Remembering when Manhattan was from Venus

"Now I am become Hope, Healer of Nations."

Why Manhattan choses to only remember its death-dealing activities during WWII is quite beyond me.

Just because that is all that the 9/11 bombers chose to recall , is no reason to emulate their example.

(Ie, the 911 planners chose only to focus upon the Mars side of Manhattan's Janus-like face.)

Wartime Manhattan : from Mars ... or from Venus ?

If I might be permitted to gently chide the citizens of Manhattan, may I suggest that they had done very little, themselves, to balance the horrific wartime image of their city created by being tagged as the place that 'birthed' the atomic bomb and its potential destruction of the entire world.

To the 911 bombers, it is the best known image of the borough.

(And by the way, it is only men, like the bosses of the best known wartime Manhattan Project , who talk about 'birthing the bomb' and think of naming it 'Little Boy'.)

Woman know better.

They actually do birth children and know that a bomb isn't a baby.

To 911 Bombers, Manhattan was from Mars - Henry Dawson's story could have reminded them it was also from Venus

We must alway remember that there was an other Manhattan Project during WWII ; unfortunately one that remains almost totally unknown to this day.

It involved Dr Martin Henry Dawson sacrificing his own life, all in an effort to see that wartime penicillin's scanty production and distribution was de-militarized  by the Allies and then made available to all the world's 'tired, poor and huddled'.

Janus Manhattan : "destroyer of worlds" or "provider of life-affirming balm" or both ?

Penicillium Monstrance

When native Manhattanite Robert J Oppenheimer proclaimed - portentously - "Now I am become DEATH , the destroyer of worlds" after the Manhattan Project's first atomic explosion , he seems to set Manhattan's wartime image in concrete for all time.

It was this existing image of Manhattan that the 911 bombers relied upon to soften the outrage against their mass killings.

But the real Manhattan is far too complex and dynamic to ever present just one face to the world --- and so it was with its activities between 1939 and 1945.

For Manhattan ,Janus-like , had another (almost unknown and largely mis-understood) Project during WWII.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson the medical scientist had a very simple thesis : that Life inevitably 'Comes in All Sizes'.

As a result, 'global commensality' (all life dines at a common table) is a necessity forced upon all of us living beings and we might as well learn to accept it.

But the tenet of his age, The Age of High Modernity (1875 -1965), was that Bigger was Better, in fact the inevitable path of progress.

So small life would have to give way and disappear before the forces of the giants of life.

Dawson believed that WWII would end quicker, with fewer deaths, if the Allies set out to defeat Hitler morally, as well as just militarily.

Instead they were seeming intent on matching Hitler's evil doctrines, albeit in a muted fashion, cut for cut.

Killing American patients like Charles Aronson by passive neglect was hardly morally different than killing German patients like Martin Bader by active injection.

In an era that exalted the Big, Dawson dared to defend the small : small patients like Charlie and small cures, like natural penicillin from mold slime.

Another native Manhattanite , Gladys Hobby, was the most religious devout on Dawson's tiny team.

Instead of a text from Hindu religion, we might choose to see a quasi-Christian symbol in her practise of daily carrying petri dishes of sectoring penicillium mold to the wards holding the dying patients like Charlie.

She did it, she says,  to sustain their morale so they might live long enough for enough penicillin to be produced by her team to save their lives.

Anyone who as ever seen a photograph of sectored penicillium mold on a flat petri dish can not help but think it reminded them of something , but just what ?

Spikes of blue with golden droplets on top radiate in all directions, ending in a circle of white mold growth.

It is a radiant, jewel like  image - rather like a stylized sun.

Like a - that's it - a monstrance : that sun-like object that contains the sacred Host and is held aloft by the priest and minister on special occasions.

A stylized sun, radiating in all directions, warming all, was always an universal symbol of life and hope, even before Christianity.

The Host in a monstrance - Jesus's body for real or as a symbol - is the unifying symbol of the Christian tradition : offering up the hope of (eternal) life , particularly as it is often exposed before those facing death.

But sometimes Jesus offered an earthly life as well as an eternal heavenly life.

So even Lazarus died, physically, in the end, as would patients like Charlie : but even so , every additional day on earth seemed a precious boom and balm to the troubled patient and their families.

Eventually a nearby doctor , Dante Colitti, was inspired to emulate Dr Dawson's government-bucking actions to obtain illicit penicillin supplies for discarded Americans.

He got the masters of Yellow Journalism , the Hearst papers, to go to bat on behalf of the Yellow Magic and a beautiful thing soon happened.

For when a two year baby named Patricia Malone got snatched back from death , around the world 'Doctor Mom' soon was demanding that the men get their butts off the couch and start seriously producing penicillin, now !  ----- fifteen long years after it was first discovered.

Dawson was only a part of the long story of penicillin and antibiotics but he is the whole story of wartime penicillin.

Without his moral drive, the medical cum scientific cum commercial powers-to-be would have still been trying to make highly profitable , patent-able ,synthetic penicillin years after the war ended, instead of mass producing life-saving natural ( public domain) penicillin during the war that so badly needed it.

Dawson's moral urgency personally moved the family of the Pfizer boss and moved that boss to mass produce natural penicillin as soon as possible - and it was Brooklyn based Pfizer that made the vast bulk of the wartime penicillin., let us never forget.

