MORAL and physical decay was a preoccupation consuming the minds of Victorians in the late 19th century. Many Britons harboured nagging doubts that the world’s foremost empire might be in decline? The fear manifested itself in the art and literature of the day, especially in Gothic novels such as Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. Contemporary commentators, social campaigners, liberal imperialists and advocates of ”national efficiency” proffered a raft of varied explanations for the alleged condition of society. Blame was attributed to the rising crime rate, insanity, poverty, unemployment, immigration, radicalism, sexual deviance, feminism, VD, the transformation away from rural life to the disease-ridden towns and the very stresses of modern civilisation (labelled “the dark side of progress”) (‘Deviance, disorder and the self’, www7.bbk.ac.uk).
The Second Boer War in South Africa, breaking out in 1899, did nothing to ease concerns that, maybe, British manhood was not made of “the right stuff” after all…Imperial Britain’s early sub-par performance in the conflict against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of British fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. The first portends emerged even before the hostilities began – in the recruitment halls of Britain. The early Boer victories required British reinforcements from home leading to a manpower dilemma – the unhealthy British cities and slums churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men. At the time of the Boer War the average British soldier was of diminished stature, shorter than that of 1845…40% of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for military service. By 1901 the percentage had increased even moreⓐ.
Afrikaner guerrilla warfare
Once the fighting began, the lacklustre efforts of the British soldiers struggling to gain the upper hand left their Australian and New Zealand counterparts with a negative impression of the home country’s martial capability. While British soldiery laboured, the Australasian contingents of soldiers equipped themselves quite well. Colonial troops from Australia and New Zealand possessed natural ability to shoot and ride, equipping them to perform well in the open war on the veldt…this plus their ‘bushman’ capacity to live off the land, meant that they clearly adapted to the South African conditions better than the British soldiersⓑ.
The Australian and NZ dominion soldiers’ take-home message from the South Africa affair was that the “old Britons” were in decline, and that they, the “new Britons”, represented the “coming man”. This view fed into earlier established myths and assumptions – Australia benefitted, it was said, from a climate infinitely better than Britain, a lavish land … making for a vigorous and healthy ‘race’. WK Hancock described the Australian ‘type’ of man as a harmonious blending of all the British types, nourished by a “generous sufficiency of food (good diet) …breathing space (vast countryside) and sunshine”. At the same time British voices were ominously warning of “racial suicide” and the waning of the nation’s “racial energy”, the self-styled “Better Britons” of Australia and New Zealand were talking up their own supposed “racial vigour”.
Reassuring symbolism: Britannia saving the world from barbarism (Source: teachmiddleeast.lib.uchicago.edu/)
Footnote:“Degeneracy” out of vogue As Victorian Britain evolved into Edwardian Britain, the fears of racial deterioration didn’t diminish, birth-rates which were already in decline going back decades had plummeted dramatically since the Victorians. However, by the time of World War I degeneration theory had lost favour, advances in the understanding of genetics and the vogue for psychoanalytic thinking had prompted its obsolescence (‘Degeneration theory’, www.artandpopularculture.com).
Source: Pinterest
Postscript: Decadence and decay “Decay” is closely related to the word “decadence” (Latin, decadentia, meaning ‘fall”. In 19th century imperialist thinking decadence and decay was a characteristic associated with the colonial anxieties of empire. The phenomenal success of the imperial powers, it was thought as in the case of past examples like Rome, made the elite complacent and weak, thus the seed of its downfall. The response of contemporary Europeans was a preoccupation with the morality and cultural values of their own societies (‘Decline and Fall’, William Rees, History Today, January 2023).
ⓐ one contemporary commentator, cricket writer Albert E Knight, thought the remedy for the physical and moral degeneration of Englishmen lay in cricket – advocating for the creation of more playing fields as an antidote to the decline of young working class men, so that they could be the beneficiaries of the ”cricket way of making honest and healthy Englishmen”
ⓑ a UK report conducted in 1904 with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration” confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested
The legacy of the renowned and influential Swiss–French architect Le Corbusier is inextricably tied up with the Chandigarh project – on his résumé it stands out as “the only urban plan of substance he (ever) implemented” [‘Chandigarh, once the future city’, Architectural Review, 6th March 2003, www.architectural–review.com.]. Inspired by the 19th century Garden City Movement, Le Corbusier’s design and planning of this new and unique town in northern India (1951–65), has been frequently lauded as one of the 20th century Modernism’s greatest experiments in architecture and urban planning [‘Le Corbusier Rediscovered: Chandigarh And Beyond’, Raynish Wattas & Deepik Gandhi (Eds.), (2018)].
Plan of grid sectors for “Chandigarh City Beautiful” (#13 was omitted because Le Corbusier was superstitious about the number)
The Chandigarh planned city captured the imagination of architects around the world. As a framework for the design Le Corbusier utilised the metaphor of the human body — head = Capitol Complex | heart = City Centre (commercial sector) | lungs = Leisure Valley (open spaces and green sectors) | intellect = Educational Zone | circulation system = network of different types of roads (the 7Vs). Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh also provided inspiration for later “utopian” city masterplans like Brasília, the new capital of Brazil𖤓 and it continues to draw praise from architects and planners both within and outside India.
Le Corbusier’s symbolic Open Hand monument, part of the Capitol Complex (photo: Fernanda Antonio/ArchDaily)
Nehru’s aspirations for a modern, forward-looking new city: The catalyst for what Le Corbusier created in Chandigarh came from India’s foundation prime minister ‘Pandit’ Nehru who envisioned the new city in an independent India as making a clear departure from the traditional model of India’s cities, overcrowded and dependent on agricultural life. In its place he wanted a modern, progressive and efficient city, one suited for a new democracy like India…and a green one, with open spaces, green landscapes and green belts①. Presented with this brief Le Corbusier produced a masterplan for Chandigarh which emphasised low-density, self-contained housing contained within an orderly grid pattern, abundant public spaces, buildings and structures which were intended to stand as symbols for freedom and aesthetic harmony as well as react well to the prevailing severe climatic conditions. His buildings in the Capitol Complex combined Brutalist elements—an opportunity to experiment with his favourite material beton brut (raw concrete)—with a sculptural form of architecture while striving for a purity of geometric form.
But has Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s magnum opus, stood the test of time? Today, 70 years on, the once fresh and vibrant modernist city is looking its age, described by one writer as being “derelict” and “glorious” at the same time, and both “visionary and anachronistic” [Jared Green, ‘Chandigarh: Where Modernism Met India’, The Dirt, 4th April 2017, www.dirt.asla.org]. Another has described Chandigarh as “a museum piece in need of protection” (Sunil Khilnani). Le Corbusier’s Capitol showpieces are now noticeably the worse for wear after exposure to Indian heatwaves and monsoons. Moreover, it is significant that Chandigarh, intended to be a universal model for a radically new type of Indian city, has not fostered any subsequent attempts to replicate Le Corbusier’s bold experiment in modernist planning anywhere else in India.
Le Corbusier (left) on his artificial Chandigarh lake with his cousin, the project’s chief architect Pierre Jeanneret (photo: Suresh Kumar)
A failure to deliver for all Chandigarh residents: Le Corbusier’s housing solution and plan to cap the size of the city’s population to give Chandigarhians some breathing space have been subverted. An influx of internal migrants has exploded the population from a planned maximum of 500,000 to more than double that. Overcrowding has led to the proliferation of shantytowns, slums and illegal food stalls on the city’s fringes, encroaching on the showcase green belt. The architect’s low-density living ideal has been compromised by the emergence of multiple occupancy, four or more families sharing the same house. For the lower/working class residents of the city have found themselves isolated in urban villages, cutoff from their destinations (shopping, educational, entertainment, etc).
Chamber of the Chief Justice (source: chinmaye.com)
Two classes of Chanigarhians: The poor are the big losers in Le Corbusier’s would-be Indian utopia…trapped on the periphery, their capacity to connect with the centre and its services, to access employment, etc is severely curtailed…representing a failure of Le Corbusier’s planning in not accommodating the social, cultural and economic problems of the lower strata of society [‘Le Corbusier’s Failed Modernism’, CRIT Magazine, the American Institute of Architects, (Tanner), March 1979, www.cknl.eu]. As put into practice, Chandigarh, though built by the poorest workers, was never intended for their use, but for the Punjabi elite (Green).
Worsening traffic is another factor to further dampen the attraction of Chandigarh as a place to live…the city has the largest number of vehicles per capita in the country and the streets and the rectangular grid pattern are unmistakably meant for automobiles rather than walkers. These are all areas of urban development where Le Corbusier fell short of his stated aim of improving the human condition.
Chandigarh city traffic (source: dailyguardian.com)
Implanting western aesthetics: Cultural insensitivity is one theme of detractors who rail against the absence of “Indianness” in the experimental city and the disregarding of the existing traditions of the Indian people. The Le Corbusier modernist experiment has been condemned as “an act of western cultural imperialism” for imposing Eurocentric ideals and a western planning ideology on a population rooted in a very different, pluralistic culture② (the grid pattern of sectors, European-style parks, hierarchical road system, etc.)[Pratyush Sarup, ‘Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh: Bold Vision or a Modernist Failure?’, AD, 13th May 2024, www.admiddleeast.com]③④.
A man and his plan
Considering the aesthetics of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh architecture—specifically the Capitol Complex—there’s a tendency among observers to see the functionalist buildings as cold, rigid and uninviting⑤ [Scott Harper, ‘Appetite for Construction: Le Corbusier’, The Rake, October 2024, www.therake.com]. Brutalist architecture and a preoccupation with concrete can be alienating for some people.
𖤓 for the story of Brazil’s experiment with modernist urban planning and architecture for the new capital of Brasília, go to https://www.7dayadventurer.com/2022/02/03/brasilia-brazils-modernist-capital-in-the-interior-an-unliveable-utopian-showcase/
① “a new town, symbolic of freedom of India unfettered by traditions of the past…(an) expression of faith in the future”
② Le Corbusier never stayed permanently in Chandigarh during the project’s lifespan and, most tellingly, never consulted with the local inhabitants about their needs and wants
③ this perspective also questions why outsiders and no native Indian architects were offered the project
④ Sarup: it was a planning failure because it “didn’t take into account the nation’s unique urban fabric”
⑤ and the large empty spaces between the key buildings conveys a sense of unconnectedness and a sterile atmosphere
I happened upon the remarkable, daring exploits of Lt. Edgardo Simoni—the Italian prisoner of war who made a habit of repeatedly escaping from various Australian POW camps during WWII—while reading the non-wartime story of another (very different) ace escape artist, Kevin John Simmonds, a con on the run from NSW cops who bamboozled an extensive manhunt comprising 500-odd police and 300 volunteers in 1959, leading them on a long, fruitless chase through harsh and rugged bush land before being finally being recaptured. To their embarrassment the state’s police officers found themselves lagging far behind the solo fugitive in a catch-up game of “Where’s Wally”, with Simmonds making them at times look like “right” (and not very bright) “Charlies” (They’ll Never Hold Me, by Michael Adams (Affirm Press, Melbourne, 2024).
Kevin John Simmonds
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The theme of valiant escape and valiant escapees from POW camps is a standard trope of cinema and television that has been done to oblivion over the years. This sub-genre has been a recurring feature in cinema for the past seven or eight decades, including a raft of classic war (WWII) features like Escape from Stalag 17, The Colditz Story, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Von Ryan’s Express, The Wooden Horse, The Mackenzie Break and of course the most lauded of all movies subscribing to the sub-genre – 1963’s The Great Escape.
But for me my favourite POW screen vehicle is the antithesis of these largely stark and grim dramas. No, not Hogan’s Heroes but another TV war sitcom, an episode from the Seventies TV series Ripping Yarns (created by two-sixths of the “Monty Python” team, Michael Palin and Terry Jones) called ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’. The protagonist played by Palin (Major Phipps) is a serial escape attempter…during the war to date he has attempted over 560 escapes, 200 of them before he had left England, as a consequence he is transferred to Germany’s most infamous prison camp. At Luft 112B he continues his escape attempts 24/7, all of them ludicrously impossible. Meanwhile the rest of the British POWs frustrate Phipps no end by being perfectly content to sit out the war in their cosy and comfy little gentleman–officer confinement. By the show’s end the other POWs and German guards have all scarpered, leaving Phillips as the only man to never have escaped the “inescapable POW camp”. In his life after the war we learn that escaping is so intrinsically part of Maj. Phipps’ DNA that two years after his death and burial, locals discovered a tunnel dug from his grave to the cemetery fence: his final and “greatest” escape! A gem of a send-up of both the unrelentingly solemn POW film and British upper-middle class and upper class twits𖤓.
Michael Palin, ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’
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Back to the real life POW escapologist Signoré Simoni. Simoni was one of more than 18,000 Italian military personnel captured by the Allies and transported to Australian POW camps, in his case assigned to the Murchison Camp # 13, near Shepparton, Victoria. Unlike the fictional Maj. Phipps’ fellow prisoners and the great majority of his fellow Italian POWs, Edgardo Simoni never content to stay put behind barbed wire and high fences paralleled the fictional Phipps in trying to escape whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Italian prisoners of war arriving at Circular Quay wharf, Sydney, 1941 (source: coasit.com.au)
Simoni’s first shot at freedom failed but undaunted he soon tried again. Swapping uniforms with an Italian private in the prison was his passport to the outside POW work detail. From there he easily managed to slip away from the Murchison guards and head for metropolitan Melbourne. Once there, he took the alias “George Scoto” and got a job selling door-to-door cosmetics (very successfully) which lasted for ten months. Afterwards, Simoni moved to Mildura in country Victoria where he found work on a farm. Here he was recaptured by Australian military police and despatched to a higher security goal in the isolated town of Hay, NSW. Simoni was not intent to accept captivity in Hay and in no time he had escaped by painstakingly filing through the bars of his cell window, becoming the only POW to escape from that supposedly escape-proof incarceration facility. Simoni then walked 300km to Bendigo where he caught a train to Melbourne. His second sojourn in Melbourne was cut short by a stroke of rotten luck when he was spotted and arrested by the same policeman who had arrested him on the previous occasion! (‘Italian POWs in Australia’ by Frank O’Rourke, Newsletter # 580, 02–07–2021, www.melbashed.com.au)✦.
Italian POWs at Myrtleford Camp (photo: Geoffrey McInnes/Aust War Memorial)
Myrtleford, Victoria, was the next POW camp (# 5) to accommodate the peripatetic Signoré Simoni. Edgardo had been an anti-fascist in Italy and had joined Mussolini’s army only after swearing allegiance to the monarchy, but in Australia he started to embrace communism which led to the authorities placing him under special surveillance. Not very successfully it seems because Simoni was still able to regularly abscond from the Myrtleford facility at night-time without much effort to moonlight as an unofficial organiser for the local tobacco sharefarmers exhorting them to agitate for better working conditions (‘Edgardo Simoni oral history interview by Dan Connell’, 06–11–1986, http://archival.sl.nsw.gov.au).
Col. Edgardo Simoni (ret.) in 1974: revisiting his travels around SE Australia
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Endnote: All in all Lt. Simoni—who earned the nickname La volpe (“the Fox”) for his war-time escapades—made 13 escape attempts in the three years he was a POW in Australian detention. At the end of the war, upon release, Simoni returned to Italy and resumed his career in the military, rising to the rank of colonel. In 1974 La volpe re-visited Australia, this time on happier terms, to retrace the steps of his fugitive odyssey around NSW and Victoria.
𖤓 the 2000 Aardman film animation Chicken Run also mines the escape from prison trope, freely parodying WWII POW movies (especially The Great Escape) by exploiting all the familiar cliches
✦ the press closely followed Simoni’s escapades in Australia as if they were tracking “Public Enemy # 1”: ‘Search For Italian’ MELBOURNE. June 10. Police and military authorities searching for Lt. Edgardo Simoni, 25, the Italian who escapedon a bicycle from a prisoner ofwar camp in Gotiburn Valley on Saturday, believe that he has crossed the Victorian border. Detectives and railway enquiry officers are checking; every interstate and country train. and interstate detectives have joined the search ~ Adelaide Advertiser, June 11 1942”
Before the creation of Israel as the national home for the Jewish people in 1947 a raft of potential candidates for a permanent homeland for Jewish refugees from the world war cataclysm were canvassed. Comprising all human–inhabited continents, the long list of proposed likely or unlikely sites (aside from Palestine) included several in the US (one being Alaska), Uganda, Madagascar, Russian Far East, Italian East Africa, British Guiana, Manchuria…and Australia!✪
Proposed area in WA for a Jewish homeland (image: Kununurra Historical Society)
A haven for one million people in the WA wilderness?: Yes Australia…a chapter in the country’s history not particularly well known. The proposed homeland in Western Australia’s sparsely–settled Kimberley region evolved out of an Anglo-Australian plan to settle migrants from the UK overseas in the 1920s. The Group Settlement Scheme had the purpose of expanding the population and economy of Australia’s almost boundless western state. Originally it targeted migrants of British and Irish stock only but the results of the scheme were dismally unsuccessful. Nonetheless the scheme captured the interest and imagination of the London–based Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization and gained concrete form when a Western Australian pastoralist, Michael Durack, offered to sell the League a large tract of his family’s land in WA’s East Kimberley. The proposal was investigated by the League with Issac Steinberg (formerly minister of justice in Lenin’s Bolshevik government) despatched to WA to determine the scheme’s feasibility and to get as many VIPs in Australia onside with the League’s objectives as he could. Steinberg’s PR skills and adept arguments for a Jewish homeland in northern WA were persuasive, managing to snare the support of many political and public figures including the WA premier and the Australasian Unions body (ACTU).
Issac Steinberg, emissary for a Jewish homeland
Despite the headway Steinberg was making on his mission, Australian politicians and the public clearly had mixed feelings about a Jewish settlement on Australian soil. The government in Canberra was committed to the objective of populating northern Australia (which the 75,000 and more refugees fleeing from Nazi persecution in Europe would certainly accomplish) but there was opposition to the plan from various sectors. Xenophobia and racism played its part, some in mainstream society were fearful that the Jewish migrants would not stick it out in the harsh conditions of the Kimberleys but would swarm to the cities, take Australian jobs and their “difference” would lead to social dislocation (‘How the Kimberley nearly became the Jewish homeland’, Ryan Fraser, Australian Geographic, 27-Sep-2018, www.australiangeographic.com.au). Newspapers like the Bulletin opposed the plan and of course no one thought to ask the local indigenous custodians of the region, the Miriwoong people, if they were happy with the plan’s ramifications. Some Australian Jews themselves were against it, fearing a backlash of anti-semitism and that the settlement would undermine the Zionist cause of securing a Palestinian homeland𖤘 (Beverley Hooper, ‘Steinberg, Isaac Nachman (1888–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/steinberg-isaac-nachman-117…, published first in hardcopy 2002, accessed online 28 January 2025).
Kimberley outback, WA
Preserving the monoculture and keeping diversity under wraps: No progress was made on the project for a few years due in part to the onset of WWII. Meanwhile conservative pressure was mounting on the Curtin Commonwealth Labor government from vested interests like the Graziers’ Association and the Australian Natives’ Association to veto the Kimberley plan. Finally in 1944 PM Curtin informed Dr Steinberg that the Australian government would not be altering its policy barring “alien settlements” in Australia of the “exclusive type contemplated by the Freeland League”. Further appeals to Curtin’s (Labor) successors and to the subsequent Menzies Liberal–Country Party government met with the same negative response, which affirmed Canberra’s refusal to budge from the overarching policy of assimilation. The discouraging experience prompted Dr Steinberg to wryly publish a book entitled Australia – the Unpromised Land (Brian Wimborne, ‘A Land of Milk and Honey? A Jewish Settlement Proposal in the Kimberley’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/essay/9/text29448, originally published 22 May 2014, accessed 28 January 2025).
SW Tasmania, an unpopulated wilderness (photo: Discovery Tasmania)
Endnote: An island wilderness for the Promised Land? The Kimberley region was not the only part of Australia that got a look-in as a possible home for Jewish refugees from Europe. One obsessively-determined, young Gentile from Melbourne, Critchley Parker, fostered the prospect of the Tasmanian wilderness providing a home for displaced Jews which, he proposed, would sustain itself on discovered mineral wealth in the area𖥠. Inspired by and infatuated with a Jewish–Australian journalist passionately involved in the Steinberg–led campaign for a Jewish homeland in the Antipodes, Parker set out in 1942, underprepared, on a solo expedition to find the ideal location for his own vision of “New Jerusalem”, but perished in the island-state’s southwest wilderness (‘Before Israel was created, Critchley Parker set off to find a Jewish homeland in Tasmania’s wilderness’, Rachel Edward’s, ABC News, 05-Dec-2020, www.amp.abc.net.au).
✪ not all of these were benevolent and altruistic proposals, Madagascar for instance was a Third Reich plan to forcibly remove European Jewry from the continent
𖤘 Steinberg and the Freeland League were opposed to Zionism
𖥠 the scheme with Jewish backing won the support of the Tasmanian state premier
When the average American movie-going punter thinks of motion pictures he or she thinks naturally of Hollywood. If they know a little bit of US cinema history though, they might stretch themselves to mention New York as well. New York City was the centre of the early film industry (production and distribution)❇︎ – where the whole movie caper started in the very early days before it shifted to sunny California. The place they probably won’t tend to associate with movie-making is Chicago. Yet Chicago did have a thriving film studio in the very early days of motion pictures. Essanay Studios, Chicago, made its first silent movie back in 1907, when Hollywood was still known as a place for growing exotic fruits and vegetables. ,
“Broncho Billy” aka GM Anderson, mainstay of Essanay westerns
Essanay got its name from the initial of the surnames of its two founders, George K Spoor and Gilbert M Anderson (“S–and–A”), the latter a specialist western movie actor acting on the screen under the name “Broncho Billy” Anderson. The first star at Essanay was cross-eyed Ben Turpin (formerly Essanay’s janitor), who specialised in vigorous physical comedy (An Awful Skate, a 1907 short exploiting the roller skate craze).
