Here's the full list from the National Film Preservation Foundation of the 75 previously lost silents recovered in New Zealand. An amazing variety of films that covers the spectrum of the silent era, including documentaries, comedies, westerns, animation, drama, and instructional films. What a treasure that closes a bit of the massive gap of lost silent films.
Just in time for football season, I have learned the Colorado School of Mines fight song from the 1930s.
"Now here we have the mining man
In either hand a gun
He's not afraid of anything,
He's never known to run;
He dearly loves his whisky,
He dearly loves his beer;
He's a shooting, fightin',
Dynamitin', mining engineer."
Not sure if they put that to music or not.
I haven't done one of these in awhile, but it's time to get back to it.
Maryland has a surprisingly lame history of prominent politicians. Given it's proximity to the nation's capital and it's relatively high population for a small state, one might expect more from Maryland. The top 10 list is pretty thin and includes some pretty unsavory characters.
1. Roger Taney--Supreme Court justice notorious for writing the opinion in the Dred Scott case.
2. Thurgood Marshall--not really a politician, but as a Supreme Court justice and gamechanger in American racial history, obviously deserves a high place on this list.
3. Spiro Agnew--it's always good times to think about Nixon's hippie-punching and race baiting vice president.
It starts getting real lame now.
4. Samuel Chase--Supreme Court justice from 1796 to 1811; most famous for being impeached by angry Jeffersonians in 1804.
5. Paul Sarbanes--Senator from 1977 to 2007, making him the longest serving senator in Maryland history. Not really any kind of leader in the Senate but is well-known for cosponsoring the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 which reformed securities law.
6. William Pinkney--Long-term Jeffersonian politician, Attorney General under James Madison
7. Millard Tydings--Senator from 1927-51. Most famous for cosponsoring the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, which provided for the eventual independence of the Philippines and ensured that Filipinos could no longer migrate to the United States. I always loved this law--we gave up colonialism in order to prevent Asian immigration! Tydings was later redbaited by Joe McCarthy and lost the 1950 election because of it.
8. John Carroll of Carrollton--signer of Declaration of Independence. The only Catholic to sign and the last surviving signer.
9. Gabriel Duvall--Supreme Court justice from 1811-35. Follower of John Marshall and made little name for himself. Averaged less than one written decision a year (17 written decisions in 24 years).
10. James Pearce--Senator from 1843-62. A Whig who switched to the Democrats after the Whig Party's decline. Not much of a player. Chairman of the Committee on the Library (!). Did serve as Chairman of the Committee on Finance for 2 months in 1861.
Was it as lame as you expected? Probably lamer.
Next: South Carolina. That ought to be interesting.
Homer Loomis was an American fascist.
Specifically, Loomis was a race-baiter and self-proclaimed fascist who attempted to rouse the people of Atlanta into white supremacist politics in the years after World War II. Originally from New York City, Loomis was a co-founder of The Columbians, Inc. in 1946. Disgusted by the gains African-Americans had made during World War II, Loomis and his cohort hoped to ignite a race war and moved to Atlanta to do so. According to Kevin Kruse, from whose White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism this is drawn from, Loomis wanted to be the Hitler of America.
"His hair was close cropped, Prussian style," an acquaintance recalled, "and his eyes had a Satanical look about them." Loomis had a specific model in mind. "I'm going to be the Hitler of America," he bragged. Friends were asked to greet him with, "Heil, Loomis!"
Leaders at the Pine Ridge Reservation went to Congress recently appealing for decent housing.
For most of U.S. history, public opinion about Native Americas have moved between outright hostility, neglect, and romanticizing an ideal Indian. Today, Native Americans have more power than any point in American history. There are two major reasons for this. First, gaming has given some tribes a lot of money. Second, Native Americans have taken advantage of white kids connecting them to the counterculture beginning in the 1960s. This phenomenon has provided them with white allies, at least so long as the Indians act like white people think Indians should act.
Despite the gains of recent decade and the overwhelming feeling among young white people today that Native Americans really got screwed over, for the most part whites still either stereotype or ignore Indians. You can see that at Pine Ridge or on the Navajo nation or at Jemez Pueblo or at Fort Peck or any number of other reservations. Particularly for tribes who have either decided not to embrace gaming or do not have the geographic proximity to interstates and cities to attract large numbers of gamers, their poverty and political powerlessness continues almost unabated.
If we really think Indians got a raw deal, how about a government commitment to actually provide safe housing, medical care, and electricity to the reservations? Sadly, most whites see Indians more as a dead people than people living underprivileged lives in the present.
