GROWTH OF ISLAM --- Episode 5

      WHAT IMPACT ON THE ECONOMY DID ISLAM HAVE??

    The impact of the expansion of Islam on the economy of western Europe has been the subject of enormous controversy among historians. There can be little doubt about the impact of Islam on the political and intellectual development  of early medieval Europe : it was negligible in both cases. The impact was negligible not because western Europe had nothing to learn from Islamic civilization ; on the contrary, both in government, in which the Arabic countries had absorbed the Roman-Byzantine traditions of bureaucracy, and in philosophy and science, the western Europeans could have benefited greatly from Arabic instruction. But during the early Middle Ages there were no Moslems living under Latin-Christian rule, and, because the western peoples looked upon the Moslems as perverse and pernicious heretics, they closed their eyes to the benefits they could derive from association with the Arabic peoples. 

   The Latin-Christian peoples deprived themselves of the benefits of Moslem civilization through their self-imposed political and cultural isolation. Only at the end of the tenth century did the hatred [imagine that : Christians hating] that the Christians felt fot Mohammed's teachings begin to take second place to the obvious advantages that could be gained through study at Cordoba.  THE GREATEST LATIN SCHOLAR OF THE AGE , THE FRENCHMAN GERBERT OF AURILLAC , WHO EVENTUALLY BECAME POPE, WENT TO MOSLEM SPAIN TO STUDY PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS.  The education received from Arabic teachers made him so intellectually superior to his Christian contemporaries that for many centuries Gerbert was regarded as the possessor of mysterious powers of sorcery and black magic. It was not until after 1100 that the iron curtain between Latin Europe and Moslem Spain was effectively breached. The result was the importation of the Aristotelian corpus from Spain and Sicily into western Europe, inaugurating an intellectual revolution. 

  The economic effects of the expansion of Islam are by no means so clear, and the question of the effect of the emergence of the new power bloc in the Mediterranean in the seventh and eighth centuries on the economic relations between the East and the West is still debated. This controversy was the result of the last work of the influential Belgian economic historian, Henri Pirenne, entitled Mohammed and Charlemagne and published posthumously in 1936. Pirenne was a rarity ---an able and learned scholar who was also am original thinker, and the master of a vivacious and persuasive literary style. 
   What was Pirenne's thesis ? Briefly, it was that the expansion of Islam brought about the economic disintegration of the Mediterranean world. The advance of Islam produced the finl separation of East from West and the end of the Mediterranean unity that, Pirenne claimed, had continued to exist all through the period of the Germanic invasions. Africa and Spain, which had always been part of the Latin world, belonged henceforth to a culture centered in Baghdad. "The western Mediterranean became a Moslem lake ; the west was blockaded and forced to live upon its own resources.  Fr the first time in history, the axis of life shifted northward from the Mediterranean." Cut off from Mediterranean life, western Europe reverted to a natural [that is, rural] economy and developed the new institutions of the feudal state and manorial society. The attractions of this clear, incisive, and cosmic thesis are obvious, and Pirenne was able to advance it with a considerable show of evidence. But several scholars writing after 1950 contended that the Mohammed and Charlemagne thesis is a gross exaggeration and oversimplification of the course of early medieval civilization. 
   Two distinct aspects of Pirenne's thesis must be sustained if his interpretation is to remain valid : first, that the Germanic invasions were not a turning point in economic history and second, that the expansion of Islam was the cataclysmic turning point. 
   Pirenne contended that in spite of the germanic invasions, the economic unity of the Mediterranean world was preserved in the fifth and sixth centuries and Merovingian France remained part of Mediterranean civilization. This view depends on a misreading, intentional or otherwise, of the picture of Merovingian society provided by Gregory of Tours. According to Gregory, there had not been a complete break with Mediterranean trade and culture, but there had been a marked decline of Mediterranean influence. In the economy of the sixth--century Gaul, trade and monetary transactions were not important ; Morovingian France was dependent to a large degree on landed wealth alone. The cities depicted in Gregory of Tours' history were political and episcopal centers, not commercial centers. The Roman curiales class had disappeared ; the trade with the eastern countries was carried on by easterners --- Syrians and Jews. Merovingian France, compared with Byzantium, was already an underdeveloped area in which agriculture was the basis of the economy and in which commerce was of little importance. This picture of the Merovingian economy, furthermore, has been substantiated by archaeological evidence. Obviously then, the economic decline of France and the disintegration of the economic unity of the Mediterranean world were well under way before Mohammed. 

GROWTH OF ISLAM --- Episode 4

                ISLAM CEASED SPREADING IN THE 700s 

   The caliph's position as the religious leader of Islam became a purely nominal one. By the end of the ninth century three distinct traditions and groups had emerged within the Moslem religious community, which by and large still prevail. First of all, there was the orthodox position , which had an overwhelming superiority in the size of its following. The orthodox position depended strictly on the Koranic revelation ; the Traditions of the Prophet, which were additional doctrinal pronouncements attributed to Mohammed and a vast complex of religious, moral, and social law derived from the Koran and the semicanonical Traditions. The caliph was supposed to be the defender of orthodoxy, but this task was actually assumed by a group of religious teachers whose attitude and professional status closely resembled that of the Talmudic Jewish rabbis, who, indeed, they may have originally emulated. There was no overriding central authority in the Moslem religious fellowship ; there was no pope in Islam. In each Moslem country the orthodox teachers banded together to proclaim the truths of revelation and religious law, and the extent of their power and influence depended largely on whether they could obtain the support of the state. Until the eleventh century the Arabic princes were frequently much more liberal and secular in their attitudes than were the leaders of the orthodoxy, and hence the latter, while they had great influence, generally lacked the power to persecute those who dissented from their doctrines and precepts. 
   The two other traditions in medieval Islamic religion were the MESSIANIC and the MYSTICAL. The Messianic form of Islamic thought involved the belief in a continuing revelation expressed by new prophets who claimed to be descendants of Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed. The supporters of these successor prophets [ Shiites ] were naturally bitterly opposed by the orthodox [Sunnis] who regarded Mohammed as the ultimate prophet. But occasionally, in the Middle East and northern India, messianic leaders succeeded in transforming their theocratic claims into actual political power and thereby provided isolated areas in which supporters of a continual revelation found refuge. 
   The MYSTICAL TRADITION in Islam, as in medieval Judaism, was a reaction against the stultifying confines of orthodoxy. The Moslem mystics [ Sufists ] sought a direct personal relationship with God and an intense religious experience as an escape from the heavy legalism of orthodoxy. 



   

GROWTH OF ISLAM --- Episode 3

It may be that the Arabs had fully expended their resources even before the battle of Tours and that they could not have, in any case, conquered France. But, their defeat put a stop to their further advance to the north, and they remained satisfied with Spain. Meanwhile, in 717 the Arabs made their last great assault on Constantinople before the fifteenth century and were unable to take the great fortress on the Bosporus. The Arabs quickly became masters of the Mediterranean and conquered Sicily and Crete, and they attacked Constantinople from the sea. But the citadel on the Dardanelles was able to withstand the Moslem onslaught in part because of a new weapon that the Byzantines had developed : the so-called GREEK FIRE, a form of incendiary bomb that the Greeks used to inflict great damage on the Moslem fleets. CONSTANTINOPLE THUS MANAGED TO TO SURVIVE THE ARAB ATTACK AND THEREBY SAVED WESTERN EUROPE FROM MOSLEM CONQUEST VIA THE SOFT UNDERBELLY OF THE EUROPEAN PENINSULA. Yet, of all its great and wealthy eastern provinces, Byzantium had managed to hold on to only Asia Minor . The harassed emperor was now forced on the defensive, and there was no possibility of the exhausted Byzantine state undertaking a war of reconquest against the Arabs for another two hundred years. 

   Until the middle of the eighth century, the extensive territory that the Arabs had conquered was under ONE RULE. The caliph made his capital in Damascus and ruled these vast territories and peoples with an autocratic government modeled on the oriental monarchy of Persia. In the eighth century the non-Arabic peoples who had been conquered and had converted to Islam became dissatisfied with their with their subject position and demanded a share of the government of the vast Arabic empire and equal citizenship with the warrior caste that had come from Arabia. Finally, in the middle of the eighth century the subject peoples revolted against the caliph of the Omayyard dynasty, who ruled from Damascus and a new dynasty, the Abbasids, who were mainly Persian in background seized the title of caliph and set up a new capital in Baghdad. 