The three biggest players together at Essanay in 1915
Many future Hollywood stars got their early screen exposure with Essanay, including Francis X Bushman, Wallace Beery, Gloria Swanson and Lewis Stone (and director Alan Dwan behind the camera). Bronco Bill Anderson’s westerns, regularly turned out by Essanay, proved a very popular earner for the studio. In a change of style from the customary westerns and comedies Essanay is credited with the first Sherlock Holmes film made in the US. Because of Chicago’s seasonal weather patterns Anderson moved an arm of the studios west, first to Colorado and later to California, based in Niles in San Francisco.
Sherlock Holmes (1916)
The studio had many of the top silent draws in the 1910s but no one was a bigger star at Essanay Motion Picture Company than Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin who joined the studio in 1915 was poached by Essanay from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios with the lure of much more money and his own production unit. While at Essanay Chaplin made 14 or 15 shorts (one or two-reelers), the crowning gem of which is The Tramp (1915), which received saturation publicity from Essanay. In this two-reeler Chaplin immortalised his most famous character, the vagabond “tramp”, conveying the right mix of melodramatics and wild slapstick [Neibaur, J. L. (2000). Chaplin at Essanay: Artist in Transition. Film Quarterly, 54(1), 23–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213798]. The studio’s star performer however wasn’t happy at Essanay’s locations in either Chicago or Niles and after just one year he departed the studios, moving to LA and Mutual and First National corporations for even more mega-money (his first $1M movie paycheck) and more creative control§.
The Tramp (1915)
Chaplin was far and away Essanay’s biggest money-spinner…with him no longer front-lining for the studio it started a downward spiral. Less than three years after the star draw card defected to Hollywood the Essanay Studios in both Chicago and Niles folded for good. Film historians contend that Essanay could have stayed successful had it been prepared to move with the times. The new trend was towards feature films (five or more reels), which were supplanting the short film as the popular form. Essanay Studio head GK Spoor lacked the necessary prescience to grasp this trend, preferring to stick with the old short film mode [Smith, M. G., & Selzer, A. (2015). Essanay Signs Charlie Chaplin. In Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (pp. 120–130). Columbia University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/smit17448.16]. Selig Polyscope, William Selig’s rival film studio in Chicago, was more attuned to the future of cinema, producing The Spoilers in 1914, an early full-length feature film starring William Farnum. Selig Polyscope however was also forced to shut down its productions in 1918, bringing Chicago’s role as a hub of American cinema production to a close, leaving Hollywood firmly and permanently in the movie-making ascendency.
Essanay Film Manufacturing Co logo
❇︎ New Jersey was often used to shoot the outdoor scenes, especially for westerns!
§ the other reason Chaplin and other east coast film-makers moved to the west coast and LA was to evade the enforcement of Thomas Edison’s patents on motion pictures [‘A Brief History of Hollywood Before It Was Hollywood’, Silent–ology, (2015), www.silentology.wordpress.com]
Queen Kelly is one of early Hollywood’s most controversial movies…its story is a cinematic journey of a production burdened by recurring misfortune and internal conflicts which is doomed to become the incomplete expression of a would-be silent classic. It’s excruciatingly long drawn-out saga starts in 1928, as a United Artists feature intended as a star vehicle for top silent screen actress of the day Gloria Swanson who had defected from Paramount to go independent. Joe Kennedy Sr, patriarch of the tragedy-soaked, almost self-destructive Kennedy family of jinked and fated politicians, comes into the film’s story at this juncture. In the late 1920s Kennedy shrewdly acquired a string of small movie studios which he consolidated into RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) in 1928.
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Kennedy’s foray into the movie biz led to a meeting with Swanson and a three-year affair between the two. Joe was hoping to launch a successful career as a Hollywood film tycoon and agreed to finance Swanson’s Queen Kelly. Controversial auteur director Erich von Stroheim was brought in to write the original story and to direct, this was the start of everything going pear-shaped. Let loose with a big budget, Stroheim, an autocratic perfectionist by nature, dragged out the filming of what he intended to his personal masterpiece with constant reshoots and delays – amassing enough footage for a five-and-a-half hour epic, but having shot only just over one-third of the film’s scenario (‘Queen Kelly’, Silent Era, www.silentera.com).
Swanson in the title role with co-star Walter Byron (still from Queen Kelly)
With the movie still not finished and the Austrian-American director having drained more than $800,000 from the production budget, Stroheim was finally sacked. Filming done, this is where the machinations started getting really interesting. Swanson discovered that Kennedy has deceived her, instead of being an investor in the project Joe had actually loaned Gloria the capital, leaving Swanson wholly responsible for the loss! To try to recoup her money, Swanson tried to finish the disaster of a movie❇︎. After a savage round of editing, a sound version directed by Richard Bokeslawski with an alternate ending was released by Swanson’s own production company in Europe and South America in 1932. Stroheim, still holding the US rights to the production, had vetoed an American release (‘Erich von Stroheim’s Damned Queen: Queen Kelly’, Michael Koller, Senses of Cinema, August 2007, www.sensesofcinema.com).
Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (“the pictures got smaller…”)
Sunset Boulevard: American audiences finally got their first screen glimpse of Queen Kelly in a curious, twisted fashion some 20 years later. The film Sunset Boulevard (1950) reunited two of the original forces behind Queen Kelly, Swanson and Stroheim (as actor). Stroheim cheekily talked director Billy Wilder into using an excerpt from Queen Kelly in Sunset Boulevard, in which Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a forgotten silent film star. In a delicious irony the interspersed old footage from the doomed 1928 “classic” is presented as one of Desmond’s great silent films! The ensuing interest generated by Sunset Boulevard resulted eventually in a very belated second release of Queen Kelly in 1957.
The 1985 version
In 1985 Kino International brought to the screen a third release of the much maligned and butchered Queen Kelly. The 1985 version—hyped as a “restored masterpiece” and “lost masterwork”—was based on Stroheim’s original script (IMDb, www.imdb.com), but of course remains incomplete as intended. Over the course of the production’s extended lifespan, four cinematographers, five directors (in addition to Stroheim) and three other writers worked on the uncompleted feature.
Queen Kelly’s final release, 56 years after production ceased (source: New York Times)
Swanson and Stroheim
❇︎ timing also contributed to Queen Kelly’s failure…it was in production at the same time as ‘’talkie” movies were starting to make their inexorable rise ultimately to unparalleled popularity. Also, the Hays Code, recently introduced, insisted Stroheim make cuts to the movie’s raunchy content, which Stroheim defiantly and characteristically refused to do
The United States’ belated entry into the global fight against German Nazism and its Axis partners and the Allies’ strategy of “Germany First” had the consequence of seeing some 1.5 million American troops moving through the United Kingdom between January 1942 and December 1945. This aggregation of forces personnel included 150,000 black American troops (some sources put the figure at 240,000).
This development was to prove problematic both for the US military and its British host as the American armed forces maintained a strict policy of segregation of its personnel…White and African-American servicemen and women served in separate regiments, lived and ate in separate quarters and did not generally mix even in combat situations𝓪. Black servicemen were usually barred from combat roles𝓫 and utilised primarily in support or supply roles in the war (driving trucks, engineering works, catering, etc) [‘“They treated us royally”? Black Americans in Britain during WW2’, Imperial War Museums, (Emily Charles), www.imperialwarmuseums.org.uk].
An African-American regiment seeking directions from an English “bobby” (source: Channel 4)
Meeting American expectations of a segregated army: The dilemma was more acute for the Brits, Churchill had tirelessly courted Roosevelt with the objective of getting the US to intervene in the conflict on the allies’ side, Britain needed Washington’s military involvement and it needed America to bankroll the crippling cost of waging the escalating world war. The thorn in the side for Churchill was that American troops coming to the UK brought with them the US’ “Jim Crow” racial discrimination system which the American military was uncompromisingly wed to𝓬. A recent BBC documentary, Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid, explores how the Conservative war-time government calculatingly turned a blind eye to the Americans’ discriminatory practice towards its own citizens (a practice which Britain itself would not countenance). And yet Britain and its Allies were fighting a war of the highest stakes against Hitler, for freedom from totalitarian dictatorship [‘Channel 4 Examines UK’s ‘Secret Apartheid’ during WWII’, sphere abacus, 07-Oct-2024, www.sphere-abacus’s.com]. The irony of this contradiction was certainly not lost on the African-American servicemen and women stationed in Britain.
The Anglo–American special relationship:With the Churchill government intent on consolidating a “special relationship” with the US, in characteristically British fashion it settled for compromise, it “wouldn’t enforce the US’s extreme race policy, but wouldn’t ask any awkward questions about it either” [‘Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid, review: clickbait title masks a moving wartime story’, Anita Singh, Telegraph, 19-Oct-2024, www.telegraph.co.uk]. Britain acquiesced to Washington’s insistence on segregation but did so covertly, although Churchill biographer Baron Roberts of Belgravia contends that the British prime minister’s 1942 war cabinet comment that Britain would not assist the US Army in enforcing the segregation policy exonerates the Churchill government of collusion (sphere abacus). British soft-pedaling extended to mollifying American sensitivities by officially encouraging Britons in towns where Black soldiers were barracked not to get “too friendly” with them (Charles).
PM Winston Churchill (photo: PA)
Grass roots community support: Thus officially sanctioned, the prejudicial attitudes of White soldiers and officers (and military police) towards their Black countrymen in Britain continued to be given voice. What particularly inflamed the ire of White troops and led to violent clashes between the two groups was the sight of coloured servicemen fraternising and dancing with and enjoying the romantic company of local (white) English women. In fact, despite their government’s appeasing of the US, its failure to object to the colour bar in Britain thus perpetuating the inequality of Black troops, the ordinary people of the UK in the main took a much more positive and accepting view of the Black GIs and airmen (further enraging bigoted White servicemen). A 1943 poll in the UK indicated that the majority of British people opposed segregation [‘The Second World War, 1935 to 1945: Segregation’, RAF Museum, www.rafmuseum.org.uk]. Many Britons during the US occupation voiced a preference for the usually good-mannered Black servicemen over their entitled White counterparts.
Black GIs in rural England (photo: David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty)
Battle of Bamber Bridge:A pitched “battle” between a Black truck regiment and White MPs occurred in this small Lancashire village in 1943, the prolonged exchange of fire between the two groups resulted in one Black soldier being killed and several injured. The catalyst of the violent confrontation was the action of racist White officers who tried to coerce the three pubs in Bamber Bridge into serving whites only, this incident coming closely on top of news of a race riot back home in Detroit which had heightened tensions between the two groups of serving personnel in England. White prejudice was reinforced in the way the confrontation was dealt with by the top brass…the US military command in England chose to view the incident as an act of mutiny on the part of the Black soldiers and 30 of those involved were charged, convicted and court-martialled, whereas none of the White MPs were charged. Later in 1943 there was another inter-racial shootout between African-American and White soldiers stationed in Launceston, Cornwall. Again the trigger was attempts to exclude Black servicemen from the market town’s pubs and again the American military identified the offending party as the Black GIs, characterising them as “mutineers”. At the court-martial proceedings the Black Bamber Bridge defendants aired grievances which make clear their status in Uncle Sam’s army was that of second-class soldiers – compared to white troops they were given poor food, forced to sleep in their trucks when stopped at White bases and they were the victims of military police harassment for minor transgressions which were typically ignored for White GIs [‘UK village marks struggle against US Army racism in World War II’, Danica Kirka, AP, 24-June-2023, www.apnews.com].
Park Street, scene of the Bristol riot, 1944
War-time clashes between White and Black American military personnel weren’t confined to England…there were physical altercations between the two groups in Wales where many Black GIs were stationed at the ports, assigned to work as manual labourers. Blacks were also employed as labourers at the docks in nearby Bristol (west country England) under the supervision of less competent White officers. The city’s worse disturbance, known as the Park Street Riot (July 1944), escalated after heavy-handed attempts by White MPs to discipline the coloured soldiers, resulting in one White MP being stabbed, a Black GI killed and several wounded in the fracas.
The sight of inter-racial couples dancing together, even if in Britain and involving non-American women, was enough to enrage the more bigoted of White American servicemen (source: Gregory S. Cooke Collection)
𝓪 the US Army didn’t end segregation in the ranks until 1948
𝓫 those Black troops who volunteered for combat roles often had to relinquish their rank and take a pay cut…”the Army did not want a Black sergeant commanding a White private” [‘This WWII battle wasn’t against Nazis. It was between Black and white GIs in England’, Lauren Frayer & Fatima Al-Kassab, NPR, 21-Jun-2023, www.npr.org].
𝓬 the British Foreign Office had initially tried to persuade the US not to send Black troops on the grounds that it would create tensions but Washington ignored the request
Exegesis: Relegating the author IN literary and artistic aesthetics the intentional fallacy occurs when readers or viewers use factors outside the text or visual work (such as biographical information) to evaluate its merits, rather than ignoring these “external” factors and relying solely on the textual or visual evidence of the novel, play, poem, painting, etc. to assess the work in question (what’s actually in the text and nothing outside). This key precept of the New Criticism school declares that a poem (or other work of art) does not belong to its author, it is (as stated by the term’s originators WK Wimsatt and MC Beardsley) “detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it”1⃞. Authorial intention is a non-consideration in the assessment of the work. The text or work has an objective status and its meaning belongs solely to the reading or viewing public. The reader’s task in literature, advocates of New Criticism assert, is to eschew subjective or personal aspects such as the lives and psychology of authors and literary history and focus entirely on close reading and explication of the text (A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 1981), edited by M.H. Abrams).
The intentional fallacy, elaborated in Wimsatt’s 1954 The Verbal Icon
The intentional fallacy doctrine has a corollary in the affective fallacy which adheres to the same principles. Wimsatt and Beardsley affirmed that evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader, is an erroneous way of approaching the task. Giving rein to the emotions a work of art evokes in you, negates an appreciation of “the (work’s) inherent qualities and craftsmanship” that an objective analysis permits (Prince Kumar, ‘Understand Affective Fallacy from Example’, LitforIndia, 23-Dec-2023, www.litforindia.com).
(source: cornerstoneduluth.org)
Semantic autonomy, Intentionalism, Anti-intentionalism: The intentional and affective fallacies as prescriptive “rules” of hermeneutics held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s, however this is not to say that there was no pushback from scholarly dissenters. Proponents (primarily American) of what is called “Reader-response theory” reject the claims of New Criticism of this prescribed mode of interpreting and critiquing a work of literature. Some of these objected to the fallacy’s nothing outside the text rigidity for constricting exploration of all possibilities of a work’s meanings. Critic Norman Holland frames it in a psychoanalytical context, the reader, he affirms, will react to a literary text with the same psychological responses he or she brings to events in their daily lives, ie, “the immediate goal of interpretation is to fulfil (one’s) psychological needs and desires” (‘Psychological Reader-response Theory’, Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism (2016), www.literariness.org). Theorist ED Hirsch in his “Objective Interpretation” essay also took issue with the expositors of the intentional fallacy thesis, arguing that on the contrary authorial intent (intentionalism) was integral to a full understanding of the work…the only meaning that is permanent and valid is that of the author in question, the reader should confine him or herself to interpreting what the author is trying to say (E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation, 1967) .
𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔
A quite different kind of fallacious argument is the argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio). This arises when a conclusion or inference is drawn based on an absence of statements in historical documents and source materials…the argument seeks not to challenge or rebut specific things an author includes in a book or document, but is critical of the author for something they should have said but didn’t! The most common instances of the argument from silence in practice relate to biblical debates and controversies, but a contemporary classic example of a non-theological, historical nature, one generating considerable heated discourse, concerns the 13th century merchant and explorer Marco Polo and the famous book of his travels in the East.
Medieval Venezia at the time of Marco Polo (source: Bodleian Library, Oxford)
Medieval world travelogue guru?: Known by various namesincluding Description of the World (Divisament du monde), Book of the Marvels of the World, Il libro di Marco Polo detto il Milione, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, or simply The Travels of Marco Polo, the book is one of the most celebrated tomes in the annals of literature dealing with the experiences of travellers to distant and unknown lands. The story, told and retold in numerous languages over centuries, presents Marco and his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo embarking on an epic road trip along the Silk Road to the court of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Beijing). The book recounts Marco’s travels in Cathay (North China) and Manji (South China), among other Eastern lands. The consensus among most historians is that Signor Polo, despite a tendency to exaggerate and embellish the tales of his travels2⃞, did nonetheless journey to China as he claimed in the book. The publication of Did Marco Polo Go to China? by Frances Wood in 1995 controversially swam against this tide. Wood infers serious doubts about Polo’s achievements, suggesting that despite his being away from his native Italy for the best part of a quarter-of-a-century, he never reached his intended destination China. According to Wood, he got only as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea where he accumulated all of his information on Chinese society and other Asian lands (his source material for the “Travels”) from picking the brains of visiting Persian merchants.
A page from the Polo travelogue
Doubting “Marco’s millions”: What made Wood so convinced that Marco Polo never visited China? Firstly, there is the book’s puzzling itinerary, it proceeds in a disjointed, incoherent fashion, is not uniformly chronological, has some odd detours and gets some geographical place names in China wrong. Then, while acknowledging The Travels of Marco Polo contains references to porcelain (from Fujian province), coal, rice-wine, paper currency and other items, Wood hones in on the fact that the Venetian traveller failed to mention certain other quintessentially Chinese things—namely the Great Wall of China, tea, chopsticks, cormorant fishing and the practice of foot-binding—in the pages ofhis “Travels’. Wood also picks up on Polo’s failure to learn Chinese during his sojourn in the Middle Kingdom. Allied to these omissions was the absence of Polo’s3⃞ name in any official Chinese document of the period, which Wood believed, further incriminated Marco as the perpetrator of a fraud.
A crumbling section of the not-so-great wall in north China built prior to Polo’s time (photo: John Man, The Great Wall)
Wood herself is perpetrating a pattern of reasoning which is problematic by recourse to an argument from silence. As Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2010) (ISBN0-415-96219-6Routledge pp. 64–65) note, “arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray.” Academic critics have been quick to pinpoint the shortcomings and misconceptions in Wood’s argument. There are, they counter, manifestly valid reasons why Polo would not refer to the Great Wall, for one, it was largely not there in the period of his residency in China! The impressive edifice of the Great Wall as we think of it was primarily a product of the Ming Dynasty (from 1368, three-quarters of a century after the Polos’ stay)…what there was of the not-so-Great Wall prior to that was a much more modest, unprepossessing sight (“a discontinuous series of derelict, pounded earth ramparts”) (‘F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go To China?’, A Critical Appraisal byI. de Rachewiltz, http://openresearch–repository.anu.edu.au). With the matter of the Chinese penchant for tea-drinking, perhaps Polo didn’t think the topic simply sufficiently noteworthy to rate a mention4⃞. The question of the omission of foot-binding, chopsticks and Polo’s linguistic ignorance of Chinese in the travelogue can all be accounted for. China and the royal court was under Mongol control (Yuan Dynasty) in Marco’s time, accordingly Polo moved in those circles, tending not to mix with the (Han) Chinese population. and so lacked the motivation (or opportunity) to learn Chinese. Likewise, he wouldn’t have encountered many upper class Chinese women in their homes, this was the strata of society that practiced female foot-binding, not the Mongols. Again, with chopsticks, not a utensil of choice for the Mongols who Polo tended to fraternise with (Morgan, D. O. (1996). Marco Polo in China-Or Not [Review of Did Marco Polo Go to China?, by F. Wood]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6(2), 221–225. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25183182). As for “the Travels’” silence on fishing with cormorants, the activity was not a widespread phenomena in China during the Yuan era, confined to the remoter areas of Sichuan Province (‘Cormorant Fishing in China’, Sally Guo, China Travel (Upd. 04-April-2021), www.chinatravel.com).
MP (source: caamadi.com/de/marco-polo-in-venice)
Filtered Marco Polo – Rustichello et al: And there’s another line of thought when considerating the book’s glaring omissions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies that Frances Wood doesn’t seem to have factored into her thesis…The Travels of Marco Polo, the published book we read today, is a different beast in form and content to the original article from the late 1290s. In fact the original manuscript which Polo dictated to his amanuensis, an imaginative romance writer Rustichello de Pisa —who had licence to inject his own theatrical flourishes and flavour into Marco’s original story—was lost early on, so “the Travels” have gone on an untraceable and interminable journey through “dozens of translations of translations, none of which are necessarily accurate” (‘The Travels of Marco Polo: The True Story of a 14th-Century Bestseller’, Anna Bressanin, BBC, 09-Jan-2024, www.bbc.com). Of the 54 extant manuscripts (out of around 150 distinct copies in all languages), no two copies are entirely alike with “improvements” and edits made by each copyist and translator. We should also remember that Marco was in prison, relying on his memory to recount a multitude of events and experiences, some of which stretched back over 20 years, hardly surprising then if readers have to contend with the recollections of a not entirely reliable narrator (‘Marco Polo’s book on China omits tea, chopsticks, bound feet’, Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post, 04-Oct-2020, www.amp.scmp.com).
