The United States had been watching the events in Europe in 1916, and although the isolationists remained strong, more and more people had come to the conclusion that American intervention in World War II was on the horizon. The City of San Francisco had organized a Preparedness Day Parade to support the anticipated entry of the United States into the war. This was to be the largest parade in the City’s history, some 51,000 plus marchers from over 2100 organizations including 52 bands had signed up for the 3.5 hour procession.

The parade stepped off at 1:30 on July 22,1916. At 2:06 a half an hour into the parade a dynamite time bomb concealed in a suitcase exploded on the west side of Steuart Street just south of Market Street a block away from the Ferry Building. Whoever had constructed the bomb had added heavy metal sash weights which fragmented into pieces of shrapnel augmenting the destructivness of the bomb. The explosion killed ten bystanders and wounded forty others making it the worst terrorist act in San Francisco history.

In an earlier post I noted that July is Laborfest in San Francisco, a celebration of the City’s labor history. The Preparedness Day bombing led to one of the most controversial legal proceedings in California history, the trial and conviction of labor leaders, Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings, for the bombing. Today, except for afictionados of San Francisco history, Tom Mooney is largely forgotten. But when pollsters conducted a survey in Europe in 1935, Europeans identified him as one of the four best known Americans, the others being Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles A. Lindbergh, and Henry Ford.

Tom Mooney was born in Chicago, the son of Irish immigrants, on December 8,1882. His father was a coal miner and a militant organizer for the Knights of Labor who died of silicosis when he was 36 leaving Tom and his two siblings fatherless. Tom started work at 14 and apprenticed as a iron molder and in 1902 joined the International Molders Union. He saved his money and travelled to Europe where he encountered Nicholas Klein, a delegate to the International Socialist Congress.while visiting a musuem in Rotterdam. Mooney returned to America a committed socialist and devoted himself to the study of the works of Karl Marx.

He found work at a foundry in Stockton, California and joined the Socialist Party of America and campaigned for the presidential candidacy of Eugene V. Debs. He returned to Chicago after the election and devoted twelve hours a day to the study of socialism in a reference library. In 1909 he returned west to take a job at Idaho iron foundry. In the following year he represented the American Socialist Party at the International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen. He settled in San Francisco on his return and became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He married Rena Hermann in 1911 and published a small socialist newspaper in San Francisco, The Revolt, and also ran as the Socialist candidate for Sherrif of San Francisco.

The Pinkerton Detective Agency tried to frame him on a charge of transporting dynamite, but he successfully appealled a two year prison sentence to Folsom Prison. Unable to find work as a molder he became a full time union organizer including participation in a stike by the streetcar workers of the United Railroads. When one of the railroad’s towers in the San Bruno Hills was dynamited in June 1916 the railroad tried to tie him to the bombing. This was the context of Mooney’s life at the time of the Preparedness Day bombing.

Suspicion first fell on Alexander Berkman, with whom Mooney had associated, an anarchist who had relocated to San Francisco after being implicated in a bombing in New York City. Two eyewitnesses had described seeing two dark skinned men, probably Mexicans, carrying a suitcase near the bomb site. But Martin Swanson, who had tried to implicate Mooney in the earlier dynamiting charge while with Pinkerton and with the San Bruno bombing while with the Public Utilities Protective Bureau became convinced that Mooney and his assistant Warren Billing were responsible and took the claim to District Attorney Warren Fickert, the night of the Preparedness Day bombing, and went to work for the District Attorney the next day.

On July 16 Fickert charged Mooney, Billings, Israel Weinberg, Edward Nolan,and Rena Hermann with the crime. The District Attorney’s case was full of holes from the beginning. None of the eyewitnesses picked Mooney or Billings out of a line up. The conviction was almost solely based on the testimony of two men, John McDonald, an unemployed waiter, and Frank Oxman, an Oregon cattleman. They claimed they saw Billings plant the bomb at 1;50 and then saw him talking with Mooney and his wife a few moments later. A famous piece of forensic evidence completely contradicted their story. The defense produced a photo of the couple taken a mile away. A clock in the photo showed the time of 1:58. Because of the heavy traffic, it would have been impossible for Mooney and his wife to be at the scene of the bombing at 1:50

Nonetheless the jury found Mooney and Billings guilty and sentenced Mooney to death and Billings to life imprisonment. The jury acquited Rena Mooney and Israel Weinberg and Edward Nolan never came to trial.

The Federal Government became concerned about the trial and the verdict,and the Secretary of Labor William Bauchop Wilson had the Director of General Employment John Densmore look at the case. He planted a dictaphone in Fickert’s office and was able to find out that Mooney and Billings had in all probability been framed. Fremont Older reported the allegation in the San Francisco Call of November 23, 1917.  Draper Hand of the San Francisco Police Department went to Mayor James Rolph to confess that he had helped frame the two men and had gotten McDonald to testify by offering him a  large share of  a reward. Two other men came forward to testify that Oxman was 200 miles away from the bombing site and could not have seen what he stated that he had seen.

William Stephens, the Republican Governor of California, commuted Mooney’s death sentence to life in prison, but over the next twenty years he and four other Republican governors refused to order a retrial or to release Mooney and Billings. In 1937 a group of federal legislators asked F.D.R. to intercede. When he refused, two of them introduced a resolution in the Senate asking Republican Governor Frank Merriman to pardon the two men.

Finally in November 1938 California voters elected Culbert Olson the first Democratic Governor in forty-four years and he ordered the release of Mooney and Billings. The Tom Mooney who emerged from prison was old from prison and sick with ulcers and jaundice. In his last hurrah the Sunday after his release he walked in a parade up Market Street from the Embarcadero to San Francisco Civic Center escorted by one hundred longshoremen with their hooks and a contingent of his own union, Local 164 of the International Moulders Union, behind them. He pointedly thumbed his nose a the Hearst Building at Third and Market as a protest against the press editors who had reviled him over the years. He died largely unrembered and alone on March 6, 1942 although a large funeral celebration followed at San Francisco Civic Auditorium.

