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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POLITICAL SPEAK

 

I wonder how many of you know, that the word “Gobbledgook”, meaning a nonsensical word or phrase designed to imply importance, has an actual birthday? The word was born on Sunday, 21 May, 1944,  in the pages of “The New York Times Magazine”. And it is just one of the many new English words born out of American politics. For example...

In 1812 the Massachusetts’s legislature contrived, with the help of Governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced "Jerry"), to redraw the lines for the Essex County Congressional District, to ensure a Thomas Jefferson Democratic-Republican won the elections there. 

According to legend it was famed painter Gilbert Stuart who first examined the twists and bends and curves of the new district (above) and observed that, to him at least,  it resembled a salamander. But whoever said it first, it was Benjamin Russell, editor of the Boston Sentinel, who renamed the proposed district a Gerrymander, after the Governor. 

So Elbridge Gerry (above), a man who signed the Declaration of Independence,  is remembered not for the good he tried to do but for his most blatant act of gaming the democratic system - cheating to win an election, It was an act so damaging to democracy his name became a verb, Gerrymandering, meaning to redraw of congressional district to insure the election of one particular candidate or party. And allowing politicians to control the drawing of districts has Gerrymandered all negotiations out of American politics. 

Almost as old is the word “Bunko”, meaning a fraud or a fraudulent spiel used by salesmen to sell bad or fake products.  Police departments around the nation still have departments assigned to uncovering fraud and cheating scams, named “Bunko Squads”.  Originally the word was used to describe a speech by Felix Walker, a congressman from North Carolina.

Walker was born in 1753 in the mountains of western Virginia. He worked as a store clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, and tried homesteading with Daniel Boone in Boonsboro, Kentucky. He fought in the American Revolution, and served in the North Carolina House of Commons, the state legislature. In 1816 he was appointed to Congress, to represent the Blue Ridge ‘hollars’ and the French River valley of Buncombe Country.

The county was named after American Revolutionary War hero Colonel Edward Buncombe (above), who had been wounded and captured at the battle of Germantown, in 1777. Recovering from his wounds in occupied Philadelphia that May, Colonel Buncombe was sleepwalking when he fell and bled to death when his wounds reopened. The new county named in his honor was so large it was locally referred to as “The State of Buncombe.”Expecting a contentious re-election in 1818 and again in 1820, Felix Walker quickly learned the value of a well publicized and well received speech. And on 25 February, 1820, while the House of Representatives debated the crucial issue of the “Missouri Compromise”, deciding whether or not to take the first step which would lead to the Civil War, Congressman Walker arose and began to pontificate about the wonders of his district. 

The leadership were eager to put the matter of the Compromise to a vote, and after listening to Walker’s rambling speech for several minutes, they urged the Congressman to stop wasting time and sit down. But Walker explained that his speech was not intended for the benefit of the congress, but for the "simple folk of Buncombe County back home". And then Walker returned to his endless platitudes.

Almost overnight Walker’s speech was transformed from being about Buncombe to being “pure Buncombe” itself. And, with a little modification in spelling, it changed from "Buncombe", to "bunkum", and then to "bunk", as in a useless, pompous and empty speech, or "bunko" a false promise intended to further a fraud: an entirely new word had been added to the English political language.

Gobbledygook is a 20th century invention, and first appeared in an article about an internal government memo. The author of that memo and that article, and the inventor of the word, was Texas Congressman Maury Maverick (above), who was one of those rare politicians who actually believed that politics was a form of public service. He won a silver star and 2 purple hearts in WWI. And then he ran for Mayor of San  Antonio, Texas

He was limited to one term because during his service a communist rented a meeting room in the Civic Auditorium (above, left) . Legally Mayor Maverick could not refuse to rent the room. But his opponents were able to rabble rouse a little Texas-Hysteria, complete with demonstrations that grew until tear gas shells were lobbed back and forth in front of the auditorium. After that panic, he was defeated for re-election.

Maury Maverick later won election to Congress, where, in 1944,  he was named chairman of the "Small War Plants Committee" -  overseeing and coordinating the work of thousands of small factories all across the United States, seeking to avoid duplication of their efforts, causing shortages of raw materials and general waste.

Being a man interested in results,  Maury (above) quickly grew frustrated with the growing complexity of official language which prolonged the already almost endless committee meetings he had to attend .

He defined his new word as a type of talk which is long, vague and  pompous,  "…when concrete nouns are replaced by abstractions and simple terms by pseudo-technical jargon…".  It all made him think of the wild turkey’s back home, and their conversations which sounded like,  "gobble, gobble, gobble, gook".

In his memorandum (above) Maury ordered, in pure Texas style, "Anyone using the words “activation” or “implementation” will be shot”. The sorry state of affairs is substantiated because those very words have burrowed their way into our language and are now passively accepted. Perhaps this is because, despite Maury's protests, no one was executed. But perhaps because no one was, the continued human attraction to verbosity has since produced such nonsense such as "Pentagoneze", "Journalize", "circumlocution", and other such gobbledygook phrases used to describe Maury’s gobbledygook.

