Danse macabre
“Untitled” (paint on canvas), by Carolyn Mae Lassiter, in her show “A Journey Through My Heart and Mind,’’ at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, through April 20.
The gallery says that these “vibrant and uniquely executed paintings and drawings are inspired by dreams, spirituality, life in the country, family and animals.’’
The invasion
Edwin Way Teale’s writing cabin on his farm in Hampton, Conn.
"The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north."
— Edwin Way Teale (1899-1976), American writer, natuuralist and photographer, in North With the Spring
Chris Powell: 'Bring out your dead'? Nullification hypocrisy
Secobarbital is one of the most commonly prescribed drugs for physician-assisted suicide in the United States.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
What should the legislation now making another appearance in the Connecticut General Assembly be called: "aid in dying" or "assisted suicide"? It depends which side you're on.
"Aid in dying" makes it sound a lot nicer, just as "pro-choice" has become the euphemism for "pro-abortion" or, more fairly, "pro-abortion rights." Meanwhile there is no getting around it: "Suicide" signifies desperation and despair.
The bill would authorize doctors to prescribe fatal doses of medicine to terminally ill people who want to end their lives. They might have various motives -- chronic pain, invalidism, reluctance to become a burden on their families, or severe depression.
The bill's opponents contend that pain almost always can be controlled medically now and that there would be great risk of hustling the afflicted into dying for the convenience of others. The bill's advocates say it contains regulations against that.
This trust in regulations may be a bit naive since government can't always be around when it is needed. Who can forget the "bring out your dead" scene in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail? That's where the wheelbarrow master collecting corpses amid a plague declines to accept a frail old man who is being carried out by a young relative while still alive. The wheelbarrow master says, "I can't take him like that. It's against regulations." But a little cajoling by the young relative produces the "aid in dying" necessary to get the old man loaded aboard -- a quick and surreptitious clubbing to the head.
On the other hand, can government be trusted to tell people what they can do with their own lives? Who else's business is it really? How is the "war on drugs" working out?
In his play Julius Caesar Shakespeare inclines to the libertarian side of the issue as the conspirators discuss the risk of failure of their plot to assassinate the emperor and restore the Roman republic.
CASSIUS: I know where I will wear this dagger then;
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.
Therein, you gods, you make the weak most strong.
Therein, you gods, you tyrants do defeat.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
If I know this, know all the world besides,
That part of tyranny that I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.
CASCA: So can I.
So every bondman in his own hand bears
The power to cancel his captivity.
Good for the Catholic Church in Connecticut for citing the sanctity of life in opposing "aid in dying." But far more lives -- mostly young ones -- are lost or jeopardized every day because of practices and policies that neither the government nor the church bothers to get upset about or even examine.
After all, in the long run we're all terminally ill even as the short run is often one blind spot after another.
xxx
NULLIFICATION CATCHES ON: Republican-leaning states that support an expansive view of Second Amendment rights are considering legislation to nullify federal gun laws, especially now that background-check legislation has a good chance of passing Congress. But somehow this nullification movement seems to have escaped the denunciation it deserves from Connecticut's congressional delegation, all of whose members support stronger federal gun controls.
Could such denunciation be lacking because no one in authority in government in Connecticut has any business criticizing nullification elsewhere? For Democratic-leaning Connecticut long has been engaging in more nullification than any state since the civil rights era of the 1950s and '60s. Connecticut's nullification is aimed against federal immigration law, as the state obstructs federal immigration agents from doing their jobs and issues driver's licenses and other forms of identification to immigration lawbreakers.
The Republican-leaning states are only contemplating nullification. In Connecticut it is aggressive policy.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Second-hand savagery
“Bird Skin” (wall-mounted discarded clothing and upholstery fabric), by Tamara Kostianovsky, in her show “Savage Legacy,’’ at the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Mass., through Aug. 22
The gallery says: “The exhibition includes Kostianovsky’s signature textile ‘meat’ sculptures made with the artist’s own clothing, sculptures of birds composed of discarded upholstery fabrics, and recent forms that reference tree stumps and severed tree limbs.’’
Can't you do better?
— Photo by Maurice van Bruggen
“What are you saying? That you want
eternal life? Are your thoughts really
as compelling as all that?…”
— From “Field of Flowers,’’ by Louise Gluck (born 1943). The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for her poems, she lives in Cambridge, Mass., and is writer in residence at Yale.
In Garden in the Woods, a 45-acre woodland botanical garden, at 180 Hemenway Rd., Framingham, Mass. It is the headquarters of The Native Plant Trust, and is open to visitors between April 14 and Oct. 15.
'The land is the culture'
Falls Mountain gorge, on the Housatonic River, site of a 17th-Century Paugussett fishing village.
“Ours is a land culture. In fact, the land is the culture.’’
— Aurelius Piper (Big Eagle) (1916-2008), chief (1959-2008) of the Golden Hill Paugussett Nation, centered in Trumbull, Conn.
Grace Kelly: Difficult tradeoffs between woodland preservation and solar-energy developers
Woodland ecosystem
— Photo by Dustin M. Ramsey
Solar array in the woods of Canterbury, N.H.
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
The siting of renewable energy is a complex issue that dances around property rights, tax revenues, the carrying capacity of energy infrastructure, smart grids, energy storage and environmental protections.
Rhode Island began grappling with the siting of utility-scale renewable energy, most notably ground-mounted solar arrays, about five years ago, when developers started to take advantage of the state’s inability to direct such projects to already developed areas. Instead, they bought or leased less-expensive rural open space upon which to erect renewable-energy systems.
The state's green-space energy rush began in earnest in March 2017, when then-Gov. Gina Raimondo signed an unenforceable executive order that encouraged the state to attain 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2020.
The governor’s order, which gave little thought or guidance to where solar installations should be sited, increased the number of renewable-energy applications being filed in cities and towns that hadn’t yet adopted regulations that adequately addressed the impacts of this fast-growing industry.
