BIRTH OF THE BOYCOTT

 

I can describe the exact moment of conception. On the evening of 22 September, 1880,  Father John O’Malley was sharing a meal with American journalist James Redpath. At some point during dinner the priest noticed the American had stopped eating. 

When queried, Redpath (above)  explained, “I am bothered about a word. When a people ostracize a land grabber..." Redpath then struggled for a moment, before explaining, "But ostracism won't do" 

According to Redpath Father O'Malley (above, center) then, "...tapped his big forehead, and said, 'How would it do to call it "to boycott him?” , “Redpath wrote later, "He was the first man who uttered the word, and I was the first who wrote it.” (Talks About Ireland, 1881) And thus was born another contribution to the English language. Of course the importance of this invention requires a little explanation.

Freed from its incubator in the central highlands of  Mexico, 'Phytophthora infestans' -  the Potato Blight - arrived in Ireland in the 1830’s. By then the humble potato had become the primary food for the 8 million people of Ireland. It could be grown almost year round. It produced so much protein per square foot that a family could be supported on a quarter of an acre of land. But because of this dependence, in the decades after 1845, the blight created "The Starving Time". Each year more and more of the crop was consumed by the moldy blight.  And because it did its work underground, unseen, its ravages would not be realized until the attempt to harvest the crop.  By 1855  20% of the population of Ireland had starved to death, and another 20% had emigrated.

The British government struggled to respond to the disaster with church based relief, but religious bigotry and politics then compounded the human misery.  The English landlords were mostly Protestant and the Irish farmers were Catholic. Potatoes were molding away in the fields. But wheat, which was growing healthy and abundant in Ireland, was too expensive for the starving Irish to buy,  thanks to the internal tariffs called the Corn Laws enforced by the English Parliment. 

These were duties (taxes) charged on grain imported into any part of the British Empire. This was done to protect the Irish and English landowners from having to compete with cheap American or European wheat.  But by 1880, of the four million souls still surviving on the emerald isle, fewer than 2,000 owned 70% of the land. The three million tenant farmers owned nothing, not even their own homes, and over the two previous years their rents had been increased by 30%, and many were being thrown out of the their ancestral rented homes (above).  And to be expelled meant starvation. The very life was being squeezed out of the people of Ireland.  Law and order demanded it.

Meanwhile, most of the largest, wealthiest landowners, those benefiting from the Corn Law duties, were absentee landlords, Englishmen and women who hired local farmers to manage their Irish estates. “Captain" Charles Cunningham Boycott was one of these local farm owners/managers.  Those tenants who could not pay their higher rent were evicted by the managers. Those who were evicted usually died (above). To argue it was not intended as “genocide” misses the point. Intended or not, it was mass murder. Ireland was teetering on the edge of a social disaster.

On Tuesday, 3 July, 1880, outside the quaint village of Ballinrobe, County Mayo, three men emptied their revolvers into the head and face of twenty-nine year old David Feerick,  an agent for an absentee landlord.  No one was ever charged with that murder.  In early September, outside of the same village, “Captain” Charles Boycott, called on the tenants to harvest the oat crop of absent landlord Lord Erne. 

“Captain” Boycott (above) would be described by the New York Times (in 1881) as 49 years old; "a red faced fellow, five feet eight inches tall, the son of a Protestant minister who had served in the British Army." However he earned his title of Captain not in the military but for his daring attitude in sport. Besides managing Lord Erne's property, Boycott owned 4,000 acres of Irish farmland for himself, farmed by his own tenant farmers.  The day he called Lord Erne's tenants back to work, Boycott also informed the tenants that their wages were being cut by almost half.  The tenants simply refused to work at those starvation wages.

The Boycott family and servants by themselves struggled for half a day to cut and harvest the oats (above) before admitting defeat. Mrs. Boycott then appealed to the tenants personally. They responded to her by bringing in the oat crop before the winter rains ruined it.

On Sunday, 19 September 1880,  Irish politician Charles Stuart Parnell (above), addressed a mass meeting in the town of Ennis.  Parnell called on the crowd to shun any who took over the property of an evicted tenant. 

