A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Point, and many other places... 5000+ total posts since 2008.. Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com
"There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work." --Lewis Hine, 1908
This is an appraisal of the working conditions of children in 1934--a third of the way through the century, thirty years before the 'sixties, not horribly long ago, not of a Dickensian era, not even a Sinclair-Lewis-ian one. Recent. The author, Dorothy Kenyon--1888-1972, a feminist, civil rights lawyer, judge, maverick, speaker, activist, and all around force of nature who stood strong and firm and tall while being accused of Commie blather by Joe McCarthy--made a very strong case for people to take a close look at the still-dismal conditions of child labor in the U.S.
Exposing the conditions of children, young child, hard at work in 40-75 hour a week jobs may belong to the documentarian photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940), whose long series of images made between 1908-1917 (and working for the National Child Labor Committee) depicted the varied working conditions of some of the 2 million kids under the age of 16 working in the U.S. He made photographs, and photographs to this generation of American newspaper and magazine reader were still relatively new-ish, half-tones coming into wide use only in the 1890's, making short work of speculation.
Hine--who gives us the quote to lead this short post--was a school teacher and sociologist who was extremely aware of the plight of the children around him--well, children, and immigrants, and laborers; people without voices, or representation, poor working people. He was a pioneering photographer whose images of these classes of people were revolutionary, a tremendously important documentarian of a societal symptom that was pretty much misdiagnosed, or at least was chosen as something to not be seen. That was hard to do when you had actual photographs of the grim situation.
Fresh from a short post on Richard Wagner writing and publishing an interesting piece on the future of music, and then months later writing a diabolically-bad and ruthlessly hateful pamphlet on Jewish people, I came to this--a pair of books with illustrations of another sort of ruthless control, this one mental, legal and physical.
Moses Roper's1(b. 1815-1891) A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery, (Philadelphia: Merrihew & Gunn, 1838) details a life-long series of vast mistreatment, punishment and torture while a slave. He was a mulatto, and of very fine and fair skin, and so endured a particularly hard treatment from a number of different masters, changing masters 17 times. But he escaped, finally (after more than a dozen attempts) and made his way from Florida to New York, and then ultimately to England. His book has few illustrations, but those that are there are unforgettable.
[Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections, here.]
This piece of propaganda and racial attack appeared in Los Angeles in 1889. The National Bakers Union called for a boycott of The Original Coffee House for purchasing their baked goods from a "scab" bakery identified as Brown's Restaurant and Bakery. Their crime was magnified by using Chinese people instead of making use of "hundreds of capable and deserving White People" were seeking employment. The union also made a connection between the next-door undertakers (and the possibility of the seepage of vermin and such) with the use of the Chinese workers.
Source: I originally found this post at the Bay Radical website, here, though the image above is a high resolution download from he Library of Congress, here, from their Chinese in California collection.
The undertakers seem to have survived whatever it was that the Bakers Union threw at them, advertising themselves in 1889 (following), and telling folks to call, day or night, by ringing Number 61:
"PECK & McCOY, Undertakers and Embalmers, No. 40 NORTH MAIN STREET. Telephone 61. Day or Night, from Los Angeles Herald, Volume 31, Number 145, 25 February 1889 — Page 6 Advertisements Column 1 [ADVERTISEMENT], California Digital Newspaper Collection, here. "
The Chinese population in L.A. had grown markedly since 1850, and by the mid-80's there were some 3,000 living in Chinatown in a city of about 50,000 people. There was a notorious riot and massacre of Chinese people there, in Chinatown, a result of a white man killed accidentally int he crossfire of a gunfight between two rival Tanns. The establishment went crazy and exacted a gross revenge, burnign amd looting, and killing 19 men and boys.