"Kids Talk about Nuclear Weapons." 1950s evidently, though I can't seem to find a precise date on it. The production values actually suggest late 40s to me, but that's a very loose guess.
The Army has changed its training regimen because the troops are too fat and out of shape.
I'm not going to weigh in much on the whole fat debate and whether or not it's mostly a socially constructed concept used to oppress people or if there's a national crisis. I understand the former but do tend slightly to the latter; regardless of the former's validity, there are real health problems with morbid obesity.
I'm more interested in how worries about soldiers' health are seen as a reflection of national character. Critics have connected the male body with the national character since at least the late 19th century. If I had more time, I'd actually go into my boxed up research notes to the various places where I've seen this. Lacking that time, let me just sketch a couple of quick points.
In the late 19th century, the middle and upper classes discovered the joys of sport hunting. While there were many reasons for this, chief among them was fear over what the industrial city did to the male body. The pollution, the closed spaces, the Jews*--all of these things threatened the white Anglo-Saxon male body and soul. Men like Theodore Roosevelt wondered what these weak bodies and corrupted morals would do to the nation during wartime. In order to see through their master plan of the United States as a military power, Roosevelt, Alfred Thayer Mahan, George Bird Grinnell, Madison Grant, and so many others clamored for young men ready to fight for their country. But they couldn't do that living in the cities.**
So these men turned to outdoor pursuits in order to make our fine young WASPs men. Boy Scouts, boxing, football, camping, fishing, and hunting all became training grounds for war. Men like Roosevelt made explicit connections between these activities. Of course, nothing could actually substitute for war, but it would have to do.
The nation had similar concerns during and after World War II. Military planners worried about the large number of conscripts denied entrance into the military during the war. Like with the Gilded Age cities or the weight of current recruits, there were legitimate health concerns here. The Depression created chronic malnourishment and untreated health problems that did reduce the fighting force during World War II. Under total mobilization, this never really threatened the nation because these men could work in factories or do any number of other necessary jobs.
While military men expressed concern over all this during the war, it was in post-war fears of communism that men's bodies really reentered the culture as a point to question the national masculinity. Americans often saw the Soviets as supermen during the 1950s, leading many to wonder whether we could defeat a nation with that combined powerful masculinity, even in their women,***, with unlimited national resources and a totalitarian government. Of course, we vastly overrated the Soviet capacity to keep up with American economic development, but that's irrelevant here.
For many Americans of these years, our national masculinity might not be up to the Cold War test. Again, returning to nature became a possible solution in our fight against the Soviets. Luckily for those upset by our national capacity for war, the 1950s became a decade of robust national health in so many ways, including in media portrayals of young people. Yes, like in the 1890s, bad morals threatened to undermine normalcy and Americans worried about juvenile delinquency.**** But Americans were going to the beach, buying big cars, taking dates out to malt shops, and going into the outdoors. Again, commentators called for a return to nature in order to recharge the national manhood.
I don't want to draw connections too closely between these three periods. We haven't seen concerns about the national male body lead to environmentalism, as happened in the 1890s and 1950s. If anything, the national indifference to environmental questions poses a major threat to our society. And no one is directly making connections between our ability to fight against supermasculine terrorists and our fat kids. However, there are interesting parallels around how Americans have made connections between the state of men's bodies***** and the national body at various points in our history, something that we see again today.
*--Quite literally, the ethnic body threatened the WASP body in the minds of these elite masculinity worriers.
**--For all the clear contempt I have for much of this line of thought, Gilded Age cities were, of course, death traps.
***--I'm fascinated at the 180 degree shift in how Americans have viewed Russian women since the 1980s. During the Cold War, we had a vision of them as coal miners, steroid-using track athletes, and hairy peasants growing cabbage for the state. Today in the American mind, they all look like models and exist as a store for men to buy wives that won't talk back and will have sex whenever demanded.
****--I've always loved that one of Paul Newman's most heinous crimes in "Cool Hand Luke" is taking the tops off of parking meters. I don't even remember him stealing the coins. For this, he is sentenced to a chain gang.
*****--Of course, any discussion of today's military also includes female bodies, but the nation has never reached any kind of comfort point discussing the role of women in combat. Most people, I believe, still view women in the military as a support system for "our boys."
A simple answer to Rick Perry's question can be provided:
“There is still a land of opportunity, friends — it’s called Texas,” Perry said. “We’re creating more jobs than any other state in the nation. … Would you rather live in a state like this, or in a state where a man can marry a man?”
Would I rather live in Texas or live in a state that allows gay marriage? Hmmmm...that is a really tough call there....
