The Ball Valve

“Red” was, without question, one of the most likable people I’ve ever met.  With a head of hair so bright it could signal ships in the fog and a grin wide enough to charm a room full of strangers, Red had friends everywhere he went.  On Galveston Island, it sometimes felt like everyone knew him (and most of them had forgiven him at least once).

Now, Red had a little quirk that made life interesting: he was a habitual thief.  Not a mean one, mind you—he practiced a very selective sort of morality:  There were “us-ins” and “them-ins,” as he put it.  If you were an “us-in,” he’d gladly give you the shirt off his back.  If you were a “them-in,” well…you might want to keep an eye on your own shirt, socks, and anything else not nailed down.

I met Red when I was managing the old Jack Tar Hotel in Galveston.  A friend of mine on the police force asked if I could give Red a job—maybe to  keep him out of state prison.  He was just a teenager then, with no family, no home, and no prospects.  My friend promised me that Red wasn’t into drugs or drinking—his only real vice being a set of itchy fingers.  All he needed, he said, was a little guidance and a second chance.

Five minutes after meeting Red, I had already added my name to the long list of people who liked him.  I hired him as a general handyman at the old Jack Tar Hotel—odd jobs, a little paint here, a little fix there.  My police friend had warned me that the boy could abscond with the morning dew, but I figured that since the job didn’t involve cash or contact with guests, I could keep an eye on him and maybe straighten him out.  (I was wrong, of course—but it was a noble thought.)

Almost immediately, Red won everyone over.  He was bright, quick to learn, and willing to work hard.  Before long, the whole hotel had practically adopted him: Half the kitchen staff was sneaking him extra meals, housekeeping had donated a small mountain of “lost” clothing, and I’m fairly certain at least one of the waitresses was helping him with his “emotional development.” For the first time in a long while, Red had a home—and the place just seemed happier for it.

Of course, that warm glow didn’t last forever.  It started with the Coca-Cola delivery driver—a man with all the charm of explosive diarrhea—who liked to bark at the kitchen staff.  When he complained that a dozen crates of Cokes and a hand truck had vanished, I did my best to convince him that he must’ve misplaced them at his last stop.  I never did find the dolly, but I couldn’t help noticing that the housekeeping refrigerator was suddenly very well-stocked.

Then there was the Houston police officer who had checked in for a weekend with his wife.  After spending a bit too much time in the bar, they became so belligerent that I was about to throw them out myself.  When they finally did leave, their departure was delayed—largely because their car was up on blocks with all four wheels missing. 

Explaining to Red why his latest escapade was a bad idea was like teaching calculus to a pig—or dollar depreciation to a city council.  It makes you feel clever for a minute, but mostly it just annoys the pig.  Red would nod solemnly, look contrite, and promise to do better.  And for a few shining hours, he probably meant it.

Red had been with us about three months when we had ourselves a plumbing problem.  It was a Saturday, which meant the regular maintenance crew was off, and a pipe had burst in one of the maintenance chases between two suites.  These chases were two-foot-wide vertical shafts—forty feet tall and packed tighter than a barrel of snakes with pipes, wires, and assorted mystery cables that had been added over forty years of “improvements.”  Crawling into one required a contortionist with nerves of steel and no sense of smell.  Of course, since the hotel sat right on the beach, the place came with its own collection of “resident wildlife” that was not, strictly speaking, paying rent.

Now, one of the bad things about being the hotel manager is that when something breaks and the guy who usually fixes it isn’t around—well, “Congratulations: You’re the guy!”  So, I shut off the water, grabbed a hacksaw, and wedged myself into the chase between a busted pipe and what I’m convinced was the largest spider web in the state of Texas.  While I was sawing away, I sent Red down to the basement to fetch a half-inch ball valve.  Once I had this section patched, I could turn the water back on to the rest of the building before the guests started noticing they couldn’t shower.

Red was gone about five minutes before reappearing to say he couldn’t find the valve.

“Red,” I said, trying to sound patient, “there’s a whole box of them on the shelf against the wall. I bought them myself—I know they’re there.”

The basement of the Jack Tar was a proper labyrinth—concrete corridors, old boilers, and shadows deep enough for a Baptist to lose his religion in—so it didn’t surprise me that Red was having trouble finding anything.  I sent him back down and kept cutting away at the pipe.  By now I was soaked, my flashlight was fading, and so was my hold on my temper.  When Red came back empty-handed the second time, I confess I lost my composure.  I won’t repeat what I yelled, but the temperature in the chase went up about ten degrees and I’m fairly sure I killed most of the spiders with the volume alone.

