and attractive, and you had to admire a guy for sticking to his guns no matter how many feathers it ruffled. You had to admire his passion.

But what about those newsletters and leaflets?

If you haven't followed the news, it seems that in the 1980s and 90s, Ron Paul had a series of newsletters that cost $99 bucks a year to subscribe to. They were full of weird conspiracy theories, the occasional racist rant, and other things that no one who actually expected to get elected could say out loud in the 21st century. You can read an 8 page letter he sent out to drum up subscribers here and many pdfs of examples here.

If Paul hadn't plugged them on TV, I would doubt that they were real. As it is, I have many questions:

1. That letter is from 1995. Desktop publishing was not new or unusual then. The Star Wars fanzine I put out in 1994 looked better than this.

2. Who in the world would pay $99 a year to subscribe to something based on a letter like that?

3. How could Paul not have known about these? His claim is that not only did he not write them, but he didn't even know about them until years after the fact. Wouldn't he have heard from a handful of crazy people? I get crazy letters from people about ghost stories all the time. If these newsletters were as widely-circulated as has been claimed (he apparently made a lot off of them), how come no one tracked him down and confronted him over this stuff?

4. I know he's for free enterprise and all, but wouldn't you prosecute someone who put stuff like this out under your name without your knowledge?

5. If he really didn't even take a casual glance at these things, how in the world can he be considered responsible enough to run a country?

Everyone who runs for office has skeletons in the closet - a bad business deal, some investors with shady pasts, attending church services where the pastor was a maniac, getting involved with a weird group or two. But you have to own up to it before people can move on. The more of these I see, the less I'm inclined to believe Paul didn't approve of them, or even that he didn't write at least some of them. Many of the conspiracies here are fairly common talking points that come up when I argue with libertarians; most major players in the party know that they appeal a lot to this sort of people (as one of the last groups that will actually argue against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and most of the things it accomplished), and surely a few of them have tried to get ahead by appealing to those people.

Joffre Stuart made a fun "fringe" candidate in 1960. But even if, by William Lloyd Smith came back from the dead and he and Joffre somehow became the democratic nominees, they couldn't get past those newsletters and leaflets of Joffre's in the general election. And I don't think Ron Paul could, either. He can poll up to about 25% in some primary polls, and that MIGHT be enough for him to carry a state or two as long as the field remains crowded with other candidates, the weather is bad enough that only die-hards come out to the caucus, etc. But that 25% is right about where his support tops out. It'd be interesting to see how the GOP at large reacted to him winning the primaries, but I think it's safe to say that they wouldn't take it sitting down. His policies have about as much to do with the regular GOP than the Beatnik Party had to do with John F. Kennedy's.

I believe it was PT Barnum who once said it was morally wrong to let suckers keep their money. I won't be voting for Paul under any circumstances that I can imagine, but what I'd like him to do us say "look, I'm not proud of those letters. But I thought I was done with electoral politics, so it didn't matter what I said, and I found that there was good money in ripping off hillbillies. If they didn't give it to me, they'd just give it to someone worse."

Go Ahead and Pray, Kiddos!

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:11:00 +0000

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father." - Jesus.

That's from Matthew, Chapter 6, in your trusty Bible. It's not from Paul's commentary, and obscure verse from a chapter that outlaws the eating of shrimp, it's straight from the mouth of Jesus himself. I was about 13 when I first noticed that verse. If Jesus told people that it was better to pray in private, why the whole push for prayer in school?

Of course, by then I knew that the issue was already rife with misinformation. Any kid can pray any time they feel like it, provided they aren't disrupting the class (i.e., during lessons on evolution, you can't sit there shouting "Dear God, please kill this evil teacher and send her to hell where demons will torture her in the lake of fire for all time" so loudly that no one can hear what she's saying). The rule is just that the school can't organize or sponsor the prayer. It seemed to me that the "prayer in school" fight was just people fighting to get the government to recognize that THEIR religion was the RIGHT one.

