From The Book of This Day in History: Big Book of 365 Days of Events & Milestones

Dr. Jonas Salk and a research team at the University of Pittsburg developed the vaccine. Salk refused to profit from the vaccine and his efforts ensured that it was widely distributed. As a result, polio was virtually eradicated worldwide.

I have wanted to delve into Polio as a topic for quite some time. Mark Groubert of America’s Untold Stories has an interesting take on the Saban / Salk feud. It was around this time that I also learned about the book The Moth in the Iron Lung, compliments of the Dark Horse podcast.

At the time, Brett Weinstein seemed to really buy Forrest Maready’s story about the origins of polio. While Maready’s story is compelling and may contain a lot of truth, I have wanted to read his book along with Jeffrey Kluger’s Splendid Solution and David Oshinsky’s Polio: An American Story and report on the findings of all three books. That may be a post on each book and then a concessionary post; it could be one post or it could be a synthesis post. Either way, if you’d like to support that work. please consider funding the work.

This is an incredible story from the early days of World War II where each beat is more breathtaking than the last. It concerns a U-boat1 doing its chivalric duty and having that chivalry repaid to it. The U-boat makes the cover of a major American magazine because of the heroism and bravery of its crew.

The Tower of London features in this story.

Lord Mountbatten and Ian Fleming–the creator of James Bond–have roles in our tale.

But first, we have to start with the dry2 topic of prize law and understand how warfare changed between what we now know as the World Wars.

Prize Law and the Submarine Problem

For centuries, naval warfare operated under a surprisingly civilized set of rules known as prize law (or the “cruiser rules”).

The name “prize law” came from the fact that a captured enemy ship and its cargo were called a prize — a valuable reward that was legally adjudicated in a prize court. The system served two important purposes.

1. It gave naval crews a strong financial incentive to fight
   
   The proceeds from a successful prize were shared among officers, men and the nation they sailed for. This was done only after a captured ship was towed to a friendly or neutral port and a court of law had determined that proper procedure aka rules of engagement had been followed.

2. discouraging outright piracy
   
   Because claiming a ship and its contents as a prize of battle was highly regulated, piracy was seen as an affront to the Navy and a sailor’s duty. Ergo, piracy was harshly punished.

If a warship stopped a merchant vessel, it was required to follow a strict procedure:

• Fire a warning shot across the bow.

• Send a boarding party to “visit and search” the ship, regardless of its nationality.

• If the ship was carrying contraband for the enemy, it could be captured or sunk — but only after the crew and passengers were taken aboard the warship or placed in well-provisioned lifeboats with clear directions to the nearest land.

As Clay Blair3 summarized it in the prologue to Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters 1939-1942:

If the interceptor found it necessary to sink the merchant vessel for whatever reason, it was required to take aboard the crewmen and passengers and land them ashore or to place them (and the ship’s papers) in sound lifeboats, well supplied with provisions, sails, and navigational equipment, and give them specific directions and courses to the nearest land…

This was the chivalric4 duty expected of a naval officer. It was cumbersome, but it had worked for hundreds of years when warships were surface vessels that could safely board prizes.

Then came the submarine.

A submarine simply could not obey these rules without becoming easy prey: surfacing to fire a warning shot or send over a boarding party made it extremely vulnerable to ramming, gunfire, or being reported by radio.

Additionally, the quarters on a submarine were cramped with its regular crew. There was scant room to host another vessel’s entire crew. A submarine’s crew didn’t lend itself to forming a prize party to tow captured vessels into a neutral or friendly port. And, to state the obvious, life boats and submarines are antithetical concepts.

The old “cruiser rules” assumed you could afford to be gentlemanly. The submarine made that assumption suicidal.

The Diamantis Incident: Chivalry at Sea

Just one month after the war began, U-35 under the command of Kapitänleutnant Werner Lott ran straight into the kind of moral and legal dilemma that prize law was designed to handle.

According to Wikipedia:

About 13:15 on 3 October 40 miles west of the Scilly Islands5, U-35 stopped the 4,990 GRT Greek freighter Diamantis6, which was taking 7,700 tons of manganese ore from Pepel, Sierra Leone, to Barrow-in-Furness. Like Suzon, she was a neutral, but carrying a strategic cargo to Britain and therefore a "legitimate target". The crew, misunderstanding the U-boat's instructions, abandoned ship prematurely. After two G7a torpedoes exploded prematurely, the ship was sunk by a G7e torpedo.

Kapitänleutnant Lott:

In the rough weather I would not have been able to examine the ship's papers, so I gave a signal to follow me. I wanted to go to the Irish coast where I knew there would not be such rough weather. They did not follow me so I fired a shot from my gun at the bow of the boat. This had the result that the crew panicked and jumped into the small boats. One could foresee that with the rough seas that they would overturn.

Panagos Pateras, master of the Diamantis (via u-35.com):

When we were about 40 miles off Land’s End on Tuesday the U-boat came to the surface about 1.30 p.m. The commander hailed us and we stopped. He then told us that he was going to sink the Diamantis. He did not ask for our papers.

He ordered us to abandon ship, but when he saw that the sea was so rough that our small boats could not possibly live in it he took us aboard the submarine. Four of us were taken across at a time, this necessitating seven trips as there were 28 of us. We were not allowed to take our belongings. When we got aboard the submarine three or four torpedoes were fired at our vessel and she sank in about 20 minutes.
Many of us were wet to the skin and the submarine’s crew dried our clothes and gave us hot food and cigarettes.

Most of the members of my crew were able to sleep a little although all the time we were wishing that we were out of the submarine. The captain of the submarine spoke English and I was able to talk to him for short periods when he was off duty.
When we had been on board for about 34 hours we came to the surface off the Irish coast [NB: Dingle, in County Kerry, Ireland] at about 5:30 yesterday evening. A collapsible boat was lowered and again seven trips were made to the shore. The submarine remained about 50 yards off the shore, which appeared to be deserted. Immediately the submarine had taken the boat aboard she submerged and that was the last we saw of her.

The crew waved good-bye to us. We were taken charge of by local policemen and the local people looked after us very well.

Why Ireland?

In the Second World War, Ireland remained officially neutral, largely because of its long and bitter history of conflict with Britain.

For Commander Lott, the nearest neutral territory offered the safest place to land the survivors without risking his boat or violating Irish neutrality. The Germans never set foot on shore — the Greeks were ferried in small groups by collapsible boat while locals watched from the beach.

The events were so extraordinary that they made the cover of the American publication, Life magazine:

A Meeting in the North Sea

Just a few weeks after appearing on the cover of Life magazine as an example of old-world naval gallantry, U-35 and Commander Lott had a similar encounter.

On November 29, 1939, in the cold gray waters of the North Sea, roughly 100 miles east of the Shetland Islands, the hunter became the hunted. British destroyers of the 17th Flotilla commanded by Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten located U-35.

What followed was a tense pursuit.

Ma.Ob.Gfr Kurt Grosser said in a documentary7,

The battle started at 9 o’clock in the morning. The first depth charges exploded. We tried to avoid them, but, of course, we did think it could be the end.. We all thought ‘This is it.’

After several hours of depth-charge attacks, Commander Lott’s boat was badly damaged and flooding. With little choice left, he ordered the submarine surfaced and scuttled. As U-35 slipped beneath the waves for the final time, all 43 crew members took to the sea.

Ma.Ob.Gfr Kurt Grosser:

Our commander said “Resurface. Every man for himself.” We all went to the top of the deck. The submarine sank beneath us. We all shouted, “U-35! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!”

Then came the remarkable twist: the British did for Commander Lott’s men exactly what Commander Lott had done for the Greek sailors of the Diamantis just weeks earlier.

They rescued every single one of them.

Ma.Ob.Gfr Kurt Grosser:

The sailors were exceptional. They took off all our wet clothes. They gave us things from their lockers, trousers and pullovers to wear so we got warmed up again.

They were all seamen, great friends to us. They brought us tea and cigarettes and all sorts of things like that. “Everything ok chap? Do you want a drink? Cigarettes?”

To the Tower

The crew of U-35 were taken to the most famous prison in England, the Tower of London.

On the journey to the tower, Commander Lott wrote in HMS Kingston’s logbook

Lt. Commander Sommerville’s advice to Commander Lott as the Commander was transferred off of HMS Kingston:

The crew of U-35 arrived at the Tower of London on Commander Lott’s 32nd birthday, December 3rd, 1939.

Once in the Tower, the crew of U-35 complained about the food.

Ma.Ob.Gfr Kurt Grosser:

We had cabbage left, right and center.

The bacon was good. But by lunchtime there was nothing left, just baked potatoes and a bit of something. But food? You can’t really call it food.

Commander Lott was put in a basement cell with a rusty bed frame and fireplace that had no fire. Given his distaste for British food and finding his accommodations unbecoming for an officer, Commander Lott decided to go on a hunger strike until he could talk to a superior officer.

Kapitänleutnant Lott:

As I was slowly beginning to doubt the wisdom of my decision, there was suddenly a commotion in front of my cell and when the door opened no lesser a person appeared than Lord Louis Mountbatten - flotilla chief of the destroyers that sunk our submarine. I shall never forget the expression on your face and the four words to the sergeant: Where is the commandant9?

Dinner at Scott’s

Not long after Commander Lott was taken prisoner, he went on hunger strike in protest at the cold in his austere Tower of London cell. On 8 December, Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten came to visit Lott at the tower and later recalled: ‘I was taken round, in the dark, somewhat dramatically by a Guardsman carrying a candle lantern. I asked for the Captain and was told he was in solitary confinement in the old Dungeons (I believe) and I insisted on being conducted to his cell. There was no furniture except one decrepit old bedstead on which we both sat talking for some time! Mountbatten arranged for Lott’s complaint of the cold to be rather imaginatively resolved. By way of an apology, Lott and his second-in-command were taken, in civilian clothes and at Admiralty expense, for a ‘splendid meal’ at Scott’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar at 18-20 Coventry Street. Some accounts say that this was the idea of future James Bond author Ian Fleming, then working as the aide to the Director of the Naval Intelligence Division that operated out of Rooms 38 and 39 of the Admiralty in Whitehall. He thought that if the German officers got drunk enough, they would reveal Nazi secrets and, specifically, how they had managed to evade British mines in the Skagerrak - the strait running between the southeast coast of Norway, the south-west coast of Sweden, and the Jutland peninsula of Denmark.

After a very fine lunch, albeit with no military secrets spilled, the German naval officers were returned to their now suitably heated cells, but not before Scott’s Restaurant had filled with Special Branch police officers after the head waiter had called the police when he overheard the lunch party speaking in German. During and after the war Fleming had a regular spot at the restaurant, a right-hand corner table for two on the first floor. It was also to be the favourite of his creation James Bond and it is said that it was at Scott’s that Fleming first heard the request for a Martini that was ‘shaken not stirred’10.

It is hardly surprising this dinner never made the papers.

Just twelve days earlier, Parliament had passed the Official Secrets Act 1939, an update in a long line of updates to the Official Secrets Act. Publicizing a story about a senior Royal Navy officer dining with a captured German U-boat commander in central London would have been an act of singular effrontery, risking embarrassment to the Admiralty, alarming the British public, and official censure.

Besides, a real war was coming. What we now call the Phoney War would soon explode into a shooting war in the spring of 1940. Given the sensitive nature of the dinner, this story was lost to history immediately after it transpired except to those involved.

Post Tower and Postwar

The crew of U-35 were transferred to Northern England and then to Canada. Ma.Ob.Gfr Kurt Grosser made it back to Germany in 1949 along with another crew member of U-35, Me.Ob.Gfr. Willi Jacob. They remained friends.

After the war, Commander Lott and Lord Mountbatten corresponded until Mountbatten’s assassination in 1979.

Special Thanks

My sincere thanks to Historic Royal Palaces for their assistance (and patience) while I researched this story. Any errors are, of course, my own.

