The Republican attempt to return America to the Gilded Age could have consequences due to one of the measures created by Progressives to ensure that we wouldn't be ruled by complete idiots--the recall. In Wisconsin, home state of Robert LaFollette and many other icons of the Progressive Era, voters can recall an elected official after they have served a year in office. While that means that voters cannot current recall Gov. Walker, they can initiate recall proceedings against 8 of Walker's Republican supporters. And while the recall has served Republican interests in the past (eliminating Gray Davis for instance), there is no place for it in their return to oligarchic rule. I strongly believe that if Walker gets his union-busting bill through, he may well go after the recall next.
I am a late 19th and early 20th century U.S. historian by training. Although I can teach widely within the field, I'd prefer to talk about this period as often as possible.
The work of the National Film Preservation Foundation has added a tremendous tool to my teaching repertoire. It's one thing to talk about race and it's another to supplement that with showing a racist film from the 1910s. You can yap on and on about immigration, but to see an early gangster film overflowing with Italian stereotypes drives that home in ways I cannot.
Just today, my American Cities class read and discussed an article about how Progressives thought the urban environment of immigrants was icky and was contributing to race suicide. They felt the need to get immigrant children out of the urban nature they were used to and into beautiful bucolic rural nature.
That fit perfectly with the 1912 film The Land Beyond the Sunset, available on the 4th disc of Volume I of the NFPF's Treasures from American Film Archives. In this film, a young boy lives a terrible urban life. He is taken care of by a drunken abusive grandmother. He sells newspapers to earn income, which his grandmother promptly steals to buy more booze. But he has a ticket from some reformers to go out in the city for a day. While in the park, a woman tells a story called "The Land Beyond the Sunset." In it, a young boy is mistreated by an evil witch but good fairies intervene. They then put him in a boat and go to an island beyond the sunset without evil old witches. The boy sees his own life in this story. He then doesn't go back to the city. He escapes, steals a boat, and sails into the ocean to the land beyond the sunset.
Of course, you know he's probably going to die. And that's the point--this film is a middle-class fantasy about how awful the slums are. The boy would rather die than be poor.
Thanks to the National Film Preservation Foundation, I can show The Land Beyond the Sunset and any number of other silent, rare, and experimental films to my classes. I owe them tremendously. The students got the point in a way they never would have without the film. It was wonderful.
The NFPF is preserving our glorious history. Give them a little cash if you can spare it. I want more awesome silent movies to present my students.
Daily Kos has a little piece quoting Glenn Beck:
I’ve done a lot of reading on history in the last few years and I was amazed to find that what we’re experiencing now is really a ticking time bomb that they designed about 100 years ago, beginning in the progressive movement. And they thought, "you know what, if we just do this and this and this and this, over time if we do it in both the Republican and Democratic parties, we will have our socialist utopia." Well, I say again, two can play at that game. I am drafting plans now to bring us back to an America that our founders would understand. ... We need to start thinking like the Chinese. I’m developing a 100-year plan for America. A 100-year plan. We will plant this idea and it will sprout roots.
Early 20th century intracervical and intrauterine pessaries.
I think the point of early 20th century birth control was to make it too painful to have sex.
And believe it or not, these devices were considered a significant improvement when they came out in the 1890s.
I realize that people might want to know about just what these things are. Here is the link to the article where I got the picture. Anyone on a university account should be able to access it for free. It's a great article on the history of birth control that I recommend for anyone. It's at least worth a look for the pictures. And if this link doesn't work, it is from the September 2000 issue of the Journal of American History.
My Progressive Era class tomorrow is reading Jacob Riis' classic 1901 expose of tenement housing, How the Other Half Lives. Figured I'd keep a tab of some of the more egregious totalizing ethnic statements.
1. "With all his conspicuous faults, the swarthy Italian immigrant has his redeeming traits. He is as honest as he is hot-headed."
2. "Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler."
3. "The Jew runs to real estate as soon as he can save up enough for a deposit to clinch the bargain... But abuse and ridicule are not weapons to fight the Israelite with. He pockets them quietly with the rent and bides his time. He knows from experience, both sweet and bitter, that all things come to those who wait, including the houses and lands of their persecutors."