Now and then, you DO hear stories about kids being told not to pray, or that it isn't allowed. This is because certain groups have been VERY successful in spreading the myth that school is not allowed. Apparently, even the governor of Texas is misinformed by it.

Well, perhaps he is, anyway. When someone goes on TV and says that prayer is not allowed in school, there are two possible reasons:

1. The person is misinformed. For most people, this is understandable, since there's so much misinformation out there (though for a governor of Texas to be so badly misinformed about something like this, which comes up a lot, is inexcusable).

2. The person is trying to play to people's base fears and prejudices in order to rile them up.

When a school lunch aide tells a kid not to bow his head before eating his chicken nuggets (despite the fact that praying to SOMEONE before eating those things is probably wise), it's probably the former.

But the people who are telling that lunch aide that prayer is not allowed - politicians, TV preachers, radio talk show hosts, and other noisemakers - should really know better. And I tend to assume that they DO know better.

History rarely smiles on politicians who get elected by playing up to people's fears and prejudices (and as a historian, you'd think Newt Gingrich would know this).

John Newberry: Morally Upright Weenie

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:45:00 +0000

In his seminal review of our first book, Richie Partington wrote that "awards committees are not likely to take seriously a history book like THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE." And right he was! We got short-listed for several, but few awards committee-types would risk their rep by sticking their necks out for a book with a title like that.

But you know what? Recently, our pal James Kennedy asked us to find out some stuff about John Newberry to use in his "90 Second Newberry" presentation at the New York Public Library, and what we found out shocked us. Do we even WANT an award named for such a guy?

Well, we ain't gettin' one anyway, so we might as well not want it, huh? Here's our video. I wear a bow tie in it. Bow ties are cool.

Anonymous

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:48:00 +0000

This afternoon I went to see anonymous with David Kathman (of
shakespeareauthorship.com) and Greg Reynolds, both of whom I know from
my time on Shakespeare newsgroups, where authorship arguments tend to
overshadow any real discussion about Shakespeare. The vibe on many of
them is more like a professional wrestling match than an academic
debate. In high school I went through a period of arguing that Edward
De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real author of Shakespeare. It
didn't last long and I'm sort of ashamed of it now, but in the process
I learned a lot about Shakespeare's life, times and works, as well as
a lot of valuable lessons about info literary that have served me
well. Kathman argued me down a lot in those days, if I remember right,
but he also did so gracefully, and, anyway, all of us on that group
knew that when we argued with David, we were in over our heads to
begin with. It was fun now, a decade later, to sit laughing at a movie
about that theory with him.

Anonymous is a movie based loosely around the "Oxfordian" theory. The
sets are stunning, the cinematography is masterful, the costumes are
fantastic. But the three of us spent half the movie laughing. One
line, "I can't very well put MY name on it. I'M the 17 Earl of
Oxford!" struck us as particularly rich, as did the scene where de
Vere's wife goes into hysterics because her husband is WRITING again.

The theory put forth here is that de Vere was the illegitimate son -
and, later, lover - of Queen Elizabeth, and could have been king if
only he had been able to stay away from writing poetry. This is a
version of the Oxfordian theory that is too outlandish even for most
Oxfordian. They didn't go the route of having everyone in town know
who the REAL author was, and never dreaming that Will Shakespeare of
Stratford was anything but a grain merchant who happened to have the
same name as the Earl's pen name, but THAT version frankly would have
been more plausible than what they came up with. I don't think the
story here is going to persuade many new converts to Oxfordianism.

Shakespeare is here portrayed as a guy who reminded me of, well….
imagine if Richard Simmons grew a mustache and was constantly
wandering around in a daze, as though he'd just been clubbed in the
head with a two by four. It's said that he's illiterate - he can read,
but "never learned to form his letters," and panics when he's
challenged to write the letter I. I'm not sure that this even makes
sense. If one can read, one ought to be able to copy down the abcs,
the same way I can draw a respectable triangle without knowing much
about trigonometry.

