The Future Lies Ahead and Peter Thiel Wants Us To Go There, Review of Zero to One

Below is my review of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future as submitted to the Sturbridge Times Magazine for the April 2015 issue.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

Crown Business, 2014

Hardcover, 195 pages

ISBN-10: 0804139296

ISBN-13: 978-0804139298

List: $27.00 Amazon: $16.20

By Richard Morchoe

In this country, competition is enshrined as almost a sacrament. It is loved so much that when it does not work, there is the obsession to create the “level playing field.” There is no one to say a good word for the opposite condition, monopoly.

Well, the heretic Peter Thiel has come along to sing its praises. Monopoly has a bad name, connected with robber barons and purchasers of influence. That is not what Thiel is talking about.

Rather, the author is about creating. That is, the going from Zero to One, or making something where before there was nothing. Zero to one; Notes On Startups, Or How To Build The Future is just that, a book about building the future that Thiel wrote from notes taken by his student, Blake Masters.

Peter Thiel should have been the last man to write the book. His existence had been that of a winner in American competitive life until it wasn’t. Thiel had been top of his class in just about any school he attended.

When you are a star at a major American university such as Stanford the next move is a top law school, again Stanford. He was shortlisted for a possible clerkship by not just one, but two supreme court justices. That’s a position that marks a future at the top of the American legal system.

Thiel got lucky in his quest. He didn’t get the job.

Instead, he would coalesce with some friends, many from Stanford. The team would build PayPal and it would make them all wealthy.

As the author would reflect, had he clerked, “I would probably have spent my entire career taking deposition or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.”

His point is well taken. We don't want a supreme court of judicial dullards, but should not our best and brightest be innovating the future instead of regulating the present?

Just how important is this? China and India have burgeoning economies with large and rising middle classes. They aspire to a lifestyle similar to ours. There is, however, a problem. Billions of people means that if it is done only using the tools we have today, the result will be an environmental catastrophe. Innovation is imperative.

Is that happening? The author makes it clear, “The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury.”

This is in contrast to the expectations of the 1950s where people looked forward to, “a four-day workweek, energy too cheap to meter, and vacations on the moon.”

There is much going on, but how much is important? True, there are some high profile monopolies out there that are not exploiting the masses. Facebook is one. Is that something that has advanced civilization? Google has saved untold hours in research as anyone who had to go to the library in the stone age about a decade or so ago remembers. How important is that?

Though he makes the case that our tech age may not live up to the hype, he also notes, it better start, “Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21^st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20^th.” Yes, and we need hurry, the current century is already even less peaceful that the bloody 20^th.

Despite the doom and gloom, he does get to writing about building a startup. His book is informative on how to go about it and the culture inherent in such enterprises. Be forewarned, if you are not a genius already, your idea may not automatically get venture capital funding despite your fidelity to the ideas expressed in Zero to One.

So what does the the budding monopolist need to succeed. The first great advantage Thiel suggests is Proprietary Technology. Who can argue that? For example, Google's computer code for search is sort of like Coke's recipe. Unless you can better it, as they say in Gotham, fuggedaboutit.

Network Effects. Facebook and LinkedIn have it. If your peers are on the network, you are probably too.

A startup should also be able to achieve Economies of Scale. You really can't do too much in a service business, but for a Twitter getting to 250 million users in no time, scale is baked into the design.

According to Thiel, “creating a strong brand is a powerful way to create a monopoly.” As a Branding success, he cites Apple. He really doesn't say how to get there, but gives Yahoo as an example of what isn't working.

The final section in the chapter on building a startup discusses the advantage of being the last mover. One might think being the first mover is most important. Remember though, Yahoo was the first mover in search and the big player for a while. Google came along and displaced them and has never been elsewhere but at the top. This is Thiel's point, “to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years of monopoly profits.”

So that's all you need to become a tech star. Assemble your team and get to work.  

Obviously, there is more to it. Still, Thiel's book is a good overview of the process.

