Polish Express

Krakow Today I finished up my lectures for Mises University. Tomorrow morning I head off to Poland for the IVR conference in Krakow to present a paper on Lysander Spooner – the same paper I plan to present at the Molinari Society meeting in December. Then, after Krakow, I head to Holland – Holland, Michigan, that is – for a Liberty Fund conference. So I’ll be incommunibloggo for a while.


Zip It

Two anecdotes that seem to belong together:

Sullivan and Hugo Once at a performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Arthur Sullivan was in the audience and was humming along with the score, when the man next to him said indignantly, “I came here to hear Sullivan’s music, not yours!”

Once when Victor Hugo was hurrying home to answer a call of nature, he realised upon reaching his building that he wasn’t going to make it inside in time, so he relieved himself against the outside wall of his house. A passerby told him, “How dare you! Don’t you know whose house that is? It is the home of the great Victor Hugo!”


But What About Jade and Theodosia?

Aaron Burr versus Green Lantern In related news, does anyone remember that Green Lantern once dueled Aaron Burr? It was back in 1974-75, in a two-part story running in the back of issues 230 and 231 of that era’s Flash series.

Despite what the premise might imply, the portrayal of Burr is quite sympathetic – probably reflecting the influence of Gore Vidal’s 1973 novel.


Burr Blur

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’ve been interested in Aaron Burr revisionism for a while. Burr had the bad luck to make enemies of both Jefferson and Hamilton, thus earning the ire of historians across the political spectrum; but I’ve long suspected that Burr, like Jefferson and Hamilton, was a complicated mix of good and bad and not the plaster villain he’s been cast as. (Besides, a man who wears a locket of Mary Wollstonecraft can’t be all bad!)

Aaron Burr I just saw a C-Span talk by Nancy Isenberg on her Burr-revisionist book Fallen Founder. The book sounded interesting, and less blindly adulatory of Burr than, say, Roger Kennedy’s book. (Kennedy’s Burr, an uncompromising abolitionist hero trying to carve out a territorial enclave of racial and sexual equality, always seemed a bit too good to be true.)

Unfortunately, I was put off by the fact that Isenberg said several things that seemed to me historically dubious:

1. Isenberg said that Hamilton wrote ahead of time that he planned to fire into the air during his duel with Burr. No; he wrote ahead of time that he planned not to fire at all. (Or at least he said that he planned to “reserve and throw away” his shot. “Throw away” is ambiguous, I suppose, between firing into the air and not firing, but “reserve” seems to favour the latter.)

2. She said that James Monroe’s military interventionism was at odds with the anti-interventionism of his own Monroe Doctrine. No; the Monroe Doctrine was not anti-interventionist – quite the contrary.

3. She said that Hamilton was a slaveowner. Maybe; but although Hamilton was complicit in slavery in various ways, as far as I know his actually owning slaves hasn’t been proven. (He had black servants, but I don’t believe it’s ever been determined whether they were free or slave. Of course, I haven’t read her book; perhaps she proves this?)


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