John W. Sloane was no stranger to the Berkshires or Lenox when he and his wife, Adela Berry Sloane, built their Tudor-style cottage in 1894. His brother, William Sloane, and his wife, Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, built the nearby estate, Elm Court, in 1886.
The brothers, who owned W & J Sloane, were Scottish immigrants who made their fortune importing oriental rugs and selling home furnishing. The brothers established the first home furnishing store in the country and soon became a favorite of the New York elite.
When Sloane bought the property in 1894, another mansion by the name of Wyndhurst already occupied the hill. That mansion, built by Gen. John F. Rathborne in 1869 was razed by Sloane. Rathborne purchased the land and Beecher s Cottage, a small farm house, for $8,000 from the Rev. Ward Beecher, brother of author Harriet Beecher Stowe.
next, gemologist of recounts his past in panther baby: a life of rebellion & reinvention. now, gemologist of recounts his life as a member of the black panther party 1960s and minute period. hello, good evening. so i wanted to introduce the writer, jamal shows the.i met i imagine all a long time ago.e he used to be the chair of columbia university where i wenu tomb graduate school. and long ago i had a friend ata newha line cinema, sort of a big company who makes big movies. i was saying to her one day i was working on this movie about a black panthers that is doing this research and i really wanted to talk to someone.id and she said well, i am working. with this fabulous screenwriter. she loves the work this man did and she s just incredible and you should talk to him. and i thought that is so odd. i didn t fully on her stand. was he a black panther, aith friend, did he just hang out with them?t it seemed very strange, for a screenwriter, that hollywood bck can t be
delay, to the conviction of bob ney, to tony rudy, to neil volz, so many people were pulled into this web. ralph reed, jjhn doolittle, karl rove, dick armey, conrad burns, don young. it was all about the money. almost everyone on that screen is gone from here they were when they either got in trouble or they were in office. a couple of them are still there. who did we just see and why did you starr with those people? i started with those people because it was interesting to me to show that jack abramoff wasn t on the periphery, that he was at a certain moment in time, his moment, the late 1990 s, early 2000 s, that he was at the center of washington. and so you saw a lot of people there, ralph reed, karl rove and others, and george w. bush who were right at the center of power in washington, because i think there have been a pretty concerted attempt to use abramoff in a way to be the scapegoat. not that he didn t do things wrong. he did a lot that was dead- wrong. but to
well, i heard some of the post, and i was astounded really by sort of the audacity of the story and how colorful it was. so thought it would make a good movie because i m always interested in stories per se, and jack is a fascinating character. very colorful, very outrageous. at the same time, the other interesting to me was it was a story that seemed to me to point out the most fundamental problem in our democracy right now, which is theeway that money rules our democracy. it s become so unbalanced that i think it s become the fundamental problem in our socieey. let s run a clip just so the auddence can get some sense of where you re going with this, and this is about a minute, 25 seconds. ii s near the beginning of the documentary. it was immediately apparent that it was going to be a much bigger deal, because he was such a well-known figure on capitol hill, really an uber lobbyist, and his connections were so widespread both in the republican party itself and in the