Red was gone for quite a while after that, but when he finally returned, he proudly handed me a valve—a very old, very rusty gate valve, that was streaked with gray paint and character.  It was not what I wanted, but at that point I was in no position to be picky.  I installed it, climbed out of the chase, and turned the water back on.  Everything in that wing worked fine—except for one suite that still didn’t have water.

Figuring I needed a threaded nipple the right length to finish the job, I hopped in my car and headed to the hardware store.  As I drove past the gas station next door, I noticed their parking lot looked like a shallow lake. Two men were standing outside the restroom, watching in disbelief as water poured out the door in a steady stream.

And that’s when I realized where Red had “found” the valve.

Red didn’t stay much longer after what became known as The Valve Incident. One morning, he was just gone—no goodbye, no warning, just gone.  Most folks at the hotel figured he’d skipped town right before someone came looking for him.  I haven’t seen or heard from Red in decades.  Wherever he is, I like to think he’s found something steady to work at…though I wouldn’t be too surprised if it turned out he’s either in a state prison or in Congress!

Hitler’s Sculptor

When I first started studying history, I got lost for several months down a rabbit hole, reading books written by German authors about World War II.  Naturally, many of the books expressed an attitude that, while they disagreed with Nazi policy, they were powerless to stop its advance…All of them.  Evidently, the only “real” Nazis who weren’t killed in combat were the thirty-five war criminals executed following the various Nuremberg trials. 

Right—and my cat just won the Nobel Prize for Hairballs.

I think the breaking point came while I was reading Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer.  He gives a very plausible description of being swept along by the tide of events that I bought into…. until somewhere about two-thirds of the way through the book when I suddenly realized…. Wait!  This guy’s a lying Nazi!  After I started reading Speer’s books a little more critically, it was easy to catch him in dozens of lies in which he tried to present himself in a better light.  In my opinion, that Nuremberg execution number should have been thirty-six.

We have a similar problem assessing the artwork of Hitler’s favorite sculptor, Arno Breker.  Look at the photo to the right:  It is June 23, 1940, and Speer (left), Hitler, and Breker are standing on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot admiring the Eiffel Tower.  Just a few years later, Hitler was dead by his own hand and Speer was writing his self-serving books from Spandau Prison.

Arno Breker, by comparison, was still producing the same kind of artwork that had glorified Nazi ideals—larger-than-life, Neoclassical sculptures that were both militaristic and vaguely angry. 

Before the Nazi era turned him into Hitler’s pet sculptor, Arno Breker’s early life read almost like the script of an ambitious art-school drama.  Born in 1900, in the Rhineland town of Elberfeld, he was the son of a stonemason — which meant he grew up literally surrounded by chisels, dust, and blocks of stone just waiting to be transformed into something more glamorous than garden walls.  After a stint studying at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, young Breker found himself increasingly drawn to the classical ideals of the human figure.  He flirted with the avant-garde crowd but never quite married into it, preferring a clean, heroic style that looked back more to Ancient Greece than to Picasso’s Cubist puzzles.

By the mid-1920s, Breker was traveling and absorbing the culture of Paris, where he rubbed elbows with artists like Pablo Picasso, Aristide Maillol, and Alexander Calder.  He picked up a reputation as a talented sculptor who had impeccable technique and a knack for monumental form — the kind of fellow who could make marble look like it was about to step off its pedestal and order a coffee.  Paris was his playground and while his art already leaned toward the monumental, it was still seen as stylishly neoclassical rather than politically loaded.  In those years, Breker was essentially a promising cosmopolitan artist, enjoying the bohemian whirl of Paris cafés and ateliers, before the winds of history swept him back to Germany and into the orbit of a very different kind of patron.

While living in Paris, Breker became friends with many influential Jewish artists and dealers.  In the decades that followed, while Breker never renounced any of those friends, there is no evidence that he ever used his influence to help those friends, either.  This is sort of the pattern with Breker:  there’s no direct evidence that he was a Nazi, but he never took a firm stand against Hitler, either.

Once back in Germany in the 1930s, Breker’s career accelerated at the speed of state-sponsored propaganda.  His muscular, larger-than-life style seemed tailor-made for the aesthetic the Nazis adored: marble gods, bronze athletes, and statues that looked like they could bench-press a Tiger tank.  Hitler took notice of Breker’s style and that was all it took:  By the late 1930s, Breker was officially the Reich’s star sculptor, showered with commissions for the new “Germania” capital that Albert Speer was designing.  His works — like the heroic Zehnkämpfer (Decathlete) and the impossibly serene Siegerin (Victress)—stood at the Berlin Olympic grounds, projecting the image of a superhuman nation, frozen in bronze and marble.  (Unlike 90% of the works Breker produced during the Nazi era, both statues still stand in their original location.)