4. "The Irishman does not naturally take kindly to tenement life, though with characteristic versatility he adapts himself to its conditions at once."
5. "The Irishman's genius runs to public affairs rather than domestic life."
6. "The Chinaman does not rise at all; here, as at home, he simply remains stationary."
7. "Between the tabernacles of Jewry and the shrines of the Bend, Joss has cheekily planted his pagan worship of idols, chief among which are the celestial worshipper's own gain and lusts. Whatever may be said about the Chinman being a thousand years behind the age on his own shores, here he is distinctly abreast of it in his successfu scheming to 'make it pay.'"
8. "Ages of senseless idolatry, a mere grub-worship, have left him [the Chinese] without the essential qualities for appreciating the gentle teachings of a faith [Christianity] whose motive and unselfish spirit are alike beyond his grasp."
9. "It is not altogether by chance that the Chinaman has chosen the laundry as his distinctive field. He is by nature as clean as the cat, which he resembles in his traits of cruel cunning, and savage fury when aroused."
10. "Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over."
11. "The Czech is the Irishman of Central Europe, with all his genius and his strong passions."
12. "Cleanliness is the characteristic of the negro in his new surroundings, as it was his virtue in his old. In this respect he is immensely superior to the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews."
13. "The German has an advantage over his Celtic neighbor in his strong love for flowers."
I could go on.
It's been way too long since I posted anything in the Absurd Texts series.
This piece is from the November 1911 issue of the Ladies Home Journal.
It concerns the rise of the conservation movement and demonstrates the unbelievable levels of sexism in American society.
THE REQUEST FROM THE MOTHER:
I wonder if you ever realize, you who live and move in the big world of things, how little a woman like myself, living quietly up here, really knows of the great questions that seem so vital and throbbing to the country....I suppose I am like hundreds of women: I would keenly like to understand these great problems, but who is there to tell us simply and clearly, and, don't forget, briefly?
What is meant by "Conservation"? Why do you say it should be more than a mere word to me? How does it affect me personally?
THE SON'S ANSWER:
I know, my dear Mother, just what's the mater. Conservation is a word so big and important-looking that it frightens you....When you open a parcel from the store do you throw away the paper and string? Not a bit of it. You smooth out the paper and roll up the string, and lay both aside till you wish to wrap a package yourself. In the autumn you gather the seeds of your choicest flowers before burning up the dried stalks. The bones the butcher sends home with the meat you drop into the soup-kettle, and the surplus fat into the soap-can; the rain water from your roof you catch for laundry purposes; your table refuse makes the pig and the chickens happy. So you have been practicing conservation all your life, doing on a small scale what the Government is beginning to do on a huge one, but you never spelled with a capital C. If the Government had begun as long ago as you did the people of the country would have been educated to the idea by degrees, just as you educated us boys not to be stingy, but to despise waste.
Now the Government is in a way the good mother of us all. She used to be rather easy-going, but she has lately come to realize that if she lets your generation and mine use up everything worth having there won't be enough for the next generation to live on. Where you save flower-seeds, therefore, she saves forests; where you store rain water for the washtub she fills reservoirs for irrigating desert lands and producing power for machinery....
Now, Mother dear, don't lie awake nights worrying over what our descendants are going to suffer as the result of our neglect, or I shall be sorry I wrote you all this. There are more profitable occupations than worrying, and one is lending a hand promptly at stopping the leaks.
I want to recommend Susan Mandel's fascinating article on the debates over the Lincoln Memorial. The story itself is interesting, but it also provides great insights into the weird politics of Progressive Era America, with people opposed to change of any kind like Joe Cannon ruling the House with an iron hand. It took ten years to get Congress to allow the Memorial to be built in its present location. Cannon wanted to build it next to Union Station. Others wanted it in Arlington. I was particularly amused by the strategy used to undermine the Arlington location. The speaker of the House after the Democrats took over the majority in 1911 was Champ Clark from Missouri. He said, "I, for one, will never consent to the erection of the Lincoln Memorial in any part of the South. We should not imitate the custom of the ancient Romans by placing a memorial of the conqueror in the territory of the conquered."