Here's a slathering piece of propaganda published by the Militant Christian Patriots (of London) on how the British government was dealing with the Nazi/Seudeten problem in September 1938. In their gunsights was Anthony Eden, who was seen by this group as a Bolshevist supporter, and who as the Foreign Minister of the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was against the appeasement policy of the government towards Nazi territorial acquisitions, particularly in this case with Czechoslovakia. Eden. identified here as "backed by the Zionists, Fabian_Scoailists and "pacifist" League of Nations enthusiasts" was a multiple threat, and seen to be capable of directing national policy towards a confrontation with Germany over the looming Czech problem. [The original is available from our blog bookstore.] On the other hand, Neville Chamberlain, who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at this time (and from May 1938-May 1940), was seen as a better ideological fit with his issues and policies of appeasement of the German nationalist needs and territorial rape. Chamberlain certainly gave what Christian Militants wanted--a free hand to Hitler in Czechoslovakia (and more), and perhaps an acknowledgement of defeat to the Nazi nation. Winston Churchill certainly thought so:
"We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat... you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude...we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road...we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged..." Winston Churchill, MP, 1938
The Christian Militants saw it all differently, tending to agree with Hitler on the Czech matter, and seeking to keep the U.K. out of confrontation and thus away from war by giving Hitler (and then Mussolini) what they demanded to satisfy their growing national needs.
"I am asking neither that Germany be allowed to oppress three and a half million Frenchmen, nor am I asking that three and a half million Englishmen be placed at our mercy. Rather I am simply demanding that the oppression of three and a half million Germans in Czechoslovakia cease and that the inalienable right to self-determination take its place." -Adolf Hitler's speech at the NSDAP Congress 1938
Eden resigned his position earlier in the year, in March 1938, but stayed in the fray. As everyone knows things went badly at the end of the month of September, 1938, with Chamberlain letting everything go and appeasing Hitler in the Munich Conference (known to the Czechs as the "Munich Dictates" and worse) in which bits of Czechoslovakia were given to Germany in a series of meetings in which that country was not invited.
And so the P.M. returned to the home country having done nothing in Germany but give away a part of someone else's country, all in a feeble attempt at maintaining peace for Europe's key players. He landed at Heston Aerodrome and held a piece of flimsy paper in his hand, which was battered by a tiny wind, and declared that there would be "peace in our time" because Hitler's signature said it would be so, all of which was a "prelude to peace" in Europe as a whole:
"My good friends, this is the second time there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Now I recommend you go home, and sleep quietly in your beds."
Less than a year later it would all come crashing down, the appeasement policy (such as it was) a shambles, and the world plunged into war. Chamberlain would last as P.M. for a little longer, until May 1940, when he was at last replaced--by Winston Churchill.
On Evacuees, Excludees, and "Segregees": Closing an Ugly Chapter in U.S. History--the Japanese Internment Camps, 1942-1945
As of April 30, 1945, the U.S. government allocated a total of $39 million to relocate 120,000 or so Japanese "evacuees" from "evacuation centers" back to their "normal homes". That comes to about $275.00 per person: but that is mostly allocated to payment for personnel, because, really, all that was happening was that these people were being sent back home somewhere, or if their homes/farms had been undersold from under them, to somewhere not-their-home. Of course the figure is slightly inflated, because of all of those Japanese interred during this time nearly 10% of them volunteered to fight in the U.S. Armed Forces, so for those who survived after serving in some of America's most highly-decorated units of all time, Uncle Sam was paying the bill to send those young men home. But offsetting the Americans of Japanese decent who fought in the war were about another 10,000 babies born in the "segregation centers", so the numbers stay fairly-well the same. (I cannot offhand find any numbers on the numbers of people who died in the camps, or for that matter what happened to their remains after the camps (and camp cemeteries) were closed. I do not know if that was a government expense--to move the coffin and pay for reburial--or if that expense became a private affair.)
Dillon Myer, who was the director of the War Relocation Authority, testified in Congress on 30 April 1945 that it was time for the "relocation centers" to be closed, and for the "evacuees" to go home. And to go home on schedule.
"Not later than 15 months, after revocation of the general exclusion orders, all evacuee property services to persons other than excludees (including segregees) will terminate, and all evacuee property warehouses not utilized for the property of such persons will be emptied..."
I expect that few of the American Japanese wanted to linger.
The "working poor" of England may have been half of that--working, that is, and hard at work, though not being paid even enough to be considered poor. Their story has been told in many ways, of course, the backbone of the Industrial Revolution succeeding on their bones, observed and recorded and shared by Charles Dickens and others, and on and on, told elsewhere in brevity and quick detail better than I can do so here.