Breker wasn’t just churning out art for show—he became part of the inner circle.  After accompanying Hitler on his trip to Paris, the perks piled up:  a villa in Berlin, a studio with virtually unlimited materials, 43 assistants, and the ear of the Führer himself.  Hitler added Breker to the list of 378 “Gottbegnadeten" (divinely gifted) artists who were exempt from compulsory military service.

Artists who had once mocked him for his classical obsessions now had to watch as he became the embodiment of official taste.  Even though Breker insisted after the war that he had never joined the Nazi Party, he was undeniably one of the regime’s cultural darlings, producing the monumental “Aryan” figures that filled plazas, government buildings, and parade grounds.

Of course, monumental fame came with monumental compromise.  Breker’s art became inseparable from the regime’s message and his statues became a visual shorthand for Nazi ideology.  While his contemporaries in Paris and elsewhere were experimenting with abstraction, surrealism, and other modern twists, Breker was chiseling out a kind of fascist neoclassicism that was all muscle and no irony. The man who had once hung out in Paris cafés now oversaw studios humming with assistants turning out state-commissioned busts of Nazi leaders.  (Breker creates a bust of Speer, right.)  His reputation — and his paycheck — soared, but so did his entanglement with a regime whose cultural “patronage” came at the steepest moral cost imaginable.

After 1945, Arno Breker’s life took a sharp turn from monumental commissions to monumental awkwardness.  Once celebrated as Hitler’s favorite sculptor, he suddenly found himself on the wrong side of history, with Allied authorities eager to figure out what to do with an artist who had been churning out bronze superheroes for the Third Reich.  He was put through a denazification trial but managed to dodge the harshest penalties by insisting that he’d never actually joined the Nazi Party.  Conveniently, many of his more embarrassing commissions had already been destroyed when the Reich Chancellery and other Nazi showpieces were blown to rubble, so there was less incriminating evidence in the landscape.  Still, the aura of being “Hitler’s sculptor” clung to him like marble dust.

Breker worked hard to rehabilitate his reputation.  When Joseph Stalin offered him a lucrative commission, the artist declined, saying, "One dictatorship is sufficient for me".

His postwar career was, shall we say, more modest.  While his reputation in Germany was radioactive, Breker did manage to get work again, often leaning on sympathetic collectors or quietly producing smaller-scale works.  Some of his surviving statues — like Zehnkämpfer and Siegerin at the Berlin Olympic grounds — remained in place, partly because they were athletic enough to pass for apolitical once the swastikas were gone.  But many other pieces that were clearly tied to Nazi grandeur were either melted down, were looted, or were left to languish in storage.  Breker lived on into the 1990s, carving, exhibiting, and defending his legacy, but he never shook the shadow of the regime that had made him famous.  In the end, his sculptures outlasted the Reich, but their survival came with the permanent footnote: “By the way, these were Hitler’s favorites.”

Even today, there is still sharp debate whether his remaining sculptures should be exhibited or destroyed.  Are they artwork or the last remaining cancerous cells of a sick regime?   Would their destruction be vandalism, acts of iconoclasm, or justice delayed?

In 1956, the people of Budapest rebelled against the Soviet domination and Hungary’s puppet government.  Marching to the City Park, they attacked the 24-foot-tall statue of Stalin with ropes, blowtorches, and sledgehammers, eventually toppling it.  Some said that the protestors were destroying history.  Others said what they did was history. 

Rome Meets Queens

Every few years, somebody pops up to tell a city’s landlords, “Hey, maybe someone poor with two kids and a minimum wage job shouldn’t have to sell a kidney just to keep a roof over their heads.”  In 63 BCE, that somebody was Lucius Sergius Catilina — Catiline if you’re on casual terms.  In modern New York, it’s Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

Catiline wanted votes, so he promised to cancel debts, redistribute land, and hand out farms like Oprah hands out cars: “You get a farm! You get a farm! And you get a farm!”  This was easy to promise because the debts weren’t owed to him, he didn’t own the land he wanted to redistribute, nor did he own the farms he wanted to give away. 

Mamdani, on the other hand, in exchange for votes, is promising to stop your landlord from raising rent so high you need to start renting out your closet on Airbnb just to pay for your bedroom.  This is also easy to say, because Mamdani doesn’t own any of those apartments and doesn’t have to make any mortgage payments.  Mamdani doesn’t mention that one of the main reasons that rents are high is that the rent control policy the city has had in effect for 82 years stifles the creation of new housing.  The chief rule of everyone ignorant of simple economics seems to be that when you see an obstacle in the road, speed up.