“When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and the marketplace, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him severely alone — putting him into a kind of moral Coventry — isolating him from his kind like the leper of old.”  

It was the birth of the modern non-violent protest. Unstated, was the reality that this was a religious war, the Catholic south of Ireland against the Protestant controlled north and England.

On Tuesday, 22 September, 1880, a local process server, under orders from "Captain Boycott",  and accompanied by police, issued eviction notices to eleven of Lord Erne's tenants.  The tenants were not surprised. Speaking of Boycott, one tenant told a local newspaper, “He treated his cattle better than he did us.”  

The server would have issued even more eviction notices, but a crowd of women began to throw mud and manure at the agent and his police escort (above) until they had to retreat into the Boycott home. That night, in the house of Father O'Mally, the word "Boycott", as a verb, was invented.  It was put to immediate use.

The next morning, Wednesday, 23 September, a large crowd from Ballinrobe (above) marched to the Boycott home and urged the servants to leave. By evening the Boycotts and a young niece living with them, were alone in the house.

A letter written by “Captain” Boycott was published in the London Times. It made no mention of the raising of rents, only of the refusal to pay those rents. It made no mention of the cutting of salaries, only of the refusal to work. 

It did detail the travails of Captain Boycott and his family (above). His mail was not being delivered. He was followed and mocked whenever he left his farm, and had to travel with an armed escort. “The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed…”

Harper's Weekly Illustrated News for 18 December, 1880,  reported what happened next. “A newspaper correspondent first started the idea of sending assistance to Captain Boycott…one person alone promised to get together 30,000 volunteers.  Mister Forester, Chief Secretary for Ireland, at once vetoed the project of an armed invasion…

"It was accordingly decided to pick out some fifty or sixty from the great number of Orange (Protestants) from northern Ireland who were anxious to volunteer. Under military protection (of 1,000 troops) these men harvested Captain Boycott’s crops… The cost of this singular expedition was about ten thousand pounds…” (over 200,000 American dollars, today).

It took two weeks under military guard for the inexperienced Ulster men to bring in the crop of turnips, wheat and potatoes, valued by Captain Boycott as worth about three hundred and fifty pounds ($8,000).  Mr. Parnell estimated the harvest had cost the English government “one shilling for every turnip.”

Boycott left Ireland with his family on Wednesday, the first of December, 1880,  shrouded in the back of a military ambulance (above) and escorted by soldiers.  His exit had been achieved by nonviolence. He never returned to Ireland. Someone described his exile as the “death of feudalism in Europe".   Or perhaps, with more hope, the birth of modern Ireland.

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WORST OLYMPICS EVER - Paris, 1900

 

I contend that that not since  776 B.C.E., when King Oenomaus was killed in a crack up in an Olympic chariot race, followed by the race winner Pelops throwing competing driver, Myrtilus, off a cliff, has there been a more horrifying Olympic games than the 1900 games in Paris, France.

What could have surpassed such gore and horror, committed in the name of the purity of athletic endeavor? Simply, in the Paris games of 1900 , Leon de Lunden from Belgium murdered 21 birds to win the "Live Pigeon Shooting" event.

In order to make the sport even “less sporting” for the birds, the little sacrifices were released one at a time, and each human contestant was allowed to keep blasting away until he missed – twice. Sports historian Andrew Strunk has described the event as “…a rather unpleasant choice. Maimed birds were writhing on the ground, blood and feathers were swirling in the air and women with parasols were weeping…”. In all 300 unlucky pigeons were sacrificed for the Olympic ideal. Just think of it; Dick Cheney could have been an Olympic athlete! If maiming fellow competitors counted, he might have won gold.

Those Paris games of 1900 almost didn’t happen, since the French bureaucracy considered Pierre Fredy Baron de Coubertin (above), who was pushing the modern Olympic concept, as "too English”, what with his alien ideas about exercise producing a healthy mind and body. In fact it wasn’t until Coubertin resigned from the French Athletic Associations that other French sportsmen agreed to back his idea.

