Rudyard Kipling and the Great War

Rudyard Kipling was more than just the man who wrote The Jungle Book, although I confess that whenever I hear his name, the first thing that trots through my brain is “the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River.” That phrase has been lodged in my head since childhood and apparently cannot be evicted, even for nonpayment of rent.

Kipling was one of the most famous writers alive when Europe went to war in 1914.  He had written about soldiers, sailors, empire, India, England, and most every other subject a properly mustached Englishman might discuss after dinner.  He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  People listened when he spoke, which is a dangerous condition for any writer.

Like most Europeans, Kipling was confused about the causes of the First World War.  That is all right: we are still confused about them.  Historians have spent more than a century sorting through alliances, nationalism, imperial rivalries, mobilization schedules, and Serbian conspirators.  We can explain the war with great confidence for about fifteen minutes, after which somebody asks one sensible question and the whole contraption starts leaking oil.

What makes the Great War especially troublesome is that, for the Europeans who entered it, this was not a simple war between good and evil.  It was not even clearly a war between “them” and “us.” The kings and emperors were cousins.  The ruling classes vacationed in one another’s countries, read one another’s books, and married one another’s daughters.  Then, in August 1914, they put on different uniforms and commenced killing one another by the trainload.

Kipling did not hesitate.  He believed that         Germany had to be defeated and his poetry sounded like a trumpet.  In “For All We Have and Are,” published in 1914, he warned that civilization itself was at stake.  “The Hun is at the gate,” he declared.  There was no room for ambiguity or for a fellow who wanted to study the railway schedules one more time.  Britain must fight.

This was not simply Kipling waving a flag from a comfortable chair.  He wrote propaganda, visited military units, and urged young men to serve.  He had spent much of his career praising the ordinary British soldier while pointing out that respectable civilians treated him like a stray dog in peacetime but discovered his virtues whenever shooting started.  Understanding hypocrisy, unfortunately, does not make a man immune to it—or to enthusiasm.

Then the war reached into his own house.

Kipling’s only son, John, wanted to serve.  John was young, short, and so nearsighted that the Army could have hidden the German Army across the examination room and he might not have spotted it.  The Royal Navy rejected him.  The Army rejected him.  These were not unreasonable decisions.  A battlefield is a poor place for an officer who cannot clearly see the men he is supposed to lead.

But John wanted a uniform and his father wanted him to have one.  Kipling used his friendship with Lord Roberts, the celebrated old field marshal and colonel of the Irish Guards, to help John obtain a commission.  It is tempting to tell this as a domineering father’s shoving an unwilling boy toward the guns.  That is too easy.  John was eager to serve.  Father and son had been raised on duty, honor, empire, and sacrifice.  They both believed the same sermon.

John Kipling became an officer in the Irish Guards at the age of sixteen.  In September 1915, not long after his eighteenth birthday, he went into action at the Battle of Loos.  Loos was Britain’s largest offensive of the war up to that time and it was an early demonstration of the military principle that, when a bad plan fails, headquarters may improve it by sending in more men.

On September 27, John led his platoon through shellfire and machine-gun fire.  Witnesses later gave confused accounts, as witnesses to battles often do.  He may have been wounded in the face and was seen stumbling or falling.  Then he disappeared into the smoke, mud, and wreckage.  He never came home. 

On his first day at the front, John went into his first attack carrying an officer’s revolver, not—as legend sometimes has it—merely a swagger stick.  By the time the Battle of Loos sputtered to its miserable conclusion, roughly 16,000 British and Empire soldiers were dead and more than 50,000 had become casualties.  John Kipling had lasted less than one day.

Rudyard and Carrie Kipling refused to abandon hope that John had been wounded or captured.  They followed every rumor, questioned survivors, and searched for any scrap of information that might tell them what had happened to their son.  None ever brought him home nor was John’s grave identified during either parent’s lifetime.  Kipling later supplied the Imperial War Graves Commission with the inscription “Known unto God” for the graves of unidentified soldiers.  For him, the words were horribly personal: they described his own boy as well as any of the nameless dead.

After John’s death, Kipling did not suddenly become a pacifist.  This is important, because history is seldom courteous enough to arrange itself into a clean moral lesson.  Kipling continued to believe that Germany had to be defeated.  He did not decide the war was unnecessary simply because it had become personally unbearable.  But the trumpet in his poetry acquired a crack.

The change can be heard in “My Boy Jack,” with its repeated plea for any kind of “news of my boy Jack?”  The poem originally accompanied Kipling’s writing about the naval Battle of Jutland and the death of a young sailor, Jack Cornell; “Jack” was not simply a private nickname for John.  Still, no grieving father could write those lines without pouring something of himself into them.  The answer comes back with the sea: not this tide, nor any tide.  Patriotic consolation remains, but consolation is not comfort.

