Monthly Archives: October 2015

California Bans ‘Redskins.’ So What About Confederate Heroes?

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Last month, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law making California the first state in the nation to ban public schools from using the term ‘redskins” as a team name or school mascot. As a result of this law, 4 high schools in California will have to change the names of their teams. They will have a year to come up with new names. All 4 of the schools are in poor communities in the Central Valley. The principals of all 4 schools said that the only reason they hadn’t already changed the names of their teams was because of the cost. They say they don’t have the money to buy new uniforms. This new law raises a question in my mind: “What, if anything, is California going to do now about the many public buildings, monuments, parks, etc. in this state that are named after Confederate heroes?” (I teach Civil War history at Orinda Intermediate School.)

 
John & Joseph LeConte. California was always a free state, and it was a Union state in the Civil War, but nevertheless, there are monuments to Confederate heroes all over California, including right here in Berkeley. The biggest building on the U.C. Berkeley campus is LeConte Hall, named after the brothers John and Joseph LeConte. John LeConte was an early president of the University of California, and Joseph LeConte headed the university’s physics and natural history departments. The LeConte brothers grew up in Georgia on their father’s plantation, where the family owned over 200 slaves. During the Civil War, the LeConte brothers volunteered their services to the Confederacy. The Confederate government gave the LeConte brothers the job of solving their most urgent chemical problem – making gunpowder. When the Civil War began, there was very little gunpowder in the South, and they had no way to make it. All of the gunpowder and chemical factories in the United States were in the North. The Confederacy also couldn’t import gunpowder because the Union navy was blockading southern ports. The leaders of the Confederate government knew that unless they found some way to make large quantities of gunpowder, the South would quickly lose the war.

Gunpowder is a mixture of 3 ingredients: sulphur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate, which is also known as niter or saltpeter. The South had plenty of sulphur, and it is easy to make charcoal. However, the South didn’t have much potassium nitrate. Potassium nitrate is a basic ingredient in gunpowder, and there is no substitute. You can’t make gunpowder without it. The LeConte brothers conducted experiments trying to find a practical way of producing potassium nitrate from materials commonly available in the South. Their experiments were successful, and as a result, they wrote pamphlets which were distributed to Southern farmers explaining how they could extract potassium nitrate from the urine of farm animals. Because of the LeConte brothers, the Confederacy never ran out of gunpowder during the Civil War.

Both of the LeConte brothers were committed to the principles of the Confederacy and were openly racist. Joseph LeConte wrote extensively on the subject of race. He wrote that “the enfranchisement of the negro was the greatest political crime ever perpetuated.” He found Reconstruction intolerable. In order to avoid teaching black students at the University of South Carolina, Joseph LeConte gave up his professorship and moved to Berkeley, where his brother John was already running the university. The LeContes are honored all over the city of Berkeley. LeConte Hall is gigantic. It is the largest academic building on any public university campus anywhere in the United States. In addition, there is a LeConte Avenue in Berkeley, a LeConte Elementary School, LeConte Apartments, and a LeConte Park.  According to AirBnB’s website, I live in Berkeley’s ‘LeConte District.’ Plus, there are statues, busts, and plaques of the LeConte brothers scattered all over campus.

Now What? O.K. California has banned ‘redskins’. So what should we do now about the heroes of the Confederacy? My own opinion is that, at the very minimum, we shouldn’t name anything else for the LeContes. They have more than enough stuff named for them scattered around town already. Admittedly, the LeConte brothers held obnoxious racial views, but their views were common among wealthy white men in America 150 years ago, both in the North and the South. If we rename everything in Berkeley that is now named for the LeConte brothers, then what do we do about all the other stuff in town that is named for other slave owners and racists. For example, Berkeley has both a Washington and a Jefferson elementary school. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both major slave owners.