Unfortunately, with Coubertin out of the way, and the French Government in charge, things went down hill. Very quickly.  

First the government decided not to award medals for first place, but "valuable artwork" instead. It must have been quite a sight to see Msr. Aumoitte, winner of the “one ball” croquet championship, standing on the victory podium with a Monet hanging around his neck.

Then there was the marathon, where two American runners, Arthur Newton and Dick Grant, lead from the start. But when they reached the finish line together they discovered two heretofore unnoticed French runners, Michel Theato and Emile Champion, rested and waiting for them, and already wearing their winner’s artwork. The Americans pointed out that all the other contestants were splattered with mud while Theato and Champion looked like they had not even broken a sweat. But this being France, the American protests were worst than meaningless.

In fact, because they protested, the Americans were awarded sixth and seventh place, instead of third and fourth. Well, as Albert Camus noted in one of his lighter moments, "Pauvre de moi, du cognito tricherie, ergo se donner la mort”, or, “Please excuse me but I think you cheated so I am now going to commit suicide".  The International Olympic Committee took the American protests under consideration for twelve years, before finally rejecting them; proving once again the Jerry Lewis rule about sports rulings; timing is everything.

The Games of 1900 were the longest in Olympic History, running between 14 May and 28 October, and including such extravagant events as "Cannon Shooting", "Life Saving", "Kite Flying" (above)... 

..."Tug of War" (above)  and "Fire Fighting". 

The Croquet Tournament took 21 weeks to play out in front of a paying audience of exactly one, an elderly Englishman living in Nice, France.

Curiously the strongest protest in that the 1900 Olympics was between two Americans. The born-again Christian coaches from Syracuse University felt that competing on a Sunday would be a sin. So they talked their most athletically gifted student,  Myer Prinstein (above), the world record holder in the long jump, into going along with them. Myer was a nice Jewish boy, and he finally agreed to skip the Sunday competition out of “team spirit”.  Besides, his qualifying jump on Saturday – his actual Sabbath - had been so impressive he thought it would be good enough for the victory. And it almost was. Almost.

That Sunday afternoon (14 July, 1900), while Myer was soaking in the Parisian culture, his Catholic teammate Alvin Kraenzlein (above) broke his own sabbath and beat Myer’s long jump mark by exactly...one centimeter. That Monday, when Myer noticed that Alvin was carrying an extra Van Gough around, he started pounding on Alvin. And Alvin pounded right back. But, since they were both track stars with no upper body strength, nobody got seriously injured.

The nineteen hundred games also featured a controversial final in the “Underwater Swimming” competition. This may sound like a fancy name for drowning, but the drowners...

...er, swimmers, were actually awarded 2 points for each meter they swam under water and one point for each second they were able to remain submerged. But despite having stayed under for far longer than anyone else, Peder Lykkeberg of Denmark was disqualified because it was alleged that he “swam in circles”. Just read the rules, I say.

Also in the river (during this Olympics all the water sports were held in the river Seine, which was not nearly as clean a sewer then it is today), were the exciting finals of the “Swimming Obstacle Course”. 

This involved swimming, of course, but also pole climbing, more swimming, boat boarding and de-boarding, more swimming, followed by swimming under a boat, followed by more swimming.

The winner was Freddy Lane (above, center) from Australia,  in 2:38. Freddy climbed over the stern of the boat as opposed to clambering across the boat's wider middle. For his efforts Freddie received a 50 pound bronze horse. I presume the equestrian winners received statues of fish. Oddly enough neither of these water events were repeated at any future Olympics.

But the sport from the 1900 Paris games  I am most glad having missed was the "Equestrian Long Jump". Now, try to picture this: four spindly legs holding up a big muscular body, and with a human wearing riding garb and hat balanced on their back. Horse and rider gallop up to the jump line and then fling themselves into the air - not over anything, just up and forward. As far as the horse can go..