The Marco Polo saga has spawned a long history of film and television versions with romantic adventure taking precedence over story accuracy
Heavily redacted archives: The issue of Polo’s claim to have been an official in Kublai Khan’s service—and in particular governor of Yangzhou—was seized on by Dr Wood who pointed out that Marco’s name does not appear in any historical official Chinese archives. Rather than being necessarily proof of Marco fabricating a presence in China as Wood assumes, other factors may explain the discrepancy…no other Italian merchants known to have visited medieval China are mentioned in any Chinese sources, even the Papal envoy to the Great Khan’s court, Giovanni de Marignolli, doesn’t rate a mention (‘Marco Polo was not a swindler. He really did go to China’, Science News, 16-Apr-2012, www.sciencedaily.com). Another factor germane to this is the fact that the Ming (Han) Dynasty that succeeded the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty initiated the practice of erasing the records of earlier non-Han officials (Morgan).
(source: LibriVox)
One particularly vocal critic of Did Marco Polo Go To China?, Sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel from the University of Tübingen, produced a research paper demonstrating that Marco’s descriptions of currency, salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly in China were of a standard of accuracy and uniqueness of detail5⃞, that produces a very high level of proof that Polo had to have been in China, close to the wheels of power, to be privy to such comprehensive knowledge (www.sciencedaily.com).
Chinese salt production (source: Wellcome Images)
The “logical fallacy of weak induction”: Frances Wood’s iconoclastic book was certainly an attention-grabber, both for medieval scholars and Sinologists and for the general public, causing a furore upon its publication in 1995 and spawning several TV documentaries. China and the world of the Great Khan is a central tenet of the Marco Polo story, making it unthinkable to most scholars, almost a sacrilege, to suggest that the legendary Venetian traveller never set foot in the Middle Kingdom! The weight of the counter-argument unleashed against Wood’s thesis throws a spotlight on the hazards of trying to “treat the absence of evidence as evidence itself”, as Steven Lewis summarises the fallacious nature of the argument from silence (‘The Argument from Silence”, Steven Lewis, SES, www.ses.edu).
(image: silk–road.com)
Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo go to China? (1995, Secker & Warburg, London)
1⃞ Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 ‘Intentional Fallacy’ essay to some extent has its antecedents in the earlier debate between CS Lewis and EMW Tillyard, published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), in which Lewis argued that an author’s own personality and biography has negligible to zero impact on the literary text, while Tillyard enunciated the contrary position: that an author’s own imagination and story can have an indelible influence on a work of literature
2⃞ and there had been doubters even in Marco’s time and later about some of his more wilder and fantastic claims, earning him the epithet Il Milione or “the Millions”) (aka “Marchus Paulo Millioni”). Wood’s particular slant on Polo’s book follows the lead of earlier German Mongolists
3⃞ who had claimed to have been an emissary in the emperor’s service
4⃞ Wood herself concedes that Rustichello may have edited out references to tea on the grounds of it being “of no interest to the general public”
In international news of late there’s been speculation by some pundits that the Republic of India might be planning to drop the name “India”—the name the world identifies the South Asian mega-state by—as the official title of the country. The conjecture stems from an apparent signal given by Modi’s government in issuing invitations in the name of the “President of Bharat” to attendees of the September 2023 G-20 summit held in New Delhi.
Why Bharat? Well, Bharat is already the other official name of India, enshrined in the nation’s constitutionᗩ, with a backstory stretching far back into the Sub-continent’s pre-colonial history. The word comes from ancient Sanskrit—Bhārata (“to bear or to carry”), a shortened form of Bhāratavarsa (first used in the 1st century AD)—as does the name Hindustān, also in currency among Hindi-speaking Indians as another name to describe the country as a whole. Some Hindu nationalists have advocated for the creation of Akhand Bharat (“Greater India”) which would unite India with all of its contiguous neighbours in a South Asian super-state.
Origin of “India”: It derives from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, a name for the Indus River and the lower Indus basin. Etymology: Ancient Greek Indikē, Latin Indía. The name “Hindu”, the predominant Indian religion and dharma, also relates to the Sub-continent’s paramount river, being an Old Persian adaption of “Sindhu”.
Modi of Bharat (photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images)
Modi’s nomenclature move has received endorsement by government officials and followers (no surprise!) who contend that the name “India” as a nation title is “tainted” with its past connotations of colonialism and slavery, echoing the sentiment that “British colonial rulers had coined the name India to overshadow Bharat and forge a British legacy” [‘India’s government has used another name on the world stage. What does ’Bharat’ mean?’ SBS News, 06-Sep-2023, www.sbs.com.au].
If Bharat has already been an official name for India since 1949, why has the Indian government decided to publicise it just now? One answer comes from the political opponents of the BJP who allege that the notion is a diversional tactic by Modi’s party to try to upstage the recent formation of the opposition’s “INDIA” alliance to contest upcoming elections (Rahul Gandhi, Congress Party). This move follows a BJP pattern in power of erasing Indian place names which reflect India’s Mughal (Muslim) and (British) colonial past. Critics accuse the government of “pursuing a nationalist agenda aimed at forming an ethnic Hindu state out of a constitutionally secular India” [‘India’s Modi gov’t replaces country’s name with Bharat in G20 dinner invite’, Aljazeera, 05-Sep-2023, www.aljazeera.com]
source: moroccoworldnewsnews.com
Disassociating with the bird: In 2022 the Republic of Turkey notified the international community that it repudiates the name “Turkey” as a descriptor for it, instead the country should be be referred to officially by all as Türkiye (pronounced “Tur-kee-yay”)ᗷ, the communique stated. The government foreign minister said the use of Türkiye would increase “the country’s brand value”, but reputedly, a reason for the name switch is the president, Recep Erdoğan’s dislike of the association of his country with the Meleagris, a large gallinaceous bird (and by extension with the whole American Thanksgiving thing)…compounding that aversion to the name, is “turkey’s” colloquial meanings, (a person who is) inept or stupid; a movie or play which is a dud.
Another motive of Erdoğan’s could be in play – a political one. The move fits in neatly with his wish to be “rid of a westernised, anglicised name that jarred with his neo-Islamist, nationalist-populist brand” [‘The Observer view on Turkey’s name change’, The Guardian, 05-Jun-2022,www.imp.theguardian.com]. Critics of the Erdoğan regime take an even more scathing view, that “the rebrand is another populist device that Erdoğan is exploiting to divert attention away from the country’s persisting economic woes and to galvanise nationalist voters ahead of (upcoming) crucial elections” ‘ Turkey is now Türkiye: What other countries have changed their name?’, Euronews 28-Jun-2022, wwweuronews.com].
Switching synonyms: While India and Turkey are topical examples of the inclination for nomenclature rebranding, the 20th century is dotted with instances of other such name changes. In 1989 the authoritarian military government in Burma—a country named after the Burmans, the dominant ethnic group—caught the world by surprise by suddenly changing the country’s name to “Myanmar”. The regime explained the switch as jettisoning a name inherited from its colonial past and choosing a new name that would foster ethnic unity by recognising it was a multi-ethnic state. In reality it was “linguistic sleight-of-hand” as in the Burmese language “Myanmar” is merely a more formal version of “Burma”. The Burmese regime, viewed as an international pariah after years of violent repression against its citizens was seeking to rebuild its PR standing, so you only needed to be slightly cynical to see the thinking behind such a cosmetic name change ploy [‘Myanmar, Burma and why the different names matter’, Kim Tong-Hyung & Hyung-Jin Kim, PBS News, 03-Feb-2021, www.pbs.org].
Myanmar, the military’s choice (photo: JPaing/The Irrawaddy)
Czechs of Czechia: The Czech Republic (Česká republika) came into existence in 1993 when Czechoslovakia ceased to be a single political entity (splitting amicably into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia). In 2016 a further name change, or more correctly, name addition, happened, the Czech government introduced a short-form title, “Czechia”, for communication in English, while retaining Česká republika as its full name. Though less controversial than other instances, the term “Czechia” was criticised by some Czechs for being confusingly too close in sound to the name of the internal Russian republic, Chechnya. This was the very reason the Kingdom of Swaziland, a landlocked southern African country, swapped names in 2018, becoming (the Kingdom of) Eswatini. The change occurred by royal fiat…with the stated reason that when Swazi tourists were overseas locals would mistakenly think they were from Switzerland.
”Resplendent” name change:The small island nation of Ceylon left the British Commonwealth and became a republic in 1972…at the same time the government affected a name change to “Sri Lanka“, which combines the honorific Sri meaning “resplendent” and the island’s original name Lanka which simply means “island”. The name “Ceylon”, based on an earlier Portuguese name, had been adopted by the British rulers after they had colonised the island in stages between 1796 and 1817 [‘Sri Lanka erases colonial name, Ceylon’, Charles Haviland, BBC News, 01-Jan-2011, www.bbc.com]. Prior to becoming a British colony the island comprised two entities, a Dutch Ceylan part and the native Sinhalese Kandyan Kingdom.
Regime change ➔ name change: In the case of the small Southeast Asian state of Cambodia the changing of the country’s name, throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, became something of a merry-go-round. In succession it went from (the Kingdom of) Cambodia to the Khmer Republic to Democratic Kampuchea to (the People’s Republic of) Kampuchea to (the State of) Cambodia back to (the Kingdom of) Cambodia, reflecting the state-level instability of ongoing regime changeᑢ.
Cambodia/Kampuchea
Ping-pong nomenclature in Bangkok: Prior to 1939 Thailand was known by the name “Siam”, deriving from a Sanskrit word, syam. In 1939 Prime Minster Phibun changed the kingdom’s name from Prathet Siam to Prathet Thai or Mu’ang Thai (English: “Land of the Thais”). At the end of WWII Phibun having backed the losing Japanese side fell from favour and the succeeding Thai regime changed the name back to Siam to distinguish itself from the previous regime associated with the fascist Japanese invaders. In 1948 however Phibun returned to power and reinstated the name Thailand, which the country has retained to the present [‘Thai or Siam?’ P Juntanamalaga, (1988), Names: A Journal of Onomastics,www.ans-names.pitt.edu].
Siam/Thailand
Footnote: Endonyms and exonyms When Turkish president Ergodan objected to the continued use of the name “Turkey” by outsidersto describe his country, he was in fact rejecting the convention of exonyms (or if you like, xenonyms) – the non-native name by which others refer to your country (cf. endonyms, the native name by which you refer to your own country)…for instance, what an English-speaker calls “China” (an exonym), a Chinese-language speaker would call Zhōngguó or Chung-kuóᘿ(an endonym). Imagine how unwieldy and confusing it would get if every country insisted on universal usage of their particular linguistic exonym?
ᗩ Article 1 of the Constitution, “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”
ᗷ not really a name change as the nation officially has been called Türkiye (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti) since 1923
ᑢ Cambodia” is the exonym, cf. the endonym of “Khmer”
ᕲ also called an autonym
ᘿ meaning “Central Demesne” or “Middle Kingdom” or “Central Nation”
Scrivener: a copyist of documents; a clerk, scribe or notary [from OldFr. escrivein from L. scriba (“scribe”)]
Sebastomania: religious insanity or mania [ [Gk. sebastos, (“reverence”) + -mania]
Sermocination: the practice of making speeches; the habit of preaching constantly [from L. sermo (“speech”; “conversation”) + -ion]
Sermocination (photo: David Henry)
Sicarian: a murderer, especially an assassin; mercenary fighter [from Sicarii a group of Jewish zealots/insurrectionists opposing the Roman occupation of Judea; cloak-and-dagger assassination unit [from sicae (“small daggers (sickles) concealed in the sicariis’ cloaks”]
Sicarian (image: EBay)
Sillograph: writer of satires [from the book Gk.Sílloi by Timon of Phlius, (flourished ca.280 BC)+ -graphe]
Sillograph (Timon)
Smatchet: a small, nasty person or child; a contemptible, unmannerly person [Scot. Eng. probably from MidEng. smatch + -et]
Somatoparaphrenia: (Psych. ) a type of monothematic delusion where one denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of one’s body [from Gk. sôma, (“body”) + -para (“beside”) + –phrenia]
Staurophobia: pathological aversion to the cross or crucifix (eg, cinematic portrayals of Dracula) [Gk. staurós, (“cross”) + -phobia]
Stentorphonic: speaking very loudly [from Stentōr, a Greek herald in the Trojan War (Homer’s Iliad)]
Stentorphonic (image: tumblr.com)
Stramineous: strawlike; valueless; consisting of straw [L. stramineus (“of straw”) from sternere (“to strew”; “spread out”; “lay flat”)]
Subderisorious: mocking gently and with affection; ridiculing with moderation [L. sub (“below”; “under”) + L. –dērīdeō (“I deride”) + -ous]
Subintelligitur: a meaning or understanding (as of a statement) implied but not expressed [from L. sub- (“secretly”; “under”) + intelligere (“to understand”) + -al]
Succussion: the action or process of shaking the body or the condition of being shaken especially with violence [L. sucussio, from -cussus, (“to shake up”)]
Supernumerary: (person) in addition to usual or necessary number [L. super- (“above”) + number]
Susurrant: gently whispering and rustling [from L. susurrare (“to whisper”)]
Syncretistic: seeking to identify common features of different belief systems, philosophies or civilisations and assimilate them or merge them into a single system [from syncretise (“to attempt to unite and harmonise”), from Gk. synkrētismos (“joining together of Greeks”)]
Synethnic: of (or together with) same race or country [Gk. syn (“same”; “with”; “together”) + –ethno (“people”; “race”; “tribe”; “nation”)]
As part of the Denazification process (German: Entnazifizierung) after the Second World War and to facilitate the Nuremberg war crimes trial proceedings, the German people were classified into five discrete groups:
• Major offenders (Germ: Hauptschuldige)
• Offenders: activists, militants, or profiteers (Germ: Belastete)
• Lesser offenders (Germ: Minderbelastete)
• Followers (Germ: Mitläufer)
• Exonerated persons (Germ: Entlastete)
Of the five categories, Mitläufer is the most contentious…it absolves the person concerned from having committed any formal Nazi criminal activity but acknowledges that he or she participated in some form of loosely defined, indirect support of Nazi crimes, which might be as minimalist as passively sympathising with Nazi aims and goals [‘Mitläufer’, Wikipedia, en.m.wikipedia.org]. The extent of the offence actually perpetrated however didn’t always equate with the category description – as will clear from the examples below.
Nazi defendants at the International Military Tribunal (Nov. 1945) (source: National Archives and Records Administration)
The German term Mitläufer (fem: Mitläuferin)—literally meaning “with-walker” or “one walking with”—can be defined as “follower” or possibly a “passive follower”. Mitläufereffekt is derived from it, also called the Bandwagon-Effekt (effect), which refers to the effect a perceived success exerts on the willingness of individuals to join the expected success. A characteristic of the Mitläufer is he is not convinced by the ideology of the group followed but merely offers no resistance, such as for lack of courage or for opportunism (ie, giving in to peer pressure) (‘Mitläufer’).
Some observers make a further (slight) distinction from the Mitläufer typology, to allow for the Nazi Mitläufer, a fellow-traveller” (Mitreisende) who sympathised with the Nazis but only indirectly participated in Nazi atrocities such as genocide.
Martin Heidegger: one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers for his pioneering work on existentialism and phenomenology, all of which has been overshadowed by his controversial association with the German Nazi Party. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 – prior to this the philosopher was fundamentally apolitical. As rector of Freiburg University he delivered a number of speeches extolling the Nazi cause and publicly expressed antisemitic opinions. At the end of the world war the knives came out for Heidegger, he was forbidden to teach and lost his West German chair of philosophy (the ban was overturned just three years later). Heidegger, perhaps because of the lofty esteem he was held in as a leading intellectual, was never submitted to any harsher retribution (such as a term of incarceration). Critics have noted Heidegger’s complete failure after 1945 to “honestly reckon with the realities of Nazi Germany’s crimes, including the Holocaust, and his own role in lending support to the regime” [Jürgen Habermas in ‘Heidegger’s Downfall’, Jeffrey Herf, Quillette, 22-Feb-2023, quillette.com]. A very full account of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism makes it abundantly clear that he was neither a reluctant fellow-traveller nor (…) a nonpolitical scholar, a ‘child’ who got caught by the juggernaut of hideous political events [‘Heil Heidegger’, J.P. Stern, London Review of Books, Vol. 11 No.8, 20-April-1989 (Review of Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, by Hugo Ott), lrb.co.uk].
Heidegger, intellectual backing for the Nationalist Socialists (image: simplycharly.com)
Leni Riefenstahl: a Berlin-born actress-turned-filmmaker, one of the few German women to direct a motion picture during the Weimar period. A favourite of Hitler, Riefenstahl was an important instrument of the Nazi propaganda machine, producing highly successful propaganda documentary films like Triumph of the Will and Olympia for the Third Reich. After the war Riefenstahl was arrested and found to be a Nazi fellow-traveller, sympathetic to the Nazi movement but not a party member[ᗩ] She however avoided being charged with any crime. Riefenstahl claimed she was an “apolitical naïf” and denied any knowledge of Nazi racial policies or the Holocaust, describing a concentration camp she had visited where the Roma and Sinti were detained as “a relief and welfare camp”[ᗷ] [‘Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker’, Kate Connolly, The Guardian, 09-Dec-2021, amp.the guardian.com].
Leni: “My favourite dictator”
Wilhelm Stuckart: to the casual observer Wilhelm Stuckart’s steady progress up the Nazi hierarchy corresponds with that of the classic career Nazi. The Nazi lawyer and senior Interior Ministry official’s fingerprints were on some of the most nefarious Nazi concoctions against humanity (eg, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, involved in the planning of the Final Solution). For someone involved fundamentally in the framing of genocidal policies Stuckart was absurdly classified as category IV (follower), copping a sentence of just three years from the tribunal. The leniency shown to Stuckart and other accomplices, Gruner attributes to the sophisticated defence strategies employed by former Nazis and their lawyers. Only a short time after Stuckart regained his freedom he was back drafting provincial German laws, one of which ended Denazification in Lower Saxony [Gruner, Wolf. The Journal of Modern History, vol. 86, no. 3, 2014, pp. 727–29. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/676745. Accessed 10 July 2024].
Wilhelm Stuckart on his SS uniform. (source: Yad Vershem)
Footnote: As illustrated above, classifying someone as Mitlaüer was a good way of allowing them to avoid the more serious categories and their consequences. Some high-profile unofficial servants of the Nazi regime managed to avoid being categorised as a Mitlaüer altogther. One was famous Austrian conductor Karl Böhm. Böhm was never a member of the NSDAP and never brought before the Denazification tribunal. However, as the historian Oliver Rathkolb has remarked, he was the artist who “had presumably been the most active (non-party) member to provide propaganda for the (Nazis)” and was lavishly rewarded with plumb conducting positions, culminating in his appointment as director of the Vienna State Opera [‘Karl Böhm – Salzburg Festival’,salzburgerfestspiele.at].
[ᗩ] Nazi party membership of itself didn’t necessarily result in a more serious classification than Mitläufer…in the case of the celebrated Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan joined the NSDAP twice (membership nos. 1607525 and 3430914), he was exonerated of illegal activity during the Nazi period at his Denazification tribunal hearing and classified as a Mitläufer
[ᗷ] trenchant critics in the West take an unflinching and unforgiving view of her role, labelling her an “unindicted co-conspirator” (Simon Wiesenthal Center), “a Nazi by association” (Sandra Smith) and “the glib voice of ‘how could we have known?’ defence” (Bach, Steven. “The Puzzle of Leni Riefenstahl.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976—), vol. 26, no. 4, 2002, pp. 43–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40260668. Accessed 11 July 2024)
Quillet: a subtlety in argument;a subtle distinction [Uncertain, poss from L. quidlibet (“anything”)]
Quinquagesima: pertaining to 50 days [from L. quinquaginta (“fifty”)]
Quisquous: hard to deal with; dubious; of people: having a character difficult to assess [from Scot. Eng. from L. quisquis (“whosoever”)]
Quodlibet: a philosophical or theological point proposed for disputation; a whimsical combination of familiar melodies or texts [from L. qui (“what”) + -libet (“it pleases)”]
Quondam: that once was; (a) former [as that grand dame of words Merriam Webster says: “Looking for an unusual and creative way to say “former”?” Quondam (which came to English in the 16th century from Latin quondam, meaning “at one time” or “formerly”) ~ look no further!]
<Word origin and root formation>
Rampallian: a bold, forward, rampant or wanton woman [Elizabethan term, Henry IV Pt II, Act II)
Rasorial: habitually scratching the ground in search of food [from LateLat. rasor (“one that scrapes”) + -ial]
Rasorial
Recusant: refusing staunchly to comply with some generally accepted rule or custom (Orig. Relig.) [from L. re- + causari (“to give a reason”), from causa (“cause”; “reason”)]
Redivivus: restored to life, or to full liveliness; reborn [L. “reused”]
Remiped: (Zool.) having feet that are adaptable as oars [from L. remiped-, remipes (“oar-footed”)] 👣
Remontado: someone who has fled to the mountains or hills and renounced civilisation; a Northern Philippine’s tribesman; go-back (to the wild) [Galician (Sp.). remontado/remontada]
The “hungry i?” Sounds like a trendy, up-market boîte on Eat Street, but it is—or rather was—a live music and stand-up comedy venue located in the “hip” North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco. Its original owner, self-styled beatnik Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, sold it to beret-sporting impresario Enrico Banducci in 1951. Under Banducci’s direction the SF joint set about making a cutting edge name for itself. For much of the next two decades the hungry i nightclub became the spot where many of the big acts in American entertainment got their start and others honed their performing skills to perfection❶.