By the end of the war, Kipling’s verse had become harder, colder, and far less impressed by speeches.  In “The Children,” he wrote of the young: “They believed us and perished for it.” In his Epitaphs of the War, he compressed the judgment of an entire generation into two lines:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Those lines are sometimes treated as Kipling’s confession that he had been wrong about everything.  That is too simple.  He may have been condemning the political leaders who failed to prepare Britain for war, the propagandists who disguised its cost, the older men who handed noble phrases to younger men, or himself.  The power of the lines lies in the fact that all those answers can sit together on the same mourners’ bench.

Kipling spent the postwar years helping the Imperial War Graves Commission decide how the dead should be remembered.  He chose words for cemeteries and memorials, including “Their Name Liveth for Evermore” and “Known unto God.” The great public poet of empire became one of the writers of its grief.  He could help ensure that John and the other dead did not vanish into French soil and government statistics.

And there is the lesson we keep forgetting:  Wars begin with maps, flags, speeches, and confident men explaining why the enemy has left us no choice.  The young hear, “honor, destiny, security, and duty”.  Some of it may be true.  Then the troop trains leave—and the meaning of the words changes.

The men who start a war usually believe they understand what they are doing.  The fathers who encourage their sons usually believe they are teaching courage.  The sons who go usually believe they will return.  Everybody may be sincere, and yet, the graveyards fill just the same.

Kipling’s journey from “The Hun is at the gate” to “because our fathers lied” does not prove that patriotism is foolish or that every war is avoidable.  It proves something less comfortable: righteous certainty is cheapest before the casualty lists arrive.  A nation may have to fight… but before it sends its children, it owes them the truth—about the cause, the cost, the mistakes, and the odds of coming home.

That is a debt old men have been refinancing—using the blood of young men as collateral—for a very long time.

James Bascom Milliorn’s Remarkably Bad Wa

The name James recurs frequently in my family.  It was my father’s name.  I have numerous cousins named James.  It is the middle name of my first son, and I also had a great-uncle named James.  At family reunions, yelling “James!” probably produced roughly the same result as yelling “Waiter!” in a crowded restaurant.

I never gave much thought to where the name came from.  Families routinely recycle names, particularly good, sturdy names that are difficult to misspell.  “James” is especially convenient because it works equally well for a farmer, preacher, bank president, outlaw, or man being questioned by the authorities.  It accommodates almost any career path.

Truthfully, I have never been terribly interested in genealogy.  I always assumed my father’s ancestors were a long line of modest farmers.  “Modest,” in this case, is the diplomatic term for poor.  They farmed land that was apparently capable of producing rocks, dust, grasshoppers, and predictable disappointment.

I was vaguely aware that my grandfather Fred had farmed in Texas, packed his family into a covered wagon, moved to Arkansas, briefly examined the opportunities available there, then loaded everyone back into the same wagon, and returned to the poor farm in West Texas.

I have seen that Texas farm and I can only conclude that all of Arkansas must have been on fire.

For most of my life, that seemed to be sufficient family history.  We had farmers.  They were poor.  They owned wagons.  At some point, somebody demonstrated questionable judgment regarding Arkansas.  I saw no urgent need to investigate further.

Recently, however, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to find out whether any of my Southern ancestors had owned slaves.  I was fairly certain they had not, principally because slave ownership required money, property, and economic resources that the Milliorns seem to have successfully avoided for generations.

The search produced one uncomfortable discovery:  an uncle of one of my direct ancestors had owned one enslaved sixteen-year-old at the beginning of the Civil War.  The census recorded the boy’s age, sex, and race, but not his name.  The white people were named.  The enslaved boy was treated as property and was entered on a separate schedule.

There is nothing amusing about that.  Even one enslaved person is one too many, and the fact that his name was not recorded is a grim reminder of how completely the system attempted to erase individual lives.

Having established that at least my direct ancestors were apparently too poor to own anyone, I thought the investigation was finished, but then, I discovered James Bascom Milliorn.

James was born near Byhalia, in Marshall County, Mississippi, on January 14, 1844.  He was the son of George B.  Milliron and Frances Doddridge.  The surname appears in records as Milliron, Milliorn, Millard, and occasionally, in whatever combination of letters a clerk could produce before lunch.   Genealogy is considerably easier when your ancestors have names that census takers can spell consistently.  My ancestors apparently regarded standardized spelling as an infringement on personal liberty.

When the Civil War began, James was seventeen.  On March 10, 1862, shortly after turning eighteen, he enlisted as a private in Company E of the 34th Mississippi Infantry.  Company E was known as the “Coldwater Rebels,” which sounds less like a military organization than a high-school football team with an unusually aggressive booster club.

The enlistment and unit are documented in the surviving 34th Mississippi Infantry roster.  The regiment was organized at Holly Springs and fought in the Western Theater.  It participated in the Battle of Perryville in Kentucky, the campaigns in Middle Tennessee, and the Battle of Chickamauga.

James evidently did not enjoy a comfortable war.

