Gender & Sexuality
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For further details about the Labor Canteen, see the long caption for Washington Area Spark, “Social equality at the Labor Canteen,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/54266105006/. ↩︎
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See a related poster for American men on this blog, one of them Black, captioned “Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!" ↩︎
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“Welcome to All!,” color lithograph, Puck April 28, 1880, pp. 130–31, Library of Congress, PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002719044/. A high-resolution TIFF file is available for closer scrutiny. ↩︎
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Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West, “What Fools these Mortals Be!": The Story of Puck (IDW Publishing, 2014) ↩︎
'A Bit of War History' – Three Paintings by Thomas Waterman Wood (1865–66)
"The Contraband"
"The Recruit"
"The Veteran"
The word “contraband” referred to an enslaved person who had escaped. Given that the term usually indicated illegally imported or exported goods, its dehumanizing quality in the context of someone who has escaped bondage is palpable. Here, however, it stands in contrast to the painting, which shows a man, not a chattel or a caricature.1
The other two paintings see the same figure transformed into a soldier and a veteran. Both of these images underlined the figure’s manhood. With time, in fact, military service came to be associated with masculinity and citizenship in an age of people’s wars fought in North America and Europe.2
From this point of view, the paintings represent a message not only of self-emancipation through military service but of modern masculine citizenship shortly before the nineteenth amendment was ratified. In the West, this image of manhood and military service reached its high point in World Wars One and Two.
Intersections: three photos of Ernestine Eckstein in a 1965 picket line outside the White House protesting Federal discrimination against gay people in civil and military service and their obtaining security clearances. Her sign reads, “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL.” Eckstein was a Black woman, whereas most of the other picketers appear to have been white men. Another lesbian activist, white, is visible in one photo: Barbara Gittings. The photographer was Gitting’s white partner, Kay Tobin.
Photos via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, images 1605765, 1605764, and 1605766
“Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?” by Samantha Hancox-Li, Contingent Magazine, October 1, 2019, contingentmagazine.org… 🏳️⚧️
Photo of Mixed Race Sociability in Jim Crow Washington, DC, 1944
Pete Seeger at twenty-five entertaining federal workers, sailors, and soldiers with a banjo and song at the opening of the Labor Canteen in Washington, DC, on February 13, 1944. This unsegregated place in a Jim Crow city was sponsored by the Federal Workers of America and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.1 Note First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying herself in the mixed race and sex audience. On the wall behind the merrymakers are sketches of a hapless character undergoing physical training, perhaps Private Snafu.
Source: Office of War Information, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017864322/
World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front
The American Front for Victory – This poster from World War Two operates on two levels. First, it emphasizes the contribution of “The American Front” to the victory for which the nation was fighting. American front because this was about the home front, the people, many of them women, contributing to victory in industry, in agriculture, through service, and with their savings. Second, the name makes an important statement about the women it pictures working. They are Black. In large parts of the country, racist Americans cast the fitness of Black people as American citizens in doubt, to say nothing of questioning their very humanity.1 Here, by contrast, four Black women are depicted doing dignified work for the national cause.
Moving clockwise from the top, one woman, wearing some kind of civilian uniform, is holding a bucket marked “save” and is participating in either the sale or purchase of “Defense Bonds”; another is working a potato field with the words “strong bodies” underneath; there is a woman in a nurse’s uniform above the label “volunteer service”; and a woman can be seen working on an airplane, perhaps installing its propeller. This is a poster proclaiming the importance of the home front and the dignity and honor of the Black women fighting on it.
Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_061.
Inspiring Photo from 1971 for Our Troubled Times
“Isabel Miller and Barbara Gittings hugging librarians” in 1971 at the American Library Association Conference in Dallas, Texas. (Miller is on the left. Gittings is on the right in the floral sleeveless dress.)
Librarians can be central in the fight against bigotry and for equal rights, which might explain why some gay rights activists were there. (An important example: early professional Black librarians.)
Photo by Kay Tobin, via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, image ID 1606079. 🏳️🌈
Photo of Joy and Love, 1962
So much joy in this photo, so much love: “Barbara Gittings in shower, circa 1962” by Kay Tobin. 🏳️🌈
Via Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs collection, NYPL Digital Collections, image ID 1605708.
