Historical Images
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“The Unrestricted Dumping Ground,” via The New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c146bf32-7fda-68d3-e040-e00a1806693f. This page includes a high resolution TIFF download option, which is what I used to examine the detail. ↩︎
- "Protect your hands! You work with them," poster (silkscreen) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518513/.
- "Be careful near machinery," poster (woodblock) by Robert Lachenmann for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, ca. 1936–1940. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518717/.
- "Work with care," poster (woodcut) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92517365/.
- "Failure here may mean death below – safety first," poster (woodcut) by Allan Nase for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518429/.
- "Backyards, Baltimore, Maryland," black and white photograph by Dick Sheldon for the Farm Security Administration, July 1938. Repository: The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ba309cea-94b2-4288-e040-e00a18066c61
- “Get away from the window! Curiosity is death!” The sketch shows a terror- or awe-stricken family looking out, many mouths wide open. Instead of gawking, the poster commands readers, “Stand individually behind pillars!”
- “Never remain standing on an exposed road!” “Always seek cover!”
- “Don’t stand behind the door!” This is followed by more advice about strong pillars or load-bearing sections of the wall.
- “Panic is worse than an air raid!” Pictured are people hurrying down the stairs, one person holding a candle, another an oil lamp. Underfoot is a small child who has fallen down, and ahead of these residents is an old man with a cane, about to be trampled. Instead of panicking, the readers are told, “Don’t worry about an attack at night!” Pictured is a man under a duvet sleeping soundly.
- “Never stand in the middle of the room!” The picture below this final warning shows a domestic space in which a man in bare feet and a nightshirt has behaved correctly: He is standing in a corner, an empty bed nearby, but the middle of his floor has disappeared.
- Puck cartoon marking the new year in 1914. A young man (the New Year) in a smoking jacket and a vest labeled 1914 says to the old year, dressed as Uncle Sam, "Have something on me, old man! Whatll it be?" The choices are two whiskeys, one marked "hope" and the other "fear". They are in a well-furnished upper middle class salon with an overhead electric lamp lighting their faces. Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011649657.
- Cartoon sketch by John T. McCutcheon titled "Is that the best he can wish us?," published in the Chicago Tribune on December 31, 1917. It portrays an old man, 1917, disappearing into the annals of history (literally pages, one marked "history") as he wishes a younger man with a globe for a head ("The World"), "Scrappy New Year!" The new year is dressed as a soldier and is weighed down by infantry kit as well as a few artillery tubes and merchant ships. Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010717171/.
- Red, white, and blue New Year’s poster with Baby 1919 flanked by Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty. Behind them is a big red sun with the text, “World Peace with Liberty and Prosperity 1919.” Europe was still in turmoil and experiencing violence, but Americans had reason to be optimistic. Thus, this lithograph from United Cigars (logo at Liberty’s feet) seems apropos for the time. Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003652819/.
Winslow Homer, 'Bell-Time' (1868)
I used to occasionally run across Winslow Homer’s wood engravings of the American Civil War, which were widely circulated in Harper’s Weekly, but this is the first work of his I’ve seen that deals with immigrant factory workers in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Note the mix of genders and ages, including the presence of young children. This was not work that could feed a whole family. No matter the difficult pecuniary circumstances of his subjects, however, Homer portrayed them with dignity.
Credit: “Bell-Time” by Winslow Homer, Harper’s Weekly, July 25,1868, via Smithsonian American Art Museum.
'The Unrestricted Dumping Ground' (1903 Cartoon)
This color cartoon by Louis Dalrymple appeared in Judge magazine in 1903.1 It linked immigration to national security by portraying Italian immigrants in ways that prefigured Trump’s despicable, racist rhetoric about “bad hombres” and pet-eaters in the present presidential race. The federal government, personified here as Uncle Sam, comes off as old and ineffectual.
At least, that’s what I see. Here: Old Uncle Sam stands at the ramparts of fortress America, bounded by the sea. The smoke from his pipe forms a wreath to his left. In that appears the late President William McKinley, assassinated in 1901 by the Polish-American anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Uncle Sam has an arm and hand around the flagpole and a cane in the other hand. Rats, monkeys, and other immigrating vermin emerge from the water, clamber up the rampart, and scurry away.
