Logan Act, legislation enacted by the United States Congress (1799) forbids private citizens from engaging in unauthorized correspondence with foreign governments.  As amended, the act reads:  Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects. https://www.britannica.com/event/Logan-Act

The Logan Act is named for a Philadelphia doctor, George Logan, who traveled to Paris in 1798 at a time of heightened tension between the United States and the revolutionary government in France.  Logan’s mission was arguably a success:  France lifted an embargo against the United States and releasing American ships and sailors.  However, former President George Washington, then-President John Adams, and members of the Federalist Party who were hostile to France condemned Dr. Logan upon his return.  The act does not apply to U.S. citizens who obtain the current administration’s approval before approaching foreign officials.  For example, then-Rep. Bill Richardson did not violate the Logan Act when, at the behest of the Clinton administration, he traveled to Cuba, Iraq, North Korea, Serbia, and elsewhere to negotiate with U.S. adversaries.  Yet the “authority” exception extends beyond diplomatic envoys.  An earlier version of the statute used the phrase “without the permission or authority of the Government of the United States,” and the shortening of that phrase in 1948 does not seem to have been intended to effect a substantive change.  Interpreting the word “authority” to include legal permission is thus consistent with the statute’s history (as well as with one longstanding usage of the term).  The executive branch on more than one occasion appears to have endorsed the idea that the term “authority” encompasses more than just diplomatic missions undertaken at the administration’s urging.  In 1961, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, labor leader Walter Reuther, and others were accused of violating the Logan Act when they spearheaded an effort to secure the release of prisoners held by Cuba following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.  The Justice Department dismissed those allegations on various grounds, including that the citizens acted with the knowledge and tacit assent of President John F. Kennedy’s administration.  And again in 1975, when Sens. George McGovern and John Sparkman were accused of violating the Logan Act by initiating contact with Cuba’s communist regime, the State Department under President Gerald Ford defended their actions on similar grounds.  Daniel J. Hemel, Eric A. Posner   https://www.lawfareblog.com/logan-act-and-its-limits

During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets.  Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves.  Lange’s first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer.  In 1940, Lange became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.  One of the preeminent and pioneering documentary photographers of the 20th century, Dorothea Lange was born Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey.  Her father, Heinrich Nutzhorn, was a lawyer, and her mother, Johanna, stayed at home to raise Dorothea and her brother, Martin.  When she was 7, Dorothea contracted polio, which left her right leg and foot noticeably weakened.  Later, however, she’d feel almost appreciative of the effects the illness had on her life.  “[It] was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me,” she said.  Following America’s entrance into World War II, Lange was hired by the Office of War Information (OWI) to photograph the internment of Japanese Americans.  In 1945, she was employed again by the OWI, this time to document the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations.  https://www.biography.com/artist/dorothea-lange  Find information on Dorothea Lange:  Words & Pictures, the first major MoMA exhibition of Lange’s in 50 years showing through May 9, 2020 at MoMA, Floor 2, 2 South, The Paul J. Sachs Galleries.  https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5079  The Museum of Modern Art is located at 11 W 53rd Street in Manhattan.  Find hours at https://www.moma.org/visit/