It’s a matter of, “different centuries, same basic fight”: who gets to call the shots when it comes to property?  The property owners and mortgage holders?  Or the people who are just trying not to end up living under a bridge?

Picture Rome in the mid-first century BCE:  The Republic’s looking a little shaky, the Senate’s packed with old men clutching their togas, and everyone’s broke.  Small farmers had lost their land to the Roman equivalent of agribusiness—big estates run by slaves.  Aristocrats were mortgaging their futures to throw the ancient version of Super Bowl halftime shows (bread, circuses, and gladiators).  Veterans were wandering around muttering, “Wait, we fought all those wars and I don’t even get a cabbage patch?”  The political climate was hotter than a June bride in a feather bed.

Into this chaos strides Catiline, promising a tabula nova—a clean slate.  Translation:  burn the IOUs, cancel the debts, and start afresh.  To the desperate, this sounded like salvation.  To the Roman Senate, it sounded like arson—which was pretty accurate since Cataline was planning to burn the estates of his enemies.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years:  Instead of togas, it’s hoodies and instead of gladiators, it’s the New York Yankees and Knicks games…but the housing crisis is pretty much the same.  Enter Zohran Mamdani, representing Astoria, Queens.  His pitch: Housing is a human right, not a Monopoly board.  His weapons:

·      Good Cause Eviction:  No more landlords deciding rent should increase just because taxes and utilities go up… Or because they’ve bought a new yacht.

·      Rent caps:  Stop the annual ritual of tenants opening their lease renewal letters like they’re scratching off a lottery ticket.

·      Social housing:  City-owned apartments that are permanently affordable (because, as we all know, this has worked so well in the past exactly nowhere!).

Landlords scream that this is socialism, but tenants call it survival.  Politicians—absolutely certain that simply passing new legislation could repeal the law of gravity—call it sound politics.

Lets size up these two like a prize fight.

Catiline vs.  Mamdani:  The Tale of the Tape

 Let’s start with Catiline.

            Catiline (Rome, 63 BCE)                                

Big Idea           Cancel debts, hand out land

Enemies          Roman Senate, creditors, Cicero with a grudge

Supporters      Indebted elites, broke farmers, grumpy veterans

Methods         Conspiracy, maybe arson, an attempted military coup

Fate                 Died in battle, labeled a traitor forever

 

Versus Mamdani (Queens, 2020s)

Big Idea           Cap rents, protect tenants

Enemies          Real estate lobby, landlords, banks, and anyone who successfully passed Economics 101

Supporters      Tenants, immigrants, socialists, and Education majors.

Methods         Legislation, rallies, and lots of tweets

Fate                 Still in office and will probably be elected mayor.  After that, who knows?

Catiline believed that wiping out debts would restore equilibrium by freeing citizens to farm, serve, and consume.  Critics saw it as destabilizing credit markets.  Mamdani argues that capping rents and expanding tenant protections will stabilize communities, prevent displacement, and preserve affordable housing.  Critics warn it will deter construction and reduce supply while property owners convert apartments into individual condominiums.

Despite the 2,000-year gap, the similarities are hard to miss.  Romans feared debt slavery while New Yorkers fear rent hikes; this might be different shackles, but the anxiety is the same.  Catiline promised a bonfire of IOUs while Mamdani promises landlords will be put in their place.   Both got cheers from the impoverished struggling masses.  Cicero thundered about Catiline destroying civilization and landlords thunder that rent control will destroy the housing market. Spoiler: civilization and New York both still exist.

Now, the differences matter too:  While Catiline tried to storm Rome, Mamdani tries to storm Albany committee meetings.  One ended with a bloody battlefield, the other has a bill in legislative limbo—one that, in the unlikely event it ever passes, will probably be doomed to die  in a Federal Court.

While Catiline wanted to erase debts outright, Mamdani wants to freeze rents without offering a solution to how the property owners can keep paying their mortgages.  The first would have triggered a civil war in Rome, while the other would trigger capital flight and economic turmoil.

While Catiline got swords, Mamdani gets subpoenas. Cicero shouted, “How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?” Today, it’s landlords muttering, “How long, O Mamdani, will you abuse our patience?”  Catiline’s reforms died with him.  Mamdani’s ideas are still duking it out in statehouses and at the ballot box. 

The two politicians, 2000 years apart, offer us a little more than a history lesson.  Every society eventually has to answer the same awkward question:  “Is property sacred, or is housing a right?”  Rome decided that property was sacred, and though the Republic keeled over within a generation, the Empire lasted hundreds of years.  New York hasn’t decided yet.