I'm not sure Clark really believed that strongly in this position but it was a good excuse.
Anyway, read the whole thing.
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Frank Clark and Ashby Corbin, young glass factory workers. Alexandria, Virginia, 1911.
Photo by Lewis Hine
One of the most fascinating things to me about teaching this semester is that I have not mentioned the Populists in my US, 1877-1920 course except in passing. I also do not discuss the Populists in my modern US survey course.
I was surprised when they didn't get mentioned in my survey course, but I am downright shocked at their omission this semester. But when I think about, the Populists seem to me to be such an outlier to American history, that I'm not sure what kind of larger narratives they fit into.
Part of this is that I teach the Gilded Age and Progressive Era course thematically rather than by chronology. I simply think the era makes almost sense chronologically because so much is happening at the same time. So I talked a lot about race, with weeks on Native Americans, segregation, imperialism, and immigration. Then I moved on to discussions of gender and sexuality for a couple of weeks (and God do they love talking about the history of sex. So do I which makes it fun!). Now I've moved on to politics. The semester is ending so next week I am discussing political Progressivism and the week after World War I. This was the week I thought I would squeeze the Populists in--I'm discussing labor. But again, they are such outliers to the larger questions of labor during the GAPE. So they are just getting dropped. I am also not discussing William Jennings Bryan or the election of 1896 at all. Were I teaching this course chronologically, or from a primarily political perspective, all of this would get serious play.
But what do you think matters more for students, birth control or Populists? Hell, what matters more for our understanding of the past? I would fall decidedly on the side of birth control. Next semester, I am teaching a labor course. There I am already planning on taking a week to talk about rural labor during the GAPE and that of course will be dominated by the Populists. But I wonder if I am the only U.S. historian who sees the Populists fading from their teaching narratives, as interesting as they might be.
Last week, I had my students in my Gilded Age/Progressive Era course read Geoffrey C. Ward's Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. Some readers have likely read the book (which I recommend highly). More may have seen the PBS series based upon it.
I have studied American history for a very long time now. I knew what to expect from early 20th century racist writers. And even I was amazed and shocked by the horrible stuff people wrote about Johnson.
I'll quote a few. It's not for your "pleasure" exactly. For your edification maybe. And a little shock value never hurts either. Anyway:
First, I found it amazing that whites cared so much about the heavyweight championship. The connections between boxing and white masculinity in this period would be amusing if they weren't so bloody disturbing.
From the Detroit Free Press:
"Is the Caucasian played out? Are the races we have been calling inferior about to demand of us that we draw the color line in everything if we are to avoid being whipped individually and collectively?" (130).
Boxer Jim Corbett agreed, blaming Tommy Burns for losing to Johnson:
"The white man has succumbed to a type which in the past was conceded to be his inferior in physical and mental prowess." (132)
Johnson eventually lost his title to Jess Willard in a match set in Havana. Herbert Bayard Swope wrote in the Chicago Tribune.
"Never in the history of the ring was there such a wild, hysterical, shrieking, enthusiastic crowd [as] the 20,000 men and women who begged Willard to wipe out the stigma that they and hundreds of thousands of others, especially in the south, believe rested on the white race through the negro holding the championship. Nowhere was the feeling stronger than in Cuba, whose race hatred is near the surface, although the negro is ostensibly received on a parity with the white." (377).
And then this lovely bit from the New York Times:
"Even those who have an absurdly exaggerated horror of prize fighting as a 'brutal' sport should gently warm in their sensitive minds a little hope that the white man may not lose, while the rest of us will wait in open anxiety the news that he [Jim Jeffries] has licked the--well, since it must be in print, let us say the negro, even though it is not the first word that comes to the tongue's tip." (165).
Subtle.
But not quite as subtle as this line from the Baltimore American expressing surprise of Johnson's relaxed nature before a fight.
"To all appearances, the black man is as happy and carefree as a plantation darky in Watermelon time." (197).
I could go on, but it's making me too depressed.