I did want to make a quick comment about a very small detail in the state of those poor people, found in Charles Kingsley's Cheap Clothes and Nasty, printed in 1850. It is quite a documentarian's tour of the plight of the poor, written by a very able observer. (Kingsley is a very interesting person--an historian, priest in the Church of England, social commentator, and novelist. As a matter of fact he was exceptionally prolific, producing during his lifetime (1819-1875) a fine long list of accomplishment, three of which have survived to this day as sorts of minor classics. But what he did with great regularity was publish books--34 of them in 25 years between 1850 and 1875, including 15 during the decade of the 1850's, 11 in the 1860's, and 8 in the 1870's to his death in 1875. Perhaps as important as all of that was the role he played in the arrival of C. Darwin's On the Origin of Species..., as Kingsley wrote one of the earliest reviews of the book and defended it strongly.)
But getting back to the poor, Kingsley made a very strong case for the poor being less so than that, as we see here:
"Folks are getting somewhat tired of the old rodomontade that a slave is free the moment he sets foot on British soil! Stuff! - are these tailors free? Put any conceivable sense you will on the word, and then say - are they free? We have, thank God, emancipated the black slaves; it would seem a not inconsistent sequel to that act to set about emancipating these white ones.Oh! we forgot; there is an infinite difference between the two cases - the black slaves worked for our colonies; the white slaves work for us. But, indeed, if, as some preach, self interest is the mainspring of all human action, it is difficult to see who will step forward to emancipate the said white slaves; for all classes seem to consider it equally their interest to keep them as they are; all classes, though by their own confession they are ashamed, are yet not afraid to profit by the system which keeps them down..."--Charles Kingsley, Clothes, Cheap and Nasty, 1850
Kingsley continues on with the stuff of research, uncommonly sharing the lot of what a vast section of English society experienced daily though mostly in silence.
Another excruciating and interesting report was made by George Godwin in his London Shadows, a glance at the "homes" of the thousands of 1854 (the whole work found on the wonderful Victorian London blog, here and about which I posted about here).
Godwin--an influential architect and editor of the very influential The Builder as well as a social reformer, who lived from 1813-1888) wrote an expose of how so many Londoners lived at the middle of the century. It is also illustrated with woodcuts of the places in which people lives--artwork in wood and ink that have a very definite quality of the unforgiving cameras of Life magazine a century later. The images are awakening and abrupt--all the bitter observation of George Orwell, only told much more quickly, like a person trying to describe a raging house fire before the thing burned itself out. Its a powerful work, and I can't help but think that those reading it in 1854 must have been appalled not only by the deep visualization of the state of the working poor, but also by its scope, and the possible revelation of England's basic bedrock.
Here is an example of Godwin's work, which includes observations on not only housing the poor, but clothing them as well, and published in the editorial pages of journal The Builder. He presents one aspect of their lot by discussing their clothing and its purchasing, bought for what the polite reading circles who would find The Builder to be almost for no money at all, though the few pennies spent on a pair of shoes or shirt were a major factor in the weekly ration of the working poor., particularly if they were making 5 or 10 pounds per year. It was an interesting way for Godwin to present to the non-poor what the other-half really had to live like, and perhaps by reaching out to the population that did the building-of-London he probably hoped to affect some sort of reform in the way in which the poor had to live and work. An example of the Godwin work:
"One of the London missionaries (a body whose valuable services can only be properly appreciated by those who understand the nature and extent of the evil to which we are directing attention) says:- "Persons who are accustomed to run up heavy bills at fashionable tailors' and milliners', will scarcely believe the sums for which the classes we are describing are able to purchase the same articles for their own rank in life." A missionary who recently explored Rag-fair, reported that a man and his wife might be clothed from head to foot for from 10s. to 15s. Another missionary stated that 8s. would buy every article of clothing required by either a man or a woman, singly. In Pennant's time it was less. He says (speaking of the other Rag-fair), that the dealer pointed out a man to him, and said: "Look at him. I have clothed him for fourteen-pence. A third missionary reported : "There is as great a variety of articles in pattern, and shape, and size, as I think could be found in any draper's shop in London." The mother may go to "Rag-fair" with the whole of her family, both boys and girls,- yes, and her husband, too, and for a very few shillings deck them out from top to toe. I have no doubt that for a man and his wife, and five or six children, £1 at their disposal, judiciously laid out, would purchase them all an entire change. This may appear to some an exaggeration: but I actually overheard a conversation in which two women were trying to bargain for a child's frock; the sum asked for it was 1½d. and the sum offered was a penny, and they parted on the difference..."
