Monday, September 6, 1943. Churchill at Harvard.

Churchill visited Harvard and received an honorary degree.  While there, he delivered this speech:

The last time I attended a ceremony of this character was in the spring of 1941, when, as Chancellor of Bristol University, I conferred a degree upon the United States Ambassador, Mr. Winant, and in absentia upon President Conant, our President, who is here today and presiding over this ceremony. The blitz was running hard at that time, and the night before, the raid on Bristol had been heavy. Several hundreds had been killed and wounded. Many houses were destroyed. Buildings next to the University were still burning, and many of the University authorities who conducted the ceremony had pulled on their robes over uniforms begrimed and drenched; but all was presented with faultless ritual and appropriate decorum, and I sustained a very strong and invigorating impression of the superiority of man over the forces that can destroy him.

Here now, today, I am once again in academic groves – groves is, I believe, the right word – where knowledge is garnered, where learning is stimulated, where virtues are inculcated and thought encouraged. Here, in the broad United States, with a respectable ocean on either side of us, we can look out upon the world in all its wonder and in all its woe. But what is this that I discern as I pass through your streets, as I look round this great company?

I see uniforms on every side. I understand that nearly the whole energies of the University have been drawn into the preparation of American youth for the battlefield. For this purpose all classes and courses have been transformed, and even the most sacred vacations have been swept away in a round-the-year and almost round-the-clock drive to make warriors and technicians for the fighting fronts.

Twice in my lifetime the long arm of destiny has reached across the oceans and involved the entire life and manhood of the United States in a deadly struggle.

There was no use in saying “We don’t want it; we won’t have it; our forebears left Europe to avoid these quarrels; we have founded a new world which has no contact with the old. “There was no use in that. The long arm reaches out remorselessly, and every one’s existence, environment, and outlook undergo a swift and irresistible change. What is the explanation, Mr. President, of these strange facts, and what are the deep laws to which they respond? I will offer you one explanation – there are others, but one will suffice.

The price of greatness is responsibility. If the people of the United States had continued in a mediocre station, struggling with the wilderness, absorbed in their own affairs, and a factor of no consequence in the movement of the world, they might have remained forgotten and undisturbed beyond their protecting oceans: but one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilised world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes.

If this has been proved in the past, as it has been, it will become indisputable in the future. The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility. Although we live in a period so tumultuous that little can be predicted, we may be quite sure that this process will be intensified with every forward step the United States make in wealth and in power. Not only are the responsibilities of this great Republic growing, but the world over which they range is itself contracting in relation to our powers of locomotion at a positively alarming rate.

We have learned to fly. What prodigious changes are involved in that new accomplishment! Man has parted company with his trusty friend the horse and has sailed into the azure with the eagles, eagles being represented by the infernal (loud laughter) – I mean internal -combustion engine. Where, then, are those broad oceans, those vast staring deserts? They are shrinking beneath our very eyes. Even elderly Parliamentarians like myself are forced to acquire a high degree of mobility.

But to the youth of America, as to the youth of all the Britains, I say “You cannot stop.” There is no halting-place at this point. We have now reached a stage in the journey where there can be no pause. We must go on. It must be world anarchy or world order.

Throughout all this ordeal and struggle which is characteristic of our age, you will find in the British Commonwealth and Empire good comrades to whom you are united by other ties besides those of State policy and public need. To a large extent, they are the ties of blood and history. Naturally I, a child of both worlds, am conscious of these.

Law, language, literature – these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all the love of personal freedom, or as Kipling put it: “Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law” – these are common conceptions on both-sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples. We hold to these conceptions as strongly as you do.

We do not war primarily with races as such. Tyranny is our foe, whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must forever be on our guard, ever mobilised, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat. In all this, we march together. Not only do we march and strive shoulder to shoulder at this moment under the fire of the enemy on the fields of war or in the air, but also in those realms of thought which are consecrated to the rights and the dignity of man.

At the present time we have in continual vigorous action the British and United States Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, which works immediately under the President and myself as representative of the British War Cabinet. This committee, with its elaborate organisation of Staff officers of every grade, disposes of all our resources and, in practice, uses British and American troops, ships, aircraft, and munitions just as if they were the resources of a single State or nation.

I would not say there are never divergences of view among these high professional authorities. It would be unnatural if there were not. That is why it is necessary to have a plenary meeting of principals every two or three months. All these men now know each other. They trust each other. They like each other, and most of them have been at work together for a long time. When they meet they thrash things out with great candour and plain, blunt speech, but after a few days the President and I find ourselves furnished with sincere and united advice.

This is a wonderful system. There was nothing like it in the last war. There never has been anything like it between two allies. It is reproduced in an even more tightly-knit form at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in the Mediterranean, where everything is completely intermingled and soldiers are ordered into battle by the Supreme Commander or his deputy, General Alexander, without the slightest regard to whether they are British, American, or Canadian, but simply in accordance with the fighting need.

