Silently
and unconsciously, some of us still pay what is by now long undue tribute to the
visionary author, “mechanician and mathematician” Byron Alden Brooks (1845-1911), often many hundreds of times a day.
Ostensibly, we use his invention, the “Shift” key, on our keyboards. But with a
computer keyboard, of course, the “Shift” key shifts nothing. Logically, it should be called a “Caps” key. Historically, it
could have been called the “Vibrate”, “Slide”, “Move”, “Push” or “Draw” key, none
of which would be any more relevant to computer use than “Shift”. Vibrate,
slide, move, push and draw were the words Brooks himself used to describe the typewriter
carriage movement in his invention, when he applied for a patent for it on
December 30, 1875. He didn’t mention “Shift” once. And although Henry Harper
Benedict also favoured “Slide”, it was Remington, not Brooks, which
decided “Shift” was more appropriate. If Remington had elected to apply the
eccentric Lucien Stephen Crandall’s prior invention to its typewriter, the
“Shift” key might have become the “Oscillate” or “Swing” key. Happily, however,
Benedict and his Remington employers recognised that Brooks had the far more
practical idea, and so today we’re stuck with “Shift”.
With the IBM Selectric, the carriage doesn’t
shift, but the golfball single type element on the head-and-rocker carrier does,
smartly pivoting on its whiffletree mechanism, 180 degrees from right to left
to change case. The advent of computer typesetting technology eliminated even
that much movement, and the word “Shift” became totally obsolete. Ironically, Brooks himself foresaw electronic communications - along with electric cars, solar power and
colour photography. These were things he described in his 1893 utopian novel Earth Revisited, a work verging on science fiction in which the protagonist,
Herbert Atheron, dies and wakes up as
Harold Amesbury in 1992. New York City has become cleaner, healthier Columbia
and war is a thing of the past. He may have been well off the mark on that
point, but the inventive, far-seeing Brooks can still be recalled today in
other ways, including politics. And the early ructions at the Republican National
Convention in Cleveland last week was one of those.
Brooks gave Atheron/Amesbury his fictional names after an
opportunist young broker called Walter Butler
Atterbury (1854-1953), who like the Earth
Revisited hero enjoyed life into the second half of the 20th Century.
Atterbury coming out against Seth Low for the borough’s nomination in the
summer of 1897 split the GOP in two in Brooklyn, incurring Brooks’ considerable
wrath. Brooks labelled him a “fool”. Atterbury
came to represent, in Brooks’ eyes, a figure of mistrust and poor judgement. A
portent, perhaps, for another divisive Republican Party nominee, 120 years down
the track.
Brooks, like the inventor of the
typewriter itself, Christopher Latham Sholes, was an unwavering Republican,
although Sholes was the beneficiary of political patronage known as the
"spoils system", an issue which divided the Republican Party throughout
the 1880s. For his part, Brooks was a GOP powerbroker in Brooklyn, seemingly in
no need of party patronage. Yet he would have qualified as a “Stalwart”, one of
those opposed to the "Half-Breeds" (that is, half-Republicans), the
faction of moderates led by Maine senator James Gillespie Blaine (1830-1893) which
backed civil service reform and a merit system. At the 1880 Republican National
Convention, Ulysses S. Grant (1822-85) was pitted against Blaine for the party
nomination. Grant's campaign was led by Stalwart leader Roscoe Conkling (1829-88)
of New York, who attempted to impose a unit-rule by which a state's votes would
be grouped together for only one candidate. But some Stalwarts went against him, by supporting Blaine, and the Half-Breeds united to defeat the unit-rule and chose
James Abram Garfield (1831-1881) as a compromise candidate. Garfield won the
nomination and went on to win the presidential election. Garfield was
assassinated by Stalwart Charles Julius Guiteau (1841-1882) and the new
Stalwart president, Chester Alan Arthur (1829-1886), surprised his own faction
by promoting civil service reform and issuing government jobs based on a merit
system. In 1883 the Half-Breeds put through Congress the Pendleton Civil
Service Reform Act, which ended the spoils system.
