Note by Phil Oliver on Substack: "“Today is the birthday of poet Ernest Thayer(books by this author), born in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1863). He was a bright and witty boy, born to a wealthy family that owned several prosperous woolen mills, and he never had to work much to support himself. He went to Harvard, w…"

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“Today is the birthday of poet poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/po…(amazon.com/gp/search?keywords=Ernest+Th…), born in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1863). He was a bright and witty boy, born to a wealthy family that owned several prosperous woolen mills, and he never had to work much to support himself. He went to Harvard, where he studied philosophy with William James…”

And then he wrote Casey at the Bat.

WJ was not impressed by another student’s suggestion that our national pastime might be a good illustration of “the moral equivalent of war”… or maybe he just wasn’t consciously impressed. The connection seems clear enough to me. ⚾️

The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

TWA from Monday, August 14, 2017

“The Saint” by Charles Simic from Scribbled in the Dark. © Ecco Press, 2017. ORIGINAL AUDIO - 2017. TEXT NOT AVAILABLE The original Social Security Act was signed into law on this date in 1935. It was part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and it was first intended to help keep senior citizens out of poverty. The country had had a national economic security program in place since the Civil War Pension Program began in 1862. But this program was only available to war veterans and their families; what's more, Confederate veterans were barred from the pension. After the onset of the Great Depression, poverty rates — especially among the elderly — skyrocketed. Some state pension plans were introduced, but they were inadequate and only served about 3 percent of the nation's elderly. FDR based his plan on "social insurance" policies operating in Europe, and envisioned a program funded by employment taxes collected from the workers themselves.

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