Meanwhile, Christopher Marlowe has a small role as a villain who calls
to mind the snake from Disney's version of The Jungle Book. In one
scene where he reveals that he knows Shakespeare isn't the author, it
can only have been by sheer force of will that the actor didn't start
twirling his mustache.

Ben Johnson, meanwhile, plays the one guy who knows de Vere's secret
and who single-handedly thwarts the Essex rebellion. As a character
here he sometimes made me think of Captain Jack Sparrow. Never once
did he make me think of Ben Johnson (though one of the other
playwrights - I think it was supposed to be Thomas Nashe - did). I
never did figure out what made the character here tick, and he was
such a big character that I felt like I needed to know more about him.

The anachronisms pile up one on top of the other. We have Venus and
Adonis being published in 1601 (8 years too late), Marlowe being
stabbed by Shakespeare in 1598 (not by himself in a tavern five years
earlier), everyone being shocked that Romeo and Juliet is entirely in
iambic pentameter (they wouldn't have been even if it was). The Essex
Rebellion went down entirely differently than it does in the history
books. Etc. Changing these things around to condense the narrative,
make the story easier to follow, or to give it more emotional heft is
perfectly fine for a movie, I think - but in this case the changes
didn't really do any of those things.

I wanted to think, early on, that if you gave everyone a different
name and didn't pretend that this had anything to do with history, it
would have been a great movie. But I wound up spending too much time
wondering what was going on, and why I should care much. There seemed
to be two movies inside of the screenplay - one about political
intrigue and the relationship between Elizabeth and Edward, and quite
another about the theatre. It wound up feeling like a bit of both but
not enough of either. I spent a lot of time not quite sure what was
going on, and a general knowledge of the era didn't help, because they
deviated from the facts so much that I only got more confused.

People are going to compare this to Shakespeare in Love, which was
also entirely fiction. But for all that was wrong with SIL, it was
still a wonderful, entertaining, and moving film. Though the notion of
Shakespeare making up the plot of Romeo and Juliet himself was absurd
(like most of his plays, the plot was not original), but at least the
changes there made clear sense to the movie as a whole - and it
contained plenty of details that made it obvious that the writers knew
the Elizabethan theatre world pretty well. We don't really know what
kind of guy Shakespeare was in 1593, in his late 20s, at the time of
Marlowe's death, when he was making the transition from being a
promising playwright to being the Soul of the Age, but Shakespeare in
Love comes off as a pretty good guess. And when they changed things,
you knew it was all in good fun - not to make a point or promote a
theory.

Still, Anonymous had a lot going for it. The cinematography, as
mentioned before, was fantastic, and many of the theatrical scenes
were great - The St. Crispin's day speech was just as rousing as it
was supposed to be. I also liked Oxford's chambers, with books
everywhere, bizarre scientific specimens in glasses, a zebra head on
the wall, maps all over…it's exactly as though someone had tried to
dream up the office of a 17th century genius and done a hell of a job
with it. And even though I got confused a lot, I definitely never got
bored.

I was quite pleased for an entirely selfish reason - my new book,
EXTRAORDINARY*, is out next Tuesday, and prominently features two bits
of Shakespeare - a bit from Twelfth Night, and the St. Crispin's day
speech (which characters shout as they roll a Wells Fargo wagon full
of unicorn poop through the streets of Des Moines), and both of them
just happen to turn up in the movie (along with the opening speech
from Richard III, which is also in both).

On The Evolution of the Words "Pee" and "Poop."

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:34:00 +0000

(here's a cross-post from Playground Jungle)

Folklorists generally ignored fart rhymes and other "naughty" ones up until about the 1970s. Even Iona Opie, a nursery rhyme expert who was no prude, was referring to "unprintable rhymes" in the 1950s. But it can generally be assumed that any time you find a counting-out rhyme about a stink, that rhyme was also used when someone farted.