No one has ever established who was resposible for the bombing. Some think it was Alexander Berkman and his anarchists. Both Mooney and Billings knew how to use dynamite and Billings had knowledge of clockwork mechanisms and became a watch repairman after his release from prison. Suspicions also centered around the radical anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani and the elusive bomb maker Mario Buda who was known to include heavy metal slugs in his dynamite time bonds to increase their deadliness. Today the bombing lives on in one of the murals in the Ricon Postal Annex, part of the rich tableaux of San Francisco labor history.

San Francisco is a seaside city, and for much of its history a major port. The wind driven clipper ships were the first to sail into the West Coast port. Since the clipper ships depended on the vagaries of the wind, they often arrived in San Francisco with little or no notice and gangs of men to unload them had to be recruited and organized quickly. Shore side criers would shout out, “men along the shore” to attract working men. That phrase gave rise to the term “longshoremen.”

Kenneth Starr devotes a chapter in Endangered Dreams, the volume in his histories of California devoted to the Depression, called “Bayonets on the Embarcadero” to the San Francisco Waterfront and General Strike of 1934 which was a defining moment in the history of West Coast longshoremen. There is a very little shipping in San Francisco today except for a few ocean liners. Most of the real freight work has moved across the Bay to Oakland. But in 1934 the Port of San Francisco was a much different place. As Starr recounts, there were eighty-two docks stretching along the northern Embarcadero and the southeastern waterfront that could handle up to 250 vessels every working day.

At the turn of the Twentieth Century the longshoremen had organized themselves into the effective Riggers and Stevedores Union. But in 1914 the employers formed the Waterfront Employers Union that broke strikes in 1914 and 1919 and formed a house union, the Longshoremen’s Association and Bay District, that dominated the Port. This house union had no ties to the most important longshoremen’s union, the International Longshoremen’s Union headquartered in New York.

The Longshoremen’s Association became known as the Blue Book Union after the blue book that the members had to carry on their persons to get work. The Waterfront Employers Union was especially adamant in opposing a hiring hall for the members of the Association. Longshoreman’s work,as Dr. Starr notes, was seasonal in the sense that the seasons were the length of time that it took to unload a particular ship which could extend anywhere from a few hours to two or three days. Whoever controlled the supply of labor controlled the waterfront.

The mechanism that the Employers Union used to control the labor supply was the shape up administered by the straw boss, one of a group of independent contractors. Every day before six in the morning the employers informed the straw bosses of their hiring needs for the day. The straw bosses would go to the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street where the men seeking work would gather around them in a horseshoe. The straw boss would announce the jobs that he was filling that day and then start selecting the men to do the job. Any man who wanted to be selected had to have a Blue Book and be willing to provide the straw boss with some sort of kickback or be willing to stand the straw boss a round of drinks in a saloon.

The longshoremen organized themselves into hierarchies. Some specialized in shipboard work others in work on shore. They used this specialization as a tool in getting work. One commentator has noted that these skill divisions and specialization often mirrored ethnic and racial divisions. In Halifax, Nova Scotia African-Nova Scotian longshoremen handled the most arduous and poorly paid cargoes.

The shape up was degrading and stacked against the men seeking work. There were roughly four thousand men seeking such work and at the most fifteen hundred jobs available on an average day. Even if a man were selected it was hard to make a living wage. He might work up to twenty-four to thirty-six hours on a given shift or as little as two hours. The going wage rate was eighty-five cents per hour and the average weekly wage of a longshoreman in Los Angeles’ port of San Pedro was $ 10.45.

The workers who sought to unionize and those who led them wanted to register all the longshoremen and to implement a hiring hall. If they could do this then the union could restrict the number of men certified to work and assign them to work in a strict rotation. All of the eligible longshoremen would get an equal opportunity to fill all of the available jobs. An Australian immigrant appeared on the scene who would play a key role in this effort, Alfred Renton Bridges, renamed “Harry” by American sailors.

The ILWU history website notes that Harry was born in Melbourne, Australia on July 28, 1901 where his father was in the real estate business. His father sent a thirteen year old Harry out to collect rent from poor tenants, an experience that Harry later related had a great effect on him. He said no one with any sensitivity could help but be affected by the task of collecting rent from people of meager means. Although his father was a conservative, Harry had two uncles who took an active interest in the Australian Labor Party, and their views shaped Harry’s political views.

Harry had no interest in a business career and spent his spare time on the docks speaking to foreign sailors and watching the boats enter and leave the harbor. He convinced his father to let him go to sea, and in 1920 he sailed on the South Sea barkentine Ysbel for America.( Photo above shows a young Harry and his mandolin aboard ship) He had his first labor confrontation on the voyage when he and several other of the sailors objected to working on Easter Monday, an Australian holiday. When the Ysbel entered the San Francisco Harbor he left the vessel, paid the head tax of eight dollars, and took a job on an American vessel.

He sailed up and down the West Coast and the Gulf for two years and walked a picket line in a New Orleans maritime strike. The New Orleans police arrested him he alleged for no other reason than he was picket. After a stint on a quartermaster on a government ship chasing he rum runners, he retired from the sea to become a longshoreman as a winch operator and rigger on a steel handling gang in San Francisco in 1922. He tried to defy the company union that ran the docks but found that unless he paid his dues he could not gain employment.

The Employers Union used the “speedup” on the docks. Gangs of longshoremen were forced to compete against each other to see who could load the most cargo in a given time. The strain on the equipment and the men and the inattention to safety resulted in horrific accidents. Employers place spies in the men’s midst to ferret out militants and played workers against each other to prevent the men from uniting.

The National Industrial Recovery Act of the New Deal encouraged ILA organizers to return to San Francisco and the other West Coast ports to again attempt to establish the ILA as a bargaining agent. Some longshoremen joined surreptitiously and others openly and in September 1933 the ILA granted a charter to Local 38-79 in San Francisco and set up a Pacific Coast District. Bridges was a member of a group of longshoremen called the Albion Group after their meeting place. Bridges joined the ILA local. He and other members of the Albion Group made up a majority of the executive board and held two of the three business agent positions.

