Posts Tagged → coal
Portrait of an American Man
Across America, tourists visit all kinds of special places, built and natural. Across America, university campuses are home to special academic buildings, donated by successful business people who graduated from those same colleges. Probably everyone who visits and studies at these places take them for granted, except the conservancies, land trusts, and other caretakers charged with the operations and maintenance jobs.
Here today, we look at one of these historic donors, who built and donated one of America’s most famous architectural statements. He was a successful businessman from humble beginnings in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of department stores, which were the internet/ Amazon/ eBay of their time, his family went from owning small clothing, fabric, and hat stores to one big department store in downtown Pittsburgh. The enormous store was famous for carrying everything that every household required, in grades, qualities, and prices that every household could afford. Foods, clothing, fabrics for making clothing, pots, pans, utensils, firearms and ammunition, fishing gear, shoes, work boots…the list is endless.
Incidentally, in the 1970s State College, PA, where I grew up, the O.W. Houts department store, out at the Western very end of College Avenue, carried everything a family would need, including old coins, stone arrowheads dug up in the local farm fields, records, a wide selection of utility-grade firearms (where I got my first .22 single shot rifle and a 16 gauge single shot shotgun), clothing, shoes, food, etc. Next door was the Houts Hardware store and Lumber Yard. They sold nails by the pennyweight, tools, keys, and of course all kinds of locally sourced lumber.
Despite its relatively small size, the O.W. Houts department store and hardware store were absolutely core parts of the State College area lifestyle. And so we can imagine what the gigantic Kaufmann Department Store was like in Pittsburgh, many many times the size of Houts. The wives and daughters of coal miners shopping for calico two aisles over from the wives and daughters of coal mine owners shopping for lace and fur trimmings. 1920s Pittsburgh was a gigantic melting pot of iron, steel, and fifty different nationalities from around the world, and everyone got most of their necessities from the Kaufmann Department Store.
Edgar Kaufmann built the family business from the ground up, taking big risks and making big sacrifices along the way, and became exceptionally wealthy. His family upbringing emphasized giving charity, which he did in large amounts throughout his life. The one charitable donation he is best known for is Fallingwater and its surrounding Bear Run Preserve.
Below is Edgar Kaufmann’s portrait, done in 1929, and occasionally on display at Fallingwater, which is where I photographed it. It is filled with meaningful symbolism and clues to his personality and outlook on life. Below is my understanding of this statement.
Edgar is standing between two potent symbols, the (Christian?) alms bowl (charity) to his right, and the carefully shielded Middle Eastern crescent moon, on his left. This moon would be his own background, of the desert, partially obstructed by cloth, that is slightly pulled back to both cover it, and also reveal it by drawing the eye to it. Cloth being the most representative symbol of his department store’s biggest staple as well as its famous fashion statements.
He is holding a rustic walking stick in his dominant right hand, which puts emphasis on the importance of this simple cut branch. Yes, it is a humble symbol of hiking and the outdoor lifestyle, and it also has the V top for holding venomous snakes’ heads. The other venemous snakes in 1929 were the Nazis, and maybe this is his way of saying he would be seeking to catch them and pin them down. Or that he was at least aware of them in his life.
Edgar’s left arm leans heavily on the chair, perhaps a symbol of his never-ending work ethic stuck at a desk.
The chair’s right side, Edgar’s outdoorsy, charitable, artistic, manly, masculine, and muscular side, is well carved, carefully defined. Its left side is deliberately stunted and malformed, as if to say that his outdoors life and his charity work defined him best, and his boring work life was his least interesting aspect. Don’t we all have have different sides to us and to our personalities?
His sporty tennis sweater says all-America, while his shirt sleeves are pulled up to reveal his manly biceps. The tennis sweater is Harvard red, instead of the blue from his alma mater Yale. Something must have happened at Yale to make him upset with the school.
Edgar Kaufmann conveys an image of American masculinity straddling two worlds, one of which he must subtly hide. And the reason I picked this portrait to write about is because nearly 100 years after this was painted, America is back to that 1929 period, where American Jews have to hide their identity, lest they be hurt, abused, robbed, for merely being Jews. This is not a good reflection on Americans, that we have come back to this kind of un-American behavior.
Edgar was a political conservative, but a cultural libertine..another personality split some readers might relate to. He helped design, build, lived in, showcased, and then donated Fallingwater through his son, Edgar jr, for public benefit. Across America, so many historic tourist attractions and artistic buildings were created or donated by Jews, as were an awful lot of the donated buildings at universities. We should be celebrating this ethic, not picking on these people as a whole.
Edgar Kaufmann
Hurricane Helene says No Such Thing as White Privilege
“White privilege” may be the most racist thing you will hear anyone say or allege in your lifetime, probably from the most racist people on Planet Earth, white liberal Democrats, but that has not stopped this fake social construction from being pronounced and bandied about like it is actually real.