This is what printing looked like, once upon a time, a great and giant mass, tended by works, massive sheets of paper flying this way and that, smoke from a steam engine drive (somewhere)--heavy, loud. Accurate. A temple of texts (apologies to William Gass). The illustration is from Robert Hoe's A Short History of the Printing Press and of Improvements in Printing Machinery from the Time of Gutenberg up to the Present Day (1902) and exhibits a ten cylinder rotary type-revolving press
In addition to being a state-of-the-art (and above that, really) printing press it is in image a generator of metaphors--there's certainly plenty to go around, even on just a surface investigation of the woodcut. You can easily see a feeding-the-beast scenario in there--for news or for technology or steam or motion or whatever else), as well as darker interpretations, making the printing press into a spider as well; also, there's humans being subservient to the god of technology from whom all good things come, and so on. I'd really just like to feel one of those gigantic newspapers in my hands, fresh off the press...
I wanted to pass along these very interesting maps that appear in Allan R. Pred Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information, 1790-1840 (Harvard, 1973) because they give a quick and elegant view of how long it took to get to various parts of the country in the first part of the 19th century.
First, Rates of Travel, 1800:
and its complement, Rates of Travel 1830:
[Note: all travel time based on starting point in New York City.]
Its interesting to see with just improvements in travel excluding the introduction of railroads and (for the most part) canals that travel time was basically cut in half in about thirty years' time. For example, in 1800 it would take roughly four weeks to get to New Orleans, and then six weeks to arrive in Iowa and the Upper Peninsula. By 1830, that time was two weeks to NO, and three for the other two locations. In 1800, it was a five day trip to the northern Outer Banks in North Carolina; that would be cut to two days by 1830. The trip in 1800 to the vicinity of Savannah and the northern part of Florida was a two week ordeal; by 1830, that time had fallen to 6/7 days. The Mississippi was reachable in five weeks in 1800; in 1830, that time was cut to two weeks. This as I said would all change drastically over the next three decades, once the railroad system became slightly mature.
And here, expanded to 1857:
By 1857 one day's travel time has been blasted to a ring encompassing the southern half of Maine, partially into Ohio and south into the northern part of North Carolina. Two days of travel will get the traveller deep into Michigan and parts of Wisconsin, and half-way through North Carolina and South Carolina (excluding the mountain region in Western NC). Three days will now get us to northern Florida, halfway through Georgia and Tennessee, and into the Midwest, past the Mississippi River. Beyond the basic reach of the railroad at this point is the rest of the country, and harder going, though one week of travel will get you deep into the central part of the country, where with some difficulty you would be able to find your way to southern California in three weeks, and the Pacific regions of Washington Territory in six weeks--basically, an entirely new world of travel and the spread of goods, service and information, not the least of which was aided by the spread of the railroads, which increased from 3,000 miles of track in 1840 to more than 30,000 in 1860.
Again, I really just wanted to share this display of information because I have found them to be useful in the past, and the info doesn't seem to be all that wide-spread.
My source for the maps has been varied from web sources, but the original work seems to have been published in Charles O. Paullin and John Wright, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the U.S., published by the Carnegie Institute of Washington, D.C. (1932), pages 138a, 138b, 138c, 138d.
I found this rather, um, provocative pamphlet that asks, right up front on the cover of the thing, "Should the Christian Church Resign?" The author, who I think is the man holding the placard on the cover, is Benjamin H. Dinnick (Cardiff, Wales) who published the work in the 1930's.
I'm reproducing the cover and one of Mr. Dinnick's impenetrable diagrams--I can't really say what he was after or what he was for, but I find the images interesting.
This broadside was an appeal to like-minded people to contribute to a fund to help relieve thew dire conditions of textile worker strikers in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1926. There were more than 16,000 people involved in this sometimes-brutal strike, people who were trying to stay even in their lives, looking for a little more money and a little better working conditions than what they had. The Passiac (a working city just south of Patterson in an industrial triangle section of the state) strikers were moving against a number of textile (wool and silk) mills there, trying to force management to pay them something closer to the $1400 annual income for a family of four to survive.