Digital Transgender Archive – Trans History, Linked
www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net. 🏳️⚧️
“To the Man on the Northeast Regional” by Charlotte Clymer, charlotteclymer.substack.com… 🏳️⚧️
Women installing assemblies and fixtures in the tail fuselage of a B-17F bomber (Flying Fortress) under construction at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October 1942. The bodies of the women seem almost choreographed, embodying the dignity and high purpose of their labor. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer for the U.S. Office of War Information.
Source: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017878924/.
Poster from the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936–39. The main text reads, “We charge the rebels as assassins! Innocent children and women die. Free men, repudiate all those who support fascism in the rearguard.” The text, bottom right, with the arrow pointing at the mother and child reads, “Here are the victims.” Note, too, the black and red triangle of the Anarchists in the lower right-hand corner.
Source of image and main text translation: Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego, https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb5188576r. This page also offers historical context and analysis.
I enjoyed rewatching “The More the Merrier,” dir. George Stevens (Columbia Pictures 1944). Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn star in this delightful comedy. Part of its charm for me is the setting itself, wartime Washington, DC. We do not see the halls of power but instead the streets, a hotel and restaurant, office buildings, a small apartment, and the shared roof of a row of houses filled with apartment dwellers.
I enjoyed another Marlene Dietrich movie this evening: “Dishonored,” dir. Joseph Starnberg (Paramount, 1931). This was her second U.S. film, coming on the heels of Starnberg’s “Morocco” (1930). She doesn’t sing this time, but her piano playing is striking. As with “Blonde Venus," her sense of duty and love put her in the crosshairs of men and their law.
First image: “Morroco” ad for moviegoers in Photoplay Magazine, January 1931. Second image: First page of a three-page “Dishonored” ad for people in the distribution and exhibition segments of the movie industry, in The Film Daily, March 5, 1931.
This evening I watched “Blonde Venus,” dir. Joseph Starnberg (Paramount, 1932).
Paramount ad for the film featuring its star, Marlene Dietrich. The ad appeared in the movie industry newspaper The Film Daily on September 12, 1932.
Reading Notes: 'Last Call at the Hotel Imperial' by Deborah Cohen
I finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) by Deborah Cohen. At times I got impatient because it was as much about the journalists' private and inner lives as their reporting, but I realized that this was the point and decided not to skip over those sections. Cohen’s protagonists were people with experiences and viewpoints relevant to their work and our understanding of it. As journalists, they had been taught “impartiality” (resembling bothsidism today) but the dictatorships, wars, and atrocities they witnessed demanded a viewpoint, even if their editors disagreed. It was for these viewpoints that I had begun reading the book in the first place.
Cohen focuses on the four biggest star journalists of the era, John Gunther, H. R. Knickbocker, James Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, whose lives became closely entwined, and who left behind a prodigious written record for Cohen to mine. Thus, we learn about their upbringings, educations, and early career experiences; their love, sex, and reproductive lives; their sexuality and mental health; their exposure to psychoanalysis, and more. This period of changing cultural mores adds an important backdrop to the events and people they wrote about, and it helps us understand the reporters themselves.
Cohen’s focus on these individuals and their significant others, especially Frances Fineman Gunther, hints at the relevance of the individual in a few other ways besides context and viewpoint. First, there is the question of private lives in situations where public affairs tend to crowd everything private out. Next, there is the question of the role of individual agency in history. This issue concerned Cohen’s protagonists, who met many of the leading political figures of the day. It was also relevant to the issue of the masses and the extent to which circumstances or individual characteristics made them into Nazis, for example. Finally, there is the question of the reporters' own impacts.
Cohen notes in the prologue that the image of the United States embodied by the large number of American journalists overseas was at odds with the old isolationist stereotype. Clearly there was an appetite for information about the world. Moreover, the travels by ship and plane of her protagonists points to the many economic, professional, and personal entanglements of the United States with the rest of the world despite the strength of nationalisms and protectionist tariff regimes. Cohen’s book takes us across Europe, including to fascist Italy, the Spanish Civil War, as well as Weimar and Nazi Germany, to whose murderous intentions they were by no means blind. We also see Ethiopia at the moment of Mussolini’s invasion, Palestine, Egypt, the USSR, pre- and postcolonial India, and civil-war China, not to mention the U.S. Jim Crow South.