Value for Value

If you enjoyed this piece, consider supporting independent writing through Value for Value: by taking out a subscription or making a direct donation. More substantial donations receive public gratitude as documented here.

Recently, I had the opportunity to cross something off my bucket list, though it was hardly a joyful experience. That wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy the event (it was fulfilling in that crossing things off your bucket list way) or because it was anti-climatic. It had everything to do with the circumstances that led up to the experience1.

Today’s post is about going to Dealey Plaza.

Like most Americans who either lived through the event or learned about it in school or through Oliver Stone’s film JFK, I knew that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy aka JFK was assassinated in Dealey Plaza. And like most people who hear about how it happened, I immediately questioned how the work knew what it claimed to know and if that’s how it really went down.

I don’t recall when I first saw the film JFK. I think I may have been in my late teens or early 20s and probably saw it prior to 2004. (The film came out in 1991.)

I wondered how much of the film was Hollywood bullshit and how much was real.

As I later got interested in history, the JFK assassination was always on my list of events to research, but it didn’t make it to the top of my list until I came across Erich Hunley and Mark Groubert’s America’s Untold Stories2.

Groubert wrote a 5 part, 10 hour miniseries for Oliver Stone on Oswald, called, conveniently enough, Oswald. Stone & Co. never produced the miniseries, but after partnering with Eric Hunley and starting America’s Untold Stories (which started with Groubert going through the assassination character by character, Hunley leaned on AI–Specifically ElevenLabs–to voice an audio drama3.

Because of America’s Untold Stories, I started reading what I could about the assassination.

I had been to Dallas once before for a block party–twenty years ago. At the time, I didn’t put two and two together that Dallas was the city where Kennedy had been assassinated. It wouldn’t have mattered because I barely had the money to fly out and back, much less rent a car and drive to Dealey.

This time around, I still had no money; seems to be a recurring theme.

I was heading to Dallas for other reasons; my destination was roughly a mile from Dealey. There was no way I could pass up the opportunity to see Dealey being that close to it, so I set my GPS for Dealey.

I thought I knew Dealey Plaza pretty well. I wasn’t prepared for how little “there” was there despite having seen it on the screen many times and having thought about it for years.

The Dogleg Turn from Houston onto Elm

The first thing I noticed was that the turn from Houston onto Elm didn’t seem nearly as acute as I had seen it depicted on film or in documentaries. Perhaps it wasn’t as dramatic, in part, because I was in a modern, short car, not the long Presidential limousine. It turns out the geometry has not significantly changed since 1963.

The Schoolbook Depository/Sixth Floor Museum

I did not visit the museum for a few reasons:

1. I couldn’t afford the parking

2. I knew if I couldn’t afford the parking, I couldn’t afford the ticket to the museum

3. I don’t believe Oswald acted alone. In fact, I don’t believe that Oswald shot anyone that fateful day.

4. Groubert took Hunley to the Sixth Floor Museum and was explaining how he believed events played out. Groubert mentioned this event on America’s Untold Stories, stating that the museum visibly disagreed with his explanation of events. So I knew I wasn’t interested in giving the museum my money nor listening to their presentation.

Parking

If you do decide to visit Dealey, be prepared to pay the Sixth Floor Museum’s fees. Or you could park at the jail/courthouse a few blocks away and walk, which is what I did. Cost me $4.

And no, this is NOT the parking garage that Oswald was shot in. As I understand it, that garage is now part of a law school.

Walking

In 1963, the motorcade was traveling towards the triple underpass moving from east to west. They turned west onto Elm from their northern route on Houston.

Walking to Dealey from the parking garage, I was on the north side of Elm. Ergo, if the motorcade had been on its route, I would have been walking towards it and it would have been driving towards me.

There were two people sleeping rough on the sidewalk of the north side of the triple underpass. I chose to walk on the south side of Elm for my return because I had crossed Elm to look at the statue of Dealey on Commerce street.

Dealey Plaza Itself

There’s a plaque that has part of the speech Kennedy was going to give at the Trade Mart had he made it to that speaking engagement. I think there’s one small plaque that mentions the assassination. Other than that, nothing.

I recall Groubert telling the America’s Untold Stories audience that Dealey was much smaller than you think it is. According to Grok, the official distance from the so-called dog-leg corner of Houston and Elm to the triple underpass is 495 feet. You can walk that distance in two minutes or less even while sauntering. You either have to stop or take baby steps the whole way to not cover the distance. That stretch of road is small. Even being forewarned by Groubert, I was still shocked at just how small Dealey is.

Confusing Geography

I drove through the plaza more than once because I was unfamiliar with the area. The so-called Stemmons Freeway is actually I-35. If you’re in the right-hand lane, you wind up going I-35 East if you stay right, but there isn’t much room to avoid getting on the Interstate if you’re already on the right (read: North) side of Elm.

Two X’s?

If you look at the hero image of this post, it’s taken from behind the picket fence which is on top of the Grassy Knoll. All that means is that there was a slight hill on the north side of Elm and the picket fence was to the west of the grass. Behind the fence is a parking lot just like it was in 1963.

I draw your attention to the hero image of this post because if you look in the middle of the image, you’ll see an X in the middle of the middle lane. (NB: Lots of middles.)

That X marks the approximate spot where Kennedy was fatally shot.

I knew there was an X on Elm because of interacting with some of the Unstructured Locals community members. It’s also possible I came across that fact before I was aware of America’s Untold Stories and forget I knew there was an X marking the spot.

What I wasn’t prepared for was this:

There were two x’s on the road when I visited the site.

In the image immediately above, the x that is slightly obscured by the tree and is closer to the lane marker is allegedly where Kennedy was first shot.

As I stated earlier, there was no plaque that tells visitors what these x’s are.

In fact, the x’s aren’t official. They aren’t maintained by the city or any government organization. In fact, the road has been resurfaced since November 22, 1963, so the x’s have been removed and replaced. I recall reading somewhere months or years ago that the x’s get refreshed from time to time, but no one knows who; my money is on the Sixth Floor Museum.

According to Grok, the distance between the two x’s is 80-90 feet.

Dealey Over the Years

Dealey Plaza–the roads, the hills, the grass and the colonnades/peristyles are geographically unchanged from 1963. In fact, Dealey was remarkably preserved from November 22, 1963 even as late as 1990 when Oliver Stone shot part of JFK in the Plaza for nearly 3 weeks. There were some cosmetic adjustments made: some vegetation trimmed to more closely match sight lines in 1963, a replica Hertz sign had to be put “back” on top of the Book Depository. The production had to pay for traffic to be diverted during their shoot.

Elm is very much an active road today.

Perhaps there are more homeless people under the triple underpass than there were in November of 1963.

Final Thoughts

Standing there on Elm Street finally allowed me to more accurately understand the place itself–a stark contrast with how large it has loomed in my mind for years.

When I return to the case files, I’ll be able to picture the geography of the crime scene much more clearly.

I am calmly content with this result.

It’s humbling when people believe in you.

This morning, of recommended my Substack despite the fact I’ve had radio silence for the past few months.

Culpium has been cited by major news outlets and podcasts including 9to5 Mac. I became aware of Tim’s reporting here on Substack through my interests in Apple; please check out Tim’s recent post on Apple’s decision to manufacture more Mac Neos:

Culpium, by Tim Culpan

Apple Doubles MacBook Neo Production, Orders Fresh Batch of Chips

Good Evening from Taipei…

Read more

4 months ago · 12 likes · Tim Culpan

I sent Tim a private note thanking him for the recommendation.

I’ve been radio silent because I haven’t had stability in my life for eight months now.

Today is a crazy day and I don’t know how it will play out. There may be a block of time later tonight I can use to tell my story.

I use the Value for Value (V4V) model on this Substack. (Details here.)

However, so as not to pollute the feed, I’ll send out my story to subscribers via email.

That doesn’t mean you have to pay1; I’m asking you to exchange your email address here on Substack in exchange for an email that contains the story of how I got to where I’m at right now.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Today is the first business day in the month of February and also happens to be Groundhog Day; let’s pray that today’s message is an omen of good things to come and that, for the sake of the Lower 48, Punxsutawney Phil doesn’t see his shadow1.

Today we thank for supporting in the latter half of January. For her support, we give public thanks.

The Duchess marches to the beat of her own drum and makes no bones about it. She is an instrument of peace, showing me love in the midst of community that holds a lot of hatred for me. She has pardoned me and shown me grace when others have taken offense. When few others believed in me, she had faith and encouraged me when I had little motivation to soldier on.

And now, she has chosen to support me with her fiat fund coupons.

You too can stand with The Duchess of New Jersey either by taking out a paid subscription or via direct donation; see Donation and Support Levels for details.

Thank you to the Duchess for her support. Long live The Duchess!

Today I learned about Rosca de Reyes.

Yes, Rosca de Reyes takes place on January 6 and I’m typing these words on January 11.

According to this page this is where circular figurines that look like the pegs from the boardgame Life and represent the Baby Jesus are baked into bread to symbolize when Jesus was hidden from King Herod.

If you find one of these figurines in your slice of the bread you're then supposed to host a gathering or provide tamales and atole on February 2 aka Candlemas Day (Dia de la Candelaria).

President-elect Trump wants the United States to buy Greenland. In fact, Trump wanted the United States to buy Greenland during his first term as President of the United States. Trump still wants to buy Greenland.

There has been much speculation on why Trump wants Greenland. Some think it’s about minerals. Attorney Robert Barnes speculated that Trump wants to protect US Shipping lanes; ergo, wanting the United States to purchase Greenland, taking control of the Panama Canal and remarks about making Canada the 51^st State.

Trump is not the first to see Greenland’s value. Eighty years ago, a Danish diplomat made a move that changed its fate.

The film The Good Traitor tells the story of the Danish ambassador to America, Henrik Kauffmann, and his actions when the Nazis invaded his country.

The Good Traitor was my introduction to Kauffmann; there are scant English-language resources available on Kauffmann, namely, Defiant Diplomacy: Henrik Kauffmann, Denmark, and the United States in World War II and the Cold War, 1939-1958.

When the Nazis invaded Denmark on April 9^th, 1940, Kauffmann had a problem: the Danish government had cooperated with the Nazis; therefore, any instructions Copenhagen gave Kauffmann were really instructions coming from the Nazis. If Kauffmann didn’t obey the puppet government, he would be guilty of treason because a government cooperating with the Nazis was, in political reality, still a functioning, geopolitical government.

Kauffmann needed another option.

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Denmark Cooperates, Not Capitulates

So on April 10^th, 1940–the day after the Nazis invaded Denmark–Kauffmann “declare[d] that we couldn’t receive and act on orders from an occupied Danish government1”. Ever the diplomat, Kauffmann concocted a middle ground out of thin air: Kauffmann proclaimed himself as acting in the name of the Danish King, Christian X representing a free and independent Denmark.

To understand the significance of this proclamation, we have to understand both the position Kauffmann was in post Nazi invasion of Denmark and how Denmark conducted itself during the Second World War.

Denmark did not capitulate to the Nazis. Nor did they collaborate. Instead, Denmark cooperated under protest. In other words, Denmark did not resist the Nazis, but neither did they aid the Nazis. This is in contrast to Norway which fiercely fought the Nazis for two months only to be heavily oppressed and subdued by the Nazis when they could no longer resist.

In exchange for not actively resisting the Nazis, the Danish government was allowed to remain intact and run its affairs with Nazi oversight vs becoming a total puppet state. There was enough autonomy and agency given to the Danish government that later in the War, Denmark would refuse to execute ethnic cleansing orders without major repercussions.

Ambassador of a Free and Independent Denmark

After Denmark agreed to cooperate with the Nazis, Kauffmann was recalled to Denmark because he no longer represented what then existed of the Danish government. Kauffmann didn’t want to go back to Denmark: he wanted to stay in the United States, resist the Nazis and serve the ideological Denmark he was de facto representing prior to the Nazi invasion of his homeland.