Some of the dehumanized immigrants are armed with a knife or pistol, and they wear a floppy, broad-brimmed hat or a bandana in anarchist red or the Italian tricolor. Their weapons and head apparel read “Socialist,” “Anarchist,” “Murderer,” “Assassination,” and “Mafia.” More inhuman riffraff falls from a garbage chute marked, “Direct from the slums of Europe daily.” There is also a cluster of regular gray rats in the harbor.
The message is clear. The immigrants, in this case Italians, are criminal, radical, or just socially undesirable. They are other, vermin, and their presence threatens the country.
Photo of “African American demonstrators outside the White House, with signs ‘We demand the right to vote, everywhere’ and signs protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama” by Warren K. Leffler, March 12, 1965. Source: U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014645538/.
Old Man of the Mountain postcard written in 1906. The Old Man, located in Franconia Notch, collapsed in 2003, but he remains a symbol of the state.
Postcard by the Detroit Photographic Co. Digital image from The New York Public Library, Image ID 62116. To learn more, see the history, images, and links at Wikipedia.
"Two U.S. Navy sailors browsing library shelf labeled 'Negro Books'" – U.S. Navy Department, Office of Public Relations, ca. 1944-49.
To scrutinize the titles in this image, download a high resolution scan from the NYPL Digital Collections.
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is clearly visible. Also: Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (1943) and Louis Adamic, The Native's Return (1934).
Repository: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/22e61340-6379-013b-2df1-0242ac110003.
Follow-up remarks: Revisiting Image of Two Back Sailors Browsing Books (Sept. 7, 2024)
Related post: Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation (June 19, 2024)
Workplace Safety Posters, ca. 1936–40
I am enjoying Depression-era workplace safety posters from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). They evoke a time when the power of government was effectively leveraged for good. If you live in the United States, there is a good chance you’ve encountered WPA building and infrastructure projects. One WPA program was the Federal Arts Project, which put artists to work. To get a feel for the diversity of programs this art supported, see the Library of Congress’s online collection.
Unfortunately, the WPA also built and helped staff internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. This part of the story underlines the negative potential of government power when racism shapes policy.
Besides the four posters that follow this text, I include a photograph of an alley behind a row of houses with tiny back yards in Baltimore. If you look closely at this image from the Farm Security Administration, you can see a WPA poster attached to an open door in the bottom left-hand corner. It is captioned “Stop accidents before they stop you.” The building itself appears to be part of a factory of some kind because only a door and a single big wall with windows is visible, visually distinct from the opposite side of the alley, where all the little houses are.
These posters remind me of the ongoing importance of government for writing, publicizing, and enforcing workplace safety regulations. They connect past concerns about workplace conditions to countless reports of workplace injuries and sickness in our own time. They also link to family stories past and present, whether handed down or forgotten, whether taught or ignored in schools, workplaces, and union gatherings.
My grandmother’s father was killed in an avoidable industrial accident in 1917 when she was six years old. The lathe he operated in a Cleveland factory had no safety guard, and then his luck ran out. He left behind six children and their mother, the oldest of them able to work. The sudden loss of this man represented a trauma that no one talked about in my childhood, and I only learned the barebones details from my mother this past year.
I often wonder if and how such trauma is passed down in other families, and why its causes are silenced or not. My mind goes there because I imagine that millions of Americans—from across the political spectrum—come from families with such experiences, even if these were not handed down from the past. And I wonder what, if anything, knowledge about these many pasts might do to change their attitudes today.
This thought ties in with the employers and politicians who fight government regulations and workers' collective bargaining. They strive to steal workers' freedom and dignity, all in the name of their own freedom. Part of this effort benefits from or fosters processes of families and communities forgetting or diminishing the significance of the workplace struggles and traumas in their own pasts.
Fortunately, good governance and organized labor seem to be making a comeback.
World War I Poster: How to Act during an Air Raid
Air raids were a new danger in the Great War, and people within range of enemy aircraft needed to know what to do. The main caption of this related instructional poster reads, “How should I behave during an air raid?” Five captioned cartoons in the top row show what not to do. Below each of these is the recommended life-saving response.
The apparent repetition and contradiction in this anonymously produced poster suggest that the poster was less a product of foresight and more an ad hoc response to recent events or rumors.