Opposing any return to this system, in
November 1897, Brooks stood accused of being a latter-day, reform-minded Mugwump,
a cry back to those Republican activists, such as Seth Low (1850-1916), who had
bolted from the GOP by supporting Democratic candidate Stephen Grover Cleveland
(1837-1908) in the presidential election of 1884. The Mugwumps switched
parties in protesting the financial corruption associated with Republican
candidate Blaine. In a close election, the Mugwumps supposedly made the
difference in New York State and swung the vote to Cleveland. (The word, from the
Algonquian [Natick] mugquomp, meaning "important person, kingpin", implied
Mugwamps were sanctimonious and holier-than-thou in holding themselves aloof
from party politics.) After Cleveland’s election, the word Mugwump survived for
more than a decade, as an epithet for a party bolter in American politics.
In a letter to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on November 8, 1897, an anonymous critic
responded to Brooks’ letter of November 6, headed “Some Things That Politicians
Should Have Remembered”, by labelling Brooks a “striking illustration of that
species of Mugwamphile” in exhibiting an “insuffarable conceitedness” of
“knowing it all”.
The
debate concerned the election for the first mayor of the expanded City of
Greater New York (incorporating the five boroughs of New York [Manhattan],
Kings [Brooklyn], Queens, Richmond [Staten Island] and the Bronx), and involved
Low and Benjamin Franklin Tracy (1830-1915).
Tracy was the official Republican
candidate, but finished third on 101,863 votes, a long way behind Democrat
Robert Anderson Van Wyck (1849-1914), 233,997 votes, and Low, who represented a
fusion of the “goo-goo” (good government) party, the Citizens' Union, and the
GOP, on 151,540 votes. Brooks believed the Democrats had “voted blindly”
against good judgement and their own best interests. But he was most distraught
by the way the Republican vote had been split, with the GOP insisting on party
loyalty support for Tracy (who Brooks called “The Old Man of the Sea”) instead of
throwing its full weight behind Low, a decision he put down to the “stupidity
and treachery of the so-called leaders” of the GOP. Had Low been elected,
Brooks argued, the result would have preserved the “organization intact for the
future”. However, the Republican leaders, he claimed, had vilified Low and
caused greater division and dissension within the party. Brooks asked whether
GOP leaders Thomas Collier Platt (1833-1910), Lemuel Ely Quigg (1863-1919) and Timothy Lester Woodruff (1858-1913) were “fools or knaves”. As for Walter Butler
Atterbury, whose opposition to Low in Brooklyn was the wedge which
split the Republicans in two, Brooks was in no doubt - he was a fool. And George Washington Brush (1842-1927)
basically a traitor.
There was also no doubt in Brooks’ mind that even as a
compromise candidate, Low represented the expanded City of Greater New York’s
best chance of a return to the “Golden Age” of good, clean government against the
influence of Tammany Hall. The Citizens Union had been founded on just such concerns,
stemming from the growing clout of the Democratic Party’s corrupt political
machine under Hugh McLaughlin (1827-1904). Low had already served as mayor of
Brooklyn from 1881-1884 and was president of Columbia University from 1890-1900.
However, his Mugwump support of Cleveland in 1884 furthered the rift with
fellow Republicans and Democrat Daniel Darling Whitney (1819-1914) succeeded
Low as Brooklyn Mayor that year, taking the borough back to Democratic machine
politics for another seven years. Low finally succeeded in the City of Greater New
York mayoral election in 1901, again on a fusion ticket and with the support of
Mark Twain.
Nonetheless, this episode in Brooks’ active political life
had been marked by disappointment and frustration with the GOP’s leadership.
Division among the Republicans? It could surely never have happened in Brooks’ brave new world, as envisaged in Earth Revisited. Could it?
3 comments:
I don't think the GOP will ever agree or quit being a divided party any more than the Democratic party being for democracy. Earth Revisited seems to be a lot like Edward Bellamy's book Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887.
I've long been annoyed by the fact that the pc has CAPS LOCK but not SHIFT LOCK, to do the number row at the same time.
Interesting post, as always.
I do hope you know of the David Cronenberg 'Mugwumps' in his movie "Naked Lunch" Highly recommended to all type writer addicts!
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