Overmod It's on p.359.
It's on p.359.
Tack så mycket.
I was quickly looking through the book last night, and overlooked that paragraph. The eldest Hill was known for being careful with his money and the GN business cars were not extravagant.
Now this is what I call fine research!
Well, well, well, and guess how this turns out! And I thought 'do you live in the Blast Zone' had an ironic source twist...
The father was Louis Hill, and if that name rings a railroad bell, yes, it's the Great Northern Hills.
Beebe said it was a business car, not a 'private car' -- not that there's necessarily a difference in luxury, but it wasn't idle rich privilege...
He had not two, but three sons there at various times, and apparently didn't miss a year that any one of them was there to send the car for Thanksgiving.
Now someone can follow up on the three Hill scions at Yale and see how they did ... Louis Warren Hill, Jr.; James Jerome Hill II (he went by Jerome, not 'Jim', btw.); and Cortlandt Taylor Hill. (Incidentally, for those watching Beebe's hijinks at Yale, the Thanksgiving dinners ran from the early to late 1920s ... Louis was born 1902 and Cortlandt, the latest, 1906 ... so he was there firsthand for the first couple; I wonder if he might have been invited...)
As far as I can tell, all three went to St. Paul's, then Exeter, if that's an important detail.
I'm sure everyone will have an opinion about this PDF and the details it contains.
I might note that Jerome won an Oscar in 1957 for a documentary on Albert Schweitzer, which, what do you know, you can watch here.
Overmod I confess I'm now interested in finding out who this was, and what the kids actually did in and after Yale. This is very much still in the Varmint/Stover at Yale years, so we have a little theoretical background (however fiddled for literary purposes) to work with.
I confess I'm now interested in finding out who this was, and what the kids actually did in and after Yale. This is very much still in the Varmint/Stover at Yale years, so we have a little theoretical background (however fiddled for literary purposes) to work with.
Convicted OneOvermod, wasn't really a "red herring".
I'm not really intending to single you out for criticism.
My real complaint is that we have a story about a father caring enough to 'send the very best' for his kids, attending one of the premier Ivy League institutions, and the argument rapidly devolves into 'kids with that kind of advantage have to be spoiled and lazy children of privilege'.
As you point out, we don't know, and that was my point as well. However, the problem in not 'really saying one way or the other' is that in doing so we commit precisely the kind of prejudice that would be cause for a Kalmbach ban if it involved 'certain tripwire social groups' and their associated stereotypical grounds for "criticism". The father is rich and loaded, and whether he sent the car out of 'caring for home life' or to show off his wealth and capability, I of course don't know. The thing is that it remains a question, not an opportunity to render judgment ... and to then apply it to the kids as recipients makes me wonder if it's more sour grapes than seeking a sense of social justice.
I confess I'm now interested in finding out who this was, and what the kids actually did in and after Yale. I think this was very much still in the Varmint/Stover at Yale years, so we have a little theoretical background (however fiddled for literary purposes) to work with.
Overmod, wasn't really a "red herring".
I was mildly offended when the suggestion was first made that wealth and privilige might have been a factor....but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it just as well could have been......so who is to really say one way or the other?
Certainly the opportunity is there.
charlie hebdo The British blockade (which lasted into 1919) caused mass starvation and deaths in the German civilian population (524000 to 783000). The military lost 1.8 to 2 million. Remember, Remarque's great novel was anti-war, so may not tell the tale accurately of back home. Also the myth "Dolchstoßlegende" that the war was lost because of the home populace, socialists and Jews, not the collapse of the military, was a favorite theme of rightist and militarists postwar.
The British blockade (which lasted into 1919) caused mass starvation and deaths in the German civilian population (524000 to 783000). The military lost 1.8 to 2 million. Remember, Remarque's great novel was anti-war, so may not tell the tale accurately of back home. Also the myth "Dolchstoßlegende" that the war was lost because of the home populace, socialists and Jews, not the collapse of the military, was a favorite theme of rightist and militarists postwar.
Remarque was really more interested in telling the story of the Frontsoldaten, more so than the story of the home front, the life at the front is what he knew best after all.
But you are correct, the British blockade of Germany was brutally effective and a direct cause, among others, of the collapse of the German effort. While the country folk weren't really affected by starvation the cities certainly were, and that's where the unrest really took hold.