Enrico Banducci rocking a cardy!
Bob Patterson, Examiner columnist (writing as Freddy Francisco)on the hungry i circa 1950s: ❝a basement Disneyland, peopled by beatniks, left-over bohemians, on the nod junkies, and other waifs and strays from reality.❞
Hothouse of new comedy:The roll call of names associated with “the eye” (as it was affectionately known), especially of American comedy, is mightily impressive…it was the launchpad for many famous performers including Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Tom Lehrer and Jonathan Winters. Other iconic comics to perform there at the formative stage of their careers include Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge, Bill Cosby, the Smothers Brothers, (Mike) Nichols and (Elaine) May and Joan Rivers❷. The soon-to-be comedy stand-up legends performed against a red brick wall that later became the standard stage backdrop of comedy clubs across America [‘1960s Folk Music at the hungry i and SF Folk Music Club’, Claire Huang, FoundSF, (2019), www.foundsf.org].
The hungry i at the height of its popularity (source: Barbra Archives)
Banducci embraced the Fifties non-conformism of the emerging “rebel cafe” culture taking root simultaneously in North Beach and in Greenwich Village, NYC. He welcomed musicians, comedians, writers and painters—“bohemians of every stripe, from North Beach bohos to Berkeley brainiacs”—to the nightspot [Stephen Duncan Riley, ‘The Rebel Cafe: America’s Nightclub Underground and the Public Sphere, 1934–1963’, (Unpublished PhD dissertation, 2014, University of Maryland)]. Uncommonly for a nightclub owner Banducci really looked after his charges, unlike many of his contemporaries who were content to sit back and count the night’s takings – Enrico always ensured that the club’s artists performed in a safe and quiet environment…patron chatter during performances was verboten and (remarkably) drinks were not served while the acts were on [‘The hungry i (1963)’, Barbra Archives, www.barbra-archives.info; ‘The ‘I’ That Stormed Through North Beach, Circa 1950’, Art Peterson, hoodline, 06-Jun-2016, www.hoodline.com].
A way-station for aspiring folk and pop artists:The hungry i provided a similar massive leg-up for music performers still in the basement of their careers. The nightspot provided the springboard for some, propelling them on the path to pop and folk music immortality, or at least to national/international recognition. The Kingston Trio, Barbra Streisand (her first gig headlining), Peter, Paul and Mary et al, all cut their teeth at the famous San Fran venue in their early days. The Kingston Trio recorded its first live album at the club (“…from the “Hungry i” (1958)). Glen Yarbrough and the Limeliters were a regular act, John Phillips (of the Mamas and Papas fame) fronted the eye’s house band (The Journeymen) in the early Sixties. By the early 1960s the hungry i had hit its heyday…in 1967 it moved to Ghirardelli Square (San Francisco’s Marina district), by this time it was mainly being used as a rock music venue❸. By 1970, Banducci deep in debt and with a flawed business model was forced to close down his cherished nightclub.
Enrico’s echo of hungry i:Banducci switched his attention to “Enrico’s”, a restaurant-café at 504 Broadway (SF) he had started in 1959. Enrico’s spot played cool jazz and drew in a mixed crowd and was for a time the place in SF to be seen, everyone from celebrities like FF Coppola, Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant to complete nonentities…Banducci’s lack of business acumen again ultimately proved its downfall with Enrico’s folding in 1988. The name “hungry i” lived on somewhat ignominiously in the form of a strip club at 546 Broadway (today operating as a Karaoke bar).
hungry i in its later incarnation
Enrico’s: Banducci’s Broadway café/jazz club (photo: William Martin/Facebook)
Endnote: the Purple OnionThe hungry i, by most observers’ reckoning, was the apex of live venues presenting the new wave of stand-up comics in the 50s and 60s, but it existed very much in a shared universe. The very same up-and-coming but still unknown talents featuring at the eye also plied their trade at other SF venues, most prominently at the hungry i’s local rival the Purple Onion, a small basement club on Columbus Ave with a similar storied history [‘North Beach History: Careers Sprouted For Almost 6 Decades At The Purple Onion’, Art Peterson, hoodline, 20-Jun-2016, www.hoodline.com].
❶ Banducci liked to describe the hungry i as a theatre rather than a nightclub
❷ a less stellar comedy name frequenting the stage at the hungry i was “Professor” Irwin Corey whose unscripted, abstruse improvisational monologues earned him a dedicated cult following
❸ in 1967 you could catch the early Ike and Tina Turner Experience at the eye
Neoteny: an indefinite prolongation of the period of immaturity, with the retention of infantile or juvenile qualities, into adulthood [from Gk. néos “young” + -o--O- + -teínein (“to stretch”; “extend”) + -y]
Nepheligenous: producing clouds of smoke [from Gk. nephélē, (“cloud”) + -genous (“producing). Coined by OW Holmes]
Neopotation: prodigality; extravagance; squandering one’s money on riotous living (OU)
Nidifugous: leaving the nest while still young [L.nīdus (“nest”) + –fugiō (“I flee”; “escape”) + -ous]
Nikhedonia: the pleasure and satisfaction derived from the anticipation of success [nik(?) poss. from Nike, Greek god of victory + Gk. –hedonikos (“pleasure”)]
Nikhedonia: Nike on a high
Nimiety: excess; extravagance; surfeit [from L. nimius (“excessive”)]
Nocent: harmful [from L. nocens (“to harm”)]
Noctivagant: wandering by night [from L. nocti- (“night”) + –vagari (“to wander”)] 🌃
Noisome: noxious; smelly; nasty [from MidEng. noy (“annoyance”) + -some, (“characterised by a specified thing,”)]
Nonfeasance: failure to perform some action which ought to have been performed [L. non- + Eng. -feasance (“doing”; “execution”)]
Nostrificate: to accept as one’s own; to grant recognition to a degree (or other formal qualification) from a foreign university (or other registered educational institution) [from L. noster (“our”) + -cate]
Noyade: mass execution by drowning (esp in revolutionary France in Nantes, 1793-94) [from L. necare (“kill without using a weapon”) (nonce word)]
The Noyades of Nantes (image source: Selbymay (CC BY— SA) WHE)
Nugacity: triviality; futility; drollery (cf. nugatory: of no value; trifling; pointless) [from L. nugacitas (“trifling”)]
Nullibiety: the state of being nowhere [from L. nūllus (“none”; “no”; “not any”) + –ibī (“there”) + -ety] (cf. Nullibist: one who denies that the soul exists in physical space)
Numen: pertaining to numina; awe-inspiring; supernatural) [L. nuō + –men (“a nodding with the head”; “command”; “will”)]
Nummamorous: money-loving (cf. Nummary: pertaining to coin) (OU) 💴 🪙
Nutation: the act of nodding the head, esp habitually or constantly; a periodic variation in the inclination of the axis of a rotating object [from L. nūtātiō (“nodding”), from nūtō (“I nod”)]
Nycterent: someone who hunts by night [from Gk. nyct (“night”) + -ent] (cf. Nyctitropic: turning in a certain direction at night) (cf. Nyctalopia: night-blindness)
Nycterent (image: Steam)
Nympholepsy: a passionate longing for something unattainable [from Gk mythology: nymphóleptos (“possessed by nymphs”)]
Key: OU = origin unknown
<word meaning and root formation>
Obsidional or Obsidionary: pertaining to a siege [from L. obsidiō (“siege”; “blockade”)]
Obsidional (source: Medieval art by Marilyn Stokstad)
Obsolagnium: waning sexual desire due to age [from L. ob- (“against”) + lagnium (“desire”)]
Obtund: to blunt, dull or deaden [from L. obtundere (“to dull”, “deaden”, “deafen”)]
Oculogyric: eye-rolling; rotation of the eyes [from L. oculo- (“eye”) + –gyric, from Gk. -gurus (“circle”)]
Oligophagos: eating only a few particular kinds of food [from Gk. olig (“few”) + –phagos (“eating”)]
Ollapod: pharmacist; (Orig. a country apothecary [name of a character in George Colman the Younger‘s comedy The Poor Gentleman (1801)]
Ollapod (source: Wellcome Collection (CC))
Ombrophilous: capable of withstanding heavy and continuous rain [from Gk. ómbros (“rain”) + –philous (“love”)]
Omniety: the state or condition of being all [from L. omnis (“all”) + -iety]
Oneirataxia: inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality [Gk. oneiros (“dream” + –taxis (“arrangement”)]
Onomasticon: an ordered list of names (Orig. a gazetteer of historical and contemporary 4th-century place names in Palestine andTransjordan compiled by Eusebius) [Gk. onomastikós, (“belonging to names”), from onomázō, (“I name”)]
Ophelimity: the ability to please another; economic satisfaction [from Gk. ōphélimos, (“helpful”)]
Opisthenar: back of the hand [from Gk. opistho- (“behind”; “back”) + –thenar (“palm of the hand”)] 🤚
Opsablepria: inability to look someone in the eye (OU) 👁️
Orarian: dweller by the seaside; relating to the seaside [from L. ōrārius (“coasting”; “along the coast”) + -an]
Orthostatic: relating to standing upright; straight posture [Gk. orth (“right angle”; “perpendicular”) + –statikós (“to make stand”)] (cf. Orthobiosis: a hygienic and moral lifestyle)
Osophagist: a fastidious eater [Gk. (?) + –phagos]
Otiose: serving no useful purpose; leisurely (cf. Otiant: idle or resting [from L. otium (“leisure”)]
Ozostomia: evil-smelling breath [from Gk ozóstom(os) (“having bad breath”)]
Macrologist: a person who engages in long and tiresome talk; ie, a bore [Gk. makrós, (“long”) + –logo (“word”) + -ist]
Macromastic: pertaining to large breasts; (Med.) (also called gigantomastic breasts) breasts which are usually heavy and pendulous with nipples and areolas facing down [Gk. macrós- (“long”) + -mastia (“abnormality of the breast”)]
Macromastic
Macrophallic: having an unusually large phallus [Gk. macrós- (“long”) + -phallós (“penis”)]
Megapod: having large feet [from Gk. mégas (“great”) + -poús “foot”)] 👣
Menseful: considerate; neat and clean [from mensk, from MidEng. menske (“courtesy”; “honour”)]
Mentulate: Referring to or characterised by a large penis; well-hung [from mentula (“cock”; “dick”; “penis”) + -ātus (“-ed”)]
Merkin: a pubic wig for women (Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: “counterfeit hair for women’s privy parts”) [Origin uncertain but prob. from malkin, a derogatory term for a lower-class young woman]
Merkin (photo: Merkin Museum)
Metoposcopy: using the physical appearance of the face (esp the pattern-lines on the forehead) to judge someone’s character [from Gk. métōpon, “forehead”) + -scopy]
Metoposcopy
Minimifidianism: having virtually no or almost no faith or belief [from L. minimus (“small”; “little”) + –fidian (?) + -ism]
Monandrous: having only one malesexual partner over a period of time [monós (“one”; “single”; “only”) + –androus (“man”; “husband”)]
Mummer: an actor in a traditional masked mime (a mummer’s play) [OldFr. momeur from mommer (“act in a mime”)]
Mummer (photo: sixsellov.live)
Murcid: slothful; shirking work or duty (OU)
Mystagogue: one who instructs in mystical or arcane lore or doctrines [Gk. mystagōgos, from mystēs (“initiate”) + –agein (“to lead”)]
Labefaction: shaking, weakening and/or downfall; impairment, especially of moral principles or civil order [L. labefactus, labefacere (“to cause to totter”; “shake”) from labare (“to totter”) + -facere (“to make”) + -ion]
Labile: unstable; liable to change [from L. labi, (“to slip or fall”)]
Labrose: thick-lipped [L. labrosus, from labrum (“lip”)] 👄
Laevorotatory or Levorotatory: counter- or anti-clockwise (opp. Dextrorotatory) [L. levo from laevus (“left”) + rotatiō] 🕰️
Lampadedromy: foot race with lighted torches, esp a relay race passing the torch from runner to runner (Anc. Greece: a race in honor of Prometheus in which the contestants ran bearing lit torches, the winner being the first to finish with his torch still lit) [Gk. lampein (“to shine”) + –dromos (“a running”)]
Lampadedromy at the ancient Greek Olympic Games (image. medium.com)
Lamprophony: speaking in a clear loud voice [Gk. lampróphónos (“clear-voiced”) from lamprós (“clear”; “distinct”) + -phone (“sound”) + -y]
Languescent: becoming tired or languid [from L. languescere (“to become faint”)]
Lapidate: stone to death [L. lapidare (“to stone”), from lapid-, lapis (“stone”) + -ate]
Lapidate (v):the punishment of Lapidation
Latebricole: living in holes (OU) 🕳️
Latibulise: to hibernate (OU)
Latifundian: rich in real estate [ L. latus, (“spacious”) + -fundus, (“farm”, (“estate”)] (Latifundium was a large agricultural estate in Ancient Rome)
Lestobiosis: living by furtive stealing; the act of pilfering food, especially of ants 🐜 [Gr. lestes, (“robber”) +–biosis, (“manner of life”)]
Loganamnosis: a mania for trying to recall a forgotten word or words [Gk. log (“word”) + -amnosis (?) perhaps from –amnesia (“memory”)]
Lucifugous: avoiding daylight or light altogether [ from L. lucifugus, from luci- + -fugus (from fugere (“to flee”)+ -al +-ous]
Lucripetous: money-hungry (OU) 💰
Luctiferous: sad and sorry [L. luctifer (“mournful”) from luctus (“sorrow”) + -fer (-ferous) + –ous]
Ludification: derision; mockery [from L. ludificatio, from ludificare (“to make sport of”), from ludus (“sport”) + -ficare (“to make”, in comparative)]
Lurdane: stupid, dull and lazy; a sluggard [MidFr.lourdin (“dullard”), from lourd (“heavy”)]
Lypophrenia: a vague feeling of sadness, seemingly without cause [OU. ? + Gk. –phrenia (“mind”)]
The Zorro story is deeply embedded in western popular culture, especially in the world of Anglophone cinema and television which trades heavily on all the familiar tropes, “carving the ‘Z’ on someone or something (the zigzagging mark of El Zorro)”; “secret identity of the protagonist, the elusive fox”🇦; “masked avenging angel fighting the powerful in the cause of the powerless”, etc. The fictional Zorro inherits the tradition of storied folklore heroes like Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel…in this Zorro is a worthy member of that exalted pantheon of morally-superior righters of heinous wrongs.
Batman: wardrobe tips from Zorro
Clark Kent aka Superman
Before Batman, Superman and the Lone Ranger: Zorro, he of the rapid rapier and distinctive black mask covering only his eyes, was a precursor to the iconic, quintessential American heroes of comic book and screen. There are transparent linkages between Zorro, the caballero (Spanish gentleman)–cum–rebellious outlaw, and Batman, the crusading superhero of Gotham City…both heroes effect a double identity. Both Don Diego de la Vega (Zorro) and Bruce Wayne (Batman) are wealthy aristocrats who feign unheroic personalities in their open identities🇧(compare Don Diego’s foppish even effeminate affectations with Wayne’s playboy persona). The dual/secret identities trope is also exhibited in the Supermen franchise, in times of great crisis or peril mild-mannered loser-type Clark Kent only has to dash into the nearest phone booth to instantly transform into peerless crime fighter Superman. The parallels extend to popular American TV westerns fare in the 1950s with the masked Lone Ranger who “was little more than Zorro in a western guise”, substituting the swashbuckler Zorro’s black garb and accessories with a lawman’s white outfit, etc. Zorro and Lone Ranger share another similar trait to their makeup, as does Batman. Unlike Superman, they don’t rely on superpowers or extra human strength but utilise “stealth, dexterity and ingenuity” to best the bad guys and end “corruption and abuse, and establish a world of moral justice” [John J. Valadez. (2016). The Lone Ranger Unmasked: Zorro and the Whitewashing of the American Superhero. Filmmaker Essay. Chiricú, 1(1), 135–151. https://doi.org/10.2979/chiricu.1.1.11]. In Batman’s case, he relies on his “scientific knowledge, detective skills and athletic prowess” [Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (1968)].
(source: archive.org/)
Over 40 films, several TV series, novels, a musical, cartoons and comics, and the obligatory merchandise, Zorro as an entertainment phenomenon has been the complete package for over a century. But it all started with a simple and seemingly nondescript adventure story, The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley, appearing in print in a dime pulp magazine. First serialised in 1919, the template was picked up almost immediately by Douglas Fairbanks Sr (a Zorro tragic!) and his production company and developed into a box office hit silent movie, The Mark of Zorro in 1920. On the strength of The Mark of Zorro’s success McCulley serialised the Zorro tale, producing in all over 60 stories by the time of his death in 1958. The Curse of Capistrano by itself has sold more than 750 million copies worldwide!
Time setting for ‘Zorro’? McCalley’s Zorro stories are vaguely set during the later era of Spanish California (ca.1800–1821), however some of the film adaptations locate Zorro much closer to the gold rushes and the US takeover (late 1840s).
Guy Williams, the iconic Zorro of ‘50s television, and creator Johnston McCulley
Chicano bandit prototypes for Zorro: McCulley drew on sources from literature and legend—primarily Robin Hood and Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel—for inspiration for the Zorro character, but he also gleaned much from the pages of history, especially of early California. McCulley seems to have modelled Zorro partly on various 19th century Californio bandidos, in particular Joaquin Murrieta whose actual historicity is uncertain🇨. The popular legend has Murrieta immigrating to the California gold fields but when gringos committed murderous atrocities against his family, the Mexican wreaks revenge on the American killers and embarks on a short but violent career of robbery and banditry. Murrieta’s “exploits” polarised opinion, Californian authorities identify him an enemy of the state and place a high price on his head while to Chicanos the romanticised outlaw has become a symbol of Mexican resistance to Anglo-American economic and cultural domination in California [‘Joaquin Murrieta’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]🇩.
Moviemakers even roped Zorro into the Italian Sword-and-Sandals (peplum strongman) sub-genre during its apotheosis, with Zorro Contro Maciste (1963)
Another Mexican bandit (more historically authenticatable than Murrieta), Tiburcio Vásquez, provided similar inspiration for fiction author McCulley. Vásquez attributed his 20-year career in crime to retribution for the racist attitudes of the norteamericanos—the white settlers from the US who had taken over Alta California after it had become an American state—and their treatment of non-Anglo (especially Mexican) inhabitants of California. Vásquez’s bold defiance earned him a folkhero following within the 19th century Méxican-American community (Valadez).
William Lamport (by PP Rubens)
An Irish Gaelic Zorro?: A decidedly non-Latino historical influence on the creation of Zorro is attributed to the career of Irish adventurer William Lamport, noted for being both an accomplished swordsman and a ladies’ man. The peripatetic Lamport served as a captain in the Spanish army and was sent to New Spain (Mexico) with a new, Hispanicised name to spy for the Spanish crown. The Eirish adventurer was appalled by the treatment of Amerindians and Black slaves in Mexico and sought to advance their liberation. Lamport was eventually arrested and accused of sedition and intending to set himself up as king of an independent Mexico. The Irishman was tried by the Mexican Inquisition and executed as a heretic in 1659 [‘The Man Behind the Mask of Zorro’, History Ireland, www.historyireland.com].
Banderas & Zeta-Jones in the 2005 sequel to ‘The Mask of Zorro’
TriStar Pictures’ 1998 production, The Mask of Zorro, with a vigorous, athletic Antonio Banderas in the title role, revived interest in the Zorro story and earned a cool US$250,000,000 at the box office. In the 1960s Disney’s television adaptation of the Zorro story (starring Guy Williams, the Anglo-sounding screen name of Armando Catalano) was one of the most popular programs on the box, especially with kids. So is Zorro just some innocuous action-adventure entertainment fare? Well, not according to some critical voices from the Latino community who see the Zorro phenomena as perpetuating Hispanic myths within the wider white-dominated mainstream, reinforcing “classic stereotypes of the Latin Lover (see also Footnote below) fighting endless series of inept Méxican villains” and misrepresenting the “multiethnicity and cultural complexity of of early California [‘Zorro still makes his mark’, Lewis Beale, Los Angeles Times, 28-June-2005, www.latimes.com]🇪. Others are critical of Zorro’s ethnicity, UCLA professor, Rafael Perez-Torres, emphasises the point that the “Robin Hood of the pueblo” is Criollo, a white Spaniard born in the New World of purely Spanish blood, he is always represented as the “honourable good ” against the evil and corrupt Méxican officials (Beale). Novelist Isabel Allende with an unorthodox take on Zorro (El Zorro: comienza la leyenda, 2005) subverts this idea of Eurocentric Zorro by reinventing his origin as a mestizo (mixed parentage: Spanish aristocrat father and Shoshone warrior mother).
The dandy Don Diego & macho he-man alter ego Zorro in the Walt Disney TV ‘Zorro’
Footnote: Celluloid Zorros One of the tropes employed by filmmakers in Zorro’s frequent screen appearances is Zorro as “sexy Latino lover”, as portrayed in the versions (big screen and small) by a bevy of heart-throb testosterone-charged actors – Tyrone Power, Guy Williams, Alain Delon, Antonio Banderas, George Hamilton (though Hamilton in the 1981 Zorro: The Gay Blade, tagline: “Zexy, Zany and Zensational!”, plays the black caped avenger purely for (campy) laughs).