“free and independent Denmark” was not a real country: it was a political fiction. But it was a useful fiction because in April of 1940, the United States was still officially a neutral country–the keyword being “officially”.

The attitude of Americans was slowly shifting in favor of war, though nonintervention was still the dominant public opinion; Lend-Lease, one of the first acts of American intervention in the growing European conflict, was one day shy of being a month old when Kauffmann made his proclamation.

Kauffmann desperately needed the United States to officially recognize him as the ambassador of a free and independent Denmark so he would have diplomatic cover.

The good news for Kauffmann was that the Americans saw no reason to expel Kauffmann from the United States, so he was in no immediate danger of being sent to occupied Denmark. The bad news was that the United States couldn’t officially recognize Kauffmann as ambassador of the free and independent Denmark because doing so risked the wrath of the Germans, wrath that would pull the United States into a war in which it did not wish to become a belligerent.

The Relevance of Greenland

Greenland was a colony whose ownership had been in dispute since the early nineteenth century. Norway and Denmark both laid claim to the island.

Greenland was originally settled, in part, by the Norwegians. Much later, Norway and Denmark had the same king. As time continued, the two nations wound up separately sovereign. Norway argued that the island should belong to them because Denmark never occupied the island. The dispute was finally settled in 1933 by the Permanent Court of International Justice. The Court ruled in Denmark’s favor making Greenland Denmark’s colony.

Greenland had its own government comprised of a Northern and Southern Governor, Eske Brun and Aksel Svane, respectively. Because Greenland was a colony, Brun and Svane acted more as managers, especially in diplomatic matters. In other words, Greenland was not sovereign and could not form legally binding agreements with other nations; Greenland was subordinate to Denmark in this regard. But Brun and Svane could express their observations of the Greenlandic population.

And this is where Kauffmann’s diplomatic genius shone: asserting that he alone represented a free and independent Denmark in the name of King Christian X, he unilaterally offered the United States the right to establish military bases in Greenland.

While both sides wanted the deal, there were questions of law and political timing, but ultimately, the deal was solidified a year after the German invasion of Denmark2.

The agreement ensured Germany could not establish bases or weather stations in Greenland and provided the United States with an immense North Atlantic buffer against a Europe engulfed in war for over a year. Most crucially, it turned the island into a strategic halfway point, dramatically shortening air and sea routes to the European theater without requiring departures from the North American mainland.

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Allowing Danish Ships to be Seized by the United States

One concurrent incident that helped Kauffmann’s cause was his diplomacy regarding Danish ships. One of the consequences of Germany controlling Denmark was that Danish merchant ships now became German merchant ships. Consequently, Kauffmann was instructed to protest U.S. seizure of these ships.

Protesting U.S. seizure of Danish-cum-German ships, of course, would have been counter-productive from Kauffmann’s point of view. Instead, he actively encouraged the ships’ captains to let the ships be seized. It took persuading because such seizures would have meant a financial loss3, but the alternative would be sailing under a swastika. Kauffmann thus ingratiated himself to the United States.

Paying for Everything

Back then, like now, everything costs something.

Kauffmann had some money of his own,but sustaining a diplomatic operation on behalf of a free Denmark required far more. With the real Danish government under Nazi occupation and funding cut off, Kauffmann needed a reliable way to pay salaries, cover operations, and support the handful of Danish diplomats abroad who followed his lead in rejecting Copenhagen’s orders.

It turns out that as a precautionary measure, in 1939 and early 1940, Denmark had sent its gold reserves to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in several shipments for safekeeping, depriving the Nazis of this gold.

The United States, by recognizing Kauffmann as the legitimate representative of Denmark acting in the name of King Christian X, allowed Kauffmann to sell Denmark’s gold bullion on the open market as needed. The funds were then used to support the diplomatic operations of the free and independent Denmark around the globe.

Greenland, Then and Now

Greenland’s strategic value hasn’t faded with time.

In 1941, it served as a vast North Atlantic buffer—shielding North America from European threats while providing a vital midway launchpad for Allied forces heading east. Greenland’s role remains largely unchanged today, especially if we discount ICBMs4.

Does Greenland need to become the 51st State, a U.S. territory or colony to serve this purpose?

No. The current defense arrangements already give the United States significant access and influence. However, full ownership would allow the United States to act more unilaterally.

Trump’s bold, often provocative calls to acquire Greenland echo the Nixonian “madman” playbook of projecting unpredictability to force better terms. By constantly claiming a desire to buy Greenland, it allows the Trump administration to make a concession that concedes…nothing.

Denmark and Greenland benefited the United States–and hence the world–once before. They have the opportunity to do so again. A strong, secure United States means peace and prosperity around the globe so long as America sticks to her principles of individual liberty and limited government.

Have you ever wondered why businesses in the United States are allowed to refuse cash despite the fact that every bill says

This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private

The answer lies in understanding the terms “legal tender” and “debt”.

What is Specie?

In order to aide our understanding of what legal tender is, we need to first understand the state of the world prior to legal tender coming into being.

Specie is money that is made from precious metal, usually gold or silver1.

Debts Must Be Pre-existing

The term “debt” in this context means a pre-existing monetary obligation—something you already owe. The key is “pre-existing.”

If I walk into your shop and want to buy something from you, that’s not yet a debt: it’s a proposed simultaneous exchange in the eyes of the law. No obligation existed before we agreed to the transaction, so you, as the shop’s owner can set terms upfront, including refusing cash (or large bills, or any payment method).

This is one of the many reasons why, when you go through a drive-thru, you pay before you get your food: in addition to being an anti-theft tactic, it allows the restaurant to control the method and details of how you pay them.

But if your shop provides goods or services first–e.g., as a restaurant you serve me a meal, or a gas station you let me pump before paying–a debt is created—then you generally must accept cash to settle that debt.

What About Loans Themselves or Financed Transactions?

If I were to buy a good or service from you–say a car–on credit or borrow money to be paid back over a period of time in a series of payments,2 you would be able to refuse a down payment in cash, but you couldn’t refuse my installment payments in cash because there is now a pre-existing debt.

How Did Legal Tender Become Part of American Law and Banking?

As some of you know from my post The First U.S. Income Tax and the Road to the Sixteenth Amendment, I recently read the book Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein. The book is presented as Salmon Chase’s struggles as Secretary of the Treasury as he attempts to figure out how to get money to come in to the Treasury. Amongst other things, money was needed to meet the obligations3 of the United States including solider’s pay, uniforms, tents and food.

Salmon Chase

Salmon P. Chase was an attorney both by training and profession.

Prior to serving in the Lincoln administration, Chase had also served as the governor of Ohio. Governor Chase’s term ended during the election year of 1860.

Governor Chase was one of the candidates for President of the United States during the 1860 Republican Convention. At the Convention, Chase earned 49 votes on the first ballot, putting him fourth on the list behind (from most to least votes) William H. Seward, Abraham Lincoln, and Simon Cameron.

Lincoln appointed Chase as Secretary of the Treasury in March of 1861 and the Senate confirmed him4.

Chase’s Plan to Fund the Government

Chase, a devout believer in “hard money” (gold and silver specie), initially resisted anything resembling paper inflation. His plan: fund the war through borrowing e.g. selling government bonds backed by gold promises.

In late 1861, major banks (somewhat favorably disposed toward the new administration) agreed to advance $150 million in specie loans, taken in tranches5. The first tranche was $50 million at what was then a steep (7.3%6) interest rate7.

Despite these loans, the government was running out of money in early 1862. Thus, the Legal Tender Act of 1862 was passed.

The Legal Tender Act

To understand what the Legal Tender Act of 1862 did, we must first understand how the financial world worked in the United States at that time. There was no federal currency. Most if not all banks were state-chartered. As such, state banks issued their own currency. This made trading across the country difficult because a bank in Minnesota may not accept the currency of a bank from Maine.

Greenbacks

The Legal Tender Act of 1862 created “greenbacks” which are physically similar to our “paper8” bills, though these notes were slightly bigger. These notes were declared Legal Tender.

The Act was not the demise of state bank currency, but rather the first domino to fall in a long chain which concluded with state banks no longer issuing their own currency9 in part because the greenbacks became a uniform, national currency.

Bonds

Additionally, the Act issued $500 million in bonds at 6% interest; these were the so-called 5-20s, so called because they were redeemable in five years, but matured in twenty, meaning the government could pay the bond off in five years to save itself paying interest for the other fifteen years of the bond. Otherwise, the bond plus its interest was fully due in twenty years.

Initially, the 5-20s were sold by banks.

But the bond market was weak. People didn’t trust the United States to win the war. Another reason for buyer’s reticence was wondering if the United States would be able to pay back the loans.

Therefore, Chase hired Jay Cooke in late 1862 to help sell bonds. Cooke successfully sold the 5-20s, though they didn’t cover the cost of the Federal Government.

In fact, the government would issue 7-30s in 1864, bonds that carried a 7.3% interest rate and, using similar logical to decode the name of the 5-20s, these bonds were redeemable in seven years but matured in thirty.

Cooke would one again be hired by Chase, this time to sell the 7-30s. But grumbling spread that Cook was profiting off not just his 0.5% sales commission, but by not immediately depositing funds into the Treasury and thus making additional money off of the interest. Despite a call for a Congressional investigation, Cooke was never investigated and he continued to sell bonds through the end of the war.

A Closer Look at Greenbacks as Legal Tender

Unlike the bonds Jay Cooke was selling so successfully, these greenbacks carried no interest and had no maturity date. The government was not promising to redeem them in gold on any specific day, nor was it obligated to pay the holder anything beyond the face value printed on the note.

From the Treasury’s point of view, this made greenbacks something extraordinary: an interest-free loan from the American people that the government never had to repay in full.Here’s why:

• When someone bought a 5-20 or 7-30 bond, they lent the government money and expected both regular interest payments and their principal back at redemption or maturity.

• When someone accepted or held a greenback, they were effectively lending the government that dollar indefinitely, receiving zero interest and no guaranteed date for repayment in gold. The note simply circulated from hand to hand as money.

To encourage circulation and indirectly support more borrowing, the government cleverly made greenbacks receivable for almost all public dues (taxes, land purchases, etc.) and allowed citizens to use them to buy government bonds. This created a virtuous loop: people earned greenbacks, paid taxes with them, or swapped them for interest-bearing bonds—keeping the notes in motion and giving the Treasury breathing room.Why Did People Accept—and Eventually Embrace—Greenbacks?Most Americans in 1862 were deeply suspicious of paper money not backed by gold or silver. Salmon Chase himself had called such “fiat” currency immoral and inflationary. Yet greenbacks quickly became indispensable for several practical reasons:

1. Legal tender status forced acceptance
   The law required creditors to accept greenbacks for pre-existing debts (taxes, contracts, wages, most private obligations). Refusal could mean forfeiting the debt entirely. This compelled businesses, workers, and merchants to use them.

2. Sheer necessity during the specie crisis
   After banks suspended gold payments in late 1861, hard coin virtually disappeared from circulation. Soldiers needed to be paid, suppliers needed payment, and everyday commerce had to continue. Greenbacks filled the vacuum—no realistic alternative existed.

3. They were convenient and uniform
   Pre-war America had thousands of different state bank notes of varying quality and trustworthiness. Greenbacks were identical nationwide, impossible to counterfeit easily (at first), and far more portable than heavy gold coins.

4. Patriotism and confidence in Union victory
   As the war progressed and Union arms prevailed, faith grew that the government would eventually redeem the notes in gold or maintain their value. Many saw holding greenbacks as a patriotic act—supporting the war effort without demanding immediate interest like bond buyers.