As far as the myth of the "stab-in-the-back," there was a study done by the German Army after the defeat as to "what went wrong." While recognizing the fact of the societal collapse the study didn't blame it, the German Army knew damn well why they lost. But, they didn't do much of anything to put the "stab-in-the-back" myth to rest, preferring people to think otherwise.
Getting way off topic here, the devastating effect of the British blockade is one of the reasons the Nazi government pursued the principle of "autarchy," or total national self-sufficiency of food and raw materials (as much as possible) as a preparation for the next war, when and if it occurred. Imperial Germany wasn't prepared for a long war and paid the ultimate price. They came close to winning anyway, but as the saying goes "Close only counts in horsehoes and hand grenades!"
charlie hebdoSorry, maybe you are sensitive on this but my Ivy friends have some stories to tell of how privilege, i.e., an elitism based on prep schools, family and wealth, was very evident in the 1960s, not only at Yale and less so at Harvard, but also at Princeton, mirabile dictu!!
I'm sure it was, and I'd suspect it was worse in the Fifties than in the Sixties. I can only say that my experience (which brackets those decades) was different when it came to actual 'elite' families with actual wealth at Princeton. Arrogance as far as I could tell was an institutional part of the Yale experience, and a sort of expected privilege at Harvard, but it never terribly bothered me as I concentrated on how things got done rather than who prepped where or roomed with whom there, and it was surprising how the origins disappeared once the minds got to work.
For pure snobbery it was hard to beat Columbia, but that was in the post-Baird Jones collapse of young New York 'society,' when it ceased to matter, if it ever did, whose families were in or out of the Social Register. (It remains interesting to me that, in the whole decade of the Eighties that I was studying at SIA as a foreign-policy wonk, neither I, nor any of my friends, nor any of my professors remembers ever having seen or heard of Barack Hussein Obama. And I knew Michelle Robinson when she was at Princeton...)
Shrub does seem a pretty sad example as a thinking man, but one does have to wonder how he went on to secure an MBA if he were that worthless intellectually, and so well connected with the New World Order types that he needed no skillz to succeed.
I think the Germans in 1918 just ran out of soldiers and when there were 1 million (so I've heard) Americans in the field, it was time to give up. We all know about the big lies told by you-know-who who said that they were stabbed in the back. Yeah, right. Plus the Spanish Flu may have had an influence.
charlie hebdo Deggesty It may have been in Bill Mauldin's magnum opus that I read that the German solldiers were provided with better food than what was available to those in the rear--and they were appalled at what was given them to eat after being captured. Even more true in WWI.
Deggesty It may have been in Bill Mauldin's magnum opus that I read that the German solldiers were provided with better food than what was available to those in the rear--and they were appalled at what was given them to eat after being captured.
It may have been in Bill Mauldin's magnum opus that I read that the German solldiers were provided with better food than what was available to those in the rear--and they were appalled at what was given them to eat after being captured.
Even more true in WWI.
Certainly true in World War Two, but not necessarily so in World War One. Erich Maria Remarque in "All Quiet On The Western Front" speaks of "short rations" on the German side on more than one occasion. And by the autumn of 1918 many German troops were, if not on the point of starvation, pretty close to it. In his history of WW1 S.L.A. Marshall mentions German POW's bolting down their food like any half-starved man would. He should have known, he was there.
Flintlock76"The food was horrible..." reminds me of something Bill Mauldin said in his book "Up Front..." "Ads in magazines back in the US show guys at the front wallowing in goodies. Only the rear-echelon troops wallow in goodies, all the guys at the front wallow in is mud! There's always plenty of that."
When my dad got back to the states - as it happens, he arrived in New York harbor on V-J Day, and on the Queen Mary to boot - the soldiers were all given two tickets and told to get in line. One ticket got them a bunch of goodies: a carton of cigarettes, a big Hershey bar, a new shaving kit, a roll of 35mm film etc. The other ticket got them into a big warehouse-turned-messhall for a steak dinner. When my dad came out, a sargeant asked him if he wanted the film. My dad said no and gave him the film. The sarge had a big roll of the tickets and gave two more to my dad. He went through the line again and got the stuff, gave the sargeant the film - and went and had another steak dinner. He said it was the first really good food he'd had since leaving home.
charlie hebdoThe stories of W. Bush are hilarious. He got in as a legacy case and was a pretty mediocre student who would have probably failed at other institutions where his name carried no weight.
