Historical Image of the Day

This week's images will be of motherhood in American history.

Hupa woman with child, 1923. The Hupa are a people of northern California. 

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Poster for concert by Bessie Smith, Harlem, 1924

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Police officer and striking woolen workers, Passaic Woolen Strike, Passaic, New Jersey, 1926

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Parade opening the United Negro Improvement Association convention, New York, 1922. The UNIA was Marcus Garvey's organization proclaiming a "Back to Africa" message.

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November 1921 masthead of The Birth Control Review, edited by Margaret Sanger and the journal of the American Birth Control League.

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This week's images will come from American social movements between World War I and World War II.

Protesting the execution of the Italian immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti for a murder they did not commit, Massachusetts, 1927

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Playground inside Irene Kaufmann Settlement House, Pittsburgh, 1924

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Hollywood, 1928

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African-American women, Los Angeles, 1929

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University of Minnesota Corn Variety Truck, part of agricultural experiments, 1925

My Historical Marker on the 1921 San Gabriel River Flood

Pictured above is the historical marker I just completed, along with my graphic designer, Carlos Barron. It's an interesting story I found. In 1921, a hurricane hit the coast of Mexico and spun north into Texas. It headed up into central Texas as a tropical storm, dumping a tremendous amount of rain. And I mean tremendous. One town received around 38 inches of rain in 24 hours, which at the time was the U.S. record. The rivers flooded. About 100 people died in Williamson County, Texas. About 100 more died around the rest of the state.

Williamson County has traditionally been a pretty white place. Like most of the Texas, the power structure has remained white and conservative since Americans arrived in the area. The flood is one of the most important events in the town's history. Local historians have told the story. Sort of.

What they did was tell the story from a white perspective. They interviewed local whites about their experiences and wrote them up in books. But most of the people who died weren't white. They were Mexican migrants. Probably fleeing the Mexican Revolution, which led to the first wave of migration north from Mexico, these people worked the cotton farms east of Georgetown on the San Gabriel River. The employers rarely provided workers housing. So they set up tents or shacks along the river, where they could bathe and have a fresh water supply.

Unfortunately, camping along the river also made them susceptible to flooding. The river rose in the middle of the night and washed them away.

In researching this issue, I wanted to tell the Mexicans' story. I found a Spanish language newspaper out of San Antonio that interviewed a woman who survived the flood. She was driving with her son from San Antonio to Taylor, about 20 miles east of Georgetown. The flood washes both her and her son out of the car. She managed to cling to a tree. Her son drowned.

In creating a historical marker around this issue, it was very important to me to make it bilingual. Williamson County, like much of Texas, has seen a huge increase in Latino migrants over the past few decades. They use the park where the sign was placed. Yet their history is not told at all on the historical markers. I thought I would receive some push back from my insistence on a bilingual sign. I know that the old people behind the local historical society have shown zero interest in putting up bilingual signs in the museum for instance. And I wondered if Texas had some kind of English-only law. But no, everyone was cool with it.

So there it is.

But it almost didn't make it. Literally a week after it was put in, which was two weeks ago, the tropical storm that headed into Texas did almost the exact same thing as the 1921 storm. It literally dumped on the I-35 corridor. About 14 inches of rain fell in Georgetown. The San Gabriel River flooded. I was sure my sign would be washed away. I thought this would be the ultimate of ironies. But while the park lost about 60% of its light poles, someone the sign survived.

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Postcard celebrating the lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, 1920

The entire phenomena of lynching postcards are one of the creepiest things in American history. That you'd actually advertise the event and connect it with a specific place in a positive way is absolutely bizarre. But I guess you can sell racism as much as anything else.

Warren Harding, The Second Son of God

I spent today reading microfilmed copies of the fine newspaper, the Eatonville (WA) Dispatch.

As many historians will tell you, looking at microfilmed newspapers kind of sucks. I actually don't mind it all that much, but it is slow going when you are looking broadly for a variety of subjects.

On the other hand, you can find some pretty amazing things. For instance, the editor of the Dispatch really loved Warren Harding. I mean, who didn't, right? Oh yeah, maybe not. But here is his heartbroken cry when Harding died in 1923. From the August 10, 1923 issue:

The death of President Harding is a personal loss. He loved people. That is why he was loved. Even with the reams of 'copy' that have been written on him, one realizes the barrenness of adjectives to describe this man.


A person will follow the even tenor of his way until confronted by an emergency. It is then that the test comes. Warren G. Harding's elevation to the highest office in the gift of man brought out the where all could see the true character he possessed.

There was a beauty about his life which won every heart. In temperament, he was mild, conciliatory, and candid;* and yet remarkable for an uncompromising firmness.** His life was an open sesame to the hearts of others. *** He followed in the footsteps of his Master by letting the sunshine of human sympathy and happiness into the dark places of life.

It is impossible to think of him in death's cold shroud of sororw [sic] **** and despair, but rather smiling on us from the sunset halo that marks God's farewell to the day--smiling with all the well remembered grace of his manhood, love and devotion, and saying to us:

"The sunset speaks but feebly of the glories of another day. All is well."

*Improper semicolon use was off the charts in the Eatonville Dispatch.

** I heard Harding's many mistresses said similar things about his uncompromising firmness.

*** I hope someone says that my life was an open sesame to the hearts of others when I die. I have no idea what this means of course.

**** To say the least, editing was not the Dispatch's strong suit.

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Ticker tape parade, Broadway, New York City, 1928

Shorter Coolidge Administration: Drinkers Deserve to Die

A student sent me this remarkable piece about the federal government poisoning alcohol during Prohibition in a failed attempt to force people to stop drinking it.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.

The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."

 .....

His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in whiskey circulating in the city: "[P]ractically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic," read one 1928 alert. He publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for poisons—that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from studies done by the New York City medical examiner's office.

Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country's poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff."

Truly remarkable. I already knew the Coolidge administration could not care less about the poor, but I had no idea they openly murdered thousands of Americans. Then, as now, conservatives blamed the problem on the poor. If only they didn't drink, they wouldn't ingest government poison!

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Ku Klux Klan march, Ashland, Oregon, early 1920s.

On the West Coast, the rise of the KKK in the early 20s was heavily infused with anti-Asian feelings.

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Record put out by Puritan Records, 1920s.

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Gusher, Winkler County, Texas, 1928

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Huntington Beach, California, 1920s.

Greatest Baseball Matchup Ever--Jews v. KKK

I like old-timey baseball weirdness because it so wonderfully reflects the weirdness of American at large during that time. Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic wrote of this 1926 baseball game between a Ku Klux Klan team and a Jewish team. He then followed it with a more substantial post, demonstrating that these kind of weird racially charged matchups were pretty common.