[This great piece of American ephemera is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.]
Most workers there were making $1,000-$1,200 a year ($800-$1,000 if the worker was a woman, and about half of them were) for 50+ hours of labor per week. The result was that the workers could not afford good housing and food, and those disadvantages paid off in high rates of tuberculosis, very high incidence of child mortality, and a low average life expectancy. The strike began slowly in January 1926, with the mills responding with vicious attacks by paid thugs and by police. IT was a long and involved process for the strikers, with the strike lasting its way for another 14 months, finally getting choked out in March 1927. It looks like there were some victories, but those seem mainly pyrrhic to me--at the end of the process many of the strikers were hired back but soon terminated, replaced by other workers who agreed to work for less.
There's quite a bit written on this strike, and most seem to say that it was an important event in the history of "labor relations", and that it was the first time that a Communist-led strike succeeded in the United States, (There is a complex legacy as to who the leadership was for this strike, but the end result is that, at the end, the Communists were in charge.)
But what I wanted to say here about this broadside was the communal effort involved with keeping the strikers (and the strike) going. The strikers needed money to live, as there was certainly no money coming in, and since there was obviously no union, there was no general fund from which any of these families could draw food money from). they needed money just to buy food and pay for housing. SO the call for "Give all you can!" and "Give right away!" were as desperate as they sounded. My guess is that there would be a representative of the International Workers Aid society national office going from factory to factory, or door-to-door, soliciting for money for the Passaic workers' relief. The strike was no doubt a very nasty business, with a victory only a victory once there was more food on the table, less illness, and far fewer babies dying from preventable causes. Probably this looked like a victory to others so far as the future of fair labor/pay was concerned, but not so much for the strikers who brought this about.
It is also interesting to note that this copy was given at some point to H.L. Mencken, who gave it right away to the Library of Congress, where it wound up in a forgotten "Pamphlet Collection", and then sold to me (years afterwards).
JF Ptak Science Books --continuation of Post 298 from 2008
I've felt that a great history lesson for school kids would be to make them keep a diary for some other kid from some other time, introduce them to the minutiae of life from another time and perhaps another place. With some guidance they could make interesting entries in their diary for, say, 15 June 1897, writing about chores, the daily schedule, what they studied in school, how they were dressed, how they got food on the table and kept the house clean, how they would spend 25 cents, what they would see from some given vantage point, and on and on. This could take place in their very own home town; it could be multi-generational, requiring them to talk to the scary white hairs, or it could reach far back into history and be of an entirely different place altogether. After they were assigned a particular place in time and space, you could give the kid subtle hints, like this one (below), asking them what they thought it might mean by dialing the phone number 200 80 in Warsaw in 1941. And what did that pair of lightning bolts mean, anyway? I think that once they were made to figure it out for themselves, as though they might've been there, and then could record their feelings and observations in a diary might actually bring history to life (especially once they had their "holy crap" (and probably worse) moment at what these numbers implied).
This is one of the ideas that came home again uncovering this odd booklet, which is a Nazi diary for those stationed in the Generalgouvernement (Tascehnjahrbuch 1941 fuer den Deutschen im Generalgouvernement) , for the year 1941. The General Government (or more fully the Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) was one administrative section of occupied Poland, the country being divided in 1939 after the German invasion of 3 September 1939, with the western section being retained by the Germans and the Eastern given over to occupation by the Soviets via the Non-Aggression pact between the USSR and Germany.1
This looks like an every day diary for the period, except for the Nazi (or NSDAP) regalia and German imprint of Generalgouvernement in Krakau. And, all of the annotated high points of the year for the most overly voracious parts of German militarism as well as for the hot points of Nazi history. Hitler, (above) Goering, Goebbels and other leaders' birthdays are highlighted, not to mention seminal points in the development of the Nazi party and party-adoptees (Richard Wagner has a number of entries for suggested celebrations).
There are also helpful directories in the back pointing to any number of cafes located in a growing number of "Adolf Hilter Platz's" throughout Poland (including three in Radom), as well as fares for the use of the railway and postal system.