The next month the Matson line fired four men who wore ILA buttons on the job, and Bridges helped organize a five day strike to force Matson to rehire the men which the shipping line did in response to the labor pressure. The Blue Book Union went in to decline and the ILA Union emerged the survivor. The ILA and the Employees Union held a group of mediation sessions on proposals to increase wages and to improve conditions.

The ILA pressed the Roosevelt Administration to develop a Shipping Code under the National Recovery Act which set up a struggle between the ILA and the Employers Union to gain as many advantages as possible to be embodied in the new Code. As each sides suspicions of the other rose the ILA had a meeting in May 1934 in which the fifteen hundred members present voted for a strike. On May 9, 1934 the longshoremen of Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, San Pedro,and San Francisco went out on strike and several other unions and associations joined them.

The Employers Union organized to meet the strike by opening a recruiting office which had a heavy police guard. The Employers Union housed the strikebreakers on two ships the Diana Dollar and the Wilhelmina anchored off the Embarcadero so that the strikebreakers would not have to cross the picket lines. The teamsters refused to haul cargo to and from the docks but the Belt Line railroad continued service the Embarcadero until the strikers sat down on the tracks. (Center photo shows Belt Line locomotive near Pier 43) The Industrial Association of San Francisco with advertising help from McCann Erickson took over from the Employers Union.

The National head of the ILA, John Ryan, arrived in San Francisco and began negotiating without seeking the approval of the Strike Committee chaired by Bridges. In four days Ryan announced a settlement. The union would not get a closed shop, but employers could recognize the ILA as bargaining agent. Bridges characterized the proposed settlement as a sellout and the membership rejected the proposal by a vote of 2,404 to 88. Ryan and his Assistant Secretary McGrady began to characterize the strike as being Communist controlled. The Western Worker had distributed 4000 copies of an edition on the watefront arguing against the settlement. The White House reacted to the allegation through Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins who asked the Office of Immigration and Naturalization to investigate Bridges’ immigration status.

An inspector for the office working with the Crime Prevention Detail of the San Francisco Police Detail cleared Bridges of any Communist association, but he did accept Communist participation in the strike.Sam Darcy,Communist Party chief on the West Coast met with the strike committee and provided them with advice. Union lawyer Leo Gallagher returned to San Francisco on May 19th from Berlin where he had been defending a young Communist accused of setting fire to the Reich stag. He met with a delegation of the striking workers and exhorted them not to accept a settlement.

The year before in 1933 had been the worst year in the Depression and the peak year of Communist led agricultural strikes. The crusading young District Attorney of Alameda County who would later play a key role in national history as the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Earl Warren, had argued for a coordinated attack by law enforcement officials against Communist provocateurs, a call which was ardently endorsed by San Francisco Police Chief William Quinn. The day before the longshoremen went out on strike he organized an anti-strike force of 182 patrolmen, seventeen mounted policemen, and five radio cars. The police and longshoremen clashed on the 9th, the 10th,and the 12th and on the 13th Quinn ordered a supply of tear gas.

Each day since the 9th, the longshoremen had paraded down the Embarcadero a thousand strong behind the American flag even though picketing had been illegal in San Francisco since the Strike of 1919. However, on the 28th as Ryan was signing the settlement agreement a detachment of mounted and foot patrol officers charged a line of longshoremen crossing the Embarcadero at Pier 18. The longshoremen resisted with clubs, bricks, and cobblestones and pulled some policemen from their horses.

The maratime strike continued into June gaining strength.Ryan and Dave Beck, the head of the Seattle Teamsters, feared the type of left-wing industrial union advocated by Harry Bridges. They favored the elite vertical unions of the AFL. To them the idea of a single coastwide union representing every aspect of the maritime industry was a Communist notion. They entered into negotiations with the Industrial Association with the central strategy of portraying the strike committee as being Communist led. By late June 1934 positions on the Right and Left were hardening. The Port of San Francisco had been closed since May 9 with a cost to businesses of close to a million dollars a day. Using the publicity skills of McCann Erickson the Industrial Association had portrayed itself as the guardian of law and order and the Strike Committee as the representative of the Red Menace. The Governor of California and former Mayor of San Francisco, “Sunny Jim” Rolph had announced that he was ready to send in troops if the Port could not be opened peacefully.

On July 3rd five thousand longshoremen gathered in front of Pier 38 opposed by seven hundred police in formation. A line of railroad boxcars sealed off the south side of the Embarcadero. At noon the steel doors of Pier 38 lifted and five trucks accompanied by eight police patrol cars exited and Police Captain Thomas Hockerton with his revolver in hand standing on the running board of the lead patrol car yelled,”The Port is open!” The caravan headed down the Embarcadero to a warehouse on King Street where strikebreakers unloaded the cargo of birdseed, coffee, and automobile tires. The caravan returned to Pier 38 two more times.

At about one thirty the inevitable happened, labor pickets and police clashed. The police laid down a barrage of tear gas and mounted officer and officers on foot wearing gas masks attacked the crowd with clubs. The longshoremen threw bricks, cobblestones, and railroad spikes and responded with their fists. The police responded with gunfire at Second and Townsend wounding two people including a bank teller. The day’s only fatality, Argonne Riley, was a strange one. He had come ashore from the Diana Dollar to drink, only to be beaten by several men and dumped in a gutter. The police hauled him from the gutter and booked him into the drunk tank. He complained of head pains, and the  police took him to Harbor Emergency Hospital where he died nine minutes after his arrival from a fractured skull.

The next day was the Fourth of July. The cast of characters had changed slightly. Sunny Jim Rolph had died of heart failure on June 2,1934. His successor was Lieutenant Governor Frank Merriman, a native of the Midwest. He was especially perturbed by the refusal of the Joint Strike Committee to allow the Belt Line to move freight . He ordered Major General Seth Howard, the adjutant general of California, to mobilize the California National Guard for deployment into San Francisco if the longshoremen again blocked the Belt Line. (Merriman and Howard are shown in the picture on the right) The Industrial Association ran a full page ad in the newspapers announcing that the Port was open for business and Mayor Rossi announced to a mass rally that the strike was being run by Communists. The stage was set for what would become known in West Coast labor history as Bloody Thursday.