Baptized Alexander Bell, the inventor longed for a middle name as a child, perhaps to differentiate himself from his father and grandfather, who were both named Alexander.  On the boy’s 11th birthday, Bell’s father allowed the youngster to adopt the middle name “Graham” in honor of Alexander Graham, a former student of his who was boarding with the family.  Bell’s patent application for the telephone was filed on February 14, 1876, just hours before rival inventor Elisha Gray filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office that announced he was working on a similar invention.  On March 7, the 29-year-old Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone, and three days later Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, clearly heard the inventor’s voice crackle across a wire in their Boston laboratory in the first successful telephone transmission.  It didn’t take long for the first of hundreds of legal challenges to Bell’s patent to begin.  Five of them reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld Bell’s claims in one of the longest patent battles in American history.  More than a century before the proliferation of cell phones, Bell invented a wireless telephone that transmitted conversations and sounds by beams of light.  Bell proclaimed his “photophone” (from the Greek words for “light” and “sound”), which was patented in 1880, to be “the greatest invention I have ever made; greater than the telephone.”  Given the technology of the time, however, the photophone’s utility proved limited.  It wasn’t until fiber-optic technology was developed many decades later that the transmission of sound by light found its first wide-scale commercial application.  In the weeks that followed the July 2, 1881, shooting of President James Garfield, the chief executive’s condition worsened as doctors made repeated probes with unsterilized fingers and instruments in order to find the location of one of the bullets.  Believing that “science should be able to discover some less barbarous method” for locating the bullet, Bell developed an electromagnetic machine that he tested on Civil War veterans who still had bullets lodged in their bodies.  Bell was twice summoned to Garfield’s White House bedside with his machine, but his “induction balance” failed to locate the bullet, in part due to interference caused by steel wires in the bed mattress and the president’s chief physician only permitting a search of the right side of the president’s body where he was convinced the bullet was lodged.  After Garfield’s death on September 19, the bullet was found to be on his left side.  In spite of gaining fame as the inventor of the telephone, Bell continued his lifelong work to help the hearing impaired.  In 1887, Captain Arthur Keller traveled from Alabama to meet with Bell in order to seek help for his 6-year-old daughter, Helen, who had become blind and mute at the age of 19 months, possibly from scarlet fever.  Bell directed them to Boston’s Perkins School for the Blind, where they met recent graduate Anne Sullivan, the miracle-working tutor who would teach Helen to write, speak and read Braille.  Keller dedicated her autobiography to Bell, whom she credited with opening the “door through which I should pass from darkness into light,” and the two remained lifelong friends.  Bell began experimenting in aviation in the 1890s, even developing giant manned tetrahedral kites.  His dreams of airplanes that could take off from water led him to work on the designs of winged hydrofoil boats that skipped across the water surface at high speeds.  The HD-4 model on which he collaborated reached a speed of more than 70 miles per hour during a 1919 test on a lake in Nova Scotia, a world water-speed record that stood for more than a decade.  Bell’s name remained in the popular lexicon after his death.  To honor the inventor’s contributions to acoustical science, the standard unit for the intensity of sound waves was named the “bel” in the 1920s.  The decibel, one-tenth of a bel, is the most commonly used metric for measuring the magnitude of noise.  Christopher Klein  Read more and see pictures at https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-alexander-graham-bell

The Comma Queen Meets Mr. Hyphen   At Merriam Webster, we enjoyed finding out that our Collegiate Dictionary has a nickname at The New Yorker--"Little Red Web."  And we enjoyed hosting Mary Norris, the Comma Queen, at our office, as she did her research into the history of dictionaries.  But mostly we take pleasure in being the ones responsible for introducing Mary to one of our all-time favorite books about the craft of editing:  a 1937 gem titled Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place), written by Edward N. Teall, a proofreader on the 1934 Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition.  When we told Mary about the book, she was appropriately appreciative, but little did we know how heartily she would embrace Mr. Hyphen and sing his praises.  But here it is, on page 118:  The best thing ever written about hyphens is Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place), by Edward N. Teall. ... [I]t may be the only full-length work on hyphens extant in English. ... Considering the rate at which the language changes, it is incredible that a study of hyphens from three generations ago remains relevant. Mr. Hyphen was onto something.  Teall and Mary agree that good compounding does not come from the overuse of hyphens.  Good compounding often comes from knowing when to leave a compound open (note that she is a copy editor, two words, and agrees with Teall that no hyphens are required in compounds involving –ly adverbs--"closely watched indicator") or when to close it up (she knows that it is high time to close up lifestyle).  Hence Teall's advice that people "should regard Mr. Hyphen with neither fear nor disrespect."  They should cultivate his acquaintance--but keep him in his proper place.  Don't let him crowd in where he doesn't belong, but insist on his doing what is expected of him.  He's a good fellow, but he has to be watched.  In the final pages Teall tells us:  It all boils down to this, that compounding is an art, not an exact science.  Personal preference, taste, and judgment are factors in it.  Words cannot be weighed and measured, blended by fixed and unfailing formula.  Or, as Mary puts it in her discussion about whether it should be "blue stained glass" or "blue-stained glass":  If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.  Mr. Hyphen couldn't have said it better himself.  Read an excerpt of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris at https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/comma-queen-meets-mr-hyphen

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2229  February 24, 2020