Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
In a perfect world this would be a substantive post, as I left on my summer bike trip last Wednesday and arrived home yesterday. On the other hand, I'm owned one short, breezy, on-the-road post. Owed, man.
Anyway, my Dad died the winter before last of the slow and fading road to the west that my uncle is now following, removing the need to ride the Crowsnest to Grand Forks for my annual visit. I also accomplished my goal of riding (part) of the Okanagan last year, and was free to return to Highway 5A, "The Old Princeton-Kamloops Highway," which I last rode, in part, as a youth so many years ago, full of all the silly follies of youth that seem so absurd when you are possessed of the follies of old age.
Detail of 1779 chorographical map of New York (including chorographical details of adjacent parts of New Jersey but evidently not those of Pennsylvania) showing the "Minisink Valley." https://minisinkvalleygenealogy.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_10.html
So Braddock's Expedition is a bit confusing because American historians all talk about his two regiments, and military historians of the Nineteenth Century know that's about ten thousand men, which is a huge force by the standards of Eighteenth Century colonial warfare, and meanwhile military historians of the Eighteenth Century are, like, "what's a regiment?" It's not inaccurate, in that regiments did exist in the Eighteenth Century as political, financial and administrative elements, and the particular two battalions of the Irish Establishment that came out with Braddock belonged to single battalion regiments. American military historians are probably informed by reading about the Civil War, where, as was often the case in that era, it was found necessary to insert an additional tier in the command structure of the Age of Reason. That is, in 1755 there were so many companies per battalion, so many battalions per brigade, so many brigades per [insert tedious historiographical discussion here] division. In 1860, armies with lots of conscripts found that this wasn't enough supervision and turned the regiment into an organisational level between battalion and brigade. Conscripts, and their ROTC officers, just need more attention from more headquarters because they can't be trusted to know what they're doing on their own.
The aftermath of Braddock's Defeat is also confusing, because, we are told, a wave of Indian attacks caused settlers to abandon frontier settlements and flee eastward, with a strong subtext of a racial war against the Westward Drive, Frontier Spirit, and Manifest Destiny. And we are not told wrong, except that, with the exception of three extraordinary attacks, the trouble took place in what was then Pennsylvania's Northumberland County, now Monroe and Pike counties, or, in Eighteenth Century usage, the "Minisink Valley," which is not a valley at all, but the region north of the Delaware Water Gap cupped by the Poconos Mountains that was shared between Pennsylvania, New York, and West Jersey, as it still was. The attacks were absolutely Indian attacks, made specifically by the followers of Teedyuscung, probably a grandson of Tamanend and, if my tinfoil hat isn't fitting too tight, William Penn, with an internally Pennsylvanian objective, which was why the raiders spared New York and New Jersey, and why the raids were probably actually a pogrom, which is why almost all the attacks killed the patriarchs of the settlements raided, and probably why there's a slightly panicked subtext to Ben Franklin's reports about the refugees gathering in New Jersey. Because if they weren't leading members of these families, they were probably mostly enslaved. This was a Pennsylvanian civil war. The racial component isn't "Scotch-Irish" versus Indians, but rather a peasant's revolt.
No wonder, then, that the Pennsylvanian Assembly settled quickly in the 1758 Treaty of Easton. But before that could happen, and just to drag this preamble around to relevance, Henri Bouquet, the Swiss Protestant (that is, Francophone) favourite of the Duke of Cumberland, had arrived in Philadelphia and there formed, not to get all genealogical, one of the ancestral units of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, most easily searched, I suspect, as the 60th (American) Rifles. Per the source most recently consulted --probably Wikipedia, but I forget-- this was formed from immigrant German workingmen. Wikipedia does not note that in 1756 the Germans who were immigrating to Philadelphia were mostly coming from German Flats, far up the Mohawk, where a German-speaking community had been growing by ethnogenesis from 1719. With regards to the demographic raw material, this can only have been the free Blacks who could not exist as such in the Eighteenth Century American cosmic order. This probably explains why Bouquet didn't need to subject his riflemen to some specialised training regime to turn them into another of the mid-Eighteenth Century's many ethnically-recruited special forces.Which is usually a bit of an anachronism in that the European units that trace their tradition to the Eighteenth Century special forces have all been long since de-specialed, pipe bands apart.
The American ranger tradition is an exception, and one that, I suggest, is rooted in race, not the primeval (hah!) forest of the American frontier.
I'm having a bit of a mix-up with my magazines, which I am sure I will have sorted out next time. In the mean time, enjoy a review of the news over two weeks in which the Chief of Naval Operations is allowed to just make stuff up and plant it in the press, an MP isn't allowed to complain about an actual security violation, and the Atomic Energy Commission outright lies about the United States having atomic warheads for guided air-to-air missiles.
Unless WWIII does break out. I can't rule it out, but I'm writing on the 15th, and I will be going to bed well before midnight, so I may wake up to find us in the midst of the final global battle between the imperialists and the Socialist Soviet of Workers and Peasants.
Tony Randall as sex symbol is the perfect lead into the musical act that closes the thumbnail below.
R_. C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
It is my understanding that I am to call you "Daddio" and decline to do my homework until such time as there's a revolution or something, and there's really no point in doing anything but knock over newstands. I'm not even sure that I am allowed to care about Kefauver '56 or Aneurin Bevan, as they might be too square. (Bevan sure is. Binge drinking is for when you're young and irresponsible, not putting yourself forward as a potential prime minister!)
