War & Society
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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) ↩︎
Scholz’s speech on dropping Lindner was impressive.🇩🇪 So was the timing.🇺🇸 I had been despairing in the face of his long-running timidity vis-à-vis Ukraine.🇺🇦 He isn’t offering Ukraine a way out of Western restrictions on weapon types or joining NATO, but it’s an important signal and a lifeline.
This evening, I watched two short films from The Kyiv Independent’s YouTube channel about people in uniform. In The Witches of Butcha, we meet a woman’s unit tasked with shooting down Shahed drones. The other introduces Ukrainian prisoners training to fight as infantrymen: “I want to come home not as some ex-convict, but a hero."
One of the 8-inch M110 self-propelled howitzer crews I served on in the mid 1980s was majority Puerto Rican. If I recall correctly, two of us were white, two Black, and six Puerto Rican. I feel richer for having had such experiences than the orange role-playing garbage man will ever be.
'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.
Whenever Olaf Scholz sees an opportunity to do the wrong thing for European security and Ukraine, he seizes it. I don’t know how his foreign and defense ministers put up with this. The Wall came down 35 years ago, and yet there’s still no backbone or leadership in sight.
Russia is intent on eradicating the Ukrainian language and all aspects of Ukrainian identity, with young Ukrainians a particular target.
In the name of civilization, rebellious villages would be burned to the ground.
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 3.
Written in connection with one of her protagonist’s reporting on the Syrian Rebellion in 1926.
Am thinking Deborah Cohen’s Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) will make for a good read in these dangerous times. 📚
We no longer live in a world where the very wealthy can do business with autocratic regimes, sometimes promoting the foreign policy goals of those regimes, while at the same time doing business with the American government, or with European governments, and enjoying the status and privileges of citizenship and legal protection in the free markets of the democratic world. It’s time to make them choose.
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday 2024), Epilogue, “Decouple, De-Risk, Rebuild”
"[American] conservatives hyped anti-Ukraine videos created by a TV producer who also worked for Russian media" – AP News, Oct. 18, 2018. #DefendFreedom #VoteBlue #RussiaIsATerroristState
Russia Wants to Muzzle Childless Cat Ladies
The Russian parliament is discussing a law to ban so-called “propaganda of childlessness” with fines up to $4,300 for individuals. Will that help to solve the country’s demographic crisis?
“What’s behind Russia’s plan to ban ‘child-free’ ideology?,” DW, Sept. 28, 2024.
It’s almost as if they were pandering to Vance – or drinking from the same batch of Kool-Aid.
Russia lets African migrant laborers enter on tourist visas. From there, they can look for work, but sign a contract that lands them on the front lines in Donbas. The Kyiv Independent has excerpted interviews with two African POWs held by Ukraine. https://youtu.be/PM9DnRxxWC0 (12 min)
Here’s another bit of decor that I added to the car last week.
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.
"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)
Russia has been testing drones and training their pilots with attacks on Ukrainian civilians in Beryslav (Kherson Oblast). Good investigative reporting by DW Documentary. https://youtu.be/kuTo94TnMPo
With its massive air attack today, Russia offers still more convincing arguments for lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western-provided missiles. It’s high time we attended to Russia’s actions instead of its bluster.
Interesting DW documentary about Palestinian refugees from Gaza fortunate enough to gain entry to Egypt: “Fleeing war in Gaza - for a new life in Egypt?"
Recommended Insights into the Kursk Incursion
Michael Bohnert, an engineer at Rand Corporation, shares some useful insights about electronic warfare in the August 16, 2024 episode of the podcast Ukraine the Latest. He discusses this topic in connection with Ukraine’s Kursk incursion and describes the difficult choices that Russia’s political and military leadership face in the coming months from the standpoint of electronic warfare.
Also, Anders Puck Nielsen, a military analyst in Denmark, released a helpful 15-minute video on YouTube today about where he thinks Russia’s leadership is in responding to Ukraine’s incursion. Acknowledging complexity, he nonetheless keeps his viewers' eyes on two fundamental issues for Russia, namely, space and manpower, and he underlines the critical domestic political entanglements that the manpower question has.
Both of these contributions offer useful perspectives on Ukraine’s shakeup of a common impression that the conflict was supposedly frozen. Of course, there are many more aspects of this story, but I highlight these contributions because I haven’t seen them in other news stories so far.
Map of the incursion in early August, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on August 8, 2024 by Ecrusized in varying sizes and languages. License: CC0 (no rights reserved).
The Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) in Warsaw has put out two interesting reports on YouTube that analyze Russia’s initially incoherent propaganda response to Ukraine’s Kursk incursion and how this propaganda interacts with ordinary Russians' reactions.
Negotiating One's Own Murder (Satire)
Here is some satire from Ukraine on a certain 🍊 candidate’s nonsense: “Shot of Peace” (cartoon in Ukrainian with English subtitles by Фріоніс), https://youtu.be/… #СлаваУкраїні #НахуйПутіна #НахуйТрампа