🇦 zorro in Spanish translates as “fox”
🇧 Bob Kane co-creator of the Batman character admitted Zorro—and in particular the Douglas Fairbanks Sr swashbuckling portrayal in Mark of Zorro (1920)—heavily influenced his shaping of the “caped crusader” of Gotham City
🇨 Murrieta’s story is mostly recounted through a contemporary novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit (1854)
🇩Californio Salomón Pico was another historical figure in 1850s California with a similar sounding story embellished by local legend – grievously wronged by white settlers so he turns to banditry against the powers that-be and shares his booty with the local Mexican poor
🇪all of which is not to deny that there are countless other Latinos (and other peoples) who have derived genuine inspiration from the story and legend of Zorro to help fortify them in their very real, everyday struggles against unjust, authoritarian and oppressive regimes
Haptodysphoria: a shiveringly unpleasant feeling experienced from touching certain surfaces, such as peaches or wool [Gk. háptō (“touch”; “hasten”) + -dus (“bad”) + –phérō (“I bear”; “carry”)]
Harpocratic: relating to silence (OU)?
Harpocratic (source: Clipart Library)
Hartal: a general strike of labour, including a total shutdown of workplaces, businesses, courts, etc, as a political protest [Hindi haṛtāl, from hāṭ (“shop”) + -tālā (“lock”)]
Hebesphalmology: study of juvenile delinquency [OU; from Hebe (“goddess of youth and spring”(?)) + ? + -logy]
Henotic: promoting harmony or peace; unifying [Gk. henōtikós, (“serving to unite”)] ☮️
Hesternopotia: a pathological yearning for the good old days (OU)
Heteronym: a word with the same spelling but a different pronunciation and meaning [Gk. héteros (“other”; “another”) + -nym]
Heterotopia: strange or ambivalent places (places that defy the normal logic of ordering) [word popularised by philosopher Michel Foucault, Fr. hétérotopie, Gk. héteros + -topia from “utopia”, (“place”)]
Horrisonant: having an ugly, harsh sound; unpleasant to the ear [L. horrēre, sonānt-em (“to dread”; “shudder”) + -ant]
Humicubation: the act or practice of lying on the ground, esp in penitence or self-abasement [L. humus (“the ground”) + –cubare (“to lie down”)]
Hygeiolatry: fanaticism about health; the worship of health and/or hygiene [ Gk. hygie (“healthy”) + –latry (“worship”)]
Hygeiolatry (image: everydayhealth.com)
Hygrophanous: seeming transparent when wet, and opaque when dry [Gk. hygr- (“wet”) + –phan, -phen (“to show”; “visible”)(?) + -ous]
Hyperhedonia: (Medic.) a condition where abnormally heightened pleasure is derived from participation in any act or happening (no matter how mundane) [Gk. hyper- + G. hēdonē, (“pleasure”)]
Hypobulia: (the procrastinator’s curse!) (Psych.) a lack of willpower or decisiveness [Gk. hypo (“beneath“ or “below,”) + -aboulía (“irresolution”)]
Hypogeal: pertaining to the earth’s interior; subterranean; growing or existing underground [Gk. hupógeios (“underground”)] (cf. Hypogeum: underground temple, tomb or cavern)
Hypogeal (source: wob.com)
Hypothimia: profound melancholy or mental prostration; depressive state of mind; diminished emotional response [Gk. hypo- + Greek -thymos (“spirit”)]
Key: OU = origin unknown
<word meaning & root formation>
Idioglossia: secret speech or language, especially invented by children [Gk. idio- (“own”; “peculiarity”) + -glōssa, (“tongue”; “speech”)]
Idolum: insubstantial image; a spectre or phantom; a fallacy [Gk. eídōlon, (“image; “idol”), from eîdos, (“form”)]
Illuminati: those who claim to have exceptional intellectual or spiritual awareness (orig. a Bavarian secret society founded in 1776) [L. illuminatus (“enlightened”)]
Inexpugnable: that which cannot be taken by assault or storm; unconquerable; impregnable [L. in + -expugnābilis]
Innascible: not subject to birth; without a beginning; self-existent [L. innāscibilitās (“state of being unable to be born”)]
Invultuation: the use of or the act of making images of people, animals, etc, for witchcraft; sticking pins in a wax doll representing someone you wish to inflict pain on [MedLat. invultuāre (“to make a likeness”) from in- + vultus (“likeness”)]
Invultuation (source: etsy.com)
Irrefragable: not able to be refuted or disproved; irrefutable; indisputable; unbreakable [LateLat. irrefragabilis, from L. refragari (“to oppose or resist”)]
Isographer: someone who imitates another person’s hand-writing [Gk. iso- (“same”) + –graphe (“write”)]
Forisfamiliate: (Scot. law) to disinherit; to shed parental authority [Medieval Latin. forisfamiliatus, forisfamiliare, from L. foris (“outside”) + -familia (“family”)]
Fungible: (Legal.) replaceable by or acceptable as a replacement for a similar item [L. fungi (“to perform”)]
Fustian: ridiculously pompous, bombastic or inflated language [Anglo-Fr. fustian (“a kind of fabric”), prob. from L. fustis (“tree trunk” or “club”; “staff”)]
Fustigate: to criticise severely; to cudgel, ie, to beat with a stick [L. fustis + –igare ]
Fylfot: “Saxon” swastika; a type of swastika associated with medieval Anglo-Saxon culture (cf. Gammadion)
Fylfot (source: the Golden Dawn Shop)
<word meaning and root formation>
Gabion: a cage, cylinder or box filled with rocks, concrete, or sometimes sand and soil used as a retaining wall in civil engineering, road building, military applications and landscaping [from It. gabbione (“big cage”) from It. gabbia from L. cavea (“cage”)]
Genarch: (also sp. Genearch) head of family; a chief of a family or tribe [Gk. géniteur (“genitor”) + -arch ]
Genial:¹ diffusing warmth and friendliness; cordial [L. geniālis (“relating to birth or marriage”; from genius (“tutelary”; “deity”)]
Glycolimia: (also sp. Glycaemia) a craving for sweets; presence or level of sugar (glucose) in the blood [from NewLat. glyco- (“sugar”) + -emia (“condition of the blood.”)]
Gormandise: eat greedily or voraciously [from MidEng. gourmaunt, gormond, gromonde, from OldFr. gormant (“a glutton”) + -ise]
Gormandise
Gracile: slender [L. gracilis (“slender”)]
Gramercy: used to thank someone; an exclamation of surprise [Fr. from grand merci (“a special thank you”)]
Grammatolatry: the worship of letters or words Gk. grammato, from grammat-, gramma) + -latry (Grammatolatry could be the motto for this whole project!)
Grampus: a blowing, spouting, whale-like sea creature; a cetacean of the dolphin family [grampoys, from graundepose (“great fish”)]
Grampus (image: facebook.com)
Grandgousier: someone who will eat anything and everything [Fr. grand gosier, (“Big throat”) a fictional character in the story of Gargantua by François Rabelais]
Grassation: the act of attacking violently; living in wait to attack [L. grassatio, from grassatus, grassarito (“go about”; “attack”; “rage against”) + -ion]
Graveolent: having a rank smell; fetid; stinking [L. graveolent-, graveolens, from gravis (“heavy”) + -olent-, -olens ]
Gravid: pregnant (-a: pregnant woman); full of meaning [L. gravidus (“laden”; “pregnant”), from gravis (“heavy”)] (cf. Gravific: that which makes heavy)
Groak: to watch people silently while they’re eating, hoping they will ask you to join them (OU)
Grobianism: rudeness; boorishness [from Middle High Ger. grob or grop (“coarse or vulgar”). 1. a Grobian is an imaginary personage known for boorish behaviour, appearing in works of 15-16th century writers 📑 2. a fictional patron saint of the vulgar and coarse, St Grobian
Gyrovagues: wandering or itinerant monks devoid of leadership. Having no fixed address they were reliant on charity and the hospitality of others [Late Latin. gyrovagus from L. gȳrus (“circle”) + –vagus (“wandering”)]
The ancients, the Greeks and Romans, perceived the world of their day as one with the Mediterranean at its centre, surrounded by the conjoined land masses of Europe, Africa and Asia, comprising what the Greeks called oikouménē, the known, inhabited or inhabitable parts of the worldⓐ. This envisaged world was “a curious place where legends and reality could co-exist” [Vedran Bileta, “3 Legendary Ancient Lands: Atlantis, Thule, and the Isles of the Blessed”, The Collector, 03-Nov-2022, www.thecollector.com]. The Greeks believed that at the northernmost extremity of the existing world lay a fabled island called Thuleⓑ. The originator of this belief was 4th century BC Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia (now Marseille, Fr.) who claimed to have visited and discovered Thule on a voyage beyond Britain to the northern sea and the Arctic. Pytheas introduced the idea of Thule—far distant and encompassed by drift-ice and possessed of a magical midnight sun—to the geographic imagination. Other ancient writers enthusiastically took up Pytheas’ fantastical notion, notwithstanding that the account of his journey (On the Ocean) had been lost to posterity…Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) described Thule as “the most remote of all those lands recorded”; Virgil (1st century BC) called the island Ultima Thule, (“farthermost Thule”, ie, “the end of the world”).
Thule, as Tile (1539 map) shown (with surrounding sea-monsters) as located northwest of the Orkney islands
Seeking Thule: The loss of Pytheas’ primary source text, the description of his voyage, led countless generations that followed him to speculate as to where the exact location of Thule might be. Many diverse places have been misidentified as Thule…the Romans thought it was at the very top of Scotland, in the Orkneys; Procopius (6th century AD Byzantine historian), Scandinavia; early medieval clerics located it in Ireland while both the Venerable Bede and Saxon king Alfred the Great asserted that Iceland was really Pytheas’s Thule, as did the famous 16th century cartographer Mercator. Other candidates advanced over the millennias include Greenland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Shetland, “north of Scythia”, Smøla (Norway) and Saaremaa, an Estonian island.
Smøla island (Norway)
Other conjectures on Thule’s whereabouts have been meaninglessly vague, eg, Petrarch (14th century Italian humanist scholar): Thule lay in “the unknown regions of the far north-west”, supposedly inhabited by blue-painted residents (Roman poets Silius Italicus and Claudian), a probable conflation with the Picts of northern Britain. Thule, from as early as the 1st century AD on, “became more of an idea than an actual place, an abstract concept decoupled from the terrestrial map, simultaneously of the world and otherworldly”…an emblem of mystical isolation, liminal remoteness, a real discovered place and yet unknown” (F. Salazar, “Claiming Ultima Thule”, Hakai Magazine, 08-Sep-2020, www.hakaimagazine.com).
The Thule neighbourhood? (image: worldatlas.com)
Thule has continued to attract the interest of explorers right up to modern times. Continent-hopping scholar-explorer Sir Richard Burton visited Iceland, writing it up as the real “Thule”. Famed Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen having explored the Arctic region, produced an account of Pytheas’s ancient Arctic expedition, hypothesising that Thule was in fact a Norwegian off-shore island that the Greek voyager had identified [Nansen F., In Northern Mists, Vols I & II, (1969)]. Greenlandic-Danish explorer and Eskimologist Knud Rasmussen underlined the case for Greenland as the location by naming the trading post he founded in NW Greenland “Thule” or “New Thule” (later renamed in the Inuit language, “Qaanaaq”)ⓒ.
Thule Society, emblem
Thule Society: In the aftermath of World War 1 Thule provided stimulus of a very different kind for extreme-right racist nationalists in Germany. An emerging Munich-based secret occultist and Völkisch group named itself after Pythea’s mythical northern island. The Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft) propagated a form of virulent anti-Semitism which fed early Nazism in Bavaria, it also preached Ariosophy (an outgrowth of Theosophy), a bogus ideology preoccupied with visions of Aryan racial superiority, a key component of the later Nazis’ ideological frameworkⓓ. Out of the Thule Society came the ultranationalist Germany Workers’ Party (DAB)which in a short time transformed into the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party). A number of Thulists (eg, Hess, Frank, Rosenberg) became prominent in the Nazi leadership during the Third Reich [David Luhrssen, Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism (2012)].
Endnote: Hyperborea’s remote utopia Greek mythology throws up a parallel legend to that of Thule in the Hyperboreans. These were mythical eponymous people living in Hyperborea (hyper = “beyond”, boreas = “north wind”ⓔ). Their homeland was perpetually sunny and temperate (despite lying within a cold, frigid region), and Hyperboreans were divinely blessed with great longevity, the absense of war and good health…in other words, a utopian society [‘Hyperborea’, Theoi Project – Greek Mythology, www.theoi.com]. As with Thule, locating this paradisiacal northern land has proved elusive to pinpoint with the ancient scribes and geographers agreeing only that it lies somewhere on the other side of the Riphean Mountains (which themselves have been variously located). Homer described Hyperborea as being north of Thrace, some other classical geographers had it beyond the Black Sea, vaguely somewhere in Eurasia, perhaps in the Kazakh Steppes. Herodotus (5th century BC) had it in the vicinity of Siberia, while for Pindar (fl. 5th century BC) it was near the Danube. Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BC) identified the Hyperboreans with the Celts and Britain, Plutarch (fl. 1st century AD) , with Gaul.
Hyperborea, imagined (image: greek-mythology.org)
ⓐ which, they believed, itself was surrounded by an unbroken chain or body of water
ⓑ a belief shared by the Romans who saw Thule as the extreme edge of orbis terrarum
ⓒ from 1953 to 2023 the northernmost US Air Force base (NW Greenland) was called the Thule Air Base
ⓓ Thule was symbolically important to the right wing nationalists, a pseudo-spiritual home of Aryanism, further “proof” of the mythic origins of the “Germanic race”
Ecclesiarch: church ruler (-y: government ruled by clerics) [L. ecclesiarcha, from Gk.]
Ecclesiarch (source: deviantart.com)
Ecmnesia: a form of amnesia in which the patient retains memories of older events but not of recent ones [Gk. ek (“out”) + -mnesis (“memory”)] 🤔
Ectorhinal: pertaining to the exterior of the nose; organ associated with sense of smell [Gk. from ektós (“outside”) + –rhin, -rhinós (“outside”) + -al]
Eldritch: weird, sinister or hideous; ghostly, otherworldly; uncanny [originally from Scot. perhaps rel. to “elf”]
Eldritch town? (source: patheos.com)
Embonpoint: plumpness [Fr. en bon point (“in good shape”)]
Emolument: “salary”; “profit” [from L. emolumentum (“advantage”) from emolere, (“to produce by grinding”) (prob. originally a payment to a miller for grinded corn) 🌽 💰
Empressment: extreme politeness [from L. imperatrix (“emperor”) + MidEng. -ment]
Enchiridion: handbook; a book containing essential information on a subject [Gk. enkheirídion, from en, (“in”) + –kheír, (“hand”) — from ‘The Enchiridion of Epictetus’ by Arrian (2nd cent. AD]
Engastrimyth: ventriloquist [MidFr. engastrimythe, from Gk. engastrimythos, from en (“in”) + -gastr- + -mythos (“speech”)]
Engastrimyth (photo: XiXinXing, Shutterstock)
Entopic: (Anat.) in the normal position (opposite of Ectopic) [Gk. en, (“within”), + –topos, (“place”)]
Ephebic: of a youth just entering manhood, esp in ancient Greek in the context of males aged 18-20 in military training [Gk. éphēbos (“adolescent”), from epí, (“early”) + –hḗbē, (“manhood”)]
Ephebic (source: Eagles and Dragons Publishing)
Epicene: effeminate; unmanly; exhibiting the characteristics of both sexes, or of neither (sexless); lacking gender distinction [Gk. epíkoinos, (“common to many people”) (cf. génos epíkoinon, (“common gender”) from epi-, (“on, upon; on top of; all over”)+ -koinós (“common”; “general”; “public”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ḱóm (“beside, by, near, with”) + -yós]
Epigone: disciple; follower; imitator (esp one in a later generation) [Gk. epígonos, (“offspring”; “descendant”), from epigígnomai, (“I come after”), from epí, (“upon”), from gígnomai, (“I become”)]
Dippoldism: (Psych.) the paraphilia of deriving pleasure from the implementation of any form of corporal punishment whether it be in the form of beating, whipping, or spanking of another; sexuoerotic arousal derived fron spanking or whipping school children [From Andreas Dippold, German schoolteacher convicted of inflicting abuse on children including manslaughter]
Dismissory: sending away; permit to depart [from L. dimittere (“send away”) (dismiss) + -ory]
Discalceate: barefooted [dis + from L. calceus (“a shoe”)] 👣
Diversivolent: desiring different things [L. diversi (“diverse”) + –volent-, volens, velle (“to will”; “wish”)]
Dolorifuge: that which drives away sadness, mitigates or removes grief [from L. dolere (“to grieve”) + –fugere (“flee”). Coinage modelled on centrifuge, febrifuge, vermifuge, etc.]
Drapetomaniac: a person with an impulse or intense desire to run away from home [Gk. drapetēs, “a runaway [slave]”) + -mania, “madness”; “frenzy”). Coinage: Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright invented the term “Drapetomania” in 1851 to describe what he believed was the “psychological disorder”(sic) that caused a phenomenon of enslaved Blacks to run away from bondage before the American Civil War (masshist.org)
Drapetomania: an 1837 engraving of an escaped slave in the US
Cacestogenous: caused by unfavourable home environment (OU)
Calepin: a notebook; a dictionary, esp a polyglot dictionary [It. calepino, named after Ambrogio Calepino ((15th-16th cent. author of a Latin dictionary]
Callisteia: beauty prizes; originally a festival held by the women of the island of Lesbos, with a prize for the fairest beauty [name of the festival , named in honour of the Greek goddess of Callisto]
Callithumpian: a noisy band parade or demonstration [alteration of gallithumpian)
Cambist: one skilled in the science of financial exchange; a banker [from L. cambire (“to exchange”)]
Cambist (source: Gumpanat/Shutterstock.com)
Campestral: pertaining to or thriving in open countryside [L. fromcampester from campus (“field”; “plain”) + -al]
Canard: a fabricated anecdote; an unfounded sensational report; a phoney yarn; a hoax — or to put it in immediately-recognisable contemporary currency…fake news [Fr. canard (“duck”), in the sense of being a hoax] 🦆
Cancrine: reads the same backwards as forwards; palindromic [From Latincancer (“crab”) + -īnus]
Canatory: pertaining to a singer or singing [from It. cantata from L. cantare (“to sing”) + -ory] (cf. Cantatrice: female singer) 🎤
Caprine: pertaining to a goat; goat-like [L. caprīnus, from caper (“goat”)] 🐐
Carriwitchet: absurd, riddling question; a condundrum; a kind of hoax; pun [uncertain, possibly a humorous alteration of catechism]
Castrophenia: the belief that one’s thoughts are being stolen by one’s enemies (OU, castro- kastron-(?))
Catholicon: a universal remedy or fix; panacea [Gk. katholikós, (“universal”), from katá, “(according to”) + –hólos, “(whole”)]
Charientism: a figure of speech wherein an insult is disguised as or softened by a jest [from Gk. kharientismós]
Chimera: (also spelt Chimaera) imaginary monster; fanciful; impossible idea; a body; an unjustified fear [from Greek mythology: a fire-breathing she-monster having a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail]
Chimera (image: oldworldgods.com)
Circumforaneous: wandering from house to house, from place to place, from market to market [L. circumforāneus (“itinerant”), from circum- (“around”) + –forum (“marketplace”) + -aneus (“-aneous”)]
Claudicant: (Medic.) limping (L. claudicans from claudio (“to limp”) from claudus (“crippled”)]
Claudicant: I, Claudius?
Claviger: club-bearer; key-keeper or caretaker [L. from clavi- (“clavi”) – + -ger (“bearing, bearer”)] 🔑
Comiconomenclaturist: a connoisseur of humorous names; a specialist in the creation of funny names [from L. comicus (“of comedy”) from Gk. komikos (“of or pertaining to comedy”) + L. nōmenclātūra nomenclature (“naming”) + -ist]
Badaud: a person given to idle observation of everything, with wonder or astonishment; a credulous or gossipy idler; an urban bystander who “rubbernecks” (gawks) at some incident [Fr. fromOld Occitanbadau, frombadar, fromMedieval Latinbadare(“to gape”; “yawn”)]
Badaud, a type in French literature (Gérard Auliac, Le Badaud sculpture)
Baffona: a woman with a slight moustache [It. from baffo (“moustache”)]
Balmaiden: a female surface miner [Cornish: bal (“mine”) + -maiden (“a young or unmarried woman”)]
Balmaiden: (Cornwall, Eng. 1890)
Balistarius: a crossbowman [Gk. ballístra frombállō,(“I throw”) + -ius]
Balletomane: a person fanatically devoted to ballet; balletmaniac [fromFr. balletomane]
Balletomane: Billy Elliot (film)
Balneal: pertaining to bathing or baths [L. balneum (“bath”) +-al, -ary] (cf. Balneotherapy: treatment using natural water)
Balneal: Roman Baths, UK (photo: romanbaths.co.uk)
Banausic: common, ordinary, mundane, undistinguished, dull, insipid [Gk. banausikós,(“of or for mechanics”), frombánausos,(“mechanical; ironsmith”)]
Bandobast: protection of a person, building or organisation from crime or attack [Pers. band-o-bast(“tying and binding”), from Urdu. bundobast]
Baryecoia: dullness of hearing; deafness (OU)
Basial: pertaining to kissing (OU) 💋
Battue: the driving of game towards hunters by beaters; massacre of helpless people [Fr. battue, (“beaten”), fromL. battere]
Biverbal: relating to two words; punning [L. bi (“two”) + fromLateL. -verbālis(“belonging to a word”)]
Brachiation: the act of swinging from tree limb to tree limb (as performed by primates) [L. bracchium, (“arm“) + -tion] 🐵
Movies based on the story of TheIliad as told by its traditionally reputed author Homer—such as the 2004 Troy, Helen of Troy (both the 1956 movie and the 2003 mini-series) and The Trojan Horse (1961)—automatically include scenes concerning the artifice of the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy, conveying an impression that these events were part of the Homeric epic poem on Troy. but in reality they do not feature in TheIliad at all, which concludes with the funeral of Troy’s champion warrior Hector. Homer in fact alludes to the Trojan Horse episode all up only thrice in the “follow-up” epic poem The Odyssey and then only briefly in passing.
