Word: benjamin
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...Archeologist Benjamin Dean Meritt is deciphering 6,000 pre-Christian Greek inscriptions. Said suave, barrel-chested North Carolinian Meritt: "Some are right interesting." For 1945 publication, he and Assistant, W. Kendrick Pritchett (now in the Army) have planned a who's who of some 30,000 Athenians mentioned in Meritt's collected inscriptions. Meritt is proud of U.S. archeology, says the long-dominant German variety has declined...
Disorderly Teetotaler. Like his contemporary, Benjamin Disraeli, Judah P. Benjamin was a sephardic (of Spanish-Jewish ancestry) Jew. Born in 1811 at Saint Croix, Virgin Islands, he became a U.S. citizen when his drygoods-vending father was naturalized at Charleston, S.C. At 14, Judah was the youngest man in his class at Yale, and a member of the teetotaling Philencratian Society. At 16, Judah was bluntly bounced out of Yale. Probable reasons: "association with a set of disorderly fellows who were addicted to card playing and gambling," theft, mysterious temptations "which he had not the moral force to resist." Judah...
...leadership of the Louisiana Whigs, practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, a huge plantation mansion. When Judah was not busily promoting railroads or flourishing what his opponents called his "oily, plausible pertinacity" in courtrooms, he was trying to raise the best sugar in Louisiana. For recreation, Benjamin would recite from memory "a wonderful stock" of verses (he was a passionate admirer of Tennyson), play whist, harpoon devilfish. His appreciation of good food and drink was vast...
...Vivant. Benjamin was the first Jew ever offered an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. He turned it down to become a U.S. Senator (from Louisiana). In an age of eloquence, Benjamin was eloquent too. Many of his speeches were as fancy as a beaded bag. But he could also say things that made his Senate colleagues prick up their ears. Sample: "If the object [of this bill] is to provide for friends and dependents, let us say so openly." To a Congressman his voice was "as musical as the chimes of silver bells." But Mrs. Jefferson Davis thought...
...England he worked harder than ever, wrote a legal classic, A Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property, with Reference to the American Decisions, to the French Code and Civil Law, better known as Benjamin on Sales. He ran his income up to $150,000 a year. For the U.S. he felt no homesickness, though in Britain he sometimes felt discomfort. "Fog, fog, fog!" he wrote. "I am most impatient to [go] somewhere where I can breathe...