The solar energy rush overwhelmed municipal officials and volunteer board members — many of whom don’t have the expertise and/or lack a statewide perspective regarding this issue — were caught flat-footed when confronted with an abundance of utility-scale energy development.
While the past five years have given Rhode Island more megawatts of cleaner energy, the acres of installed ground-mounted solar have further fragmented and stressed Rhode Island’s forests.
The covering of open space with solar panels comes with a cost, even it reduces dependence on fossil fuels and generates tax revenue.
“It’s essential that we safeguard and enhance the capacity of forest natural lands to absorb and store carbon,” Scott Millar, senior policy analyst for Providence-based Grow Smart Rhode Island, said during a recent presentation on forest conservation and solar reform.
He noted that both Rhode Island and Massachusetts have the opportunity to become national leaders in balancing two of “our best weapons in the fight against climate change: forests and renewable energy.”
The former Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management staffer moderated a March 17 discussion featuring various experts in the forest conservation and solar realm in New England, each bringing their own perspective and data on how forest conservation and solar could work together.
Part of this relationship, they said, centers around the idea that promoting solar shouldn’t mean clear-cutting valuable forestland. In fact, it can be easily argued that it’s detrimental to the very principals that have spurred on solar use: reducing carbon emissions.
“We need to conserve forests and natural areas to absorb and store carbon,” Millar said. “It has been well documented that forests and natural areas are the most practical and cost-effective tool. The crucial next step is to reform our renewable-energy programs to provide incentives to accelerate solar in developed and disturbed locations, such as rooftops, landfills, brownfields, and parking lots, and stop any incentives that are encouraging the clearing of forests and natural areas to make way for solar development.”
He said the fight against the changing climate is like a three-legged stool, where all the legs are needed: cut greenhouse-gas emissions as quickly as possible; conserve energy and use it efficiently to reduce demand; and conserve forests to absorb and store carbon.
Frank Lowenstein, chief operating officer at the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF), sees a future where forests are given value both as beautiful natural places and as natural carbon sequesters. He also sees this as indispensable to reducing carbon emissions.
“We need to get down to about half of our current emissions over the next ten years,” he said. “That’s a very big challenge. You need to get rid of 187 gigatons of expected emissions over the course of 10 years.”
To promote healthy forests and therefore help reduce human-generated carbon emissions, Lowenstein promoted the idea of creating incentives for forest landowners to practice what NEFF calls “exemplary forestry.”
The NEFF Web site defines exemplary forestry as “a forest management approach … that prioritizes forests’ long-term health and outlines the highest standards of sustainability currently available to the region’s forest owners.”
In addition to protecting forests and their ecosystem services, NEFF noted that exemplary forestry is designed to accomplish three goals: enhance the role forests can play in mitigating climate change; improve wildlife habitat; and grow more and better-quality wood.”
The third goal — grow more and better-quality wood as a building product — is an interesting part of this complex equation. This goal dovetails with the idea that NEFF promotes of using naturally carbon sequestering materials, e.g. timber, to build carbon-storing structures and limit the use of emissions-heavy steel and concrete.
“It’s one way to increase the productivity of the forest, the actual amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere per acre per year,” Lowenstein said. “We can basically double the average productivity per acre per year of New England forests. That lets you do two things: it lets you store more carbon in living forest … and it also lets you continue to harvest wood to create wood products and long-lived wood products like wood flooring, wood paneling, tables, and wood buildings that all keep carbon dioxide locked out of the atmosphere.”
A local example of this wood-centric construction is the Rhode Island School of Design’s recently completed North Hall, a steel-frame and cross-laminated timber (CLT) hybrid.
CLT is also known as mass timber and is created by gluing milled planks together and layering them to create a sturdy building material.
While the use of CLT is more popular in Europe and gaining some traction at more sustainably minded entities in the United States, tied up in this idea of using carbon-storing wood — and better preserving forests in general — is one word: incentive. And this incentive to preserve forests and use wood to build is linked to solar development.
David Milner, CEO and founder of Warren-based NuGen Capital, discussed how solar developers are often incentivized to clear-cut forests for solar installation because of the difficulty and high costs of siting solar on developed areas and disturbed locations.
Last year his company started construction of a 6.76-megawatt rooftop solar system on a 560,000-square-foot warehouse in East Greenwich. The project is comprised of more than 16,000 solar panels.
“I believe that everyone actually does care where solar is sited,” Milner said. “They just have a different opinion on where those trade-offs should be. I wanted to bring you into some of the fundamental economic reality that comes with rooftops and landfills and solar projects. The reality is rooftops, landfills are much riskier and more expensive than an open field or forestland. So that’s where people want to go.”
He went on to explain how some investors and banks won’t fund projects unless they are directly on the ground, because of inherent risks with elevated solar installations.
“Let’s take roofs for example,” Milner said. “When roofs leak, it’s a serious problem, not so much for the ground. Roofs have to be replaced. So, everybody, by and large, for large-scale solar wants to go to the ground. It’s also really hard to coordinate with the towns. Just last week I was reading about a western Massachusetts solar project that’s enormous, that’s going to clear forest, and the town can get 450 thousand dollars in tax revenue by allowing it to occur. That’s pretty tempting for some rural towns.”
Milner suggested that the only way to really promote sustainable solar siting is through incentives.
“We really do, I think, need to incentivize what we want to see,” he said. “We need to change the market dynamics and I think that’s coming.”
On the other side of incentives for preserving forests is the landowners who often sell or lease their property to solar developers since they see little money in the timber industry.
“This is particularly focused in the industrial forestlands of northern New England that are owned by individuals and companies largely for the financial benefits,” Lowenstein said. “They’re in it as a business proposition and right now they’re not getting paid for carbon in a simple enough way and a high enough value way.”
Lowenstein called for a few solutions that take incentive away from clear-cutting and put them into the sustainably sourced timber industry.
“First of all, no net loss of forest — part of that needs to be stopping incentivizing forest clearing — and increase incentives for solar in developed areas,” he said. “We also need more funding and support for forest conservation and improved management … we need to recognize that … just stopping harvest or reducing harvest, that may not do very much at all in part because wood, as I said earlier, substitutes for more carbon intensive materials like steel and concrete.”
This vision, if aligned with the needs of solar developers in making developed and disturbed locations more financially approachable and profitable, could lead to a symbiotic relationship that could change the world for the better, according to Lowenstein.
Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News reporter. EcoRI News editor Frank Carini contributed to this article.
Sperm whales learned to avoid human killers through social communication
Picture in early edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
Mother and baby sperm whales off Mauritius in the Indian Ocean
— Photo by Gabriel Barathieu
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Scientists have determined that sperm whales (think Moby Dick), under relentless attack by whalers, many from New England, in the 19th Century communicated with each other on ways to escape their killers. Whales are highly intelligent and have very well organized social cultures. We humans too often forget that we’re far from the only intelligent creatures on Earth. Indeed, we’re often not very intelligent at all
Consider this from a Royal Society report:
“Analysis of data from digitized logbooks of American whalers in the North Pacific found that the rate at which whalers succeeded in harpooning (‘striking’) sighted whales fell by about 58% over the first few years of exploitation in a region. … The initial killing of particularly vulnerable individuals would not have produced the observed rapid decline in strike rate. It appears that whales swiftly learned effective defensive behaviour. Sperm whales live in kin-based social units. Our models, show … that learned defensive measures from grouped social units with experience could lead to the documented rapid decline in strike rate. This rapid, large-scale adoption of new behaviour enlarges our concept of the spatio-temporal dynamics of non-human culture.’’
How much have the whales learned from their groups on how to avoid collisions with ships and fishing-line entanglements, or how to find new sources of food as mankind changes the ocean environment
To read more, please hit this link.
Map showing the distribution of sightings of sperm whales. Sperm whales can be found in virtually any part of the ocean not covered by ice, but are most often spotted in certain "grounds" where they like to feed or breed.
— Kurzon
In the Bourne Building of the New Bedford Whaling Museum
'Materializing the medium's memory'
Image from ‘‘LUCID,’’ artist Exeter, N.H.-based Shaina Gates’s show from April 15 to May 15 at Gallery 263, Cambridge
The gallery says:
“This exhibition reflects the artist’s interest in the transfer and translation of images across surfaces, systematized processes, and theories related to dimensionality and the organization of space. In ‘LUCID,’’ a body of lumen prints on both paper and film are on view. The works in ‘LUCID’, which conjure a joy similar to what one may experience when looking through a kaleidoscope, map the physical experience of how the prints were systematically folded by the artist, materializing the medium’s memory as a visible record. In this way, the material becomes lucid.’’
Downtown Exeter, N.H.
'Grotesque' courses
Water hazard, sand trap and dense vegetation on the 13th hole at Ridgefield (Conn.) Golf Course
— Photo by Don Williams
British golfer Harry Vardon at the 1913 U.S. Open, at The Country Club, in Brookline, Mass. The club had one of America’s earlier courses, and it remains one of the country’s most famous.
“You claim New England’s a pretty place? Think again. Oh, it’s fine for hiking or camping; it’s got all those swell bubbling brooks; it’s peaceful and clean and colorful. But, look, when it comes to something truly important, like the game of golf, these northeastern states can be downright grotesque.’’
Tim O’Brien, in “The Beholder’s Eye,’’ in New England: The Four Seasons (1980, edited and with photos by Arthur Griffin
Looming islands
“….Across old tides, Deer Isle and
Little Deer loom tall as
spruce, dark as deer….’’
— From “Beyond Equinox,’’ by Philip Booth (1925-2007), a long-time resident of Castine, Maine, on Penobscot Bay.
Main Street in Castine
Paranoia-promoting plants
Detail from “Hothouse Bouquet with Spider” (acrylic on panel ), by Nicole Duennebier, in her show “Flora Hex,’’ at 13FOREST Gallery, in Arlington, Mass., through April 16.
The gallery says: “Her compositions bring to mind the old masters, Dutch still-lifes and Rococo landscapes in their attention to detail. But these paintings aren't idly pretty artworks, as Duennebier prefers to inject an element of the grotesque into her work, making her pieces simultaneously compelling and challenging. Some paintings feature floral wreaths and memorials depicted in lonely caves and desolate woods, conveying a sense of melodrama and isolation. Others contain carelessly squashed blossoms and fluttering insects marring the beauty of a bouquet. Perhaps most striking are the paintings in which flowers surround dead fish or slimy, unidentifiable meat. Each artwork has something unsettling about it, whether obvious or subtle, that adds a layer of emotional depth. Duennebier's work in ‘Floral Hex’ is complex, both beautiful and uncanny, offering an duality that both repulses and entrances the viewer.’’
She lives and works in Malden, Mass., an inner suburb of Boston.
Fellsmere Park, in Malden
—Photo by pilgrimsong
Closing on final approval of Vineyard Wind 1
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Avangrid recently received the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for Vineyard Wind 1 from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the last step before a Record of Decision (ROD) that would jumpstart approval for the project to begin construction.
“A joint venture between Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), Vineyard Wind seeks to establish a massive offshore wind farm about 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.“Dennis V. Arriola, CEO of Avangrid, commented, “We are one step closer toward realizing this historic clean energy project and delivering cost-effective clean energy, thousands of jobs and more than a billion dollars in economic benefits to Massachusetts.” The project would generate electricity to power over 400,000 residences and businesses in Massachusetts, while also reducing electricity rates, carbon emissions, and creating new job opportunities.
“The New England Council looks forward to the progress Avangrid makes in developing this project for the region. Read more from the Hartford Business Journal and Avangrid’s press release.’’
In Greater Boston, the intersection of the pandemic and immigration
Cambridge Hospital, part of the Cambridge Health Alliance
From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
A year into the global pandemic, we are grappling with the scale of its impact and the conditions that created, permitted and exacerbated it. For those of us in the mental health field, tentative strides toward telepsychiatry pivoted to a sudden semi-permanent virtual health-care delivery system. Questions of efficacy, equity and risk management have been raised, particularly for underserved and immigrant populations. The structures of our work and its pillars (physical proximity, co-regulation, confidentiality, in-person crisis assessment) have shifted, leading to other unexpected proximities and perhaps intimacies—seeing into patients’ homes, seeing how they interact with their children, speaking with patients with their abusive partners in the room, listening to the conversation, and patients seeing into our lives.
As the pandemic crisis morphs, it is unclear if we are at the point to do meaningful reflective work, but for now, I offer some thoughts through the lens of my work at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), an academic health-care system serving about 140,000 patients in the Boston Metro North region.
CHA is a unique system: a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, which operates the Cambridge Public Health Department and articulates as “core to the mission,” health equity and social justice to underserved, medically indigent populations with a special focus on underserved people in our communities. Within the hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, four linguistic minority mental-health teams serve Haitian, Latinx, Portuguese-speaking (including Portugal, Cape Verde and Brazil) and Asian patients.
While we endeavour to gather data on this across CHA, anecdotal evidence from the minority linguistic teams supports the existing research suggesting that immigrant and communities of color are bearing a disappropriate impact of COVID-19 in multiple intersecting and devastating ways: higher burden of disease and mortality rates, poorer care and access to care, overrepresentation in poorly reimbursed and “front-facing” vulnerable jobs such as cleaning services in hospitals and assisted care facilities, personal care attendants and home health aides, and overrepresentation in industries that have been hardest hit by the pandemic such as food service, thereby facing catastrophic loss of income.
These patients also face crowded multigenerational living conditions and unregulated and crowded work conditions. These “collapsing effects” are further exacerbated by reports from our patients that they are also being targeted by hateful rhetoric such as “the China virus” and larger anti-immigrant sentiment stoked by the Trump administration and the accompanying narrative of “economic anxiety” that has masked the racialized targeting of immigrants at their workplaces and beyond.
Telehealth. As we provide services, we have also observed that, despite privacy concerns, access to and use of our care has expanded due to the flexibility of telehealth. Patients tell us that they no longer have to take the day off from work to come to a therapy appointment and have found care more accessible and understanding of the demands of their material lives.
Some immigrant patients report that since they use phone and video applications to stay in touch with family members, using these tools for psychiatric care feels normative and familiar. For deeply traumatized individuals, despite the loss of face-to-face contact, the fact that they do not have to encounter the stresses inherent in being in contact with others out in the world has made it more possible for them to consistently engage in care with reduced fear as relates to their anxiety and/or PTSD. These are interesting observations as we try to tailor care and understand “what works for whom.”
Immigrant service providers. Another theme in the dynamics of care during the pandemic is found in the experiences of immigrant service providers whose work has been stretched in previously unrecognizable ways—and remains often invisible.
Prior to the pandemic, for example, CHA had established the Volunteer Health Advisors program, which trains respected community health workers, often individuals who were healthcare providers in their home country, who have a close understanding of the community they serve. They participate in community events such as health fairs to facilitate health education and access to services and can serve as a trusted link to health and social services and underserved communities.
What we have seen during the pandemic is even greater strain on immigrant and refugee services providers who are often the front line of contact. We have provided various “care for the caregiver” workshops that address secondary or vicarious trauma to such groups such as medical interpreters often in the position of giving grave or devastating news to families about COVID-19-related deaths as well as school liaisons and school personnel, working with children who may have lost multiple family members to the virus, often the primary breadwinners, leaving them in economic peril.
While such supportive efforts are not negligible, a public system like ours is vulnerable to operating within crisis-driven discourse and decision making. With the pandemic exacerbating inequities, organizational scholars have noted in various contexts that a state of crisis can become institutionalized. This can foreclose efforts at equity that includes both patient care as well as care for those providing it. The challenge going forward will involve keeping these issues at the forefront of decisions regarding catalyzing technology and the resulting demands on our workforce.
Diya Kallivayalil , Ph.D., is the director of training at the Victims of Violence Program at the Cambridge Health Alliance and a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Something in common
The town common, also called the town green, in Douglas, Mass.
“The idea of land held in common, as part of a manifest, workday covenant with the Bestower of a new continent, has permanently imprinted the maps of these towns, and lengthens the perspectives of those who live within them.”
-- John Updike (1931-2009), famed and prolific writer, in “Common Land,’’ in New England: The Four Seasons, edited by Arthur Griffin. Updike spent most of his adult life in towns on the Massachusetts North Shore.
Robert Whitcomb: What let Flagler revolutionize Florida
A 1913 advertisement extols the many advantages of traveling on the Florida East Coast Railway, the "New Route to the Panama Canal".
From a talk I gave on March 17 to a Florida group
— Robert Whitcomb
‘When looking back at Henry Flagler's life, George W. Perkins, of J.P. Morgan & Co., reflected,
"But that any man could have the genius to see of what this wilderness of sand and underbrush was capable and then have the nerve to build a railroad there, is more marvelous than similar development anywhere else in the world."
My interest in railroads goes back to dim memories of taking the train to see relatives in Florida, other parts of the South and the Midwest as a child. Traveling in those Pullman compartments was exciting! I wrote a master’s thesis on East Coast railroads while in graduate school. And I’ve been fortunate to live in places with passenger trains, mostly in the Northeast but also when we lived in Europe in the 1980s. I love passenger trains and I’m happy to see that they’re making a comeback in Florida.
The dramatic story of the Florida East Coast Railway has been told many, many times and is easily available, especially in Palm Beach. So I’ll just give a brief chronology of it and then, of more interest to me, anyway, talk about the social and economic conditions that presaged it and kept it going for so long.
The story of Henry M. Flagler, the railway’s founder, is astonishing: From 1885 to 1913, Flagler built an empire in Florida of cross-promotional railroads, hotels, resorts and steamship lines (with close connections to his trains). His vision led to the creation of many communities, and the great expansion of some already existing ones, such as Jacksonville, from northeast Florida all the way down to Key West, most famously Palm Beach and Miami. And his work led to a huge expansion of commerce in the state, most notably tourism and agriculture. No wonder you see his name everywhere: Consider Flagler College, Flagler County, Flagler Memorial Bridge, Flagler Beach, etc., etc.
There were other great Florida early developers, mostly notably Henry Plant on the state’s west coast, but Flagler was the most important.
Henry Morrison Flagler was a partner of John D. Rockefeller in the creation, in 1867, in Cleveland, of Standard Oil, one of the greatest Gilded Age corporate behemoths. Of course, Flagler became very rich in the process. He also became very expert in railroad engineering and economics because Standard Oil obviously had to ship its petroleum long distances. The oil was first used primarily for kerosene, followed by oil to run trains, among other things (!), gasoline and other petro products.\
In 1878 he traveled with his first wife, who, like many others in those pre-antibiotic days, had tuberculosis, to winter in Jacksonville. It was then that the potential of Florida, which at that time had a small population and not much of an economy, as a winter resort and year-round agricultural area, started to jump out at him.
Then, after she died, in 1881, he married one of her caregivers, who, by the way, turned out to be crazy.
With this new spouse, he traveled in 1882 to St. Augustine, which he found charming, if a bit bedraggled, and lacking in good hotels and easy and reliable transportation to get there. He saw the promise of Florida and was determined to achieve it. So he gradually withdrew from active management duties at Standard Oil to pursue his Florida interests.
In 1885, he began building the big Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine. To start to address the region’s transportation issues, he bought railways, most importantly the Jacksonville, St. Augustine & Halifax Railroad, and converted the latter to standard gauge from narrow gauge, which made it much more efficient. This railroad was extended to the south and in 1895 was renamed the Florida East Coast Railway-Flagler System, which revolutionized life on the east coast of Florida.
Meanwhile, he was building up Saint Augustine as a major resort town, including developing three more hotels, and he built more hotels southward toward Daytona, which he reached in 1889.
Then in 1892, he started extending his line much further south. He was encouraged in this effort by the State of Florida’s providing HUGE grants of land to encourage railroad expansion and other development. He took advantage of owning land that had massive potential for developing agricultural, timber, phosphate and other operations – much of the products of which ended up being shipped on his railroad. Pure synergy. Of course, much swamp-draining work was necessary in the process.
By 1894, his railroad reached West Palm Beach, from which he looked east to the big resort opportunities of Palm Beach island. So he built the first version of the Breakers there, as well as the Royal Poinciana.
In 1896 Flagler’s railroad reached then-tiny Miami, which he proceeded to turn into a major winter resort and agricultural area, with big hotels. A major incentive for developing South Florida was that two hard freezes that ravaged the citrus and vegetable crops in most of Florida in the winter of 1894-95 did not affect the area south of Palm Beach. So not only did that make Miami more alluring for winter visitors than, say, Daytona, it promoted the agricultural development of South Florida.
Flagler relentlessly worked to create full-fledged towns that would bring more people and commerce to his businesses. These people included farmers to grow and ship produce, most of it to the north, laborers to develop the area and staff for hotels and resorts. He built schools, brought in utilities, arranged for stores to be built, created parks and even financed churches and cemeteries. It was a mix of enlightened self interest tinctured with philanthropy. Synergy, synergy, synergy!
Meanwhile, he had long been fascinated by the prospect of extending the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West. One of his hopes was that that little city, which for a time had been – bizarrely -- the biggest in Florida, could be turned into a major international port, especially with the coming of the Panama Canal. It never happened, although Miami, which Flagler had a great role in developing, became a major international port. Flagler long saw South Florida as a key area for hemispheric trade, but Miami, not Key West, turned out to be the linchpin.
The first train on what was called the Key West Extension, ran in 1912. Flagler died the next year, with his dream fulfilled.=
The extension was one of the engineering marvels of the age but the great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 did so much damage that it was abandoned. Now, of course, you can drive on the extension’s exact route.
In any event, the railway went on to prosper with a growing number of passengers, most of them drawn by the sun from the affluent but cold Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest states, and a hefty freight business, much of it to carry the stuff produced on land granted to the railroad by the state and then sold off for agriculture.
The railroad mostly prospered until the late ‘20s, when the crazily speculative Florida land boom burst; two hurricanes in South Florida didn’t help either. Florida’s railroads suffered mightily, and the Florida East Coast Railway went into bankruptcy protection in 1931. In any event, freight and passenger operations continued, with, it should be said, long-haul trains from New York and the Midwest continuing to use its tracks.
But FEC passenger train service ended in 1968 after very nasty labor disputes. Still, the railway freight business continues and, as I note below, there’s a new FEC passenger train connection.
Of course, the coming of America’s automobile culture and associated construction of many more and better better roads from the 1920s on, and especially the Interstate Highway System in the late ‘50s, took a big bite out of the Florida East Coast Railway.
At the same time, longer life expectancies, the expansion of the middle class, the introduction of Social Security payments and the decades in which corporate pensions (now disappearing except for upper management) were common helped drive a huge increase in people retiring in Florida. When will it end?
Let’s look at some of the factors that enabled Flagler to build his railroad and associated developments in Florida, in addition to the state giving him lots of land for his railway and for associated development.
First was the great wealth he was able to accumulate as a result of the American industrial revolution, which gave him piles of money to spend to build his Florida empire. Part of this technological and economic revolution was development of better steel track and the aforementioned standardized railroad-track gauge. Coal-powered earth-moving equipment to drain swamps and build road beds were also essential, as was the revolutionary effect of the development of machine tools in – The first machine tools were invented.
A machine tool is a machine for handling or machining metal or other rigid materials, usually by cutting, boring, grinding, shearing, or other forms of deformation.
These included the screw cutting lathe, cylinder boring machine and the milling machine. Machine tools made the economical manufacture of precision metal parts possible, although it took several decades to develop effective techniques. Machine tools were obviously very important in train and track making, among other things.
Indeed, Flagler’s Florida empire wouldn’t have happened without what’s called the Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution.
Advances in manufacturing and production technology enabled the widespread adoption of technological systems such as telegraph and railroad networks, gas and water supply, and sewage systems. The enormous expansion of rail and telegraph lines after 1870 allowed a vastly increased movement of people and ideas. Then came electrical power and telephones.
The Second Industrial Revolution was also, of course, accelerated by rapidly increasing use of oil, the source of Flagler’s wealth.
A synergy between iron and steel, railroads and coal (and petroleum) developed at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. Railroads allowed cheap transportation of materials and products, which in turn led to the production of cheap rails to build more railways. Railroads also benefited from cheap coal for their steam locomotives. Virtuous circle!
Meanwhile, Flagler had learned before his Florida projects how to use the law for maximum benefit. He was an expert in partnership and incorporation laws and in using the U.S. Constitution’s new 14th Amendment, which affirmed equal protection of the laws to all persons, to protect businesses from many lawsuits and even criminal prosecutions. This was especially after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the 1886 that said that companies had legal protection as “persons’’—a still controversial ruling.=
Also very helpful to furtherance of his Florida projects was the discovery that mosquitoes spread such diseases as yellow fever and malaria as part of the development of germ theory. Draining swamps near Flagler’s developments and the use of such early pesticides as kerosene (made by Standard Oil!) made promoting Florida as a resort and retirement place easier. And that Florida is flat, while meaning that its wet subtropical climate would produce a lot of swampland, also cut construction costs. Among other things, he didn’t need to build tunnels or do a lot of blasting.
As I implied above, improvements in train engineering and standardization (especially of track gauge) made passenger and freight trains much faster as well as more reliable and comfortable. This made growing and shipping produce, lumber, turpentine, etc. ,to the north much more profitable. Mining and shipping phosphate, of which Florida had a lot as the pile of limestone that it is, was also developed into a major industry. Then there was the expansion of electricity, which enabled safe and bright lighting in buildings and railway cars as well as such new luxuries as fans. Before air conditioning as we know it began on trains, in the 1930s, some passenger trains had primitive cooling systems involving having fans blow are over blocks of ice from New England.
And we shouldn’t underestimate the role of the development of luxurious Pullman sleeper cars and dining cars that were sometimes as good as fancy restaurants. While trains were getting faster, it still was a trip of two or three days from the Northeast and Midwest, and so comfort was important and the Gilded Age nouveau riche had the money to pay for it.
By the way, it’s hard to exaggerate the effect on residential and business development in Florida of modern air conditioning from the 1930s on. But at least electric fans were a start. Anyway, obviously without air conditioning, Florida’s Congo-like summer climate would have kept many winter residents and businesses from becoming year-round ones.
Very important, of course, was the developing role of new refrigeration technologies in preserving the vast amount of produce grown and shipped from Florida by train – a big business for Flagler. At first ice blocks from northern lakes were used on the freight cars. Refrigerated railroad cars created a national industry in vegetables and fruit that could now be consumed far away. The sale of this stuff was a bonanza for Flagler’s empire, which included vast acreages of land that could sold off and turned into large farms.
Flagler’s interest in developing vast tracts for agriculture on land that the state had given him along the route of his railroad was heightened by the development of improved fertilizers (much of which used Florida-mined phosphate!) and better equipment to cultivate and harvest crops.
Fast trains were essential for meeting the burgeoning demand of the rich and middle class in the North for fresh vegetables and fruit in the winter – demand created in part by the arrival of modern advertising.
At the same time, improvements in paper making, presses and inks made producing free-standing brochures and flyers, as well as ads in newspapers and magazines, touting the attractions of Florida that much easier.
Indeed, Flagler was a brilliant salesman. He took out ads in northern publications, and planted news stories about the development of “America’s Riviera’’. And he bought or started newspapers in Florida to tout its wonders, as a vehicle for real estate and travel ads and so on. He was one of the early geniuses in mass marketing to America’s rapidly expanding consumer society, in which people learned about, and wanted, a far wider variety of products and services than ever before.
The growing sophistication in the late 19th Century of modern building construction materials, for example, steel-reinforced concrete, also greatly aided Flagler’s construction projects, especially his resort hotels up and down Florida’s East Coast. Indeed, his Ponce De Leon Hotel in St. Augustine is said to have been the first large poured-concrete building project.
He had learned at Standard Oil the benefits of using state-of-the art equipment and building materials. While the initial cost was higher than using mediocre stuff, the longer-term benefits for efficiency and marketing made his emphasis on quality the right choice.
As I keep noting, the State of Florida gave Flagler’s vast acreages of undeveloped land (8,000 acres per mile of track south of Daytona) in return for extending his railroad, and the development that followed. The state gave other Florida railroads lots of land, too, but Flager proved to be the most adept at using it. His company then made piles of money from marketing this land for resorts, year-round residential communities, agribusiness and other lucrative businesses. Without these land grants his empire would have been much, much smaller. By the way, it could be said that Florida was the first place in the world where building resorts and winter and retirement communities became major industries.
And, dating back to his experience in the grain and then oil business, Flagler was an expert in making secret deals. An example is his quiet purchase of land, using dummy companies, that he wanted to develop since the price would obviously go up a lot if owners knew someone as rich as Henry Flagler was interested in a tract. It reminds me of how Disney quietly bought up land for Walt Disney World, whose development and opening I covered back in the early ’70s. And Flagler was an expert in buying distressed enterprises – most notably northern Florida rail lines – at cheap prices and turning them around.
With the goal of transforming Florida’s east coast, Flagler would ride his own railroad in disguise in an effort to discover properties that could be developed into resorts and entire communities. The disguise obviously was to avoid tipping off landowners of his plan and thus drive up prices.
And the coming of oil-fueled locomotives, to replace coal, after the turn of the 20th Century, made train travel cleaner and more efficient in getting people to and fro the Flagler empire.
Electricity and the rapid adoption of indoor plumbing made staying in winter resort hotels much more alluring, and the faster trains from the 1880s on made it much faster to get there from, say New York. Flagler himself had a keen eye for the aesthetics of hotel and other buildings, inside and out, and of the high marketability of new creature comforts, including such recreational attractions as swimming pools, tennis courts and golf courses.
The Industrial Revolution was creating a class of rich folks who had the means to travel from (mostly) the Northeast and Upper Midwest to the resort hotels built and promoted by Henry Flagler and his Florida East Railway. Previously, most of them had mostly thought of going to luxurious SUMMER resorts relatively close to such wealth centers as New York, such as Newport.
But faster and more trains made it much easier than it had been to travel to Florida for its winter pleasures. The hotels promoted the Florida East Coast Railway and vice versa as Pullman sleeping cars, as well as dining cars, became more and more luxurious. And it became a status thing for your friends up north to know that you spent time in Flagler System hotels and perhaps later, with development of services and infrastructure spawned by the railroad, in your own capacious place in South Florida. Starting in the ‘20s, showing up back north with a tan became seen as a sign of status and wealth. (No one worried about skin cancer, sadly.)
And such increasingly popular sports associated with wealth as golf, tennis and yachting could, unlike in the North, be enjoyed in Florida in the winter – another promotional tool! Facilities for these sports were provided at the great resort hotels.
The Spanish-American War, in 1898, by bringing many troops from other parts of the country to Florida for the first time, further expanded national interest in the state.
Now to the labor situation during Flagler’s empire building – a situation that was generally very favorable to a mogul like Flagler. For one thing, unions were weak in America then, and in some places, including Florida, virtually nonexistent, and, anyway, state and local governments usually sided with owners/managers, and not with average workers.
Indeed, there were dark sides to Flagler’s empire building. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Flagler, like many industrialists, virtually all of whom were white, across the South, leased African American convict labor from the state. Convicts helped extend his Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) from West Palm Beach to Miami, cleared the land for his Royal Palm Hotel in Miami and graded the rail lines running from the mainland to his FECR extension across the Keys.
Industrialists like Flagler also used another system of forced labor that mostly targeted African Americans: debt peonage. A federal statute outlawed peonage, but in practice, it overlapped with convict labor. Convicts held beyond their sentences became debt peons, forced to labor to pay off debt owed to their lessor-turned-employer. Escaped peons were often arrested for vagrancy and leased out as convicts.
Convict lease laws in almost every Southern state provided a means for authorities to arrest freed people for such pseudo-crimes as vagrancy, lease them to private companies and force their labor.
Convict leasing generated revenue and provided a tool to intimidate and control black citizens. For businesses, the state offered vulnerable laborers who could be brutalized at whim, with chains, hounds, whips, sweat boxes, stringing up workers by the thumbs. Sanitary conditions were often terrible, and medical attention scant.
White immigrant workers, especially in the gigantic project to extend the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West, often also had it bad:
Flagler worked with Northern labor agencies to lure new immigrants to work on his railroad extension to Key West in often very dangerous conditions that included extreme heat and humidity and disease-carrying mosquitoes, not to mention hurricanes.
Workers were often refused passage off the Keys unless they worked off hefty transportation, boarding and commissary fees while men who had been promised positions as cooks, foremen or interpreters were compelled to work as laborers. Those who refused to work were sometimes denied food. Foremen often carried guns, and some sick laborers were beaten and threatened with death if they didn’t work.
Cheap labor indeed!
It’s hard to know how much Flagler knew of these conditions – obviously he knew something. In some ways, he was a kindly and charitable character.
Flagler’s empire building was also aided by the climate of political corruption of the Gilded Age. He had the money to bribe state and local politicians to make it easier for him to do his projects. (He even apparently bribed the Florida Legislature and Governor to pass a law in 2001 that made incurable insanity grounds for divorce so he could divorce his insane second wife in order to marry his third wife.)
First came the rich, but the Industrial Revolutions, mostly after the turn of the 20th Century, also created a middle class that, with careful saving, could afford to visit Florida. Few could afford to stay in Flagler’s grand hotels but could pay for the innumerable other accommodations (some built by Flagler) that sprang up to no small degree because of the creation of the Florida East Coast Railway. Many of these folks liked it so much they decided to move here. Sadly, many of them lost their shirts in the implosion of the Florida land boom in the late ‘20s but the population kept growing….
Of course, the coming of America’s automobile culture and associated construction of many more and better roads from the 1920s on, and especially the Interstate Highway System, took a big bite out of the Florida East Coast Railway, as did the use of big trailer trucks to carry Florida products.
At the same time, longer life expectancies, the expansion of the middle class, the introduction of Social Security payments and the decades in which corporate pensions (now disappearing except for upper management) were common helped drive a huge increase in people retiring in Florida. It’s hard to predict how long might continue.
In any event, it’s nice to know that Brightline passenger trains were running on the Florida East Coast Railway before the pandemic shut it down. It’s supposed to reopen in the fall.
This is good news for Florida. It needed a modern (for the time) rail system developed in the late 19th and early 20th Century because it was underdeveloped and poor. Now it needs one to reduce the choking car congestion that’s a result of the development jump-started by Henry M. Flagler.
Stop the ATV angst in Providence
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com.
It seems that Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza’s administration has been unwilling or unable, at least until recently, to strictly enforce laws against the use of ATV vehicles and dirt bikes on city streets, despite the very serious public-safety and quality-of-life issues such vehicles pose, especially given the arrogant, selfish and menacing irresponsibility of some of their riders. Indeed, the mayor has expressed an interest in legalizing their use on city streets, for those who would receive licenses and insurance for such use, although he has more recently back-tracked on that.
So, as a recent GoLocalProv.com article suggested, perhaps Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee should send in the State Police to arrest these riders. ATV’s and dirt bikes don’t belong on city streets.
To read the editorial, please hit this link.
Life in a square picture
“Candy Jar” (mixed media), by Boston-based artist Helen Canetta, in her show “Kodachrome Chronicles,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, April 2-May 2
The gallery says:
“The purchase of an old-fashioned Polaroid camera for her daughter led painter Helen Canetta to create this collection of abstract ‘snapshots.’