‘Helen of Troy’ 1956 (It-US)
Epic Cycle ~ it was left to other ancient authors, some roughly contemporaneous with Homer and some later, to, as it were, fill in the gaps in the popular tale of the Trojan War between the end of Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey. This collection of non-Homeric verse in dactylic hexameter acquired the name of Epic Cycle (Epikòs Kýklos), and exist today only in fragments and as later summaries made in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period.
‘The Iliad’ (image: etc.usf.edu)
Aethiopis ~ this lost epic poem (c.776BC), comprising five books, is attributed to Arctinus of Miletus. Arctinus spices up the Trojan conflict by introducing two new allies of the Trojans into the story. First Penthesilea and her band of fierce Amazon bellatrixes (women warriors) from Thrace enter the fray against the Achaeans (Greeks). The Amazonian Queen more than holds her own against the men, cutting a sway through many of the Greek warriors until Achilles bests her in hand-to-hand combat and kills her…creating something of a double-edged sword for himself as in the act of killing Penthesilea he makes the unsettling realisation that he is in love with her (real Freudian messing with your head stuff this!) Arctinus then brings in Memnon, king of Aethiopia➀ (Ethiopia) and his vast army to bolster the besieged Trojan side. Memnon is deemed almost equal in martial skills to Achilles and the two über-warriors and demigods square off in mortal combat. After a titanic struggle Achilles kills the Aethiopian warrior-king which causes his army to flee in terror. A fired-up Achilles launches an attack on the Trojans but gets too close to the city walls, giving the initiator of all the troubles, Paris (whose behaviour is consistently dishonourable and cowardly), a chance to take a pot shot. Paris’ arrow pierces Achilles’ heel, the only vulnerable spot on his otherwise immortal body, but Paris still gets no credit for it it is Apollo (god of archery) who guides the trajectory of the arrow truly to its target➁.
Amphora depicting Achilles & Penthesilea in combat (6th cent. BC), British Museum, London
Ilias Mikra (“Little Iliad”) ~ this lost epic, in 4 books, is mainly attributed to the semi-legendary Lesches➂ (of Lesbos(?), flourished 700–650BC). Lesches covers the conception and construction of Odysseus’ Trojan Horse➃ and the awarding of the dead Achilles’ arms to Odysseus over Ajax, prompting the latter to lose the plot altogether, attack a herd of oxen and commit suicide in shame. The rest of the Little Iliad follows various escapades mostly involving Odysseus who treks off around the Aegean in company with Diomedes, collecting sacred objects which the Achaean prophecies decree are the preconditions necessary for Troy to be conquered. One such adventure takes them in disguise behind the enemy’s walls to steal, with Helen’s help, the Palladium (an archaic cult image said to preserve the safety of Troy).
Odysseus & Diomedes purloining the Trojans’ Palladium (The Louvre, Paris)
Iliou persis➄ (“The Sack of Troy”) ~ the surviving fragments of this epic, comprising just two books, is usually attributed to Arctinus, giving it a comparable vintage to the Aethiopis. The verse opens with the Trojans discovering the “gift” of the Wooden Horse. After debating it the citizens fatefully ignore the warnings of the prophetess Cassandra and Laocoön and decide to dedicate the horse to Athena as a sacred object. After the Trojans drunkenly celebrate their supposed triumph through the night the Greek traitor Sinon signals to the Achaean fleet to return, Odysseus and the other warriors disembark from the wooden horse and wholesale carnage, destruction and slaughter spells the end for Troy and its citizens.
The sack of Troy (source: Heritage Images/ Getty Images)
The Aeneid ~ this part of the story is also covered in later surviving versions by the Roman poet Virgil in his Aeneid and by Quintus Smyrnaeus (of Smyrna). Virgil’s Aeneid (12 books, written between 29 and 19BC) focuses on one of the minor participants of the Trojan War mentioned in the Iliad, a Trojan hero named Aeneas who escapes from Troy with his supporters (the Aeneads) before the Wooden Horse ruse is executed. Homer provides the template for Virgil’s epic poem which follows Aeneas and Co on their circuitous wanderings and adventures around the Aegean and Mediterranean seas (including an excursion to the Underworld) in Odysseyesque fashion, before settling in Italy and becoming progenitors of the Romans.
Aeneas’ wanderings after Troia (source: readthegreatbooks.wordpress.com)
Posthomerica ~ Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica (14 books, written 3rd–4th century AD) picks up the story from the end of the Iliad and continue the narration of the war. Quintus modelled his work on Homer’s and also drew heavily on material from the Cyclic poems of Arctinus and Lesches, revisiting the well-trawled landscape of the capture of Troy through the Wooden Horse, the eradication of Troy’s royal family, including the killing of King Priam by Neoptolemus (Achillles’ son) in a sacred temple and his bestial murder of Hector’s infant son, violations for which the gods punish the returning Greeks with a series of misadventures – eg, Menelaus is delayed from leaving the Troad and driven off-course by storms and winds, taking seven or eight years to get back to his kingdom in Sparta; his brother King Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Achaean expedition, is murdered immediately upon his return to Mycenae➅.
Ajax, Aeneas, Paris & others in combat (source: ancientworldmagazine.com)
➀ some sources refer to it as Scythiopia
➁ none of this gets a mention in the Homeric poems
➂ also attributed to other ancient writers like Cinaethon of Sparta and Thestorides of Phocaea
➃ or should we say Epeius’ Trojan Horse as it was he who built the gigantic equine decoy in rapid-quick time
➄ as in Ilion or Ilium, the Greeks’ name for Troy
➅ and of course there’s the curse of Odysseus’ decade-long tortuous trek trying to return to his home island Ithaca, as recounted in the Odyssey
“Y” (pronounced the same as “why” or “wye”) is the 25th and penultimate letter of the English alphabet. “Y” appears in the Semitic alphabet as waw, which it shares with several other Latin letters, namely F, U, V and W. n the Classical Greek alphabet “upsilon” or “ypsilon” represents the letter Y. In mathematics “Y” is the 2nd unknown variable, following “X”. Y is a consonant but also can be a vowel in the articulation of certain sounds (eg, the semi-vowel “yes”).
{word} <meaning> <derivation>
Yale: (Euro. myth.) mythical animal resembling a horse (or antelope) with a tusk in combination with the the tail of an elephant (used in heraldry) [etymology uncertain but believed to be derived from the Hebrew word yael (“ibex“)]
A Pair of yales adorning St John’s College, Cambridge
Yam: (Hist.) was a postal system or supply-point route messenger system extensively used by the Great Khans; a posting-house along a road (Marco Polo: a yam was a waystation where a “large and handsome building” housed messengers and horses in “rooms furnished with fine beds” fit for a king, decorated with “rich silk” and “everything they can want.”) [Mongolian. örtöö, (“checkpoint”)]
The Yam system: described as a kind of “medieval pony express” operating within Mongolia (source: Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Yarborough: hand of cards (whist) or bridge with no card above a nine; a weak hand [Eng. from toponymic surname, from Yarburgh (Yarborough) in Lincolnshire, from OldEng. habitational or topographic nameeorðburg (“earthworks”; “fortifications”)]
A Yarborough hand (source: Science matters)
Yardland: unit of land area equal to 30 acres (¼ of a hide🄰); also called a Virgate) [MidEng. yerdlond, from yerde (“yard”; “measure”) + –lond (“land”)]
Yardland or virgate
Yare: (esp of a vessel) answering swiftly to the helm; easily handled; marked by quickness and agility; nimble; prepared [from OldEng. gearu (“ready”)]
Yaud: a worn out or old horse; a workhorse (Scot. mare) [MidEng.? yald from Old Norse. jalda (“mare”) of Finno-Ugric origin, cf. “jade”] 🐴
Yealing: person of the same age as oneself (of uncertain origin)
Yellowplush: a footman [from character in Yellowplush Papers, a series of satirical sketches by William Makepeace Thackeray (1850s) (compounding of “yellow” + “plush”)]
Yellowplush
Yegg: a burglar of safes; safecracker (origin unknown)
Yegg
Yobbery: hooliganism; characteristic of the (bad) behaviour of a yob; a rowdy, disruptive youth [coined 1970s by inverting the spelling of “boy”]
Yogibogiebox: a container holding the assessories used by a spiritualist [a compound of yogi + –bogey + –box. Coined or introduced by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922)]
Yogibogiebox (Ulysses’)
Yogini female yogi [from yoga from Sanskrit. yuj (“to join or unite”)]
Yoicks: a hunting cry used to urge hounds after a fox or other quarry; expression of surprise or excitement (origin unknown but appears related to fox-hunting) (cf. Yikes: exclamation of alarm or surprise)
Yonderly: mentally or emotionally distant; vacant or absent-minded [from “yonder” from Eng. “yon” and from Dutch. ginder (“over there”)]
Yoni: symbol representing female genitalia [Sanskrit. yoni (“female reproductive organ”; literally “the womb” or (“the source”)]
Yowndrift: snow driven by the wind (Scot. Eng.? origin uncertain)
🄰 English unit of land measurement originally intended to represent the amount of land sufficient to support a household
The letter “X” is the 24th letter of the Latin alphabet, as well as the Roman numerical symbol for “ten”(10). It derived from the Phoenician letter samekh, meaning “fish”, then circa 900BC the Greeks borrowed the samekh letter and renamed it Chi, giving it its present shape, the meaningful symbol of two diagonally-crossed vertical strokes. X is notable for its versatility and is powerfully ingrained in popular culture with so many different applications – it can signify the unexpected in everyday life, the mysterious phenomena or the unknown value of something; X can be defiantly undefinable. “X marks the spot” (see at bottom) or it can be a cautionary viewer-rating for television or films; it can represent a chromosome juxtaposed with its succeeding letter of the alphabet, “y”; it can stand in place of the word “Christ” as in “X’mas”; and it can be a shorthand affectionate or amorous sign-off between two correspondents (XXX or XOXO), the “kisses” in “kisses and hugs”; or the “crosses” in the perennial game of “noughts and crosses”; there’s “Generation X” of MTV-land and there’s “X” the rebranded moniker for the US-based social media website formerly known as Twitter (‘Before X Was X: The Dark Horse Story Of The 24th Letter’, January 09, 2019, www.dictionary.com)
Xanthippe: an ill -tempered woman [Gk. history: Socrates’ Athenian wife]
Xanthippe
Xanthocomic: yellow-haired [Gk. xanthós (“yellow”) + (?)-kómēs (“harmony”) from -kome (“hair of the head”) (?) (cf. Xanthochroic: having yellow skin) 👱
Xenagogue: a tour guide; someone who conducts or directs strangers [Gk. xeno, xenós (“stranger”; “foreigner”) + -agōgos (“to lead”)] (cf. Xenodochy: hospitality; reception of strangers)
Xenarthral: resembling a sloth, an anteater or an armadillo [Gk. xenós (“foreigner”) + -árthron (“joint”)
Xenarthral (image: Encyclopedia Britannica)
Xenodocheionology: (studying) the history of hotels or inns; the lore of hotels or inns [Gk. xenodocheion (“inn”) + -o- + –logy]
Xenodocheionology: The Don CeSar, Florida, AKA “The Pink Palace”
Xenoglossia: supposedly when someone is able to speak, understand or write in a foreign language that he/she has never learnt or studied [Gk. xeno + -glossia (“speak)] (cf. Xenoglossophobia: fear of foreign languages)
Xenoglossia (image: sanaco.com)
Xerothermic: both dry and hot [Gk. xērós, (“dry”) + -thermós, “heat”) + –ic] (cf. Xerarch: growing in dry places) (cf. Xerasia: abnormal dryness of the hair) (cf. Xerostomia: excessive dryness of the mouth)
Xiphias: swordfish; a genus (the type of the family Xiphiidae) of large scombroid fishes comprising the common swordfish [Gk. xíphos, (“sword”)] 🗡️ 🐟
Xylopolist: one who sells wood; a timber merchant [Gk. xylo (“wood”) + –polist (“I barter”; “sell”)] 🪵
Xystus: (Hist.) architectural element in Anc Greece for covered portico of the gymnasium; covered walkway for exercises [from Gk. xustos, (“smooth”) (ie, polished floor of the xystus)
Xystus (source: facebook.com)
◢━■━■◤◢━■━■◢━■━■◤◢━■━■◤
“X marks the spot!” (from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)
The blog preceding this one addressed the German-American phenomena of Turnverein (gymnastics-cum-social-cum-political associations in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries), detailing how the American Turners movement derived its inspiration from the philosophy and gymnastics theory of the Prussian educator Johann Friedrich Jahn. Jahn and the Deutsch Turnenschafts exerted a similar motivational effect on the Czech gymnastics movement’s genesis. Sokol (a Slavic word meaning “falcon”) was founded as a gymnastics, social and fraternal club by two ethnic Germans (Miroslav Tyrš and Jindřich Fügner) in Bohemia in 1862🅰. Sokol’s approach to physical education derived from Tyrš’ PE system placed an emphasis on mass calisthenics.
Mass calisthenics display at Prague’s Strahov Stadium
Just as Turnverein was transplanted into America and took root there, so did Sokol. In 1865 the first American Sokol was formed, just three years after the parent Bohemian organisation started! By 1937 there was nearly 20,000 members of Sokolsocieties in the US. Back in Europe Sokol became both a catalyst for Czech nationalism and patriotism and an expression of Pan-Slavism with Moravia (Slovakia), Poland, Bulgaria, Russia (including Belorussia and the Ukraine) and the southern Slav (Yugoslav) states all adopting a form of Sokol from the Czech prototype.
Sokol women in a mass calisthenics exhibition (source: Reddit)
Sokol cf. Turnverein: the pursuit of physical fitness through the practice of gymnastics and calisthenics was the raison d’être of both Sokol and the American Turners, both movements were essentially male-focused and geared unequivocally towards the demonstration of masculinity. Underlying the physical educational aims of both were other ideals, a determination to use each’s movement to elevate a sense of group identity…in Sokol’s case, to help forge a sense of Czech nationalism (the practice of gymnastics as a national movement), and for German-Americans, to underpin and preserve the distinctive German-ness and cultural values of the immigrants in an non-German society. The question of politics was a point of departure for the two movements. The Turnverein associations were liberals/socialists by persuasion (at least up until the First World War) and actively supported progressive political causes. Sokol on the other hand in its stated principles was avowedly non-political. This in practice caused internal tensions within Sokol between older Czech members and younger ones, the latter openly advocating for the movement to embrace more direct political participation.
Poster for 1901 Slet (source: sokolmuseum.org)
Slet fests: the pinnacle and showcase of the Sokol phenomena was the Slet🅱 festivals, these were mass, open-air extravaganzas for public consumption. Centrepiece of the Slet fest was thousands of athletes in a stadium exhibition of synchronised calisthenics, accompanied by stirring classical music. Complementing this were competitions in gymnastics and other sporting events, gatherings, parades and rallies, celebrations of culture and the arts. The first Slet was held in Prague in 1882, culminating in a mass calisthenics display. By the 1895 All-Sokol Slet Sokol’s growth and expansion was evident with around 5,000 men and boys performing in the stadium. The 1901 Slet was the first to include women as well as international participants from France and the US. The 1926 Slet (in an independent Czechoslovakia) was the first in the massive, purpose-built Strahov Stadium with a spectator capacity of 250,000 and 182,477 participants taking part (‘History of Prague Slets’, SOKOL Museum Library, www.sokolmuseum.org). After the Second World War the new communist regime in Czechoslovakia permitted only one more Slet to be held (1948) before the Slets and Sokol were suppressed, replaced in 1955 by the first Spartakiad, a mass exercises event and propaganda vehicle for the socialist Czechoslovakian regime, purportedly based on the Soviet Spartakiades. The reality was that the Spartakiads wereadopted from the earlier Czech slets and it was only possible for the authorities to organise such a complex, large scale, mega-event with the expertise and active involvement of Sokol organisers (Petr Roubal) (‘The first ever Spartakiad mass exercise and how it was influenced by the Sokol movement’, Thomas McEnchroe, Radio Prague International, 23-Jun-2020, http://english.radio.cz). After the eclipse of communism in the Eastern Bloc, the Sokol Slet was revived in the early 1990s, albeit on a much smaller scale than hitherto.
1948 Slet (source: sokolmuseum.org)
𖤗 mirrors the Turnenfest/American Turners motto
🅰 then part of the Czech lands within the Austro-Hungarian Empire
🅱 in the Czech language meaning “a flock of birds” – to continue Sokol’s ornithological metaphor
Turnverein (Pl. “Turnvereine”) from German: turnen (“to practice gymnastics”) + –verein (“club” or “union”)
𖥠𖥠𖥠𖥠𖥠
The earnest pursuit or physical exercise and a healthy lifestyle isn’t the first thing you think of in regard to fast-foodified, modern America and Americans. But it was the case for many German-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These immigrants and sons and daughters of immigrants formed themselves into Turnvereins (German gymnastic/athletic clubs) in the US which, inspired by pioneering early 19th century Prussian physical educationalist and nationalist, JFLC ‘Vater’ Jahn (“the Father of Gymnastics”), promoted physical culture, German cultural traditions, freethinking and liberal politics1⃞.
Cincinnati Turners, 1909 (source: Indiana University Library)
The members of these Turnvereins, known as “Turners”, played leading roles in sponsoring gymnastics as an American sport and a subject for school, helping to popularise physical exercise and callisthenics as a way of life. Turner gymnastics, the centerpiece of the societies’ activity, comprised distinctive calisthenics routines and apparatus exercises which emphasised masculine strength and agility [‘Milwaukee Turners’, Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, https://emke.uwm.edu]. The Turners’ clubs and associations (Vereininigte Turnvereins Nordamerika) spread out from the Ohio Valley throughout the US. At one point, around 1894, Turnerism reached its zenith with 317 societies and approximately 40,000 members. The Turnvereins performed a multi-functional purpose, aside from the physical activities they fulfilled a social role for recent arrivals from Germany, helping them to integrate into their new home while facilitating the retention of German culture (the societies’ halls (Turnhalles) were havens for social get-togethers). In so doing the Turners fostered a form of group solidarity among German-Americans by preserving their ethnic culture and identity [Annette R. Hofmann, ‘The American Turners: their past and present, Revista Brasileira de Ciências do Esporte’, Volume 37, Issue 2, 2015, Pages 119-127, ISSN 0101-3289, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rbce.2014.11.020.]
Central Turner Hall, Cincinnati, Oh.
The Turner societies were politically progressive, supporting the liberal brand of Republicanism in the 1850s and 60s.2⃞. Turners were strong abolitionists, both antebellum and during the Civil War, when many of the members fought for the Union side. Later, the Turnen associations embraced homegrown causes in the US such as the struggle to achieve women’s suffrage and equality3⃞ and workers’ rights under capitalism; in the interwar years the Turnvereins were vocal in their opposition to the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe [‘The Milwaukee Turners at Turner Hall’, www.milwaukeeturners.org).
Milwaukee Turners (source: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee)
By the early 20th century the Turnverein impulse in America was losing its intensity, partly this was generational, the American-born Germans were increasingly less fluent in German and more attuned with the mainstream US culture. The associations were less radical and socialist and more conservative in their outlook and American government WWI hostility to Germany and Germans and Prohibition in the decade-plus after it were factors that further undermined Turner solidarity. The pull of assimilation and an inevitable “Americanisation” process severely weakened the cultural affinity with things Germans within the associations and the number of Turner societies dropped off dramatically from the 1920s on 4⃞ (Hofmann).
Today, the Turnen movement in America, massively diminished in size and influence with the number of active clubs having plummeted to under 50 and shorn both of its political activism and its Teutonic focus, maintains its existence as gymnastics (and other sports) clubs and social associations, while espousing the motto “a sound mind in a sound body” and still advocating the core virtues of physical fitness and exercise.
100th anniversary of Baltimore Turners (source: Indiana Memory Hosted Digital Collections)
Endnote: while the gym and physical fitness remains central to the societies’ ethos, the modern American Turner clubs have diversified their repertoire of group activities beyond the exclusive practice of gymnastics. The Riverside Turners (New Jersey) for instance offers a range of activities including darts, shuffleboard, horseshoes, basketball and golf, while the Milwaukee Turners provide members looking for something more challenging with rock and ice climbing walls.
