Milestones: December 2, 2023

December 2, 2023 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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‘CASTA DIVA’ — DEC. 2 MARKS THE CENTENNIAL OF LEGENDARY OPERA DIVA MARIA CALLAS, born in New York City in 1923 to Greek immigrants, and originally named Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos. Her mother Evangelia (Litsa) is said to have pressured Maria early into a musical career, and into a kind of forced escort with men, but claimed the monies for herself. Maria Callas’ professional debut was with the Royal Opera of Athens in Boccaccio, and soon won her first major role with “Tosca.” Callas made her Italian opera debut at the Verona Arena in 1947, and her 1954 American debut in “Norma,” and became one of the most prominent 20th century artists. Nicknamed “La Divina,” Callas led the postwar revival of bel canto operas, particularly “Norma,” and its famous aria, “Casta Diva.” A dramatic persona on and off the stage, Callas epitomized the diva in popular culture.

Jay Nordlinger, in a National Review remembrance, published this week in time for Callas’ birth centennial, called the diva “a celebrity, in addition to a singer or musician. She was involved in scandals. She ditched her husband for Aristotle Onassis — who would ditch her for Jacqueline Kennedy. Callas’s last years were tragic, or at least pitiable. She died young, or youngish — at 53 in 1977.”

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‘NO DECENCY’ — AFTER A TUMULTUOUS FIVE YEARS OF BULLYING AMERICANS WHO WERE SUSPECTED OF HAVING COMMUNIST TIES, SEN. JOE McCarthy was silenced in the US Senate, when his colleagues voted to censure him on Dec. 2, 1954. McCarthy had risen from obscurity as Wisconsin’s junior senator to prominence — and then infamy — after announcing during a speech that he possessed a list of Communists who worked in the State Department. The frenzy of McCarthy’s accusations grew as he held Senate hearings and bullied his defendants, many of them Hollywood figures, during what was termed the Red Scare. His tactics were exposed on television when he made his next target the U.S. Army. The Senate then voted 67-22 to censure him.

McCarthy also took on the wrong guy, which led to his censure. A Boston attorney named Joseph Welch squelched McCarthy’s popularity with the question, “Have you no sense of decency?” Welch, aspiring toward the bench, became a jurist but only on film, playing the judge in Otto Preminger’s now-classic 1959 courtroom drama film, “Anatomy of a Murder.”

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KICKING OUT EUROPEAN CONTROL — A DOCUMENT OF US FOREIGN POLICY MARKS ITS BICENTENNIAL ON DEC. 2. The Monroe Doctrine, which would lay the groundwork for American foreign policy and articulate U.S. identity worldwide, was announced during the fifth President, James Monroe’s, annual speech to Congress in 1823. Monroe said, “In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part…We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” Not only was America saying she would not intervene in European conflicts, but also exercising control and oversight over any aggression by European nations’ involvement in the Western Hemisphere.

President Theodore Roosevelt some 80 years later added the Roosevelt Corollary (or codicil) allowing the United States to police the Latin American corridor after European creditors tried to force debt payments.

See previous milestones, here.