His Arkansas Confederate pension application states that he was shot in the left knee and suffered a fractured skull due to a second gun shot.  Unfortunately, the information available does not clearly establish where or when this happened.  Civil War soldiers were not issued convenient medical summaries, and Confederate record keeping deteriorated as the Confederacy ran short of paper, clerks, transportation, food, shoes, soldiers, and eventually, Confederacy.

Being shot in both the head and the knee would ordinarily qualify as the low point of a military career, but in James’s case, it may merely have been the opening act.

Testimony submitted with his pension application states that James was involved in an elevator accident while being held as a prisoner in a five-story hotel in Nashville.  The elevator supposedly collapsed, dropping him several stories.

On first reading that account, I was skeptical.  Elevators existed during the Civil War, but a five-story elevator accident involving Confederate prisoners sounded a little too elaborate.  It had all the necessary ingredients for a story that had improved with age: a war, a prison, a hotel, an elevator, and a very long fall.

Surprisingly, the central event really happened.

The building was the unfinished Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville.  Construction had stopped when the war began.  After Union forces occupied Nashville, the building was used as a barracks, a hospital, and a prison.  During the war, it was known as Zollicoffer Barracks.

In case you are wondering, Felix Kirk Zollicoffer was a recently deceased Confederate general and former Tennessee newspaper editor who had gone for a ride on a foggy morning and mistook the Union lines as Confederates.   The general was rather quickly killed.

On September 29, 1863, approximately 600 Confederate prisoners were crammed into the top floor of the brick building.  Many had recently been captured at Chickamauga.  When the prisoners assembled to go downstairs for breakfast, part of the temporary staircase and flooring collapsed.  More than 100 men plunged through several floors in a mass of soldiers, beams, boards, and debris.

Contemporary reports disagreed about the number killed.  The first newspaper reports said that only a few died immediately, while later accounts claimed that dozens died at the scene or later from their injuries.  A survivor insisted that the prisoners fell all the way to the bottom floor rather than merely to the third floor.

After the war, the building served as the site where Nathan Bedford Forrest was inducted into the Ku Klux Klan.  Finally finished as a hotel, seven presidents, as well as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, stayed there, and the coffee served at the famous hotel served as the start of the Maxwell House Coffee brand.  Guests of the hotel claimed it was haunted by a ghost of one of the soldiers who perished in the collapse of the floors.

The important point is that this was not a family legend invented around a fireplace several generations later.  The elevator account appears in testimony given in support of James’s pension application.  Someone was formally explaining to the State of Arkansas why James was old, disabled, poor, and deserving of assistance.  According to the application, during the collapse of the flooring, his “arms were mashed up.”

The testimony called it an elevator accident.  Contemporary descriptions call it the collapse of temporary stairs and flooring near the stairwell.  It is possible that the word “elevator” referred to an open shaft, hoist, or unfinished part of the building.  It is also possible that, several decades after being dropped through a hotel, James did not feel obligated to supply the Arkansas pension board with an architectural diagram.

The distinction probably seemed unimportant to him.  Whether the elevator fell, the floor collapsed, or the stairway gave way, gravity performed its assigned duty.

A casualty list published years later includes a “J.  B. Millard” of Company E, 34th Tennessee.  That appears likely to be another bureaucratically mangled reference to J.  B.  Milliorn of Company E, 34th Mississippi.  The initials, company, regiment number, pension testimony, and circumstances all fit.  Only the surname and state are wrong, which by Civil War record-keeping standards may qualify as unusually accurate.

There are no surviving details on how long it took Pvt. Milliorn to recover, but eventually, he was moved north to the Illinois Rock Island Prison Barracks on an island in the Mississippi River.  While this was not the worst of the Civil War POW camps, it was far from a picnic for the more than 12,000 captured Confederate soldiers kept there.  About one in eight prisoners died during their confinement, most of whom died from disease.  The camp was cold and overcrowded, so the prisoners easily succumbed to smallpox, dysentery and scurvy. 

In her book, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell puts Ashley Wilkes in the Rock Island Prison Barracks.  When Wilkes staggers back to Tara, he wearily describes the camp as the Andersonville of the North.  It’s a good, well-written scene, but it is far from accurate as Andersonville had twice the death rate.  Still, the almost two years James spent there must have been hell.

After serving for over 1100 days (with a little over half of them as a prisoner of war) James survived the war, as well as two gunshot wounds, his captivity, and the collapse inside the Maxwell House.  He then returned to the much slower but apparently unprofitable occupation of farming.

His pension application offers an unusually blunt summary of his economic achievements.  It reported that the total value of his property was less than $100.  After a lifetime of farming, raising a family, and surviving events that should have killed him several times, James had accumulated property worth less than the price of a modest modern television.

The State of Arkansas approved an annual pension of $25.

That was not $25 a month.  It was $25 a year. 

In exchange for being shot twice, captured, imprisoned, dropped through several floors of a hotel, and remaining poor long enough to prove financial need, James received slightly more than two dollars a month.  Government generosity apparently had not yet been invented.