Zero to One is not really a how to tome, though there might be a young genius who could read the book, quit MIT and come up with the next big thing.  Thiel's book is a wide ranging discussion of the startup culture, the economy and the political and social environment.  It is a great and important read, even though the author is a bit suspect as he didn't drop out of school as did the more successful examples, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.

Review of Henry Kissinger's World Order from the Sturbride Times Magazine of March 2015

World Order

Henry Kissinger

Penguin Press HC, 2014

Hardcover, 432 pages

ISBN-10: 1594206147

ISBN-13: 978-1594206146

List: $36.00 Amazon: $21.60

By Richard Morchoe

From the 1970s there was a joke that went as follows; Four men are passengers in a plane; a hippie, an old priest, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger. Suddenly the pilot announces, “The plane is going down and the co-pilot and I are bailing out. There are three parachutes for passengers. Good luck.”

Gerald Ford takes one and says as he jumps, “As president, I am entitled to a chute.”

Kissinger grabs another and with Teutonic intonation states as he exits, “I am der smartest person in der vurld, so dis ist mein.”

The priest says to the hippie, “I am an old man and have lived a long life. I am ready to meet my maker. You take the third parachute.”

The hippie replies, “Not to worry, padre. The smartest man in the world just bailed out with my knapsack.”

Henry Kissinger did not evoke neutral emotions. He was either reviled or admired. He served under presidents Nixon and Ford, first as National Security adviser and then as Secretary of State. Few holders of those officers ever seemed as dominant from the rapprochement with China to the Paris negotiations ending the Vietnam War.

Kissinger was a departure from previous Secretaries of State. The office up until his appointment had been the preserve of members of the Eastern Establishment. We had never had an immigrant, let alone a refugee hold the position. The Kissinger family had to flee Germany due to National Socialist persecution of Jews.

He saw service in and after World War II. Among other duties, while only a private, the young soldier was placed in charge of a city. On leaving the military, Kissinger attended Harvard, eventually earning a doctorate.

After teaching at his alma mater he went on to government service. Leaving State, he would found Kissinger and Associates along with another policy insider, Brent Scowcroft. It is a prosperous and influential enterprise. Few turn down a phone call from Henry.

Kissinger could have written an interesting autobiography. World Order is none of that. The author was wise not to use the word “New” in the title. It is a sober record of our nation’s interaction with other countries. In many ways it is similar to Angelo Codevilla’s To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations, reviewed in this magazine’s October 2014 issue. There is however a difference in emphasis as evidenced by the titles.

The book is a valuable resource as regards diplomatic history. We in the West have been under the Westphalian system that arose out of the peace conferences that ended the Thirty Years’ War in the 1600s. The system is based on the respect each state had for each other’s sovereignty and the balance of power. Kissinger’s explanation of that regime and how it is and is not working in the contemporary world is excellent. That said, the book is not without problems.

The whole of Chapter 4 discusses Iran. It is an important topic as our dealings with Persia go back not to the embassy takeover, but to the early postwar period. This the author does not address, though he does give a fair gloss of the history of that ancient land other than that.

He gives credit to the Iranians’ subtlety in pursuing foreign relations. Kissinger is concerned that these world class negotiators are gaming the international system. Through the talks over their nuclear program, he contends they continue progress toward a weapon of mass destruction.

His polemic is countered by The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). On December 19th of last year, as reported by Reuters, they have stated Iran is keeping to its agreements and not enriching uranium to fissile level. That does not mean Kissinger is wrong, but his tone is that what he is saying is uncontested fact.

We should not want a nuclear armed Iran, but there are two other middle-eastern states in the nuclear club. One, Pakistan, is arguably far more unstable than Iran. How much more sleep do we have to lose?

The section dealing with the Iraq and Afghan entanglements begins on Page 317 with; “After an anguishing discussion of the "lessons of Vietnam," equally intense dilemmas recapitulated themselves three decades later with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Both conflicts had their origins in a breakdown of international order.  For America, both ended in withdrawal.” It would seem that Kissinger is not aware that such an admission is not in any sense evidence that America can do the job of managing a world order.