The winner in 1900 was a British stallion named “Extra Dry”(above), with a soaring leap of 20 feet and one quarter of an inch. Can you imagine the excitement that must have gripped the crowd, watching this equestrian suicidal display? A horse leaping twenty feet and one quarter of an inch; that’s just nine feet short of the current human long jump record. And we've only got two legs.

It makes me wonder if the X Games are really all that original.

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SPREADING THE WEALTH

"God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive." Ayn Rand. 

I think Sir Francis Bacon (above) is usually credited with the saying, “money is a good servant but a bad master”.  Actually, it was an old French proverb, far older even than the Elizabethan politician and writer, and Sir Francis merely translated it. His own original observation about money said the same thing, but was as prosaic as fertilizer. “Money is like muck,” Sir Francis said, “not good except it be spread.” 

"The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind." Ayn Rand 

You see, Sir Francis believed the biblical warning that “The love of money is the root of all evil” (Timothy 6:10), because capitalism is without morality. It is not amoral. That is an excuse. It is immoral, because money has no memory and no soul.  You buy a loaf of bread and you employ the baker and the driver who delivers it, and the check-out clerk, the farmer who grows the grain...etc. Morality has nothing to do with any of that,

Economists, by the way,  call this the “velocity of money multiplier effect”, or the VMME, and most economists multiply each dollar spent on bread by six. This is the material logic which – in addition to Judeo-Christian and Islamic and Hindu and Confuscusian morality - justifies food stamps and unemployment insurance.  Government is supposed to provide context via morality.

And yet, today's devotees of Ayn Rand (above), meaning most Republican politicians,  ignore VMME,  preaching that wealthy Americans should act only out of self interest while the working poor, once known as the middle class, are sacrificed on the alter of more wealth for the wealthy. Heads the bankers win, tails, anybody who borrows from a banker, looses.  No wonder that these days, every corporation wants to be a bank,  

"We will rebuild America’s system on the moral premise...that man is an end in himself."

Ayan Rand Atlas Shrugged 

According to Wikipedia, “A bank connects customers that have capital deficits to customers with capital surpluses.” But in the post “Citizens Untied” world, where a Supreme Court majority can chose to believe that corporations have the same rights of free speech as individuals – and enough money to reduce “Free Speech” to an oxymoron - money has become the master. Five American banks now hold – hold - more than $8.5 trillion in assets – 56% of America's $15 trillion economy.  

As the stock market becomes increasingly detached from the middle class values these mega-bankers practice zombie capitalism, trading their cash surpluses back and forth between themselves, hedging their equity by shifting the money from this pocket to that, paying themselves a bonus every time their computers shift the funds. At some point reality must intervene in this monetary computer game world, as J.P. Morgan discovered back in 2007 and as Silicon Valley Bank learned in 2023. And when it does, the destructive effect is suffered by the nation as a whole. Sacrifice might be required, but only for those who cannot afford to live in the fantasy world of 21^st century hedge and byte fund managers.  

"I will never live for the sake of another man."  Ayan Rand Atlas Shrugged 

It brings to mind an observation once made by a very angry young man. He wrote, “There have been gambling manias before... (but) the ruling principle of the...the present mania, is... to speculate in speculation...” The angry young man was Karl Marx (above), and he was writing about the swindle of the moment in September of 1856, the collapse of the Royal British Bank. 

It was a fabulous enterprise which seemed solid as granite at one moment and in the next a cruel fraud and a fantasy. And the most interesting thing about the case, besides the moral lessons the fathers. of Communism saw in it, is that the bankers who perpetrated it actually went to jail, however briefly, without bringing down capitalism. 

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction."

Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged. 

The Royal British Bank, created in 1849, was innovative. Previously, banking had been a rich man's game. Those with money had banded together to lend to those who could afford to borrow it - i.e. Royalty.  In return the boworers were they granted titles and land rights. But the fortunes created by the industrial revolution were not exclusively blue blooded, and both blue blood and non-blue blooded advanced thinkers in Scotland invented the publicly owned bank. 

They then convinced Parliament and the House of Lords to charter an institution which would allow small investors with a little extra cash to combine their money  And according to the new rules, once they had sold L50,000 worth of stock in the bank, they could open their doors and begin accepting accounts and lending money to make a profit. 