   The supplanting of the Omayyad by the Abbasid dynasty was a signal for revolt and political decentralization throughout the Islamic world, and by the end of the ninthe century, instead of one great Arabic empire, the Islamic world was divided into several states.  The rulers of these states continued to respect the caliph as the successor of the Prophet, but the political power in the Islamic world had fallen into the hands of various despotic princes. Among these princes was the ruler in Spain, where the Omayyad dynasty alone had managed to prevail. The Mediterranean world was now united by the Arabic religion and language, and it formed a great economic system, BUT THE ARABIC CIVILIZATION WAS NO LONGER A POLITICAL ENTITY. From the eighth century the term Arabic identifies a great civilization on the eastern and southern shores of the Meditarranean to which many peoples --- Greek, Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, Jewish, and Berber, as well as Arab --- contributed. 

GROWTH OF ISLAM --- Episode 2

         Mohammed may not have been the most sophisticated and learned of religious thinkers, but no spiritual leader has ever founded a faith which has so rapidly appealed to such an enormous number of people. Of all the great religions of mankind, Islam is most suited to serve as a universal religion. The theology presented in the Koran is simple and easily comprehended. It envisions an omniscient deity who makes severe ethical demands on mankind, but who at the same time promises certain reward of eternal life in return for fulfillment of the divine precepts . The all-powerful and all-knowing Allah is a purely monotheistic deity : the Christian idea of the trinity is as much an anathema to the Moslems as to the Jews. Mohammed brings to mankind the word of God, but Mohammed is only the last and the greatest of the prophets, "the seal of the prophets," and he is not in any way a partaker of divinity. In the Koran view Christ, like Abraham, is one of the great prophets who prepared the way for Mohammed, but the Christian theology of the Trinity , with its heavy debt to Platonism, is rejected by Mohammed in favor of pure monotheism. 

  "Islam" means "submission" to the will of Allah, and Allah demands from His adherents among mankind, if they wish to enjoy the great rewards which He promises, the fulfillment of a stern and puritanical code of conduct. The Moslem is to pray several times a day, and he is to make an attempt to go on a pilgrimage to the fountainhead of the true faith at Mecca at least once in his life. The Koran sets down a long series of regulations on the daily life of the Moslem. The Moslem is to refrain from drinking and gambling, he is not to practice usury in business, and generally he is to deal with his fellow humans according to the highest precepts of justice and mercy. The Moslem is to exercise charity toward his fellow men, and he is to be most generous in assisting the unfortunate and downtrodden of mankind. The Koran emphasizes the value of family life, and while, for the Moslem who can afford it, four wives are allowed, the most rigorous precepts of sexual morality are enjoined upon all members of the Islamic faith. Finally, the Moslem is required to give his life, if necessary, to further and protect the true faith, and for those Muslims who suffer such martyrdom the rewards of eternal life will be the most assured and the greatest. Holy war is one of the pillars of Islam.
   The Koranic doctrine presents the most explicit theory of merits among any of the great religions of mankind. Those who follow the word of Allah and who serve God with sincerity and devotion are assured of eternal life and eternal happiness. The agonizing problems raised by the Pauline--Augustinian stream in Christian thought are completely avoided in the Koranic teachings. And even the occasional doubts that creep into Hebraic thinking on the question of merits and reward, such as are found in the Book of Job, are largely absent from Islamic thought. Furthermore, whereas the Hebraic concept of heaven is extremely vague and the Christian concept of heaven is purely ethereal and spiritual, the Koranic picture of heaven is both specific in detail and highly attractive to human desires. In fact, the Moslem is promised a heaven in which he can partake of pleasures denied him in this world. He may drink, gamble, and enjoy the company of beautiful black-eyed maidens, who are mentioned several times in the Koran as rewards promised to the most worthy members of the faith. The Islamic religion, then, is an optimistic one. It conceives of an omnipotent and omniscient God who requires a high and generous level of conduct, and for those who fulfill these precepts it promises the certainty of reward in a heaven that turns out to be a most attractive oasis. It is no mystery why this religion proved to be most popular among the Arab warriors, but its theology is austere enough and its ethic certainly rigorous enough to appeal also to men of the greatest education and sophistication, both in the medieval period and today. 
   

GROWTH OF ISLAM --- Episode 1

  THE IMPACT OF ISLAM ON EARLY MEDIEVAL
                                            EUROPE 

   The expansion of Islam was a decisive factor  in medieval history. It divided the Mediterranean world into three civilizations and power blocks : [1] THE BYZANTINE, [2] THE EUROPEAN, and [3] THE ISLAMIC. One of the major themes in medieval history from the seventh to the twelfth centuries was the relationship and interaction among these three cultural, economic, linguistic, and religious groupings. In various degrees each of these civilizations was an heir of the late Roman Empire. Byzantium exemplifies the most direct continuation of Roman law, administration, and thought. Western Europe also inherited many Roman traditions, and Islam absorbed some aspects of Roman imperial organization and the better part of the philosophy and science of Greece and Rome. However, Islam was also heavily indebted to oriental traditions, particularly those of Persia and Egypt. Oriental culture had also influenced the later Roman Empire, but Islam was the medieval civilization most directly in touch with the eastern heritage. 
   The triumph of Islam on the eastern and western shores of the Mediterranean in the seventh century was the consequence of the final and successful attempt made by Arabic tribes to break into the Mediterranean world. There was nothing novel in an Arabic invasion of Egypt and Syria ; there had been periodic invasions  of the Fertile Crescent by nomads from the Arabian desert since the second millennium B.C.E., and the appearance of the Hebrews in Palestine may have been the consequence of one such northward thrust. The organization of the Mediterranean world under Roman rule had, however, put a stop to large-scale Arabic incursion, and the Byzantine empire, until the early seventh century, was successful in blocking the northward migration of the Arabian peoples. 
   What difference, then, can be seen in this new Arabic invasion that accounts for its success on a great scale ? In the first place, the attack on the Mediterranean world came at a time when the two empires that could have blocked the path of migration and conquest were either dead or exhausted. Heraclitus I had just destroyed the Persian empire, but Byzantium's military resources had been fully expended, and the imperial armies were able to offer only token resistance to the Arabs. Furthermore, great masses of the population of Egypt and Syria had been alienated by the religious policy of the orthodox emperor. Not being satisfied with this disaffection, Heraclitus had undertaken a large-scale persecution of the Jews, who made up substantial portions of the population of Alexandria, Antioch, and other great eastern cities. Under these circumstances, the Arabic invaders could not but have succeeded, provided that they possessed  a modicum of unity and organization. 
   And for the first time the warlike peoples of the Arabian desert had been united by a common faith and by religious authority. In this way Islam contributed the vital factor that made possible the rapid Arabic conquest of the richest provinces of the eastern Roman Empire. The old myth that the Arabs burst forth with sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, offering the Mediterranean peoples either either conversion or death, has long been discredited. In fact, the Arabs tolerated the religious practices of the Christians and Jews they conquered, only placing a head tax and limitation of political rights on those who would not recognize Mohammed as the Prophet of Allah, and therefore they had a vested interest in not hurrying the conversion of their subjects. 
   We should also forgo the assumption that Arabia was an impoverished desert. On the contrary, there were several important commercial cities, of which Mecca was the largest and most prosperous, and extensive commerce was carried on with the lands to the east. Great caravan routes stretched across the peninsula, and the picture we build up of Arabia at this time must include areas where urban and agricultural life flourished. 

HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 5

                 DISCUSSION OF PARADIGMS ---continued 

   Natural analogies and and resemblances can be found within almost any group of items. A paradigm is not only an achievement but also a particular way of modeling future practice upon it. How does a community perpetuate particular ways of carrying on from an achievement ? First ask what the problems at the ends of chapters in science texts are principally for. What can it be that students learn while solving them ? 
  One has to acquire an "ability to see resemblances between apparently disparate problems." Yes, textbooks present lots of facts and techniques. But they do not enable anyone to become a scientist. You are inducted not by the laws and the theories but by the problems at the ends of the chapters. You have to learn that a group of these problems, seemingly disparate, can be solved by using similar techniques . In solving these problems you grasp how to carry on using the "right" resemblances. The student discovers a way to see her problems as like a problem she has already encountered. Once that likeness or analogy has been seen, only manipulative difficulties remain. 
  Publishing in 1974, Kuhn could say that work on sociology of the sciences developed in the 1960s enables one to have sharp empirical tools for distinguishing scientific communities. There is no question about what a scientific community "is." The question is what binds its members together as working in the same discipline. This is the fundamental sociological question to be asked of any identified group, large or small, be it political, religious, ethnic, or simply a soccer club for teenagers, or a group of volunteers who deliver meals on wheels to the elderly. What keeps the group together as a group ? What will cause a group to divide into sects, or simply fall apart ? This can be answered in terms of paradigms. 

HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 4

                                                                PARADIGM 

   This element needs special attention. There are two reasons for this. First, the physicist/history writer Thomas S. Kuhn, single-handedly changed the currency of the word paradigm so that a new reader attaches very different connotations to the word than were available to him in 1962, when he wrote his wonderful book, Structure.  Secondly, as Kuhn himself stated clearly in his postscript :"The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of this book." On the same page he suggested exemplar as a possible substitute word. In another essay written shortly before the postscript, he admitted that he had "lost control of the word." In later life he abandoned it. But we, the readers of Structure fifty years after it was published and after a lot of the dust has settled, can, I hope, happily restore it to prominence. 
   As soon as the book was published, its readers complained that the word was used in all too many ways. This prompted Kuhn to clarify. The upshot was an essay called "Second Thoughts on Paradigms." He distinguished what he called two basic uses of the word, one "global" and one "local." Of the local use he wrote, " it is, of course, the sense of 'paradigm' as standard example that led originally to my choice of the term." But readers, he said, had mostly used it in a more global way than he had intended, and he continued, "I see little chance of recapturing 'paradigm' for its original use, the only one that is philologically at all appropriate." Maybe that was true in 1974, but on its fiftieth anniversary, we were able to return to the intended use of 1962. 
   By way of background, the Greek word paradeigma played an important part in Aristotle's theory of argument, especially in the book called Rhetoric.That book is about practical argument between two parties, an orator and an audience, who share a great many beliefs that hardly need stating. In English translations the ancestor of our word paradigm is usually rendered as example, but Aristotle meant something more like exemplar, a very best and most instructive example. He thought that there are two basic types of arguments. One kind of argument is essentially deductive, but with many unstated premises. The other is essentially analogical. 
   In this second basic type of argument, something is in dispute. Here is one of Aristotle's examples, which many readers will find all too easy to update from the city-states of Aristotle's time to the nation-states of today. Should Athens go to war with its neighbor Thebes ? No.  It was evil of Thebes to make war on its neighbor Phocis. Any Athenian audience would agree ; it is a paradigm.  The situation in dispute is exactly analogous. So  it would be evil for us to make war on Thebes. 
  In general : Something is in dispute. One states a compelling example about which almost everyone in the audience will agree --- a paradigm. The implication is that what is in dispute is "just like that."
   In Latin translations of Aristotle, paradeigma became exemplum , which pursued its own career in medieval and renaissance theories of argument. The word paradigm was, however, conserved in modern European languages but largely divorced from rhetoric. It tended to have very limited usage, for situations where a standard model was to be followed, or imitated. When schoolchildren had to learn Latin, they were told to conjugate to love ----"I love," you love," he/she/it loves"---amo, amas, amat, and so on. That was the paradigm, the model to imitate with similar verbs. The primary use of the word paradigm was in connection with grammar, but it was always available as a metaphor. As metaphor it never took off in English, but it seems to have been more common in German. In the 1930s members of the influential philosophy group the Vienna Circle, such as Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath, were comfortably using the German word in their philosophical writings. 
  In the early-to-mid-1900s, some English analytic philosophers promoted the word. This was partly because the profoundly Viennese Ludwig Wittgenstein had made much use of it in his lectures at Cambridge University during the 1930s. His Cambridge classes were obsessively discussed by those who fell under his spell. The word appears several times in hisPhilosophical Investigations[ another great book , first published in 1953 ]. The first use of the word in that book speaks of a "paradigm of our grammar," although Wittgenstein's idea of grammar is far more encompassing than the usual one. Later he used it in connection with "language-games," an originally obscure German phrase which he made part of general culture.
   Kuhn probably first read Wittgenstein at Harvard and then at Berkeley, but he had many conversations with Stanley Cavell, a fascinatingly original thinker who was deeply immersed in Wittgenstein.  Each acknowledged the importance, at that moment in their lives, of sharing their intellectual attitudes and problems. And paradigm definitely came up as problematic in their discussions. 
   At the same time, some British philosophers invented a happily short-lived "paradigm-case argument," so named in about 1957. It was much discussed, for it seemed to be a new and general argument against various kinds of philosophical skepticism.  Here is a fair parody of the idea. You cannot claim we lack free will [for example], because we had to learn the use of the expression "free will" from examples, and they are the paradigms. Since we learned the expression from the paradigms, which exist, free will exists. 
   "Normal Science" is based on prior scientific achievements acknowledged by some scientific community. Paradigm entered the science vocabulary hand in hand with scientific community. The achievements served as exemplars of what to do, the kinds of questions to ask, successful applications, and "exemplary observations and experiments." 
   Kuhn became interested increasingly interested in events much smaller in scope than Newton, which pertained to small communities of workers. There are very large scientific communities --- genetics, or condensed-matter [solid-state] physics, for example. But within such communities, there are smaller and smaller groups, so that in the end the analysis should apply to "communities of perhaps a hundred members, sometimes significantly fewer." Each will have its own group of commitments, its own models of how to proceed. 
   Moreover, the achievements are not just anything notable. They are 
  [1] "sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents" away from what has been going on. And 
[2] they are open-ended, with plenty of problems for the "redefined group of practitioners to resolve." 
   Kuhn concluded : "Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as 'paradigms'." 
   Accepted examples of scientific practice, including laws, theories, applications, experiment, and instrumentation, provide the models that create a coherent tradition and serve as the commitments which constitute a scientific community in the first place. The few sentences just quoted establish the fundamental idea of Kuhn's writing. Paradigms are integral to normal science, and normal science, practiced by a scientific community, continues as long as there is plenty to do, open problems which yield to research using methods acknowledged by the tradition. Normal science is characterized by a paradigm, which legitimates puzzles and problems on which the community works. All is well until the methods legitimated by the paradigm cannot cope with a cluster of anomalies. Crisis results and persists until a new achievement redirects research and serves as a new paradigm. That is a paradigm shift. 

HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 3

                   NORMAL SCIENCE and PUZZLE SOLVING 

    Normal science is just working away at a few puzzles that are left open in a current field of knowledge. Puzzle-solving makes us think of crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and sudoko, pleasant ways to keep busy when one is not up to useful work. Is normal science like that ?
   A lot of scientific readers were shocked, but then had to admit that is how it is in much of their daily work. Research problems do not aim to produce  real novelty. If you look at any research journal, you will find three types of problems addressed : [1] determination of significant facts, [2] matching of facts with theory, and [3] articulation of theory. To expand slightly : 

   1. Theory leaves certain quantities of phenomena inadequately described and only qualitatively tells us what to expect. Measurement and other procedures determine the facts more precisely.  

   2. Known observations don't quite tally with theory. What'swrong ? Tidy up the theory or show that the experimental data were defective. 

   3. The theory may have a solid mathematical formulation, but one is not yet able to comprehend its consequences. Some give the apt name of articulation to the process of bringing out what is implicit in the theory, often by mathematical analysis. 

   Since the 1980s there has been a substantial movement in emphasis, with historians, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers attending seriously to experimental science.  As Peter Galison wrote, there are three parallel but largely independent traditions of research : theoretical, experimental, and instrumental.  Each is essential to the other two, but they have a good deal of autonomy : Each has a life of its own. Immense experimental or instrumental novelty novelty is simply missed in some history writer's theoretical stance, so normal science may have a good deal of novelty, just not theoretical. And for the general public, which wants technologies and cures, the novelties for which science is admired are usually not theoretical at all. 
   For a current illustration of what is absolutely right, and also of what is questionable, notice that the high-energy physics most widely reported by science journalists is the search for the Higgs particle. This involves an incredible treasury of both money and talent,all of which is dedicated to confirming what present physics teaches --- that there is an undetected particle that plays an essential role in the very existence of matter. Innumerable puzzles, ranging from mathematics to engineering, must be solved en route. In one sense, nothing new in the way of theory or even phenomena is anticipated. Normal science does not aim at novelty. But novelty can emerge from confirmation of theories already held. Indeed it is hoped that when the right conditions for eliciting the particle are finally established, an entire new generation of high-energy physics will begin. 

HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 2

           Is There Such A Thing As A Scientific Revolution ? 

   We normally think of revolution in political terms : the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution.  Everything is overthrown ; a new world order begins. The first thinker to extend this notion of revolution to the sciences may have been Immanuel Kant. He saw two great intellectual revolutions. One was the transition in mathematical practice in which techniques familiar in Babylonia and Egypt were transformed in Greece to proofs from postulates. The second was the emergence of the experimental method and the laboratory,  a series of events that he identified as beginning with Galileo. He repeats the word revolution several times in just two long paragraphs of his 1787 book The Critique of Pure Reason [ a real page turner !!!! ] . 
   Although we think of Kant as the purest of scholars, you gotta bear in mind that he was living in turbulent times. Everyone knew that something profound was afoot all over Europe, and indeed the French Revolution was only two years away. It was Kant who set in place the idea of a scientific revolution. As philosophers we can find it amusing, and certainly forgivable, that honest Immanuel himself confesses, in a footnote, that he is not in a position to pay attention to the minutiae of historical details. 
   The great physicist/historian [ whom I'm plagiarizing the hell out of ] Thomas S. Kuhn wrote a first book concerned with science and its history and entitled it The Copernican Revolution. The idea of scientific revolution was already very much in circulation. After World War II there was a great deal of writing about the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon was its prophet, Galileo its lighthouse, and Newton its sun. 
   Some historians believe that there was a "second scientific revolution." It took place during the early years of the nineteenth century ; whole new fields were mathematized. Heat, light, electricity, and magnetism acquired paradigms, and suddenly a whole mass of unsorted phenomena began to make sense. this coincided with what we call the industrial revolution It was arguably the beginning of the modern technoscientific world in which we live. 
  Then, there came Einstein's special [1905] and then general [1916] theory relativity that were earth-shattering events. Relativity had, at the beginning,  far more repercussions in the humanities and arts than genuine testable consequences in physics. For sure, there was the famous expedition of Sir Arthur Eddington to test an astronomical prediction of the theory, but it was only later that relativity became integral to many branches of physics. 
   Then there was the quantum revolution, also a two-stage affair, with Max Planck's introduction of quanta around 1900 and then the full quantum theory of 1926-27, complete with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Combined, relativity and quantum physics overthrew not only old science but basic metaphysics. Kant had taught that absolute Newtonian space and the principle of uniform causality are a priori principles of thought, necessary conditions on how human beings comprehend the world in which they live. Physics proved him totally mistaken. Cause and effect were mere appearance, and indeterminacy was at the root of reality. Revolution was the order of the scientific day. 
   Karl Popper [1902--94] was a widely read philosopher of science. Popper had come of age during the second quantum revolution. It taught him that science proceeds by conjectures and refutations,to use the title of one of his books. It was a moralistic methodology that Popper claimed was exemplified by the history of science. First we frame bold conjectures, as testable as possible, and inevitably find them wanting. They are refuted, and a new conjecture must be found to fit the facts. Hypotheses can count as "scientific" only if they are falsifiable. This purist vision of science would have been unthinkable before the great turn-of-the-century revolutions. 

HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 1

  UNDERSTANDING THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE 


                            LOOKING BACK AT 1962

    1962 was a long time ago, when one is talking about scientific development. The sciences have changed dramatically since then. The queen of sciences, then, was physics. Few people knew much physics, but everybody knew that physics was where the action was. A cold war was in progress, so everyone knew about "THE BOMB." American schoolchildren had to practice cowering under their desks. Thse who protested against a nuclear weapon stood a chance of being arrested, and some were. Bob Dylan first performed "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" in September 1962. Everyone assumed it was about nuclear fallout. In October 1962 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has come, after 1945, to nuclear war. Physics and its threats were on everyone's mind. 
   The Cold War is long over, and physics is no longer where the action is. Another event of 1962 was th awarding of Nobel prizes to Francis Crick and James Watson for the molecular biology DNA and to Max Perutz and John Kendrew for the molecular biology of hemoglobin. That was the harbinger of change. Today biotechnology rules. Add in information science. Add in what the computer has done to the practice of science. Even experiment is not what it used to be, for it has been modified and to a certain extent replaced by computer simulation. And everyone knows that the computer has changed communication. In 1962 scientific results were announced at meetings, in special seminars, in preprints, and then in articles published in specialist journals. journals. Today the primary mode of publication is in an electronic archive. 
   There is yet another fundamental difference between 2015 and 1962. It affects fundamental physics. In 1962 there were competing cosmologies : STEADY STATE and BIG BANG, two completely different pictures of the universe and its origin. After 1965 and the almost fortuitous discovery of UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND RADIATION, there is only the big bang, full of outstanding problems pursued as normal science.  In 1962 high-energy physics seemed to be an endless collection of more and more particles.  What is called the standard model brought order out of chaos. It is unbelievably accurate in its predictions, even if we have no idea how to fit it together with gravity. Perhaps there will not be another revolution in fundamental physics, although there will no doubt be surprises galore. 

          EXPLAINING THE  DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE 
         REQUIRES A DISCUSSION OF BOTH STRUCTURE
         AND REVOLUTION

                       A DISCUSSION OF STRUCTURE 

 There are scientific revolutions but they have a structure. It's easier to understand this if one can attach a useful name to each node in the structure.  Here are the aphorisms that can be used to understand structure : [1] normal science ; [2] puzzle-solving; [3] paradigm; [4] anomaly; [5] crisis; and [6] revolution, which establishes a new paradigm. 

  That is the structure of scientific revolutions : normal science with a paradigm and a dedication to solving puzzles ; followed by serious anomalies, which lead to a crisis ; and finally resolution of the crisis by a new paradigm. Another important word that has not been yet mentioned is incommensurability.  This is the idea that, in the course of a revolution and a paradigm shift, the new ideas and assertions cannot be strictly compared to the old ones. Even if the same words are in use, their very meaning has changed. That in turn led to the idea that a new theory was not chosen to replace an old one, because it was true but more because of a change in world view. Progress in science may not be a simple line leading to the truth. It may be a matter of making more progress away from less adequate conceptions of, and interactions with,  the world. 

   
          

  

   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 22

   HARVARD PRESIDENT LOWELL IS TRYING TO FIX 
   THE "JEWISH PROBLEM" AT HIS ELITE UNIVERSITY

   By the spring of 1922, when Lowell moved decisively, the proportion of Jews had already reached 21.5 percent. Unless immediate measures were taken, Lowell wrote in a letter on May 20, it would suffer the fate of Columbia. At Harvard, he warned, "the danger would seem to be imminent." 
   Compared to rural and small-town institutions such as Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, and Amherst ----which had already taken measures to limit the size of the freshman class and overhaul their admissions policies --- Harvard was particularly vulnerable. An urban institution with a long tradition of openness to graduates of public as well as private secondary schools, Harvard was not insulated from the growing numbers of public school graduates who met its entrance requirements. Between 1900 and 1920, the number of male graduates from the nation's high schools had risen from 95,000 to 310,000---an increase of over 300 percent.  The democratization of the opportunity to graduate from high school was a mixed blessing for institutions such as Harvard. While their numbers meant a larger pool of academically qualified students, it also meant a surge in the number of applicants who lacked the social graces of an earlier generation. Many of these students were from urban areas, and a disproportionate number of them --- especially in the college preparatory track --- were naturally the children of Russian and Polish Jews. 
   Left to his own devices, the authoritarian Lowell would have been more than willing to impose his own solution to the "Jewish problem." Indeed, that is precisely what he tried to do when he asked the Committee on Admissions to admit as transfers only those "Hebrews . . . possessed of extraordinary intellectual capacity together with character above criticism" and to impose a higher standard for admission to the freshman class on members of the "Hebrew race." This was a covert attempt to impose a quota, but it was rejected by Chairman Henry Pennypacker, a graduate of Harvard [1888] who had served as headmaster of Boston Latin School from 1910 to 1920. Though Lowell's subordinate, Pennypacker told him that the group's members "felt that the Committee should not practice discrimination without the knowledge and assent of the Faculty," of which it was "merely the administrative servant." The stage was thus set for a conflict between the autocratic Lowell and a faculty that, while hardly free of anti-Semitism, was reluctant to publicly endorse a policy of discrimination. 
   By this time, the faculty ws actively involved in the debate about the "Jewish problem" that Lowell had initiated. At a meeting on May 23, Lowell's brother-in-law and personal friend, James Hardy Ropes, the Hollis Professor of Divinity, introduced a three-part motion : its most controversial elements instructed the Committee on Admissions "to take into account the proportionate size of racial and national groups in the membership of Harvard College" and declared that "it is not desirable that the number of students in any group which is not easily assimilated into the common life of the College should exceed fifteen percent of the whole college." These proposals, which clearly had Lowell's support, generated a complex and at times bewildering array of amendments and countermotions, some of them supporting the basic thrust of Ropes's proposals and others opposed.  Though the motion proposing a 15 percent quota on "any group which is not easily assimilated" [ an unsubtle euphemism for Jews ] was not approved the meeting was a partial triumph for Lowell, for a slightly revised version of the other controversial element was passed by a vote of 56--44. It called upon the Committee on Admission, "pending further action by this Faculty . . . to take into account the . . . proportionate size of racial and national groups in the membership of Harvard College." This was a dramatic departure from Harvard's historic commitment to nondiscrimination and, for that very reason, was warmly welcomed by Lowell. 
   Yet even before the faculty meeting, opposition to Lowell's efforts to limit Jewish enrollment had been growing. In addition to Federal Judge Julian Mack, a member of the Board of Overseers, who had exchanged a series of increasingly tense etters with Lowell, further opposition was expressed by Jerome D. Greene, who had served as secretary to President Eliot [1901---1905] and then secretary to the Corporation [1905--1911]. Reportedly Eliot's top choice as his successor, Greene left Harvard to become an important banker in New York two years after Lowell took office. On the Board of Overseers, he was generally thought to represent the views of Eliot, who remained a towering figure at Harvard [and a troublesome presence for Lowell] even though he had retired thirteen years earlier and was nearing the age of ninety. 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 21

           THE "JEWISH PROBLEM" AT THE  
           ELITIST UNIVERSITIES IN AMERICA 

     By 1914, the "Jewish problem" was so great at Columbia that its dean, Frederick Keppel, openly acknowledged the widespread perception that the large number of immigrants had made it "socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement." While publicly insisting that "Columbia is not 'overrun' with Jews any more than it is with Roman Catholics or Episcopalians," Keppel privately admitted that "boys whose families are in New York society" had a strong tendency to go out of town for college and that no conceivable plans that Columbia could devise would attract them. In truth, New York's upper class had begun to abandon Columbia as early as the 1890s. But the arrival of large numbers of Jews in the years after 1910 seems to have decisively accelerated the process. Still attracting 16 percent of the sons of New York's elite between 1900 and 1909, the proportion dropped precipitously the following decade to 6 percent.
   By the time Columbia finally moved vigorously to repel the "Jewish Invasion," it was far too late. Though the proportion of Jews, which had reached perhaps 40 percent, was reduced to 22 percent by 1921, the sons of the Protestant Elite had abandoned Morningside Heights, never to return. In the 1920s, just 4 percent enrolled at Columbia. Meanwhile, 84 percent matriculated at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, THE BIG THREE. As the case of Columbia had demonstrated, the possibility of "WASP FLIGHT" was a "danger" for any institution with a substantial Jewish presence. 
   The specter of Columbia was very much on the mind of Harvard President Lowell as he confronted Harvard's "Jewish Problem." With Columbia and NYU taking active measures to limit Jewish enrollment, Lowell moved in February 1920 to inquire about the number of Jews at Harvard College. Although the dean's office did not provide a precise estimate, Lowell had ample reason to worry. A study of higher education enrollment patterns in 1918-1919 among the leading private colleges revealed that only Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania ---- the very institutions that many members of the eastern upper class believed had already been "ruined" by the Jews --- had a higher percentage of Jewish students than Harvard. 
 Though the proportion of Jews in Harvard's freshman class had ranged from 13 to 20 percent between 1912 and 1919, Harvard retained its close connection to Boston's upper class throughout the 1910s. Indeed, the link between Harvard and Brahmin Boston was far tighter than the historical ties between the upper classes of New York and Philadelphia with Columbia and Penn respectively. By the 1910s, Harvard enrolled 85 percent of the sons of the Boston upper class, whereas just 52 and 6 percent of their counterparts in Philadelphia and New York matriculated at Penn and Columbia. Harvard, moreover, enjoyed a close relationship with the upper class of New York City, which in recent decades had come to dwarf Boston in economic importance. In the 1910s, nearly a third of the sons of New York's elite enrolled at Harvard. To President Lowell, Harvard's rising Jewish enrollment posed a threat to these crucial relationships, making it imperative to bring the "Jewish Invasion" under control. 
   In a letter to the Harvard philosophy professor William Earnest Hocking, who had proposed enlisting the Jewish alumni to assist in eliminating the "undesirable Jews" [ as he claimed had already occurred at Williams ] , Lowell explained that his main concern was that the sheer number of Jews would cause the flight of the Protestant elite and thereby "ruin the college" : 

     The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also. This happened to a friend of mine with a school in New York, who thought, on principle, that he ought to admit Jews, but who discovered in a few years that he had no school at all. A similar thing has happened in the case of Columbia College ; and in all these cases it is not because Jews of bad character have come ; but the result follows from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body. Therefore any tests of character in the ordinary sense of the word afford no remedy. 

Lowell's personal preference was "to state frankly that we thought we could do the most good by not admitting more than a certain proportion of men in a group that did not intermingle with the rest, and give our reasons for it to the public." But he also anticipated quite presciently that "the Faculty, and probably the Governing Boards, would prefer to make a rule whose motive was less obvious on its face , by giving to the Committee on Admission authority to refuse admittance to persons who possessed qualities described with more or less distinctness and believed to be characteristic of the Jews." For Lowell, however, it was crucial that "the Faculty should understand perfectly well what they are doing, and that any vote passed with the intent of limiting the number of Jews should not be supposed by anyone to be passed as a measurement of character really applicable to Jews and Gentiles alike." 
   In frankly endorsing a double standard, Lowell was rejecting the argument that applying ostensibly neutral criteria such as "character" would be sufficient to reduce the number of Jews. On this issue, as on many others, Lowell was utterly forthright : his goal was restriction itself. In a letter to Julian Mack, a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers and a federal judge, Lowell made explicit some of the cultural assumptions behind his commitment to a Jewish quota : "It is the duty of Harvard to receive just as many boys who have come, or whose parents have come, to this country without our background as it can effectively educate ; including in education the imparting, not only of book knowledge, but of the ideas and traditions of our people. EXPERIENCE SEEMS TO PLACE THAT PROPORTION AT ABOUT 15%. " 

JEWS IN THE UNITED STATES FROM1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 20

    EMPHASIZING THE STRENUOUS LIFE AT GROTON 
  [ continuing with the saga of Endicott Peabody, headmaster]

   
   Peabody's most important ally in promulgating the "strenuous life" ideology at Groton was Theodore Roosevelt, who had been preaching the virtues of "the strenuous life" since the 1890s. A close friend of Peabody's and the father of a student, TR was a frequent visitor at Groton, where he unfailingly preached the virtues of a life of gentlemanly service to the public. In a speech on Groton's twentieth anniversary, in 1904, President Roosevelt told the students : "You are not entitled, either in college or life, to an ounce of privilege because you have been to Groton---not an ounce, but we are entitled to hold you to exceptional accountability because you have been to Groton. Much has been given you, therefore, we have a right to expect much of you." 
   Adherence to the philosophy of "the strenuous life," Roosevelt believed, implied a duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself." The Christian gentleman, then, was impelled on both moral [ ? ] and practical grounds[Reckon these are economic grounds?] to take up what some have called the "gentlemen's burden" : the responsibility, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, to "fulfill duties to the nation and . . . to the race" and to "do our share of the world's work by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers has driven the Spanish flag." 
   Peabody, whose beloved Cheltenham had sent many of its graduates into the imperial civil service in India, shared Roosevelt's enthusiasm for America's fledgling empire. Indeed, even before the Spanish-AmericanWar ended, he wrote to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, offering Groton as a source of the officials who would be needed to administer the empire. Yet Peabody was not, as the historian James McLachlan has rightly noted, "a howling imperialist ; he simply believed that if America was to have an empire, it should be a Progressive empire --- honestly administered by well-educated gentlemen, pure, clean, and Christian."

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II ---- Episode 19

        GROTON TURNED OUT "MANLY CHRISTIANS " 

    The idea of "manly Christian character" was a British import that may be traced back to the writings of Charles Kingsley [1819--1875] , an Anglican clergyman, novelist, and Cambridge professor who exerted a profound influence on the young Endicott Peabody.  A passionate advocate of what came to be known as "muscular Christianity," Kingsley was a devoted English patriot and a stout defender of British imperialism.  A proponent of a reformist strand of "Christian socialism," he believed that committed Christians were warriors on behalf of goodness whose responsibilities both at home and abroad could not be met without great "strength and hardihood." Kingsley was a firm champion of vigorous athletics, for sports would instill the sturdy character and shape the strong body that permitted Christians to do God's work. Athletics, he believed, would offer England's privileged classes "that experience of pain and endurance necessary to bring out the masculine qualities." 
   Kingsley was near the height of his influence when Peabody was a student at Chetenham and Cambridge. Early in his college career, the young American read the Life of Charles Kingsley, which first gave him the idea of becoming a minister.  Kingsley's biographer, Peabody later recalled, "set forth his subject's enthusiasm in connection with social problems" and "introduced me to a man of vigorous, virile, enthusiastic character ; a gentle, sympathetic, and unafraid example of muscular Christianity, a 'very' gentil Knight." Kingsley's distinctive version of muscular Christianity exerted an enduring impact on Peabody as well as on the headmasters of many other boarding schools. 
    As at the British public schools, Groton's vehicle for the development of manly Christian character was athletics. Competing in sports, Peabody believed, helped develop in students a multiplicity of virtues : loyalty, courage, cooperation, and masculine strength. Bt teaching young men to exert themselves to the fullest while playing within the rules, athletics would teach self-control and a sense of decency and fair play. 
   Though quite attached to crew and "fives" [a kind of squash imported from Eton] , Peabody reserved his greatest enthusiasm for football. All boys, however physically slight or personally uninterested, had to play. Football was, in Peabody's view, a deeply moral enterprise. Writing to a friend in 1909, he articulated his views : "In my works at Groton I am convinced that football is of profound importance for the moral even more than the physical development of the boys. In these days of exceeding comfort, the boys need an opportunity to endure hardness and, it may be, suffering. Football has in it the element which goes to make a soldier." For Peabody, as for many of his contemporaries in the British and American upper classes, life was a ruthless Darwinian struggle between good and evil in which the morally superior ---those who represented "civilization" against "barbarism" --- would sometimes need physical force to impose moral order. 
   With athletes occupying the apex of the student pecking order, both Christianity and character tended to be overshadowed by "manliness." Ranking lower still was intellect --- a quality that was viewed with suspicion as oriented to the self rather than the community. "I'm not sure I like boys who think too much," Peabody once said. "A lot of people think of things we could do without."
   In such an atmosphere, the boy of bookish or artistic inclination who lacked interest in ---or talent for --- manly sports was relegated to the lower ranks and sometimes despised. Remembering his years at Groton, Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of Atlantic Monthly who later became a trustee, recalled "but a single instance of a boy who became the acknowledged head of the school wholly innocent of athletic supremacy and merely gifted with character and superlative intelligence." In a school in which "organized sport is the personification of manliness" and the belief widespread that "moral courage is a by-product of the physical struggle," Sedgwick observed, "the boy who seeks another path to his development presents to the master a picture of a shirker and not infrequently a poltroon as well." 
   There was little room at Groton for the boy of artistic or intellectual inclination. As his biographer admits, Peabody "distrusted artists as a genus," believing them to be "a folk who have unreliable relationships with the world, the flesh, and the devil, with a consequent weakening of moral fiber." Nor was there much room for the independent spirit. In a letter to the parents of boy whom Peabody suggested "would get more from a different school," the young man, whose offenses were admittedly "very slight," seems to have been guilty of the crime of being "an individualist who has little in common with his surroundings." 
   Peabody was fond of saying that a headmaster has "to be a bit of a bully" and needs to have the capacity to inflict pain. But in Groton's system of authority and social control, it was often the students who used the harshest means to enforce conformity and to punish classmates judged deviant. For students deemed to be in violation of the school's rigid and sometimes mysterious code of etiquette or who were felt to be lacking the right "tone"[often by showing insufficient deference to upperclassmen], the punishment could be brutal. 
   The harsh atmosphere was part of a larger system of socialization that imposed on the children of the privileged a willful regime of austerity and deprivation. These schools were hardening the sons of the elite for a life of command in which subordinates --- whether inferior classes, ethnic or racial groups, or colonial "natives" ---would often be disinclined to obey and would sometimes mount resistance. The system of power and control at the elite boarding schools was devised to expose the young men who went through them to the experience of both obedience and command, often under trying conditions. Having survived institutionalized bullying, the graduates would have the necessary toughness to succeed in their future leadership positions. 
   The Groton ethos, like that of the leading British public schools, was an admixture of two seemingly contradictory systems of belief : gentility and social Darwinism. On the one side, men such as Peabody were deeply committed to the nurturance of Christian gentlemen : men whose devotion to such virtues as honesty, integrity, loyalty, modesty, decency, courtesy, and compassion would constitute a living embodiment of Protestant ideals. But on the other side, life was viewed as a struggle in which the battle went to the strong, and those individuals and nations not manly enough to participate would be left remorselessly behind in a world in which only the fittest survived. The Christian gentleman thus had no choice but to be aggressive and even ruthless in order to win. 
   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --Episode 18

      BY THE LATE 1800s, THE PROTESTANT ARISTOCRATS
      SAW THE "NECESSITY" OF PREP SCHOOLS FOR THEIR
      KIDS 


The tiny Groton School was an almost immediate success. Within five years of its founding, Theodore Roosevelt,  who had declined Peabody's invitation to to become one of the school's first teachers, wrote to the headmaster, telling him that he was "doing a most genuine service to America" and that "it has been a great comfort to me to think of small Ted [then ten years old] at your school." In 1889, Peabody was asked to apply for the presidency of Columbia University [he declined] , and in 1890, the prominent diplomat and future secretary of state John Hay asked Peabody to place Hay's two sons on the list of students wishing to attend Groton. To support his request, he offered a list of references that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Adams, and Phillips Brooks. [In the end, Peabody placed the boys on the wrong waiting list, and they were forced to attend other schools.] Even Emily Post entered one son's name at birth for admission to Groton and the other's at age two. By 1900, a veritable Who's Who of the American ruling class---Whitneys, Biddles, Adams, Saltonstalls, du Ponts, and Roosevelts ---had entrusted their sons to Endicott Peabody and Groton. 
   Social distinction was at the very center of Groton's magnetic appeal to the Protestant ruling class. Peabody himself---with his patrician appearance, his gentlemanly demeanor, and his ardent commitment to the boys' cultivation of impeccable manners ---attracted the scions of leading families. The men of wealth and power who entrusted their sons to him were well aware of his unique social position. To be sure, many other boarding school headmasters shared his background [if not his British education] . But none of them could match his personal location at the crossroads of America's two most important investment banking firms of the era --- the House of Morgan and Lee, Higginson and Company ----in New York and Boston, the nation's two greatest financial centers. To the Protestant elite, a Groton education meant, not only the inculcation of the right values, but also the fostering of intimate ties to "THE RIGHT PEOPLE." One of the principal motivations to send boys to Groton and like institutions seems to have been their parents' desire to rescue them from the life of luxury and self-indulgence that they feared the children were destined to lead unless vigorous countermeasures were taken. "Early Groton parents," wrote Peabody's biographer, were privately disgusted with the bringing up of well-to-do American boys of the period, "whom they considered 'spoiled ladies' men tied to women's apron strings." Affluence, they believed, was rendering their sons soft and effeminate." 
   In response to these concerns, the "St. Grottlesex"schools imposed a regime of Spartan deprivation on their charges. At Groton, the students lived in small, barren cubicles almost totally lacking in privacy. Showers were cold, and weekly allowances were limited to a quarter, a nickel of which was to be donated at Sunday church services. Deprivation, Peabody firmly believed, was salutary. Otherwise, the parental "tendency to overindulge their children" would lead to a "lack of intellectual and moral fibre." 
   What did not loom large among these parents was a commitment to intellect. Scholarship as such was not something most of these parents gave a shit about. Mathe WASP ny of these eminent parents had never attended college themselves.  What they correctly saw in Peabody was a man who considered character [ethical conduct among peers] far more important than intellect. In hiring teachers, Peabody valued intelligence, but he believed that "there were things distinctly more important" such as "fine character," a "lively manner," and a love of boys. 
   At the core of Peabody's vision of Groton was the ideal of "manly Christian character." Generally speaking,  the WASP elite was not really and truly religious : Some of the early fathers did not care a tuppence for religion, except as a thing to be generally encouraged and strengthened.  What the fathers of the ruling class were really concerned about was emphasis on "MANLY CHARACTER." What Peabody promised the ruling class was that Groton would turn their fragile and overindulged sons into the kind of "manly" men fit to run the affairs of the nation. 

JEWS IN THE UNITED STATES FROM1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II----Episode 17

      CONTINUING WITH THE SAGA OF ENDICOTT 
      PEABODY AND THE BEGINNING OF PREP 
     SCHOOLS IN THE UNITED STATES 

  By the time Peabody returned to the United States in 1880, he was as much British as American in both speech and demeanor.  In search of a career, he initially followed the family tradition by joining Lee, Higginson and Company, a brokerage firm founded many years earlier.  But he quickly became restive in business and soon enrolled at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge. A competent but uninspired student, he briefly left the seminary before being ordained to serve as parson in the remote town of Tombstone, Arizona. Cotty then returned to complete his studies, and it was there, in the spring of 1883, that he conceived the idea of a school that would stress religious education and Christian life while striking a balance between the acquisition of culture and participation in athletics. His vision, shared by his fellow seminarian and and lifelong friend Sherrand Billings, was of "a school where boys and men could live together, and play together in friendly fashion with friction rare. 
  For most twenty-five-year old men, such a vision might be a distant dream, but Endicott Peabody was no ordinary young man. Tall, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, and fair haired, he was a striking presence whose enthusiasm, energy, and obvious decency left a strong impression. More than personal presence was needed, of course. Founding a school, especially a boarding school on the British model, would require considerable resources. Cotty's family, fortunately, was at the center of a network of some of the wealthiest and most powerful patricians in the United States, so resources would prove no obstacle. Starting with his relative James Lawrence, who [along with his brother] donated ninety acres of farmland for the school, Peabody put together a board of trustees that included J.P. Morgan, James and William Lawrence, Phillips Brooks, and his father, Samuel Endicott Peabody. Its site was approved by no less a figure than Frederick Law Olmsted, the renowned landscape architect. The Groton School opened its doors in the fall of 1884. 

