Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant — ” by Emily Dickinson. Public Domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of advertising exec-turned-writer Ilene Beckerman (books by this author), born in Manhattan (1935). She didn't begin her writing career until the age of 60, and even then, she became a published author almost by accident. She had written and illustrated a book for her five children, something to remember her by. She said: "My purpose was to say things to my children one doesn't have the time to say. I wanted them to know I wasn't always their mother. I was a girl, I had best friends, we did stupid things together. I was on a bus with my friend once eating dog bones so people would look at us. I wanted them to know."

She took the book she'd written down to the ad agency she owned, to use the machines there to make a dozen photocopies. She put them in big red binders, with the illustrations she had sketched in plastic sheet protectors, and handed them out to her children and a few close friends. She was done, or thought she was. Then, the cousin of a friend got a hold of one of the binders and sent it over to Algonquin Books. Pretty soon, the publisher was calling her about publishing her book. Beckerman said that they offered her "an advance that had a comma in it. I think I fainted."

The book came out in 1995, and was called Love, Loss, and What I Wore. It's the story of her life growing up in Manhattan in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, accompanied by drawings of the clothes that she was wearing during that time. She insists that clothing plays an integral part in many women's memories, that they can recall important events or distinct spans of their lives by what they were wearing at the time. When the book came out, bookstores were not sure whether to market it as memoir or fashion. It has now sold more than 100,000 copies.

Beckerman insists that clothes are the least important part of her book, which she considered a memoir. The book contains advice and aphorisms from her grandmother, who raised her, such as, "If you have to stand on your head to make somebody happy, all you can expect is a big headache."

On this day in 1215, King John of England placed his seal on the Magna Carta, granting basic liberties to his subjects. He wasn't the first English king to grant a charter, but he was the first to have it forced on him by his barons. He had taxed the Church and the barons heavily to fund the Third Crusade, defend his holdings in Normandy, and pay for unsuccessful wars, and England was on the brink of civil war. The charter limited the monarchy's absolute power and paved the way for the formation of Parliament, and it is the nearest thing to a "Bill of Rights" that Britain has ever had. It guaranteed, among other things, that "No free man shall be arrested, or imprisoned, or deprived of his property, or outlawed, or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor shall we go against him or send against him, unless by legal judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land."

Of course, John had no intention of upholding the document, and it was repealed almost immediately on the grounds that he gave his seal under duress. But the idea had taken root, and through a succession of subsequent charters, it became the basis for the British legal system and, in turn, the legal systems of most of the world's democracies. Parts of the United States Constitution were lifted directly from the Magna Carta, and it is so central to our own idea of law that the American Bar Association erected a monument at the meadow of Runnymede. The yew tree, under which the signing is believed to have taken place, still stands.

The first successful transfusion of blood into a human was performed on this day in 1667. The blood donor was a sheep, and the supervising doctor was a French physician named Jean-Baptiste Denys. He put a small amount — about 12 ounces — of sheep's blood into a 15-year-old boy, who survived the procedure. He repeated his experiment on another man and was again successful, but when he tried to increase the amount of blood actually transfused for his third and fourth patients, they died, and the practice of animal-human blood transfusions was outlawed in 1670.

It was believed at that time that volatile, hot-tempered people could be calmed by giving them the blood of a docile animal, like a sheep or cow, but there were concerns about long-term changes and mutations in the patient. Would he end up with a sheep's head? Samuel Pepys mused in his diary about the possibilities: "This did give occasion to many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such like." It was generally agreed upon that humans should only receive transfusions of human blood, but the first successful human-to-human blood transfusion didn't occur until 1818, due to lack of understanding about blood type compatibility.

On this day in 1752, Benjamin Franklin is believed to have performed his famous kite experiment and proved that lightning is electricity. He tied the kite to a silk string with an iron key on the end. From the key, he ran a wire into a Leyden jar, a container that stored electrical charge. He then tied a silk ribbon to the key, which he held onto from inside a shed, to keep it dry. The electrical charge from the storm overhead passed through the key and into the Leyden jar.

Franklin, as it turns out, was lucky to have conducted this experiment safely. Several others who attempted it after him were electrocuted. He used the information he gained to design lightning rods, which conducted a storm's electrical charge safely into the ground. One of Franklin's lightning rods saved his own house years later, during a storm.

The Duluth lynchings occurred on this date in 1920. Three young men — Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie — were among a group of six black circus workers wrongly accused of raping a white woman. They were pulled from their cells in the Duluth jail and hanged from a light pole in front of a crowd of thousands. Nineteen men were arrested in the lynching, eight stood trial, and three were convicted of rioting. They served less than 15 months of their five-year sentence. Two of the surviving circus workers were tried for rape, in spite of a lack of evidence of sexual or any other type of assault, and one was convicted and sentenced to 30 years.

Many African-Americans left Duluth as a result of the lynching, and those that remained founded a chapter of the NAACP; the organization's first guest speaker was sociologist, black protest leader, and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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