March 11
Warren G. Harding, John W. Dean (2004)

This is the new biography of Harding I mentioned a few weeks ago. It's part of the "American Presidents Series" edited by Arthur M Schlesinger Jr and published by Times Books. I borrowed the book from the library after seeing a panel on C-Span with Schlesinger and four of the authors, including Dean. Later I saw Dean on C-Span again, this time being interviewed alone. He mentioned that his first draft was far too long and he had to cut it back. Apparently the publisher insists on keeping the books short.

And short it is. I wouldn't call it a disappointment, since I still enjoyed the book -- it's very rare that a book is so bad that I actually regret reading it -- but there wasn't much there. I suppose I'm not the target audience for the series. To me, it seemed like little more than a long article from an encyclopedia.

The best thing about this book, for me, is the author's tracing of recent historiography about Harding, along with a useful bibliography. Dean argues that the reason Harding has had such an undeservedly bad reputation derives from the strange history of his presidential papers. Not only did these papers go unpublished for 40 years after his death, but throughout that period it was widely believed that they had been destroyed. Thinking that no evidence would ever surface to prove them wrong, writers with an ax to grind felt free to make up whatever stories they liked about Harding. This included not only some outlandish scandals and conspiracy theories (eg, Nan Britton, Gaston Means), but also mainstream studies by respected writers and historians of the time (William Allen White, Frederick Lewis Allen, Samuel Hopkins Adams) which form the basis of what we now see in textbooks and older encyclopedias.

Several years after his death, Harding's papers were discovered, but they remained privately owned and unpublished until 1964, when they were turned over to the Ohio Historical Society, which catalogued them and made them available to researchers. The papers clearly disproved many of the allegations against Harding, but by that time his reputation was already well established in the conventional wisdom. Dean is content to merely report this course of events. He doesn't actually present much evidence. This has already been done by more serious scholars, listed in the bibliography, and his role is only to draw attention to the fact with his shorter and higher-profile work. The main revisionist biography seems to be that by Randolph C Downes (1970), which is now on my list to read some day (probably not soon).

I was a little disappointed in the inconsistency in Dean's skepticism. His focus is less on finding out the truth than on rehabilitating Harding's reputation. Apocryphal tales which put Harding in a bad light he eagerly rebuts, but other fanciful stories which are flattering or merely amusing he cheerfully repeats. For instance, he tells the story of how, when Harding was still a long shot in the primary, a psychic told Mrs Harding that her husband would become president and would die in office. Perhaps this is true, I don't know, but it's the sort of thing I'd expect a real historian to scrutinize. Dean presents it as fact with no comment. In another story from the primary, Harding is on the phone with his campaign manager (later his attorney general) Harry Daugherty. He has done poorly so far, and he's considering dropping out of the race. Mrs Harding grabs the phone away from him and tells Daugherty that they'll never give up. For this one, amazingly, Dean cites as his source Samuel Hopkins Adams, one of the authors whom he discredits elsewhere.

Editing of this book isn't too bad, but like virtually everything published nowadays it isn't error-free. Perhaps it's only my wild imagination, but it felt to me like copy editing for this one was outsourced to India, where everything was carefully looked at but without the background knowledge required to know what makes sense.

The one typo I noticed is in the first paragraph of the main text (ie, after the preface and introduction), where Harding's father is described as a "Union solider". Perhaps "solider" means "more solid" and thus gets through a spell check. Perhaps the copy editor found it plausible that Harding Sr might have made a living "soliding" things for some union.

Subsequent errors are not typos, but bungled history. The Davis-Bacon act appears as "Davis-Beacon". The man who became Harding's secretary of the navy is described as "former three-term Michigan congressman Edward Denby, who signed up for the marines in World War I before he was eighteen, and completed his active duty as a major." I'm not sure which point is in error here, but it doesn't add up. America joined World War I in 1917, and Harding was elected in 1920. This leaves insufficient times for three terms as Congressman, for which he would have had to be at least 25 years old anyway. My guess is that Mr Denby served in an earlier war.

Nothing that Dean wrote is quoteworthy, but some of Harding's speeches are. I am an unabashed Harding fan, both for his policies and for his special brand of rhetoric that somehow manages to be lofty and blowzy at the same time.

For example, this tour-de-force of alliteration, from Harding's nomination of Taft at the 1912 Republican convention. To make sense of it you have to remember that this is the year when Theodore Roosevelt, dissatisfied with his successor Taft, tried to wrest the Republican nomination away from him. Failing to do so, he ran as a third-party candidate with the Progressive Party. The Republicans in attendance know that Harding is alluding to Teddy and his ego.

Well, tour-de-something.

By 1920, he had toned it down a bit, but he still likes the taste of those big chewy words. Here's the speech that introduced "normalcy":

I'm not sure what he means by equipoise, but all the others sound good to me. Here's an elaboration on "nationality". It means nationalism, but of the stay-at-home variety, not the Woodrow Wilson save-the-world nationalism which holds sway today.

