From the first issue (1920) of a magazine called The Brownies’ Book, the first American children’s magazine targeted to an African-American audience, and edited by W.E.B. DuBois:

There is no doubt about it, we Children have just got to take hold of this world. The Grown-ups have made an awful mess of it. First and worst, they have forgotten how to Laugh. Now let me say right here: The nicest thing in the world is Laughter—good, big, loud laughs. And next is Smiles, the sort that come before and after. Laughter clears away rubbish and gets things started. Fancy forgetting how to laugh! How could they? But they did and then, naturally, they fought. Fighting is mostly wrong and silly. Of course, if you’re just set upon by a bully and you can’t laugh it off, why just punch him hard, and then make up. See? Make up! Don’t try and be mad forever, or for a day. Make up, and try a game of ball. Let him bat if he wants to. He’ll probably strike out, and then you’ll have your innings.

Of course, we Children know this is easy; but Grown-ups don’t. They’re awfully dull at times, and if we don’t take hold of things and help, I don’t know where this old world is going to land. It’s a mighty nice world, too. The best ever if you just treat it square. But if you mess it up with blood and hate and meanness, why it’s awful. If the Grown-ups keep on, we Children will just have to crowd them right off the edge and take charge of things. Gee! But what a jolly place: marbles, and tag, and funny stories, and pennies, and dolls, and tops, and—oh! everything that really counts.

So look out, Grown-ups, we’ve got our eye on you, and “Don’t let us have to speak to you again,”—as Father says.

Amen.

I am fascinated by how Eisenhower—the all-American, general, Cold War president—ended a September 24, 1957 speech from the Oval Office, concerning the Little Rock Central High School integration crisis:

Thus will be restored the image of America and of all its parts as one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Good night, and thank you very much.

Now it is impossible for a president to end a speech—any speech—without saying “God bless America.” And yet Eisenhower, the president whom we usually credit with inserting “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance (in 1954, three years before this speech), and with generally using Christianity as a way to shore up American values in contrast to those of the godless communists, isn’t going there in this speech. I think it’s a reminder, dare I say it, of how much the new post-Reagan Republican party has done to make us think that the new normal has always been the normal. Even in my life time it has become increasingly easier to be un-American—maybe not as easy as it was at the height of the McCarthy witchhunts, but pretty damn easy.

Tonight I gathered with friends and heard a great deal of poetry I’d never heard before. Then I came home and, a propos de rien, realized that this is my very favorite Whitman poem:

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d,
And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.

Seek beauty.

Quote, in fact, of basically all days, because a little meander through the Internet led me to the following fabulous entry in the OED:

Princeton, n. orig. and chiefly U.S.

attrib. Designating a form of male homosexual activity in which the penis is rubbed against the thighs or stomach of a partner.

1965 S. FRIEDMAN Totempole 265, I should have known..it would be the Princeton rub or nothing. 1969 W. H. AUDEN in N.Y. Rev. Bks. 27 Mar. 3/4 My guess is that at the back of his mind, lay a daydream of an innocent Eden where children play ‘Doctor’, so that the acts he really preferred were the most ‘brotherly’, Plain-Sewing and Princeton-First-Year. 1972 B. RODGERS Queens’ Vernacular 154 Princeton style,..fucking the thighs. 1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 21 Mar. 324/5 ‘Princeton-First-Year’ is a more condescending version of the term ‘Princeton Rub’; that is, coitus contra ventrem. 2004 D. BERGMAN Violet Hour iii. 105 He arrives there still a virgin, without even the benefit of the ‘Princeton rub’.

Hey, Yale, you think you can beat that?

Addendum: It’s interesting that the first citation is 1965. I would be very surprised if the expression weren’t in common usage long before that—see, for example, this fin-de-siècle gem dug up by Press Clubber David Walter.