“‘Watching my daughter focus on and capture the little wonders of everyday life in a meaningful square picture inspired me to rediscover the magic and emotions surrounding us in all its glorious simplicity.’
“This collection was created during 2020, a year filled with momentous and complex events and emotions. Finding the simplicity and the beauty in everything that ‘is’ was a healing force and a successful coping mechanism to get through the year. It also filled Canetta with a renewed appetite for simplicity, minimalism and hope.’’
David Warsh: Biden's policies, like Reagan's, are a big gamble, but based on experience
On Wall Street, with flag-draped New York Stock Exchange at right
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Might Democrats retain control of the White House through 2032? When I ventured that possibility the other day, my sagacious copy editor observed that one party had won three consecutive terms only once in the 70 years since Harry Truman left office on Jan. 20, 1953 – during the dozen years after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, reelected in 1984, and succeeded by Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988.
I’ve been thinking ever since about why it might happen again. I know, I said I planned to write for a while mostly about economic topics, but what’s more economics than this?
It is not easy to recall how unlikely a Reagan’s victory seemed in the months running up to the 1980 election. True, he had served two terms as governor of California, but he had run unsuccessfully for president twice; he’d announced at the last minute in 1968 before running again, in 1976. His right-wing instincts were so little trusted by the Republican Party’s Establishment that Henry Kissinger sought to persuade him to accept former President Gerald Ford as his running mate. He was 69, an additional factor against him.
Similarly, Reagan’s policy initiatives – big tax cuts for the well-to-do, a willingness to tolerate the Federal Reserve Board’s high interest rates, deregulation for everyone, and an expensive confrontation with the Soviet Union – were thought to be dangerous and, at least by the Democrats, were expected to fail. Not much about America’s future was clear in 1980, except the widespread dissatisfaction with President Jimmy Carter. (Former Republican John Anderson was also on the 1980 ballot, as an independent; Reagan still would have won if he hadn’t been, but it wouldn’t have been the landslide it turned out to be.)
Then two years into Reagan’s first term, the economy took off, inflation fell, financial markets boom and China entered global markets. Over the course of the decade, the Cold War ended, and the government of the Soviet Union collapsed. Vice President Bush succeeded Reagan and fought a successful war in Iraq. Bush was defeated in 1992 because of a lack-luster economy, but the next 24 years – the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – were dominated, one way or another, by the “Washington Consensus” on economic policy that had formed during the Reagan years.
What similarities does Joe Biden share with Reagan? His candidacy was unexpected, for one thing; twice before Biden had run for president and failed to come close, in 1988 and 2008. At 78, Biden was even older than Reagan when elected. Most important, after nearly 50 years in the Senate, Biden is thoroughly wed to a movement, if that turns out to be what is unfolding, that has been in the making for as long or even longer than his service to it.
What movement? If Reagan’s gospel was that government was the problem, Biden’s credo seems to be that government spending is the solution to a variety of present-day problems – a fraying social safety net, deteriorating infrastructure, diminished U.S. competitiveness in global markets, and diminished opportunity. Gerald Seib, political columnist for the news pages of The Wall Street Journal, made a similar point to the one I’m making here the other day when he observed that not since Reagan’s presidency has a new administration opened with “a gamble as large as the one in which President Biden is now engaged” – an effort to change “not just the policies but the path of the country” with borrowed money.
Why might voters’ minds have changed in significant numbers about such fundamental matters as their enthusiasm for taxing and spending? Experience is one reason: Free markets and austerity failed to redress the problems they promised to solve. Indeed, they seem to have made them worse. Changing circumstances are others. Global warming has become manifest. A new kind of Cold War, this one with China, has emerged. And the Republican Party is deeply divided.
A shift of opinion on this scaled scale would, of necessity, entail a massive realignment of financial markets. As it happens, I have been reading The Day the Markets Roared: How a 1982 Forecast Sparked a Global Bull Market (Matt Holt Books, 2021), by Henry Kaufman. Kaufman was the authoritative Salomon Brothers economist whose forecast, on Aug. 18,1982, that interest rates would soon begin dropping ignited a stock market rally that hasn’t ended to this very day. Toward the end of his book, Kaufman mourns what he sees as a system of capitalism giving way to a system of “statism,” especially as the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve System come under collaborative management in pursuit of White House goals. There is plenty more to be borrowed, he says — certainly enough to readjust in the future the currently skewed rates of return among stocks, bonds and commodities. Financial markets might yet sigh.
Saying how the battles of the next 10 years might play out would be a foolish venture. Forecasting who might be the Democratic and Republican Party nominees in 2024 and 2028 is considerably more pointless than guessing who will meet in the Super Bowl next year since there are far more variables involved. But there is nothing foolish about acknowledging the existence of tides of public opinion that ebb and flow. Reagan’s presidency was a “triumph of the imagination,” wrote former New York Times reporter Richard Reeves, in 2005. Might someone say the same of Biden in 2045?
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
Waterfront on woodcuts
“Sea Fox on an Evening Tide’’ (reduction woodcut), by Don Gorvett , in his show “Don Gorvett: Working Waterfronts," April 2 to Sept. 12, 2021, at the Portsmouth Historical Society's Academy Galleries, in Portsmouth, N.H. (This exhibit coincides the galleries show "Twilight of American Impressionism: Alice Ruggles Sohier and Frederick A. Bosley.")
Mr. Gorvett, born in Boston in 1949, is a contemporary artist and master printmaker. His immediate surroundings, the seaside, and its harbors are fundamental to his work. He’s influenced by a romantic passion for history, drama and music. He’s well known for his reduction woodcuts that record maritime subjects from Boston, Gloucester, Portsmouth and and Ogunquit, Maine.
His skills as a draftsman and understanding of printmaking are paramount features of his bold graphic style. By virtue of the reduction woodcut method, he arrives at a degree of abstract imagery and liberation from literal realism.