Catiline’s ghost might whisper to Mamdani: “Careful, kid — they’ll call you a traitor to property, too.”  Mamdani might whisper back: “Yeah, but at least they won’t execute me in the Forum.”

The fight goes on, whether in marble forums or in rent-stabilized walk-ups.  And as long as people need somewhere to sleep that isn’t the street, somebody will always step up to poke the bear and say, “Maybe property rights aren’t the only rights worth protecting.”

Rain Follows the Plow

The plow has stood as a symbol of agriculture for centuries, dating back to ancient civilizations when humans first cultivated the land.  It is more than just a tool:  it represents hard work, perseverance, and the eternal hope for a bountiful harvest.  As farmers till the soil, they prepare the earth for seeds to be sown, breaking ground and creating an environment where crops can flourish.  

In many ways, the act of plowing is a dance with nature.  Farmers have a unique rhythm: plow, plant, water, weed, and wait.  Each motion is a step toward achieving that delectable harvest.  The anticipation builds as they watch the first tender shoots break through the soil—a vivid confirmation of their labor’s bearing fruit.

The story of America is the story of farmers’ inexorable push west, bending nature to their will, turning the endless prairie into fertile farms.  As we all learned watching Little House on the Prairie—Rain Follows the Plow.  Agricultural life on the prairie was idyllic.

“Horse Hockey,” says Pa Ingalls.  “The only thing my daughter Laura got right in that damn book was that dinky little shack was on a prairie.  We worked our asses off and the damn farm failed after only two years, and we moved back to Minnesota.”

If you’ve ever spent time with farmers, you know they can be stubbornly optimistic.  After all, farming is basically betting your year’s work on what the sky decides to do.  Maybe that’s why one of the most famous sayings of the 19th-century frontier was the cheery promise: “Rain follows the plow.”

At first glance, it sounds like a nice bumper sticker…maybe even a hymn to human effort: till the soil and the heavens will reward you.  But behind this simple phrase was a grand story—part pep talk, part science experiment, part sales pitch, and a smidge of religion—that helped drive settlers westward, reshape whole ecosystems, and eventually teach Americans a hard lesson about respecting the limits of the land.

The idea that farming could coax water from the sky wasn’t new when Americans started repeating it.  Ancient agricultural societies like the Sumerians along the Tigris and Euphrates, or the Egyptians on the Nile, knew that cultivation and irrigation transformed dry landscapes into fertile breadbaskets.  Their success helped cement the belief that human effort could literally bend nature to our will.

Fast-forward a couple of thousand years and European farmers carried the same assumption with them.  Wherever the plow went, crops followed, so why not the rain, too?  By the time American settlers were eyeing the Great Plains, this belief was ripe for a revival.

In the mid-1800s, the United States was in the throes of Manifest Destiny—that heady conviction that Americans were meant to spread across the continent.  Railroads were pushing tracks westward, land companies were printing glossy pamphlets, and homesteaders were itching for their slice of farmland.

But there was a problem:  west of the 100th meridian (that invisible north-south line running through the middle of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas) pthe climate got a lot drier.  Rainfall dropped below 20 inches a year and the grass grew in tough, wiry clumps instead of lush meadows.  To settlers from wetter eastern states, the land looked suspiciously like desert.

Enter the slogan.  “Rain follows the plow” became the marketing pitch of the century.  Railroad promoters and government boosters assured would-be pioneers that simply breaking the soil would literally improve the weather.  Each furrow, they claimed, released moisture into the air, invited rainfall, and proved that the West could be as fertile as Ohio or Illinois.  Even digging holes for fence posts or setting up a line of telegraph poles would improve the climate of the plains.

It sounded almost magical—plow hard enough and clouds would appear like friendly neighbors bringing a casserole.

And you know what?  For a while, it seemed to work.  The 1870s and early 1880s brought a stretch of unusually wet years to the Great Plains.  Farmers who took the plunge and staked their claims often harvested bumper crops of wheat and corn.  Newspapers crowed about the miracle.  Scientists with shaky barometers nodded approvingly.  And boosters pointed to every green field as proof that the climate had indeed changed.

In Kansas, promoters even set up “demonstration farms” to showcase the miracle.  Visitors would arrive, see lush fields waving in the breeze, and sign up for land on the spot.  The Ingalls family — yes, the same one immortalized in Little House on the Prairie — joined the westward migration to Kansas around this time.  While their short-lived homestead near Independence, Kansas was just east of the 100th meridian, they were swept up in the same current of optimism that fueled the “rain follows the plow” craze.