On Page 322 he suggests that if the major powers can’t guarantee Afghan neutrality as they did Belgium in the Nineteenth Century, that country “is likely to drag the world back into its perennial warfare.” His writing does not make the case. We got along well ignoring the place until the Russians invaded and then we had to meddle. If we had minded our business, the USSR would probably have still imploded and, most certainly, The Twin Towers would not have fallen.

Yes, Afghanistan may become a mess, not that it is paradise now, but it only becomes our mess if we let it. Leaving and forgetting it would be a better plan. Ignorance may not be bliss, but in this case, it could be good strategy.

The tone of the book is all too much, we have to do things, because we have to. He does a good job of laying out the situation, but does not provide a compelling reason for intervention.

When Kissinger was the dominant foreign policy player, his most important task was to extricate the country from Vietnam. It would have been nice if we could have achieved “Peace with honor” as Nixon put it, but the big thing was leaving. We were as LBJ put it, hunkering “down like a jackass in a hailstorm.” We couldn’t stay forever and knew we had to go.

Kissinger accomplished the mission and, yes the South fell. All the predictions of the end of the world for us, however, did not come to pass.

Maybe that’s the lesson about World Order that needed learning.

It’s déjà vu all over again, and again and again, do we need a debt ceiling?

Below is my column as submitted from the December, 2013 Sturbridge Times Magazine, Page 22. It's something odd from moi, showing love to a politician I never voted for.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend

The words of Polonius to his son, Laertes, resonated with me almost before I ever heard them.  Raised by a mother who embodied thrift, debt was to be avoided and feared. 

Polonius might not be the most apt guide.  He also said, “brevity is the soul of wit” but was quite the windbag.  Mom, however, I cannot gainsay.  She would quote the Danish courtier always and my experience with loans and mortgages only reinforced caution. *

Sadly, as evidenced by the latest fiscal contretemps, not too many congressmen and presidents had similar maternal experiences.  To characterize our government’s addiction in borrowing to finance its largesse as spending like a drunken sailor is to slander the relative natural frugality of the men who go down to the sea in ships three sheets to the wind.

Was it ever thus?  The United States has almost always had a national debt, and managed it with more or less hands on congressional oversight.  In 1917 we entered a world war and who knew what that would necessitate?  So in the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917 discretion was granted to the government to spend as it would.  That bill, however, set a limit.  Federal shopping could not exceed a set amount.  The debt ceiling was born.

Since then, through thick and thin and with admirable discipline, our nation has never exceeded the debt ceiling.  The admirable discipline does not mean reining in spending, but making sure the legislative ceremony of raising the limit has been observed steadfastly.  Still, our financial house did not seem horribly out of order.

Raising the debt ceiling is sort of like when the credit card company sends out a letter telling you they have raised your credit limit.  It comes with one of those “you’ve been so good about paying us, you deserve it” notes.  What it really means is “you’ve been so good about paying us, now, we’d like to see you pay us more.”  I do hope no one in this country is under the impression that the issuer is doing this because they want to help anyone but themselves.

The question is begged, however, if they always raise it, why even bother with a debt ceiling?  The word “ceiling” implies there is a point at which you stop. 

So is the bickering over the debt ceiling just much ado about nothing, as it defies gravity no matter what?  Is it time to just abandon it?  Obviously, this is a case for the Long Hill Institute for Economic Policy.  After a miniscule amount of deliberation, an opinion was rendered.  They referenced the story of an ill run railroad.  The trains never left or arrived on time.  Though mostly tardy, occasionally a train would leave ahead of when it was supposed to.  Complaints abounded and as it was a monopoly, users had no alternative.

Finally, the president of the line deigned to speak with the riders.   He was condescending when one angry questioner asked him why the railroad even bothered to publish a timetable when no train ever arrived or departed on time?  The president replied that that was proof of its tremendous value.  “Why,” he thundered, “How would you, my riders, ever know the train was late if we did not publish a schedule?”