In this case the idea belonged to Londoner John Menzies (above), who suggested the idea to his lawyer, Edward Mullins. Together they printed up a prospectus (or Deed Of Constitution), and went looking for investors. But as England was in the middle of a recession (its fourth “Panic” since 1817) they found little money available for investment.

Until they approached shipbuilder John McGregor (above), who was also a Liberal Party politician representing Glasgow, Scotland. For the price of ten shares – at L10 per share –McGregor bought himself a seat on the board of the new bank. Cheap enough. 

He immediately suggested the board hire an old friend of his who had knowledge of the “Scottish style” of banking, fellow Minister to Parliament,  Hugh Innes Cameron (above).  A bank started by politicians, for the politicians. What could go wrong?  

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."

Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged 

Cameron was offered the position of Managing Director of the Royal British Bank. And with McGregor's help, Mr. Cameron obtained a seven year contract which would impress any modern equity or hedge fund manager. The first year Cameron would be paid L1250 (equivalent to $2 million today) , rising to L2,000 a year ($4.5 million today), with an annual housing allowance of L200 (about a hundred thousand modern day dollars). 

Within a few months Cameron had squeezed out the man who first conceived of the idea for the bank, Mr. Menzies, buying him out  with L400 of investors' money. Now there was nobody looking over the shoulder of any of the bank's officers or investors. The fraud was afoot.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans...they were the people who created the phrase "to make money”.

Ayan Rand Atlas Shrugged

From that moment, the bank never stood a chance of surviving. Instead of the L50,000 the law required and which appeared on it's books, at its opening the Royal British Bank actually had no more than L18,000 in its vaults.

Over the next six years, while the 6,000 depositors supplied the salaries, advances and loans never repaid to the officers of the bank, each of those men became involved in enumerable kickbacks, scams and frauds which removed even more of the  investor's  funds -  about L130,000, (or the equivalent of $247 million today). The whole thing collapsed in the summer of 1856, producing, yet another nation wide “Panic”, this one which taught so much to the Father of Communism.  

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged. 

John McGregor escaped arrest by sailing to Boulogne, France. He died there, deeply in debt in April of 1857.  In February of 1859 the seven surviving board members were finally tried on seven counts of fraud. The jury convicted them of six. 

At sentencing the judge, Lord Cameron (above), could have been speaking directly modern Wall Street Crypto geniuses, and their patron saint, Ayn Rand. “It would be a disgrace to the laws of any country” said the judge 150 years ago, “if this were not a crime to be punished. It is not a mere breach of contract with the shareholders and the customers of the bank., but it is a criminal conspiracy to do what must inevitably lead to a great public mischief, in the ruin of families and the reduction of widows and orphans from affluence to destitution; I regret to say that in mitigation of your offense it was said to be common practice. Unfortunately a laxity has been introduced into certain commercial dealings...and practices have been adopted without bringing in a consciousness of shame...”  In other words - morality.

"When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is. And I want to be able to afford the price of admission." Ayn Rand 

Because it was his first conviction, Hugh Innes Cameron could only be sentenced to a year in jail. All the other board members received even lesser sentences, and one was only fined a single shilling. 

The scandal sold a few newspapers, and produced a marvelous pamphlet, “The Curious and Remarkable History of the Royal British Bank showing how We Got it Up and How it went down.” But judging by recent history, nobody learned anything from the affair, or any of the other enumerable “Panics”, recessions and depressions which have stricken capitalist economies once or twice a decade ever since. 

I think we learn nothing because greed makes you stupid, and the mega-bankers and their paid political apologists are purveyors of greed and thus are selling and buying stupidity . 

Which is why conservative politicians increasingly say really, really stupid things. We have seen this progression since biblical days. To acknowledge this reality and yet not deal with it is to acknowledge you are a zombie, addicted to greed, and without hope of ever seeing a better future. A devotee of Ayn Rand. 

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."  Ayn Rand.

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