;City Guides is an organization in San Francisco that provides free tours to tourists and local residents of sites of historical interest in San Francisco. City Guides organizes the tours by subject, the waterfront, the theater, the gold rush. I signed up and was accepted for the City Guides training program, but I am also interested in tours beyond San Francisco and in particular science tours.

Therefore, I was delighted to come across a book series published by Rutgers University Press and edited by Dr. Duane S. Nickell entitled Guidebook for the Scientific Traveler. I ordered the first book in the series subtitled Visiting Astronomy and Space Exploration Sites Across America  ;and when I received it started looking for close to home destinations in the book.

I am a native Nevadan and found one Nevada site Area 51 (Groom Lake) and the nearby Extraterrestrial Highway. Groom Lake is approximately 83 miles north-northwest of downtown Las Vegas. The Groom Box is a 23 by 23.5 box of restricted airspace at whose center lies dry bed of Groom Lake with a super secret airbase on its southern shore. The site is crossed by restricted Groom Lake Road which outside the restricted area joins State Route 375, the Extraterrestrial Highway outside the hamlet of Rachel. The photo at the right is an aerial view of the Lake.

The military used Groom Lake for artillery and bombing practice during World War II, but then abandoned it until April 1955 when a Lockheed Skunk Works team selected it as a site to test the U-2 spy plane because the site was within the perimeter of the Nevada Nuclear Test site and surrounded by the Emigrant Valley Mountains which protected the site from outside inquiry.

Before the U-2 development was complete Lockheed began work on another project in the 1960 s that has contributed to the area’s atmosphere of mystery, the OXCART project. The goal of the OXCART project was to develop a Mach-3 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft to overfly the Soviet Union and Cuba. The first shakedown flight of the A-12 took place at Groom Lake on April 26,1962. The production run of 18 aircraft made 2,850 test flights out of Groom Lake. The aircraft had an entirely new wide disk-fuselage in order to carry vast quantities of fuel (see picture above left). Commercial pilots flying over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of an Oxcart aircraft with the sun glinting off its titanium body at 2000 miles per hour. It was little wonder that many thought that they had seen a UFO.

 The secrecy surrounding the site and the connection to super secret aircraft made Area 51 a focus of UFO and conspiracy theories. Among the the stories  put forward as to what the government was doing at the site were the following:

• The government engaged in reverse engineering in which it examined and recreated crashed alien spacecrafts. This included the study of the alien occupants living or dead found in the craft.
• The government used the site to meet with extraterrestrials.
• The government developed exotic weapons and means of controlling the weather at the site.
• The government used the site for time travel and teleportation research and exotic propulsion systems.
• The government used the site for activities related to a shadowy one world government sometimes called the Majestic 12 organization.

There was a touch of truth to some of these suppositions. Reporter Annie Jacobsen interviewed some people who had worked at Area 21 in an April 5,2009 story in the Los Angeles Times. Thorton”T.D” Barnes, a special projects engineer, stated that the group at Area 51 did reverse engineer foreign technology such as the MIG 21 out of the area and he also worked on a rocket project in underground chambers located at nearby Jackass Flats, but there is no real evidence to support any of the other conjectures.

Stephen Rgenold, a reporter for the New York Timestravelled down the vast expanse of the Extraterrestrial Highway in a feature dated April 13,2007. He stopped at the Little A’Le’Inn ( pronounced Little Alien) in Rachel, population 75, and found people who believed and who debunked the alien tales. I believe the Nevada desert and mountain scape has a severe beauty that can be appreciated. See picture above. Who is to say that there may not be some extraterrestrials out there somewhere who also find it appealing?

I grew up in Sacramento, California and went to Sutterville Elementary School. “Sutterville” is a reference to John Augustus Sutter, pictured at the left, born Johan Suter in February 1803 in the Kingdom of Saxony,whose father came from Neuchatel, Switzerland. Young Suter moved to and went to school in Switzerland. He joined the Swiss Army and became a captain in the artillery, but he incurred gambling debts and left Europe for the United States. He arrived in the United States in 1834 and by a circuitous route that took him to Vancouver in the Oregon Territory to Honolulu to the Russian colony in Sitka, Alaska he landed at Yerba Buena, now San Francisco, a then poor mission station, on July 1, 1839.

At that time there were fewer than 1000 Europeans in California. Suter, who was now calling himself John Augustus Sutter, obtained permission from Juan Bautista Alvarado to settle in the Sacramento Valley and to qualify for a land grant Sutter became a Mexican citizen. The Mexican government granted him 48,827 acres in June 1841, the El Sobrante or “leftover” grant. He named his new settlement, which was centered at present day Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento, New Helvetia or New Switzerland since Helvitia was the Latin name for Switzerland.

In 1848 John Marshall and Sutter began the construction of a sawmill in Colma along the American River, and Marshall discovered gold flakes in the ground. Sutter and Marshall could not keep the find a secret and the Forty-Niners, coming from around the world to prospect for gold, overran Sutter’s holdings. Sutter deeded what remained of his land to his son John A. Sutter, Jr., who started planning for a new city which he named Sacramento after the river on which it was located, rather than Sutterville after his father.

The Squatters Association challenged the legitimacy of the Sobrante grant, and in 1858 the Supreme Court denied the validity of the grant. Sutter sued to recover his Gold Rush losses but received nothing but a pension of $ 250 from the United States government. He and his wife, Nanette, moved to New Lititz, Pennsylvania where he spent  fifteen years petitioning the U.S. Congress unsuccessfully for redress. He died virtually penniless in a Washington D.C. hotel and was buried in New Lititz.

This saga of early California is the basis of a fascinating article by Joe McNeill in the June 2010 issue of True Westentitled “Heil Hitler Away” describing a German western, yes a German western, based loosely on Sutter’s life, Die Kaiser von Kalifornen( The Emperor of California). To reach the story author Joe McNeill makes a necessary digression through the history of the German western as embodied and created by Karl May.