Also, what was after the creating more jobs. "We're executing more black people than any other state in the nation." Or perhaps, "We're allowing more chemical plants to give more of our citizens cancer than any other state in the nation." Or one of the many other awesome things about Texas that makes Rick Perry proud.
I think it's time for an occasional series entitled "Famous Loomises," dedicated to those people out there with whom I share a last name.
Henry Loomis was a foundational figure in the beginnings of the Voice of America. A high-ranking official within the United States Information Agency (USIA) during World War II, Loomis fought hard to open Americans to the value of international propaganda. Oddly enough, those very right-wingers like Joe McCarthy who most decried the potential of communism to take over America also led the charge against funding an agency that would present the U.S. side of things to the rest of the world. They feared the government producing left-leaning propaganda that would then be used to influence American citizens against god and country and whatever. Senseless worries that again remind me that Joe McCarthy was a Soviet dream--no provocateur could have done more to damage the U.S. during those years than McCarthy.
Anyway, Loomis ensured that the USIA retain power within early Cold War foreign policy. In 1958, President Eisenhower named Loomis head of the Voice of America, an agency that had mixed success in its propaganda goals during the Truman and Eisenhower years (again largely because of Congressional interference). Loomis remained VOA head until 1965, when the Johnson administration became agitated that VOA was reporting negatively on U.S. foreign policy.
This always bugged me--the idea that if we don't talk about our foreign policy failures that no one else will either. That's absurd--every other country's news agencies were talking about Vietnam and Cuba and the Dominican Republic--and all we were doing by pressuring VOA and other agencies to be more positive was to lessen our credibility to people around the world.
In 1973, Richard Nixon named Loomis the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but he spent his five years at the head of that agency fighting with PBS over control of programming, something that showed neither agency in the best of light.
This week's images will consist of Cold War propaganda films.
"Communism vs. Capitalism," late 1940s
Regardless of Grover Cleveland's somewhat questionable sexual history, what's really offensive about the man is how he destroyed working-class rights during his presidency. The Democrats were supposed to be the party of the working man in the late 19th century. But tainted with the Confederacy and realizing they would never win another election if they didn't election a quasi-Republican, the Democrats went for Cleveland in three straight campaigns.
Most notably, Cleveland used the military to crush the Pullman Strike in 1894. This really impressed Fox News blowhard Chris Wallace when he "wrote" his 2004 book Character: Profiles in Presidential Character. What does character mean to Chris Wallace?
WALLACE (continuing directly): And so they decided they were going to strike. And it happened in the context of lots of people coming to Chicago for the international exposition, and it became riots and tremendous civil disorder. And they counted, the labor people, on their friend in the White House staying out, or, if anything, caving in to their demands, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland, who, as I say, was a huge friend of labor, felt that the nation`s security was in jeopardy. And he really went against the Constitution because at the time, there was—you—presidents were not allowed to send troops into a state unless the governor asked for the troops, and Governor [John] Altgeld of Illinois didn`t want them because he was a—he favored labor.
And so Cleveland went against the law, went against Altgeld, sent in federal troops, restored order.
Wallace: ..."I have to say I'm not sure Barack Obama really is the President of the United States because the oath of office is set in the Constitution and I wasn't at all convinced that even after he tried to amend it that John Roberts ever got it out straight and that Barack Obama ever said the prescribed words. I suspect that everybody is going to forgive him and allow him to take over as president, but I'm not sure he actually said what's in the Constitution, there."
I am creating my syllabus for my U.S. history course since 1945. Because the course is at least as much thematic as chronological, I am creating a 100 most important events list to include in the syllabus. Here's what I came up with. Comments? Anything egregious that I am missing? Anything dumb that I have included?
As we see that Lisa Murkowski might actually lose her grudge match against Palin clone Joe Miller, I wonder why polling of Alaskan races trends far to the left of actual reality. Murkowski was supposed to blow Miller out; all the stories were written about the slap in Palin's face. Yet this is very much not the case. Similarly, in 2008 Mark Begich was supposed to destroy the scandal-riven Ted Stevens and longtime Republican Rep. Don Young was also likely to lose. Yet Begich barely squeaked out a win and Young won fairly easily.
What's up with this? Do they not poll the lunatics who live in the middle of nowhere, crawling out of their caves covered in animal furs to vote for the farthest-right candidate possible?
This Times piece on gay cadets at West Point doesn't do a very good job of keeping its anonymous sources anonymous:
“The most important thing I’ve learned here is how to be a good actor,” said one gay male cadet, who grew up in Philadelphia and is in his fourth year at the academy.
