Monday, September 22 — Eric went for a run this morning to the Lincoln Memorial. He saw the sunrise behind the Washington Memorial.
The Lincoln Memorial glowed in the early morning sun.
He went inside and said hi to Abe.
Continue readingcontinued… In 1945, WWII ended and then-President Truman dissolved the OSS. But with the Cold War brewing, people convinced Truman they needed to peacetime intelligence agency to prevent another Pearl Harbor from happening. To try to garner public support, they even used the propaganda card by making a Hollywood film called “OSS” about the heroic actions of the OSS during the war. In 1947, Truman authorized the creation of the CIA, which was staffed by many OSS alumni.
The next section was provocative. “In a democracy, there is always tension between openness and secrecy. When people fear their country is under threat, they accept more security. When fears fade, they often demand greater transparency.” The first display was about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were convicted of espionage in 1951 and later executed, based on the US governments assertion that there was indisputable evidence that the Rosenbergs had passed atomic weapon information on to the Soviets. However, the evidence was top secret and couldn’t be shared — while there was supporting evidence revealed in court, the jury convicted without seeing the allegedly most damning evidence. The execution was highly controversial, with many protests. In 1995, the evidence was finally released — it was captured and decrypted correspondence that proved that Julius was a Soviet spy. Whether he passed on information about atomic weapons and whether Ethel was a spy were less clear.
In the 1970s, there was a movement to expose the government’s extralegal activities. In 1971, a group broke into the FBI office and stole information about COINTELPRO, a secret counterintelligence program to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt social and political movements. Tactics utilized included wiretapping, forgery, searching homes, sending anonymous notes ad leading false information. The files were given to the press and published. The burglars were never caught. From 1975 – 1976, there were congressional hearings on the FBI and CIA operations, which led to reforms, including instituting a congressional oversight committee and the creation of the FISA court to review secret surveillance requests.
In 2013, government contractor Edward Snowden stole and leaked to the press 1.5 million classified files about secret US surveillance programs, such as PRISM, that violated people’s privacy rights by harvesting data from cell phones, land line phone, emails, texts, social media and more.
continued… The third room on the third floor of the Charles building was similar to the first two that we’d already seen: very large, spacious rooms filled with large paintings and some other types of art.
There were also exhibits in the walkway that ran along the perimeter of the courtyard below.
Continue readingSaturday, September 13 — We’d planned to go to The Walters Museum and Peabody Library this afternoon. Keith was opposed to going to yet another museum, but Christi and Eric managed to talk him into going because Walters had a large collection of medieval weaponry and armory.
The museum was almost 3.5 miles away, near the Washington Memorial. We could have taken public transit, but it would have taken at least an hour and involved about a mile of walking each way to/from the transit stops. Even though it was a gorgeous day, we’d walked 8-miles yesterday and just didn’t feel like we could do another extensive day of walking. We called a ride-share, instead, and were door to door in minutes.
The museum appeared to be two separate buildings that had been fused together. They each had a very different architectural style, so it was kind of weird looking. We entered through a set of doors set in the glass panel towards the left in this photo. Per the map, we were in the Centre building. The more ornate building was the Charles building. The map indicated there was also a third building on the west side of the Charles building called the Hackerman House.
The bus belonged to a tour group of senior citizens from Georgia, and we entered with them. We were delighted to find that admission was completely free for everyone! In order to leave the group behind, we headed up the stairs and started on the 3rd floor of the Centre building, where the medieval exhibit was located. Keith was disappointed to find that the armory exhibit was small.
Next we went into another large room that was set up to look like a clothing manufacturing facility. Baltimore was also a hub for clothing manufacturing. Our tour guide showed us the revolutionary technology of the era that made mass-produced clothing possible — a device that simultaneously cut many pieces of cloth stacked together instead of cutting one piece at a time. Coupled with an assembly line sewing process, where each woman on the line sewed a particular piece of the garment and then passed it on to another who would sew her particular piece, ready-to-wear clothes could be quickly produced. The machines were loud and deafness was a problem for the workers.
Next we went to a section that was designed to look like a belt-driven machine shop from 1910. Baltimore had also once been a hub for fabricating parts and tools for various industries. Most of the machines were connected via belt to a rod that ran along the ceiling. The rod rotated, moving the belt and powering the machine. The rod was rotated by a steam engine in the corner.
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