Karl May was born into a family of weavers in Saxony in 1842 and became a teacher but lost his license because of a conviction for theft. He spent time in a pair of gaols, and while serving a sentence in Bohemia he became the gaol librarian and read a great deal including travel literature. He became a writer of popular novels and one of his most successful series was set in the American West, a place he never saw or visited, and featured the adventures of  Winnetou, the Apache Chief, and his white blood brother, Old Shatterhand. The picture in the center show May dressed as Old Shatterhand.

These novels had a great appeal to Germans who were seeking an imaginative escape from the industrialized capitalist society in which they found themselves. Numbered among May’s readers were Albert Einsetein, Herman Hesse, and Albert Schweitzer, and over 200 million copies of his works, including translations, have been sold world wide.

One of May’s admirers was not to have such a beneficial influence on world history as Einstein, Hesse, and Schweitzer. As Joe McNeill notes in the article, one of May’s most fervent admirers was Adolph Hitler. Hitler attended a lecture that May gave only ten days before May’s death and was devestated to hear of May’s death. Hitler praised Winnetou to his troops as a master tactician and distributed copies of the Shatterhand/Winnetou novels to them.  Albert Spier said that in times of trouble Hitler looked to the stories to renew his courage. .

Author McNeill notes that the Nazis appropriated the German film industry as an instrument of their propaganda and that May’s Teutonic view of the West had a big influence on Director Louis Trenker’s 1936 dramatization of Sutter’s life in the film, Der Kaiser von Kalifornen. The director and the cast actually  came to the United States to film some outdoor scenes for the film.

Trenker,who also played the title role of Suter, filmed some initial scenes near Mt. Whitney in a landscape that would be featured in Republic Pictures 1938 Lone Ranger serial. He rented a distinctive white stallion named Shiek who was later ridden by the likes of John Wayne, Tim McCoy, and William Boyd in low budget westerns. But he filmed the most improbable scenes in Arizona.

He and the cast took rooms at the El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. In an earlier post I noted the German mountain climbing or bergfilmes. German audiences had an expectation of mountain climbing scenes in adventure films. Der Kaiserhas scenes of Trenker climbing the walls of the Grand Canyon as part of his depiction of  Sutter’s search for California. In the climactic scene Trenker/Sutter reaches the top of the canyon wall to find himself with a panoramic view of California and exclaims,”California Hello!”

The California that Trenker/Sutter is actually looking at is, by a feat of creative editing, Sedona, Arizona. McNeill notes that great effect is made of Sedona in the cinematography. The cinematographer, Albert Benitz, showed crisp skies and billowing clouds shadowing the Sedona peaks and rock formations. He observes that the film looks more like Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda masterpiece, The Triumph of the Will, than the 1931 film Riders of the Purple Sagealso shot in Sedona. The effect is all the more eerie because the soundtrack for the ascent is a mixture of “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the Nazi Party anthem and the “Star Spangled Banner,” the American national anthem. The cast finished the exterior shots in Yuma, Arizona and made a side trip to Washington D.C. to film the penniless Trenker/Sutter slumped on the steps of the United States Capitol in the ending scene of the film. The Nazis designated Der Kaiser a “Great National Film,” and showed it to the Volkssturm ( the people’s storm) militia of old men and boys that he formed as a last attempt to hold off the advancing Russian Army in 1944

Hitler and most of the hierarchy of the Nazi Party attended the world premiere of the film in Berlin on July 21, 1936, and at the Venice National Film Festival in 1936 the Der Kaiserwon the award for best foreign film beating out among others Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town starring Gary Cooper.

Trenker denied that he himself was a Nazi and in 1983 the Goethe-Institute sent him to the U.S. with prints of two of his films including Der Kaiseras part of a series honoring the German immigrant experience in America. The tour concluded at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado with a tribute in his honor. He died in 1990 at the age of 97 as a much honored German figure. When East and West Germany reunified a researcher at the Berlin Document Center discovered a Nazi membership card in Trenker’s  file which established that he had joined the party in 1940.

Trenker had cited the theme of Der Kaiser as being one of Lebensraum, Hitler’s idea that the German people needed space to carry out their destiny. The story of one of the first and most prominent European settlers of California was used to forward on film the ideas of the modern world’s most evil figure.

The June 2010 edition of Discover Magazinehas an article on Harvard mathematician, Shing-Tung Yau. The article describes Dr. Yau as the man who has devised the math to describe string theory. String theory postulates that at the deepest reality the universe is composed of 10 dimensional vibrating strings. His particular branch of mathematics is topology.

Topology is the mathematical study of the way in which the properties of objects are preserved through the deformation, twisting, and stretching of objects. Tearing, however, is not allowed. In topology a circle is equivalent to an ellipse since you can turn the circle into an ellipse by stretching the circle. The set of all possible positions of the hour hands on a clock is equivalent to a circle, a one dimensional closed curve with no intersections that can be embedded into a two dimensional space.

A central idea in topology is that spatial objects like circles and spheres can be treated as objects in their own right and that the knowledge of these objects is independent of how they are represented or embedded in space.

The article in Wolfram Mathematica gives the following examples of the following studies in topology: the space-time of general relativity including fractals, knots, and manifold which have some of the same basic properties as the universe, phase spaces in physics such as the positions of the hands of a clock, and symmetry groups such as the collection of ways to rotate a top.

In the interview in the article Dr. Yau explains that geometry is specific whereas topology is general and that topologists study large patterns and categories of shapes. The example given in the article is that in geometry a cube and a sphere are distinct but not in topology. In topology the two objects can be deformed into each other without cutting through the surface. A torus, a sphere with a hole in the middle is different. A torus is distinct from a sphere because one cannot deform a torus into a sphere no matter how much one twists it. The interesting graphic above depicts the twisting of a torus into the shape of a coffee cup.

In mathematics topology highlights the importance of non linear equations in nature. He notes that even though the stock market is traditionally described in straight lines and linear equations that is not a correct depiction of reality. The stock market fluctuates up and down in a nonlinear way. Topology constrains geometry in the physical world. He notes that if water flows around a sphere, there must be two points at which the water is perfectly still. If the ocean flows from east to west, it cannot flow in the same direction everywhere without hitting a snag. By way of contrast in another topology, that of the torus, the water can flow around and around. There is no point at which the flow must stop because the hole eliminates the impasse.

