Category: Heroes Notes

Representing Crisis

A beta version of the website collating my research is now up and accessible. It is now more friendly to lower bandwidth users, and more extensively linked. Testing the earlier version revealed something I had long suspected: typical users are much smarter than Jacob Nielson gives them credit for. They had no difficulty using the navigation, and inspired me to make more intra-page navigation available.

This is just the first step toward a more logical arrangement for the material that I’m gathering. I realize it is difficult for even long-time readers of my blog to figure out how the pieces I occasionally post fit together. Eventually, I will link from the timeline and other indexes that I will be adding to the blog entries. Blogging my research has been great, but it is very difficult to set up logical categories when you have no idea where things fall, or what the categories are when you find pieces to the puzzle.

The major reason for doing things this way is because some of the figures I’m researching are well represented on the web— such as Lewis Hine, who was the first sub-page added. Right now, it mainly collects the most useful links I’ve found. I want to add a more detailed bibliography to print articles later. Other figures, like Edwin Rosskam, have little or no presence on the web, a situation I hope to remedy. I want to place representative samples from his books online. There is a lot of work to be done, and by doing it this way I’m getting a bigger sense of how these things are related to each other. This will help my writing process.

The address to the front page will remain constant as material is added, so linking to it is fine now. Right now, it covers a lot of material in a shallow way. The depth will come later. I mainly wanted to get my approach and navigation issues sorted out. Suggestions for additions, or any error reports are welcome. This is a major step for me, after six months or more of gathering stuff— some items probably won’t make sense to everyone, because they are part of my larger thesis though not specifically representational in nature. It was nice to step back for a second, and gather them together.

The pages validate, and are designed for at least 1024×768. I haven’t tested on a variety of browsers yet. I did resort to tables for positioning so I hope it won’t present a problem for the usual suspects. I’ve only checked it with Mozilla and IE 6.

Busy Signal

Everything always gets jammed up at the end of the semester. I have so much crap to create and do in the next week that I think my head may explode. It’s all fun stuff, really, I just wish I didn’t have to do it so damn fast. Sometimes I regret my motto of never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.

One of the things I’m working on is a web site, which I need to do some usability testing on tomorrow. For anyone who would like a preview, it is primarily a timeline of key events in social documentary work from 1890-1941. The main test page is here. Apologies to those on dial-up, eventually I’ll break things up a bit more and add more detailed sub-pages. But right now, I need something to test with human subjects. I would appreciate if no one linked it right now, since it will be greatly refined in the next week. Comments are welcome, however.

I decided that my blog note-taking just wasn’t enough. I wanted to arrange the material in an indexed chronology. In the next few days, I’ll be adding indexes to the authors and texts. There are still lots of events and texts missing, but I wanted to get the basics of my work so far. This thing keeps expanding away from my center in the twentieth century, with a lot of theoretical background still to be written. But that will have to wait until the break. Right now, I just want to consolidate some of the research and complete a document design assignment at the same time.

Bear in mind that this is purely an alpha-test. I always feel guilty when I don’t write at least something here in my blog, so I thought I’d offer up the premature debut. I’m just so freaking busy lately. I’m going to force myself to take a break to enjoy Eyes Adrift on Friday night though. All work and all that . . .

“It is false to assume that share croppers and share tenants are humanly hopeless”

A SHARECROPPERS FAMILY NEAR HAZELHURST GEORGIA

Frontispiece from Forty Acres and Steel Mules

Continue reading “Forty Acres and Steel Mules” →

Your True Hero

Procrastinating about writing an introductory chapter for my major project, I stumbled on a compelling site: yourtruehero. The site founder, Gary Hale, explains how the site came to be in a fascinating way:

A number of people have inquired about how this project began. The answer is pretty simple.

About two years ago my family was celebrating a traditional holiday dinner. As I looked around the room, filled with relatives, I felt a sense of gratitude for the people who were there and for their contributions to everyday life. A World War II veteran, several educators, a hospice nurse, a police officer, health care workers, a volunteer karate instructor, a court system employee and small business owners – the list went on. These are all good and decent people who quietly go about their jobs, seeking neither praise nor celebrity, but each making the world a little better by their efforts. It occurred to me that millions of other families with equally good people were gathered together in their homes all around the country. I make no claim that my family is superior or more noble than the next but I do believe that we hear too little of the stories of people like these – the true heroes of everyday life.

Later that night, after the last guest was bid goodbye and the kids were asleep, I spent 10 minutes flipping through the cable channels on television. There they were – back to back to back: Monica Lewinsky, Dennis Rodman, and Eminem. Now, I have no personal grudge against those three but I do know that there is not one more thing about them that I possibly care to learn.

Why do we hear so much about meaningless celebrities and so little about good people whose stories are compelling, interesting and inspiring? Why is it that some movie star’s third divorce is more noticed than the story of the firefighter rushing into a building to save a small child or the nurse tending to a lonely and sick old man? Do I really have to hear any more about Puff Daddy?