Now in my opinion it would be a most foolish and improvident act on the part of our two Governments, or either of them, to break up this smooth-running and immensely powerful machinery the moment the war is over. For our own safety, as well as for the security of the rest of the world, we are bound to keep it working and in running order after the war – probably for a good many years, not only until we have set up some world arrangement to keep the peace, but until we know that it is an arrangement which will really give us that protection we must have from danger and aggression, a protection we have already had to seek across two vast world wars.

I am not qualified, of course, to judge whether or not this would become a party question in the United States, and I would not presume to discuss that point. I am sure, however, that it will not be a party question in Great Britain. We must not let go of the securities we have found necessary to preserve our lives and liberties until we are quite sure we have something else to put in their place which will give us an equally solid guarantee.

The great Bismarck – for there were once great men in Germany – is said to have observed towards the close of his life that the most potent factor in human society at the end of the nineteenth century was the fact that the British and American peoples spoke the same language.

That was a pregnant saying. Certainly it has enabled us to wage war together with an intimacy and harmony never before achieved among allies.

This gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance, and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship. I like to think of British and Americans moving about freely over each other’s wide estates with hardly a sense of being foreigners to one another. But I do not see why we should not try to spread our common language even more widely throughout the globe and, without seeking selfish advantage over any, possess ourselves of this invaluable amenity and birthright.

Some months ago I persuaded the British Cabinet to set up a committee of Ministers to study and report upon Basic English. Here you have a plan. There are others, but here you have a very carefully wrought plan for an international language capable of a very wide transaction of practical business and interchange of ideas. The whole of it is comprised in about 650 nouns and 200 verbs or other parts of speech – no more indeed than can be written on one side of a single sheet of paper.

What was my delight when, the other evening, quite unexpectedly, I heard the President of the United States suddenly speak of the merits of Basic English, and is it not a coincidence that, with all this in mind, I should arrive at Harvard, in fulfilment of the long-dated invitations to receive this degree, with which president Conant has honoured me? For Harvard has done more than any other American university to promote the extension of Basic English. The first work on Basic English was written by two Englishmen, Ivor Richards, now of Harvard, and C.K. Ogden, of Cambridge University, England, working in association.

The Harvard Commission on English Language Studies is distinguished both for its research and its practical work, particularly in introducing the use of Basic English in Latin America; and this Commission, your Commission, is now, I am told, working with secondary schools in Boston on the use of Basic English in teaching the main language to American children and in teaching it to foreigners preparing for citizenship.

Gentlemen, I make you my compliments. I do not wish to exaggerate, but you are the head-stream of what might well be a mighty fertilising and health-giving river. It would certainly be a grand convenience for us all to be able to move freely about the world – as we shall be able to do more freely than ever before as the science of the world develops – be able to move freely about the world, and be able to find everywhere a medium, albeit primitive, of intercourse and understanding. Might it not also be an advantage to many races, and an aid to the building-up of our new structure for preserving peace?

All these are great possibilities, and I say: “Let us go into this together. Let us have another Boston Tea Party about it.”

Let us go forward as with other matters and other measures similar in aim and effect – let us go forward in malice to none and good will to all. Such plans offer far better prizes than taking away other people’s provinces or lands or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

It would, of course, Mr. President, be lamentable if those who are charged with the duty of leading great nations forward in this grievous and obstinate war were to allow their minds and energies to be diverted from making the plans to achieve our righteous purposes without needless prolongation of slaughter and destruction.

Nevertheless, we are also bound, so far as life and strength allow, and without prejudice to our dominating military tasks, to look ahead to those days which will surely come when we shall have finally beaten down Satan under our feet and find ourselves with other great allies at once the. masters and the servants of the future. Various schemes of achieving world security while yet preserving national rights, traditions and customs are being studied and probed.

We have all the fine work that was done a quarter of a century ago by those who devised and tried to make effective the League of Nations after the last war. It is said that the League of Nations failed. If so, that is largely because it was abandoned, and later on betrayed: because those who were its best friends were till a very late period infected with a futile pacifism: because the United States, the originating impulse, fell out of line: because, while France had been bled white and England was supine and bewildered, a monstrous growth of aggression sprang up in Germany, in Italy and Japan.

We have learned from hard experience that stronger, more efficient, more rigorous world institutions must be created to preserve peace and to forestall the causes of future wars. In this task the strongest victorious nations must be combined, and also those who have borne the burden and heat of the day and suffered under the flail of adversity; and, in this task, this creative task, there are some who say: “Let us have a world council and under it regional or continental councils,” and there are others who prefer a somewhat different organisation.