So, you know, who cares about stuff and anything? Not us young people today! (I am young, right? At least, I'm not thirty!) Anyway, because it is March and the technical press is still exhausted from the New Year's stuff, and the British press is waiting on an election, it will probably feel like this installment is all rebellion.
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
It won't hit the top of the charts until the summer, but Rock Around the Clock is the hit single from the Blackboard Jungle soundtrack. Did you know that the novel that Blackboard Jungle is based on is set in a British school? I didn't!
Yeah, well, I was tired yesterday and I needed to do some bike training (mainly wearing calluses into my tender tootsie) ahead of my summer bike trip, which is in July this year. That's why I'm talking about something that came up while I was half-finishing the March II postblogging.
The Special Report in the 7 March issue of Newsweek covered the then-ongoing movie industry revival, and the 28 March issue has some letters about it, including a self-promoting but still valid explanation from Lester Rand of the Youth Research Institute (kids like going to the movies), and a letter from Zira Siegel of Culver City, California, pointing out how extraordinary this self-portrait with the Junior MGM Players, shot by Newsweek staff photographer Dale Healy is. Siegel asks whether it is a composite, and the Editor replies that it is not. Leslie Caron is 20ft behind the lens; Debbie Reynold is three feet away leaning in, and Pier Angeli is sitting on a pillow.
Dean Schary doesn't even appear to have an online biography. He was just one of the anonymous staffers who made Newsweek, in spite of itself, a great magazine. And speaking of "in spite of itself," I first encountered the "U-bomb" in The Periscope, which feature, as was its way, got the whole thing so hilariously wrong that I was sent down the very productive rabbit hole that makes up most of this post. The U-bomb, it explains, means that the American atomic stockpile has been suddenly increased ten-fold, that there are enough bombs to "knock out the USSR with radioactivity," and that since the U-bomb "does not, (contrary to some reports) necessarily require a hydrogen bomb to set it off, the Soviets are in a position rapidly to overtake our lead."
So my boss is on his annual pilgrimage to the Old Continent to show everybody that he's a big shot in Canada, and we're training yet another ambitious young man as a future produce manager, as we do because the company totally has a skilled labour continuity plan that involves systematically identifying talent and nurturing it. "Nurturing" in this case tends to mean humping oversized orders around the back room, because our automated perishable ordering system is proving the brilliance of our plan to use AI to replace skilled labour. (Look, it's obviously not the computer's fault that we use the same produce code for two distinct kinds of carrots, but manually straightening out the order and inventory every day is precisely the kind of fiddling that AI was supposed to get rid of!) The upshot is that yesterday was my second day off in the last eight and I was not exactly filled with energy on what had to be a laundry day anyway.
Which is fine, because this is the month that Flight grudgingly fessed up to an explanation for why the United States has the Matador, and we don't. We have the UB.109T, or RED RAPIER. So why have I chosen a Bomarc for my thumbnail?
Because.
On 31 March 1958, the Canadian electorate got its long-awaited opportunity to send Canada's Natural Governing Party to the benches, electing "Prairie populist" John Diefenbaker and his Progressive Conservatives by a swingeing 53% to 34% popular vote majority. Diefenbaker proceeded to reign over the Party for an immensely destructive decade-and-a-half. Anyone who has read as much contemporary Newsweek as I have and wonders whether my narrator's cynicism is anachronistic is referred to my Dad's collection of old Brothers-in-Laws albums to illustrate one fairly common reaction to Dief the Chief. One might even draw larger conclusions about contemporary events if it were desired!
Although as far as aerospace defence issues are concerned this would be a red herring. Cancelling the upcoming Avro long-range supersonic continental interceptor was an unfortunate necessity, and the fact that the Bomarc was insane has nothing to do with the fact that Diefenbaker was also crazy. And since Wikipedia has pictures of Bomarc and not RED RAPIER, there you go.
Here in London the winter of our discontent is rushing to an end. The Economist is at its wit's end trying to portray Rab Butler as some kind of genius after income tax cuts had to be followed by a 4.5% bank rate, and is worried about a Labour resurgence ahead of the election that can't now be too far away. The thought here is that Churchill can't possibly go on any longer, as his senility is leading to public blundering about in diplomacy after we came far too close to a war over Formosa. Whoever replaces him, and it now looks much more likely to be Eden than Butler, will have to call a general election. The tortuous theory that Bevan has staged his little revolt to undermine Labour (and Hugh Gaitskell's) prospects seems a bit conspiratorial, but it might be true.
Thais have discreetly pointed out how insulting the dinky American exhibit at the recent Bangkok Trades Fair was.
If you're wondering how I got so much more political of late, it's because I've been pricing homes in Berkeley and wondering how we can afford them. It is time for our little Air Force family to stop wandering, since I have to settle down somewhere and practice once I join the California bar, and I have actually had a very intriguing response to some feelers I have put out. It turns out that having a personal connection with Bill and David is very attractive in some circles! James and the Air Force have to decide whether they will part ways some time in the next ten years, and we certainly do not want to drag James-James and little Lizzy through one nursery school after another! Bill and David will certainly have a big enough company to require a Vice-President In Charge of Something Indefinitely Important by 1965. and in a perfect world he'll be married to one of the company's patent lawyers.
So, you see, some people are making plans, even with Korea II, 1948 War II, or even WWIII upon us!
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
The memorial to the IDF paratrooper losses in the 28 February 1955 OPERATION BLACK ARROW is sited between Kibbutz Mefsalim and the fortified border of the Gaza Strip. Mefsalim's armed security was successful in holding off attackers on 9 October.