But prairie weather has a way of humbling human optimism.  By the late 1880s, the wet cycle ended.  Rainfall plummeted back to its long-term averages.  Crops shriveled.  Wells ran dry.  Suddenly those lush “proof” fields turned into parched reminders that slogans don’t change climate.  Countless farms failed and families who had staked everything on a patch of Kansas or Nebraska soil packed up wagons and left in despair.

One stark historical example comes from Garden City, Kansas, where a demonstration farm once showcased shockingly good harvests during the wet years.  Settlers poured in, encouraged by glowing reports.  But when the drought hit in the late 1880s, the very same fields became dust.  Many of the surrounding homesteads collapsed, and the boosters who had promised endless fertility were left red-faced.

And of course, the ultimate verdict came in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when decades of over-plowing met a decade of drought.  The land itself seemed to revolt.  Dust storms blackened skies, crops failed, and thousands of families fled the Plains—a grim reminder that rain doesn’t follow anything except atmospheric pressure and jet streams.

Not everyone was fooled.  Some scientists raised red flags early.  John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran turned geologist, warned Congress in 1878 that the Plains west of the 100th meridian were too dry for farming without serious irrigation.  He argued that settlements should be based on watersheds, not survey grids, and that small farms would fail in arid regions.

His advice? Don’t assume the sky will change just because you’ve sharpened your plow.  Naturally, Congress ignored him.  After all, optimism sells; caution doesn’t.  But history proved Powell right.

So why bother with this old frontier motto today? Because its lesson is timeless.  “Rain follows the plow” is a cautionary tale about the dangers of believing that human effort alone can rewrite natural laws.  It’s also a reminder of how badly we want to believe we’re in control of the elements.

Modern farmers face their own version of the same dilemma.  Climate change is reshaping rainfall patterns and turning once-predictable seasons into nail-biters.  The difference is that now, instead of repeating catchy slogans, we have meteorological models, satellite data, and sustainable practices like crop rotation and no-till farming.  The wisdom we’ve gained — painfully — is that the land will treat us better if we treat it with respect.

Still, there’s something almost charming about the old phrase.  It speaks to the boundless optimism of settlers who looked at a windswept plain and thought, “Sure, we can make it rain if we just work harder.”  Were they wrong? Absolutely.  But also a little inspiring.  It’s a reminder that human beings are endlessly hopeful — even if that hope sometimes plows us straight into a dust storm.

Maybe the modern version should be: “Rain doesn’t follow the plow, but wisdom should.” It doesn’t rhyme, but it might keep our topsoil where it belongs.

The Failure of French Gunpowder

For any student of military history, it frequently seems that more ink has been spilled over French failures in the Napoleonic Wars than the blood spilled on the battlefield.  This will not stop me, however, from pointing out that the centrally planned economy of revolutionary France resulted in the production of inferior gunpowder that seriously hampered both the French Army and the French Navy,

Gunpowder began as a happy accident in medieval China, when alchemists chasing immortality mixed charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, discovering the recipe for very mortal fireworks.  By the 900s, the stuff powered fire lances, bombs, and rockets; by 1044, writers of Chinese manuals were jotting down secret formulas like proud cookbook authors.  The idea zipped along trade routes to the Islamic world, where engineers refined siege craft, and then to Europe in the 1200s, where monks and monarchs promptly asked, “Does it make castles go away?”

Early European “serpentine” powder was a fussy, dusty blend that separated into useless components at the worst moments—think salad dressing with a temper.  Around 1500, makers started “corning” it into grains, giving a more predictable bang for the buck, and handheld guns and big bombards multiplied.  The 1600s brought flintlocks, paper cartridges, and generals who standardized calibers so that cannonballs finally fit the cannon.  In the 1700s, European chemists like Lavoisier tidied French production, while Britain built Waltham Abbey into a gunpowder campus and imported ultra-pure Indian saltpeter by the shipload.  By the time the Napoleonic Wars rolled around, Europe had turned black powder into an industrial science—equal parts chemistry, logistics, and earplugs—setting the stage for continent-wide warfare that flashed—and boomed—from Portugal to Moscow.

From the very beginning of the war in the late 18^th century, the British had an advantage: they imported high quality saltpeter from India.  The French, on the other hand, created a huge domestic program to make and gather salpêtre—building nitre beds (nitrières) per official manuals, and ordering citizens to scrape “nitrous earth” from cellars, stables, barns and rubble for sale to the gunpowder administration. Chemists like Lavoisier/Guyton de Morveau helped standardize and teach the process and authorities used requisitions to keep supplies flowing—so wartime French saltpeter was largely home-produced rather than imported.  The poor-quality homemade saltpeter was hygroscopic—it literally pulled moisture out of the air—not only making the powder less effective but leaving a residue fowled the barrels of the weapons.