We also see the following telephone number: 23075. That's for the Literarische Kaffee Stefansgasse I, Krakau. This is the location that the Reichsminister and administrator Hans Frank (about whom we'll read in a moment) decided to hold a chess tournament in 1941, to satisfy his own need for chess while freshly in the pursuit of the murder of millions of people.
‘Frank was extremely interested in chess. He not only possessed an extensive library of chess literature but was also a good player, and he even “received” the Ukrainian chess master Bogoljubow at the castle. On 3 November 1940 he organized a chess congress in Cracow. Six months later he announced the setting-up of a chess school under Bogoljubow and the chess master Dr Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine, and he visited a chess tournament in October 1942 at the “Literary Café” in Cracow."--Hans Frank (subtitle: Hitlers Kronjurist und Generalgouverneur) by Dieter Schenk (Frankfurt am Main, 2006) "and quotes a reference to chess on page 177 (given below in our translation)..."[Source: Chesshistory.com., here.]
PM (short for "Picture Magazine, evidently) newspaper1--begun 18 June 1940 and ended 1948--was a very strong, left-wing newspaper in NYC, a short-lived daily with a long pedigree of contributors2. The "Memorandum" reproduced here, sent by the Managing Editor John P. Lewis "to the writing staff", was a powerful and interesting directive on how to present the news, and addressed the speech of President Roosevelt of the night before.
Lewis felt that here, at the beginning of the American end of the fighting war, was the appropriate place to set out a war strategy for reporting and publishing regarding information received from overseas, or unverified sources, or from dispatches from the countries against which we were fighting. He was clear and very concise--the whole of the memorandum fitting on one side of a single sheet of paper.
[This piece of ephemera may be purchased through our blog bookstore, here.]
The Roosevelt speech of 9 December 1941 can be found here. Some interesting extras as follows:
"Your Government knows that for weeks Germany has been telling Japan that if Japan did not attack the United States, Japan would not share in dividing the spoils with Germany when peace came. She was promised by Germany that if she came in she would receive the complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area...This alone if true could be a justification for war with Germany." // "Our policy rested on the fundamental truth that the defense of any country resisting Hitler or Japan was in the long run the defense of our own country."
But the main thrust that Lewis was addressing was this:
"I cite as another example a statement made on Sunday night that a Japanese carrier had been located and sunk off the Canal Zone. And when you hear statements that are attributed to what they call "an authoritative source," you can be reasonably sure from now on that under these war circumstances the "authoritative source" is not any person in authority."
"Many rumors and reports which we now hear originate, of course, with enemy sources. For instance, today the Japanese are claiming that as a result of their one action against Hawaii they hare gained naval supremacy in the Pacific. This is an old trick of propaganda which has been used innumerable times by the Nazis. The purposes of such fantastic claims are, of course, to spread fear and confusion among us, and to goad us into revealing military information which our enemies are desperately anxious to obtain."
Lewis was quick to the point: "President Roosevelt's address Tuesday night gave the American people a quick lesson in phony reporting. After that address all any newspaper has to do to convict itself of falsifying is to say that it learned something from authoritative sources."
He continued: "The president laid down a very clear line on what people can believe and what they can disbelieve..." and then outlined four major points for his writers to follow:
"1. We will not pass on as news any communique about the conduct of the war from any hostile government without warning the reader that these are claims of an enemy government which wants to confuse us...
"2. We will never report anything from "Authoritative" sources or anonymous synonyms.
"3. On the actual conduct of the war, the only material which we will pass on as absolute fact is material from the American communiques."
"4. In covering war stories as well as other news, we will carefully segregate fact reporting from opinion reporting and editorial conclusions."
Lewis was also particularly demanding in his policy regarding personal opinion in news stories: "Where we want to express an editorial opinion, we will label it "Editorial."
And Lewis meant it, too. Unlike almost all newspapers, PM editorials were signed. The newspaper also took no advertising, hoping to keep the paper running on sales and subscriptions. And so it did, for eight years--not long by long-running standards of newspapers, but fairly long for the times, and for the type of business plan practiced.
In any event I enjoyed the crispness and clarity of Lewis' directive.
Notes:
1. The publisher was Ralph Ingersoll (1980-1985), who before coming to PM was the managing editor of Time-Life, and who was also the business plan designer and then managing editor of Fortune magazine; and the silent partner in the whole thing was MArshal Fields III, who pretty much bankrolled the newspaper from a distance.
