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/.
Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis, not bondage!
World War Two poster – The word "bonds" can work three ways here: the bonds or chains pictured here as broken, the bonds that unite us, and U.S. war bonds. The second of these offers the most powerful contrast to "bondage."
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_065.
📽️ I rewatched “Amsterdam,” dir. David Russell (New Regency, 2022) because machinations in and around the current administration give the story fresh relevance. Set in 1933, with flashbacks to the World War and postwar, there is cruelty, but also defiance, friendship, love, music, and dance.
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.
Thinking of a member of Orange Oaf's cast of terrible characters…
Don't Kill Our Wild Life – Department of the Interior, National Park Service – By Works Progress Administration – Federal Art Project NYC – [ca. 1936–40]
Via Library of Congress.
Office of Strategic Services, Simple Sabotage Field Manual (Washington, DC, 1944) via the Internet Archive.
U.S. Government Caricature of Nazi Propaganda
This 1942 poster was designed to counter the effects of Nazi propaganda in the United States. It is fascinating in its own right, but parts of the text reveal startling similarities to Russian disinformation in our own time.
Accessibility: Description and full transcription of poster.
Watching 'Citizen Kane' in late 2024
Last week I watched “Citizen Kane” (dir. Orson Wells, 1941) for the first time in more decades than I can remember. I didn’t really enjoy the experience, maybe because the initial premise (tearing a boy away from his home for a huge inheritance) is as misshapen as the psychological development of the lead role, Charles Foster Kane. There is also the crass materialism, the emptiness of Kane’s soul, and his insatiable appetite for the adoration of others. His unhappy loneliness in the end as the only occupant (not including servants) of a giant castle filled with statues and other valuable artifacts from Europe was presumably the point of this bleak story, one that might be construed as a moral tale.
I should have liked the references to newspaper moguls and opinion making to be less oblique, though that might have pushed one of them too far in real life. (Apparently William Randolph Hearst did what he could to suppress the film because it hit too close to home.) Or maybe this context was secondary to Kane’s personal development anyway. After all, this was an era when foreign correspondents reported on populists and dictators, and psychoanalysis was in vogue. Sure, it was an era of mass politics, but these masses had their great men, for better or worse.
None of this is a criticism of the film. I just didn’t enjoy it. Perhaps the biggest problem is how readily Kane can stand in for certain men in our own time. The film’s dark, fatalistic overtones reinforced this effect in my mind. Still, there is one external factor that helped me to contextualize “Citizen Kane” better this time around: I actually saw the Hearst Castle in 2018, a truly extraordinary monument, fascinating and unsettling at the same time.
Indoor Roman Pool at Hearst Castle
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.