No second acts for most war veterans - except in booming NY ?

F Scott Fitzgerald's most famous line is also his most misquoted line.

For Fitzgerald - like his character Jay Gatsby - was ever the eternal optimist , never the cynic.


For in fact, in a published essay written just after the Stock Market Crash, "My Lost City", Fitzgerald admitted that while he once thought there are no second acts in America , the exception had to be for those living in eternally booming New York City.

I thought of this while reading, in passing, literally hundreds of brief biographies of WWI veterans in the British and Commonwealth media, to mark this the one hundred anniversary of the start of WWI.

For these biographies tend to offer a twisted take on the true reality of WWI veterans.

For the relatively few lives taken up, from a choice of the literally millions of possible lives, and put in the newspapers almost always are of those men who were in the infantry frontlines and among those who died during the war.

Died as either notable heroes --- or as happenstance victims.

My home province of Nova Scotia, for example, has made much of  its first and last soldiers to die in the Great War : both men died undramatically in routine frontline activities when almost randomly shot by snipers.

But maybe only a third of WWI veterans occupied the most forward infantry trench and actually went 'over the top'.

The rest served in the Navy and Air Force, in the Artillery, Engineers, Pioneer and Forestry Brigades, in Supply, in the Medical Corps and as battalion musicians - on and on, in situations more to the rear of No Man's Land.

Death and injury was almost as common to them as to the infantry but their living conditions did tend to take less of a toll on their lifelong general health.

And in pure statement of fact, most frontline infantry soldiers in almost all WWI armies did come home alive.

Alive, but broken to some degree  - suffering losses in both mental and physical health.

Wounded limbs and scarred lungs did tend to heal, for  you had to be relatively young and healthy to even make it to the tough frontline life.

But the damage doesn't really ever go permanently away and can lead to a lessened capacity to enjoy life and an earlier than expected death.

Many WWI veterans did not simply return to humdrum lives that failed to ever match the achievements of this  brief youthful experience, to sound the old cliche - instead they became even more distinguished in their later civilian careers.

I have often thought it worth detailing whether those WWI vets with the most noted successful civilian careers were also the ones who suffered the least wretched physical conditions during the war.

Because success is often measured as much by sheer quantity (length of time doing an activity) as by quality while doing that activity.

Frequently Genius dies young and unknown while the more ordinary figure can achieve fame by having a long career and merely doing their job competently.

To be honest, I am thinking now of the twice-wounded war vet and penicillin pioneer Martin Henry Dawson who died tragically young and relatively unknown at 48 versus his rival Howard Florey who successfully avoided war service, kept his health and died age seventy world famous.

Dawson - I would hold - was never the conventional scientist or much admired by his more ordinary and conventional fellow scientists - but one more likely to break old paradigms and create new ones.

But he didn't live long enough, in good enough health, to do more than start down this path.

By contrast, Florey was highly conventional in both his lifestyle and in scientific thought -no ground breaker here - but nonetheless a hard worker, ambitious, a life-long striver.

The early death of his more successful penicillin rival ensured Florey ended up showered in honors and a baron, rewards more for his science administration skills than for his science experiments.

But back to Dawson - he might well have had a moderately successful life if he had stayed in Canada after the war - nothing perhaps to ever match the glory of his war record.

But instead he went to booming 1920s New York City, where among other things, he became the person to ever work with DNA in a test tube , ushering in our era of microbiology and also the first to ever inject penicillin into a patient, ushering in our era of antibiotics as well.

A notable second act .

F Scott Fitzgerald would have been proud indeed ....

Emma Lazarus's message to immigrants : America , if it is about anything , is ALL about second acts ...

F Scott Fitzgerald got it wrong. Not about everything , of course. But the bit about there being 'no second acts in American lives' - that 24/7 bromide of the modern news and entertainment biz.

As Emma Lazarus's own legacy demonstrates , there is plenty of room in America for second and even third acts.

Not really a surprise to readers of the New Testament I suppose.

Or to tens of millions of born again Americans (or to the many fans of Richard M Nixon) .

Lazarus arising 

Emma was actually quite an internationally prominent poet and social activist in her day.

Her poem written to raise funds for the pedestal of the French-donated Statue of Liberty was the definite hit of the fund-raising effort.

But then she took seriously ill with a terminal cancer and so became inactive in America's literary cum social action circles.

Thus, in the lead up to the actual ceremony mounting the statue in New York harbour neither she or her poem was mentioned.

(Again , re-affirming a cliche of the modern news and celebrity biz - you have to be out there all the time self-promoting or you're yesterday's news.)