Continue reading “Your True Hero” →

Superior Protein

In another bizarre confluence, I had some strange thoughts on heroic genealogies. It started out innocently enough. I was watching a show on the History Channel about US marshals. Much of it was centered on the area where my parents live— Judge Parker, the hanging judge of Ft. Smith Arkansas. With Shirley Abbott’s assertions about the tri-racial character of the South fresh in my mind, I was thinking that even that is an oversimplification when it comes to the Oklahoma territory. There were bits about black marshals, Native American outlaws, and the general lawlessness of the area at the turn of the twentieth century.

It reminded me of a conversation I was having with one of my students about the fate of the Cherokee that managed to escape the trail of tears, whose lineage became melded with white settlers as they resisted forced relocation. There are no pure blood-lines here, as far as I can see. But its a secret of the South, because the appearance of native tribes is not far removed from the settlers who came in.

The program that followed was about the forensic investigation into the lineage of Jesse James. In most countries, I suspect, the point of genealogy is to trace your family tree to some aristocratic beginning, some king or hero, in order to feel validated by tradition. But here in the US, to be descended from an outlaw is an amazing point of pride. It seems so strange how in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence some people cling to the idea that they might be related to a junkie, a murder, and a thief.

I took a shower, and when I got out the first thing I heard was a bit of dialogue regarding the bidding wars over bull semen. When a particular prize bull’s genetic material becomes scarce, the prices escalate. The consequent elaboration of eugenic techniques was captivating. They actually do sonograms to determine the marbling pattern of fat in the flesh to find the choicest bits of beef. The insistence on ancestry as a way of establishing heroic merit seems to me to be not far removed from this— as if people could be engineered to be heroic. As one of the cattle breeders remarked, we do our best to assure our superior protein. There’s something downright sick about the whole enterprise.

From the Photo-secession to Commercialism

From 1913 to 1917, Karl F. Struss, the last photographer to join the Photo-secession, took pictures of interiors and model railroads for Harper’s Bazaar. He was among the first to promote photography as a commercial medium. In 1914, an unidentified author wrote:

The facility of its reproduction, the economic advantage it affords over other arts, its adaptability to personal expression, and its universal and understandable appeal are implements the intelligent users of the camera should employ in helping photography take its place in the world of illustrative art. For the illustration of stories and poems, there is no reason on earth why a photograph should not be desirable to a publisher.

[emphasis mine, from “Spheres of Usefulness,” Platinum Print May 1914, p.10]

By the end of the decade, there was a significant increase in the use of soft-focus photographs in advertising, pointing to the influence of the pictorialists. The world of commercial culture, disdained by Steiglitz, was nonetheless influenced by his circle. The rise in advertising over the course of the roaring twenties was also marked by an interest in using photographs to appeal to the public. Leonard A. Williams Illustrative Photography in Advertising was published in 1929. Williams stressed unity, with the logic of a modern day Aristotle:

Every writer of advertisements or short stories lives up to the rule— Have a single character, a single event, and a single emotion. Now, the illustrator, or pictorial publicity photographer, must have rules similar to the writer. His rule is— Every picture must have a border around the frame; within that frame a center of interest must be placed at what is known as the aesthetic center or A.C. point. Some call it the talking point.

Soft-focus commercial portraiture grew across the depression. The tension between the soft-focus work of pictorialists and the hard edges of modernism was strong. The industrial subject matter favored by modernists dovetailed with the emotional emphasis favored by pictorialists in the commercial universe of advertising. In 1933, the first Detroit International Salon of Industrial photography was held at the same time and in the same building as the cities second pictorial salon, drawing over 30,000 visitors. Leading pictorial photographers began to endorse photographic products around this time as well.

This material, abstracted from After the Photo-secession by Christian Peterson, provides an interesting subtext to the development of documentary photography during the same time period. The borderline between commerce and art seems to be much lower in the case of so called “artistic” photographers. No wonder so many people like Walker Evans felt the need to rebel against the theories flying around this age.

Isn’t it Hypnotic?

Notes on some more research from A History of Hypnotism by Alan Gauld. Though mesmerism was the rage in Europe from 1784-89, there seems little doubt that the French Revolution and general political upheavals slowed its introduction into Britain and the United States. Once it arrived however, it “set the brush ablaze” in the US, catching on more slowly in Britain. Gauld theorizes:

In the United States, authority in professional, intellectual, educational, and religious matters had not yet become highly institutionalized, centres of advanced learning were scattered, and a habit of individual thinking flourished even among the less well educated. Such a country was bound at a certain level to be more open to new social, religious, intellectual, and medical ideas than was Britain with its entrenched professional, intellectual and political establishments. Between 1830 and 1850 the eastern United States was a ferment of new ideas, new movements and new cults, many of a reformist or utopian character, and was uplifted by an almost euphoric optimism as to the prospects for improving man’s lot in this world or assuring his comfort in the next. The literary and intellectual side of these movements met and merged with the New England transcendentalism which grew up along with Unitarianism as the older style of Puritanism began to lose its grip on the American mind. (179)

Gauld notes that Emerson and most “eminent literary persons” took a poor view of mesmerism. It had stronger affinities with the more popular reform and progressive movements, including women’s suffrage, the abolitionists, child labor movements, socialism, Fourierism, “communitarianism,” free love, vegetarianism, penal and educational reform, homeopathy, phrenology, and Swedenborgianism (180). Gauld refers the reader to Orestes Brownson’s autobiographical novel The Spirit-Rapper (1854) for further details.