All these matters weigh with us now in spite of the war, which none can say has reached its climax, which is perhaps entering for us, British and Americans, upon its most severe and costly phase. But I am here to tell you that, whatever form your system of world security may take, however the nations are grouped and ranged, whatever derogations are made from national sovereignty for the sake of the larger synthesis, nothing will work soundly or for long without the united effort of the British and American peoples.

If we are together nothing is impossible. If we are divided all will fail.

I therefore preach continually the doctrine of the fraternal association of our two peoples, not for any purpose of gaining invidious material advantages for either of them, not for territorial aggrandisement or the vain pomp of earthly domination, but for the sake of service to mankind and for the honour that comes to those who faithfully serve great causes.

Here let me say how proud we ought to be, young and old alike, to live in this tremendous, thrilling, formative epoch in the human story, and how fortunate it was for the world that when these great trials came upon it there was a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave. Let all who are here remember, as the words of the hymn we have just sung suggest, let all of us who are here remember that we are on the stage of history, and that whatever our station may be, and whatever part we have to play, great or small, our conduct is liable to be scrutinised not only by history but by our own descendants.

Let us rise to the full level of our duty and of our opportunity, and let us thank God for the spiritual rewards He has granted for all forms of valiant and faithful service.

It'd be a different Harvard if he visited it today.  He'd probably draw protestors upset with he history of British colonialism.

Konotop was taken by the Red Army.

The Tirpitz and Scharnhorst left for a raid on Spitsbergen.

The British 8th Army took Palmi and Delianuova.

A large US Army Air Force raid took place on Stuttgart.

A derailment of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Philadelphia resulted in the deaths of 79 people and 116 being injured.  An Amtrak train would derail at the same spot in 2015, resulting in the death of 8 people.

Lex Anteinternet: Thick cut baloney. And while we are at it . .

Lex Anteinternet: Thick cut baloney.:   What on earth is the matter with Trump's diction?  "Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable"? Does this mean he generally f...

I saw a link of Ted Cruz from News Max (why would anyone watch News Max?) stating something to the effect that the country is 200 years old, and we've never had a former President indicted, and that's a reason that this must all be politically motivated baloney.

Ted Cruz is a Harvard Law graduate and former U.S. Supreme Court Clerk.  If this doesn't give a really good indication of the complete moral sewer the practice of law actually tends to be, and that the time has long come to quit hiring Harvard Law graduates to anything, and dismantle Harvard law brick by brick, nothing will.

That is about the dumbest argument for not indicting Trump there is.  It's actually a really good reason to indict Trump.  In 200 years, we've never had a President before who tried to overthrow an election.

D'uh. 

Is the kind of sloppy thinking that Harvard is proud of?

Can't win for losing. Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action.

For the reasons provided above, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.

At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. See, e.g., 4 App. in No. 21–707, at 1725– 1726, 1741; Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 20–1199, at 10. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing,not the name.” Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 325 (1867). A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.

Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

The judgments of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and of the District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina are reversed.

It is so ordered.

After a series of decisions on cases which liberal pundits were in self afflicted angst about in which the Court didn't realize their fears, the Court finally did realize one and struck down affirmative action admission into universities, something it warned it would do 25 years ago.

The reason is simple. Race based admission is clearly violative of US law and the equal protection clause. That was always known, with the Court allowing this exception in order to attempt to redress prior racism.  As noted, it had already stated there was a day when this would end.  The Court had been signalling that it would do this for years.

Indeed, while not the main point in this entry, it can't help be noted that when the Court preserves a policy like this one, which it did last week with the also race based Indian Child Welfare Act, liberals are pretty much mute on it.  There are no howls of protest from anyone, but no accolades either.  Political liberals received two (expected, in reality) victories from the Court in two weeks that they'd been all in a lather regarding. They seemed almost disappointed to have nothing to complain about, until this case, which gave them one.

Predictably, the left/Democrats reacted as if this is a disaster.  It isn't.  Joe Biden instantly reacted.  Michele Obama, who has a much better basis to react, also made a statement, pointing out that she was a beneficiary of the policy, which she was.  That's fine, but that doesn't mean that the policy needed to be preserved in perpetuity.

At some point, it's worth noting, these policies become unfair in and of themselves.  Not instantly, but over time, when they've redressed what they were designed to.  The question is when, and where.  A good argument could be made, for example, that as for the nation's traditionally largest minority, African Americans, this policy had run its course.  In regard to Native Americans?  Not so much.

