After his release from a Hong Kong prison in late December 1932, Ho made his way by a circuitious route back to Moscow, where he finally arrived in the late spring of 1934. This photograph, which was apparently taken in the Soviet Union, suggests that his prison experience must have been an arduous one.

Ho Chi Minh
by William J. Duiker
   (not a very good book, but a great man... described by his enemy)

The Vietnamese agronomist and journalist Bui Quang Chieeu, later a leading figure in one of the chief rival organisations to Ho Chi Minh's communist movement, recalled meeting him on the voyage and asking why someone so intelligent should wish to seek employment that required such hard labour. Thanh smiled and remarked that he was going to France to seek a reversal of the recent dismissal of his father by the imperial government.

After stops in Singapore, Colombo and Port Said, the Amiral Latouche-Treville docked in Marseilles harbor on July 6, 1911. Here Thanh received his wages -- about ten francs, a sum barely adequate to feed and house him in a cheap hotel for a few days -- and disembarked with a friend to get his first glimpse of France. For the first time, he saw electric trams ("running houses," as the Vietnamese then called them). For the first time, too, he was addressed as "monsieur" when he stopped at a cafe on the city's famous Rue Cannebiere for a cup of coffee. The experience inspired him to remark to his friend: "The French in France are better and more polite than those in Indochina." At the same time, he discovered that there was poverty in France, just as there was in French Indochina. Then, as now, Marseilles was a rough city, its streets filled with sailors, vagabonds, merchants, and thieves of all races. Seeing prostitutes board the ship to consort with the sailors, he remarked to his friend: "Why don't the French civilize their compatriots before doing it to us?"

from the book ONE-NIGHT STANDS WITH AMERICAN  HISTORY

Prostitutes in the Theater

Promoters often wonder what the best  way is to fill a theatre. In the first half of the nineteenth century free admission for "women of infamy" was the favorite method of assuring a full house. With a sizable number of prostitutes inside, the paymg customers were not far behind. And with paying customers came high ticket receipts for the theater.
Seating for the "ladies" was limited to the upper gallery of the auditorium. This arrangement affected not only the rowdiness but the design and construction of the house. Shouts and noises ernanating from the upper gallery often bore little relation to the action on the stage. Back staircases leading directly to the upper gallery began to be designed for many theaters, assuring that good citizens merely out for the show would not have to enter or leave by the same door as those going to work. This door also provided an easy exit in case any theatergoers decided they were no longer interested in watching the show.
If receipts were low, managers would sometimes send messengers directly to a house of prostitution to distribute block tickets. This type of publicity attracted even more girls than usual and brought scores of men eager to pay money to get into the theater.
Occasionally, however, public pressure forced a theater manager to close the upper gallery. Almost without fail, this reduced patronage and profits. Many theatergoers were simply not interested in seeing only the show that occurred onstage. At Boston's Tremont Theater, after one such interdiction, "scarcely fifty persons were present."
Churchmen and "respectable" members of society despised the theater and the upper gallery. According to the Reverend Phineas Densmore Gurley, President Lincoln's assassination by the actor John Wikes Booth was God's way of showing Americans the evil character and influence of the theater.
SOURCE: Claudia Johnson, "That Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century American Theaters," American Quarterly, XXVII (December 1975), 581.

from the book ONE-NIGHT STANDS WITH AMERICAN  HISTORY

How to Make 36 Million without Really Trying

Everyone knows that the great magnates of the Gilded Age fleeced the public. Yet in many cases the public literally jumped at the chance to be cheated by a Rockefeller or a Gould. Henry Rogers and William Rockefeller once earned $36 million without investing a dime, simply because the public was willing to buy anything the men's names were associated with, regardless of its value. The fortune was made by "purchasing" the Anaconda Copper Company. Rogers and Rockefeller gave a $39 million check to Marcus Daly for Anaconda, with the understanding that Daly would hold the check and not cash it in for a short time. Next, with their own clerks as dummy directors, the two robber barons founded the Amalgamated Copper Company. Amalgamated's first move? The new company, with no assets, printed up stock and randomly valued it at $75 million. With this paper the company "bought" Anaconda from Rogers and Rockefeller. The two "entrepreneurs" then went to the bank and borrowed $39 million to cover their original check to Daly. The bank gladly agreed to use the Amalgamated stock as collateral. Next, of course, Rogers and Rockefeller sold the Amalgamated stock to the hungry public for $75 million cash. The bank loan was paid off with $39 million, leaving $36 million for the two partners. They also gained one copper company.