Jack London. And what should the city of Oakland do about all the stuff there that is named for Jack London? Jack London was very racist. His 1904 essay ‘The Yellow Peril’ is full of ugly anti-Chinese stereotypes. Even worse is Jack London’s ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’, a science fiction novel in which the author gives his approval to a plan to exterminate of the bulk of the population of China by biological warfare as the “only possible solution to the Chinese problem” and then resettling the country with Westerners. Renaming everything in Oakland that is currently named for Jack London would cost a ton of money. There is a lot of stuff in Oakland named for Jack London. So what do you think Berkeley and Oakland should do?

Kitchen Smoke Detectors.

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Do you have a smoke detector in or near your kitchen that goes off while you are cooking? If so, I can replace it with different kind of smoke alarm, one that is much less likely to do that. There are 2 different kinds of smoke detectors. One kind works by ionization, and the other is photoelectric. Most smoke detectors work by ionization. They are generally recommended for use in bedrooms. Photoelectric smoke detectors work on a different scientific principle and are far less likely to go off from normal kitchen cooking. More than 50% of Americans admit that they have silenced a false alarm by removing a smoke detector from the wall or by taking out the batteries and not replacing them. That is a pretty shocking number! If you would like me to replace a smoke detector in your kitchen, hall, or living room that is annoying you with false alarms while you are cooking, contact me, and I will replace it with a photoelectric smoke alarm.
 

Would You Believe A 5 Square Foot Kitchen?

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tinykitchen tinykitchen2Micro apartments and condominiums in San Francisco keep getting smaller, and so do their kitchens. Below are photos taken from San Francisco Craigslist rental ads. These are examples of what is politely known in the City as ‘efficiency kitchens.’ Each kitchen measures less than 5 square feet. In that tiny space, they somehow squeeze in a stainless steel sink, a stove, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, and some shelves or a storage cabinet. Just because these kitchens are tiny, doesn’t necessarily mean these apartments are cheap. They are in San Francisco, where the average 1 bedroom apartment now rents for $3,600 a month. Whenever I see ads for newly-built micro apartments and condominiums in San Francisco, I think: ‘Well they can’t get any smaller than that’, but they always do. I wonder how they will make kitchens smaller than this.

Why Do German Directors Wear Monocles?

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vonStroheimBack in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood’s Golden Age, many of the top directors in the U.S. were Germans. Most of them moved to Hollywood when Hitler came to power; however, some important German directors in Hollywood arrived long before the Nazi era. Erich von Stroheim was a big movie star in the U.S. during World War 1. He was the first German actor in Hollywood to figure out that the way to get jobs directing big-budget movies was to act the role of a stereotypical German theatrical director. He knew that Americans had a very clear idea what German directors were like. Americans thought that German directors were arrogant monocled tyrants, terrorizing the people who worked under them, but that they were also artistic geniuses. Von Stroheim knew how to play to that stereotype. He starred in many big-budget movies in World War 1 and World War 2, always playing a nasty, arrogant, monocled German military officer. American audiences lapped it up! Von Stroheim was billed as ‘the man you love to hate.’ Von Stroheim began wearing a monocle soon after arriving in Hollywood, but he didn’t actually need glasses to see. The lens in von Stroheim’s monocle was just window glass. He wore the monocle as part of his theatrical personae. Twenty years after von Stroheim arrived in Hollywood, Hitler came to power, and a slew of top German directors moved to Hollywood, most of them Jewish, and all of them looking for work. Two of the best of these Jewish German directors were Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. Both of them knew Erich von Stroheim. Soon after arriving in Hollywood, both Preminger and Lang started wearing monocles. Neither of them wore monocles when they lived in Germany. They also began sneering when being photographed. Like von Stroheim, they quickly got jobs directing important movies. My favorite movie directed by Otto Preminger was  ‘Laura.’ It has often been called the best cinema noir movie ever made. Preminger won the Academy Award in 1944 as Best Director for that film. He also acted in a number of movies. In ‘Stalag 17’, Preminger played the arrogant, sadistic commandant of a German POW  camp. In that movie, Preminger plays with his monocle while tormenting American POWs. So, if you know someone with a German accent who wants to become a big-name Hollywood director, my advice is – start sneering and get a monocle!