Sherry Chandler

It’s the first day of Women’s History Month and also the anniversary of the beginning of the Salem Witch Trials, and I must begin it by qualifying my earlier statement about Cotton Mather. According to today’s Writers Almanac, Mather, in the end, tried to moderate the witch hysteria:

There were multiple attempts to keep the trials from getting out of control. Judges resigned in protest of the convictions. Neighbors gathered petitions in support of the accused. But in the end, 19 accused witches were hanged, 14 of them women, and three more died in jail. By the following fall, the preacher Cotton Mather was speaking out against the trials. He said, “We ought not to practice witchcraft to discover witches. It is better that 10 suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned.”

On the other hand, he apparently began as an enthusiastic prosecuter of witches.

BTW, do you think he might be wearing a wig?

is found competent.

“This defendant clearly has the capacity to assist his attorneys,” Judge Cooke said, adding that Mr. Padilla’s case was “unique” and that “he understands that.”

Judge Cooke, who allowed limited testimony from brig officials during the competency hearing, said that her ruling should not be construed as a finding on Mr. Padilla’s claims of mistreatment during his detention and interrogations at a military brig in South Carolina.

“Those claims are for another day,” she said, referring to another pending motion by Mr. Padilla that the charges against him be dismissed because of “outrageous government conduct.”

And the New York Times thinks maybe members of our government have been watching too many Hannibal Lector movies.

Poetry Daily has a link up to The First American Modernist, Ernest Hilbert’s review, in The New York Sun, of Scott Donaldson’s biography, “Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life” (Columbia, 2006), from which I lift this passage:

His career enjoyed numerous boosts from dedicated friends in New York, Boston, and his hometown of Gardiner, Maine. The most famous of these supporters was [Theodore] Roosevelt, who, in 1905, learned of the struggling poet from his son, Kermit. The president was an avid reader — devouring a book daily, according to some accounts — and offered to help Robinson in any way he could. He located a sinecure for Robinson in a Lower Manhattan customs house and even went so far as to review Robinson’s books in Outlook, the only known example of literary criticism by a sitting president. A duly grateful Robinson said that Roosevelt “fished me out of hell by the hair of my head.” Unfortunately, the four years at the customs house were perhaps the least productive for Robinson. He believed the struggles that characterized his younger years had inspired him.

Maybe it isn’t always a good thing to have a president for a fan.

BTW, I notice this article uses two versions of Robinson’s name. I do think it is Edwin.