Well, Mother Nature herself has recently descended from the heavens above to demonstrate that in reality and in the natural world too, there is no such thing as “White privilege.”
In the form of Hurricane Helene last week, Mother Nature inflicted huge devastation and destruction upon eastern Tennessee and northern North Carolina and the regional demographic there. It is a group of people I have had a lot of life experience with and who I maintain intense admiration for, white rural working people.
That there are a lot of white liberal Democrats in Asheville folded into the mix of Hurricane Helene victims does not mitigate or reduce my sympathy or hope for everyone’s full recovery there. Everyone is equal before the law, everyone is created in the image of God, and we are all Americans who should be caring for one another, regardless of our political opinions or religious views.
So Hurricane Helene destroyed billions of dollars in built infrastructure, including homes, towns, villages, farms, rural roads and interstates and bridges and schools and hospitals, stranding hundreds of thousands of largely white rural American citizens without power, water, or food.
And so just to demonstrate that white people can be victims and actually have no racial privilege whatsoever, the federal government response to Hurricane Helene has been… almost silent. Like cavalier and ignoring the huge mess of human misery. Like on purpose.
Recall that to our elites, Appalachian whites are the deplorable, disposable, ignored, maligned, forgotten Americans who nonetheless mine the coal that gives us most of our electricity, serve as the roughnecks on oil and gas drilling platforms that run our vehicles, fill up the special forces and combat infantry positions in our most highly motivated and patriotic high-risk fighting forces, who log the forests that provide us with high grade lumber for our fancy kitchens and furniture, who work for the railroads, and who drive trucks across the interstates that bring Amazon Prime to your home super pronto.
In every one of these professions, these (white, rural) people are taking big risks that almost always exceed their expected financial return. Why? Because they are proud to work hard, and they love America more than they love themselves. And they are devoted to America because there is no other nation anywhere that will give them the same freedom and opportunity.
White rural working people are the people who disproportionately make America work and run and give you, dear reader, the comfortable lifestyle to which you have become all too accustomed. And now that these people need a lot of help to get through this natural catastrophe, it sure appears that they are being abandoned by the same federal government that is simultaneously giving away unlimited taxpayer dollars right and left to border-jumping illegal migrants and to the porous demi-government in Ukraine.
I am hearing mostly consistent reports of aid efforts from acquaintences, friends, and family in Asheville and eastern Tennessee (some of their own photos are below; one of my family members from there is now in a hotel in South Carolina). Last week a friend of mine from Harrisburg loaded up his work van with bottled water and food and drove seven hours to the literal end of the paved road in eastern Tennessee, where he followed signs to a Baptist church. There in the church parking lot he was met with tears of fear and appreciation, and many needy hands as entire families sought shelter there with their sole remaining belongings: Their clothing on their bodies. (Some of his own photos of this are below).
Radio personality Glenn Beck reported his unbelievably negative experience with a sole FEMA crew instructive example of No White Privilege To Be Found Here.
Plenty of political fallout has resulted from apparent Biden-Harris government failure, or even willful blocking of aid efforts. While checking his email at a FEMA post, a partisan leftist Democrat in my family there said this is all politically generated misinformation, but I don’t know if I can accept that. The damning reports and real-time online videos are overwhelming and seem irrefutable, while politically partisan mainstream media outlets appear locked into a defend-Kamala Harris-at-all-costs posture, instead of having their crews on the ground recording what the citizens journalists are capturing.
Tons of on-the-ground reports are pouring out of the region, showing a complete lack of federal interest in helping, and a complicated mix of local territorialism, miscommunication, petty power flexing, and even theft of supplies. And even when the Biden-Harris Administration does speak publicly, they are actually saying sorry, we have no money for your disaster relief.
Because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ALREADY GAVE AWAY all the unsustainable taxpayer money to illegals and the endless war in Ukraine.
Folks, not only was there never any such thing as White privilege, but when there was an opportunity to demonstrate that American Whites get treated at least equally with everyone else, both American citizen of color and illegal border jumper alike, the point is made by our current federal government that American White people come last, if they get any help at all.
Natural resource envy
Being a conservationist, I’m on a bunch of email lists about conservation, natural resources, environmental protection.
Why and how groups send emails decrying natural resource companies, while happily using those same resources, like oil, coal, and natural gas, is beyond comprehension.
Oil and gas companies serve a demand by consumers who want their cars to run, their stoves to cook.
Coal powered electricity is ubiquitous. It runs hospitals and schools, as well as your home and place of business.
Somehow, in a twisted way, the companies supplying the power are “bad,” and the consumers are off the hook. As if these companies operate in a vacuum.
Credibility suffers when you’ve got two or more standards for the same behavior. It’s sad because environmental quality is important. My request to conservatives is to not dismissively abandon the field of battle, and don’t let the far left define or frame the issue, either. And don’t let the leftist groups get away with demonization of companies the world depends upon, unless those same groups are willing to generate their own power and transportation fuels.