And Bush's 2004 opponent, John Kerry, had a lower grade average at Yale than Bush.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4684384
York1 John
Sorry, maybe you are sensitive on this but my Ivy friends have some stories to tell of how privilege, i.e., an elitism based on prep schools, family and wealth, was very evident in the 1960s, not only at Yale and less so at Harvard, but also at Princeton, mirabile dictu!!
The stories of W. Bush are hilarious. He got in as a legacy case and was a pretty mediocre student who would have probably failed at other institutions where his name carried no weight.
Once they became co-ed, perhaps this pernicious influence lessened.
Yes, warn before emptying, just as we were invited to warn before flushing if someone were taking a shower at the same time--I can still see one of my classmates leaping out of the shower because no warning was given.
However, when "Picayune" Butler brought his army into New Orleans, the ladies in the houses would give no warning if a soldier should be below her window. General Butler issued an order promising punishment if the practice continued.
Johnny
NKP guy But college kids could be spoiled all through history. I once read of a rich businessman from the South who had two sons attending Yale University around 1900. He had his private car sent up to New Haven, presumably fully staffed, because he "wanted his sons to have Thanksgiving dinner under (their) own roof" and not in some hotel or stranger's house.
But college kids could be spoiled all through history. I once read of a rich businessman from the South who had two sons attending Yale University around 1900. He had his private car sent up to New Haven, presumably fully staffed, because he "wanted his sons to have Thanksgiving dinner under (their) own roof" and not in some hotel or stranger's house.
That's probably from Beebe's "Mansions on Rails". Don't have my copy with me, but seem to recall that the businessman was named in the book.
OvermodAnd I'm angry, enough I find to be almost furious, at even the implication that merit wasn't the defining characteristic for those two boys. It might even be easy enough to consult Yale alumni records to find the last names of two boys attending at the same time, in those years, coming from the South. See if both of them graduated in four years. See what both of them did subsequent to their time at Yale. Might even be possible to see what they studied, and how they did. But before you've done that, there's no reason to even consider them 'slacker' 'gentleman's-C' students just because their father can send up a private car for holiday dinner.
I had a good friend who graduated from Yale in '09...that's 1909. In his memoirs he wrote, "Yale and other Ivy League colleges required one to pass the College Board Examinations, or their equivalent: Yale's own examinations. My classmates planning to apply to Yale were permitted to divide these 24 exams over the last three years of (preperatory school)."
"Yale required passing Latin grammar, Julius Caesar and Cicero." I surmise that these were 3 of the required 24 examinations; one may guess the 21 others were on equally esoteric or difficult subjects.
My point is this: Whatever those college boys with the private car did with their educations or careers, there was a time in their young lives when they were most definitely not slackers. They had to hustle to get into college. See for reference Theodore Roosevelt at Harvard.
Once into college, however, things were different. College courses became much more rigorous by the time of the First World War; before then, "gentlemen C's" were quite acceptable. See for reference FDR at Harvard.
I like the following aphorism as it applies to our elites:
"From those to whom much is given, much is expected."
Convicted OneSince when is money (truly) second to merit?
Stop with the red herrings.
The issue here isn't even whether Yale might be tempted ... as Harvard was with J.F.Kennedy after he flunked rather spectacularly out of Princeton ... to take the money and carefully skirt the academics as far as possible.
I knew quite a number of people from 'wealthier families' at the schools I attended. At least one, whose last name you'd quickly recognize, was in agony one night because he'd made a B+ in one of his classes and he was mortally terrified that his father would take him out of school as a 'failure'. Perhaps my experience was more than a little non-typical, but I knew very few students from 'non-financial-aid' backgrounds who did not work hard in all respects, certainly up to their intellectual capacity.
The issue is whether two kids with a rich father were, or weren't, good Yalies. And that is not something anyone has established here. Even if, as I might add...
Convicted OneAfter all, you remember the old manifesto: "if ya don't work, then ya don't eat"
... that is, unless ya own.
I never cared for those Halazone tablets ... nor did I really think they posed a relative health risk of their own if you had to use them on any sort of regular basis!
Interestingly, some Scandinavians seem to have found out that using a simple filter on the 'ambient' water, then putting it in used PET plastic bottles and exposing it to bright sunlight for a surprisingly short time, provides just as potable a water with no terrible 'side effects'. Certainly gets it to a state where much less heroic chemical treatment would be needed for safety...