The Long Hill Institute uses this parable to make the point that having to observe the ritual tethers us to reality.  

The late Senator Dirksen said in the sixties that billions of dollars added up to real money.  We are in trillions zone.  Some might say there is no problem.  In Dirksen’s time we collected much less in taxes then we do now, so it’s covered.  People who take that argument have a point, but is this a function of inflation?  After all, taxes collected are in money that is worth less.  Inflation is a whole other question that keeps economists’ minds from suffering idleness.

At what point is it too much?  Better we should have to at least look at the question periodically rather than sweep it under the rug, or maybe a national debt of 100 septillion dollars is the sign of a healthy economy?  That would certainly be the logic of those who view not raising the debt as fiscally irresponsible.

*Hamlet was not the only Shakespeare she referenced.  Oft the words of Lear, “Sharper than a serpent’s tongue an ungrateful child” were directed at me.

Say it ain't so, Mike!

Below is my column as submitted from the March, 2014 Sturbridge Times Magazine, Page 18. It's something odd from moi, showing love to a politician I never voted for.

There is only one thing worse in life than to have one’s heroes exposed as less than noble.  It is a personal disaster to hear that someone you never felt warm and fuzzy about does something that forces a reappraisal.

Sadly, Michael Stanley Dukakis has done that to me.  I could never warm to the man.    It’s part of my class warrior persona.  You always got the feeling that the Duke was talking down to you and telling you that you had to take the bad tasting medicine because it was good for you.

The Duke, on his rise seemed over promoted.  There was the No Fault Auto Insurance that he successfully steered through the General Court.  Was that the panacea as promised?  For all one knows, it might be the best of all possible worlds.  We do still pay a lot for car insurance here.

In his successful run for governor, the bumper stickers read, “Mike Dukakis Should Be Governor.”  The tone of the campaign was that the messiah would relieve us from the scourge of the usual hacks.  The man was almost too good for us.

In his first term, he was celebrated for taking the MBTA to the Corner Office.  If it was an attempt to connect with the common man by an uncommon man, it did not work.  An electorate that had not forgot his broken “lead pipe guarantee” of no tax increase put him on hiatus for a term.

Back in office, he would tout the short-lived improvement in the state economy as the “Massachusetts Miracle.”  He hoped it would get him across the Potomac, but his presidential candidacy in a literal sense “tanked.”

There would be another call for new taxes as he entered the lame duck zone.  The governor would promote the still controversial Big Dig and would leave a bad taste in our region for supporting a prison in New Braintree that smelled of a sweetheart deal.

His ambition was immense, but so was his desire to make a difference.  A controversial English politician who experienced it said, “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” True enough, Mike left office unloved and unlamented.

His post-electoral life is sweet.  Few remember that he could not get elected dogcatcher after his last term.  The Duke has his academic sinecure and enjoys the plaudits of his class.

Contrast Dukakis with another Massachusetts pol, the late Congressman John Joseph Moakley.  You remember him.  Well, you probably don't.  He was not flashy and though he had a long career, his congressional accomplishments escape my mind.  His constituents probably don't remember them either.

His big claim to fame was that he defeated Louise Day Hicks.  If you remember her, you are either a politics nerd or you are giving away your age.  She had opposed forced busing when chairwoman of the Boston School Committee.  Louise was crazy enough to think that the idea of putting kids on buses and shipping them off to neighborhoods not their own in an ethnically fractious city was absurd.  She was delusional enough to believe that her opposition could lead to a successful political career.

All the great and good got behind Joe to defeat Hicks' congressional re-election bid.  Joe said nothing.  It was better for him not to.  He won and went on to an extended tenure as a mediocrity in the nation's capital.

I was reminded that he was still alive shortly before his death.  A new federal courthouse was to be named after him.  On WBZ news one morning, I heard it mentioned and one of the solon's flacks was asked about it.  I can never forget his comment, “Joe, in his own humble way, this was the only building he wanted named after him.” 

The John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse is an ornate architectural monstrosity.  Maybe it's not on the scale of the pyramids, but Joe was no Amenhotep.  When looking at it, one would not say this is the memorial to a humble man.

On January 31 The Boston Globe reported that it was proposed that South Station be named The Governor Michael S. Dukakis Transportation Center at South Station.  No news there.  As noted above, structures are named after public figures.  Usually a man who, in the words of Macbeth,  “struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”  There may be a couple of geezers left who remember Maurice Tobin of Tobin Bridge fame, but who the heck is Leonard Zakim of the Zakim Bridge?*

It was Michael Stanley's reaction that shocked me.  He said No.  Had I a pacemaker, the battery would have shorted.  This may not be unprecedented, but who has years to research it?  One should not cavil at the act.  Even if his reasoning might not be mine, it's still a noble sentiment and it pains me to say, a humble gesture.

So Governor Duke, you have my admiration, but I will never forgive you for making me give up my resentment.

*I looked him up once and completely forgot who he was a minute later.  All I remember is that he was, in the words of the late Jerry Williams, “not a bad guy.”

Book with ridiculously long name unveils very uncomplicated truth about D.C.’s bad influence

Below is my review of This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capitol that appeared on Page 6 in the February 2014 Sturbridge Times Magazine.

This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capitol

By Mark Leibovich

Public Affairs, 2013

Blue Rider Press, 400 pages

List: $27.95 Amazon: $18.58

Book review by Richard Morchoe

This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America's Gilded Capital is a brutal look at the nomenklatura who rule us.  The author, Mark Leibovich catches the denizens in the act of schmoozing, peddling influence, securing sinecures and book deals and getting on TV or mentioned in the press.  All too often, it is done at the expense of the rest of us.

Mr. Leibovich should know.  He’s done time in D.C., first at the Washington Post and then for the New York Times.  He is currently chief national correspondent for the New York Times Magazine.

The author sets the tone on Page 1, “Tim Russert is dead, but the room was alive.”  It was the memorial service to celebrate the deceased, and, not coincidentally, a networking opportunity.  You might remember Tim; he was the long-time moderator of Meet The Press.  In 2008, he was on Time Magazine’s 100 most influential list.  He was big, and then he was gone.

 The author quoted a friend, ““We’re all obituaries waiting to happen,” Henry Allen, my former Post colleague, once wrote.  “At the same time, the city of Washington feels like a conspiracy we’re all in together, and nobody else in America quite understands, even though they pay for it.”” 

It should be a bit of surprise to some that this is such a good read.  After all, it’s about the class of people who were student government nerds in high school.  Leibovich writes well and enjoys the subject.  Also, love or hate these people, they influence our lives out of all proportion to their intellects and abilities.

There are many stories and tidbits about those who bless or infest (as you wish) the D.C. ether.  For personal reasons, I enjoyed his quotes about Chris Matthews, that apply to a whole class as well,

“In his book about the media’s conduct during the Monica saga, Bill Kovach, the founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, anointed Matthews as part of a “new class of chatterers who emerged in this scandal…a group of loosely credentialed, self interested performers whose primary job is remaining on TV.””

 “After leaving Tip O’Neill’s office, for example, Chris Matthews got himself a column for the San Francisco Examiner.  He was even named the Examiner’s Washington Bureau Chief, though he was the only one in Washington for the Examiner and it had no footprint beyond being the Bay Area’s sleepy afternoon newspaper.  But the affiliation and title helped Matthews get on TV.”

Matthews will stick like a barnacle and be on TV even after his memorial service.

There are also profiles of relative unknowns.  Chapter 8 is given over to Kurt Bardella.  Bardella is refreshing if only because he was not guilty of any “I’m here for the kids” schmaltz that most people in politics give as the reason for their “service.”  Kurt was a hard charging press aide to Representative Darrell Issa.  So hard charging that he got into trouble for his zeal.  His errors got him fired and would have been career ending in a real environment.  Bardella worked the TV and publicity circuits and was back on staff with the Congressman.  It’s not easy to be a complete failure in D.C.