Ten years prior to the introduction of photography, hypnotism came into the country in much the same fashion— through a series of lectures by Joseph du Commun, a teacher of French at the US Military Academy at West Point, in 1829. It didn’t catch on until another French lecturer Charles Poyen St. Sauveur, author of Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England (1837), began private instruction in mesmerism in March of 1836. It spread quickly, mostly through lecturers trained by Poyen (181). Early supporters included Francis Wayland, President of Brown University, and J.C. Brownell, Episcopal bishop of Connecticut. It gained an intellectual base, and early accounts are filled with both with cures and references to clairvoyance (182). Mesmerism also gained a foothold in New Orleans, were a group began to meet in the late 1830s, founding the Sociét&#0233l du magnétisme de la Nouvell-Orléans in April 1845. By 1848, it had 71 members (183).

Robert H. Collyer began attracting audiences of 500-1000 in Boston and New York in the early 1840s. Samuel Gregory, an advocate of medical education for women published Mesmerism, or Animal Magnetism and its Uses in 1843 (183). A class of “professional magnetizers” grew up quickly, with one contemporary estimate citing two hundred of them in Boston alone by 1843. Many of the practioners were also allied with phrenology, following Dr. Johann Spurzheim who died in New York in 1832 (185). Mesmerism became quickly entangled with phrenology. Of these early “missionary” hypnotists, the theories of J.S. Grimes seems most in keeping with other social trends.

Grimes called the mesmeric fluid etherium, and proposed that hypnotism worked through a practitioner’s ability to connect his etherium with a passive subject, to “induct” them into a state, or by playing upon the organ of the subject’s Credenciveness. “Credenciveness is ‘a conforming social propensity. The whole group which it belongs have this peculiar character, that they all tend to conform to the wishes, feelings, actions, commands, and assertions of others’” (186). Stage hypnotism appears to have developed in the late 1850s.

In the later Victorian era, mesmerism became closely connected with the spiritualist movement, and with Christian Science. Gauld ties this to the tendency in Puritanism towards “conversion experiences” and with the growth of scientism— “The American mesmerists were the first to encourage popular audiences to abandon a scriptural based theology in favour of psychological principles said to govern an individual’s ability to inwardly align himself with a higher spiritual order” (194).

Cross-dressing was a common feature of American theater during minstrelsy’s early days. . . . The practice was not restricted to comedians, however, because cross-dressing was not uncommon among both white and black men during the antebellum period.

Peter Sewally, alias Mary Jones, who was wearing female attire while he was arrested in 1836 for grand larceny, said that he “attended parties among the people of [his] own color dressed this way.”

The burnt cork masks, costumes, and wigs of early minstrelsy’s best female impersonators— Maximilian Zorer (famous for his Jenny Lind roles), William Newcomb (noted for his appearances as Mrs. E. Oakwood Smith), and George Christy (renowned for his “wench” characters)— did not represent women any more accurately than did the cross-dressed characters of Mose— the Bowery B’hoy— and his companions portrayed working class women of the Bowery and Broadway in Benjamin Baker’s Glance at New York (Feb 15, 1848), where Mose, who is a man and no mistake— and one of de b’hoys at dat”— makes a pass at Mrs. Morton to show his manly aggressiveness.

(Behind the Burnt Cork Mask by William Mahar, 312)

Mahar also makes the point that minstrel shows also parodied popular lecture forms such as political rhetoric, and lectures regarding the latest “sciences” of the day, like phrenology and mesmerism. I love the bit about the “bump of lub” that causes swelling problems:

Lecture on Phrenology

Freenology consists in gittin’nolage free, like you am dis evening; it was fust discubered in de free schools, and was always looked ‘pon by de larned as being closely connected wid “E Pluribus Unum.” . . .

De hump in a cullered man’s hed . . . am siterated on de top, and called by de siantifick de cokanut bump; dis bump lays in a triangular form ober be bump of don’t care- a-d-nativeness, which every black man’s hed am vully blessed wid . . . .

De bump dat am moss cultiwated in de cullered man hed, am call’d on Fowler and Wells’ map ob de brane, “Amativeness.” Dis am de bump dat plays de debil wid de fair sex, bekase dat am whar Kupid springs from; dis bump lays in de back ob de neck, near de coat collar; it am call’d de bump of lub . . . .

It am de bump what all de selfishness and wickedness ob mankind lays; and I wod say a word to dem fellers as hab got an ober quantity ob it. Look out how you fool you time ’round de opposite sex, kase wen you fall in lub dis bump swells to such an ‘xtent dat it overwellms de hole brane, common sense am kicked out do be drainum, and lub rain ‘spreme till every ebenue leadin to de soul am oberflowed wid de milk ob human kindness, and it takes an “orfullpoletice,” as we say in French, to traduce de swell’d bump to its proper size.”

From Black Diamonds (1855) cited on 72-73, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask.