TO LIGHT ONE CANDLE, Seeing the Light From Whale Oil

I wonder if you realize how dark the world has been for most of the last 10,000 years? For most of that time you could burn wood for light, but firewood was not a quickly renewable resource and Emperors and Kings preferred to use wood to build ships and thrones,  rather than incinerate it.  Sure, you could burn olive oil in a lamp, but burning olive oil creates smoke, and it has a limited shelf life, and it is really not very portable. And then some Etruscan genius in the eleventh century B.C. invented a thing you could carry in your pocket until you needed it, and which when you needed it burned very slowly. It was such a great invention that it was given the Sanskrit name “cand” meaning 'to give light'.  And whoever that Etruscan Thomas Edison was, I bet he got stinking rich,  because the stuff they usually made candles out of - rancid animal fat - tended to produce a powerful stench when it was heated. It is stunning to realize how much human effort over the next 3,000 years was devoted to inventing the stink-less candle.The guy who finally did it was a Jew who had escaped Seville just ahead of the Spanish inquisition.

Jacob Rodriguez Rivera landed in Newport, Rhode Island in 1748 because eight years earlier the English were so desperate for people willing to settle in America that King George II had rescinded the requirement that colonists pledge their loyalty to him "upon the true faith of a Christian." With the removal of those five little words America was endowed with all the brains, blood and brawn the rest of the world didn’t approve of on religious grounds. That is what made us what we are, which is not a Christian nation, but a multi-religious nation, the most consistently successful nation (over the last 200 years) in the world.

Anyway, Jacob went into business with his brother-in-law, Moses Lopez, who was a candle maker. And while wandering the docks of Newport looking for supplies of animal fat, Jacob stumbled upon the slaughter of a sperm whale. Now, whale blubber had long been boiled down for the oil it contained, but burning whale fat stank even worse than cow or pig fat, and since whales were difficult to find, kill and slaughter, blubber was usually mixed with other fats to reduce the stench and stretch the more expensive stuff. But since the blubber was cheap, Jacob bought a couple of barrels to see what he could make of it, and while he was at it, he also bought some Spermaceti, because nobody knew what to make of that, either.

See, if you poke a hole in a Sperm Whale’s head, you will find gallons of the stuff. Maybe it helps the whales eco-locate their prey, and maybe it helps them dive so deep. No human is really sure. But it’s white and it's sticky and it looks like…well, you know what it looks like. That’s why they are called them Sperm Whales.

Within a few years Jacob developed the following process; each fall when the whaling fleets returned, the Spermaceti was bought from the whalers in 42 gallon barrels. (The barrels were filled with water going out, and after the crew drank the water, the empty barrels were returned, filled with Spermaceti.) The stuff was boiled down and the residue was allowed to congeal over the winter into a spongy, sticky stinky mess. Yuck. Then, in the spring, the congealed stuff was shoveled into bags and pressed until the “winter –strained oil” was squeezed out. This was considered the creme-de-la-crème of whale oil and sold for the highest price.

After more processing and squeezing, Jacob was left with a cake that could be melted and molded into smokeless, stink-less candles, ready for shipment in the summer. When they burned, they actually smelled sweet and produced almost no smoke. And the light they made was such a pure white light that a “foot-candle”, the amount of light a Spermaceti candle produces at a distance of one foot, remains the standard for measuring pure white light to this very day. Jacob’s only problem was that within a couple of years several competitors had guessed or stolen his process.

So in 1761 Jacob and Moses helped to found the United Company of Spermaceti Chandlers, and pushed for the formation of a cartel, a Spermaceti cartel. Jacob Rivera teamed up with Obediah Brown and Company, primarily a Quaker family business based in Providence, and with other whalers along the coast down to Philadelphia. They were generally labeled 'The Spermaceti Trust’. The rules of The Trust set a top price of six pounds Sterling that its members would pay for a pound of Spermaceti, and set the bottom price its members would sell 100 finished candles at one pound and one shilling.

The hunt for the Sperm Whales was on. From 1770 until the start of the American Revolution, The Spermaceti Trust produced 45,000 barrels of sperm oil annually, compared to just 8,500 barrels a year of oil from all other types of whales.

After the War of 1812 The Trust became unofficially based on the Quaker power center of Nantucket Island, 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, where some 36 chandlers made the precious Spermaceti candles. So much money was made on Nantucket that the Brown family endowed an entire university with the profits. By 1846 the tiny harbor in Nantucket supported more than 700 whaling ships and more than 70,000 jobs, full and part time.

Then, just after 11:00 p.m. on 13 July of 1846 a faulty stovepipe led to a fire which was whipped by high winds. By morning it had destroyed 250 buildings, seven chandler factories, tens of thousands of barrels of Spermacti oil stored in warehouses and on the wharves. Three of the town’s four wharves burned completely. Stores and warehouses, blacksmiths’ shops, rope-makers’ shops, and Sail-makers’ workshops were all consumed. Over 800 people were left homeless. The proud town was reduced to begging for “…provisions, clothing, bedding, money…” Help poured in but the golden age of the Spermaceti Trust was over. Nine years later the Trust was completely broken and the industry had been cut by half. By 1875 the island’s population had been reduced by two thirds, down to just 3,200 souls.

The reason for the breaking up of The Trust was not just the Nantucket fire, of course. That didn't help. And the wholesale slaughter of whales meant they were getting more difficult to find, that voyages to hunt the Sperm whales which had had once lasted six months, now took three years. But what really hurt was the discovery of gold in California. A ship owner could make as much in six months carrying miners and mining equipment to California, as he did on one three year voyage in search of Sperm whales.

In the forest of masts of abandoned ships in San Francisco Bay, left adrift when their crews went hunting for gold, at least half were the masts of ex-whaling ships. And The Trust was also doomed by the development of drilling for petroleum, or rock oil, in Canada and Pennsylvania. Kerosene lamps replaced Spermaceti lamps and candles because they were far cheaper and almost as odorless.

The new baron of oil would be John D. Rockefeller, who called his company “Standard Oil” to sooth buyers used to variations in oil grades produced from different species of whales. And he supplied his product in the same 42 gallon barrels used to supply whale oil. We still measure oil in terms of those 42 gallon barrels. John D. seemed to be reassuring his customers that nothing had changed in the oil business, except the names of the people who ran The Trust.

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THE PRACTICAL USE OF TIME MACHINES

I know nothing practical about automobiles. So if I had to build one I would climb into my time machine and ask Henry Ford; the man who conceived of, designed and built the Model “T”. But if I had questions about Judaism, the American publisher of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ would be the last man I would waste my time with. Of course the engineering genius, and the vicious adherent to the anti-Semitic claptrap in the “Protocols” (actually written in 1902 by the Czar’s secrete police) shared the same brain tissue. And that illustrates the trouble you can get into trusting experts, very far outside of their area of expertise.

Take Mr. James Rand, Jr., who started an office supply company in 1915, and turned it into Remington Rand, which dominated the market by the mid-nineteen twenties. A genius in his field, in 1933 Rand co-started "The Committee for the Nation", which lobbied President Roosevelt and his “Brain Trust” of advisers to take the U.S. off the gold standard - a decision that helped America climb out of the Great Depression. So far Mr. Rand sounds like a genius. He also pulled three drowning girls out of the ocean off Long Island, so he was also a hero. But then Mr. Rand publicly endorsed some ideas of a Dr. William Albert Wirt, and overnight he went from hero to zero.

William Wirt was a Hoosier farm boy, who had made a name for himself as superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana. He espoused a return to teaching traditional family values, or what a modern sociologist might term  'educational nostalgia'. What? You thought nostalgia was something invented in 1980, or 2010?

What William called for was “'the ennobling of daily and common work”, which he proposed to achieve via his “platoon system”. He was not espousing bad ideas. They had value and his advocacy of them made him famous and popular, for awhile. They were not the ultimate educational solution, but William can be excused if he thought they were. Pride is human nature, but it is not our best nature. Anyway, what got William Wirt into trouble was not his educational theories, but a little fifty page document he wrote and mimeographed, and handed out all by himself. He called it “America Must Lose”, and it had nothing to do with education. Basically it was William's addition to the arguments against the gold standard in foreign monetary exchange, a subject you might think was a bit esoteric for a superintendent of schools. But then we all think, at times, that we have the answer to everything, if people would just listen to us. William was just prideful enough to put his into print.

The real trouble came when William sent a copy of his tract to Mr. Rand. Now, Mr. Rand, who was a Republican, had received criticism from his Republican friends for supporting something the Democrats had agreed with. And he was looking for support from any place he could find it. So in March of 1934, Mr. Rand brought William's little paper about the gold standard to the attention of Republicans on the House Interstate Commerce Committee. And they latched onto just 12 pages of the wisdom from Dr. Wirt, and turned those pages and Dr. Wirt, into an anti-FDR political cause-celeb.

I will rely on Arthur Schlesinger, from his book “The Coming of the New Deal”, to explain. “In the summer of 1933, according to the manuscript, Dr. Wirt had asked a group of ‘brain trusters’ how they planned to bring about their proposed overthrow of the social order. They replied that by holding back recovery they could prolong the countries troubles until people would realize that the government had no choice but to take over everything. What about the President? Wirt asked. Roosevelt, the brain trusters said, was in the middle of a swift stream, with current so strong he could not turn back. ‘We believe we can keep Mr. Roosevelt there until we are ready to supplant him with Stalin. We all think Mr. Roosevelt is the Kerensky of this revolution.’ But would Roosevelt not see through their schemes? “We are on the inside’, they told Wirt. We control the avenues of influence. We can make the President believe he is making the decisions for himself.’

Just a little explanation;.when Franklin D. Roosevelt became President in March of 1933, he faced 26% unemployment, and a collapsed economy. He had no solutions. He was not an economist. He was a politician. So he gathered a group of experts across a broad range of knowledge which the press dubbed his "brain trust". The members were well educated, usually young minds who had no idea of how things were usually done, so they were willing to break the rules to get the economy moving again. By 1936, unemployment would be reduced to 11%, an indication that many of these new ideas were actually working. However, in March of 1934 that argument could not yet be made.

Now, Kerensky was the guy who had overthrown the Czar in 1916.

Most people have never heard of him because in November of 1917 Lenin and the Communists had overthrown Kerensky, charging that he had not been radical enough. This scary Soviet stuff was all still recent history in 1934, and there were still plenty of people who thought Communism might yet work. The harsh reality would set in for most of them over the next decade. But everybody knew in 1934 that calling Roosevelt a 'Kerensky' was calling him a fool and the tool of the communists, who the opponents were convinced were pulling the strings from behind the curtains in the "New Deal".

Now, in the summer of 1934 the Republicans, having just been drubbed by Roosevelt in November of 1932, were throwing a lot of spaghetti against the wall, hoping some would stick,  And Mr. Wirt had just become some of that spaghetti.  Remember, his self published tome had actually supported the idea of getting off the gold standard, But still feeling the tug from his old stall, he still wanted to get back in the barn, and the 12 pages the Republicans had latched onto were his clumsy way of saying so. But none of that mattered. Politics is not reality. Politics is theatre.  

Time Magazine set the stage on 23 April, 1934,  “In the big caucus room, while flash lamps winked, newsreel cameras purred and squads of radio engineers and reporters elbowed through the jam packed spectators, a special committee of Representatives sat down to investigate charges of the utmost gravity: that the President's intimate advisers were plotting to overthrow the Republic… Impatiently the audience waited while the committee of three Democrats and two Republicans haggled along strict party lines over the rules of procedure…with 60-year-old Dr. Wirt nervously chewing his index fingernail...Democratic Chairman Alfred Lee Bulwinkle of Gastonia, N. C. put the epic question: "Doctor . . . you stated . . . that you 'asked some of the individuals in this group what their concrete plan was for bringing on the proposed overthrow'. . . . Who were those persons?”

And it was right there, with the charge of treason against members of the "Brain Trust", which had been so trumpeted by the Republicans, that the charge of "treason" began to fall apart. It turned out that none of the actual attendees of the dinner party were actual members of Roosevelt’s brain trust. The gathering had been a dinner party thrown on Friday, September 1st, 1933, by Miss Alice Barrows, “a curly-headed blond...a school building expert in the Office of Education.” (ibid) The other two women, Miss Hildegarde Kneeland and Miss Mary Taylor, were both“…bright, obscure incumbents of small Government jobs” (ibid). Also at the dinner party were Mr. Richard Bruere, a specialist in industrial relations, and Mr. David Coyle “… a theoretical writer on business and finance...(who had) just finished planting a nut farm in New Jersey.” (ibid)

But the most interesting person at the dinner (to the conspiracy believers at least) had been Mr. Laurence Todd, a correspondent for TASS, the Soviet news agency. But then, of course, Todd was the only person at the party who had no actual connection to the government, and was certainly not a member of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust”. Wrote Time magazine, “To the nation, which had been waiting…the names of Dr. Wirt's "brain trusters" meant a little less than nothing”.

Worse was to come, for Republican hopes; “Dr. Wirt, the glare of Klieg lights pitilessly burnishing his baldish brow, confessed that he had "done a great deal of the talking” (ibid) at the party. And, on that issue, at least, the other attendees agreed. Miss Barrows recalled, “As a dinner it was not a success. Dr. Wirt talked practically all the time.” According to Miss Kneeland, “It was impossible for either myself or anyone else to take a considerable part in the conversation.” Miss Taylor said, “Dr. Wirt really had no conversation. The monologue continued.” Said Mr. Breure; “I listened to Dr. Wirt for several hours discoursing on money.” And according to Mr. Todd, the reporter for Tass, Dr. Wirt had “…talked for nearly five hours continuously”.

So Dr. Wirt's memory of the fateful dinner party had been faulty. He thought he had been the life of the party. He had killed the party. He thought others had said frightening things. He had been talking to himself. And his ego had reconstructed events to his own benefit and to confirm his own opinions; what a typically human form of behavior. And this was how the Republican party spent their summer of 1934, throwing poor Dr. Wirt against a wall, to see if he stuck. He didn't.

The outcome was that Dr. Wirt (and Mr. Rand, who was now associated with him) became fodder for the Democrats. And they were just as merciless toward these men as the Republicans had been for them. Roosevelt observed that the Republicans had "gone from Wirt to Wirt". FDR advisor, Donald Richberg,  was moved to poetry. “A cuttlefish squirt, Nobody hurt, From beginning to end, Dr. Wirt.” The San Francisco Chronicle editorialized, “Dr. Wirt opened that basket containing that famous catch he has bragged so much about and, as suspected, it contains nothing but Minnows. Not a fish in the lot worth talking about.” Said Time magazine; “Thus, flatter than a crepe Suzette, fell the Red Scare of 1934.”

But perhaps the strongest response, and the one most needed, to the Republican noise machine of 1934, was a speech made by the poet, Mr. Richberg “'There are a great many stuffed shirts who have access to avenues of great publicity”, he said, “and so they pour their hysterical fears and their warped views of economic recovery into the public ears. They cannot use facts, even if they recognize them, so they create myths and hobgoblins and repeat nonsense over and over again. . . . We are not in the slightest danger of a political revolution so long as we preserve our national sanity….When any man ventures to scoff at the use of brains in government, he should be asked to explain by what part of the anatomy he believes human affairs should be conducted.”

Dr. Wirt received a telegram of support from the Klu Klux Klan. But the Republican party had little use for him, now that his story had deflated and he had become unstuck. It is what happens to all amateurs from the right or the left who get to close to professional politics.