Still, $25 was not completely insignificant at the time.  It could purchase food and other necessities, but it was hardly a comfortable retirement.  The pension system was designed as minimal relief for elderly or disabled Confederate veterans who could demonstrate both military service and poverty.  James evidently met every requirement with room to spare.

After the war, he married Frances Evelyn Boggan and fathered a large family.  Their children included Guy, Lillian, Elmo, Fred, Ray, and others.  Fred, born in 1877, became my grandfather and helped carry the James name into later generations.  My father was James H. Milliorn, and my brother and I gave one of their sons the name.

Thankfully, my great-grandfather’s pension was raised in later years.  It appears to be his only means of support during the last decades of his life.

James Bascom eventually settled in Arkansas and lived until July 3, 1933, dying at age eighty-nine. He had been born before the Mexican War, survived the Civil War, lived through Reconstruction, and remained alive long enough to witness automobiles, airplanes, radio, the First World War, and the Great Depression.

That is an extraordinary span for a man whose military experience included being shot, captured, and dropped through several floors of a hotel before the hotel had even opened.

I began this investigation expecting to confirm that my ancestors were poor farmers.  That part was easy.  They were.  James’s declaration that he owned less than $100 in property provides something approaching official certification.

Instead, I also found an unnamed enslaved boy who deserves to be remembered as a person rather than a line on a property schedule.  I found a Mississippi teenager who joined a war, suffered a serious wound, became a prisoner, survived one of Nashville’s strangest wartime disasters, and lived another seventy years.

I also found the probable source of all those Jameses scattered through the family tree.

The name was not merely recycled because nobody could think of anything better.  It may have been passed down because James Bascom Milliorn proved extraordinarily difficult to kill.

Considering his war—and the size of his pension—that seems reason enough.

The Great Cat Migration

Did 5,000 Siberian Cats really save Western Civilization?   (Spoiler Alert:  Nope.)  The story goes something like this:

During the Siege of Leningrad, virtually every cat in the city disappeared.  Some starved, some froze to death, and some were eaten by people who had reached the unfortunate stage of starvation at which Fluffy with gravy begins to sound less appalling than it normally would.

With the cats gone, millions of rats poured into the city.  They marched through the streets in vast gray armies, attacked food warehouses, gnawed through electrical wires, overran the Hermitage Museum, and prepared to eat their way through several centuries of European art.   Rembrandt Tartare.

Then, following the breaking of the siege, the Soviet government launched the Great Cat Migration.  Five thousand specially selected Siberian cats were collected in Tyumen, Omsk, Irkutsk, and other distant cities.  They were placed aboard a special train and transported thousands of miles to Leningrad.

When the train arrived, the doors were opened, the cats charged into battle, the rats were annihilated and Western civilization was saved.  The cats were installed in the Hermitage, where their descendants continue guarding the Rembrandts, Leonardos, and assorted imperial furniture to this day.

It is a wonderful story.  Unfortunately, it may contain almost as much fiction as the average congressional budget proposal.

The actual story begins in 1745, when Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, issued a genuine imperial decree ordering that 30 of the finest and largest mouse-catching tomcats be obtained from Kazan and delivered to the imperial court.

Kazan cats were reputed to be particularly formidable mousers.  Apparently, eighteenth-century Russia had already developed regional cat rankings, although ESPN had not yet begun televising the playoffs.

The decree specified that the cats should be large, good at catching mice, properly fed during the journey—and castrated.

That last qualification becomes important whenever someone claims that the cats currently living at the Hermitage are direct descendants of Elizabeth’s original Kazan cats.  Unless eighteenth-century Russian veterinarians were remarkably incompetent, those 30 tomcats did not leave descendants.

Nor, strictly speaking, did Elizabeth introduce cats to the “Hermitage Museum.” The present Winter Palace was not begun until 1754, and Catherine the Great did not establish the art collection that became the Hermitage until 1764.  Elizabeth brought cats to the imperial court.  The later palace and museum inherited the tradition.

Over the following centuries, cats were kept in the Winter Palace to control mice and rats in its kitchens, storerooms, corridors, and cellars.  As the palace accumulated paintings, furniture, tapestries, books, and other objects upon which rodents might dine, the cats became unofficial guardians of the imperial collections.

They were not art critics, but they were certainly more useful than most art critics.

Cats, Rats, and the Siege of Leningrad

The Siege of Leningrad began in September 1941 and lasted until January 1944.  It was one of the most appalling episodes of the Second World War.  Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, most from starvation, cold, and disease.

During the Siege of Leningrad, virtually every cat in the city disappeared.  Some starved, some froze to death, and some were eaten.  There was nothing historically unusual about people eating rodents—British sailors, for example, ate shipboard rats known as “millers,” apparently because the animals emerged from the flour stores looking as though they had been working the night shift in a bakery.  Cats, however, were household pets, and eating the family cat required a rather more desperate adjustment in culinary standards.  By the winter of 1941–42, many Leningraders had reached precisely that point.