I was looking for an antique recipe for pesto and came across this remarkable book by Salvatore Massonio, Archidipno overo dell'insalata e dell'vso di essa, published in Venice by Marc'Antonio Brogiollo in 1627. It is in short a philosophical cookbook for salads—and the first of its kind dedicated solely, devoted entirely, to the salad.It must have been a revolutionary publication, and probably intended for the very wealthy, given that the vast majority of people in Europe didn't have money for a book, and many couldn't read, and lettuce and its makings were outside the standard diet for the working poor.The book is no slim effort: 68 chapter and 425 pages long, it describes the stuff of the salad and its dressing. Unfortunately there are no illustrations, no images on presentation--not even the new chapter capital letters are designed in a food motif. Nothing. (The full text is available here.)
Actually salad wasn’t limited to just greens in this book, and his quasi-vegetarian sentiment was tested by including cold salted meats, cold salted tongue, livers and such in the mix.But Massonio was definitely far ahead of anyone else at the time dealing with the benefits of the salad for both health reasons, as well as for making the salad not a meal in itself but an appetizer for something larger to come.In another great possible “first”, the wonderful Massonio seems to be the first to describe the use of garlic in a sauce.
Now. About that pesto recipe…all I need is some stuff from Italy and a special-marble mortar and I’ll be somewhat on my way, at least as the purists are concerned. The birthplace of pesto, Liguria, takes its position as the originator of the great green delicacy very seriously, legislating exactly how and with what peso should be made.And that is as it should be. Maybe I'll just buy the pesto...
(Robbing Peter website has taken a translation of the cucumber salad from Massonio and created it here--looks pretty good.)
Reading Dickens now and stopping for a view of socially-conscious England via the excellent Victorian London website in the work of George Godwin's 79-page critical exposition London Shadows, a Glance at the "Homes" of the Thousands (1854). The images are awakening and abrupt--all the bitter observation of George Orwell, only told much more quickly, like a person trying to describe a raging house fire before the thing burned itself out. Its a powerful work, and I can't help but think that those reading it in 1854 must have been appalled not only by the deep visualization of the state of the working poor, but also by its scope, and the possible revelation of England's basic bedrock.
There are any more works to chose from at Victorian London--I decided to pry out the images from the Godwin work along with his commentary on them. It is truly a stunning work.
"When every man is his own end, all things will come to a bad end." COLERIDGE.
“....there must be a point beyond which there may be no abridgement of civil liberties and we feel that whatever the emergency, that persons must be judged, so long as we have a Bill of Rights, because of what they do as persons. We feel that treating persons, because they are members of a race, constitutes illegal discrimination, which is forbidden by the fourteenth amendment whether we are at war or peace.”-- A. L. Wirin, Counsel for the Southern California Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, speaking on the internment of Japanese-Americans, 1942
"We make these statements, not because we fear evacuation, but because we believe, to the bottom of our hearts, that the best interests of the United States, our nation are to be served by being permitted to stay, work, fight, and die for our country if necessary here where we belong."--Response by the Japanese American Citizens League to Internment Camps, 1942
This excruciating, heart-rending 1942 document was submitted by the Japanese American Citizens League (of Seattle, Washington) to the Tolan Congressional Committee with recommendations, proposals and requests in the event of the removal of Japanese citizens from “sensitive” areas in western America It is an exceptional report, a well-reasoned response to the developing and calamitous American fear of Japanese fellow-citizens; a fear which was swiftly leading itself to xenophobic actions the result of which was the internment of 120,000 American citizens in internment camps.
The Roosevelt administration’s Executive Order 9066 was the legal bombshell that gave the War Department the authority to authorize the removal of the Japanese (19 February 1942) and theoretically prevent those people from engaging in sub rosa and fifth column activities asd wartime terrorists fighting for Imperial Japan. The Tolan Committee was that of Congressman John H. Tolan (CA), chair of the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration (!), undertaken at the request of Carey McWilliams (chief of the California Division of Immigration and Housing) who was trying to prevent or at least delay the coming removal of the Japanese. Needless to say, the operation backfired
The document is “heart rending” because Executive Order 9066--at its base terribly wrong, a weakness exhibited, a moral embarrassment of the highest order--was addressed by its authors in a logical, clarifying and accommodating fashion in a noble and valiant attempt to negotiate an untenable situation while making every effort to appease the aggressor without judgment and offense. It was an attempt at maintaining dignity and some sense of Constitutional freedoms for a group of people in a situation in which their dignity and freedoms were being withdrawn....at least their freedom was.