The poem was also almost totally absent from the many tributes to her on her death in 1887.

No artistic figure , no matter how prominent or how big a seller while alive , remains so unless they created a historically important institution, school of thought or work of art.

That is to say no one remains prominent unless they are taught about in school or college.

One sixty word poem tossed off in an hour, but considered highly suitable for a students' anthology, can easily out-weigh a lifetime spent writing three million profitable words , in this fame game.

Seemingly , Emma lacked that 'hit' .

But in 1903 , a friend of Ms Lazarus , Georgina Schuyler , re-discovered the poem about the statue (The New Colossus) in an used book store.

She succeeded , after a great deal of resistance from Emma's family, in having the last few lines of it engraved on a modest bronze plaque in a corner of the statue.

There it remained un-noticed for another thirty years until a Slovene immigrant and social activist , Louis Adamic , campaigned tirelessly for decades , until his death in 1951 , to turn the poem and the statue into a symbol of how America should still welcome immigrants.

(In 1924, America had closed its doors to all but a handful of immigrants from a handful of nordic protestant countries.)

By 1936, at the fifty year celebration of the statue, FDR's carefully eloquent speech had to take in this new sense of the statue taking in (all) refugees who thereby got a second chance at life in America --- because, in FDR's equally careful bow to the right - America offered expanded liberties (to all those who qualified as good enough to become Americans) - the original meaning of the statue.

Gradually , though still contested today by many on the right, Lazarus's hijacking of the Statue of Liberty's original meaning has won the day.

And what person worldwide would be considered truly educated by others if they instantly failed to know what the words tired, huddled and wretched refer to ?

I have written and spoken before (on my local CBC)  about how fragile the early existence of today's universally understood myths often were.

My starting point was simply a passing reference in George F Williston's Saints and Strangers of how during the Revolutionary War , the British took the crucial manuscripts of Governor Bradford, the only real chronicler of the early Plymouth Colony , from out of a Boston church steeple and behind the counter of a humble Halifax grocery store.

There the sheets of paper manuscript detailing the tale of the First Thanksgiving Dinner almost got consumed itself --- as wrappers for greasy pieces of cheese on their way home to hungry post-revolutionary Nova Scotian diners !

This led me to discover the long and windy path to today's universally known account of that first dinner.

So today's story of the first thanksgiving dinner actually is fully faithful to the original event.

However , for most of the 19th century, the story was re-cast as the Indians sending hostile arrows and tomahawks, not peaceful food, to the gathering !

Now I am trying to revive a symbolic tale for Manhattan and America.

True but nevertheless forgotten : Martin Henry Dawson and penicillin-for-all.

His hugely significant role was well noted in the first detailed newspaper and book accounts about wartime penicillin - which coincided with his premature death.

But Dawson had four problems if he wished to have a 'hit' .

He was extremely modest about his role while alive.

He was dead. ( And had no kin or friend who felt like working hard to keep his story alive.)

Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey were alive.

They were total failures in terms of totally failing to do what they intended to do with penicillin versus what America had done so successfully with penicillin.

They were pushy self-promoters.  And all of Britain backed them fully in this need to re-cast the history of wartime penicillin as a British triumph.

Academic historians have fully bought into either the Fleming or Florey version .

Though I find it rather noteworthy that generations of Hollywood producers (armed only with cigars rather than doctorates) consider both men's story to be box office poison and have failed to make a movie out of the dramatic events of wartime penicillin.

My efforts might thus seem totally hopeless but for one more bromide from the North American newsroom.

Those heartless bastards in the news and entertainment biz who give you your fleeting 15 minutes of fame and then toss you out like a used condom ?

They love - simply love - a comeback story - clawing your way back out of the grave like a 'where are they now' lazarus.

The latest example - timely this - is Weird Al Yankovic , who write , sings and performs musical video parodies of well known pop songs while sending up pop culture.

The very physically unattractive and supernerdy Yankovic was supposed to remain a one hit wonder from almost 40 years ago - a weird guy playing accordion at a time of heavy metal and punk.

But he hung on in and gradually getting him to parody you
became as crucial to an superstar's ego as dipping your feet in cement in Hollywood or seeing yourself in wax at Madame Tussauds .

This week his latest album debuted at number one in America and the press went crazy --- this just seemed the-paint-by-numbers kit of all comeback stories - even if Weird Al never really left.

Dawson's no prettier than Al - his biting wit not as potent - but morally , his story really can't be beat.

There's hope yet ...