History | The Gad About Town

Today in History, February 19

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

A note about The Gad About Town web site: A very sad thing happened in my girlfriend’s family this week, and while she has been attending to matters related to this, I have been striving to attend to her. My intent with the “This Day in History” feature is for it to be just that, a feature, but I have not had the time to finish my backlog of posts. Thank you all for your notes of encouragement about this feature. And, look, here it is now:

Operation Detachment, more famously known as the Battle of Iwo Jima, began 71 years ago today. The battle for control of the island, whose value as either a resource or a staging area for future operations was questioned by civilian and military authorities alike even as the invasion commenced, raged for five weeks.
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Today in History, February 18

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

Toni Morrison is 85 today. Her most recent novel, “God Help the Child,” was published last year.

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“What took you so long?”—Robert Hanssen

When he was arrested by FBI agents 15 years ago today, Robert Hanssen asked them, “What took you so long?” An FBI agent himself, Hanssen had been a volunteer mole selling secrets to the Soviet Union and then to Russia since 1979. By February 2001, he had grown suspicious that he was being monitored, finally, and had started to look for a new job, had complained that he suspected his car was bugged, and wrote to whomever might help him on the other side that he thought “something has aroused the sleeping tiger.” His 22 years of intelligence damage earned him $1.4 million and 15 consecutive life sentences. His arrest was announced two days later, on February 20, 2001.

He is held in the “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, in solitary confinement for 23 hours each day.
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Today in History, February 17

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

“Probably we err in treating most of these pictures seriously. It is likely that many of them represent in the painters the astute appreciation of the powers to make folly lucrative which the late P.T. Barnum showed with his faked mermaid. There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint.”—Theodore Roosevelt, “A Layman’s Views of an Art Exhibition”

The New York Armory show of 1913 opened on this date that year. It had nothing to do with the National Guard, but the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized that year by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors needed a huge space, so the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue was secured. More than 1300 works by about 300 artists were featured.

The exhibition introduced the American public to paintings by Matisse and Picasso and Derain and sculpture by Duchamp. The public was scandalized, having seen very little avant garde art before. Former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a review for Outlook magazine in which he praised the American, realistic, paintings seen in the show, but said of the European works, “That’s not art!”
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