Photo: Facebook, Milwaukee Turners
1⃞ unfortunately Jahn’s training regimen which tended towards the militaristic had a downside…it also directly influenced the Nazis and the Hitler Youth movement of the following century [‘A History of Gymnastics, From Ancient Greece to Tokyo 2020’, Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 26-July-2021, www.smithsonianmag.com]
2⃞ in the 1850s the Turners found themselves in bitter conflict with the short-lived, nativist “Know-Nothing” party
3⃞ which contrasts starkly with the record of gender exclusion within the Turnen societies themselves…women were firmly ensconced in a subordinate role as the Turnvereins remained male preserves right up to recent times
4⃞ German culture was submerged under “Apple pie Americanism” with German references in the organisation’s names such as Demokratischer Turnerbund shelved…from 1938 the national movement officially and permanently became “American Turners”
“W”, letter number 23 in the alphabet, traces its genesis to the Semitic letter vaw (as does f, u, v and y), which the ancient Greeks adopted as upsilon. W’s place in the English alphabet came about indirectly via the prior-existing letters “U” and “V”. At first there was no letter “W”, “W” was represented by two consecutive letter U or V …eventually one single character evolved to represent the “W” sound – “W” or “Double-U”. “It’s this history that gives W the longest name of any letter of the English language—and also means that the acronym www uniquely contains three times more syllables than it does letters” (www.mentalfloss.com).
Why Double-U and not Double-V? In print (but not cursive writing) “W” comprises two Vs (VV), so why wasn’t it called “Double-V”? Basically it’s to do with the timing of the letter W’s evolution in Old English. At the time the “W” symbol was created “V” did not exist in that language, so “W” was rendered as “UU”, and so it stayed (‘Why isn’t a W called a double V?’ Grammarphobia (27-Apr-2011), www.grammarphobia.com).
<word> <meaning> <derivation>
Wafture: (cf. Waftage) act of waving or making a wave-like motion; wafting: to convey or carry lightly and smoothly through the air or over water [from LowGer., Dutch wachter, from wachten (“to guard”, the sense of “convey by water”/“escort a ship”) from wafter (“armed convoy vessel”)] 👋
Waggoner (source: National Maritime Historical Society)
Wagtail: an obsequious person; a harlot (origin unknown)
Wale: to choose; the act of choosing(?) (origin unknown)
Wamble: nauseous; walk unsteadily; a staggering gait; wobbling or rolling motion; churning of the stomach [MidEng. wamlen; (“to become nauseated”), from L. vomere (“to vomit”)]
Wergild: fine paid by family of murderer to family of murder victim (“man-price”) [MidEng. wergeld, from OldEng. wer (“man”) + -geld, alteration of gield, geld (“payment”; “tribute”) 💰
Wertfrei: without value judgement; morally neutral [Ger. wert (“worth”) + -frei (“free”)]
Whangam: an imaginary creature [17th cent. neologism coined by Oliver Goldsmith, Anglo-Irish author]
Whipcat: a person who makes, repairs, or altersouter garments, esp menswear; a tailor (slang: a worker “who whips the cat”) (origin unknown)
Whiskerando: a man with extravagant whiskers [Scand. Iceld. visk (“a wisp of hay”); allusion to Don Ferolo Whiskerando in RB Sheridan’s The Critic] (cf. Whiskerine: beard-growing contest)
Widdershins: counterclockwise, anticlockwise; to walk around an object by always keeping it on the left MidLowGer. weddersinnes, (literally “against the way”, i.e. “in the opposite direction”)] cf. Widersinnen: “to go against”)
Wight: nimble; strong; courageous; a supernatural, man-like being [from MidEng. wight or wiȝt, from OldEng. wiht, from Proto-West Germanicwihti]
Wold: a piece of high, open, uncultivated land or moor (Brit.) [OldEng. wald (“wooded upland”) of Germanic origin; perhaps related to wild]
Wondermonger: one who promises miracles; a person who tells of or exploits strange or freakish things [from MidEng. wonder, wunder, from OldEng. wundor (“wonder”; “miracle”; “marvel”), from Proto-West Germanic*wundr + from L. –mangō (“dealer”; “trader”)]
Woonerf: a road in a residential district which has installed devices (eg, traffic calming, low speed limits, shared space) to reduce or slow the flow of traffic (a living street) [Dutch: wonen (“reside”) + erf (“ground”; “premises”) (literally: “living yard” or “residential grounds”)]
Woopie: an affluent retired person able to pursuit an active lifestyle [derived from the acronym “well off older person” (“woop)”]
Gladiator: Gladiatorius, from the Latin, gladius (“sword”)
We’ve all see gladiator movies, right? And most of us have probably seen either the eponymous Gladiator or its celluloid forebear Spartacus, or some inferior version of the cinematic sub-genre. A bunch of armed desperados fighting for their lives in the arena for the pleasure of Caesar and co. On the screen gladiators all seem much of a muchness with some variations of weaponry, but it may surprise some to discover that contrary to the world of movies, in reality there were a whole host of different types or classes of gladiatorial warriors plying their brutal and perilous trade in Ancient Rome.
Spartacus (1960)
The first record of gladiatorial contests in antiquity dates to 264BC and there’s some evidence that the Etruscans were forerunners to the Romans in this combative pastime. By the time of the opening of Rome’s Colosseum (80AD) the gladiatorial games (Munera gladiatoriaⓐ) were a serious business, with prize money and betting on matches the norm. Gladiators served a two-year internship with one of four special arena-schools (ludus) that specialised in training new gladiators of different types. With the fights strict rules and etiquette applied in the arena (pompa), and careful planning went into the bouts. The organisers sought to put on strategic contests with well-matched opponents…these promotions were above all entertainments, and no one involved with the promotions wanted them to end too quicklyⓑ.
Let’s look first at the types of gladiators that we’re probably most familiar with thanks to Hollywood, Cinecittà, etc. before moving on to other ones that film-makers didn’t bother to research. Moviegoers will recognise the lightly-armoured gladiator wearing a manica (arm guard) who fights with a weighted net (rete), dagger (pugio) and three-pointed trident (fuscina or tridens), trying to ensnare his sword-wielding opponent within his net and skewer him. The movies are not big on the typology of gladiators, tending to lump them altogether under the generic name, but this arena net-fighter in the Roman world—resembling and modelled on a fisherman—was called a Retiarus (pl: Retiarii). It would be very unusual for a Retiarus to fight another Retiarus, gladiators of the same class did not normally fight each otherⓒ, it was much more interesting to see a gladiator tests his skill and weapons against an opponent with a distinctly different set of weaponry. In particular Romans were fascinated by the prospect of a lightly-armed gladiator and a heavily-armed gladiator going head-to-head, the former testing his speed and agility against the skill and precision of the latter (Marlee Miller).
Retiarius (Lower right)
Secutor (Bas-relief with secutores. National Museum of Rome, Baths of Diocletian, Rome. 2nd-3rd century AD)
Symbolic battle of the sea The Retiarus would usually be matched, for contrast, against a heavily armed gladiator with a helmet, long sword and shield. This was the Secutor (“follower” or “chaser”)ⓓ or the similar Murmillo. The Secutor held a scutum (large oblong shield) and gladius (short sword, 64-81cm in length) with protection on his right arm and left leg. The full-visor helmet worn by both the Secutor and the Murmillo had a fish-like appearance, imbuing the Retiarus v Secutor/Murmillo contest with the symbolism of a battle between angler and fishⓔ.
Murmillo: Murmillo stands triumphant, in a 4th century CE mosiac from Torrenova, Southern Italy. (Source: Corbis / Getty Images)
The Retiarus seems to have provided the inspiration for another entrapment style of gladiator, the Laquerius (= “snarer”). Laquerii pursued a similar strategy and tactics as the net-man but used a lasso or noose to catch and subdue his opponent. The “snarer” in the illustration below is armed with a trident though his usual weapon would be a poniard or sword. The Veles (= “skirmisher”), armed with a spear, sword and parmula shield, was another lower-level gladiator with a similarly indirect style of fighting.
Laquerius: “The Snarer” (image: escenarys.com)
Barbarian vs Greco-RomanThe Thraex (Thracian) gladiator was a bit of a variation on the Secutor theme…entire head enclosed in a broad-rimmed helmet, a parmula shield (small, circular, lighter but still made of steel), armoured greaves (leg guards) and a Thracian short curved sword (a sica) about 34cm-long. The Thraex was usually up against the Hoplomachus (so-named for his equipment which resembled the Greek hoplite soldier), whereas the Murmilloⓕ tended to be matched with both. The Hoplomachus (“armoured fighter”) wore heavy protective gear and a bronze helmet and was armed with a small concave shield, sword and spear (hasta).
Proto-gladiator The Samnite gladiator (from Samnium in southern Italy), thought to be the first type of Roman arena fighter, was the prototype of the Secutor, Murmillo, etc., with similar apparel and weaponry, short sword, rectangular shield and rimmed helmet. The Samnite was very popular during the Roman Republic, but when Samnium became an important ally of Rome under Augustus, the Samnites stopped featuring in the contests.
Scissor (Tombstone bas-relief to Scissor Muron. Louvre Museum, Paris. 1st–2nd century AD)
There was also the gladiator types who used an unusual weapon, the Scissor…his fighting instrument had two parts, a long tube that protects the gladiator’s arm, and at its end, a thin cylindrical pipe with a crescent-shaped blade. Scissores were often pitted against Retiarii, which could be to his advantage if he could get close enough to cut his opponent’s net with the pincer movement of his open scissors. Another, minor type of gladiator, the Arbelas, utilised a weapon, the Arbelos, which resembled a cobbler’s semi-circular blade.
Gladiator vs the animal kingdomTwo very different types of gladiators shared the arena with captured animals. One type, called Bestiarii (“beast-fighters”) fought wild animals like lions, leopards and bears in the amphitheatres, but with the odds massively stacked against them. As condemned criminals or prisoners-of-war they were basically “thrown at the beasts as punishment or spectacle”, most with nil chance of survival (Encyclopedia Romana). The second, the Venatores (“hunters”) were much more fortunate, they were fully armed and got to hunt down an assortment of beasts.
Venator vs leopard: Roman mosaic, Galleria Borghese, Roma, 4th century AD. (source: Henry Yad Henry/Pinterest)
The Dimachaerus (Greek for “bearing two knives”) fought their opponents (often the Hoplomachus) using two swords (usually a pair of curved scimitars). These ambidextrous gladiators were considered by the elite and the people alike as having low prestige, due to the general disapproval of their method of fighting and reliance on dual weaponry (the sica), which the Roman populace considered sneaky (‘The Roman Guy”).
Other gladiator classes tended to be even more bizarrely left-field – the Andabata gladiator was drawn from the noxii (criminals who had been sentenced to death in the arena). These unfortunates armed with a gladius were forced to fight blindfolded (ie, they wore a helmet which was devoid of any aperture rendering them effectively sightless). The Essendarius romped spectacularly into the arena aboard a war chariot (called an essendum), but whether he immediately dismounted and fought on foot or initially from the chariot is a matter of speculation. The Cestus seems more boxer than gladiator, he had no body armour and his only weapon was a padded glove containing pieces of iron, blades and spikes. The Bustuarius (= “tomb-fighter”) fought not in the arena but about the funeral pyre as part of the ceremony honouring the newly deceased. Accordingly he was given even lower status than other gladiators.
The Crupellarius was a kind of despised apprentice gladiator. He fought weighed down by heavy armour that comprised a “bulky continuous shell of iron”. Historian Tacitus described the Crupellarii “as a contingent of Gaulish, slave, trainee gladiators”, adding that “they were too clumsy for offensive purposes but impregnable in defence” (Book III, 43, 46 in The Annals of Tacitus, Loeb, 1931).
Stone tablet of a pair of gladiatrices (Photo: De Agostini/Getty Images)
Women’s place in the arena?: We’ve seen them, in sexually alluring poses, on cinema screens but did the Gladiatrix (woman gladiator) actually exist in the ancient world? Yes, it seems so! It was very rare and typically met with male censure but there was some Roman gladiatrices who were active in the sport. Sources for the gladiatrix are very threadbare however…historian Cassius Dio makes reference to Emperor Titus permitting female gladiators to perform but on the proviso they were of “acceptably low class”ⓖ (there is however some evidence of elite women, as well as from other classes of Roman society, participating as gladiatrices including as Venatrixes from the 1st century BC). Where they did take part in amphitheatre fights a gladiatrix fought against her own sex – with the single exception mentioned by Cassius Dio, that Emperor Domitian staged night games which pitted gladiatrices against dwarfs.
Sideshow to the main event Gladiatorial combats in the Colosseum, like Shakespeare’s Tragedies, were deadly serious affairs, but like the Tragedies it was considered prudent to include an outlet for comic relief. In the pompa this was provided by performances by the Paegniarii, pseudo-gladiator entertainers who fought “burlesque duels” with blunted or mock weapons, especially during the midday break (‘List of Roman Gladiator Types”). The appearance of dwarf (pumilus) gladiators in the amphitheatres were probably also part of the light entertainment fare for the spectators.
Editor: this was the producer who financed or sponsored the gladiatorial spectacles
Lanista (manager): the owner-trainer of a troop of gladiators (known as a familia); involved active player in the trade of slave-gladiators; rented gladiators to the editor for contest events
Lorarius: an attendant who whipped reluctant combatants or animals into fighting
Rudis: the referee; a senior referee was called summa rudis
𖡒 𖡒 𖡒 𖡒 𖡒
A gladiator who won his freedom was awarded a rudis (“wooden sword”) and was known accordingly as a Rudiarius. Some retired gladiators became trainers or Doctores (“instructors”), assistants or referees. Some gladiators or ex-gladiators hired themselves out as bodyguards for wealthy and important Romans.
Gladiator Mosaic (Panel 4) from Torrenova, Southern Italy
Gladiator movies’ legacy of lingering myths If you were to rely solely on English and Italian language gladiator movies as a representation of historical accuracy you would come to certain conclusions. One would be that all of the arena fighters seemed to be infames, eithercriminals or enslaved “barbarian” prisoners-of-war who were pressed into the profession against their will. Initially this was the case, however by the end of the Roman Republic the demographics had shifted to the extent that volunteer gladiators, known as Auctoritas, comprised half of the amphitheatre fighters (Encyclopedia Romana)ⓗ. A second conclusion to draw from viewing examples of the sub-genre on screen is that gladiators fought to the death and therefore there was a high casualty rate in the arena. The reality was quite different. Sine missio (👎🏼 no mercy given) contests were rare, it was much more common occurrence for bouts to end with a missio outcome (👍🏼 mercy granted). Often economics rather than compassion swayed the outcome, gladiators were a very valuable commodity to the editor/owner and the rich and powerful had a vested interest in protecting their investment (Miller). Historians vary in their estimates of the numbers who died as a result of the combats but the concensusis that it was low. According to Suetonius(Life of Nero, XII. 1), in one full year in Nero’s Campus Martius amphitheatre no one died. It needs to be remembered that the Rome’s gladiatorial games constitutedonly a small window of the year, about 10 to 12 days and that most gladiators only fought about twice in that period (Encyclopedia Romana), which in itself would limit the death toll.
Secutor vs Retiarius (illustration source: forums.taleworlds.com/)
ⓐ Munera gladiatoria was part of the system that required Roman citizens of high status and wealth to provide public works and entertainment for the pleasure of the Rōmānī people
ⓑ for the combatants too, there was no virtue perceived in easily defeating a weaker opponent (Encyclopedia Romana)
ⓒ an exception to this was the Provocator (= “challenger”) who wore heavy legionary armature and fought other Provocatores
ⓓ the Secutor was so named because he would pursue the lightly armed Retiarus – from sequor (“I follow, come or go after”)
ⓔ Retiarii tended to be derided as a type of gladiator—they were seen as an effeminate (low) class because of their indirect fighting style—the net-man was described derogatorily as Retiarius tunicatus (“tunic”), despite the fact that he was one of the most successful gladiators in the arena
ⓕ introduced to replace the Gallus, “barbarian” prisoner-gladiators from Gaul
ⓖ that many Romans thought the gladiatorial profession was suitable only for the lower, especially criminal (infames), classes, is a recurring theme, notwithstanding this some middle-upper class citizens did fight in the arena. Known as Eques, these lightly-armoured knights fought on horseback but were only permitted to pit their skills against other members of the Eques
ⓗ even one Roman emperor, the egocentric Commodus, “volunteered” to participate in the Colosseum gladiatorial combats as a Secutor (and Venator) sparking widespread disapproval among Romans
᯼ ᯼ ᯼ ᯼ ᯼
Reference materials, articles and blogs consulted
‘Types of Gladiators That Fought In The Colosseum’, The Roman Guy, www.theromanguy.com
‘The Roman Gladiator’, Encyclopedia Romana, http://penelope.uchicago.edu
‘Gladiators: Types and Training’, Marlee Miller, The Met, August 2023, www.metmuseum.org
‘5 Famous Ancient Roman Gladiators’, Michael Waters, History, Upd. 07-Jun-2023, www.history.com
‘The Roman Scissor: Gladiator, Weapon, or…? (AKA: Return of the Arbelos’, (Alessandro Bettinsoli), Eleggo.Net, 18-Dec-2016, www.eleggo.net
V (lower case: v) is the twenty-second letter in the Latin alphabet, it appears in the modern English A—Z as well in as the alphabets of other western European languages. Its name in English is pronounced vee. As is the case with its sequential predecessor, “U”, which was the conduit for V’s linguistic journey, “V” ultimately comes from the Phoenician letter waw.The letter “V” in the popular consciousness is forever associated with “victory”, a symbolic nexus forged during the Second World War as a rallying call for the Allies’ war effort. It’s originator, an obscure Belgian politician, largely forgotten by the overarching giantic shadow of the phrase’s populariser, that wallflower of the shrinking violet variety, Sir Winston Churchill, for which the term “V for victory”, along with its accompanying Winnie trademark two-digit gesture, is eternally associated. Again, as with the letter “U”, Latin root words form the nucleus of “V” words in the following list.
<word> <meaning> <derivation>
Vaccimulgence: the milking of cows [L. vacci- (“cow”) + –mulgentia (“milking”)] 🐄 🥛
Vadelect: serving man, part of the household staff; personal servant [L. vadelectus, vad- (“go”) + unknown (?)]
Valetudinarian: a person who is obsessed with some ailment; hypochondriac [L. valēre, (“to have strength”; “to be well.”) + -ian]
Valuta: comparative value of different currencies (USD: AUD, etc) [[L. valēre]
Valuta (source: 123rf.com)
Vaniloquent: speaking only of oneself or speaking egotistically [L. vanus (“vain”) + –loqui (“speak”)]
Vapulate: to beat with a whip [L. vāpulō [Prob. onomatopoeic in its origin, meaning “cry”; “wail”) from which meaning the attested meaning “be beaten, be stricken” evolved]
Veduta: panoramic view of a town; highly detailed, often large scaled painting or print of a cityscape or other vista [It. veduta (“view”)]
Vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time [velli- (unknown?) + -chor (“sing”; “dance”)]
Vellichor (photo: en.japantravel.com)
Velocious: with great speed [L. veloc-, velox (“quick”) + -ious] (cf. Velocipede: swift-footed person)
Velologist: collecting of, study of, buying & selling of vehicle tax discs (UK) [L. velo (unknown?) + -logy]
Velologist
Venator: (also Venerer) hunter; huntsman (cf. Venatrix (Fem.)); (Hist.) a type of Roman gladiator who specialised in hunting wild animals; type of wolf spider 🕷️ [from L. vēnor (“I hunt”) + -tor]
Vendible: capable of being sold [L. vēndere (“to sell”) + -bilis (“capable of being acted upon)”]
Venineman: juror (derivation unknown)
Ventripotent: having a fat belly, or being a glutton [L. ventr-, venter– (“abdomen”) + -potent-, potens, from OldLat. potēre (“to be powerful”)]
Venustaphobia: fear of beautiful women [L. Venus (“Roman goddess of love and beauty”) venust (“beautiful”) + -phobia]
Verbarian: coiner of words[MidLat. verbum (“word”; “verb”) + -arian]
Verbigerate: to continually repeat a word or phrase meaninglessly, usually unconciously [L. verbum (“word”) + -gerare, from gerere (“to carry”)]
Verger: church usher and attendant [L. verge (“rod”; “wand of office”) + -er] ⛪️
Veriloquent: speaking nothing but the truth [L. vērāc– (“true”) + –loqui] (cf. Veridical: veracious; genuine; truthful)
Vernarexia: (also Vernalagnia) a romantic mood brought on by Spring; “Spring Fever” [L. vernal (“spring”) + -orexia (“desire”)]
Vernarexia
Versutiloquent: speaking craftily [ L. versūtus, from vertö, versum (“to turn”) + loqui] (cf. Versute: crafty; wily; artful)
Vertiginous: extremely high or steep; giddy, dizziness (affected by Vertigo) [L. veriginosus, from vertigo (“whirling about”)]
Vertiginous (source: atlasobscura.com)
Vespertine: happening or active in the evening; flourishing or flowering at night [Gk. Hesperus is from (“evening star”) + -ine] (cf. Vesper: evening; the evening star)
Vesthibitionism: the flirtatious display of undergarments by a woman [L. vestimenta, (“clothes or undergarments”) + –exhibeo, (“to show”) +-ism]
Vestigial: a very small remnant of something once greater or more noticeable; rudimentary or degenerate organ/body part [Unknown, possibly from earlier verstīgium, from L. verrō (“to sweep”), or poss. from vē- + stīgō, from Proto-Indo-Europeanstéygeti (“to walk”)]
Vetanda: forbidden things [Vetanda in Sanskritvetanda (? “elephant”)]
Vetust: very ancient [L. vetustus (“old, ancient”)]
Vexillologist: a collector of flags for display [L. vexillum (“flag”) + -logist] 🇧🇷🇧🇮🇬🇱🏴🇨🇽🇺🇬🇨🇼
Viātor: “traveller;” “wayfarer” [from L. via (“track or road”) + -tor] (cf. Viaggiatory: traveling frequently)
Viator: Marco Polo was a viator
Vicennial: occurring every twenty years [LateLat. vīcennium, (“period of twenty years”)]
Vicinage: neighbourhood; residents in a neighbourhood [L. vīcīnus (“neighbour”)]
Victrix: female victor [from L. vincere (“conquer”)]
Victrix (image: lessonplanned.co.uk)
Victualler: one who operates a pub or eatery; supplier of provisions to a naval ship or army; seller of alcohol [L. victus (“food”) + -ler]
Videndum: the thing to be seen [L. vindendus, from videō (“I see”)]
Vigneron: wine-grower 🍷 [from OldFr. vigne, (+ -ron) from L. vīnea (“vines in a vineyard”)]
Vigneron (photo: vigneron-independant.com/)
Vilipend: to treat or regard with contempt; to belittle; to speak slanderously or slightingly of someone [LateLat. vīlipendere, from L. vīlis (“worthless”) + -pendere (“to esteem”)]
Virago: a woman who demonstrates abundant masculine virtues [L. virāgō (“vigorous maiden”) from vir– (“man-like”) + -ago] (cf. Viraginity)
Virgivitiphobia: a fear of being raped [L. virgi (“marriageable girl”?) + -phobia]
Viripotent: fit for a husband; marriageable [L. vir (“man”) + –potens (“fit for”)]
Virvestitism: a preference of some women to wear mens clothing [origin unknown)
Voluptuary: sensualist; person fond of luxury [ LateLat. voluptuārius, from L. voluptārius (“pleasure-seeker”; “agreeable”; “delightful”; “pleasant”; “sensual”), (cf. Volupty: sexual pleasure)
Voraginous: pertaining to something which devours everything [L. vorāginōsus, from vorāgō (“abyss”) + -ous]
Vorago: gulf; chasm; abyss (origin unknown)
Votary: a devoted follower, esp a monk or nun; adherent; a staunch advocate of someone or something else [L. vot (“vowed”) + -ary]
Votary
Vulgus: the common people [L. volvō (“I roll”; “turn over”) (cf. Vulgo: commonly; popularly)
Vulpine: pertaining to foxes; (Literal: crafty; cunning [L. vulpinus, from vulpes (“fox”)] 🦊
The letter “U”, 21st letter and ultima vowel of the Latin alphabet, phonemetically one-half of the letter “W” (“double-U”). “U” derives from the Semitic waw, as does F, and later, Y, W, and V. Pictorially its oldest ancestor goes to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and is probably sourced from a hieroglyph of a mace or fowl, representing the sound [v] or the sound [w]. This was borrowed to Phoenician, where it represented the sound [w], and seldom the vowel [u]. The bulk of the U-words that follow reveal the extent of the debt of their Latin roots.