Journalist Edwin Balmer writing in October 1904 about the media coverage of the Chicago meatpacking strike of that year:

A newspaper is merely a dealer in news. It buys the special styles, sizes and qualities of news which it thinks it can sell to its patrons. It is business, and as with all other business concerns, the business policy varies with the classes of buyers to which the newspapers, as the department stores, can best appeal. It is business which puts cheap, gaudy and shoddy goods in one department store which has an immense patronage; it is business which puts reliable “all wool and a yard wide fabric” in another department store which may have an equally large number of patrons. It is also business which suplies one newspaper with sensational, unfounded “fake” stories, exaggerations and imaginations displayed in large showy type and it is also business which makes it good policy for another paper to by [sic] wholesale, for retail purposes, calm, moderate, reliable accounts and reports at least prefering the truth,—other things being equal.

[…]

What paper has not nobly and enthusiastically offered the full strength of its editorial staff to settle the strike? How many newspapers have had, or even endeavored to have had, published unbiased, unexaggerated news—the calm, moderate statement of conditions and issues instead of the exaggerated sensationalism which helps to sell papers but also contributes to the widening of the breach between the two classes which are and must be necessary to each other?

Plus ça change…

Here’s a Valentine’s Day quotation for you, dear reader, from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”:

Probably the prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken its rise from Moses’s poetical story [Genesis 2:18-23]; yet as very few, it is presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground; or, only be so far admitted as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to shew that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke, because the whole creation was only created for his convenience or pleasure.

[…]

Besides, the woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will, by managing her family and practising various virtues, become the friend, and not the humble dependent of her husband; and if she, by possessing such substantial qualities, merit his regard, she will not find it necessary to conceal her affection, nor to pretend to an unnatural coldness of constitution to excite her husband’s passions. In fact, if we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.

And what a relief that is for this high achiever!

In related news, Wollstonecraft is slowly but surely convincing me that Milton’s repetition of the Biblical anti-Eve sentiment, which I have always thought of as very secondary to the plot of Paradise Lost, is actually fundamentally essential to understanding the text.

Auden, “O Where Are You Going?”:

“O where are you going?” said reader to rider,
“That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.”

“O do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,
“That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking,
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?”

“O what was that bird,” said horror to hearer,
“Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.”

“Out of this house”—said rider to reader,
“Yours never will”—said farer to fearer
“They’re looking for you”—said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

In utterly unrelated news, I’ve had the best birthday one could wish for.

Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, section 149:

Thus Children may be cozen’d into a Knowledge of the Letters; be taught to read, without perceiving it to be any thing but a Sport, and play themselves into that which others are whipp’d for. Children should not have any thing like Work, or serious, laid on them; neither their Minds, nor Bodies will bear it. It injures their Healths; and their being forced and tied down to their Books in an Age at enmity with all such Restraint, has, I doubt not, been the Reason, why a great many have hated Books and Learning all their Lives after. ‘Tis like a Surfeit, that leaves an Aversion behind not to be removed.

I can only think that if more of my teachers post-Montessori School had embraced this 18th-century philosophy, I (and my peers) would have been a lot less miserable for much of our childhoods.

Whitman, from the Calamus poems, because I was reading about John Addington Symonds today:

The Base of All Metaphysics

And now gentlemen,
A word I give to remain in your memories and minds,
As base and finalè too for all metaphysics.

(So to the students the old professor,
At the close of his crowded course.)

Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,
Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel,
Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato,
And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having studied long,
I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems,
See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see,
Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land.

And on the facing page:

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d,
And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night, In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.

To a Western Boy

Many things to absorb I teach to help you become eleve of mine;
Yet if blood like mine circle not in your veins,
If you be not silently selected by lovers and do not silently select lovers,
Of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine?

Also:

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and the woods, and above every keel little or large that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.

I love the Calamus poems dearly; it was difficult to only pick four of them to quote here. And I see why Symonds (and Carpenter, and Wilde, and all their many descendants) might have gone looking for something in Whitman, and why they might have believed themselves to have found it. And yet I maintain that what they might have thought of Whitman, what they might have so desperately wanted Whitman to be, is woefully incomplete—although I do sympathize deeply with the quest for external validation.