These views of topology lie at the heart of string theory which postulates the possibility of a world composed of many more dimensions than three. The article requires some rigorous attention but contains some fascinating ideas and is well worth reading.

An article in the April 8, 2010 edition of Nature explores the way in which flocks of birds move together while flying in formation. Scientists mounted 16 gram GPS loggers on the back of homing pigeons in order to track the flight of each bird in a flock of up to ten birds.

The experimenters found that the bird’s position in the flock during flight depended upon a defined social hierarchy-an airborne pecking order. They also found that each bird responded more quickly to a flock mate seen with the left eye, an observation  supporting the theory that each bird has a specific role depending on its position in the flock formation.

Conservation Magazine, in the January-March 2010 issue, reprinted an article from the Economist. The Economist noted a study preformed by a group of researchers from Stanford University led by Illan Kroo which highlighted the possibility that airplanes might save on fuel if they mimicked the flight pattern of birds flying in formation.

Birds flying in formation expend less energy than those who are not in formation. The air that flows over the bird’s wings curls upward behind their wingtips, a phenomenon known as up wash. Birds flying in the up wash experience less drag and spend less energy on propelling themselves than those not in the up wash. Aeronautics expert Peter Lissaman has speculated that a formation of 25 birds might increase their range of flight by almost 71 % because of this phenomenon.

Kroo and his colleagues modelled these principles to the flight of aircraft. The model scenario postualted three passenger jets leaving from Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and then rendezvousing over Utah to continue their respective flights to London in an inverted V formation. According to the model the three aircraft would use 15 % less fuel than if they continued alone and would at the same time reduce their CO2 emission and  nitrogen oxide emissions substantially

Would passengers feel uncomfortable flying in a convoy? The planes could fly separated by several nautical miles, so a passenger looking out the window of one plane might not even see the other planes. Weather will have an effect. In zones of turbulent air the wake of the airplanes will decay more quickly than in calm air and the up wash effect will diminish. Scheduling commercial airlines to fly in a mini flock might also be difficult. The idea might have more application to the flight of military and cargo planes which do not have to meet advertised commercial schedules. The article ends by noting that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is already investigating the possibility of formation flights, so that the next flock you hear flying overhead may be airplanes rather than birds.

I just finished watching the first season of the AMC television series Breaking Bad. The series chronicles the life of a high school chemistry teacher Walter White who learns that he has terminal lung cancer and who then turns to the production and sale of methamphetamine to hopefully create an inheritance for his teenage son and wife. The first season offers hints that Walter was once a promising theoretical chemist and that teaching high school is beneath his talent level.

The writing and acting on the series are excellent, but chemistry also plays an important part. The opening credits feature symbols from the Periodic Table in green and letters in the title and in the names of the cast also use this device. The title appears as Breaking Bad. Br is the Periodic Table symbol for bromine and Ba is the Periodic Table for barium. The opening credits also display the molecular formula for amphetamine,C₁₀H₁₅N and the number for the compound’s molecular mass, 149.24. The compound has 10 carbon atoms, 15 hydrogen atoms, and one nitrogen atom.

The actor who plays Walter explained in an interview that ” breaking bad” is a Southern colloquialism for someone who has taken ceased to be law abiding and has chosen a life of crime for as little as a day or as long as a lifetime. One of the engaging elements of the series is the way in which Walt uses his chemical knowledge to “break bad.” Walt and his cohort and ex student Jesse Pinkerman are forced to kill a pair of drug dealers in the first episode and are then faced with the dilemma of how to dispose of  the body of one of them, Emilio. Walt chooses to dissolve the body in hydrofluoric acid. Jesse ignores Walt’s admonition to put the body in a plastic tub and instead puts the body and the compound in a bathtub on the second story of his home. The acid then dissolves the body, the tub, and the floor beneath the tub and the floor beneath that.

In a later episode Walt is forced to face off against the vicious dealer who has replaced Emilio and beaten Jesse senseless and sent him to the hospital. Walt purports to bring the dealer a bag of crystal meth but which is actually the explosive, fulminate of mercury. Walt hurls a small piece against the floor which produces a violent explosion that wards off the drug dealers and convinces them to give him the money for the crystal meth that they had earlier taken off Jesse.

The real Periodic Table has been in the news recently in an equally fascinating fashion. Scientist at the Center for Heavy Ion Research have named Element 112, Copernicum, after the Fifteenth Century astronomer Copernicus, who was the first to recognize that the Earth and the planets travelled around the Sun. This had a fundamental effect on human thinking. At the time most believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe and that all the other celestial bodies revolved around it. This put an end to the theological view that the Earth was the center of the Universe. Note that the version of the Periodic Table above ends at Element 110

A team of scientists led by Sigrund Hofmann first discovered the element in February 1996. Using a 100 meter long linear accelerator the team fired zinc ions on to a lead foil. The atomic nuclei of the two elements fused to produce the new element 112 which was only stable for a fraction of a second. After the existence of the element was confirmed by other independent experiments the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) invited the team to propose a name for the new element, which led the team to suggest copernicum with the chemical symbol,Cn.

In an article in the April 8,2010 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle science writer David Perlman reports that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working with Russian scientists on a new super heavy element, 117. Mr. Perlman reports that only six atoms of the element have been produced at an atom smasher in Russia. Like all the super heavy elements 117 decays by radioactivity, but that it decays more slowly than most super heavies and may exist in or near an island of stability of super heavies. In the theoretical middle of this island heavier elements might last for months or even years so that their properties and uses could be explored. The scientists have produced an isotope of 117 which has 177 neutrons as well as 117 protons. As with copernicum, the scientists will eventually be allowed to name the element, but for now they  call it ununseptium in a play on its element number. Mr. Perlman ends the article by concluding that to reach the island of stability the element will have to have 184 neutrons and that no technology yet exists to produce that element.

Perhaps in a new version of Breaking Bad produced twenty years from now the children of Jesse and Walt will be working with a miniature atom smasher and a miniature linear accelerator in the basement of an Albuquerque home and breaking bad by producing a molecule with atoms of heavy elements with yet unknown properties. That may be a small problem compared to finding an actor who has the adjoining letters Cn in his or her name so that they can be highlighted in green.