   Groton was the second of seven elite boarding schools ---the others were Lawrenceville [1883] , Hotchkiss [1892], Choate [1896], St. George's [1896], Middlesex [1901], and Kent [1906] --- founded between 1883 and 1906. It was a period of tremendous social change in America, and many of the transformations were deeply disturbing to the old protestant upper class. Mass immigration and rapid urbanization, in particular, created a sense among patricians that they were losing control of the country, especially its cities. Increasingly, they withdrew to their own clubs and summer resorts. 
   The transformed urban environment of the late nineteenth century presented a distinctive set of problems for the rearing of upper-class children Whereas in previous years the elite had relied on private day schools and tutors to educate their offspring, they believed that the city had become an unhealthy place for children to grow up. One solution could be to send them to an undefiled rural or small-town setting in which Christian educators of solid character could be entrusted with their children's moral development. 

  The official announcement of the opening of "a school for boys in Groton, Massachusetts made a direct appeal to these sentiments : "Every endeavor will be made to cultivate manly, Christian character, having regard to moral and physical as well as intellectual development. . . A farm of ninety acres, in a healthy and attractive situation near the town of Groton, 34 miles from Boston and in direct communication with New York, has been given the school, and upon this estate will be erected during the coming season a building with classrooms and dormitory. " In a preface to the announcement, the trustees described the idea of Groton as "an attempt to found a boys' school in this country somewhat after the manner of the Public Schools of England." They noted that the headmaster was a graduate of Cambridge University who had spent five years at Cheltenham. Like its British counterparts, which were under the influence of the Church of England," Groton would be "under the influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church" and its headmaster, an Episcopalian clergyman.

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800s UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode16

        EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS PLAYED A ROLE IN 
        PROMOTING PREJUDICE IN AMERICA 

   Educational institutions ----notably, boarding schools and the elite private colleges ---- played a critical role in socializing and unifying the national upper class. Indeed, it was only during this period that entry into the right clubs at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale --- few of which predated the Civil War --- became a student obsession. Meanwhile, the upper classes of the  great eastern cities increasingly sent their children to the Big Three. By the 1890s, 74 percent of Boston's upper class and 65 percent of New York's sent their sons to either Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. 

   Perhaps even more than the Big Three, the emblematic institution of the Protestant upper class was the private boarding school. Bringing together children as young as eleven from the upper classes of the major eastern metropolitan areas, the boarding school was the ideal instrument to shape the personal qualities and instill the values most esteemed by the Protestant elite. Educational and cultural ideals, Max Weber once observed, are always "stamped by the decisive stratum's . . . ideal of cultivation." In the United States in the late nineteenth century, the "decisive stratum" was the WASP upper class and its ideal, that of the cultivated "gentleman" along British lines. 
   
   As early as 1879, the North American Review, a venerable magazine founded in Boston in 1815 that was one of the few American periodicals to compete with the great British quarterlies, published a two-part series, " The Public Schools of England." It was written by Thomas Hughes, the author of the popular Tom Brown's School Days, and it was intended to introduce an American audience to the peculiar British institution that had proved so successful in welding the aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie into a cohesive ruling class. Hughes proposed that private boarding schools on the British model be built in the United States to serve as a "stepping-stone . . . between the home of the American gentry and the universities."

   "It is not easy," he wrote, "to estimate the degree to which the English people are indebted to these schools for the qualities on which they pique themselves most --- for their capacity to govern others and control themselves, their aptitude for combining freedom with order, their public spirit, their vigor and manliness of character, their strong but not slavish respect for public opinion , their love of healthy sport and exercise." However discriminating a nation may be in spirit and character," he argued, "the time must come when it will breed a gentry, leisure class, aristocracy, call it by what name you will." The public schools had "perhaps the largest share in molding the character of the English gentleman." Two "nations of the same race, and so nearly identical in character and habits as the people of the United States and the English," Hughes concluded, would benefit from employing the same type of educational institutions to shape their leadership class. 

   Less than four years later, a young Massachusetts patrician named Endicott Peabody proposed the establishment of a boarding school in New England almost exactly on the model described by Hughes. A member of a distinguished family whose roots went back to the Puritans, at the age of thirteen Peabody had moved to England, where his father joined Junius Morgan [the father of J.P. Morgan] as a partner in a banking firm. "Cotty," as the young man was called by friends, immediately entered Cheltenham, an English public school, and soon became a devoted Anglophile. The sturdy Peabody flourished at Cheltenham, joining enthusiastically in the athletic life of the school and becoming skilled in cricket, tennis, and rowing. After five years at Cheltenham, he went on to Trinity College at Cambridge, where he studied law and once again was a star athlete. Though born a Unitarian, Cotty developed a deep attachment to the Church of England during his time at Cambridge. 
   PEABODY RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES IN 1880. TO BE CONTINUED. 

   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 15

         ADMISSIONS STANDARDS AT THE BIG THREE WERE
         SET UP TO HELP THE RICH KIDS GET INTO COLLEGE

    Especially when coupled with the high cost of tuition, the net result of these requirements was that the students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were overwhelmingly from well-to-do backgrounds. Almost exclusively white [though in some years Harvard and Yale enrolled a handful of blacks] and composed largely of graduates of elite private schools, the student bodies represented the most privileged strata of society. Though Harvard ---which had the most flexible entrance requirements and the most generous scholarship program --- was a partial exception, the Big Three were strikingly homogenous, not only in class and race, but also in religion and ethnicity. At Princeton, whose country club reputation was not without justification, Catholics and Jews together made up only 5 percent of the freshman class in 1900. At Yale, which was in a city with a large immigrant population, the combined Catholic-Jewish population was just 15 percent in 1908. Even Harvard, which was in a dense urban area with large numbers of immigrants from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe, the Catholic proportion of the freshmen was 9 percent in 1908, with Jews roughly the same number. 
   These were by no means trivial numbers, especially at Harvard and Yale, but it was clear that the same relatively compact social group predominated at each school : old-stock, high-status Protestants, especially Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians. The Big Three were, in short, overwhelmingly populated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs---a term coined more than a half century later by the sociologist and chronicler of the WASP upper class, E. Digby Baltzell. 

THE PROTESTANT UPPER CLASS AND THE CREATION OF A CULTURAL IDEAL 

   As the nineteenth century ended, the Protestant upper class stood at the summit of a nation that was more powerful than ever before. For the first time in history, the United States was a genuine global power ; its population of 76 million far surpassed that of Great Britain, Germany, or France, and its economy was the most dynamic in the world. In 1898, the United States had made the fateful decision to enter into a war with Spain ---- "the splendid little war" that made the United States a colonial power, owning the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico along with de facto control of Cuba. The United States took its place among the great imperial powers in a world increasingly divided into zones controlled by the major European powers. 
   Though members of the Protestant upper class ---notably Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and Alfred T. Mahan --- were at the forefront of the imperial project, the WASP elite was in fact bitterly divided over America's new imperial role. Indeed, it was the graduates of Harvard and Yale who made up most of the members of the Anti-Imperialist League. And it was patricians such as William James, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Charles W. Eliot---joined by a diverse group that included Jane Addams, Samuel Gompers, Mark Twain, and Andrew Carnegie ---who led the opposition to the annexation of the Philippines. Condemning "Expansion, World-Power, Inferior Races, Calvination, Duty-and-Destiny" as "twaddle and humbug," the anti-imperialists ringingly reaffirmed America's tradition of anticolonialism---after all, the United States owed its very origins to its colonial struggle against Great Britain. 
   Yet, the proponents of a new and more muscular American global role carried the day, their cause strengthened by the brute reality that European powers had gained control of one-fifth of the world's land and one-tenth of its population between 1870 and 1900 and that recent years had seen the rise of Japan and Germany as colonial powers. In the wake of the new global position of the United States, many white Americans[though not Irish Americans ], as the historian Nell Painter has noted, "renounced their traditional anglophobia [a legacy of the American Revolution and, especially the War of 1812] to proclaim the kindredness of the English-speaking people and the natural superiority of Anglo-Saxons." The ideology of Anglo-Saxonism, though hardly new, received a powerful boost from America's entry into the ranks of imperial nations. Among the core tenets of the ideology was the conviction that, not only blacks, Native Americans, and Asians, but also the burgeoning population of Italians, Jews, Poles, Irish, and other immigrants lacked the distinctly Anglo-Saxon talent for self-governance. 
   During the three decades before 1900, the Protestant elite had become  true national upper class. Under the stimulus of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and nationalization of what had been a largely regional economy, the upper class developed a set of institutions that helped weld it into a national entity that bridged the cultural and social divide between the old patricians and the nouveaux riches of the Gilded Age. Among the upper-class institutions that either were invented or came to prominence in the 1880s and 1890s were the Social Register [its first edition was published in New York City in 1888], the country club, the exclusive summer resort, and the elite men's social clubs that arose in cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II-----Episode 14