The disappearance of the cats contributed to a serious rodent problem.  Rats threatened what little food remained and damaged buildings, wiring, archives, and stored materials.  The Hermitage was not immune, although most of its greatest treasures had already been evacuated to Sverdlovsk before conditions became completely disastrous.

Popular accounts often say that every cat in Leningrad died during the siege.  That is probably an exaggeration.  Contemporary records mention individual cats appearing in the city by early 1943, and several families later claimed that their pets survived.

The most famous was Maxim, whose owners reportedly protected him throughout the siege, occasionally locking him in a room to prevent a hungry relative from turning him into dinner.  Maxim may indeed have survived the entire siege.  Calling him “the only cat in Leningrad to survive,” however, would require a citywide feline census conducted under conditions in which the government had more pressing administrative concerns.

What can be said with confidence is that cats became extremely rare and extremely valuable.  By 1943, a kitten could cost several times the price of a loaf of bread.  Once people no longer needed to consider cats as food, they again wanted them as pets and rat catchers.

Enter the Meowing Division

This is where history begins turning into folklore.

According to one version, after Soviet forces opened a land corridor into Leningrad in January 1943, city authorities ordered four railway cars filled with gray or “smoky” cats from the Yaroslavl region.  These cats supposedly arrived while the siege was still underway and immediately began exterminating rats.

According to another version, the great shipment occurred after the siege ended in January 1944.  This time, approximately 5,000 cats were collected across Siberia, with Tyumen serving as a major collection point.  Residents donated household pets, officials rounded up strays, and a special train carried the animals to Leningrad.

Some accounts combine both stories: first came the Yaroslavl cats, followed by the larger Siberian feline reserve.

The details vary considerably.  Depending upon the person telling the story, there were two railway cars, four railway cars, or an entire train.  There were 500 cats, 1,000 cats, or 5,000 cats.  They arrived in 1943, 1944, or 1945.  They came from Yaroslavl, Tyumen, Omsk, Irkutsk, or all of the above.

This is generally not a sign that historians have uncovered an unusually rich collection of corroborating evidence.

In 2020, researchers at St. Petersburg State University reported that they had searched government records, wartime diaries, letters, and memoirs without finding confirmation of the famous trainload of cats.  They concluded that the mass migration story was probably a postwar legend representing a return to normal life—a time when cats could once again be pets and useful companions rather than emergency food.

That does not mean no cats were brought into Leningrad.  They almost certainly were.  Returning evacuees carried pets with them.  People bought, traded, and transported cats.  Officials probably encouraged their introduction, and some organized shipments may have occurred.

But the image of exactly 5,000 specially recruited Siberian commandos boarding the Feline Express and reporting for duty at the Hermitage remains unverified.

The recovery of Leningrad’s cat population was probably gradual and untidy.  Cats arrived from many places, reproduced, wandered into buildings, and were adopted by residents.  Traps, poison, sanitation programs, and ordinary pest-control work also helped reduce the rat population.

In other words, history did what history generally does: it unfolded through thousands of small, poorly documented actions.  Posterity then improved it by adding a special train.

Today, approximately 50 cats currently live beneath the Hermitage.  The number fluctuates because cats occasionally wander in, are rescued by employees, or are surrendered to the museum.  Others are adopted by carefully screened families.

The cats have names, identification documents, veterinary records, vaccinations, bowls, beds, and medical care.  They live primarily in the cellars, service areas, and courtyards.  They are not normally permitted to stroll through the galleries, critique the Dutch masters, or sharpen their claws on a Louis XVI chair.

Their modern pest-control value is largely preventive.  The smell and presence of cats discourage rodents from entering the area.  The cats themselves are reportedly well-fed and not always enthusiastic hunters.  One was once photographed peacefully watching a rat drink from its bowl, suggesting that feline work ethic has deteriorated since the heroic days of 1944.

The museum nevertheless treats them as honorary employees and public-relations ambassadors.  They have a veterinarian, caretakers, sponsors, an adoption program, an annual Hermitage Cat Day, and even an official spokeswoman.

Whether any are descended from the cats brought into Leningrad after the siege is impossible to establish.  Museum representatives say that a few descendants of the Yaroslavl cats remain, but there is no published pedigree or genetic study proving it.  The modern colony has absorbed stray cats and rescued animals for decades, and its members are routinely sterilized.

They are not a special breed.  They are ordinary mixed-breed cats with an unusually impressive business address.

A few wildly popular—and equally inaccurate—stories about the Hermitage cats deserve to be tossed out with the cat litter.

Peter the Great brought the first Hermitage cat, Vasily, from Holland.  Perhaps.  It is an old and charming tradition, but there is no contemporary documentation proving it.  Other versions say Peter obtained Vasily in Russia from a Dutch merchant.  Apparently, even the legendary cat’s travel documents have been misplaced.

The present cats descend from Elizabeth’s original Kazan cats.  No.  Elizabeth ordered castrated tomcats.  Their dynasty was over before it began.