The book is long, probably too long to teach undergraduates, unless one assigned specific sections, but it is accessibly written, affordably priced, and has received favorable reviews outside the academy, including in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. Readers should be prepared to look up names and descriptive vocabulary they might not know, which is easy enough with today’s mobile phones.
When Russia makes yet another nuclear threat, why is the biggest scaredy cat in the room always a would-be “man’s man” like Joe Rogan? Also, when did doing the right thing cease to be a part of normative masculinity for so many Americans?
An Old Putin Meme – 'Weaponizing Ridicule'
Here is a once popular meme in Russia that the thin-skinned Putin banned, thereby making it more popular (artist unknown). This is one of the examples that J. Michael Waller offers in “Weaponizing Ridicule” (Military Review, Sept.–Oct. 2017). His findings, it seems to me, are relevant to how we could deal with the big orange lump.
'Welcome to All' (1880 Cartoon)
This Puck cartoon from 1880 portrayed immigration in positive terms.1 Uncle Sam stands at the entrance to a wooden “U.S. Ark of Refuge,” a U.S. flag to the side. The image offers a strong contrast to the ramparts Uncle Sam stands at in 1903 and behind in 1916. Beside him is a list of “free” things offered by “U.S.”
FREE EDUCATION
FREE LAND
FREE SPEECH
FREE BALLOT
FREE LUNCH.
U.S.
The meaning of “free” varies here. Sometimes it has to do with “liberty” (free speech and the secret ballot), and other times “no cost.” If public (“free”) education is an achievement some in our own time wish to destroy, its existence was bound up with both senses of “free.” No tuition was required, sure, but it was also a precondition for a free people and for making Americans. “Free land” in this list would have meant federal lands according to the terms of the various Homestead Acts. But “free lunch”? What was that about?
This last item was initially a head scratcher for me. I thought it might be a comment or joke about immigrant expectations, but it seems the saying “no such thing as a free lunch” only gained currency during the middle decades of the twentieth-century. In fact, American saloons were offering free lunches at the time of this cartoon, so there really was such a thing for those who liked their beer and whiskey. Given the loads of correspondence and rumors between Europe and the United States, this kind of knowledge would have filtered through, too.
Because saloons are the context of these lunches, it is tempting to gender these free lunches “masculine” and assume the existence of a social critique of intemperate immigrant men. The image, however, shows heterosexual couples in the prime of life, suggesting that such gendered moralizing was not part of the artist’s intention. Moreover, Puck had begun its life as a German-language publication in the previous decade, and the artist-publisher Joseph-Keppler had immigrated from Austria.2
Highlighting the list of attractions on the door is the metaphorically clear sky over the “ark.” Behind the migrants, to the east, are dark storm clouds with black carrion-seeking scavengers in them. The clouds themselves are monsters labeled “WAR” and “DISTRESS.” War entailed not only destruction but also mandatory military service of varying terms. Distress, in this context, probably meant economic distress. Europe was in the middle of a long depression, while it was continuing to experience great socio-economic changes in the course of its ongoing industrialization.
Adding more economic and political arguments to the mix, more liberty, a sign in the middle advertises more benefits to life in the United States:
NO OPPRESSIVE TAXES
NO EXPENSIVE KINGS
NO COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
NO KNOUTS [OR] DUNGEONS.
The cartoon’s pairing of dark and light, of the prospects of distress or prosperity, represented what migration discourse in our own time refers to as push and pull factors. Beneath the cartoon is a quote from the N.Y. Statistical Review that highlights the cartoonist’s main interest: “We may safely say that the present influx of immigration to the United States is something unprecedented in our generation.” The detailed cartoon offered a context for this rise.
UPDATE: On Bluesky, @resonanteye.bsky.social reminded me of the Page Act of 1875, which excluded Chinese women. That made me think of the two single men at the end of the line in this cartoon because one of them appears to be Chinese. It is likely that this represented an acknowledgement of the Page Act. It also seems possible that the inclusion of this figure amounted to a critique of it. Here's our exchange—unfortunately, her settings require one to be logged in to see her posts.