Past & Present
- “Beware the cancer quack / A reputable physician does not promise a cure, demand advance payment, advertise” by Max Plattner, Works Progress Administration – Federal Art Project NYC, for the U.S. Public Health Service in cooperation with the American Society for the Control of Cancer, ca. 1936–38, via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518641/.
- “No home remedy or quack doctor ever cured syphilis or gonorrhea / See your doctor or local health office” by Leonard Karsakov for the United States Public Health Service, ca. 1941, via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/96502760/.
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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) ↩︎
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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
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.
📽️ Think I’ll start rewatching “Good Night, and Good Luck,” dir. George Clooney (Warner Bros, 2005). Seems all too relevant again.
Sometimes it feels like the Cold War was a long cease fire, and now we’ve decided to reprise the 1930s to see what else we can muck up. (Bad historical thinking, I know, but I did say “feels,” so cut me some slack.😤)
Good and healthy societies do not require to be ruled by terror. This is not to deny that terror is an enormously effective means of creating a menacing machine. The shrewd exploitations of fear is an ancient means of ruling. But it is also a dangerous way of ruling. For one thing, it cuts the rulers themselves off from reality. In a society where no one can complain, no one knows the depths of resentment ready to flare up once the opportunity comes.
– Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1939), 11.
“Who Goes Nazi?" by Dorothy Thompson, Harper’s Magazine, August 1941 (alternative link). – This short piece by a woman who watched it happen up close in Germany, Austria, and France, a woman who knew “the types,” makes for a fascinating read in our current moment.
Two U.S. Public Health Service Posters Warning against Quacks, ca. 1936–41
Poster from 1919 Advocating American Citizenship
The notice in the bottom-right corner reads “Copyright 1919, The Stanley Service Co.” According to the Library of Congress Copyright Office’s Catalogue of Copyright Entries for that year, the company in question was the Stanley Industrial Educational Poster Service in Cleveland, Ohio. This provenance suggests to me that employers were being offered this messaging for their workers, even if the artist portrayed the immigrants as fresh arrivals.
Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95507947/
“How some Texas parents and historians say a new state curriculum glosses over slavery and racism” by Jaden Edison, The Texas Tribune, November 18, 2024.
@Infrogmation asked on Mastodon what Mussolini was wearing on his nose in an image I had reposted. I didn’t know, but now I do thanks to @Infrogmation: Il Duce got a bloody nose in an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1926. Talk about history rhyming! 👀
Photos of a Vigilante Deportation in 1917
I was quite startled by these and related images from 1917 because they show a lot of men being rounded up for removal in box cars in the hot dessert sun. It turns out that this was the Bisbee Deportation of IWW strikers in 1917. Some 1,300 people were kidnapped and put on a train in the summer heat by a 2,200-man posse. The action, ordered by Phelps Dodge, was illegal but supposedly not covered by federal law, only state law, and the state never prosecuted. In fact, one photographer, Dix, saw a money-making opportunity in the forcible removal of workers from Arizona to New Mexico. The Library of Congress holds the first, darker image below as a photo print, whereas it has the other three lighter images by the same photographer as postcards, suggesting the existence of at least a local market for souvenirs.
“Marching From Lowell [Ariz.], Deportation of I.W.W.s, July 12, 1917."
“July 12, 1917, Deportation of I.W.W.s, Marching Down R.R. Track from Bisbee."
“Deportation of I.W.W.s, July 12, 1917, Guards around Ballpark at Warren."
“Deportation of I.W.W.s, July 12, 1917, Marching Men to Train from Warren Ballpark."
From Chicago, John [Gunther]’s editor sent a request for “more diversified” articles: “The whole paper has been loaded with anti-Hitler copy for two weeks.” The time had come, his editor insisted, “to write about something else besides the infringement of personal liberty.” The Daily News was laying itself open to the charge of bias; the news columns shouldn’t be used “for the advocacy of a cause.” . . .
According to a columnist for the Montclair Times, [H. R.] Knickerbocker had gotten himself “quite excited” about Jews and failed to depict the German perspective. His reports were “hearsay,” they were exaggerated, they could scarcely be believed. “There must be two sides to the question."
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 7.
“Oakies” by Stuart Davis, ink and black crayon on paper, captioned “In a Florida Auto Camp: ‘Don’t cry baby, popper’ll sell the spare tire, and we’ll look for a new boom somwhere else’”, in New Masses, vol. 1 (May 1926), p. 6. Repository: Library of Congress.
How wretched it was to think that one’s own fate depended on what some farmer in Iowa felt—or more to the point, how he voted. Still, if Herbert Hoover could be got rid of, if FDR prevailed . . .
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 6.