Tags: American Scientists, Periodic Table

AB 32 is the four year old California legislation that requires deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in the state. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and Valero Energy of Texas are sponsoring an initiative to place a measure on the November ballot which would suspend the plan until California unemployment falls to 5.5 % a little more than half the current level of slightly more than 12.5 %.

The principal legislative sponsor of the measure is Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue of Chico. He argues that the measure is one of many that are driving jobs out of California. Both Republican candidates for Governor have joined in the call. Meg Whitman has called for a one year suspension of the law, and Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner has indicated that he supports the initiative.

In October 2009 two academics from Sacramento State University (CSUS), Sanjay Varshney,dean of the College of Business Administration at CSUS , and Dennis Tootleian, a business professor at CSUS, produced a pair of studies on the effect of AB 32. One report calculated that regulations had cost the state’s economy 3.8 million jobs and $ 492 billion. In the other study they concluded that implementation of AB 32 would wipe out one million jobs and $ 183 million in economic output.

Stanford enegy efficiency expert Dr. James Sweeney released his review of the report and concluded  “that their estimates are highly biased, are based on poor logic and unsound economic analysis, and are likely to be too large by a factor of at least 10.” Frank Ackerman, an economist with the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University had equally scathing comments and has been quoted as saying “The losses they project would be serious economic impacts-if they were real. They are, however, entirely unreal: they should be viewed merely as daydreams of disaster.”

The two academicians prepared the study on the cost of regulation for the Legislature at a cost of $ 85,000. Democratic Assemblyman Kevin de Leon of Los Angeles requested the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s office to assess the two studies. Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor wrote the Assemblyman that the two studies had major problems associated with them. He termed the first study “essentially useless” and the second “unreliable.”

The March 20-26 issue of the Economist has a helpful review of the entire subject. The magazine notes that legislators in Washington have revived talks on legislation to control carbon emission and may reach a compromise. But the magazine notes environmentalists have no reason to cheer. Any legislation that passes will be a pale imitation of what advocates had hoped for.

Why? The magazine notes several reasons. The Copenhagen Conference came with great hopes and little in the way of results. The recession has diverted the attention of business people and the population at large. While they may want to save the planet,business people have a more pressing concern with their bottom lines and no desire to incur new costs and people are going to be wary of anything even alleged to have a negative effect on the creation of new jobs. The bitter debate, if that term can even be applied to the bitter exchange of views over health care reform, has made any bipartisan effort very difficult. The weather, two feet of snow on the ground at the Capitol, seems to give the lie to global warming. And Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s error in predicting glacial melting in the Himalayas and the emails of scientists from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia that I discussed in an earlier post have cast a shadow on climate science.

However, the magazine notes that most research still supports the idea that the planet is warming and that the warming is a result of human activity. The magazine’s main point and mine is that there is no certainty in science. The range of possible outcomes of global warming are numerous but the most drastic would have draconian implications for the planet and the people who live on it. If prudent measures can be adopted to avoid these outcomes, those measures should be pursued. The Whitman campaign in California so far has been a prime example of disingenuous. Her commercials end with a starlit sky over a beautiful desert scene implying that all will be well if she enters the Governor’s Mansion. There are two aspects of the problem. First, the politicians need to seriously discuss the issue in all of its complication and not just engage in sloganeering in the form of sixty second sound bytes. Second, the voters must put in the effort to understand the issues and to give them a reasoned consideration and not place all the weight of their judgment on the fact that we have had the first normal winter in awhile. The consequences of being wrong are just too dire.

The piece of doggrel in the title ends “box me up and send me home, ” and was a popular ditty among American soldiers in Vietnam. On March 14 HBO begins showing the ten part miniseries, Pacific, which is a retelling of World War II in the Pacific Theater. It follows by a couple of years on the heels of Band of Brothers, the Tom Hanks produced HBO miniseries on World War II in the European theater which also played on HBO.

The press indicates that the new series is in part a response to requests for Pacific theater veterans who wanted to make certain their story was told. Most surviving World War II veterans are now in their seventies and eighties. The Associated Press wrote in a 2008 article that of the 16 million who served in World War II about 2.5 million remained and that those veterans were dying at a rate of over 1000 a day. A museum historian indicated that at that rate the last World War II veteran would pass in 2020.

I served with the 43 rd Infantry Platoon Scout Dog attached to the First Brigade of the Fifth Infantry Division (Mechanized) in Quang Tri, I Corps, bordering the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in 1970 whose unit patch the Red Diamond appears above. An article on VA Watchdog dot org states that there were eight million service members in Vietnam era from 1964-1975. Since 2001, according to the article, the death rate of Vietnam veterans has doubled. The article states that the rate is approaching 300 a day, almost five times the daily casualty rate during 1968, the peak casualty year of the war. The average age of the Vietnam veteran is 62 as of 2010 although I am 67 and five years older.

Vietnam veterans will tell you that the war is never very far from their thoughts even though for most of us the major events are now forty years in the past. Strange things can bring the war back to life. The March 15, 2010 issue of People has an article entitled “Healing the Dogs Who Serve.” The article describes the new $ 15 million dollar Holland Military Working Dog Hospital at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, named after Lt. Colonel Daniel E. Holland, who died in Iraq in 2006. The primary aim of the facility is to put working military dogs back to work, but it also has a program that allows people to adopt the dogs that cannot be rehabilitated with priority given to the dogs handlers who have left the military.

The military subjected the three to four thousand dogs who served as sentry, tracker, and scout dogs to a much different fate. The majority of them were euthanized at the end of American involvement in the war or turned over to the South Vietnamese Army. My dog was a beautiful black and white German shepherd named Kentucky who had already served at least one tour in Vietnam by the time I arrived in country. For seven months Kentucky and I walked point on patrols or joined armored or staight leg units in ambushes . We also served with a Civic Action Program (CAP) unit that was stationed in a Vietnamese village. I can remember going out on a night ambush with about five Marines and a contingent of four of five villagers that we referred to as ruff-puffs rather than regional forces, their proper military name.