In an interesting (I think) side note, gobbledygook was the Maverick family’s second addition to the American lexicon. The first was their family name. There was a Maverick aboard the Mayflower. And 17-year old apprentice, Samuel Maverick, was shot down by 'lobster backs' at the Boston Massacre (above). But the most famous Maverick of all was another Samuel, born in Pendleton, South Carolina in 1803.

This Maverick, Samuel Augustus Maverick (above), graduated from Yale in 1825 and was admitted to the bar in 1829. A year later, he ran for the South Carolina Legislature, but his anti-secession and pro-union opinions contributed to his defeat.  

In 1835 Samuel Maverick moved to Texas. He was one of two men the rebels in the Alamo elected to the Texas Independence Convention, and he thus missed being butchered when Mexican troops captured the mission.   

He was elected Mayor and then Treasurer of San Antonio, and later served in the seventh and eighth Texas Congresses. He also dabbled in East Texas land speculation, and sometime in 1843 or 1844, as payment for a bad debt, Samuel Augustus took possession of a ranch around Matagorda Bay,  on the Mexican border.

The only problem was that Maverick had no experience in ranching and no interest in learning. When he saw that every other rancher had branded their cattle, Augustus decided there was no need for him to bother with that expense.  In 1847, when Samuel moved back to San Antonio, he left his cattle under the care of his ranch hands, who saw no reason to pay more attention to their jobs than their absentee boss

They let the animals wander the open range. Cowboys who found unbranded cattle thus identified them all as the property of "Mr. Maverick", and mavericks thus became any unbranded cow or horse.

Samuel Augustus Maverick favored Texas annexation by the United States. And after it was, he opposed  secession from the union until he realized there was no stopping it.  When he died in 1870 he left holdings of over 300,000 acres and a reputation for independence - not being branded by any special interests. His son, Albert, fought with distinction for the south in the Civil War and was promoted to second lieutenant. After the war Albert Maverick  helped preserve the Alamo, donated "Maverick Park" to the city and lived to swear in his own son, Fontaine Maury Maverick (above), as Mayor of San Antonio - and later inventor of the term gobbledegook.  Albert Maverick died in 1936 at the age of 98. Maury Maverick died in 1954. He was not yet 59 years old.

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TOWER OF BABBLE THREE

 

I believe that Michael Ventris dozed off when, well after one in the morning of 6 September, 1956, his car crossed the center line at high speed and slammed head on into a truck pulled over in a “lay-by” on the Barnet Bypass (above)  20 miles from his London home. Seatbelts were still not standard, so the man who broke the "“Linear B code" was killed instantly. The lorry driver insisted the headlamps of his disabled truck were on. And a coroner’s jury even ruled the tragedy an accident. Yet, to this day, there are many who suggest it was a suicide.

There is no question that Michael George Francis Ventris  fit the profile of a person at risk. His upbringing had been coached by the step father to psychoanalysis, Carl Jung (above), who had treated and maybe seduced Michael's mother, Dorothea. He drilled in to her that “Michael was not to be touched by anybody. This was to avoid him having complexes,” she said.  

His genetic father, a gentle and loving man, died of tuberculosis when Michael was a teenager. While still in college Michael married a “rich society beauty”. But when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, his mother lost the income she had inherited from Michael's domineering grandfather. In July of 1940 Dorothea was found dead in a Welsh seaside hotel, having taken an overdose of the first commercially available barbitruate sleeping pill - Barbitone.

Michael dropped out of college in 1942, and then served three years as a navigator aboard a Royal Air Force bomber - a service which suffered a 44 ½ % death rate. Michael's son would say decades later, “My father was a private person...In fact he seemed rather remote” That isolation from his family led to his divorce. Three years before his death Michael Ventris was hailed as having scaled “the Everest of Greek archeology” by decoding the Minoan texts. But it seems that left him with perhaps the most epic case of post-partum depression in history.

Michael's career as an architect had been built promoting team work, but after reaching the linguistic summit of solving Linear B, there were few colleges interested in hiring him.  At 34 years of age he lacked academic credentials in that field. But I still don't think he intended on hitting that truck.

Those who decipher ancient texts often earn a reputation for instability.  In the 1870's George Smith (above), then an assistant at the British museum, was the first man in 5,000 years to read the story of the Assyrian holy man named Utnapishtim,  who survived a great flood by building a boat for his family and animals. 

Smith was so excited by the discovery of what was clearly an early version of Noah's Ark written in cuneiform Assyrian, that he began rushing about, tearing off his clothing. But despite the legends, he was stopped before he got completely naked, and never made it into the hall. Insanity, is not the greatest danger to archaeologists or linguists.  That threat is just being human.