As with a not-insignificant number of people, there are times in my life where I've gotten incredibly drunk. Nonetheless, I'm fairly certain that, even at my drunkest, I think I would have noticed if I'd been shot in the head.
With the semester about to start, I suppose it's time to start with the historical images again. This week's theme will be the environment and environmentalism in the decades after World War II, but before Earth Day.
Over on Facebook, I responded to Erik's Dylan question that the electric side was better, all because of Dylan's sneer on the live version of "Like a Rolling Stone" (after having somebody yell out "Judas!" and telling his band to "Play it fucking loud!"), which I suggested was one of the three greatest "fuck you" moments in rock and roll. He asked me what the other two were. I responded that they were (in no particular order): Donita Sparks of L7 reaching up between her legs, pulling out her used tampon, and throwing it into the audience after being pelted with mud at the Reading festival in 1992; Dylan's sneer in "Like a Rolling Stone"; and the "Fuck'em" bit in the Libertines' "I Get Along."
Question of the day: Which set from Dylan's 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert is better? I say the electric set by a single Robbie Robertson guitar lick. But it's damn close.
Also, everything bad about the 60s can be summed up by the idiot who screamed "Judas" at Dylan after he finished Ballad of a Thin Man.
Until I found this editorial while researching something on the 2007 May 1 immigrant rights rallies, I had almost forgotten what a stupid racist asshole Lou Dobbs is. In this editorial, he not only insists on calling migrants "illegal aliens," he finds it conspiratorial that they would choose the workers' day of May 1 for their rallies. Of course, he forgets that it's not just a Soviet holiday, but that celebrate in such commie paradises as France and Sweden. But then he goes on and reminds us that apparently May 1 is Law Day in the United States. Evidently, this was some sort of Kennedy Cold War creation. Anyway, I'm sure the people who were blown away by the police after the Haymarket bomb would totally respect this. I don't know what I like the most--the whole idea of Law Day as some sort of slap at the Soviets or Lou Dobbs bringing this up in 2007.
I'm so glad we've moved on from this idiotic racist nonsense in the last 3 years....
Forgive me the childish joy I am taking in reading that Roger Clemens has been handed a perjury indictment for lying his ass off to a Congressional committee about his use of steroids.
The proposal to erect a mosque near Ground Zero poses something of a quandary for Democrats and the president. President Obama has defended the rights of the people involved to build the mosque, which is, of course, the right thing to do. The protection of religious minorities is an important part of the American experiment, certainly. But is it the most strategic move?
With 62% of Americans opposing the construction of the mosque (a number most likely inflated because most people don't seem to realize that the mosque and Islamic center wouldn't be on the actual Ground Zero property, just near it), Democrats and Obama are spending some serious political capital and assuming a modicum of risk in an election year. Of course, the most admirably idealistic among us may say strategy be damned in the face of ethics, but I think weighing the cost is worth discussing. Is this a big enough issue to swing a few close races in the midterms? It seems as such, at least in New York, where a number of Democratic congressional nominees are opposing the project. What cost will a few more losses in the midterms have on the Obama agenda going forward? Will this resurface in 2012 (I'm thinking of heinous right-wing attack ads in Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, etc.)? At what point do we consider the greater good of a more successful Obama agenda vis-a-vis taking a stand on this particular issue?
This is an interesting battle for the President to weigh in on-- I'm wondering if "no comment" would have been a better play. Obama isn't totally innocent of this kind of Clintonian hedging-- look at the situation with "Don't Ask-Don't Tell" (the repeal of which has far more popular support in the nation than the proposed mosque project).
This is an interesting issue to me because I don't have much of an answer to these questions. But I can't shake the feeling that the left is involved in a bit of a gamble here; the ethics of possibly hindering progress on the economy, the environment, and a host of other far more important (in the sense of the number of, and degree to which, people are affected) issues is certainly worth thinking about.
The Cleveland Indians are and always will be my first baseball team. That said, living in New York turned me into a pretty strong Mets fan, for better and for worse (though being a lifelong Indians fan has made me relatively immune to what Mets fans think is severe suffering). With the Metropolitans as my second team, I quickly invested a decent amount of emotion and energy into them, and ever since the firing of Willie Randolph, I've insisted the Mets need a purging, not so much because I was a major Randolph partisan, but rather because of the fact that Minaya handled it about as terribly as one could. Ever since then, I've never missed a chance when with friends to call for Minaya's firing and the removal of Jerry Manuel (not out of ill will, but out of a desire for a completely fresh start).
Joke from an 1850s quasi-pornographic newspaper:
"Why is Ex-President Pierce like the privates of a man?
