Past & Present
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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
“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.
There are two documentary films streaming on Paramount+ right now that I find inspiring and motivating: “Superpower” (2023), directed by Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman; and “Kiss the Future” (2024), directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain. The first centers on Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelinsky in Russia’s current war against Ukraine, and the second goes back to the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–96).
A theme common to each film is ordinary citizens standing up to genocidal aggressors. There is also the relationship between popular culture and politics in war, including the role of international celebrity. In the first movie, an entertainer-turned-president must lead a country in war, supported by a self-mobilizing citizenry. Moreover, one of the directors is himself an entertainer. In the second movie, inhabitants of a city under constant fire find a way to get by and even thrive with punk rock and dance. They are later joined on TV and then in person by the band U2.
“How Charles Holman discovered the Bushes’ ancestors had enslaved his family” (Washington Post) archive.ph/zx17m.
“Scientists identify victim of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in mass grave” (Washington Post) archive.ph/DPC5e.
How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 2, section: “Another Russia”.
Important historical context for this week’s unconscionable immunity ruling: Sean Wilentz, “The Dred Scott of Our Time”, NYRB, July 4, 2024, archive.ph/qJ1xx (archived version so anyone can read about this vital topic)
The current moment reminds me of how desperately we need to teach the contested and often fraught history of human rights. We need better literacy on the subject. I’ve done this in a required Western Civ course at GMU.
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.
Children Watching
“The Children Were Watching,” dir. Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, USA 1961, 25 min. – This documentary doesn’t feel as old to me as I wish it did. In part that’s because I watched it in Trump’s America during an especially difficult year, but something deeper is at play. The film’s ongoing relevance represents an ambiguous answer to its directors' main question: What were the children of a New Orleans neighborhood learning as they watched their parents during the conflicts surrounding school integration in November 1960?
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.
'Mr Smith Goes to Washington'
I watched "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939) last night. Despite the many differences to today's world and the oversimplification of the state political machine, the politics in the film strike me as relevant to our own time. Thing is, though, it would probably resonate with Americans regardless of ideological or party orientation. Anti-Trump people could take its anti-corruption and pro-democracy message to heart. Pro-Trump people could embrace how the Washington outsider triumphs, and credulous pro-Trumpers could go for the anti-corruption, pro-democracy stuff too. Finally, the rough-and-tumble quality of the political game would resonate across the political spectrum.
'The Public Health' (1840)
Via JSTOR Daily, which describes an 1840 pamphlet advocating "a four-pronged approach to public healthcare that sounds remarkably like our own."
Two Faces of America
To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.
Alex Ross (The New Yorker)
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.
A Walls from 1916
Speaking of imagined walls, here’s one from 1916, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The Changing Faces of Nationalism
As a historian who sometimes teaches about Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have to give Trump credit for one thing: His constant upending of the broad political consensus that emerged after World War II and the Cold War means that basic historical terms are constantly making it into the news and national discourse as quasi new problems, new questions. As upsetting as these times are, as abhorrent as Trump is, it is hard to deny the value of Ron Elving’s reaction to the president’s recent statement about being a nationalist: “We are about to have a national conversation about the word nationalist. And Elving wants to offer nuances to the term’s meanings in past and present—well, as much as anyone can in some 1,100 words.
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.
Angry America
Jeet Heer’s provocative commentary in the New Republic is worth a read: “America Has Always Been Angry and Violent." The historical rhetoric he offers is startling. I definitely need to read more U.S. history.