Arthur Evans (above), the legendary archaeologist who between 1900 and 1906 had uncovered the palace at Knossos, on Crete, and had struggled for forty years to read the 5,000 year old language he uncovered scattered about the place.  Evans had engaged and encouraged the greatest linguists in the world to examine the 3,000 baked clay fragments recording the culture's language. He was certain it represented something new in history, and referred to the culture as Minoan and the language as “Linear B”. But when Evans died in May of 1941, he had managed to deciphered just one word: “total”,. It appeared at the bottom of many of the tablets.

Next the American, Professor Alice Kober  (above) took the lead in the search, and methodically cataloged the 90 plus signs used in “Linear B”, discovering the triple suffixes (as in English “Britain/Briton/British”) which seemed to connect the symbols on the fragments. At first, like Evans, Alice thought the mystery language must be “Minoan”. But near the end of her brief life, Alice decided it could be Etruscan. But when she died in 1950, the problem was still unresolved.

Michael Ventris had been familiar with Linear B all his adult life. When he was 13 (above) this “pleasant and humorous, if solitary boy” had encountered Evans at a museum exhibit, and impudently asked if it were true the language was not yet deciphered.

In 1940, at age 18 he had published his first academic paper on Linear B. In 1948 he got his degree in architecture, but he also met Professor Alice Kober, who was visiting  Oxford University, and later corresponded with her. They did not like each other, but Michael cut off the communication only because he was trying to concentrate on architecture. But then, as his Bauhaus minimalist work was falling out of favor, Michael found himself surrendering again to his obsession with decoding Linear B.

Languages always came easily to him. He was raised for a time in Switzerland, the mountain nation with three official languages. Michael was proficient in Spanish, French, German, Polish, Italian, Greek, Ancient Greek and Latin, and, after just one week of exposure, he was participating in conversations in Swedish. But he was having no luck decoding Linear B. 

Then, one evening, while his wife was preparing for a dinner party, the frustrated architect turned to Alice Kober's triplets, and it occurred to him to apply them phonetically to place names, but not in Etruscan but in ancient Greek. What if, he wondered, the first character in a particular triplet was pronounced as “ko”, the next “no” and the last for 'so”? Could it be that simple, that obvious: Knossos? Just then the guest arrived and Michael had to leave his work.

But while his wife was preparing to serve the desert, Michael Ventris stole back to his study. Abruptly the triplet names of several other sites on ancient Crete fell into place. With a start Michael came to the realization that the language of Linear B was not Minoan, or Etruscan, but Greek. Arthur Evans had been wrong. Alice Kober had been wrong. All the hundreds of linguists who had studied Linear B before him had been wrong. 

The truth was so obvious it might have been uncovered decades earlier, except for Arthur Evan's (above) immediate determination that it could not be Greek. Evan's so dominated the study of Knossos, that his fundamental assumption had even confused Alice Kober. Michael returned to the party and shared the excitement with his guests. He did not tear his clothing. But one of the dinner party guest happened to be a producer for BBC Radio, and the next day she put Michael in front of a microphone to share his excitement with the world.

It should have inspired an earthquake of coverage. But 1 July, 1953, the day Michael Ventris walked into the BBC Radio booth and announced his solution to the Linear B puzzle, was the day after Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England, and the same day news broke that a month earlier, on 29 May, 1953,  New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had peaked Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

It did not help that once Linear B was decoded (above), it related no great epics of heroes and gods. The translations merely recounted the inventory of storage rooms, the numbering of everything from livestock, to drinking vessels and furniture, to grain and grapes. It was the tax receipts. But...

"... Because of finger and palm prints and writing styles left by the authors, we now know there were only 100 scribes writing at Knossos, and another 32 at Pylos. These numbers are so low they suggest a religious order restricting access to the knowledge of writing. The priests scribes kept a running total (the first word deciphered by Evans in the 1920's) in the soft clay, wetting it to add and subtract from the inventories. The tablets and their counts would not be fired, and the numbers set in stone, until the palaces containing them burned down, in the Bronze Age Apocalypse of Minoan culture, some time after 1375 B.C..

Two weeks before his terminal accident, Michael Ventris wrote a letter to the editor of the Architect's Journal, the publication of the Architectural Association. Michael was leaving the field, explaining, “I’ve come to the conclusion that...you’d be justified in writing me off...All I can ask you is to temper your justified anger with a little compassion.” It was almost as if Michael had assumed the role of Utnapishtim, and was appealing to his god for understanding. 

Two weeks later Micheal Ventrs was dead. And his achievement and his passing are both proof that for the last 5,000 years and probably the next 5,000, all humans are on the same journey. It is not our achievements or our failures, or our insights or our false assumptions that bind us together, not our gods, or our nations, nor even our dreams, our nightmares or aspirations. It is the journey itself.

And that is why the study of Archeology, and Linguistics and psychology, are all important only because they provide perspective about the journey. Utmapsihtim, and King Minos, Arthur Evans and Edmund Hillary, Queen Elizabeth II, Dorothea Ventris, Karl Jung, Alice Kober – they are all fellow travelers, heading to the same destination - oblivion. Best celebrate the trip.

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