Works for me.

10:01:32 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

This first exchange has been sitting in my emailbox for a couple weeks, but reviewing it I see it's no less relevant than it ever was, so here it is.

It starts with an email I sent to David Hood, one of my conservative friends from the old Benzene. I was reading his letter in one of the last issues of the zine, and it reminded me that I had missed him when I sent out the first email announcing the blog. The texts labeled "Me" with a date are my emails to David. The texts indented and in brackets after David's letters are my additional comments today.

Me (Feb. 21)

I didn't have your email address when I sent out the first notice, so maybe you haven't yet heard of Benzene's reincarnation as a blog. That was a few weeks ago. It's at http://radio.weblogs.com/0134204/index.html.

Anyway, I happen to be glancing through one of the last printed Benzenes (from June 93) and I see you wrote:

I'll be curious to know what you think of the current administration's tax break policies. Aside from the overall question of across-the-board taxes and stimulus packages, it sure looks to me like there are a lot of corporate welfare programs being repackaged as tax breaks for no better reason than that if it's a "spending program" it must be bad but if it's a "tax break" it must be good.

It's all well and good to say, "let people keep more of their own money", but if how much of your own money you get to keep depends on what industry you invest it in and what hoops you jump through, that's not really a free market.

Then again, I'm not even sure Republicans still believe in a free market anymore. I lament the death of neoliberalism in my Party, but I have to admit, you guys on the other side have it even worse.

Me (Feb. 22)

Good to hear from you. Let me know if I can print that. I want to have a wide variety of political viewpoints as I did in the old Benzene, but so far I only seem to have attracted liberals. If I have to be the token conservative, that's not much of a spectrum.

I think I'm probably significantly more left than I used to be, but it's largely because I have problems with the current administration which are not strictly ideological, and because the administration has such a strictly partisan method of governing that other Republicans are mostly quiet right now.

That makes me a solidly ABB ["anybody but Bush"] left-centrist now, though not strictly anti-Republican. Hypothetically, if the Bush administration were to somehow self-destruct and be replaced by some other Republican on the ticket, I might well vote for him (or her) against Kerry. Not that that's likely to happen, of course.

On the war, I'm effectively neutral, though arguably that's because I'm way-far-out-left. With the possible exception of Kucinich (whom I oppose for other reasons) I don't see any Democrat as being significantly better than Bush on foreign policy, not even Dean (whom I do like) who is not at all the dove that some think he is. Pat Buchanan, strangely enough, is not so far from me on foreign policy, though I have plenty of other problems with him as well. And unlike both Buchanan and Kucinich, I do like trade.

1:33:10 AM  [permalink]  comment []  

This is a bit off-topic from Benzene's usual fare, but I need to rant about this, and what's a blog for but to indulge such needs?

While browsing around on the Web, I encountered a blurb about pop singer Mariah Carey, which includes the ludicrous assertion, "Her vocal range spans eight octaves, reaching two higher than most sopranos." I've seen similar claims before, though they're usually more modest, claiming only five or six octaves.

Let's back up. Those of my readers who know something of music (probably most of you) already know it, but for the rest let's review some terms.

The octave is a basic unit of distance between pitches. As its name suggests, it spans the distance of eight notes. (I'm going to ignore chromatic tones; those of you who know better, please forgive the oversimplification.) An octave is the distance from the first note in a scale to the eighth one, and might also be called an "eighth". Other intervals are counted similarly: the distance from the first note to the third is a "third", the distance from the first note to the fifth is a "fifth", and so forth. A larger cardinal number indicates a larger interval, so that a fifth is larger than a third -- which is opposite of fractions with similar sounding names.

But notice that the eight notes of the octave are inclusive of the ones at both ends, so it's really more like seven. Counting days of the week starting with Wednesday, the eighth day in the list is another Wednesday, whereupon the pattern repeats. Similarly, counting notes of the scale starting with C, the eighth note on the list is another C, whereupon the pattern repeats. This makes for some funny math: for example, a third added to a fourth equals a sixth, not a seventh, because the third note of the first interval is the first note of the second interval.

The relationship between intervals of pitch and frequency of the sound wave is logarithmic. That is, while note on the piano or lines on the musical staff are added, frequencies are multiplied. Counting single scale tones, the base of this logarithm is either 1.06 or 1.12 (there's those chromatics again). Counting octaves, the base is 2. That is, adding one octave is the equivalent of doubling the frequency. That is why notes an octave apart sound like the "same" note, only higher. The exact doubling of the frequency makes them resonate similarly.

I've digressed too far. All I really needed to get across is that a fifth is bigger than a third, and that an "octave plus a fifth" is roughly equal to 1.6 octaves, not 1.2 octaves.

Here's the claim again: "Her vocal range spans eight octaves, reaching two higher than most sopranos." (If you must know, I found this claim on a surprisingly well-organized website that catalogs when various celebrity bosoms have fallen out of their blouses -- most of them less dramatically than Janet Jackson's. I won't elaborate on why I happened to be there....)