To produce the gunpowder, the three ingredients are combined in a process called corning.  In broad strokes, English corning in the Napoleonic era was a tidy, factory-forward affair: mills like Waltham Abbey first compressed the damp “mill cake” into dense press-cakes, then broke and sieved those cakes into consistent grain sizes—an assembly line for bang that prized uniform density and repeatable burn from batch to batch.  The British then polished the powder by tumbling it in a wooden barrel with a small amount of graphite.  This glazing helped prevent clumping and made the powder even more resistant to moisture, while at the same time preventing the buildup of static electricity that could spontaneously detonate the gunpowder.

By contrast, French corning was carried out across a patchwork of state poudreries, but with techniques that varied more between sites: the official instructions emphasize milling and granulation steps, and in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic scramble some works pressed before granulating while others effectively corned from damp cake as equipment and throughput allowed—producing fairly good powder, but with more variability in grain density than Britain’s heavily standardized press-then-corn routine.

There was a significant difference in how the gunpowder was stored.  The British standardized in 25-, 50-, and 100-pound barrels equipped with copper hoops.  The French had a wide variety of barrels, some weighing more than 200 pounds and all them made with iron hoops.  If two barrel hoops bumped together, the resulting spark could ignite all the powder in the magazine.  Perhaps this is why French powder works blew up at least four times during the war.

By the 1790s, plenty of French powder men could see why British stuff went “boom” so politely while French powder frequently either didn’t blow up or blew up prematurely, but the obstacle wasn’t brains…it was bureaucracy.  In France’s centrally-run system, every tweak to grain size, press pressure, or glazing seemed to require a memo to Paris, two committees, and a stamp the size of a wagon wheel.  Nitre inspectors had quotas, poudreries had fixed procedures, and purchasing officers couldn’t just splash out on new presses or hire extra coopers because a clever foreman had an idea: they needed approvals, inventories, and—oops—another approval. Add wartime scarcities and blockade headaches, and even sensible changes moved at the speed of a courier on a muddy road.  Meanwhile the British, who sunk capital into a factory model earlier, could swap dies, retool, and standardize faster than you could say “pass the priming flask.”  The French knew where they wanted to go, but the central planning machinery kept tapping the brakes.  So they made lots of perfectly serviceable powder—sometimes very good indeed—but catching up to Britain’s consistency and scale meant loosening paperwork, freeing procurement, and investing mid-war—none of which a bureaucracy excels at.

The results of this difference in quality were evident in the field.  The French army used a 12-pound field gun.  Due to the increased power of British gunpowder, they achieved nearly the same result with a 9-pound cannon.  Since the British gunpowder produced less fouling, the British army could fire the cannon more frequently than their enemy, while using fewer horses to maneuver the guns. 

For the British Navy, there was an even bigger advantage.  After the Battle of Trafalgar, French captains estimated that because of the difference in powder strength, the British guns could hit targets 15-20% farther than French guns, with a corresponding effect on hull penetration.  The British could score hits while still out of range from return fire.  And when those shells hit, they did more damage than the French shells.  Due to a combination of cleaner barrels and better discipline, British ships fired 50% faster that their French counterparts.

Britain decisively won the Napoleonic Wars.  Better gunpowder wasn’t the only reason, but it contributed.  And the French centrally-planned economy, as it usually does, created more problems than solutions.

Going Bananas

Back in 1964, Roy Drusky released a song with the unlikely title of “Peel Me a Nanner”.  The song, a minor hit, is a playful, tongue-in-cheek take on a heartbroken narrator who is lamenting a failed romance, using the whimsical imagery of bananas, peanuts, and a coconut tree to add humor. The full chorus goes:

Peel me a 'nanner, toss me a peanut, I'll come swingin' from a coconut tree
Peel me a 'nanner, toss me a peanut, you sure made a monkey out of me. 

 

I mention this because this week I’m going to talk about bananas, and I can’t stop humming the damn tune.  This is probably an early warning sign for the onset of dementia.

 

With apologies to both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Chiquita Banana Lady, bananas are not native to either Africa or Central America.  Bananas originated in Indonesia and quickly spread across Asia and Africa along trade routes.  By the 16^th century, the Portuguese had introduced the fruit to Central and South America, where bananas became an important food source since the fruit grows year-round and is easy to spread.

Bananas were not available in the United States until the last decades of the 19^th century because even if the fruit was picked before it was ripe, it would ripen and spoil before it could reach the consumer.  Finally, by the 1870s, with the use of railroads and steamships, green bananas could be picked and rapidly shipped to American ports, the fruit ripening during the trip.  It didn’t take long before the entire process had been  standardized into a well-oiled machine that was controlled by large corporations like United Fruit and Standard Fruit (which later became Chiquita and Dole).