In the introduction to the document (titled Report submitted to Tolan Congressional Committee on National Defense Migration Emergency Defense Council Seattle Chapter Japanese American Citizens League, and published April, 1942) we read that people are willing to go and abide 9066, but that one of their main issues was where exactly it was that they were going, where they were being taken. That hadn't been established yet, and it makes me shake my head to think of the government establishing this order without a clear indication of any (?) of its consequences.
"[Introduction] A large number of people have remarked that they will go where the government orders them to go, willingly, if it will help the national defense effort. But the biggest problem in their minds is where to go. The first unofficial evacuation announcement pointed out that the government did not concern itself with where evacuees went, just so they left prohibited areas. Obviously, this was no solution to the question, for immediately, from Yakima, Idaho, Montana, Colorado and elsewhere authoritative voices shouted: "No Japs wanted here!"”
“[Resettlement] What will the government's policy be? Will communities be shifted as units to other sections? Will the Japanese be re-settled as family units? Will men and women be segregated and families split up? Will Japanese be scattered at random in the interior? These are questions that are arising in the Japanese communities in this area.”
Already thinking of the future and the end of the war, the authors wondered about the prospects for the return of the Japanese people to their former residences:
“[Return] “It is necessary to think of the future, of the day when this war will be over. Could the Japanese people, once evacuated, return to their homes? There is the great possibility that once the Jap-haters and outspoken opponents of the resident Japanese were successful in driving the Japanese out of this area, they would never permit them to return. A post-war campaign of hate and vilification when resident Japanese tried to get back to their homes and investments here, is a definite possibility should these elements score an initial victory.”
The idea for a “model city” was proposed, or at least opened for discussion, as a possible place for the interned Japanese to go:
“[Model City] This is an ambitious plan entailing the creation of an all-Japanese city somewhere in the interior of the country, able to sustain itself as a self-sufficient unit. It would be financed originally partially by the Japanese themselves, partially by the government. Some important defense industry would be set up to give employment to Japanese labor, preferably one calling for skill and efficiency which Japanese workmen possess. The city would be governed by American citizens, who would elect a mayor and council, just as other American cities, and the Japanese, both American citizens and aliens, would be given an opportunity to practice the American ideals of democratic government which they have learned.”
“After the initial investment, the city could be expected to become self-sufficient and a center for the hinterland. It is altogether likely that such a city, as an experiment in democracy would be so progressive and would provide such advantages that friends of the Japanese would desire to share its benefits.”
“This would be a long-range project, to be continued in perpetuity. The objection of the time required to set it up would be overbalanced by the permanent nature of the project.”
After 38 pages of questions and planning, the authors of the report declare that the Japanese Americans affected by 9066 would comply (“to the best of our ability”) with whatever was demanded of them. They felt very strongly though that they could do more for their country by staying in their homes and fighting Japan just like any other American.
“[Conclusions] If it is for the greater good that evacuation be decreed, we shall obey to the best of our ability. But we are convinced that here in our homes and in our community is where we belong, where we can lend every ounce of our strength, and every cent of our resources, in creating the sinews of war so necessary to total victory. We are Americans. We want to do our duty where we can serve best. We make these statements, not because we fear evacuation, but because we believe, to the bottom of our hearts, that the best interests of the United States, our nation are to be served by being permitted to stay, work, fight, and die for our country if necessary here where we belong.”
[This document is for sale in our bookstore, here.]
This is an appraisal of the working conditions of children in 1934--a third of the way through the century, thirty years before the 'sixties, not horribly long ago, not of a Dickensian era, not even a Sinclair-Lewis-ian one. Recent. The author, Dorothy Kenyon--1888-1972, a feminist, civil rights lawyer, judge, maverick, speaker, activist, and all around force of nature who stood strong and firm and tall while being accused of Commie blather by Joe McCarthy--made a very strong case for people to take a close look at the still-dismal conditions of child labor in the U.S.