Five thousand pedigree Siberian cats arrived aboard one special train.  There is no documentary confirmation.  Furthermore, “Siberian cats” may simply mean cats collected in Siberia, not 5,000 registered members of the modern Siberian breed traveling with certificates and matching luggage.

Every cat receives a government salary.  They receive food, housing, and veterinary care.  They do not receive rubles, pension contributions, paid vacation, or compensatory time for working nights.  Perhaps they should start a union.

A wealthy Frenchman left the cats an enormous fortune.  This one is partially true, which makes it ideal for the Internet.  A French admirer did include the Hermitage cats in his will.  Headlines breathlessly announced that the cats had inherited a “fortune,” conjuring images of 50 newly wealthy felines lounging aboard yachts, manipulating offshore accounts, and refusing to associate with common alley cats. 

The actual inheritance was approximately €3,000.  Divided among 50 cats, that comes to roughly €60 apiece—enough for each cat to purchase a respectable quantity of food, but probably not enough to establish a hereditary European banking family.

Still, €3,000 is €3,000.  It may not have made the Hermitage cats rich, but it did place them in a small and exclusive category: cats who have inherited more money than most cats and performed more useful government service than many humans.

Elon Musk and the Long Range Foundation

In Robert Heinlein’s 1956 novel, Time for the Stars, mankind’s most important scientific work is financed by an organization called the Long Range Foundation.  The Foundation invests in research so speculative, expensive, and slow that governments, corporations, and sensible people want nothing to do with it.

Naturally, the projects keep succeeding.  A sustained and diversified portfolio of research usually pays off in the long run, even though most individual research projects do not.

Weather control and other improbable ventures make enormous amounts of money, so the Foundation invests in even more improbable ventures.  Eventually, it becomes fabulously wealthy and can afford to finance interstellar spaceships, telepathy experiments, and anything else that strikes its directors as potentially useful to humanity.  It is the ultimate virtuous circle: invest vast sums of money on unlikely research, accidentally make a fortune, and use the fortune to investigate something even crazier.

This was science fiction when Heinlein wrote it.  Today, we call it the Elon Musk business plan.

Musk made his first serious money from Zip2 and, then, a much larger fortune from PayPal.  He could have purchased several islands, a respectable collection of yachts, and enough politicians to start his own congressional caucus.  Instead, he put much of his fortune into electric automobiles and rockets.

At the time, neither investment looked particularly sensible.

Electric cars were slow, unattractive little vehicles with limited range.  They were marketed chiefly to people who believed smugness should be classified as an alternative fuel.  Rockets, meanwhile, were built by governments and gigantic defense contractors.  Starting a private rocket company sounded approximately as reasonable as announcing that you intended to build your own aircraft carrier in the backyard.

Musk did both.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 with the modest objective of reducing launch costs, making rockets reusable, colonizing Mars, and saving the human race.  Most new businesses begin with more manageable goals, such as surviving until Friday.

The first three Falcon 1 launches failed.  Spectacularly.  SpaceX was running out of money, and Musk was simultaneously trying to keep Tesla alive.  Had the fourth launch failed, SpaceX probably would have collapsed.  It succeeded.

SpaceX subsequently developed the Falcon 9, Dragon spacecraft, and reusable booster systems.  Landing an orbital-class rocket vertically had long been considered technically possible but economically doubtful.  SpaceX turned it into something approaching routine.  Boosters now return to Earth and land upright on platforms at sea, looking like something Heinlein would have rejected as a little too theatrical.

SpaceX also created Starlink, which required launching thousands of satellites before the system could produce anything resembling an adequate return.  A conventional company would have balked at the cost.  A government program would have required years of hearings concerning orbital debris, rural broadband, environmental impact statements, minority contracting requirements, and whether the satellites were being launched from a politically equitable selection of congressional districts.

Musk ignored all of the problems and just launched them.

Tesla followed a similar path.  Musk did not create the original company, although he became its largest early investor and eventually its dominant executive. Tesla began with the Roadster, proved that an electric car did not have to resemble a golf cart with doors, and then gambled heavily on the Model S.

The company came close to failure more than once.  It nevertheless built factories, developed battery systems, established a charging network, and forced nearly every major automobile manufacturer to take electric vehicles seriously.  One need not believe that every Tesla is perfect—or that every prediction from Musk arrives on schedule—to recognize that he changed the automobile industry.

Then there is Neuralink.

Neuralink is attempting to produce a practical interface between the human brain and computers. Its current experimental implants have allowed people with severe paralysis to control computer cursors and other devices through thought.  The company is also developing Blindsight, an implant intended to create visual perception by stimulating the visual cortex directly.

Musk has suggested that Blindsight could eventually allow blind people to see and might someday provide vision extending into ultraviolet or infrared wavelengths.  For the moment, that portion remains a promise rather than an accomplishment. Musk’s predictions are frequently delivered according to a calendar that has only a casual relationship with the one hanging on everyone else’s wall.