Mr. Leibovich has a way with a euphemism and if you don’t chortle often, you are probably in the care of an undertaker.  On page 139 he calls David Gergen a “politically versatile talking head.”  If you have at all followed politics from the Reagan administration on, you realize he essentially tabbed Gergen as a practitioner of the world’s oldest profession.

On the BP spill debacle, “Washington becomes a determinedly bipartisan team when there is money to be made.-sorry I mean a hopeful exemplar of Americans pulling together in a time of crisis. “

Are there any problems with the book?  Almost none of us have any real experience with Washington, so it is near impossible to raise objections.  Fortunately, on Page 35, Mr. Leibovich serves up a high hanging slow ball of a blunder that is easy to blast out of the park.  In discussing the Mitchell-Greenspan power couple he wrote,

“Andrea was in the midst of a rough moment because a lot of people were blaming her husband, Alan Greenspan, for the financial collapse.  His free-market, Ayn Rand-influenced policies while running the Federal Reserve were not looking good now.”

Anyone remotely familiar with Rand’s writings knows she was a sound money gal and Greenspan’s pumping moolah out of the Fed would have been anathema to her. On page 38 he observes,  “Washingtonians love the “So-and-so is spinning in his grave” cliché.”  Mark made Ayn revolve at warp speed.

His snarky and continuing reference to Romney as Mittens, with the Greenspan comment might indicate his boat has a slight list to port.  Still, he had no problem skewering Team Obama over their holier than thou attitude as all too many of them had no problem monetizing their service when they had the chance.

Leibovich’s work makes plain that Planet D.C. will always stand apart and be alien to the nation.  As soon as the rep, senator or staffer arrives, they go native and are forever separate from what they nominally represent.

In the November 2012 issue of this magazine, your reviewer proposed the nation’s capital should be moved to the cold, desolate hills of Wyoming.  This Town has convinced me that that is not only correct, but also desperately urgent.  A new beginning is called for.  If not in a remote, inhospitable terrestrial region, another galaxy.

Now more than ever.

So how did all this valentine stuff come about?

 Below is an article I wrote on the history of Valentine's day for the February 2014 Sturbridge Times Magazine, see page 14. 

In this country, there are unofficial holidays we enjoy that are fun, but other than the names, the ancient roots are obscure.  Oh, we may know Saint Patrick’s was a holy man, but his sanctity is rarely celebrated on March 17.  Halloween was the pagan New Year that Christianity took over to observe deceased saints, though one would hardly know it these days.

So it is with the 14th of this month.  As children, we learn about it in elementary school as notes are given and received.  Candy is a big part, especially those little hearts with messages like “be mine.”  As we grow up, a young swain forgets the day at his peril.  One should not begrudge the florist or restaurant owner his or her living, let alone the employees, but why does all this happen?

It goes way back, really way back.  We know of the Roman fertility festival called the Lupercalia.  Undoubtedly, the celebration long predated the Latins, but they enjoyed it with gusto.  From the 13th to the 15th of February young men would whip young women with the flesh of sacrificed goats.  At the end there would be a lottery to pair up the boys and girls for a year with marriage possibly ensuing.  Hey, not every society can come up with speed dating.

Christianity would replace Paganism within a few short centuries after Christ.  The West took up the new faith easily enough, but the people were attached to many of the old ways.  The excesses of the Lupercalia could only offend the theologically advanced of the new dispensation.  The masses would have to be weaned away from the ancient practices.

Something the church did not lack was an abundance of martyrs.  One that died for love could fill the bill in co-opting the pagan holiday.  Valentinus was the man for the job.  He was a priest at the time Emperor Claudius was persecuting the faithful.  Against an imperial prohibition, the cleric married Christians and was jailed for it.  