5. Inflation was gradual at first
   Prices rose (greenbacks traded at a discount to gold), but the inflation was not catastrophic during the war years. Workers and merchants adjusted, and the economy kept functioning.

Ultimately, the public didn’t just tolerate greenbacks—they came to rely on them. By war’s end, over $400 million were in circulation, and the idea of a national paper currency had taken root permanently.

The Greenback’s Legacy

Though the U.S. returned to the gold standard after the war (with greenbacks eventually redeemable in gold from 1879), the precedent of government-issued fiat money—not fully backed by precious metals—had been set. This opened a slow but steady path away from “hard money” standards.

Late-19th-century farmers, debtors, and Populists continued battling deflationary policies that favored creditors, demanding easier credit and an expanded money supply. The climax came in William Jennings Bryan’s electrifying “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention, where he railed against crucifying mankind “upon a cross of gold” and championed free silver coinage as a way to inflate the currency and relieve economic hardship.

While Bryan focused on bimetallism (silver alongside gold) rather than unbacked paper, his crusade echoed the earlier greenback movement’s call for “cheap money” over scarce gold.

These debates persisted into the 20th century leading to:

• the abandonment of the domestic gold standard (1933) by FDR

• the collapse of the Bretton Woods system10 (1971) when Nixon took the United States off the remaining international gold convertibility

thus leaving the modern dollar as pure fiat currency, backed solely by faith in the U.S. government. Therefore, the greenbacks of 1862 marked the beginning of a long march toward today’s unbacked paper (and digital) money.

This is why, today, our dollar bills inherit the same legal tender status: they settle debts reliably, but businesses can refuse them for new transactions—because greenbacks were born as a wartime necessity, not as a mandate to force cash on every seller.

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Canadian General Lawrence Moore Cosgrave had a problem: when he was serving in WW I, he was wounded and blinded in his left eye. Roughly twenty-five years later, this would cause a diplomatic problem that could have led to World War II never ending–or at least not ending aboard the USS Missouri.

So, what happened and why was General Cosgrave in the center of this diplomatic faux pa?

Preparing the Articles of Surrender

When it was signaled to the Allies (read: the Americans) that Japan was willing to surrender unconditionally, the physical documents were hastily created once the wording had ben worked out. There were to be two copies of the Instruments of Surrender: a copy for the Americans and a copy for the Japanese.

Interestingly, both copies were printed in English. Whether or not this was done to humiliate the Japanese by having to accept a document not in their own language remains unclear. What is clear was that the Americans didn’t want any ambiguities due to translation, so they wrote the Articles of Surrender in English so there would be no misunderstanding1.

Parchment was found for both copies in a monastery and the documents were prepared by General McArthur’s staff. The Americans put their copy in a leather folder with gold tooling and embossed seals2 whereas the Japanese copy was put into a canvas with irregular stitching and no seals or embellishments. Again, this was not to insult the Japanese, it was more due to a lack of resources in a war zone on short notice.

Both copies had the same eight paragraph text on the verso and signatures on the recto. The Japanese signatures were on the top of the recto and the Allied signatures were underneath. There was a line where each signatory was to sign with their title underneath the line.

Flow of the Ceremony

When it came time to sign the documents, the Japanese signatories, Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijirō Umezu, signed first. When it was each man’s turn to sign, they signed both the Allied and Japanese copies of the Articles of Surrender as did each of the Allied signatories.

The Allies signed in printed order from top to bottom with General Douglas MacArthur signing first. As with the Japanese signatories, both documents were signed by each signatory when it was their turn to sign. MacArthur was followed by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz for the United States, General Hsu Yung-chang for China, Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser for the United Kingdom, Lieutenant General Kuzma Derevyanko for the Soviet Union, General Sir Thomas Blamey for Australia, Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave for Canada, Général de Corps d’Armée Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque for France, Lieutenant Admiral Conrad Helfrich for the Netherlands and finally Air Vice-Marshal Leonard M. Isitt for New Zealand.

Cosgrave’s Error

When General Cosgrave signed the Japanese copy of the Articles of Surrender, he skipped his line and signed on the line below where he was supposed to sign. Hauteclocque, Helfrich and Isitt signed below Cosgrave’s signature. The error was pointed out to General Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur’s Chief of Staff.

See, this was a legal document. A very important legal document. If it wasn’t filled out correctly, it may not have the force of law behind it. The Japanese3 could have claimed that World War II, therefore, did not properly end. The Japanese could have fought on, though this likely would not have occurred given they were severely resource constrained.

In order to rectify the situation, Sutherland crossed out the printed titles and hand wrote them under the representatives’ signatures. The Japanese were still not happy with measure, so Sutherland initialed each of his changes. At this point, the Japanese accepted their copy of the document and World War II officially ended.

EDIT: I found a YouTube video that was published in time for the 80th anniversary of the surrender that has restored footage of the mis-signing. I’ve queued the video to the moment of correction, but it’s interesting to note that in the footage, the narrator tells us that General Cosgrave hesitated for a moment before he signed. (There’s footage of that as well earlier in the video.)

On November 19, 1794, the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America aka the Jay Treaty was signed.

What was the Jay Treaty and why was it needed? Let’s find out.

Background

After the British surrender at Yorktown which commenced on October 17, 1781, the American Revolution as an armed conflict ended. Legally, the war would continue for another two years until the Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783.

As schoolchildren used to be taught, Cornwallis surrendered, in part, because his army was trapped between the French and American troops on land and the French Navy just off the coast. In other words, the French were an ally of the United States during the American Revolution with the Marquis de Lafayette having trained American soldiers earlier in the war.

The reason it took so long to end the American Revolution legally was that France and Spain were still at war with England and those conflicts had to cease before the treaty could take effect. The United States Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris on January 14, 1784. Then, according to Wikipedia,

Copies were sent back to Europe for ratification by the other parties involved, the first reaching France in March 1784. British ratification occurred on April 9, 1784, and the ratified versions were exchanged in Paris on May 12, 1784.

So, now the war was finally legally over and the United States had its Independence…

…except…

…the British still occupied forts in parts of what was officially the United States.

The British Lien

And why hadn’t the British left the forts eleven years after the war ended? Because London treated those forts as a lien — their only leverage to force payment of the millions in pre-war private debts that American borrowers, especially Virginians and Carolinians, had stopped paying once the shooting started.

Article 4 of the Treaty of Paris explicitly required the United States to let British creditors sue for those old debts in American courts without “lawful impediment”:

It is agreed that Creditors on either Side shall meet with no lawful Impediment to the Recovery of the full Value in Sterling Money of all bona fide Debts heretofore contracted.

But many Americans were broke after having fought off the most powerful nation on earth even if they did have the French as an ally.

Pressed Into Service

Additionally, the British were capturing American ships that were trading with France because Britain and France were at war. And when those American ships were captured, their American crews were pressed into service in the British Navy.

West Indies Closed for Business

The British had closed trade between the United States and the West Indies.

The Enemy of My Enemy

And because the British couldn’t resist needling an old enemy, they used the forts they still occupied as based for arming and supplying Native Americans.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the Governor-General of Canada Lord Dorchester (Guy Carleton) and Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada John Graves Simcoe openly declared that Britain did not recognize the Treaty of Paris boundary and considered the Ohio River the true border between the U.S. and Indian country.

This lead to the Northwest Indian War aka “Little Turtle’s War“ which had its roots in the end of hostilities between Britain and the United States1. That war didn’t end until August 20, 1794.

Clearly, something had to be done.

Jay Treaty To the Rescue

As you can imagine, the Jay Treaty addressed most of these problems.

The British agreed to

• Vacate all the northwestern forts (Detroit, Niagara, Michilimackinac, etc.) by June 1, 1796 — ending 13 years of illegal–if somewhat justified–occupation.

• Open the Canadian border to free American-Indian-British trade across land and inland waterways (Article 3) — a huge economic win for American fur traders and settlers.

• Allow American ships into British East Indies (India) ports on equal terms (Article 13) — first real U.S. foothold in Asian trade.

• Grant most-favored-nation treatment in British European ports (Articles 14–15) — direct trade with Britain exploded after 1796.

• Settle the St. Croix River boundary and other disputed borders by arbitration (Articles 4–5) — prevented another war in Maine.

• Pay compensation for illegal ship seizures during the current European war (Article 7 commission).

The Americans agreed to:

• Pay British creditors for pre-war private debts that state laws had blocked (Article 6) — the federal Treasury effectively paid millions that individual Americans owed.

• Accept severely restricted West Indies trade (Article 12 — tiny 70-ton ships, no re-export of sugar/molasses/coffee/cotton). But this point of negotiation was so bad the Senate suspended the entire article.

• Do absolutely nothing about impressment — Britain kept seizing American sailors.

• Do absolutely nothing about neutral rights — Britain kept seizing ships trading with France.

• Give British subjects already living in the U.S. permanent land-owning rights and protection (Article 9).

Things Neither Side Got (or Liked)

Signing of the Treaty

The treaty got its short name–the Jay Treaty–from the surname of the American delegate who negotiated and signed the treaty. That man was none other than the sitting Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay.

Jay went to London to negotiate the treaty and signed, along with his British counterpart, Lord Grenville, on November 19, 1794.

Aftermath of the Treaty

Federal Government Pays Off Private Debts

Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists had previously argued for and succeeded in getting the federal government to assume the war debts of the individual states. To keep peace with Britain and get the British to relinquish control over the forts they were still occupying as “liens”, the Federalists now applied the same “national honor” logic to old private debts that state courts had blocked for years; the federal government assumed these private loans just like it did previously with the state’s loans.

Jeffersonians were angry that they were having to pay debts that they personally didn’t run up when they paid federal taxes. Additionally, they thought this was a betrayal of the United States’ former ally, France while simultaneously paying an old enemy.

France Feels Betrayed

France wasn’t happy either.

No, wait, that’s an understatement: France felt betrayed.

France had helped the United States fight the strongest nation on the planet and the thanks they got was their debts weren’t honored AND the enemy of their enemy became their enemy’s friend (or, at least, Britain was friendlier with the United States than they had been during the Revolutionary War.)

France Rejects the new Minister Plenipotentiary

James Monroe was the Minister Plenipotentiary2 to France in the period after the Jay Treaty. Monroe, Jefferson’s protege, was, like his mentor, VERY pro-French. He told the French Directory that despite the US Senate ratifying the Jay Treaty, this wasn’t the sentiment of most Americans and that when a Republican government took power, the Jay Treaty would be abolished.

President George Washington, a Federalist (and therefore an anti-Republican), recalled Monroe and sent Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in his place so there would be someone more in line with the Administration’s position representing the United States in France.

France refused to receive Pinckney in early December, 1796 when Pinckney presented his letters of introduction. In fact, Pinckney was never granted an official audience with Talleyrand or any member of the Directory. French police began shadowing him and his family and he was privately told he had thirty days to leave France or else.

Pinckney left France for French-controlled Amsterdam3 to await further instructions from Philadelphia. (Washington, D. C. was not yet the capital of the United States.) When he was in Amsterdam, French police caught up with Pinckney and told him he had 10 days to leave Europe. Pinckney promptly sailed for home.

But that wasn’t the end of Pinckney as a minister to France on behalf of the United States. In 1797, President John Adams sent Pinckney along with (later Supreme Court Chief Justice) John Marshall and Elbridge Gerry as a trio to once again reach a diplomatic solution.

XYZ Affair

Then the French blundered big time.

In October 1797, the three Americans meet French agents sent by Foreign Minister Talleyrand. Instead of negotiating, the French agents (later immortalized in American dispatches as “X, Y, and Z4”) demand:

• a $250,000 personal bribe for Talleyrand (about $6 million today), and

• a huge loan from the United States to France as the price of even starting talks.

“Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!” became the American battle cry. Congress tore up the 1778 treaties, built a real navy, and for two years the United States and France fought an undeclared naval war (The Quasi-War) across the Caribbean.