Here's one from The Counting Out Rhymes of Children, an 1888 tome by a guy named Henry Carrington Bolton (with a name like that, he just about HAD to be a 19th century scholar):

Ink, pink, a penny a wink
Oh, how do you stink!
-- (Ontario, Canada)

Another one goes back even further - Mary Cooper recorded it in Tom Thumb's Pretty Song Book, the very oldest surviving collection of nursery rhymes, which she published in 1744

Little robin redbreast sat on a pole
niddle noddle went his head, poop went his hole

Eventually people cleaned up the last line - it was later published as "wiggle waggle went his tail," which, of course, doesn't even rhyme. Lame. Incidentally, the "poop" here means "fart." When the word "poop" first appeared in America, it meant "butt." In 1640, a guy named Ned Ward wrote a sentence that went "while he manages his whiffle staff with one hand, he scratches his poop with the other." But a 1714 dictionary actually defined the word "poop" as "to break wind backwards." It didn't start being used in its modern sense until around 1900 (according to the book on the left). So, while "poop" has become a broadly accepted, even polite term for both excretion and that which one excretes, you're really showing that you're a fan of traditional values when you use a much older term, like %&%^.

Another rhyme in the same 1744 collection:

Piss a bed, piss a bed,
barley butt
your bum is so heavy
you can't get up.

This later turned up in Joyce's Ulysses.. "Piss" meant the same thing then as it does now - in fact, it's one of the older words in the English language. People starting saying the first initial, "pee" (I suppose we should spell it "p---" ) when "piss" started to be considered impolite. Even the cleaned-up versions of the rhymes are pretty well out of circulation now, as far as we can tell, but the 1700s were not a terribly prudish time.

Grave Robbing: Interview with a professional "subject gatherer."

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:26:00 +0000

Nearly half a century after the Anatomy Act was passed in the U.K., granting medical schools the bodies of poor people who had no friends to pay for a burial, colleges in the states were still desperate for bodies - desperate enough that you could bring a body to most medical schools and trade it in for cash or valuable prizes, no questions asked. Here’s an interview with Charles Keeton, “Professor of Subject-Gathering” conducted by the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1878. Keeton was proud of his profession, since his labors were performed in the interest of science:

Enquirer; How long have you been in the business?

KEETON: About eleven years, sir. I began with Mr. Cunningham, “Old Cunny,” they called hi, eleven years ago, and have followed the business every winter since that.

Does it pay pretty well?

Not now. It used to pay, for we got a good price for subjects, but there isn’t much money in it now.

Why don’t they pay so much now?

Well, sir, the fact is I don’t want to say nothing against anybody, but it ‘pears to me that somebody ain’t exactly doing the fair thing by the profession of subject-gathering. I don’t ‘cuse none of the doctors themselves of going out to get stiffs, but there is something wrong somewhere. The old demonstrators of anatomy at the colleges wouldn’t have stooped to such a thing either, but I think things are changed now. I went to the demonstrator of one college— I ain’t going to call any names— in March, and asked him how many subjects they were going to want for the spring session, and he told me he thought they wouldn’t want any more, that they had enough on hand. Well, you see, I know better than that, and my private ‘pinion is that that ‘ere demonstrator gets his subjects in some queer sort of way. I don’t say that he goes out for ‘em himself, but if he doesn’t he must have some no ‘count men that would as soon rob the grave of a party well connected, with lots of friends, as any other way. Now, now body snatcher as has any respect for hisself or his calling ‘ll do a thing of that sort. There’s plenty of material lying ‘round and rotting, just rotting, sir, and no friends to claim it.

How long have you been at the business?

It’s about eleven years since I first begun it. I begun with Old Cunny. First he paid me $3 a head; that was while I was learning. Then he gave me $8 apiece, and finally I decided to quit him and go by myself, and so he said he’d give me half, and then we worked together and shared till he died.