Source: “Wie verhalte ich mich bei Fliegergefahr?,” poster from the Kriegsbilder exhibit of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, https://ausstellungen.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/kriegsbilder/items/show/28. Physical object: Hessisches Landesarchiv. License: CC BY 4.0 Attribution.
Waging War with Factories
Production. B-17F heavy bomber. Working on the roof of a B-17F (Flying Fortress) bomber swung over on its side in the Boeing plant at Seattle. A turret will be mounted over the large circular opening. The Flying Fortress, a four-engine heavy bomber capable of flying at high altitudes, has performed with great credit in the South Pacific, over Germany and elsewhere.
– Andreas Feininger, December 1942, United States, Office of War Information, Library of Congress
The library has a large collection of photos showing the manufacture of B-17 bombers under the subject heading United States–Washington–King County–Seattle.
Ringing in the New Year: Peace and War, Hope and Fear
Red Cross Poster with Christkind, circa 1917
"Christmas collection of the Bavarian Red Cross for our men in field gray" reads the caption of this Red Cross poster from Germany during the Great War. The angelic Christkind it features shines bright yellow in the dark Christmas night as she delivers parcels wrapped in field grey to men on the front. Stars twinkle above her, and there is snow underfoot. To her left is a sled heavy with more parcels, and to her right is a dependable, mustached soldier, pipe in mouth, a freshly delivered parcel in his hands.
A photograph taken in Louisville, Kentucky the same year, shows a similar effort by the American Red Cross: women preparing Christmas parcels for American soldiers.
Repository: Library of Congress.
Potato Harvest
Harvesting potatoes on a collective farm near Kyiv in 1959, via the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2021791980
Russian Anti-Austrian War Propaganda, 1914–15
“An Austrian went to Radziwill and came right on to a peasant woman’s pitchfork,” Russian print by Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, 1914–15, New York Public Library Digital Collections. The library has digitized five more prints in this series.
Getting the News
Crowds lining up to get their letters and newspapers at the post office on Pike and Clay Streets in San Francisco, California, ca. 1850. This was a decade before the East and West Coasts were linked by rail and telegraph. Besides getting news through the mails, note the many conversations people were having while they did so.
Source: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012645628.
Depression in Two Senses of the Word
Shot in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, in 1934. Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2013647257.
The Sod
Leveling hummocks in dust bowl, thirty miles north of Dalhart, Texas. Farmer: "Every dime I got is tied up right here. If I don't get it out, I've got to drive off and leave it. Where would I go and what would I do? I know what the land did once for me, maybe it will do it again." Son: "It would be better if the sod had never been broke. My father's broke plenty of it. Could I get a job in California?"
Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration, June 1938, via New York Public Library.
Migrant Girl in the Dust Bowl
"Migrant worker looking through back window of automobile near Prague, Oklahoma. Lincoln County, Oklahoma," 1939. Repository: The New York Public Library.
Happening Here
WPA Federal Art Project in New York City, ca. 1936/37. The play was based on a novel about fascism happening here.
Repository: Library of Congress.
'Emigration—Detailing the Progress and Vicissitudes of an Emigrant' (1833)
Here is a 15-panel satire by C.J. Grant, perhaps meant for working-class Britons. In it, British emigrants could get away from taxes, but expect frightening exotic animals, cannibals, isolation, poverty, and homesickness. Read the panels in high definition at the Library of Congress, and check out Matthew Crowther's blog post about the artist at Yesterday's Papers for some publishing context.
A Walls from 1916
Speaking of imagined walls, here’s one from 1916, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Munitions Workers
Female employees of the German munitions factory WASAG in their work clothes, 1916. The one on the right seems to have been “conscripted” (zwangsverpflichtet), though it is unclear on what basis. She was also apparently highly skilled insofar as she was a production manager of some kind.
Source: Haus der Geschichte Wittenberg, “Arbeiterinnen der WASAG Reinsdorf.”
Emperor Mussolini
The caption reads, "I've decided to accept God, but he has to become Italian." The German here for "accept," "gelten lassen," could also be translated as "allow."
Source: Simplicissimus, May 3, 1926, http://www.simplicissimus.info.
Writing
I blogged some thoughts on this compelling image recently at History of Knowledge.