Still, the research is real.  It requires neuroscientists, surgeons, engineers, custom electronics, experimental robots, regulatory approval, years of testing, and an astonishing amount of money. There is no guarantee of success. There may not even be a clearly defined path to success. That is precisely why ordinary investors are reluctant to finance it.

There are, of course, caveats.

Private capital did not accomplish all this by itself. SpaceX received hundreds of millions of dollars in NASA development payments and later billions in government contracts. NASA provided knowledge, facilities, technical standards, and—most importantly—a dependable customer.

Tesla received a $465 million Department of Energy loan that helped finance the Model S and its Fremont manufacturing plant.  Tesla repaid the loan early, but the government assumed a risk that private lenders were unwilling to accept.  Electric-vehicle tax credits also helped create a market.

Neuralink stands on decades of neuroscience and brain-computer-interface research conducted at universities, hospitals, and government laboratories, much of it financed by taxpayers.

Musk did not invent rocketry, electric motors, lithium-ion batteries, satellites, or brain implants.  What his companies have done exceptionally well is combine existing scientific knowledge, take it out of the laboratory, and force it through the long, expensive, humiliating process of becoming a useful product.

Nor does a large fortune automatically produce technological miracles.  Jeff Bezos has invested billions in Blue Origin without matching the accomplishments of SpaceX.  Musk’s Boring Company has yet to transform transportation, and the Hyperloop appears to have been placed in the same imaginary warehouse where we keep flying cars and household nuclear reactors.

Money is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It must be accompanied by technical judgment, disciplined management, persistence, and a willingness to look foolish for a very long time.  Musk exhibits a remarkable tolerance for failure, steadfastly continuing to financially support projects long after a board of directors would have cut their losses and pulled the plug.

Government certainly can conduct great research. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, the internet, GPS, jet engines, nuclear power, and much of modern medicine demonstrate that beyond dispute.  Government is particularly good at financing basic science because the benefits are widely dispersed and may not appear for decades.

The difficulty is not that government lacks money.  The difficulty is that government lacks patience under public observation.

Imagine a federal rocket program exploding three vehicles in succession.  The first explosion would produce an investigation. The second would produce televised hearings. After the third, members of Congress would demand resignations, refunds, criminal prosecutions, and perhaps a constitutional amendment prohibiting rockets.

No administrator would be rewarded for saying, “Yes, we destroyed $100 million today, but we learned a great deal.”

A private investor can call that research.  A newspaper calls it a scandal.

Government programs must survive elections, annual appropriations, changes of administration, hostile committees, inspectors general, environmental lawsuits, and the evening news.  A project that will require fifteen years of failure before producing a breakthrough must be defended repeatedly to people whose next election is never more than two years away.

Public pressure demands visible results, predictable schedules, and an explanation for every failure.  Genuine experimental research offers none of those things.  It advances through wrong turns, broken equipment, embarrassing mistakes, and discoveries that were not included in the original PowerPoint presentation.

A large pool of private capital provides something more important than money: insulation.  It gives researchers time to fail without having the project canceled by a congressional committee or converted into a campaign issue.  It allows one generation of profits to finance the next generation of speculation.

The ideal system is, therefore, neither government nor private enterprise. Government should finance basic research, absorb risks that society as a whole must bear, establish reasonable regulations, and become the first customer for valuable new technology.  Private capital should perform the frantic experimentation, integration, manufacturing, and cost reduction that government manages poorly.  There are some projects that are only feasible if large pools of capital are in the hands of relatively few people. 

Heinlein understood the essential point. The Long Range Foundation succeeded because it possessed enough money to ignore short-range thinking.

Musk has not created Heinlein’s Foundation and he certainly has not succeeded at everything he has attempted.  But he has demonstrated that civilization occasionally benefits from having an enormously wealthy eccentric willing to spend a fortune on ideas that respectable people consider ridiculous.

Some of those ideas remain ridiculous.

A few become the future.

The King Who Hated Tobacco—Right Up Until He Taxed It

You could call it royal hypocrisy.  You could call it cognitive dissonance.  You could even call it moral inconsistency—assuming, of course, that someone who claimed a divine right to rule over everyone else was expected to have morals in the first place.  Personally, I'll settle for economic opportunism on a truly royal scale, courtesy of King James I of England.

But before we get to James and his famous hatred of tobacco, we need to back up a few thousand years.

Actually...more than 12,000 years.

Long before Europeans had ever heard of tobacco, Native peoples in South America were cultivating and using it.  The plant probably originated somewhere in the Andes or nearby western South America before spreading throughout the Americas.  It was smoked, chewed, snuffed, and used in religious ceremonies from the Amazon to what is now Canada.  Contrary to popular belief, the earliest smokers probably weren't rolling cigars.  They were more likely smoking loose tobacco in primitive pipes or as wrapped leaves, while true cigars seem to have been developed much later, in the Caribbean.