SOURCE: Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (New York: Simon & Sdiuster, 1953), pp. 202-3.
keywords: stockmarket, bull market, stopck tip, hot stock, shares shareholder value, price earnings ratio, offer, IPO.
from the book ONE-NIGHT STANDS WITH AMERICAN  HISTORY

Millard Fillmore and the Bathtub

 
On December 28, 1917, H. L.  Mencken published in the New York Evening Mail a startling account ot the history of the bathtub in America. The history was a complete fabrication from beginning to end, and contained utterly fantastic claims, but people across the country believed it entirely. The story began to show up in other newspapers, and eventually creeped into works of scholarship. To this day it can be found in respected histories of the United States. Mencken's story began with the patently improbable claim that the bathtub was unknown in America until 1842, when Adam Thompson, a Cincinnati cotton and grain dealer, recently back from a trip to Europe, where he had laid eyes on a bathtub for the first time, introduced it amid much fanfare. Unfortunately, the celebration did not last long. Thompson, the hick from Cincinnati, could not persuade people in the cosmopolitan East of the bathtub's usefulness. Instead, the city slickers decided that the bathtub was Public Enemy Number One. Eminent physicians expressed the opinion that bathing posed a serious danger to health, while legislators in the

nation's two most advanced cities -- Philadelphia and Boston -- passed laws against it. The Boston town fathers decreed that no one could take a bath without the advice and consent of a doctor.
According to the story, opposition the bathtub remained strong until 1851, when Millard Fillmore -- described as "intrepid"  -- ordered one installed in the White House. After that bathing became fashionable.
For ten years Mencken watches in silent disbelief as his ridiculous story passed the lips of millions of gullible Amercans. Finally, in May 1926, he revealed that the whole purported history was a pack of lies that he had fabricated in 1917 "to sublimate and so make bearable the intolerable libido of the war for democracy." He had not expected, he wrote, that anyone outside of a few raving idiots would believe it.
About thirty newipapers, reaching almost 250 million people. printed Mencken's confession of the bathtub hoax. But to his astonichment the story would not die down. That June the Boson Herald, which had published Mencken's disclosure three weeks before under the title "The American People Will Swallow Anything." published the original story as a news item.
Again Mencken wrote that the whole thing was a fake, but to no avail. A few months later Scribner's Magazine printed the old story as fact. In the 1930s someone wrote a whole book based on Mencken's spoof, and in the early 1970s a prize-winning historian related the discredited facts in his widely acclaimed trilogy on the American experience. In the middle 1970s the story made its way into the comprehensive multivolume Dictionary of American History.

Source: James T. Farrell, ed., H. L. Mencken: Prejudices (New York: Vintage. 1955), pp. 242-47.
from the book ONE-NIGHT STANDS WITH AMERICAN  HISTORY

Before the Titanic
 

The sinking of the Titanic on a cold April night in the icy waters of the Atlantic stunned the world. Partly the shock was due to the enormous loss of life: 1 500 dead. Partly it was because the British luxury liner was loaded with rich and glamorous passenger. So many, as a matter of fact, that not a few scheduled high society events were canceled or postponed that spring. But mostly, perhaps, the world was startled because it had had so much faith in the new ship. The largest ship in the world  ... declared unsink-able by experts ... so safe it carried just a few lifeboats. A ship that symbolized the good and expensive life.
But the sinking of such a ship had not been unanticipated.
Fourteen years before, a young American named Morgan Robertson had written a novel about a similar ship, filled with fabulously wealthy passengers, which hit an iceberg in the Atlantic one cold April night and went down -- a ship named Titan.
Robertson's ship was remarkably like the real one. Both vessels were triple-screw and could reach about twenty-five knots. The real ship was 800 feet long; Robertson's 882.5 feet. The Titanic weighed about 66,000 tons fully loaded; the fictional ship weighed about 70,000 tons fully loaded. Both had a maximum capacity of approximately 3,000 passengers, and neither was equipped with an adequate number of lifeboats. Both ships were reputedly unsinkable; both were the largest ships in the world.
In the novel the big ship represented the best of modern society, just as the Titanic would fourteen years later. And, of course, the sinking of the Titan shocked the civilized world as much as the sinking of the Titanic.
The name of Robertson's novel was Futility.
Source: Walter Lord, A  Night to remember (New York: Holt,  Rinehart & Winston, 1955), p. 9.


from the book ONE-NIGHT STANDS WITH AMERICAN  HISTORY

The Best Man for the Job
 

In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt named Oscar Straus, a Jew, as secretary of commerce and labor. At a dinner celebrating the appointment, T. R. explained that he had selected  the new secretary without regard to race, color, creed, or party. The President had been accused by some of courting the large New York Jewish vote with the appointment. T.  R. stressed, however, that his only concern had been to find the most qualified man  in the United States for the job, Jacob Schiff, who was present at the dinner, was asked by the President to confirm this. Schiff, wealthy, respectable, old, and quite deaf, nodded emphatically and exclaimed, "Dot's right, Mr. President, you came to me and said, 'Chake, who is der best Jew I can appoint Secretary of Commerce?' "
SOURCE:   John   Morton  Blum,   The  Republican Roosevelt   (Cambridge,  Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 37.
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