Incidentally, when I was at college between the late '70s and early '80s the bathroom facilities were not 'at the end of the hall' ... they were down up to three flights of stairs in the basement, and the school arranged dormitory 'entries' by sex so they only needed one kind for everyone on a given stairwell.
wjstix Flintlock76 SD70Dude And don't drink the water! And THAT reminds me of something they left out of the movie from General Patton's address to the troops... "When we get to Europe DON'T drink any water unless you get it from our engineer water points! ALL the water in Europe is p***! You wouldn't drink p***, would you? Of course not!" My dad served in the 30th infantry div. in Europe during the war. He said they had pills issued to them that they dropped into their canteen after filling it with water, and it disinfected the water. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been able to drink the water. He noted that the food was horrible, as he was in a front line unit they had a hard time getting supplies up to them. He said the guys who complained after the war about eating spam were guys who spent the war in the states. At the front, a can of spam was a welcome change.
Flintlock76 SD70Dude And don't drink the water! And THAT reminds me of something they left out of the movie from General Patton's address to the troops... "When we get to Europe DON'T drink any water unless you get it from our engineer water points! ALL the water in Europe is p***! You wouldn't drink p***, would you? Of course not!"
SD70Dude And don't drink the water!
And don't drink the water!
And THAT reminds me of something they left out of the movie from General Patton's address to the troops...
"When we get to Europe DON'T drink any water unless you get it from our engineer water points! ALL the water in Europe is p***! You wouldn't drink p***, would you? Of course not!"
Those sound like Halazone tablets. They were still available in outdoor sports stores into the 1970's, and may still be, I'm not sure, I haven't looked in a while.
"The food was horrible..." reminds me of something Bill Mauldin said in his book "Up Front..."
"Ads in magazines back in the US show guys at the front wallowing in goodies. Only the rear-echelon troops wallow in goodies, all the guys at the front wallow in is mud! There's always plenty of that."
C'mon guys, be realisatic..... this is America we are talking about. Since when is money (truly) second to merit? Oh,..it would be nice to suppose otherwise...'knights in white satin' and all that.....but I'd never underestimate the "ambitions" of the Bursars office, either.
After all, you remember the old manifesto: "if ya don't work, then ya don't eat"
charlie hebdoPerhaps the word is "angry"? Many of us want to see merit be the defining characteristic, not deep pockets.
And I'm angry, enough I find to be almost furious, at even the implication that merit wasn't the defining characteristic for those two boys.
It might even be easy enough to consult Yale alumni records to find the last names of two boys attending at the same time, in those years, coming from the South. See if both of them graduated in four years. See what both of them did subsequent to their time at Yale. Might even be possible to see what they studied, and how they did.
But before you've done that, there's no reason to even consider them 'slacker' 'gentleman's-C' students just because their father can send up a private car for holiday dinner.
Flintlock76 BaltACD NKP guy But college kids could be spoiled all through history. I once read of a rich businessman from the South who had two sons attending Yale University around 1900. He had his private car sent up to New Haven, presumably fully staffed, because he "wanted his sons to have Thanksgiving dinner under (their) own roof" and not in some hotel or stranger's house. Wonder if someone at Yale was bribed to permit the kids to enrole. Maybe, maybe not. But the old saying "Money talks" was just as true back then as it is now. And why is everyone so shocked and "outraged" by this?
BaltACD NKP guy But college kids could be spoiled all through history. I once read of a rich businessman from the South who had two sons attending Yale University around 1900. He had his private car sent up to New Haven, presumably fully staffed, because he "wanted his sons to have Thanksgiving dinner under (their) own roof" and not in some hotel or stranger's house. Wonder if someone at Yale was bribed to permit the kids to enrole.
Wonder if someone at Yale was bribed to permit the kids to enrole.
Maybe, maybe not.
But the old saying "Money talks" was just as true back then as it is now. And why is everyone so shocked and "outraged" by this?
Perhaps the word is "angry"? Many of us want to see merit be the defining characteristic, not deep pockets.
What General Patton said is sure true-when I made my four Med cruises in the 1970s, the water in the various ports was undrinkable. Barcelona, especially. But there, if you want water to drink, you buy it at the store. Tap water was for washing and flushing. And Barcelona water sure stunk. I wonder if it's still like that.
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