Because he went in Hard and came out Soft."
I'm not actually sure what the joke means. Perhaps monetary policy. But any Franklin Pierce sex joke must be shared.
From Donna Dennis' Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York.
The wire-taps are the least controversial part of the Watergate scandal. Nobody condemns Nixon for the wire-taps. They condemn him for the constitutional abuses, the paranoia, the attempts to use his authority to ruin his opponents, and the illegal effort to cover up an absurd break-in.
Although editorials like this are all too common and don't surprise, their absurdity never ceases to amaze me. I always marvel at how far some will stretch in order to attack Lula, even when all other evidence suggests their arguments are wrong. Are there good reasons to criticize Lula? Absolutely. It's completely fair to say that his environmental record is at best "not good." Although I wouldn't fully agree, you could also suggest that he did not go far enough with his social programs, and that he compromised too many of his ideals to become president.
This episode from 1998 demonstrates perfectly a couple of things: the unreliability and partisanship of some of the major polling institutions in Brazil; many media organizations' (and not just Datafolha's) ties to the PSDB; and their efforts to either swing Brazilian voters to the PSDB and its allies, or to persuade those who would vote for another party to just abandon hope before the election. Additionally, as a sometimes-collateral effect, this type of activity also does a great job ratcheting up hatred for the PT among the more conservative elements of the middle-class; not only is it a "Workers' Party," but this type of misinformation (which was not an isolated incident in 1998, but continues today) lowers expectations for how the PT will do; when it does much better than predicted, the outrage increases, as people expect one outcome but receive another.
I've been terribly remiss at dealing with this topic, in no small part because, while Brazil prepares to head to the polls again, I continue to try to finish a dissertation. However, with the campaign having really picked up steam once Brazil exited the World Cup, now seems as good a time as any to dive into the debates and discussions on the impending election.
-The PSDB under FHC pushed privatization to extremes, trying to privatize everything (and succeeding with just about everything except Brazil's public university system and Petrobras; on both, the Brazilian people drew the line, and FHC had to step back a bit). While some say this did improve services, it also raised prices (when a French company bought out Brazil's public phone system, for example, phone prices in Brazil immediately went up 30%, even as they dropped 30% in France); what is more, as Lula demonstrated, investing in state-run companies and improving efficiency are not mutually exclusive terms, and when both are executed, can make an even stronger company than privatization could, all while offering greater benefits to your own citizens.-In addition to adhering strongly to neoliberalism, FHC kept his economic relations connected almost strictly to the European Union and the United States, meaning Brazil's economy was by and large dependent on the fluxes of the American and European markets (no small irony, given that, in the 1970s, FHC was a leading theorist in dependency theory). While Lula did not shed the mercantilist policies of his predecessor, he did extend them to all of the world. Trade with Africa; deals with Arab countries in the Middle East; agreements with China; partnerships with India; collaborations with the United States - all were fair game, and Lula fostered these agreements in all parts of the world. This was beneficial both economically and politically; on the economic front, it diversified Brazil's trade, making it less susceptible to one country's or region's economic decline and strengthening its own economy (indeed, it was one of the last countries to enter the 2008 global recession, entering into recession in June 2009 and emerging from it just one quarter later.) Politically, Brazil was able to strengthen its role as a global player, working with everybody but dependent on nobody. Thus, Brazil enjoyed a level of both political and economic autonomy it had never witnessed before. The old joke used to be "Brazil - the country of tomorrow, forever." Yet Lula seems to have guided it very close to being the country of tomorrow today.-Thirdly, there has been Lula's emphasis on state programs. A sort of flip-side to neoliberalism, Lula proposed a greater state presence and higher government spending on programs like Zero Hunger and the Bolsa Familia, which provided money to poor families for food or for their children to attend school longer. These programs have by all accounts been massively successful, and thanks in no small part to them, more people are joining Brazil's middle class than had ever taken place before. These policies ran directly counter to FHC's emphasis on "trickle-down" economics, something that Serra also emphasizes. While there are still enormous gaps between the wealthiest and the poorest in Brazil, the middle seems to be growing, and has done so through increased state spending (something the U.S. could learn from), and not from privatization and hopes for a trickle-down effect.
It's an impressive number. Judge Leonardo Ordonez, president of the provincial court of the Sucumbios in Ecuador's Oriente, has said he won't be able to rule this year on the suit between indigenous communities of the region and Chevron Corporation in part because of the extent of the filings in the case, totaling 182,152 pages. How many of those pages are superfluous motions, document dumps, and the like by Chevron? The case has dragged on for 17 years now.