Quietly Wirt returned to Indiana and wrote no more on economic affairs. In 1938 he died of a heart attack, and his visions of education were gradually discarded, the good with the bad. Mr. Rand’s business achievements after 1934 were, in many ways, even more impressive than those which preceded his involvement in politics. But after the summer of 1934 he avoided publicity for his political views, and died in 1968, a wealthy and powerful man. Even today, If I were assembling a corporation I would use my time machine to ask his advice. But I would certainly not seek out his opinion about politics or time machines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion

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HOOSIER HOOLIGANS - The Invention of Train Robing

I must tell you that Willie Sutton never said he robbed banks because that was where the money was. In his autobiography Bill Sutton, as he preferred to be known, did admit that “If anybody had asked me, I’d have probably said it.” But after robbing 200 banks over a 40 year career, Sutton enunciated his real philosophy as thus; “Go where the money is…and go there often.” And that idea becomes really interesting when you combine it with the philosophy of novelist Paul Theroux, who noted that “Almost anything is possible on a train…”

“RAILROAD, n. The mechanical device enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off.” - Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary.

Frank Reno (above) began his criminal career running three-card monte games along the Columbus highway, which forded the White River near his family’s 1,200 acre farm, about two miles north of Seymour, Indiana. When neighbors who had been fleeced complained, Frank and three of his brothers - John, Simeon (Sim) and William - responded with arson. Over several years, as the boys matured, most of their hamlet of Rockford was burned down at least once. The brothers then invested their winnings, buying up distressed properties, including a hotel, known as the Radar House.

“DISOBEDIENCE, n. The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.” ibid

Beginning in 1863 the boys joined in the Union Army, not out of patriotism but with a fiduciary respect for the $400 bounties that were being paid for new recruits. So strong was the Reno sense of capitalism, that after a day or two of military service the boys would desert just to sign up again. It was called bounty jumping if they caught you, but only William was held long enough to receive an honorable discharge.

“RASCALITY, n. Stupidity militant.” ibid

In 1864 Frank and John (above) teamed up with a black man, Grant Wilson, to rob a store and Post Office 8 miles north of Rockford, in the Wayne County community of Jonesville, Indiana. The three were quickly arrested and under pressure Grant Wilson agreed to testify against Frank. However the officials in Wayne County did not know the Reno brothers well, and all were granted bail. Shortly thereafter Grant was mysteriously shot to death answering a late night knock at his front door. In the days before finger prints or ballistic evidence, the Reno boys walked away free men.

“RETRIBUTION, n. A rain of fire-and-brimstone that falls alike upon the just and such of the unjust as have not procured shelter by evicting them.” ibid

In July of 1865 the Seymour Times warned visitors to “be wary of thieves and assassins”.And everybody knew who the paper was referring to.  In 1866 this warning was reinforced when the body of Mr. Moore Woodmansee, guest at the Radar House, was found floating in the White River, sans his head. His luggage and $2,800 in cash he had been carrying, were also missing. Then, in October, the Reno brothers got really inventive.

“HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy…” ibid

John and Sim Reno, along with a compatriot named Frank Sparks (above), boarded the 6:00 p.m. Ohio and Mississippi train out of Seymour, Indiana. A few miles south of town they made their way to the express car, got the drop on clerk Elam Miller and removed $10,000 in gold coin and $33 in bank notes from the safe. It was the first robbery of a moving train in American history. George Kinney, a passenger on that train identified the Reno brothers as the robbers. They were arrested on 11 October. But after Mr. Kinney met with an unfortunate accident while answering a late night knock on his front door, no other passengers stepped forward, and, again, all charges against the Reno brothers had to be dropped. But local anger was growing.

“ABSCOND, v.i. To "move in a mysterious way," commonly with the property of another” ibid

Faced with increasing hostility from his neighbors, on 17 November, 1867, John Reno and a friend named Val Elliot took a train to Gallatin, Missouri and robbed the court house of $23,000. However, Pinkerton detectives tracked John back to Seymour, and arrested him there in early December. The brothers tried to raise money for a good lawyer by robbing another train out of Seymour, but this only inspired the locals to form a vigilante committee, called the Scarlet Mask Society. The remaining brothers and their “friends” (above)  decided to look for financial opportunities elsewhere. So, with a lynch mob organizing, on 18 January, 1868, John Reno faced the music in Gallatin alone and was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in a Missouri prison.

KILL, v.. To create a vacancy without nominating a successor.” ibed

This inspired the remaining brothers and their gang to move, and a robbery on 18 February, 1868,  in Magnolia, Iowa,  netted them $14,000.  But the now incarcerated John seems to have been the brains of the group, because after another robbery in March, three members were arrested.The entire trio  managed to break out for April Fools Day.  But the Reno brothers now decided it would be safer to practice their trade back home again in Indiana. They were wrong.

“BRANDY, n. A cordial composed of one part thunder-and-lightning, one part remorse, two parts bloody murder, one part death-hell-and-the grave and four parts clarified Satan.” ibid

On 22 May 1868,  12  men boarded a train in Marshfield, Indiana, broke into the express car, threw the clerk off the train, and grabbed about $96,000 in gold coins. The clerk died of his injuries. Then on 9 July,  the Reno gang went a robbery too far. This time, when they broke into the express car, 10 Pinkerton detectives were waiting for them. The Pinkerton's opened fire. Theodore Clifton and Charles Rosenberry, were wounded, and Volney Elliot, was captured.  On 10 July , as the three prisoners were being transported south to the county courthouse, the Scarlet Mask Society waylaid the train, removed the prisoners at gunpoint and hanged them from a tree at a nearby crossroads.  Indiana, it seemed, and gotten civilized enough to lynch evil doers.

“TREE, n. A tall vegetable intended by nature to serve as a penal apparatus.” ibed

On 11 July three more gang members, Henry Jerrell , Frank Sparks and John Moore, were arrested in Illinois, and dispatched to Seymour via wagon. On 25 July they were also intercepted by the Scarlet Mask and introduced to the same tree. The site became known as Hangman’s Crossing; today, simply as “The Crossing”.

“GALLOWS, n. A stage for the performance of miracle plays, in which the leading actor is translated to heaven” ibid

Two days later, on 27 July, William and Sim Reno were arrested in Indianapolis, where they had gone to gamble. They were tried and convicted of the Marshfield robbery, and after local officials heard rumors that the Scarlet Mask was preparing another neck tie party, the two men were shipped south to the strongest jail in Indiana, in the Ohio River town of New Albany( above). Said Sheriff Thomas Fullenlove, “These men were sent here for safekeeping and they will be safely kept, if it is in the power of the authorities to do so”. Shortly thereafter Frank Reno and Charlie Anderson were arrested in Windsor, Canada. After the niceties of an extradition hearing, the pair  arrived at the same secure little jail in New Albany at the end of October, 1868.

“ACCOMPLICE, n. One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty.” ibid

Just after midnight, Saturday, 12 December, 1868,  an unscheduled train arrived in New Albany. Some 65 hooded and masked men disembarked and made their way to the jail. There they surrounded the building and beat up Sheriff Fullenlove before securing a rope to an iron stairwell support. Then Frank Reno was dragged from his cell, and strangled while dangling from the ironwork. After he was dead, the mob lynched William and then Sim, with Charlie Anderson being strung up at about 4:30 a.m.  However the overused rope finally broke under the strain of Charlie, dropping him to the floor. So the members of the lynch mob simply procured another rope and strung up poor Charlie again, and this time the rope held. It appears that the members of the Scarlet Mask also adhered to that other lesson later espoused by Willie Sutton, “Success in any endeavor requires single-minded attention to detail and total concentration.”

HANGMAN, n. An officer of the law charged with duties of the highest dignity and utmost gravity, and held in hereditary disesteem by a populace having a criminal ancestry.” ibid

No one was ever accused of participating in any of the lynchings. Ten years later, in February 1878, John Reno was released from prison and returned to Rockford. He quietly worked the family farm for five years before being arrested for counterfeiting. After serving another three year sentence, he died in his home, 31 January, 1895. And that was the end of the Reno gang of Indiana, if not the world’s best train robbers, at least the world’s first. And there is something to be said for that.  Not much, but something.

“A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car. But if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.” Theodore Roosevelt.

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