Critics will point out that poverty and all the ills that accompany it still afflict African Americans at disproportionate levels, and that's true. The question then becomes why these policies, which have helped, don't seem to be able to bridge the final gap.  A whole series of uncomfortable issues are then raised, which the right and the left will turn a blind eye to. For one thing, immigration disproportionately hurts African Americans, which they are well aware of.  Social programs that accidentally encouraged the break-up of families and single parenthood hit blacks first, and then spread to whites, helping to accidentally severely damage American family structures and cause poverty.  Due to the Civil Rights movement, African Americans became a Democratic base, which was in turn abandoned by the Democrats much like Hard Hat Democrats were, leaving them politically disenfranchised.  Black membership in the GOP has only recently increased (although it notably has), as the black middle class and traditionally socially conservative black community has migrated towards it, but that migration was severely hindered by the legacy of Reagan's Southern Strategy, which brought Southern (and Rust Belt) Democrats into the party and with it populism and closeted racism.

While the left will howl in agony on this decision, it won't really do anything that isn't solidly grounded in the 1960s, and 70s, and for that matter probably moribund, about the ongoing systemic problems.  Pundits who are in favor of institutionalizing every child during the day will come out mad, but they won't dare suggest that immigrants take African American entry level jobs.  Nobody is going to suggest taking a second look at social programs that encourage women of all races to marry the government and fathers to abandon their offspring, something that Tip O'Neill, a Democrat, noted in regard to the African American family before it spread to the white family.  The usual suspects will have the usual solutions and the usual complaints, all of which aren't working to push a determinative solution to this set of problems.

Hardly noted, yet, we should note here, is that this decision, just like Obergefell and Heller, will have a longer reach than people now seem to note.  If college affirmative action is illegal, then similar race based programs (save for ones involving Native Americans, who are subject to the Indian Commerce Clause) are as well. And maybe so are gender based ones, including ones that take into account the ever expanding phony categories of genders that progressive add to every day.  In other words, if programs that favor minority admission into university are invalid, probably Federal Government policies that favor women owned companies over others are as well.

Indeed, they should be.

Societies have an obligation to work towards equality before the law, and before society, for all.  But the essence of working on a problem is solving it.  The subject policy was successful for a long time, but this institutionalized favoritism was no longer working to a large degree, and for that matter, in some instances, impacting others simply because of their race.  It's not 1963, 1973, or 1983 any longer.  New thoughts on old problems should be applied.

Some of those new thoughts, frankly, should be to what extent must we continue to have a 1883 view of the country as if it has vast unpopulated domains to settle that it needs to import to fill.  Another might be, however, that American society really has fundamentally changed on race even within the last 20 years.  While racism remains, and the Obama and Trump eras seem to have boiled it back up, for different reasons, a lot of street level racism really is gone.  For one thing, seeing multiracial couples with multiracial children no longer causes anyone to bat an eye anymore, and that wasn't true as recently as 20 years ago.  We may be a lot further down this road than anyone suspects.

Monday, June 21, 1943. Spreading the Holocaust in the Baltic

Douglas SBD "Dauntless" dive bomber balanced on nose after crash landing on carrier flight deck, June 21, 1943.

Head of the SS Heinrich Himmler ordered that all remaining Jews in the Baltic States be transferred to slave labor camps.

Sarah Sundin notes, on her blog:

Today in World War II History—June 21, 1943: US Marines land unopposed at Segi Point, New Georgia, in the Solomon Islands. Detroit race riot begins between whites and Blacks.

The NFL approved the temporary Merger of the Eagles and the Steelers, something we reported on the other day.  The declined the proposal to merge the Bears and the Cardinals.

Occupied Greece saw action as the SOE destroyed a railway bridge over the Asopos and the Greek Liberation Army conducted an ambush in the Battle of Sarantaporos.

The US Supreme Court rules in Stack v. Boyle that a foreign born citizen could not have that citizenship revoked for joining the Communist Party.

Harvard rejected a proposal to admit women to its medical school.

Monday, April 9, 1923. Minimum Wage Struck Down.

The United States Supreme Court held that a Federal Minimum Wage was unconstitutional, ruling to that effect in Adkins v. Children's Hospital.

The holding was, rather obviously, later overruled.

On the topic, it's worth noting that generally wages, even the lowest paid wages, tend to be well above minimum wage.  The minimum wage is near and dear to the hearts of political liberals, but it basically ceased to function as a floor years ago.

The Tribune had some notable headlines:

Harvard University passed a resolution that whites and blacks (all men) could not be compelled to live or eat together, but that no man could be excluded by reason of color

Los Angeles won its bid to host the 1932 Olympics, a bid made easy by the fact that it was the only city to put in for it.

First Naval District, The Cadet School, Nov. 7, 1917 (Harvard University)

Saturday, October 9, 1909. William James Sidis

William James Sidis of Brookline, Massachusetts, the son of two Russian physicians, was admitted to Harvard at age 11, the youngest person to obtain that status.

1914 graduation photograph.

He lived an eclectic and not particularly happy life, not seemingly making the transfer to adult life very well, and having been arrested for being present at a Socialist demonstration in 1919.  He died in 1944 of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 46.

Last edition:

Monday, October 4, 1909. Cook exposed on Mt. McKinley.