French Privateering

During the Jay Treaty era right through the Quasi-War, the French authorized privateers to seize hundreds of American ships.

Trade

On trade, the Jay Treaty gave Americans full most-favored-nation access to Britain’s home ports and a crack at the East India trade — genuine commercial victories. In the British West Indies, however, the deal was humiliating: American ships under 70 tons could visit, but they were banned from carrying away sugar, molasses, or any of the high-value staples that made the Caribbean trade worth having. To critics it felt less like ‘opening trade’ and more like being handed crumbs from Britain’s table.

Heading into the Nineteenth Century

The Jay Treaty was signed on November 19, 1794, and for the next century Britain and America would keep circling the same three questions the treaty had failed to answer:

• Who gets to trade where?

• Whose sailors can be seized?

• And when push comes to shove, whose side are we really on?

Britain left the forts in 1796 and never came back. France answered the treaty with insults, bribes, and two years of undeclared war.
Neither country got everything it wanted in 1794, but both got something far more valuable: time.

Time for America to grow from thirteen quarrelsome states into a continental power.
Time for old hatreds to cool, new crises to flare, and — eventually — for two nations that once burned each other’s capitals to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the world.

That story starts with the treaty you just read about.

Next Time

How the grievances John Jay couldn’t solve in 1794 finally exploded into the War of 1812 — and why even that war couldn’t kill the slow, strange warming that began the day Jay’s pen touched paper in London.

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As I told you at the beginning of the month, this Substack had risen to #56 in the History category.

This morning, I received a similar notification: we’re now #39 in History!

I want to thank all my readers so much for helping this Substack rise through the ranks in the History category.

Next stop? #1!

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I’ve seen countless heartstring-tugging Quora posts that, when you get the bottom of the post, you find out the post came from Facebook…like this one:

“I’m scared of him,” the 5-year-old whispered, refusing to take the witness stand.

The judge nodded, then did something no one in the courtroom had ever seen.

It was the hardest part of the trial. 5-year-old Anna was the only witness to the domestic violence that had put her mother in the hospital. Now, she was in a large, intimidating courtroom, and her father was staring at her from the defendant’s table.

She refused to move. She just hid behind the prosecutor, shaking. “I can’t,” she cried. “He’ll see me.”

The prosecutor was about to ask for a recess when the judge, a man known for his stern demeanor, called for a brief pause. He stepped down from his high bench, walked over to the little girl, and knelt.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” he asked, his voice suddenly soft.

“Anna,” she whispered.

“Well, Anna, I’m Judge Marcus. This is my courtroom, and in here, I’m the boss. And my number one rule is that no one gets to be scary in here. Not even him. I won’t let him.”

He pointed to the witness stand. “That chair looks big and lonely, doesn’t it?” She nodded. “How about,” he said, “you and I go sit up there together? You can sit on my lap. I’m a good shield.”

He held out his hand. She took it.

The judge sat in the witness stand, holding Anna securely in his arms, his black robe acting like a protective cape. Shielded by the one man in the room more powerful than her father, she finally found her small, brave voice and told the court what she saw.

Reminds me of the line from The Watchmen:

Funny story. Sounds unbelievable. Probably true.

I doubt whether this story is true. After all, it’s just too perfect: a little girl is intimidated, doesn’t want to testify because she’ll have to look at her (alleged) abusive father?

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Through the magic of internet, I had heard of Bikers Against Child Abuse before, likely on a similar Quora story. The gist of the story was some kid was or had been abused and the local group of bikers started guarding the house the kid lived in prior to the trial. The kid was made an honorary member of the biker “gang” and was given their own vest with patches. There was a heart-tugging line in the story as we learned who the individual bikers were and how they darted or hid from the kid so the kid wouldn’t see the hard bikers cry from sympathizing or pitying the kid.

Finally, court day comes. The bikers fill the first two rows in the courtroom so the kid doesn’t have to see the alleged abuser. The judge asks the kid if they are scared of the bikers and the kid says, “No, they’re my friends.”

Surprisingly, there is a truth contained in the story I shared with you at the beginning of this post.

Despite the unlikeness of all of the pieces of this story falling into one place, I thought that the judge wouldn’t be able to have the girl sit on his knee as she testified in open court because it prejudice the case against the defendant. And the line “This is my courtroom, and in here, I’m the boss. And my number one rule is that no one gets to be scary in here. Not even him. I won’t let him.” just seemed too perfect.

If you want the answer to medical questions, you go to med school or watch every episode of House, M. D. three times. (They’re equivalent.) Similarly, legal questions are subject to the three watches per episode rule only this time the show is Better Call Saul. Now, I’ve watched every episode of Better Call Saul at least three times, but alas, some how that curriculum didn’t cover the judge’s behavior in this story.

So I did the next best thing: I asked Grok1. Here’s what Grok had to say:

Yes, this would almost certainly be legal in the United States (and in most common-law jurisdictions), and no, the case would not be thrown out for judicial impartiality. Here’s why, with legal grounding:

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1. Judicial discretion to accommodate child witnesses is explicitly allowed

• Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) 611(a) gives judges broad authority to “exercise reasonable control over the mode... of examining witnesses” to protect them and ensure truthful testimony.

• FRE 611(a)(3) specifically allows measures to protect witnesses from harassment or undue embarrassment, which includes child victims of abuse.

• Many states have statutory protections for child witnesses (e.g., California Evidence Code § 765; Texas Family Code § 104.006), allowing:

  • Closed-circuit TV testimony

  • Support persons (including on the stand)

  • Judges modifying courtroom procedures to reduce trauma

Holding a child on the lap during testimony has been upheld when deemed necessary to elicit testimony (see Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836 (1990), which allowed remote testimony to protect child victims, even though it limited confrontation rights).

Trust but Verify: Point 1 of Grok’s response

Federal Rules of Evidence

I checked on FRE 611(a)(3). Cornell Law School’s website was the first hit in search results.

Cornell quotes the Federal Rules of Evidence and gives commentary. Cornell does not specifically mention children being comforted in court.

Maryland v. Craig

This was a real case.

According to the summary on Justia, the issue in the case was whether or not the defendant has lost their Sixth Amendment right to “face their accuser” by letting a child who was the alleged victim of sexual abuse testify from a room separate from the court room.

If the procedure is invoked, the child, prosecutor, and defense counsel withdraw to another room, where the child is examined and cross-examined; the judge, jury, and defendant remain in the courtroom, where the testimony is displayed. Although the child cannot see the defendant, the defendant remains in electronic communication with counsel, and objections may be made and ruled on as if the witness were in the courtroom.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court found

1. The Confrontation Clause does not guarantee criminal defendants an absolute right to a face-to-face meeting with the witnesses against them at trial.

2. Maryland’s interest in protecting child witnesses from the trauma of testifying in a child abuse case is sufficiently important to justify the use of its special procedure, provided that the State makes an adequate showing of necessity in an individual case.

3. The Court of Appeals erred to the extent that it may have rested its conclusion that the trial court did not make the requisite necessity finding on the lower court’s failure to observe the children’s behavior in the defendant’s presence and its failure to explore less restrictive alternatives to the one-way television2 procedure.

However, Maryland v. Craig does not deal with a child sitting on the judge’s lap, a bad implication on Grok’s part.

My aside about the Sixth Amendment

I’ve always heard that a defendant has the right to face their accusers in a court of law and I knew that the so-called Confrontation Clause came from the Sixth Amendment. I was less sure about the wording of the Sixth Amendment, so I looked it up and present it here for discussion:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence [sic3].

So, textually, the defendant does not have the right to face the accusers. Ergo, the Supreme Court’s ruling does not appear to violate the Sixth Amendment because the defendant still had the ability to hear the testimony against him, make procedural4 objections and to have the witness cross examined.

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2. Impartiality concerns are overridden by the child’s welfare

• Judges are not required to be cold or detached—they must be fair, not emotionless.

• The Code of Judicial Conduct (ABA Model Rule 2.2) requires impartiality, but Comment [3] clarifies that “a judge may properly intervene... to protect the rights of a party or witness.”

• Courts have ruled that comforting a frightened child does not show bias toward one party (see State v. Rowray, 66 Or. App. 14 (1983), where a judge’s protective actions toward a child witness were upheld).

Key precedent: In People v. Chenault (Mich. 2014), a judge allowed a therapy dog and support person for a child victim. The appellate court ruled:
“The trial court’s accommodations... did not convey partiality or deprive defendant of a fair trial.”

Trust but Verify: Point 2 of Grok’s Response

Grok gets Rule 2.2 right:

A judge shall uphold and apply the law,* and shall perform all duties of judicial office fairly and impartially.*

But gets the comment wrong:

[3]When applying and interpreting the law, a judge sometimes may make good-faith errors of fact or law. Errors of this kind do not violate this Rule.

In fact, here are all of the comments on rule 2.2, at least on the ABA’s website:

[1] To ensure impartiality and fairness to all parties, a judge must be objective and open-minded.

[2] Although each judge comes to the bench with a unique background and personal philosophy, a judge must interpret and apply the law without regard to whether the judge approves or disapproves of the law in question.

[3] When applying and interpreting the law, a judge sometimes may make good-faith errors of fact or law. Errors of this kind do not violate this Rule.

[4] It is not a violation of this Rule for a judge to make reasonable accommodations to ensure pro se litigants the opportunity to have their matters fairly heard.

uscourts.gov has some interesting things to say, especially in Cannons 2 (A Judge Should Avoid Impropriety and the Appearance of Impropriety in All Activities) and 3 (A Judge Should Perform the Duties of the Office Fairly, Impartially and Diligently) but says nothing about handling children.

State v. Rowray

State v. Rowray is, in fact, a real case that came out of Kansas. In that case, the defendant, James Rowray convicted of “four counts of indecent liberties with a child…and one count of aggravated sexual battery” appealed his case:

On appeal, the focus of Rowray’s argument is that this procedure unfairly enhanced the credibility of the children’s testimony and that, because they were the first to testify, the entire trial was infected with undue sympathy for the testimony of the child victims.

Slightly further down, Justia goes on to say

The State claims no prejudice has been shown. The trial court warned the State that: “If it appears that the mother is not capable of conducting herself with the appropriate decorum and that her nonverbal behavior is interfering with the presentation of the testimony of the child, she will be excused, and the child will testify without the benefit of the parental support.” The State claims the record shows no involvement by the mother, while Rowray contends her mere presence was inherently prejudicial.

The court held

The Confrontation Clause does not guarantee criminal defendants an absolute right to a face-to-face meeting with the witnesses against them at trial. The Clause’s central purpose, to ensure the reliability of the evidence against a defendant by subjecting it to rigorous testing in an adversary proceeding before the trier of fact, is served by the combined effects of the elements of confrontation: physical presence, oath, cross-examination, and observation of demeanor by the trier of fact. Although face-to-face confrontation forms the core of the Clause’s values, it is not an indispensable element of the confrontation right. If it were, the Clause would abrogate virtually every hearsay exception, a result long rejected as unintended and too extreme…
…Accordingly, the Clause must be interpreted in a manner sensitive to its purpose and to the necessities of trial and the adversary process.

So, accommodations can be made for the witness so long as the defense doesn’t lose their right to confront their accuser.

But we still don’t have an example of a child sitting on the judge’s lap as an emotional support.

People v. Chenault (Mich. 2014)

This case exists, but it turns out that Grok got the state wrong5. It’s actually People v. Chenault (Calif. 2014).

From the Justia summary:

Defendant-appellant Darrell Chenault appealed his convictions on 13 counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 years of age, and two counts of forcible lewd acts on a child under 14 years of age. On appeal, he argued: (1) the trial court abused its discretion by allowing a support dog to be present during the testimony of two child witnesses without individualized showings of necessity; and (2) the presence of the support dog was inherently prejudicial and violated his federal constitutional rights to a fair trial and to confront the witnesses against him. Because the Court of Appeal concluded the trial court did not abuse its discretion by allowing the support dog to be present during the testimony of the two child witnesses, it affirmed the judgment.

But once again, what’s missing? That’s right, the kid didn’t sit anyone’s lap, let alone the judge’s.

3. Confrontation Clause (6th Amendment) is satisfied

• The defendant still sees the witness, hears the testimony, and can cross-examine.

• The Supreme Court in Craig held that face-to-face confrontation can be limited when necessary to protect child victims from trauma, as long as reliability is assured (oath, cross-examination, observation by jury).

Trust but Verify: Point 3 of Grok’s Response

This is a restatement of material we have already covered. Nothing new here, ergo, no commentary from me.

Share ProfessorTom’s History and Trivium

4. Real-world examples

• Judges have:

  • Allowed children to testify while holding teddy bears or sitting with a victim advocate.

  • Moved the witness stand closer to the jury to avoid the defendant’s line of sight.

  • Taken breaks so children could sit with a parent or counselor.

Your scenario is actually milder than some approved accommodations.

Trust but Verify: Point 4 of Grok’s Response

Grok doesn’t provide any citations for its examples.

I would expect holding a stuffed animal, doll, action figure or toy to have happened at least once and likely many times even without citation.

I’d like to see a citation for moving the witness stand, but I’m willing to accept this as well.

Ditto the last bullet point.

However, I disagree that the supposed fiction is milder than the mentioned accommodations. Unmentioned accommodations, perhaps. But certainly nothing in that list of three accommodations.

Bottom line:

The judge’s actions would be seen as compassionate judicial discretion, not bias. Appellate courts routinely uphold such measures when:

• The child is traumatized

• The testimony is essential

• Less intrusive alternatives fail

The case would not be thrown out. In fact, reversing it could violate the child’s due process rights under victim-protection laws.

This is exactly the kind of humane flexibility the system should allow.

Trust but Verify: Grok’s Conclusion

I agree that a judge telling a young girl that has allegedly been abused that she doesn’t have to be scared is compassionate and sensible. A judge establishing authority in a courtroom and explaining it to such a fragile young girl is understandable, though perhaps slightly prejudicial against the defendant.

To say that someone doesn’t get to be scary in the court room is really pushing the limits in my mind. Why? Because it could sway the jury against the defendant; however, I expect the counter-argument to be that the jury may be able to contextualize that the judge was trying to make the girl more comfortable so the trial could continue.

But the judge letting the child sit on their lap? That definitely seems like a bridge too far. Even if doing so is somehow still impartial, it reeks of impropriety, e.g. it could be construed as being prejudicial, especially when there are other remedies available such as a remote testimony as in Craig.

Findings

Despite Grok trying to convince me that the fiction could indeed turn into fact, I’m was still not convinced. I still thought Grok was out over its skis and challenged Grok on its responses and how it did not address my question. Then Grok gave me what I should have been given in the first place: State v. Rulona.

There were, however, three errors committed by the court below, in the course of the trial, which require a reversal and a remand for a new trial.

First, the alleged victim, who was eight years old at the time of the trial, was allowed to give her testimony before the jury sitting on the lap of a sexual abuse counselor.

HRS § 621-28 provides as follows:

Accompaniment of children at judicial proceedings. A child less than fourteen years of age, involved in a judicial proceeding, including a grand jury proceeding, shall have the right to be accompanied by a parent, a victim/witness counselor, or other adult designated by the court. The accompanying person may be placed side by side with the child at the discretion of the presiding judge or court officer; provided that this position does not interfere with the proceedings of the court. The accompanying person shall not communicate in any manner with the child unless directed by the presiding judge or court officer.

Appellant urges us that permitting a child witness to have an accompanying person placed side by side with the child during testimony, as the statute expressly provides, is as far as the trial court could go, and that permitting the child to testify, seated on the lap of a counselor, overstepped the statutory permission, and was error.

In this case, however, we do reach the question of whether there might be circumstances in which a court could permit a child witness to testify sitting in the lap of an accompanying person. Even if we assume that the court had the discretion to do so, there is nothing in the minor witness’ testimony, either before the court made its preliminary ruling, or after she took the stand before the jury, which shows a compelling necessity for allowing such a prejudicial scenario. On the contrary, the record shows that the child apparently testified before the grand jury without needing to be seated on the lap of a sexual abuse counselor. Her testimony in sum was that she was frightened to be there as a witness, and would feel better if she sat on the sexual abuse counselor’s lap. Most witnesses appearing in trial for the first time, even adults, are frightened, but there was no indication that she could not testify without being seated in the counselor’s lap.

We note that the last sentence of HRS § 621-28 provides “[t]he accompanying person shall not communicate in any manner with the child unless directed by the presiding judge or court officer.” Communication is not always verbal, and the procedure followed here was fraught with opportunity for a violation of that sentence.

If the court below had discretion to permit the complaining witness to sit in the lap of a sexual abuse counselor, the exercise of that discretion in this case, on the record, was abused, and the court below erred in permitting the procedure.

(emphasis mine)

If the Hawaii Supreme Court said the lower court erred in allowing the child to sit on the lap of a sexual counselor, imagine what would happen if the robe-wearing authority figure were to let a child sit on their lap.

Prejudicial indeed.

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Per the Donation and Support Levels, I have someone to publicly thank.

Yearly Subscriptions

This week, stepped up in a big way and took out a yearly subscription.

Don and I have known each other for quite some time hanging out in the same tech chat for nearly a decade (or has it been longer?) Don gives back to the tech community by having an open door offering mentorship and friendship to those who are willing to ask for it. I finally made that ask this past week and Don came through in a big way, graciously giving me his time and his treasure.

Thank you, Don. Your support means more than the subscription. You gave meaning to the phrase “a friend in need is a friend indeed”.

I can’t believe it! #56 on Substack in History?

Must be a slow day on Substack.

This is all due to you, my readers. I wrote the content, but you read it, You shared it. And now, we’ve charted together.

Only 51 more places to go!

If you haven’t done so, now would be a great time to take out a subscription.

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And as a little treat, I’ve composed a little ditty, to the tune of Sammy Davis Jr.’s Second Best Secret Agent:

He’s not the first.
He’s not the worst.
He’s just the 56th best writer in the History category.

He’s every bit as good as whats-his-name
#55—practically the same!
And all those comment threads in his inbox
Prove you work a little harder when you’re fifty-sixth best!

Here’s the original1 in case you don’t know it:

This morning, while in a haze thanks to interrupted sleep, I was struggling to spell the rank of colonel correctly without resorting to its abbreviation. Sounding out the word didn’t help me spell the world correctly either.

I was pretty sure there wasn’t an “r” in colonel, despite the fact that I’d always heard the rank pronounced as if it were a computer operating system proper or the inside of a single piece of corn.

I suspected the French had something to do with the word because in my experience, the French never write or spell anything the way it is pronounced. I had my doubts because there wasn’t a conceivable way that any of the letter combinations in the word “colonel” could form an “r” sound.

So, being the curious critter I am, I asked Grok for an explanation. This is what Grok said:

The word “colonel” (the military rank) is pronounced /ˈkɜːrnəl/ (”kernel”) in English due to a historical mismatch between its evolving spelling and pronunciation, rooted in borrowings from Italian and French. Here’s a step-by-step explanation of how this quirk developed:

1. Italian Origins (15th Century)

• The term originated in Italian as colonnello, derived from colonna (”column”), referring to the commander of a column of soldiers.

• This made phonetic sense: colonnello was pronounced roughly “ko-lo-NEL-lo,” with no “r” sound.

2. French Adaptation and the Introduction of “R”

• As Italian military terms spread across Europe during the Renaissance, the French borrowed it but altered the spelling to coronel (or coronelle) to better fit their phonetics.

• This change likely stemmed from a linguistic process called dissimilation, where similar sounds (like the two “l”s in colonnello) are simplified or replaced—one “l” became an “r” to avoid repetition.

• The French pronunciation shifted to something like “ko-ro-NEL,” introducing the “r” sound.

3. English Borrowing and the Split (16th Century)

• English adopted the word around the mid-1500s, primarily from the French coronel, leading to an early English spelling of coronel and a pronunciation of “ker-nel” (similar to modern “kernel”).

• English accents further influenced this, emphasizing the “r” and reducing syllables to /ˈkɜːrnəl/.

• At the same time, some English speakers encountered the original Italian colonnello through scholarly translations and military texts, prompting a competing spelling: colonel (with “l”s instead of “r”).

4. Standardization: Spelling Wins, Pronunciation Stays

• By the late 16th to mid-17th century, colonel (the Italian-influenced spelling) became the standardized form in English dictionaries and print, influenced by a desire to align with etymological roots.

• However, the spoken form had already solidified as “kernel” from the earlier French version. Once pronunciation is established in a language, it often resists changes even if spelling evolves.

• This created the modern irony: a word spelled with “l”s but pronounced with an “r” sound that isn’t there.

This isn’t unique to “colonel”—English has many “irregular” pronunciations from multilingual borrowings (e.g., “Wednesday” or “island”). The “r” persists because language change prioritizes how words sound in everyday use over how they’re written. Today, virtually all English speakers (American, British, etc.) use the “kernel” pronunciation, making it the norm despite the spelling.

I knew the French had something to do with how to spell and pronounce this rank!

Colonel Trivia

Which way should the eagle face?

Wikipedia has this to say about how the rank of colonel is to be displayed on a soldier’s uniform. I found one of the statements in the description of the insignia to be particularly poignant and emphasized it for effect:

The insignia for a colonel is a silver eagle which is a stylized representation of the eagle dominating the Great Seal of the United States (which is the coat of arms of the United States). As on the Great Seal, the eagle has a U.S. shield superimposed on its chest and is holding an olive branch and bundle of arrows in its talons. However, in simplification of the Great Seal image, the insignia lacks the scroll in the eagle’s mouth and the rosette above its head. On the Great Seal, the olive branch is always clutched in the eagle’s right-side talons, while the bundle of arrows is always clutched in the left-side talons. The head of the eagle faces towards the olive branch, rather than the arrows, advocating peace rather than war. As a result, the head of the eagle always faces towards the viewer’s left. Some colonel eagles from the 1920s to the 1950s faced the arrows, though this is no longer done.

The line I emphasized is a quaint thought. But that doesn’t make it any less worthy a goal to pursue. It reminds me of a quotation I’ve heard attributed to Winston Churchill: “Always negotiate from a position of strength” as well as the adage “peace through strength”.

Oak Leaves

The rank of major and lieutenant colonel are both known as “oak leaves”. However, the rank of major is a gold oak leaf whereas the rank of lieutenant colonel is silver despite the fact that a lieutenant colonel outranks a major. Why is this?

I’ll let Grok explain once more:

Historical Origins of Silver Outranking Gold in U.S. Military InsigniaThe convention where silver insignia denotes higher ranks than gold in U.S. military officer insignia (shared across the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and to some extent the Navy and Coast Guard) is a quirk of 19th-century evolution, not a reflection of the metals’ real-world value—gold is far more precious. This “silver > gold” hierarchy emerged from practical design choices for visibility and consistency during the early standardization of uniforms, particularly in the U.S. Army, which influenced all branches. It’s counterintuitive today but stems from heraldic traditions and the need to contrast insignia against uniform elements. Below, I’ll break it down step by step.1. Early Uniforms and Branch-Specific Metals (Late 18th–Early 19th Century)

• U.S. military uniforms in the Revolutionary and early Federal periods used epaulettes (shoulder ornaments) and later shoulder straps to denote rank.

• To distinguish branches of service, metals were assigned based on tradition borrowed from European armies:

  • Infantry: Silver epaulettes (and later silver borders on shoulder straps).

  • Other branches (e.g., artillery, cavalry): Gold epaulettes (gold borders).

• Rank insignia (e.g., bars, leaves, eagles) were made of the opposite metal for contrast and visibility against the epaulette background. For example:

  • Infantry captains and first lieutenants wore gold bars on silver epaulettes.

  • Non-infantry officers wore silver bars on gold epaulettes.

• This created an early precedent: Silver elements appeared on higher-visibility or senior contexts in some cases, but no strict “silver > gold” rule yet.

2. Civil War Era and the Emergence of Leaves (1860s)

• During the Civil War, oak leaves were introduced for field-grade officers:

  • Majors: Gold oak leaves (with silver braid edging).

  • Lieutenant colonels: Silver oak leaves (with gold braid edging).

• Why gold for majors? Majors had previously been distinguished by simpler devices (e.g., no fringe on epaulettes), and gold was chosen as a new, contrasting element to avoid confusion with second lieutenants (who had no insignia). This was a practical fix rather than a value judgment.

• Colonels wore silver eagles (standardized in 1851), partly because generals already used silver stars (since 1780), creating a silver theme for senior ranks.

3. Post-Civil War Standardization (1872 Onward)

• In 1872, epaulettes were replaced by shoulder knots (simpler straps with no fringe), necessitating clearer insignia.

• All shoulder strap borders were unified to gold for consistency across branches (abolishing the infantry’s silver border).

• To maintain visibility and tradition:

  • Lieutenant colonels kept silver oak leaves (contrasting against gold borders).

  • Majors retained gold oak leaves.

• This locked in the pattern: Silver for the senior field grade (lieutenant colonel), gold for the junior (major).

• By World War I, when collar pins became standard, the system extended downward: Second lieutenants got gold bars to distinguish them from privates, while first lieutenants used silver bars.

4. Why Silver “Outranks” Gold: Precedent Over Preciousness

• The hierarchy isn’t about the metals’ monetary value (gold has always been more expensive). Instead, it’s a heraldic accident—silver became associated with senior ranks through incremental changes:

  • More colonels wore silver eagles than gold by 1851, so silver was chosen as the standard for eagles when unifying.

  • Silver was already used for generals’ stars and higher colonels, so it “cascaded down” to lieutenant colonels.

• Once established, the convention stuck due to military tradition: Changing it would require redesigning all insignia, which wasn’t justified.

• Fun fact: The “gold” insignia are often actually brass (a cheaper alloy), while “silver” is often sterling silver or plated—reinforcing that it’s about color symbolism, not material cost.

This system is unique to the U.S.; most other countries (e.g., UK, France) treat gold as senior.

1. If. an article doesn’t interest me or I don’t understand it or I can’t get into it, I’m allowed skip it.

2. While I intend to read the set in order, I may, at my discretion look up a specific topic and write about it. Usually this means that something happened in my life that I’m interested in learning more about.

3. I don’t want to be a broken record by constantly comparing World Book to Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia, but, unfortunately, the frequent comparisons can’t be helped.

4. I plan on doing a deep dive into the reliability of Wikipedia; this may turn into a special, paid report.

   1. I also want to write a piece on primary, secondary and tertiary sources and talk about their uses in academia.

What other rules do you think should apply?

A decade ago, I had a manager who was in his late 50s or early 60s. Let’s just say he was 60 years old in 2015. This would mean he was born in 1955. This manager grew up in rural Alabama or Tennessee.1

He told me that he remembered people had bought refrigerators and kept them on their porch for when they finally got hooked up to electricity.

This timeline seemed absurd to me.

Suppose he had memories from three years of age. If he was only sixty, he would be able to remember things from 1958. If he were a few years older–say, 63, then he could have memories from 1955.

I thought for sure that even in rural Alabama, people had electricity by the 1950s. Heck, I assumed rural Alabama got electricity during the 1930s or 40s as part of the New Deal. And if not the New Deal, certainly WW II.

Foy Information Desk

Recall in my last piece I mentioned Foy Information Desk. In fact, it was in the Oxford American article that I first learned about Foy Information Desk.

To briefly recap, Foy Information Desk2 is a phone service run by Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. It was started by James Foy, the Dean of Students, in 1953.

In the beginning, the service was available around the clock and was only for students to get information. Since them, the service has opened to the public at large; current hours are 7am to 11pm Central Time.

My Call with Foy Information Desk

In the call that I mentioned in The Mystery of the Courtroom Pitcher, I discovered that the young lady who answered my call was a native Alabamian. So after we dealt with when water first appeared on counsel tables, I then told her about my manager and said that the timeline didn’t make sense to me.

To my surprise, she said that most of rural Alabama didn’t get electrified until the 50s, this despite the fact that What’s My Line, I’ve Got a Secret and I Love Lucy all got their start in the early 1950s. Was Alabama really that backwards in the 1950s?

The First Sin in History

Some might point to depictions of Alabama in film and television as proof. Unfortunately, much of film and television is or was caricature: let’s not forget that Mississippi was the richest state per capita in the 1840s and 50s3 or that NASA got its start in Huntsville, AL.

The greatest sin in History is applying current circumstances, beliefs and mores to the past when they had different circumstances, beliefs and mores. Or one forgets what life used to be like because they’re so used to their current life.

As an example of the latter, imagine living in London the 1930s. Times were tough, sure, but could you have imagined that your house might have a bomb dropped on it in the early part of the next decade?

Huntsville, AL

Growing up in rural Alabama, I viewed my small town’s way of life as the norm.

Moving to Huntsville for college 23 years ago introduced me to a city I once saw as the “Little City That Tries Really Hard,”.4

Birmingham was, by far, the largest metro in the State.

I’ve never been to Mobile, though I have been to the capital (Montgomery) twice: once as a kid to pick up my brother from TeenPact and once a few years ago for the America’s Untold Stories meetup. Despite being a capital city, it’s remarkably small; I suspect that Mobile is much bigger.

You see, Huntsville has become the largest city in Alabama by population surpassing Birmingham.5 And allegedly, Huntsville was the city to ride out the COVID pandemic.6 It’s rapid growth is similar to Nashville’s, except Nashville has more land and more interstates. With 5G, gigabit internet7 and new construction, Huntsville is a hub of modernity.

Apocryphally, Huntsville allegedly had more PhD.s per capita than any other city in the United States. This turns out to not be the case, but the rumor is aided by the fact that NASA was born in Huntsville and there are at least seven (7) colleges or universities in the metro.8

Huntsville, therefore, does not fairly represent the majority of places in the State of Alabama. Ergo, reasoning about Alabama as a whole can be clouded by twenty year’s experience of living in Huntsville. Just because Huntsville is electrified–and may have been electrified early–doesn’t mean the entire State was electrified early.

My call with Foy Information Desk didn’t just validate my manager’s memory—it made me question my assumptions about Alabama’s past, a mistake I’d repeat when reading about the Great Depression.

Speaking of Refrigerators…

As some of you know, I recently finished reading ‘s, Bullfrogs, Bingo, and the Little House on the Prairie: How Innovators of the Great Depression Made the Best of the Worst of Times. In Chapter 1, Clearly Magic, Voivich makes a startling claim: the sales of refrigerators went UP during the Great Depression.

Let’s put it more simply. When you put yourself in that time [the Great Depression], in that place, with that mindset, would you feel good about going out to spend money? Of course not.

The first thing you’ll do—before anything else—is avoid waste. If you could avoid a trip to the grocery store by preserving food or mending torn clothing, that kept money in your pocket for a rainy day. That was especially important during a season when there seemed like no sunshine in sight. Psychologically, it felt better, too. It was empowering. You weren’t making do with less; you were simply being practical and smart.

Waste not, want not, right?

Saving food was a good start, and everyone was doing it.

---

Did you know that refrigerator sales went up during the Great Depression? It’s true. Sales of first-generation refrigerators exploded in the United States during the 1930s. At the beginning of the decade, only eight percent of kitchens had one. By 1939, 44 percent did. And they weren’t cheap. Advertisements of the time feature models (without a freezer, it should be noted) starting at $99.50 (and up). That’s just over $2,000 adjusted for inflation, not counting the “and up” part. The average inflation-adjusted prices ranged from $2,300 to $3,600.9

Concluding Remarks

It’s logical, in a 1930s mindset, that refrigerators were investments during the Great Depression, preserving food and saving money in tough times. And, once you stop looking at History through a modern mindset, what once seemed absurd–Alabamians not having electricity in the 1950s–it makes perfect sense why people would have unused refrigerators sitting on their porches. It only took a phone call, a book and forty years of living to arrive at those conclusions.

I called the Foy Information Desk for help with a question I’ve had for a while: when did water start appearing on counsel tables in court rooms?

This might seem like a “who cares” question at first, but if you think through it, there is a progression and there is a first time that water was put on counsel tables. The reason for pinning this down requires a walk through history.

The Bar That Doesn’t Stock Alcohol

I was under the impression that for a long while, courtrooms didn’t have wells until sometime in the 19th Century, most likely because of the miniseries John Adams1:

It turns out that the “bar” that one passes to be able to represent clients is an extended metaphor. Let’s take a look at a typical courtroom layout:

As we can see, there is a wall in front of the gallery/spectators section. This wall usually has swinging doors in the gap in the middle.

The area in front of the wall is called the well.

The wall itself is the bar; ergo, passing the bar means both receiving a sufficient grade on the bar exam and it means that you get to pass the bar–that is, you are now allowed into the well.

Why this discussion about the bar?

Presumably, there were bars in court rooms long before there were counsel tables. And once counsel tables became a staple in courtrooms, it was only natural that water would be provided to both counsels given the amount of talking they would need to do. In other words, my presumption is that water was provided to both sets of counsel so that their throats wouldn’t get parched while they were doing their jobs.

But that begs the question, when did a pitcher of water and cups for the water start appearing on counsel tables?

Working Backwards from Modernity

We presume the water in the pitcher will be chilled and not room temperature. There are many reasons for this, but the top reasons for this assumption is that cold water is refreshing and, below 41ºF, bacterial growth is stunted2. This means either water was fetched from a cold, running stream or otherwise refrigeration was involved.

Why a running stream?

If water stands still, it becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes which in turn gives malaria and dengue fever to humans3. Other things that grow in stagnate water:

• Denitrifying bacteria

• Leptospira

• Purple bacteria (both sulfur and non-sulfur)

• Brain-eating amoeba

along with:

• Dragonfly nymphs

• Fly maggots

• Mosquito larvae

• Nepidae (water scorpions)

ZIS IZ NÖT GÜT!4

Ice

Just to cover our bases, we don’t call frozen water stagnant, we call it “ice”. Ice, however, is not, by itself, potable. In other words, the ice has to go from solid to liquid.

Alternatively, ice could be added to the pitcher to cool the water, but that begs the question: where does one get the ice?

If the ice is natural, you’re in a cold climate or a cold season.

If you’re in a cold climate where ice is always abundantly available, then perhaps cool, potable water may always be available. If potable water is always available in a sufficiently cold region, perhaps it was here the water first appeared on counsel tables, assuming that the area was inhabited and civilized prior to warmer climates.

But if you’re just in a cold season, water, ice or both may be plentiful, but only during that season. Ergo, for some part of the year, you may not have natural, potable water.

If the water is cold enough (say, below 41ºF) but is still in liquid form, then bacterial and life form growth is stunted if not halted.

Honorable Mention: Well Water

We know that people have drank well water for millennia.

We know that there were public wells per the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak which was ended by Dr. John Snow5 suggested removing the handle of the water pump. Of course, people in the Middle East dug wells long before that. How do wells work?

The Danger Zone®™

Anyone who has worked in the food industry for any length of time should know that the so-called “Danger Zone” is when food is between 41ºF and 135ºF. According to what you’re taught in the restaurant business, below 41ºF and above 135ºF, (most) bacteria have a hard time surviving. That is why meat has to be cooked to at least 135ºF, though chicken and pork have higher temperature requirements.

Presumably, then, drinking water has to be below 41ºF, right?

Caves and the 61ºF Rule

It’s a commonly repeated “fact” that underground caves maintain a constant temperature and that temperature is 61ºF. It turns out that this oft-repeated fact isn’t quite as solid as stated; 61ºF is an “average” or midpoint for cave temperatures in the United States and possibly parts of Europe6.

As an example. it is claimed that Mammoth Cave has a constant temperature of 54ºF7.

The National Park Service’s website states the following about Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico where the highest recorded surface temperature was 110ºF8:

…the year-round temperature in the cavern is about 56ºF.

Ergo, the more general statement about caves is that they each have a fairly constant temperature despite surface temperatures. The two examples provided here are lower than the 61ºF common wisdom temperature. But they are above 41ºF.

So how have humans drank from wells for millennial and not routinely gotten sick or died from drinking well water?

Well, it turns out that the Danger Zone applies more to perishable food than it does to beverages. Additionally, the reason that well water isn’t (usually) lethal is that rock and soil act as natural filters. And there’s also less exposure to the kind of heat that bacteria thrive in. And to top it off, organic material tends to stay on the surface of the earth and thus doesn’t enter underground water; if bacteria can’t enter the water supply, it makes it quite difficult for the water supply to become contaminated.

Refrigeration and Plumbing

In the naturally occurring world, one either needs a (natural water) spring or an underground water source to get cool, refreshing, uncontaminated drinkable water. The alternative is to provide a source of mechanical refrigeration9 or internal plumbing connected to an uncontaminated water supply–possibly with cooling involved (think of a drinking water fountain which is sometimes called a water cooler). This means electricity must be supplied to the courthouse because the process of instant or quick chilling is difficult without the use of electricity.

Of course, the water needs to get into the courtroom in the first place, which means indoor plumbing10. The combination of indoor plumbing and electricity puts us squarely in the Twentieth Century.

Foy Hall

As I mentioned above, I called Foy Hall after learning about them in the Oxford American article. For this particular inquiry, I talked with a young lady who was a Senior in Computer Science.

She suggested that water could have started appearing on counsel tables as late as 1972 with the passage of the Clean Water Act. That seemed a bit too modern to me, but then again the 1970s were half a century ago.

I suggested we look at pictures from famous early trials in the 20th Century to see if we could find water on counsel tables during those trials. We made cursory searches of images from Emit Till’s murder trial, the Scopes Monkey Trial and The Scottsboro Boys and did not find images of pitchers of water on counsel tables in any of those trials11.

When recounting this story to an older friend, he suggested looking at the TV show Perry Mason12.

Conclusions

Multiple accounts of the history of alcohol state that water was not drank plain in Europe for most of European history. I suspect Europeans polluted many of their water sources with human waste, to say nothing of “industrial” waste even in pre-industrial eras. Consequently, the story goes that water was either boiled, distilled or more commonly, something fermented was drunk.

Certainly, vineyards were common in what is now known as the Middle East even in Biblical times, so wine was an early beverage for mankind. As told in Ken Makimsy Middleton’s Bamboozled: How Alcohol Makes Fools of Us All and in Mark Groubert’s/America’s Untold Stories The Dark History Behind the Mayflower's Journey to America, in 1500, Hieronymus Brunschwig publishes a book about distillation. From this book we get juniper berries being distilled by the Dutch; the name of their product was simplified to gin. Hops and barely were abundantly available in England and Germany, so they made beer. The Irish added yeast and made whiskey.

In the New World, the pilgrims et. al. did not know that most of the water was potable. Given their European experiences, the colonists made beer and corn liquor.

At some point, the colonists realized that most water in the New World was drinkable. I’m not sure what led to that revelation; perhaps it was out of thirst and desperation. On the other hand, wells had been a thing since the beginning of human history, so humans knew that some water was drinkable. Perhaps the colonists started by building wells and capturing flowing, clear water.

During the mid 19th century, germ theory came into prominence, though, like many scientific advances, it took time to be widely accepted. We’ve already mentioned that John Snow intervened in the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak.

Seven years earlier in 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis observed that if baby deliveries were performed by midwives, there was a much lower chance of infection than if doctors performed the deliveries. He concluded that the doctors were spreading disease because they were performing autopsies and coming into the delivery room without washing their hands. Doctors at the time thought that because they were learned men, they couldn’t possibly be spreading disease, ergo pushback. Ultimately, Semmelweis was vindicated.

While it would have taken some time for the news to reach the United States from Europe, less then a decade after Snow’s ending of the cholera epidemic, the United States learned its own lessons about disease during the American Civil War. And during the first half of the twentieth century, the world at large learned about germs and how to combat them.

It has been stated that sanitation is the number one cause in the rise of life expectancy. Sanitation as a term covers a multitude of sins, but in particular, we mean here indoor plumbing and the safe removal of human waste from the home. A little basic hygiene goes a long way, as this story from Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right illustrates:

Thinking of these essential requirements—simple, measurable, transmissible—I recalled one of my favorite public health studies. It was a joint public health program conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and HOPE, a charitable organization in Pakistan, to address the perilous rates of premature death among children in the slums of Karachi. The squatter settlements surrounding the megacity contained more than four million people living under some of the most crowded and squalid conditions in the world. Sewage ran in the streets. Chronic poverty and food shortages left 30 to 40 percent of the children malnourished. Virtually all drinking water sources were contaminated. One child in ten died before age five—usually from diarrhea or acute respiratory infections.

The roots of these problems were deep and multifactorial. Besides inadequate water and sewage systems, illiteracy played a part, hampering the spread of basic health knowledge. Corruption, political instability, and bureaucracy discouraged investment in local industry that might provide jobs and money for families to improve their conditions. Low global agriculture prices made rural farming life impossible, causing hundreds of thousands to flock to the cities in search of work, which only increased the crowding. Under these circumstances, it seemed unlikely that any meaningful improvement in the health of children could be made without a top-to-bottom reinvention of government and society.

But a young public health worker had an idea. Stephen Luby had grown up in Omaha, Nebraska, where his father chaired the obstetrics and gynecology faculty at Creighton University. He attended medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern. But for some reason he was always drawn to public health work. He took a CDC job investigating infectious outbreaks in South Carolina, but when a position came open in the CDC’s Pakistan office he jumped to take it. He arrived in Karachi with his schoolteacher wife and began publishing his first investigations of conditions there in the late nineties.

I had spoken to him once about how he thought through the difficulties. “If we had the kinds of water and sewage systems we’ve got in Omaha, we could solve these problems,” he said. “But you have to wait decades for major infrastructure projects.” So instead, he said, he looked for low-tech solutions. In this case, the solution he came up with was so humble it seemed laughable to his colleagues. It was soap.

Luby learned that Procter & Gamble, the consumer product conglomerate, was eager to prove the value of its new antibacterial Safeguard soap. So despite his colleagues’ skepticism, he persuaded the company to provide a grant for a proper study and to supply cases of Safeguard both with and without triclocarban, an antibacterial agent. Once a week, field-workers from HOPE fanned out through twenty-five randomly chosen neighborhoods in the Karachi slums distributing the soap, some with the antibacterial agent and some without. They encouraged people to use it in six situations: to wash their bodies once daily and to wash their hands every time they defecated, wiped an infant, or were about to eat, prepare food, or feed it to others. The field-workers then collected information on illness rates among children in the test neighborhoods, as well as in eleven control neighborhoods, where no soap was distributed.

Luby and his team reported their results in a landmark paper published in the Lancet in 2005. Families in the test neighborhoods received an average of 3.3 bars of soap per week for one year. During this period, the incidence of diarrhea among children in these neighborhoods fell 52 percent compared to that in the control group, no matter which soap was used. The incidence of pneumonia fell 48 percent. And the incidence of impetigo, a bacterial skin infection, fell 35 percent. These were stunning results. And they were achieved despite the illiteracy, the poverty, the crowding, and even the fact that, however much soap they used, people were still drinking and washing with contaminated water.

Ironically, Luby said, Procter & Gamble considered the study something of a disappointment. His research team had found no added benefit from having the antibacterial agent in the soap. Plain soap proved just as effective. Against seemingly insuperable odds, it was more than good enough. Plain soap was leverage.

The secret, he pointed out to me, was that the soap was more than soap. It was a behavior-change delivery vehicle. The researchers hadn’t just handed out Safeguard, after all. They also gave out instructions—on leaflets and in person—explaining the six situations in which people should use it. This was essential to the difference they made. When one looks closely at the details of the Karachi study, one finds a striking statistic about the households in both the test and the control neighborhoods: At the start of the study, the average number of bars of soap households used was not zero. It was two bars per week. In other words, they already had soap.

So what did the study really change? Well, two things,Luby told me. First, “We removed the economic restrain on purchasing soap. People say soap is cheap and most households have soap. But we wanted people to wash a lot. And people are quite poor. So we removed that as a barrier.” Second, and just as important, the project managed to make soap use more systematic.

Luby and his team had studied washing behavior in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other locations around South Asia, and they found that almost everyone washes their hands after defecation. “There are strong ideas about purity in South Asia,” he said. Even when the place to wash is far away, people go and clean their hands over 80 percent of the time, a rate that would put most denizens of airport bathrooms to shame. But the washing was not very effective, the researchers found. Often people did it too quickly. Or they cleaned just the “involved” hand. Or they used ash or mud rather than soap and water.

The soap experiment changed that. The field-workers gave specific instructions on hand-washing technique—on the need to wet both hands completely, to lather well, to rinse all the soap off, even if, out of necessity, as the published report noted, “hands were typically dried on participants’ clothing.” The instructions also got people used to washing at moments when they weren’t used to doing so. “Before preparing food or feeding a child is not a time when people think about washing,” Luby explained. The soap itself was also a factor. “It was really nice soap,” he pointed out. It smelled good and lathered better than the usual soap people bought. People liked washing with it. “Global multinational corporations are really focused on having a good consumer experience, which sometimes public health people are not.” Lastly, people liked receiving the soap. The public health field-workers were bringing them a gift rather than wagging a finger. And with the gift came a few basic ideas that would improve their lives and massively reduce disease.

–Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, pg 93-97

As the late period of the Industrial Revolution took hold in the United States, many creature comforts emerged both at work and in the home. Two of the major ingredients necessary to make water on counsel tables throughout the Lower 48 were electricity and indoor plumbing.

One would expect highly populated areas to benefit first from these innovations, particularly a place like New York City. It would take longer for rural areas of the United States to obtain these conveniences and raise the likelihood of water being a staple on counsel tables. And yes, the Clean Water Act of 1972 may well have served as a catalyst for water appearing on counsel tables, though I’d bet even money that water appeared on counsel tables long before then. Why? Because it’s difficult to be afraid of what one doesn’t know to be afraid of. In other words, if you don’t have reason to believe your local water supply is contaminated, you would drink the water from the local supply being none the wiser…until the potential danger was pointed out to you.

Final Words

So, when did water pitchers first grace counsel tables in courtrooms?

Despite attempting to chase down the answer to this question, I don’t have a definitive answer. I suspect that the first time could have happened during the Colonia Era, though I have my doubts. If I were a betting man, I’d place my money on the Lincoln Era perhaps while he was practicing law.

Certainly as the United States became more connected via rail and we move into the age of Edison and Tesla, one would expect to find electricity and indoor plumbing become staples of courtrooms because of engineering of all stripes13.

What we do know is that wars accelerate science. The acceleration of knowledge during the first half of the twentieth century was greatly propelled by two world wars and even, perhaps, by the American Civil War. Americans gave up the public consumption of liquor during Prohibition which could very well be when Americans started drinking water more freely. It would then follow that water would become to be more and more expected in courtrooms at this time.

But as for tracking down “the first”…

…like a good academician, I can only conclude that the matter requires more research.

When do you think water first appeared on counsel tables?