Valentinus would talk with his jailer’s daughter, eventually converting her.  In his last letter, he told her to stay strong in her faith and signed it, “your Valentinus.”  The next day on February 14th 270 A.D. he was martyred.  Whether fact or legend, Pope Gelasius established his feast day in 496 A.D. noting the saint was among those “whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God."

In the post-Roman age, Saint Valentine’s Day was celebrated here and there, but was not a major event.  The Lupercalian overtones continued, with doves, known for fidelity becoming symbols.  In Hamlet, the doomed Ophelia in her madness sings of it.  

The Calvinist Reformation was not kind to the day.  The Puritans who came to New England treated it almost as they did Christmas, which, while not a hanging offense, was near anathema.  In spite of that, some vestiges remained.  The stern Puritan, John Winthrop, who would become governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, while still in England wrote in a letter to his wife that he hoped she was his valentine.

It would take about a couple of centuries for the holiday to attain widespread popularity.  For this we owe a debt to the postal system in the Mother Country.  In 1840 the British restructured rates, dramatically lowering the cost of mailing a letter.  The penny post made it much cheaper to be romantic.

As they did to promote the acceptance of Christmas as a commercial holiday, merchants promoted Valentines Day through newspaper advertising.  

America was in thrall to almost everything English.  Anglophilia being in vogue, when London had its opulent Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, it would be necessary for New York to copy it.   In 1853, Gotham would put on a similar, if not more sumptuous display with its own Crystal Palace.

Well, if we could do as well as the Brits in the field of proto world’s fairs, we could be even more commercially romantic with Yankee ingenuity, and we had just the gal to do it.

Esther Howland pioneered the American Valentine.  She had graduated from Mount Holyoke when it was an academy and returned home to her parents’ house afterward.  Dad owned a stationery store in Worcester.  Esther saw an English paper lace valentine and said she could do better and proceeded to.  Her salesman brother took samples on a trip and came back with $5,000 in orders and an industry was born.

The third floor of the family home was converted into a valentine’s card factory.  The cards sold for from a few cents to ten dollars.  Esther knew about branding, the back of each was embossed with a red H.  By the 1860s her company was making hundreds of thousands of dollars, a vast sum in the day.

Esther never married.  She sold her business to take care of her parents. The buyer, George C. Whitney Company, continued to make the valentines in Worcester until 1942.  

There is a local connection.  A couple of lovely portraits of her parents are on display at the Fitch House in Old Sturbridge Village.

The association of chocolate and the day is even newer than the mass produced valentine.  This is because until the second half of the 19th Century, chocolate meant a beverage, and not a confection.  In fact, there was no chocolate in chocolate cake in the same sense there is no coffee in coffee cake.  The recipe for chocolate cake from a famous cookbook, The Virginia Housewife, had recipes without any cocoa.

  

With the invention of a process known as “conching” chocolate could be made into candy.  In 1868 Richard Cadbury came up with the heart shaped candy filled box, connecting chocolate to the holiday.  

We have come along way since the Lupercalia, or have we?  A young couple from ancient times or prehistory transported to the present would not understand.  Then again, they would not comprehend much about our times.  It is doubtful they would think the day interesting or fun without the raucous festivities.  Until, of course, they had some chocolate.

Tom Kelleher of Old Sturbridge Village consulted for this article. The Village is holding Be Mine: Chocolate and Valentines on Saturday, February 8^th and Sunday the 9^th.

Review of Jonathan Cook's Beer Terrain

Below is a book Review from the December 2012 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine Page 6, of a book about the revival of brewing in New England.

Jonathan has an interesting blog that features his ongoing exploration of brewing culture.

Sturbridge native and his love of local beer

Beer Terrain: Field to Glass from the Berkshires to the Maine Coast

By Jonathan Cook with Suzanne LePage

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Paperback, 156 pages

ISBN 978-1492346715

List: $16.20 Amazon: $16.20

Book review by Richard Morchoe

Jonathan Cook’s Beer Terrain is a labor of love about people who love their labor.  With his wife, Suzanne LePage they have come up with a book about the efforts of those in New England who are creating an industry that is an art form.  The couple is serious about beer.