Do you make it a regular business, then?

I get my living by it in the winter time.

What do you get for subjects?

We used to get about $25 apiece for them, but lately the price somehow has got down to $15. The professors buy some subjects for themselves, and they most always get them for about $15.

How do you usually get the bodies?

Well, we generally go out two together and go to a burying ground. We go to the poor lots, the Potter’s Field, and when we can find any fresh graves we get the bodies.

You don’t get them from the parts where the better class of people are buried?

No. Lots of times Cunny and I have been out together and we’d find a fresh grave on a large lot, and Cunny would always say “Come ‘long, honey, we won’t take that.’ When we’d come through to the part where the graves were close together, and we knew it was the poor lot where the people without any friends were buried, then we’d dig down to the coffin, break it open, and put a rope around the neck and pull the body out. I don’t do it that way now, though, for it is just as easy to throw all the dirt out. Then, after throwing it out, I generally get down and open the coffin, and take the body by the waist and lift it out to my partner. He takes it, and gently runs a knife down the back and rips the clothes off, and lets ‘em drop down. Then we slip the head into a sack, press the knees up against the chest, and slip the body in it and tie the sack. That’s all there is to it.

How do you enjoy the work?

Well, it wasn’t very pleasant at first, of course, but any one gets used to it. It is for the good of science, and I think it is just as right and honorable as for the man what does the dissection. I want to say one thing, though, and that is that the colored people have ‘cused me of robbing the graves and their graveyards. I never have done so. I have took up a good many bodies of colored people wot was buried in the poor lot, but never any other.

How many do you suppose you have furnished in your experience as a body snatcher?

Maybe 500. I got about forty last winter, but it wasn’t a very good winter for it, though.

For WAY more information:

Drafting the Confederate Constitution (Chapter 4 supplemental article)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:18:00 +0000

In 1861, big shots from the newly formed Confederate States of America met in Montgomery to draft a provisional constitution for their new country. Only sight changes were made between their provisional draft and the final one.

Not many changes were made to the original United States constitution - Jefferson Davis gave a speech saying that the new constitution was what the founding fathers intended, and differed only in that it made their original intention more explicit (in a very good example of the still-common fallacy of thinking that the original founding fathers all agreed on anything).

Of particular note is the addition of a line to the pre-amble which invokes the aid of "Almighty God," a concept left out of the United States constitution altogether. Confederate archives that were captured by the Union in 1865 give an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how this was added.

After some debate about whether to call the new country The Confederate States of America or The Republic of Washington, a motion was made to ad "invoking the aid of Almighty God" into the pre-amble. One man objected and wanted the line removed. Another wanted it changed to "invoking the aid of almighty God, who is the God of the Bible and the rightful source of all power and government." But, since this might imply that Christianity was the official religion, Judah P. Benjamin, the most notable Jewish confederate big shot, objected. The short "almighty God" line was kept; the longer one and more explicit one was left out.

There was also an attempt by either Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb, the be-mulleted gent above, or his cousin Thomas Howell Cobb, the guy below who looks like a larger, fresh-from-the-fight clone of Stephan Douglas (sources aren't clear about which Cobb it was), to add a line stating "No man shall be compelled to do civil duty on Sunday."

It was quickly rejected, so whichever Cobb it was tried to insert a law about at least banning the delivery of mail on Sunday. A guy from Louisiana said that the people of Louisiana believed that people could worship God any day they wanted, so Louisiana should be exempt from that law. Texas wanted out too, and in the end the whole line was removed.

Interestingly, the provisional authors voted down a rule saying that all new states joining the Confederacy had to allow slavery. However, since the final draft very explicitly protected the right to own slaves, such a rule would have been unnecessary. A non-slave state could have joined, but it would have immediately become a slave state.