CHARLES W. ELIOT WAS PRESIDENT OF HARVARD FROM 1869 UNTIL 1909 [ 40 years ]

    During the era of Eliot's liberal --- and much criticized --- elective system [ students could choose their courses and were not bound to a particular curriculum that matched up with a major] , many students gravitated to the "snap" and "cinch" courses then abundantly available. So common was this practice that the students joked about "teh Faculty of Larks and Cinches." Henry Yeomans, a government professor who was himself an alumnus [1900] , aptly described the atmosphere of the time  :"Few among either students or instructors, who knew the college about 1900, and who respected intellectual achievement, could be satisfied with conditions. A man who worked hard at his studies was too often called a 'grind.' As if the term were not sufficiently opprobrious, it was not uncommon to strengthen it to 'greasy grind'." The problem, hr believed, was made worse by "the social cleavage between the men who studied and the men who played, or more commonly and worse, who loafed." In Yeomans's view, there could be little question about who set "the undergraduate standard of idleness : it was the rich and socially ambitious." 
   The low academic standards at the Big Three were in no small part a product of just how easy it was to gain admission. A candidate had only to pass subject-based entrance examinations devised by the colleges. Like many American universities, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia administered their own exams. But the tests were not especially demanding, and a young man with modest intelligence from a feeder school like Groton could usually pass them with ease. If he did not, however, he could take them over and over again to obtain the requisite number of passes.
   Even the unfortunate dumbass applicant who failed to pass exams in enough subjects could still be admitted with "conditions." In practice, this meant that he gained entrance by special action of the faculty. At each of the Big Three, admission with conditions became a common pathway to the freshman class. In 1907, 55 percent of those admitted at Harvard had failed to fulfill the entrance requirements. Similarly, at Yale in 1909, the proportion of freshmen admitted with conditions was 57 percent. Of these, 22 percent had one condition , 14 percent two, and 21 percent three. Even Princeton a smaller institution that was making a vigorous effort to raise its standards under Woodrow Wilson, admitted a clear majority of its students with one or more conditions.  Between 1906 and 1909, the proportion of students so admitted ranged from a low of 56 percent in 1909 to a high of 65 percent in 1907. 
    Why would these eminent universities admit so many students who did not even meet their modest entrance requirements ? Part of the answer is their eagerness to enroll what later came to be called "paying customers," for tuition provided the bulk of their income [over 60 percent at Harvard in 1903-1904]. But there was also a powerful sense of pride in sheer bigness, especially at Harvard and Yale. In the 1890s, Harvard Graduates' Magazine [HGM] bragged about how its enrollment had grown spectacularly and in the process outstripped Yale. In 1900, it boasted that Harvard had the largest undergraduate enrollment of over 4,000 placed it "among the great universities of the world, surpassed in population only by Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and Paris." Harvard, HGM noted proudly, had passed England's two ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which enrolled just 3,500 students respectively. 
   Although Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were willing to allow the size of the freshman class to fluctuate from year to year to accommodate the growing number of students who could pass some or all of the required exams, there were powerful forces limiting expansion. In addition to escalating competition from smaller colleges, such as Dartmouth, Williams, and Amherst, there was an increasingly visible disconnect between the Big Three's traditional entrance requirements and the curricula offered by the nation's rapidly expanding public high schools. Both Yale and Princeton required that candidates pass examinations in both Greek and Latin, thereby effectively excluding most high school graduates, for only a handful of public schools offered both languages. Even Harvard, which under Eliot had abolished its Greek requirement in 1898, still required latin ---not a problem at well-established secondary schools such as Boston Latin and Philadelphia's CentralHigh School, but still an insurmountable obstacle at most public schools. The Big Three therefore found it hard to tap into the expanding pool of high school graduates --- a point frankly admitted in 1909 in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which noted that it did not recognize many of the subjects taught in public high schools while its own requirements, especially in classical languages, could not be fulfilled in most of them. Even the public schools in nearby New York City, the nation's largest urban center, did not offer the courses required by Princeton. 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---Episode 13

MANY STUDENTS WENT TO THE BIG THREE TO PARTY AND TO SOCIALIZE WITH "THEIR KIND" 

    Despite their growing prominence, however, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton faced serious problems. Yale had become the archetype of the elite private college through the immense popularity of Frank Merriwell and later of Dink Stover [ the hero of Owen Johnson's 1912 novel, Stover at Yale ], but deteriorating academic standards were a subject of intense internal discussion. So, too, was the alleged decline in standards of deportment --- a significant issue for an institution that prided itself on turning out "gentlemen." According to the George W. Pierson, "Disorders, infractions, and petty irritations had been getting rather frequent and unnecessary." By 1902, "an unending stream of individuals had to be disciplined for cheating, or for drunken disorder, or for throwing bottles out the windows,  or even for going sailing with low women." 
   In1903, a committee headed by Professor Irving Fisher issued a devastating report about the academic atmosphere at Yale. Scholarly performance, the report concluded, had been dropping regularly since1896--1897, with the decline most marked among the highest-ranking students. The value system underpinning campus culture, which elevated social, athletic, and fraternal activities over scholarship, was at  the root of the problem: "An impression is very strong and very prevalent that the athlete is working for Yale, the student for himself.  To be a high-stand man is now a disadvantage rather than otherwise . . . In fact, hard study has become UNFASHIONABLE at Yale." 

   "In general," the report went on, "the man who attends strictly to study [ the 'grind'] is regarded as peculiar or even contemptible. It is believed that a man should 'know mwn' at Yale ; that 'study is a mistake'." To support its sobering conclusions, the report offered an intriguing fact : whereas 26 of 34 of Yale's valedictorians had been tapped by one of Yale's prestigious senior societies between 1861 and 1894, only 3 of 9 had been tapped since.
   So anti-intellectual was the undergraduate culture at Yale that classes vied with one another for the honor of being the least studious. In 1904, the yearbook boasted of having "more gentlemen and fewer scholars than any other class in the memory of man." But the class of 1905, judged by the Fisher Committee to have been the worst in recent Yale history, bested its predecessor, offering the following ditty : 

     Never since the Heavenly Host with all the Titans fought 
        Saw they a class whose scholarship 
    Approached so close to naught. 

Meanwhile, the Yale senior societies continued to select their members on the basis of athletic talent, prominence in extracurricular affairs, and social background. And so great a public honor was election to a society that the question of who was [and who was not] "tapped" on Tap Day was the subject of regular coverage in the New York Times.

If intellect was not highly valued at turn-of-the-century Yale, it was perhaps even less esteemed at Princeton. Headed since 1888 by Francis Landley Patton, a Presbyterian theologian noted for his administrative laxity and his failure to enforce disciplinary and academic standards, Princeton had a reputation as the least academically serious member of the Big Three. Patton himself hardly helped matters when he reportedly said at a faculty meeting : "Gentlemen, whether we like it or not, we shall have to recognize that Princetonis a rich man's college and that rich men do not frequently come to college to study." Patton also made a remark that was to haunt Old Nassau's reputation for years to come : Princeton was "the finest country club in America." 

   So weak was Princeton's academic atmosphere that a faculty committee was formed in 1901 to investigate "the scholastic condition of the college." Patton vigorously opposed its recommendation to raise academic standards, and by March 1902 a group  of trustees began to look into the matter. It became clear that Patton's end was near when, at a dinner at the Waldorf in New York, men from Harvard, Columbia, and Hopkins told several trustees in blunt terms that "Princeton was becoming the laughing stock of the academic world, that the President was neglecting his duty, the professors neglecting theirs, the students theirs, that Princeton was going to pieces." In a matter of weeks, Patton had been forced to resign, and Woodrow Wilson, an eminent political scientist who had been on the faculty since 1890, was named president. Wilson spent much of the next eight years trying to raise his school's academic standards. 
   Though Harvard was by far the most academically distinguished of the Big Three, it too suffered from a student culture largely hostile to academic exertion. As at Yale and Princeton, a faculty committee was formed at Harvard to identify the sources of low academic standards and to devise policies for elevating them. The committee, which was chaired by Le Baron Russell Briggs and included Harvard's future president A. Lawrence Lowell, concluded that the amount of time that students spent studying was "discreditably small." Its analysis of replies of letters ofinquiry from 245 instructors and 1,757 students revealed a surprising fact : the instructors believed that students spent twice as much time on their studies as they actually did. Even the better students were devoting only about 25 hours a week to academic work, including the 12 hours spent at lectures; the less committed students spent considerably less time on academic tasks.