Just how serious?  Jonathan writes of a pause at a tavern in the White Mountains,  “This was a great stop on our honeymoon which took us all around New England visiting brewpubs and drinking microbrews.”  To spend so much time at the beginning of the marriage on the quest displays a devotion to the subject and the region.

There had been fair beer industry in New England at one time.  Prohibition obliterated that.  So of necessity, our new brews have had to restart the process from nothing.  Is this necessary?  After all, there is beer in this country, freely sold.  In the introduction, Jonathan makes the point about two versions of capitalism, “One is the global supply network that sells grain on the commodity market and homogenizes the malt distributing it worldwide via vast interlinking petroleum based transit systems.  The other involves a handshake and a short drive in a small truck.”  Must it be a worldwide consistency or is there room for a local uniqueness?

 It is not possible to say if Jonathan intended it, but Beer Terrain is report card as to how far we have come in getting the beer from our fields into our glasses.  A lot has been done, and there is room for more.

Jonathan starts close to home in Worcester.  Ben Roesch at Wormtown Brewery is trying to be as local as he can.  Year round, five percent of the ingredients are “a little Mass in every glass.”  The day of Jonathan’s visit, he gets to taste a beer made with hops and malt grown within 40 miles.  Granted it’s a special offering of Masswhole  Hop Session, but that is an achievement.

100% once a year, is that all we can do?  Well, since 2010, it’s been getting easier.  That year, Christian and Andrea Stanley opened New England’s first malthouse since prohibition in the Pioneer Valley town of Hadley.  Their malted barley is the freshest around and their customers can now close another part of the circle.  Over 20 breweries use the product of Valley Malt,

There’s another ingredient associated with beer.  How are we doing regionally with hops?  In 2010 the University of Vermont did a feasibility study suggesting there is enough demand for at least a hundred acres of production.  People are trying it even nearby at Hardwick’s Clover Hill Farm.  Steve Prouty has planted a third of an acre and has supplied the aforementioned Wormtown Brewery.  Hop cultivation is no easy number.  Our damp climate puts us at a disadvantage, yet that is not stopping the adventurous.

Locally, Brimfield’s Tree House Brewing Company uses hops grown not ten minutes away.  Granted, production is such that the Local Nugget (named after a hop variety) is only occasionally on offer.

So malt and hops are coming on line more and more.  What else do we need?  How about yeast?  Is it important to have that locally too?  Bryan Greenhagen, brewer and microbiologist, seems to think so.  In of all places, urban, gritty Chelsea, he is working on it.  From off the skin of a plum, he has developed a strain of the fungus that not only ferments, but also imparts some flavor.

Beer Terrain does not overlook the largest component of almost any beverage, H2O.  The book has that covered.  Suzanne is an engineer and teaches at WPI.  Her research has focused on storm water management.  Okay, we don’t want storm water in our brewskis, but she does know water.  Chapter 8 is her paean to aqua.

Suzanne notes we do not have a common water source.  So, other than the Quabbin, the water used is going to be local.  Does that affect taste?  It can.  Depending on composition.  The atoms that make up water can bond with other atoms.  The hardness and softness has an impact as well.

Whatever else we can grow here, water will always be local.  The more other ingredients of a nearby origin become part of our beers, the more we will have our own “terroir.”  Jonathan used that term, more often associated with wine, to describe the sense of place.  The malt and hops grown here are and will be different from those of other regions.  We have had wonderful local brewers for a couple of decades now.  It is time to build the terroir.

The book is no sense a dry technical manual.  Jonathan and Susanne have enjoyed their odyssey and convey it from the Wonderful Peoples’ Pint in Greenfield to the Peak Organic Brewing Company in Portland Maine.  Jonathan, the Sturbridge native enjoys the product served at Hyland Orchard as well as the aforementioned Tree House when not on the road.  One can learn a lot from Beer Terrain while working up a thirst.