For all the talk you hear about "State's Rights" being a major cause, there's precious little of it in the CSA constitution, other than some lip service to the states acting in their "sovereign character." That's the impression one gets from reading accounts of these conventions and meetings - they would talk about state's rights now and then, but there was only one that really loomed large in their mind. Once people got started talking about slavery and their frustration with northern attempts to end it, it was hard to get them to shut up.

Slavery and the Civil War (Chapter 4 supplemental article)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:49:00 +0000

The issue in The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History that generates the most mail is, without question, slavery and the Civil War. There are a LOT of people out there who absolutely insist that it never occurred to anyone that slavery had anything to do with what was going on at the time, and the real fight was about "State's Rights" and that thousand of black soldiers fought for the Confederacy.

Most of this is a myth - but to say that the war was "about" slavery is over simplifying. Let's take a look....

For the whole first half of the 19th century, there was no more divisive issue in America than slavery. And every ten years or so, the south would threaten to secede from the union to preserve it. The whole point of the Mexican American War was to add more "slave" states so that slave states would continue to be able to outvote non-slave states in congress.

By 1860, the growth of the country was robbing the South of its power. Today, no single region holds THAT much power, and for a president to be elected without winning any state in New England or the Southeast is hardly unheard of. But when Lincoln won without even being on the ballot in many Southern counties, people got rather freaked out.

If you read through the articles of secession that a few states issued, the reason they left was very clear: it was to preserve slavery. In fact, they usually mentioned slavery in the first couple of sentences. The new Republican party was thought of as an anti-slavery party (which wasn't totally accurate; it's like when conservatives calls the Democrats the pro-gay marriage party today), and with the country adding new states, we were approaching a situation where all the OTHER states could vote to outlaw slavery, and the south would just have to sit there and take it. This could have affected other issues besides slavery, but if you look at the documents and rhetoric from the time, it's hard to figure out which other issues, if any, were on their minds.

In fact, the CSA's constitution didn't provide many additional states' rights. In fact, by giving the president a line item veto and a six year term, it could be argued that they made their president MORE powerful (they did give him a single term, but it was largely an age of one term presidents). Really, the CSA constitution was just a minor revision of the USA one, with one particularly glaring change: a section that insured that congress would pass no law restricting slavery (see our article about the drafting of the CSA constitution, including a picture of a guy with a mullet.)

One the fighting began, no one really thought of it as a war to end slavery - they thought of it as a dust-up to get things back to "normal." But once it became clear that this was not going to be a three month conflict, but an actual war, ending slavery seemed like a good move for a variety of reasons. It gave the north a rallying cry, along with a new supply of soldiers in freed slaves. But another issue was that if the war DIDN'T end slavery, but just brought the south back to the union, we would just end up fighting the same war over again sooner or later.

Most of the "it wasn't slavery" brigade sends us the same false information - usually a quote from Grant saying that if he thought it was about slavery, he would have fought for the other side (which, as we state in a sidebar, was just a quote someone made up to make him look bad when he was running for president in 1872), or the common story that thousands of black soldiers fought for the confederacy - they weren't allowed to join at all until the very last weeks of the war, when they were desperate enough to offer freedom for service. None are known to have seen combat. Prior to that, the south was always fearful of a slave revolt, and arming black people was the last thing they wanted to do. They wouldn't even consider black union soldiers to be actual soldiers when negotiating the release of prisoners.

But that's not to say that every soldier in the CSA army was fighting to protect slavery, or that every soldier in the Union was out to end it. Indeed, your average soldier probably didn't care too much one way or the other. The reason they fought was that there was a war going on. From the point of view of a confederate soldier, there was an army marching into their home state, ready to burn down their home and everything around them. Very few of the soldiers actually owned any slaves, but all of them felt that they had SOMETHING to protect. When a ruling came down that men who owned enough slaves were exempt from service, soldiers sneered that this was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight." And in the union, when the draft came around and men could get out of it by paying $300 (roughly a year's salary for many working class men at the time), soldiers THERE sneered that it was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

Then again, most wars are.