Let's set the record straight. The complete range of a piano is seven octaves plus a third. This website, then, is claiming that Mariah Carey's vocal range is larger than that of a piano. Or to put it another way, that her vocal range is larger than that of an entire symphony orchestra, from the highest note of a piccolo to the lowest note on a contrabassoon (ie, the one that sounds like a fart in Beethoven's ninth symphony). If the pipe organ is excluded, the range of the symphony is actually slightly less than that of a piano. At the top end it's the same; at the bottom, a string bass with an extension goes a bit below the contrabassoon, but it's still a third short of a piano[*]. When a piano is added to a symphony, as often as not it's for the bass notes.

So what is Mariah's range then? Her top notes, which she sings in that strange squeaky style, are generally around f''' to a'''. That's the traditional nomenclature, in which the lower-case, triple-accented letters indicate the octave above soprano high C. In contemporary nomenclature, where you simply count up from the bottom of the piano, that's F6 to A7. The highest standard note in opera is F6, also known as the "Queen of the Night" F, for the character in Mozart's Magic Flute who sings the note several times. The highest note I've heard on Mariah's recordings is A7, but I've been told that there's another song in which she sings a B7. I believe that, since she doesn't seem to be at the end of her range on the A, and if she's like most singers, she can squeak out a few more beyond that which she doesn't choose to display publicly.

Like most female pop singers, Mariah sings primarily in the low range, and her lowest note in her songs is near the middle of the octave below middle C. I know of a G3 that she sings, but perhaps there's an F3 or even an E3. That means that her "usable" range (ie, the notes she'll perform in public) is about three and a half octaves. From that we can estimate that her actual squeak-and-growl range is a bit over four octaves. That's very impressive, for a singer in any genre, but it's not even close to the eight octaves being claimed here.

Another thing I should point out is that Mariah Carey, more than any singer I know, sings in two distinct registers. Talk of her "vocal range" should really be about her "vocal ranges", since she has two of them. In her lower range, she sings with a husky belting sort of sound, typical of pop singers from the R&B tradition. In her upper range she has a very light heady voice ("whistle-tone", it's sometimes called in opera) which spans only about a fifth. Between the two ranges is a large gap of nearly an octave -- roughly E5 to D6, corresponding to the "money notes" of an opera soprano -- where I've never heard her sing at all.

Typical range for a modestly trained singer is about two octaves. One can have a very fine career in opera without ever venturing beyond two octaves. The roles which ask for more than that are a minority, albeit a minority that includes some of the more renowned roles. A typical professional opera singer has a usable range of about two and a half octaves, and one who specializes in roles calling for a large range (nearly all of them female) will have a usable range of about three octaves. Typically, an opera singer's range extends about a third beyond the "usable" in either direction. These additional notes are the unreliable ones that are sometimes there and sometimes not, or which are physically on pitch but sound unpleasant (at the top) or barely audible (on the bottom). Opera singers, when they claim a range at all, invariably claim less than they can actually accomplish, because the culture is such that it's better to claim less and sound excellent at one's supposed extremes.

The culture in pop music seems to be the opposite. I see a lot of "how-many-octaves" boasting among pop singers -- more precisely, by their agents and their fans -- which one almost never sees in the opera world. It's as if singers expect to be judged based on how many octaves they command, which is ridiculous. Suppose that some singer has a freakish voice that really can tweet like a piccolo or fart like a bassoon. So what? It's not like anyone is ever going to hear those notes. Mariah Carey's songs display the widest range by far in any pop song, at about three and a half. Any ability to "sing" beyond that range is irrelevant, since it will never be used. 99% of pop singers will never even use anything beyond two octaves.

The second claim is that Mariah's vocal range reaches two octaves higher than most sopranos. Does it? Well, that depends on what you mean by "most sopranos", but basically no. If "most sopranos" means your average chorus soprano, Mariah sings a little more than one octave above them. If it means professional opera sopranos, she sings about a fifth above them. If it means the subset of opera sopranos who specialize in the high stuff, she's about a step or two above most of them.

Who Mariah does sing two octaves above is a moderately high male pop singer or an opera tenor with a weak top -- eg, Elton John, Billy Joel, Sting; Placido Domingo, me. Compared to a crazy high pop singer or an opera tenor with a good top -- eg, Michael Jackson, Freddie Mercury, Paul McCartney; Luciano Pavarotti -- she's about an octave plus a fifth higher. (Forgive me for being stuck in the 1980s. I don't know who the contemporary equivalents are.)

For future reference, here's a simple summary of vocal range sizes:

• 2 octaves = normal
• 3 octaves = impressive
• 4 octaves = freakish
• 5 octaves = bullshit

Anything beyond that is just more bullshit, increasing exponentially with each additional alleged octave.

[*] Update: In the original post this said "sixth" instead of "third". A reader pointed out my error. Oops.

12:30:08 AM  [permalink]  comment []