 

Since Americans almost exclusively consume only one variety of yellow banana, it might come as a shock for you to learn that there are approximately a thousand varieties of bananas and that bananas come in almost every color from red to gold and from blue-green to black.  Long ago, the banana importing companies decided to specialize in one variety—the yellow Big Mike (Gros Michel) banana—because it ripened relatively slowly, and had a thick resilient peel, which protected it from bruising during long sea voyages to Europe and North America.  Its dense, large bunches facilitated efficient shipping, and its sweet, creamy flavor and firm texture made it appealing to consumers.  To consumers on both continents, the Big Mike was the banana.  

 

Plantations specialized in the Big Mike, and shipping boxes were built to accommodate their size.  Cargo ships were built to precise specifications to accommodate those boxes and to keep the cargo holds at precisely 55 °F—the temperature that keeps a green Big Mike from ripening from three to four weeks.  After the bananas were unloaded, special processing warehouses would expose the still green bananas to a mild amount of ethylene gas at 63 °F that would rapidly ripen them, turning them into the yellow color consumers expected.  (If your banana is still too green to eat, you can ripen it overnight by putting it in a paper bag with an apple or a tomato.)

 

Everything was perfect…until in the 1950s, when a soil fungus called, “Panama disease” (technically Fusarium oxysporum, Race 1) began devastating Big Mike plantations in Central America.  When a disease shows up in most plants, the answer is to search for the few plants in the plantation that are resistant, then replant the field with the offspring of the resistant plants.

 

You can’t do that with bananas.  You see, all of the bananas you have eaten in your life were clones.  You may have noticed that the bananas you eat are “seedless” (those little black specs you see are undeveloped seeds that can’t germinate); all the banana plants are cuttings—technically pups—from another banana plant.  Genetically, all the Big Mike banana trees are the same plant, so if one of the plants is susceptible to the fungus, they all are.

 

You can imagine the panic in the boardrooms of Chiquita and Dole.  Stopping the spread of the fungus across Central and South America was (and still is) impossible.  The companies spent a small fortune convincing us that their long yellow fruit was the perfect thing to slice up and put on our cornflakes, so it was going to be a little difficult to now convince the public to switch to a short red fruit that they claim is a banana.

 

Fortunately, there was a similar variety of banana, the Cavendish.  It was about 10% smaller, and the bunches were about a third smaller, but it would fit in the boxes, ripen the same, and most importantly—it was yellow.  If you didn’t know better, you could mistake a Cavendish banana for a Big Mike…At least until you ate it.  The Cavendish banana is not as sweet as or as creamy in texture as Big Mike and it is much milder in flavor.  Anyone who has eaten both will tell you that the Big Mike is a much better banana.

 

Unfortunately, grocery stores in the United States stopped selling the Big Mike by 1960.  I know I ate bananas in the 1950’s, but I don’t remember it.  But, in the 1990’s, I found a specialty shop in San Pedro Sula, Honduras that sold long fat Big Mike bananas.  Boy, is there a difference.

 

Now that the Cavendish is literally the top banana—there is a bit of a problem.  These bright yellow beauties, which we’ve all munched for decades, are now facing their own extinction, under assault by a new strain of Panama disease, (Fusarium oxysporum Tropical Race 4)—a fungus with a flair for drama.  It’s like a bad comedy plot where the star keeps tripping over the same banana peel!  This soil-dwelling troublemaker clogs the banana plant’s roots, turning lush green leaves into sad, wilted props, and it’s spreading faster than gossip at a garden party.  And once again, since Cavendish bananas are clones that are all genetically identical, they’re like one big, unhappy family with zero immune system variety.

 

Scientists are scratching their heads as they race to save the day.  They’ve tried everything from funky soil treatments to breeding new banana buddies, but the Cavendish just pouts and says, “I’m too pretty to change!”  Some suggest a wild banana remix—think funky flavors and colors—but good luck convincing the world to swap its morning smoothie staple.  It could happen, all the bananas shown at left are real.  Meanwhile, farmers are doing a hilarious dance, rotating crops and praying for a miracle, and banana companies, like Chiquita and Dole, are probably sweating bullets behind their corporate smiles.

 Barring a scientific breakthrough, it is likely that, in the next few years, we will see an extensive advertising campaign trying to convince us that a banana doesn’t have to be yellow.  Or alternatively, that the new and improved yellow banana that tastes like wet cardboard is better for you.