When I read the People story, I went to the website of the Vietnam Doghandlers Association (VDHA), the best source of information. I had supposed that the Army had turned Kentucky over to the South Vietnamese. But the VDHA has a link to the dog’s history. I found Kentucky’s name and the notation Red Tongue, 71, 6. Vietnam is hot and humid, and dogs sweat through their tongues. When Kentucky and I went to the field I carried a five pound bladder of water. We could stay in the field only for up to five days at a time. Otherwise the dog’s sense of smell and alertness deteriorated. The notation indicates that Kentucky died in 1971 at the age of 6 from heat stroke. The VDHA site has an incomplete list of men who served in the 43 rd IPSD. No one from the platoon died during the time I served, but the site lists 37 names including my own, and 15 are accompanied by the notation, KIA.

Many Vietnam soldiers later suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ( PTSD) from the strains of combat and the hostile reception many,if not most, encountered when they returned home because of the controversial nature of the war. I have often wondered how combat affected the dogs since they essentially were in Vietnam for the duration. A small box in the People article asks “Do Dogs Get PTSD?” The note quotes Walter F. Burghardt Jr., the military’s only board certified specialist as concluding that they do. In dogs the symptoms can range from failure to perform tasks ( like finding explosives ) to changes in relationship with handlers. When I was in the field with Kentucky, he would become very agitated and bark loudly when he heard artillery or shell fire. When I first came in country and started training him, I reached over to correct his seated position, a standard procedure in working with dogs. He began biting my arm, and I had to go for a tetanus shot. So looking back I conclude that at that time Kentucky exhibited signs of stress.

For the four footed and two footed veterans of the Nam, the entrance to the netherworld is not the River Styx but as the cadence call familiar to everyone in  the Infantry goes:

River of Saigon
Oh Mighty River
River of Saigon
One more river to cross.
One more river to cross

I subscribe to Wired Magazine, but am sometimes frustrated by the nature of its content which can drift off into the nonsensical. Just when I am ready to give up on the publication, it prints something that renews my interest.

The March 2010 issue has an article by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, “F_ll _n t_e Bl_nks”  about the mathematical concepts of sparsity and compressed sensing. I will not spoil the article but he begins the article by describing an MRI scan of a young child at Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. The pediatricians needed a high resolution scan of the child’s liver. If the doctors were to get the scan they needed, the child would have to remain perfectly still for two minutes. If the doctors gave the child enough anesthesia to stop his breathing for that period of time, they could place him in grave danger.

The solution lay in an algorithm for compressed sensing discovered by Emmanuel Candes, an applied mathematician, then at Caltech now at Stanford, in 2004. As Jordan Ellenberg explains Candes,center photo, was looking at a image called the Shepp-Logan Phantom, shown on the left, used by computer scientists to work on imaging algorithms. The image replicates the fuzzy one doctors might get if they had insufficient time to do an MRI. Candes applied an algorithm called l one minimization to the image by the press of a computer key. To his amazement the image appeared in perfect definition.

He consulted a colleague at UCLA, Terry Tao, and they developed an explanation of what might have happened. As a consequence of this research MRI machines can now produce images in seconds that used to take up to an hour to produce. The National Science Foundation awarded Candes the $ 500,000 Waterman Prize, its highest honor, for the work in 2006.

Ellenberg gives a commonsense explanation. Suppose one takes a digital image of an object that is composed of one million pixels. In compressed sensing or CS instead of measuring all one million of the pixels, one measure “only” 100.000 pixels leaving an infinite number of ways the remaining 900,000 pixels could be filled in. Candes and Tao turned to the mathematical notion of sparsity. They noted that a picture is made up of a few understandable elements of wiggly lines and blocks of color. In mathematical terms it is sparse in the way a random collection of dots on a page is not.

But Candes and Tao realized that the sparsest image is the one with the fewest number of building blocks and that they could use the l one minimization algorithm to find it quickly.The algorithm takes the blank space and starts trying to fill them in with with large blocks of color. Ellenberg notes that if the algorithm sees a cluster of green pixels it will fill the space between them with a large green rectangle. In areas of different colors it puts down smaller and smaller rectangles or other shapes to fill in the colors. At the end of the process the algorithm creates an image with the smallest possible combination of building blocks whose one million pixels have all been filled in with color. The Wired article, available on the magazine site on the Internet, has an interesting graphic showing the application of the algorithm to a grainy picture of President Obama.

The article notes that Candes and Tao have shown mathematically that the chance the image will be wrong is infinitesimally small. If it is off a bit, a mathematician can tweak the image on a laptop instead of shutting down the young patient’s lungs for an extra minute to keep his breathing still. Ellenberg notes that every interesting signal is sparse, he uses the example of a piano chord, if one can only discern the way to define it. Take what you have and then use l one minimization algorithim to fill in the blanks.

CS also addresses a growing problem, what do we do with all the information that is being accumulated? The February 24 th edition of the Economist has a 14 page supplement on “The Data Deluge.” In a sidebar entitled ” All Too Much, Monstrous Amounts of Data.” the magazine notes that the amount of information is growing at a annual compound rate of 60 %. It cites a study which notes that in 2010 1,200 exabytes of data will be generated. One exabyte is the number two to the power of sixty or ten billion copies of the one hundred and two page magazine. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN generates 40 terabytes of digital data per second. All the catalogued books in the Library of Congress contain fifteen terabytes. In other words, the information generated is more than can be stored or analyzed, so the scientists collect what they can and let the rest disappear. These numbers are beyond normal human comprehension.

Candes sees the use of CS to lighten this load. Compression and decompression algorithms will steadily improve. Perhaps in the future we will store only twenty per cent of the pixels from an audio visual image and then use the algorithms to produce the original should it be needed.

In a sense everything old is new again. In the current movie “The Last Station,” Helen Mirren plays Tolstoy’s ( played by Christopher Plummer) wife. She had worked with him for years on his novels and was able to anticipate his thought processes. In one scene she recounts how he gave her only two letters from a paragraph he was working on and exxpains how using those two letters she was able to construct the entire paragraph, a human sparsity algorithm at work.

Tags: Compressed Sensing