Ask the Smart Aleck Staff: The Boston Tea Party

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:52:00 +0000

Here comes some reader mail from Ava, a reader in Nebraska,

In your book, you say that the Boston Tea Party was a protest against the government giving tax breaks to a business. So why do the tea party guys dress up like colonists? And why did the Boston Tea Party people dress up like Native Americans?

Great quest, Ava! First of all, here's a multiple choice question for you:

Which party is most often guilty of making wild claims about how The Founding Fathers would agree with them?
a. Democrats
b. Republicans
c. Libertarians
d. whichever party is not currently in power.

The answer is usually D (and, therefore, C - those guys are never in charge).

Both sides are making ridiculous generalizations to imply that the framers of our country all felt the same way on any given issue (especially issues relating to things they couldn't have imagined in the 18th century).

Exactly who counts as a Founding Father and who doesn't is a bit of an X factor - some count everyone who lived in the 1700s, some just count the people who fought in the wars and/or served in congress, and some just pick and choose at random. But any way you slice it, the Founding Fathers were a rather diverse bunch (for a bunch of rich white guys). They didn't agree on much back then, and they wouldn't agree on much now. When you ask what the founding fathers would think of any given issue, you really have to take it on a founding father by founding father basis.

And even then, their individual views evolved over time - it's impossible to guess what they'd make of the situation now. Even if we dug them up (you know that we here on the Smart Aleck Staff just LOVE grave robbing) to see if they'd registered their disapproval by rolling over in their graves (as one does), it would take some hardcore forensics to figure out WHEN they'd rolled over (or how many times). Even if they were facing down, they might have rolled over at the Missouri Compromise, then again the Nebraska Kansas Act, and again during Bloody Kansas.

As for the costumes, one thing conservatives and liberals have in common is that their protest rallies tend to be taken as an invitation to put on stupid costumes, say stupid things, and act obnoxious (see also: the Smart Aleck's Guide to Making an Ass Of Yourself) (one that we're definitely qualified to write!). Protest rallies in the 1770s were probably no different.

But we digress (as we do). In the 18th century, the East India Company was BIG business - it actually controlled parts of India for a time. In the 1770s, the British government gave them a legal monopoly on importing and exporting tea - colonists who wanted to buy tea from anyone who wasn't one of their consignees had to buy tea from smugglers. Smugglers didn't pay taxes, so they were able to keep their prices low. To help the East India Company, the government gave them MASSIVE tax breaks, allowing them to lower their prices and push competitors out of business.

But there was no spending cut attached to the tax break, so the government made up for the loss of revenue by passing The Townsend Acts, which added some taxes for colonists, including one on tea. They were not exactly crippling taxes, but the colonists were rather miffed that they had to pick up the slack to allow for a company to get a tax break.

So they organized boycotts, and started pushing locally-grown tea that didn't need to be imported (but apparently was not very good). It worked well enough that in 1770 the government repealed most of the taxes in the Townsend Acts - except for the one on tea, which they left in place just to show that they could. For a few years, taxes on both the company and the colonies went up and down. By 1773, the East India Company was basically operating tax free, and were allowed to do their own exporting, cutting out middlemen and helping keep their prices far lower than any competitors. Some in parliament wanted to do away with the tea tax, since it was just annoying the colonists, but they had set it up so that the revenues it brought in were what paid the wages of local officials, like judges.

With the smaller-time dealers and smugglers out of business, the East India Company now controlled the tea trade - if they didn't name your store as a consignee, you'd be going out of business. Several people who WERE consignees resigned in protest. In 1773, seven East India Company ships were sent to the colonies, but since their consignees had resigned, six had to be sent back - all except the one bound for Boston, where the governor had talked the consignees out of resigning.

Sam Adams (brother of John) held a meeting at which people passed a resolution urging the ship to turn around and go home. 25 people guarded it against being unloaded. On the last night before the deadline by which they had to either pay the duties and unload the tea or go home, another meeting was held, attended by some 7000 people.