Election Night Illumination, Flatiron Building, New York City, color postcard, N.Y. Sunday American & Journal (W. R. Hearst, 1904), Library of Congress.
“Watching the election returns—great crowds before the Times B’ld’g. and Astor Hotel, New York,” stereograph card by H.C. White Co., 1907, Library of Congress.
Broadcasting Election Results and Taking Opinion Polls in 1872
The illustrated British weekly The Graphic published these two fascinating images of U.S. election technologies in 1872. Explanations from the publication follow.
“The Electoral Magic Lantern” aka Broadcasting Results (top)
“Mammoth stereopticon”, at the corner of Broadway and Twenty-Second Street. “By means of a stereoscopic apparatus and magic lantern, the telegrams [of election results] are rapidly copied on a glass plate, and then put in the apparatus. Large crowds assemble till early in the morning, to watch the returns, which are shown on the wall of some building, covered with a large white sheet."–from source periodical.
“Taking Votes in a Railway Car” aka Polling Voter Intentions (bottom)
“It is a common thing to take votes in the railway carriages during election campaigns, though strictly speaking, it is not so much taking a vote as ascertaining approximately which candidate will have the best chance. Each passenger enters the name of his choice on a piece of paper, and a gentleman, generally a politician, takes his hat and collects the votes. Bets are offered and taken, and after the scrutiny animated discussions arise, each man endeavouring to persuade his opponents."–from source periodical.
Source: Wood engravings by Paul Frenzeny (artist) and Francis Sylvester Walker (delineator), The Graphic, November 30, 1872, via The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. (Higher resolutions available.)
"Susan B. Anthony to the women of today: 'Everything but the vote is still to be won'" by Nina Allender (1872–1957) for the Women's National Party, Equal Rights: Official Weekly Organ of the National Woman's Party, February 24, 1923, via Library of Congress.
On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future.
– Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, November 3, 2024.
“Confessions of a Republican” (LBJ 1964 Presidential campaign commercial) https://youtu.be/LiG0AE8zdTU 🗳️
The past is being whitewashed at the National Archives museum.
The changes to the new exhibits are remarkable. A photo of King was replaced with one of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley. A “proposed exhibit exploring changes to the Constitution since 1787,” including “amendments abolishing slavery and expanding the right to vote,” was reduced in size, and employees were told that “focusing on the amendments portrayed the Founding Fathers in a negative light.” Shogan “told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees” and her aides “also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational material.” An exhibit on coal communities “cut references to the environmental hazards caused by the mining industry.” Shogan’s aides “also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.” A photo of Betty Ford wearing an Equal Rights Amendment pin was removed from a video, and in an exhibit of “patents that changed the world,” the birth control pill was replaced with, of all things, the bump stock.
Nathan J. Robinson, “It’s Going to Take a Constant Fight to Preserve the Historical Record,” Current Affairs, October 31, 2024.
'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.
'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.
Revisiting Image of Two Back Sailors Browsing Books
On August 27th, I posted a mid-to-late 1940s photo of two Black sailors browsing books in a library section marked “Negro Books." In response, a couple people on my socials expressed outrage or sadness over the segregation they thought they were seeing. That makes sense if one doesn’t consider the book titles I mentioned or the link to a related post here titled Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation.
Thing is, though, books could be powerful wherever librarians made them available in their collections and discoverable by their readers. That’s why I see in the image two sailors browsing books in a thematic library display that highlighted a selection of books of probable interest to Black people. The photo’s provenance also suggests as much: the U.S. Navy Department’s Office of Public Relations produced it, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture preserved it. What’s more, there is the photo’s suggestive chronological proximity to the end of the war and to Harry S. Truman’s desegregation order for the U.S military in 1948. Yes, the photo was taken in a broader context of prejudice and segregation, even atrocity, but the story does not end there.
We can’t allow our knowledge of historical and present-day racism to blind us to signs in the image of people with agency who worked toward a more just world. Someone in the navy’s PR office decided or was ordered to take and distribute such a photo, or have this done. One or more people in a navy library ordered and displayed the books that caught the photographer’s eye, perhaps owing to the cataloging innovations of Dorothy B. Porter. Moreover, someone shaped the command climate in which these things transpired.
Whatever led to these particular sailors posing for this picture, the camera recorded two young black men doing something about their present and future. We see them serving their country. We see them acquiring knowledge about it that had emancipatory potential.
Of course, nothing in this kind of framing can negate the history of racism in this country. What thinking about individual agency can do is open our eyes to the humanity and strength of the people who endured and made lives for themselves despite the oppression. The books on the shelves written by Black authors were also evidence of such spirit. And the unknown characters behind the making of this photograph? It is productive to think of them as individuals who made choices within a specific institutional, social, and cultural matrix. Human agency matters.
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.