Like every successful vice in history, tobacco traveled well.  Whether it spread because people enjoyed it, because they believed it had medicinal value, or because nicotine is one of the world's more persuasive chemicals is anyone's guess.  Archaeologists have found evidence that people were using wild tobacco in what is now Utah roughly 12,000 years ago. That does not  mean they were farming it, however.  Deliberate cultivation probably began somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, making tobacco one of the oldest domesticated plants in the New World.

The first Europeans to encounter tobacco arrived with Christopher Columbus in 1492.  While exploring Cuba, two members of his expedition reported that the local Taíno people carried "firebrands and bundles of leaves" that they lit and inhaled.  The Europeans had just witnessed the world's first recorded cigar smokers.  Columbus himself wasn't particularly impressed, but one of his sailors, Rodrigo de Jerez, apparently acquired the habit and may have become the first European smoker.

The Taíno also gave Europe the word tobacco—or at least something close to it.  Historians still argue over whether the original word referred to the plant itself or to the Y-shaped tube used to inhale its smoke.  Either way, within little more than a century the strange New World weed would conquer Europe far more effectively than any Spanish conquistador ever could.

By the late 1500s, tobacco had become the latest must-have import for Europe's upper crust.  Spanish and Portuguese sailors carried it home first, and before long it had reached England.  Contrary to popular legend, Sir Walter Raleigh did not introduce tobacco to England.  English sailors and explorers had already encountered it and members of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony returned home smoking it.  Raleigh's real contribution was far more powerful: he made it fashionable.  As he was one of Queen Elizabeth I's favorite courtiers, anything Raleigh did instantly became more interesting.  If Sir Walter had shown up wearing a lobster on his head, half the nobility would have been shopping for crustaceans by week's end.

We are certain that Raleigh demonstrated his new fad at court, but whether the Virgin Queen ever sampled the weed is not recorded, but I like to think she got to enjoy at least one good vice.

Then, in 1603, Queen Elizabeth died and was succeeded by James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England.  James took one look at the growing number of Englishmen puffing away on clay pipes and reacted much the way a modern health crusader reacts to a teenager with a vape.

In 1604, he published his famous pamphlet, A Counterblaste to Tobacco.  It wasn't merely a criticism of smoking—it was a full-throated literary assault.  James described tobacco as:

"A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs..."

That is one of history's more memorable one-sentence product reviews, even if the King neglected to put it on Yelp. (That’s quite a contrast to the positive advertising by tobacco sellers some 360 years later—and those guys knew about the scientific evidence that backed up the claims made by the king!)

Given such strong feelings, you might expect James to outlaw tobacco entirely.

He didn't.

Instead, in that very same year, he imposed what amounted to one of the biggest "sin taxes" in English history.  The import duty on tobacco jumped from 2 pence per pound to 6 shillings and 10 pence per pound.  Since there are twelve pence in a shilling, that meant the tax soared from 2 pence to 82 pence per pound—a staggering forty-one-fold increase.

Apparently, tobacco was so vile, so disgusting, so offensive to God and man...that the Crown simply couldn't afford to let anyone stop buying it.

The plan worked—sort of.  The higher tax generated revenue, but it also generated smugglers, who quickly discovered that avoiding an eighty-two-penny tax could be a profitable line of work.  Eventually the government moderated the duty, not because James had softened his opinion of tobacco, but because confiscating contraband is considerably less profitable than collecting taxes on legal imports.

The irony only deepened over time.  England's American colony at Jamestown was struggling to survive until John Rolfe began growing a sweeter variety of tobacco that English smokers actually wanted to buy.  Suddenly, the "loathsome" weed became the economic engine that kept Virginia alive.  Before long, English ships were carrying ever-larger cargoes of tobacco across the Atlantic, customs officials were collecting ever-larger duties, and the Crown was becoming increasingly dependent on revenue from the very product its king had condemned as an abomination.

Walk into an English tavern in about 1700 and you'd likely be handed two things: a mug of ale and a long-stemmed white clay pipe.  The pipe wasn't yours, mind you—it belonged to the tavern, just like the tankard and (probably) the cat sleeping by the fireplace.  You smoked it, handed it back, and the innkeeper tossed it into the hottest part of the fire.  Before long it was hot enough to burn away every trace of tobacco—and quite possibly every germ within a hundred yards.  Centuries before anyone had heard of bacteria, publicans had accidentally invented a remarkably effective sterilization process.

The pipes themselves were so inexpensive that they were practically the disposable coffee cups of the seventeenth century.  Most cost only a fraction of a day's wages, and if one broke, nobody shed a tear.  Archaeologists have since repaid the favor by digging up millions of broken stems and using them to date old settlements with surprising accuracy.  It seems the humble tavern pipe, designed to be smoked, broken, and forgotten, has become one of history's most talkative little artifacts.

History has a wicked sense of humor.  Governments often discover that the fastest way to embrace a vice is to figure out how to tax it.  James I may have sincerely hated tobacco, but he also loved revenue.  Faced with choosing between his principles and his treasury, the treasury won by forty-one to one.