According to legend, when it became apparent that the governor wasn't about to let the ships go home without paying the duties on their cargo, Adams said "this meeting can do nothing further to save the country," which was the coded signal for the tea partiers to take action. As with most of these legends, it isn't exactly right - the phrase may or may not have been a code, and Adams may have tried to STOP people from leaving because he wasn't done talking yet.

But hundreds DID leave, and one group (from 30 to 130, depending on who you ask) boarded the ship, supposedly dressed as Mohawk Indians (to conceal their identities and guard against being accused of treason, though it's hard to imagine the disguises actually fooling anyone - we here at the Smart Aleck's Guide think there's just something about a protest that makes people want to get dressed up in pointless costumes). Once on board, they dumped the tea in the water.

What they were there for is probably a mixed bag - some might have been generally anti-tax, but it seems like the issue most were protesting was paying taxes to allow for a company's tax break. We don't know of anyone railing that parliament should have been cutting spending altogether and eliminating the need for taxes.

Others, of course, were probably just there because it sounded like a real party.

No one at the time really seems to have thought they made much of a point, and even most of the pro-independence colonists seem to have found the whole affair sort of embarrassing - the sort of thing that made them look like they were nuts. The British responded with MORE "intolerable acts."

But the bottom line is that the party was about saying "this sucks, let's change it." This is something both parties can get behind - neither has a monopoly on the Boston Tea Party. But it's certainly VERY difficult to imagine the modern "tea partiers" having any issue with the government making things easier on the East India Company. In any case, the common notion that all of the "founding fathers" favored small government, low taxes, and the rest of the Libertarian Party platform goes against the basics of human nature. The "Framers" were arguing about what the part in the Constitution about promoting the general welfare meant before the ink was even dry.

Victorian "Mummy Unwrapping Parties:" Fact or Fiction?

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Selzer) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:09:00 +0000

One often comes across mention of the Victorian fad for "unwrapping parties." In those days, you could buy an actual mummy at any decent antiquities auction, and many of them were bought and publicly "unwrapped." According to the oft-repeated story, it became a huge fad among the upper class to host "unwrapping parties," where a mummy would be unrolled in one's parlor, with the trinkets found within the folds given out as gifts.

While we here at the Smart Aleck's Guide were working on our guide to grave robbing, we went looking for accounts of actual unwrapping parties. As far as we can tell, the term "unwrapping party" didn't appear in print until the very late 20th century. We never found a single account of anyone unwrapping a mummy for the fun of it at a social function. There are no diary entries like:

Today was the big unwrapping party of Lord Autumnbottom's estate...the creature was gruesome and the smell horrid, and Henry and I were so covered with yellow dust that a man outdoors thought we were urchins and suggested that we die and decrease the surplus population. Henry says we must get a mummy of our own before Ascot, but I'm not at all sure I shouldn't rather simply play whist.

Public unwrappings DID happen. Here's the "party" invitation that probably sparked the urban legend - it's advertised a gathering at Lord Londesborough's home with "a mummy from Thebes to be unrolled at half-past two:"

But while this sure looks like a party invite, it wasn't a social gathering. Surviving accounts of what went on that 10th day of June, 1850, make it sound less like a party than an academic lecture. Most attendees were members of the Society of Antiquaries.

There were many other notable unwrapping (including a highly-publicized one in Boston at which a man unwrapped a "princess" who turned out to have a wiener), but most of them were held in lecture halls and universities, not at private homes. Many accounts indicate that having one at a party would have stunk up the house (even by Victorian standards), and that the dust and dried bitumen would have gotten all over everyone's clothes. Unwrappings were not something to attend in party clothes!

Full details of what we "uncovered*" are in our new book, The Smart Aleck's Guide to Grave Robbing!

* - Yeah, when you talk about researching grave robbing, making puns about stories you "dug up" just comes with the territory.