My book about Dawson's Manhattan Project is written as a deliberate rebuttal to the story the 911 bombers told against Manhattan, to try and justify their mass killings.

What they said about Manhattan wasn't totally untrue but it told only part of her story.

Because, like Life itself, Manhattan 'Comes in All Sizes' : she has been the home to unbelievably good things as well as bad things.

I would so much like to ask the 911 bombing planners and their supporters if they or their loved ones had ever been saved by cheap abundant penicillin and do they know that the effort to de-militarize penicillin and make it available to all was spawned in the same Manhattan they love so much to hate ?

Hopefully this book will be the start of that conversation we need to have with the Manhattan-haters.....

When nations bully

From 1931 to 1946 , the world saw an ending series of bullying sessions, as big and aggressive nations bullied small nations and small peoples and small individuals.

Contemporary historians are tending to extend WWII to run from 1931 to 1946  --- which is a good first step.

But they still tend to view it exclusively through political and military lenses, but might do well  to start calling a spade a spade .

Because contemporary parents and children (if not historians)  increasingly recognize bullying as something that does not begin and end in the childhood schoolyard ....

A Presbyterian with a Monstrance of Penicillium Mold

Devout Presbyterian layperson and wartime penicillin researcher Gladys Hobby recounts in her book "Penicillin : Meeting The Challenge" of  her rounds carrying a petri dish containing a big circular 'wedged' penicillium mold, every day through the wards at Presbyterian-Columbia Hospital.

This daily pilgrimage served no medical or scientific purpose, but it did serve the moral purpose of helping to sustain the spirits of the young SBE patients there.

They all knew that faced imminent and inevitable death from their disease, unless the tiny team of which she was a part of could produce in time enough of the natural penicillin to save their lives.

Anyone who has even seen an artistic rendering of  such 'wedged' penicillium mold and an artistic rendering of a Monstrance is immediately struck, as I was, that the two paintings are very hard to tell apart.

As a Catholic, I particularly relish the image of a Calvinist Protestant dutifully carrying a monstrance, so alien to her religious traditions ( and albeit a monstrance of penicillin-hope), daily through the pain-filled wards.

Truly, God works in mysterious ways ....

Dawson rebukes the "bystanders" of the Allied "coalition of the UN-willing"

In 1939, the British and French empires were initially unwilling to honour even the letter of their solemn pledge to come to the aid of Poland if it was attacked.

And they remained in no mood to truly honour the spirit of that pledge and provide serious help to the Poles.

But - pushed by some bold MPs in the British Parliament - they at least (and at last) declared war on Hitler and thus began the formation of the coalition of people that finally stopped him.

And these two empires did so without themselves being attacked by Hitler's forces.

Let us always honour them for at least that.

For all the other nations in the ultimately victorious Allied "Coalition of the Unwilling" only took up arms against Hitler when his forces attacked their own nation.

And then they defended their homeland against him with a fiery determination.

Militarily impressive but morally indefensible.

Because until then, the sight of Hitler (and Mussolini and Tojo) attacking neighbour after neighbour the previous ten years had left the bulk of these people strangely unmoved.

They loved their own collectivity (group-love) oh fully well , but not their neighbours (no agape self-less love for them).

Often their narrow group-love went beyond the indifference of bystanders to an active dislike of neighbours as a collectivity and as individuals.

So the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil would have had very few participants, if Hitler and his Axis trio had only restrained themselves.

Just a few aggressors, a few victims and a few defenders ----- along with a whole bunch of "bystanders" , as such conduct is referred to in books on the (Jewish) Holocaust.

Maybe it is past due time that we extend the use of this term "bystander" to cover the conduct of most people on most aspects of WWII - in particular their global inaction during the long ,slow buildup to the formal declaration of war.

We bystanders stood back and did nothing while Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ,Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece and Yugoslavia got gobbled up by bigger bully neighbours.

It took two Axis mistakes to finally get the American people into the ultimate fight of good versus evil .

One was the stupid Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbour along with the British and Dutch eastern empires , and the other was the even stupider personal decision of Hitler to declare war on America.

So there never was any internal moral impulse that moved the bulk of Americans to 'do the right thing'.

But individual Americans did try to do the right thing : I intend to focus on the largely unknown agape efforts of Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.

Conventionally, Agape, the English word, means openness in general, including openness to new experiences and ideas ; Agape, the Greek word, means openness to others' needs .

My sense of Dawson's efforts was that his agape-ness showed a very broad 'openness to others' ,  open both to their individual needs and to their individual experiences and ideas.

His WWI efforts to help those wounded in combat extended to his 1930s and 1940s concern for the forgotten institutionalized chronically ill.

He was clearly open to others in need ; this is why he started to grow his own penicillin to try and save the dying SBE patients.

They had been abandoned to die by an American wartime medical establishment seeking to emulate how the wartime Nazis would treat their own SBE patients.

But Dawson was open to the pioneering idea of using natural penicillin made by the lowly penicillium mold .

All the other doctors expected penicillin could only be made by man-made efforts.

I think he did so because his studies on commensal oral bacteria had opened his eyes to the versatility of the humblest types of lifeforms.

Because when we approach others in a spirit of Dawson-like agape-ness, we not only seek to help them when they are in trouble, we also cherish them when they are not - because they have interesting ideas and experiences that we do not have and we are never smug that our group has all the answers.

Agape-ness gives us clarity as well as charity....