Ubicity: whereabouts [L. ubi (“where”) + -icity] (cf. Ubique: everywhere)
Ucalegon: neighbour whose house is on fire [eponym from ancient Greek. ~ an Elder of Troy, Ucalegon’s house was set afire by the Achaeans during the sack of Troy (the Iliad; the Aeneid]
Ultraist activism: the upsurge in far-right politics (photo: ft.com)
Ultramontane: south of the Alps; other side of the Alps; a Catholic Church belief that supports the pope’s supreme authority [L. ultrā + -mont-, -mons (“mountain”)]
Ultramontane: the Papal cross-keys, symbolising the Papacy
Ultroneous: pertaining to a witness who testifies voluntarily [L. ultroneus, from ultro (“to the further side, on his part, of one’s own accord”)]
Unasinous: equally as stupid as each other [L. ünus (“one”) + -asinus (“ass”) + -ous]
Undecennial: occurring every eleven years [L. undecim (“eleven”) + –ial]
Undinism: the trait of having erotic thoughts when viewing or contemplating water; an awakening of the libido caused by viewing running water or urine [L. unda (“wave”) -ism]
Undinism (image: theseamossharvest.com)
Unicity: the fact of being or consisting of one, or of being united as a whole; the quality of being unique [L. ūnicitās, ūnicus (“uniqueness”) + -ity]
Unigeniture: the state of being the only begotten (ie, fathering a child into existence) [L. unigenitus (“only-begotten”), from unus (“one”) + –genitum (“to beget”)]
Unipara: a woman who gives birth only the once [unus, unius + –parus (“to produce”)]
Unsinew: to take the strength from [un- + from Old Saxon. sinewa]
Untreasure: to despoil [un- + Gk. thēsaurós, (“treasure house”)]
Unwithdrawing: not withdrawing or retreating”; “lavish or liberal” [un- + MidEng. from with from + drawen (“to draw”)]
Upaithric: roofless; open to the sky [Gk. hypaithros, from hypo- + aithēr (“ether”; air”)]
Upas: poisonous or harmful institution or influence [Indon. Malay pohon upas (“poison tree”)] 🌳
Upas: the highly toxic Upas tree (source: naturespoisons.com)
Uraniscus: roof of the mouth; the palate [Gk. ouranískos, (“ceiling”)]
Uranism: male homosexuality [Gk. ouránios, (“heavenly”; “spiritual”)]
Urinator: a diver, especially someone who searches for things underwater [L. ūrīnātor (“diver”), from ūrīnor (“to plunge under water”; “dive”), poss. from ūrīna (“urine”; water(?))]
Urinator (source: Southeast Texas Scuba)
Ursine: of, like or pertaining to bears [from L. ursus (“bear”)] (cf. Ursiform: having the shape or appearance of a bear)
Urticant: (Path.) causing a stinging or itching sensation; irritating [MedLat. urticant-, urticans, from L. urticare (“to sting”)]
Usance: (orig.) habit; custom; firmly established and generally accepted practice or procedure; use, employment; (obs.) interest [L. ūsant-, from ūsāre (“to use”)]
Usitative: signifying a usual act [L. usitari (“to use often”)]
Usufruct: (Civil Law) the right to use and enjoy something; a limited real right which unites the two property interests of usus (usage of or access to) is the right to use or enjoy a thing possessed, directly and without altering it) and fructus (the right to derive profit from a thing possessed: eg, by selling crops (the “fruits” of production), leasing immovables or annexed movables, taxing for entry, and so on [L. uses et fructus (“use and employment”)] 𓍝
Uxorial: of, like or pertaining to a wife [L. uxōrius (“of or pertaining to a wife; overly fond of one’s wife”) from uxor (“wife”) + -al ] (cf. Uxorious: excessively fond of one’s wife) (cf. Uxorodespotic: morbid domineering by one’s wife; wifely tyranny of her husband ➲ (cf. Maritodespotism: tyrannical rulership of a wife by her husband)
The letter “T”/“t”, in English pronouncedtee, numeroventi (20) in the Latin alphabet, like many of its letters owes its advent to the Phoenicians et al. It derives from the Semitic Taw 𐤕 and Paleo-Hebrew script (Aramaic and Hebrew Taw ת/𐡕/, Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ) and once again the linguistic go-between is the Greek letter τ (tau). Unlike the English “T”, Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The T-words that follow consist of lexemes and morphemes of all shapes and sizes, including the unholy trinity of the trim, the taut and the terrific, not to forget the terras, the teles, the technos, the thermos, the tachys, and a whole lot more!
Tabellary: auditor; carrier of letters [L. tabellārius from tabella (“letter”) + -ārius]
Tabellion: (Hist.) a scrivener under the Roman Empire with some notarial powers; an official scribe or notary public especially in England and New England in the 17th and 18th cent. [from L. tabella + -ion] 🪶
Tabellion: a Roman scribe 📜
Tacenda: things not to be mentioned [from [L. tacëo (“silent;” “shut up”)](cf. Tacent: (“to be silent”; “hold one’s tongue”)
Tachyphrasia: the act of talking very fast [Gk. takhús, (“swift”) + -phrasia (“talk”; “say”)] (cf. Tachyphagia: fast eating) (cf. Tachygraphy: shorthand; literally, “speedy writing” ✍️
Taliped: with a club-foot; with a foot twisted out of shape or position [L. talus (“ankle”) (?) + –ped (“foot”)]
Tambour: (Arch.) sloping buttress wall or fortification [Fr. tambour (“drum”), from Arabic ṭunbūr]
Tantième: share of profits or royalties [Fr. tantième (“percentage”;“proportion”)]
Tapinosis: use of degrading or diminutive diction regarding a topic; undignified language that debases something or someone; deliberately using a base word to diminish a person or thing’s dignity [Gk. tapeinós, (“low”)] (cf. Meiosis – using a euphemism to depreciate an object or thing’s size or significance)
Tarantism: (Psych.) an extreme impulse to dance, esp to overcome a feeling of melancholy [It. tarantismo (from Italian city of Taranto (during (15th-(17th. a spider bite from the tarantula was believed to trigger the dancing mania)] 🕷️
Tarantella, the frenetic dance inspired by Tarantism (source: britannica.com)
Tauromachy: the art or practice of bullfighting [Gk. taurus (“bull”) + –machia (“fight”)] 🐂
Tautochronous: lasting the same amount of time [Gk. tauto (“the same”) + –khrónos (“time”) + -ous]
Tautonym: word composed of two identical words/spellings/sounds (in repetition) eg, paw-paw, yo-yo 🪀[Gk. tautó, (“the same”) + –onuma (“name”)]
Technopole: place where high-technology industries are located; tech hub [Gk. tékhnē, (“skill”) + –pólis (“city”)] (cf. Tectiform: shaped like a roof) (cf. Tectonic: structural component of a building/construction)
Technopole (image: mixcloud)
Telegenic: having an appearance and exhibiting qualities thought to be attractive to televisionviewers [Gk. têle, (“at a distance”; “far off”; “far away”; “far from”) + -genḗs, (“offspring”; “kind”)]
Telekinetic: (Psychic.) supposed skill to move objects at a distance by exercising your mental power only [Gk. têle + –kinēsis (“motion”) from -kinein (“to move”)]
Telos: ultimate object or aim; provides the moral justification [Gk. télos, (“end”; “purpose” or “goal'”)]
Temporality: (Philos.) linear projection of past, present and future; existing within or having some relationship with time; temporal [L. temporālis (“of time”) + –itāt, itās]
Tempore: in the time of; in historical literature, denotes a period during which a person whose exact lifespan is unknown, was known to have been alive or active, or some other date which is not exactly known, usually given as the reign of a monarch [L. tempus (“time”; “period”)] (cf. Temporise: to delay; to procrastinate) 🕰️
Teratology: study of monsters, freaks, abnormal growths or malformations [Greek terat-, téras– (“sign sent by the gods”; “portent”;“marvel”; “monster”) + –logie (“-logy”)] (cf. Teratoid: resembling a monster) (cf. Teramorphous: of abnormal or monstrous form)
Teratology (credit: GregLuzniakArt/Etsy)
Terdiurnal: three times per day [L. ter (“thrice”) + LateLat. –diurnalis “daily”)
Terebration: a pain that feels as though a drill is boring through some body part [L. terebro, (“to bore”) + -ion]
Tergal: of, like or pertaining to the back; (Zool.) relating to the terga of an arthropod [L. terga (“the back”)]
Termagant: a violent, nagging, brawling woman; a shrew [MidEng. termagaunt, earlier tervagaunt, alteration of OldFr. tervagan (“name of the imaginary deity”)]
Terraneous: of, like or pertaining to the earth [L. terrenum (“land”; “ground”), from terra (“earth”) + -ous] (cf. Terrigenous: produced on land; produced by the land)
Terremotive: (Geology) relating to an earthquake; seismic [L. terra (“earth”) + –mōtus (“movement”)]
Terremotive (Diagram: worldatlas.com)
Terrisonant: having a terrible sound [L. terrëo (“frighten”; “terrify”; “scare away” + -ant]
Tessaraglot: a person who is capable of speaking in four languages [Gk. téssara (“four”) + –glôssa (“tongue”)] 👅
Tessellation: fitting together exactly; leaving no spaces; surface tiling with no gaps or overlays [L. tessella (“small square”) from Gk. tessera, (“four”)]
Tessellation (source: tilewizards.com.au)
Tesserarian: of, like or pertaining to games of dice [Gk. tessera + -ian] 🎲
Testicond: having the testes concealed within the body [L.testis (“testis”) + –condere (“to hide”)]
Thalassic: marine; of seas; of inland seas [Gk. thalassa (“sea”)] (cf. Thalassography: science of the sea) 🌊
Thaumaturgic: performer of miracles, esp a magician or a saint [Gk. thaumatourgós (“performer of wonders (as an acrobat”) + -ia– y]
Theandric: divine and human at the same time [Gk. theandros (“God-man”)]
Thelemite: one who does as he or she pleases; libertine [Fr. thélémite, from L’Abbaye deThélème, imaginary abbey with the motto “Do as you please” in Gargantua (1535) by François Rabelais (1553) + -ite] (cf. Thelemic: allowing people to do as they wish [Gk. thelema (“will”) + -ic)
Thelemite: L’Abbaye de Thélème, Rabelais’ fictional “anti-monastery”
Thelyotokous: having only female offspring [Gk. thêlus, “female”) + –tókos, (“birth”)]
Theologaster: petty or shallow theologian [Gk. theológos, (“one who talks about the gods”; “theologian”) + L. –aster (“inferior”; “shallow”, etc.)
Theotherapist: faith-healer; treatment of illness or disease by prayer and other religious exercises [Gk. theó, (“god”) + -therapeía, “(service”; “medical treatment”)]
Thereology: the art of healing; therapeutics [Gr. therein=therapeuein, (“totendthesick”) + -logy]
Theriacal: (Medic.) of, like or pertaining to antidotes [Gk. thēriakḕ, “of or related to poisonousreptiles”), from thēríon, “littlebeast”) from thḗr + -al]
Therianthropic: combining human and animal forms [Gk. thērianthrōpos (“beast-man”)]
Theriatrics: the science of veterinary medicine [Gk. thḗr, (“wild beast”) + iatrós, (“doctor”)]
Thesmothete: law-giver; (Hist.) a juniorarchon or magistrate responsible for legislation in Ancient Greece [from Gk. thesmothétēs]
Thirdborough: petty provincial constable [MidEng. thridborro, probably by folk etymology, from frithborg (“frankpledge”)]
Thooid: resembling a wolf; (Zool.) relating to an obsolete group of carnivores including wolves, dogs and jackals [Gk. thōs jackal + -oid]
Threnody: a lament for the dead (poem, speech, song) [Gk. thrēnōidia, from thrēnos, (“dirge”)]
Threpterolagnia: A lust for female nurses [Gk. threptero(?) + –lagnia (“coitus”; “lust”)]
Thyestean: cannibalistic [from Greek mythology, Thyestes, a king of Olympia, was served his own children’s flesh by his vengeful twin brother Atreus as revenge for adultery]
Thygatrilagnia: an incestuous desire by a father for his own daughter [Gk. thygatro (“daughter”) + –lagnia]
Tibialoconcupiscent: having a lascivious interest in watching women put on stockings [L. tibia (“shinbone”?) + -lo (?) + –concupiscēns, –concupiscere (“to conceive an ardent desire for”)]
Timbromaniac: an avid stamp collector; a passionate philatelist [Fr. from timbre (“postage stamp”) + -o- + -mania]
Timbromaniac (credit: istockphoto.com)
Tirocinium: a soldier’s first battle; military baptism of fire [L. tirocinium (“first military campaign”; “inexperienced raw recruit”; “first attempt”]
Tmesis: a word compound that is divided into two parts, with another word infixed between the parts for emphasis, thus constituting a separate word compound, eg, “Absar—bloody—lutely!”; “in—fucking—credible!” [Gk. tmēsis (“a cutting”) from temnō, (“I cut”)]
Tolutiloquent: pertaining to a smooth talker, characterised by fluency or glib utterances [L. tolutim, “trotting along”) + –loqui (“speak”)]
Tomecide: the act of “murdering” or destroying a book, esp by the act of book burning [Gk. tomḗ + -cide]
Tomecide: Book burning by the Pinochet regime after the 1973 coup in Chile
Toponym: (Onomastics) a name by which a geographical place is known or a word derived from a place name or from a topographical feature eg, cashmere from Kashmir, lima beans from Lima [Back-formation from toponymy Gk. topos (“place”) + -nym] (cf. Toponymics: the study of place names)
Toxophilite: archer; fond of or an expert in archery [Gk. toxon, (“bow and arrow”) + -phil + -ite]
Toxophilite (source: allkpop.com)
Tranch: a portion (literally: slice) of something [OldFr. trenche, (“slice”)]
Tritavia: (Ancient Rome) the female ascendant in the sixth degree; the great grandmother of one’s great grandmother; the mother of either an atavus or atavia [L. trēs (“three”) + –avus (“(“grandfather;” “uncle”)] (cf. Tritavus: great grandfather of one’s great grandfather)
Tropoclastics: the science of breaking habits [Gk. trope᷄ (“a turning”) + -klastos (“shattered”) from –klan (“to break”)
Tuism: apostrophe; reference to or regard to a second person [L. tu (“thou”) + -ism]
Turgescence: act or process of swelling; swollenness [L. turgescent-, turgescens, turgescere (“to swell”)] (cf. Tumefy: to swell)
Turnverein: (Hist.) (19th-(20th. German-American association of gymnasts (members called “turners” promoted German culture, physical culture, and liberal politics); athletic club [Ger. turnen (“to practice gymnastics”) + verein (“club”; “union”) ]
“S” is the 19th letter of the Latin alphabet. Pronounced [ess] the letter is a veritable wellspring of onomatopoeic worddom – (alliterative indulgence follows for effect) sizzling, screeching, slithering, swaying snakes alive! As with other entries in the sequence, the symbol corresponds to the Semitic sin (“tooth”). The cool shape of the Latin “S” came about from the Greek Σ (sigma) by dropping one out of the four strokes of that letter. The (angular) S-shape composed of three strokes existed as a variant of the four-stroke letter Σ already in the epigraphy in Western Greek alphabets, and the three and four strokes variants existed alongside one another in the classical Etruscan alphabet. Trust the ‘truscans to always bob up in the linguistic story somewhere! In other Italic alphabets (Venetic, Lepontic), the letter could be represented as a zig-zagging line of any number between three and six strokes. The lower-case “s” used to be rendered as ∫¹ (sometimes called a medial S or a “long-s”) and looking more like a fancy f sans the cross stroke) but this went of vogue in English sometime in the 18th century and was eventually phased out like pounds, shillings and pence. Neato!
____________________
¹ sometimes written with a slight cursive tilt to the left
<word> <meaning> <derivation>
Sabulous: sandy; gritty; growing in sandy places [L.sabulosus, from sabulum (“sand”)]
Saccadic: a rapid movement of the eye between fixation points; jerky; twitching [OldFr. saquer (“to pull”)]
Sadogue: fat; easy-going person (origin unknown))
Salsipotent: ruling the salt seas; having the power of/over the sea (ref. to Neptune, Roman god of the sea [L. salsipotentem (as if from salsum (“salt”), (a false reading for salipotentem, from salum (“salt water”) + -potentem (“potent”)]
Neptune, salsipotent of the seas (image: empirerome.com)
Sargasso: a mass of floating vegetation, especially sargassums (seaweed); gulfweed [from Port. sargaço (flowering plant related to the rockrose)] originally from L. salicastrum (“kind of wild vine found in willow-thickets”) ➾ Sargasso Sea (tract of still water with masses of thick seaweed in Nth Atlantic) ➾ which is prob. the source of Sargasso’s second meaning: a confused, tangled mess or situation]
Sarmassant: pertaining to sexual caressing or any such form of love-making (origin unknown) (cf. Sarmassate: to make love by handling, fondling or squeezing organs and tissues of a female)
Sartorial²: of or relating to a tailor or tailored clothes; (broadly) of or relating to clothes [L. sartor (“tailor”) + -ial]
Sarwan: a person who drives and guides a camel [Pers. sārwān, from sār (“camel”) + -wān (“keeping”; “guarding”)] 🐫
Satisfice: to aim for or achieve that which will suffice; (Heuristics) a decision-making strategy that aims for a satisfactory or adequate result, rather than the optimal solution [blend of satisfy and suffice]
Satrapess: A female satrap; an official who acts like a petty tyrant [from satrap Gk. satrápes, from OldPers.khshathapavan (literally “protector of the province”) + -ess]
Saturnalian: riotously merry or orgiastic; behaviour like the Saturnalia: an ancient Roman holiday/festival honouring Saturn, the god of seed-sowing, a time of jovial merrymaking with many social norms were relaxed and inverted; riotous merry-making [L. Saturn (Roman god of agriculture among other things)]
Scamander: to take a winding course; to meander [Gk.from Skamandros (also called Xanthos), a river god in Greek mythology. Origin uncertain ➠ poss. from skázō (“to limp”; “to stumble (over an obstacle)”) or from skaiós (“left(-handed”; “awkward”)]
Scamander River (Türkiye)
Scanderoon: homing pigeon (origin unknown)
Scansorial: relating to, capable of, or adapted for climbing [L. scansus + -orius -ory) + –al]
Scapegrace: an incorrigible rascal; a mischievous or wayward person, esp a child [Eng. scape (Literally) one who escaped the grace of god]
Scaphism: form of execution (alleged relating to ancient Persia) by covering someone in honey and abandoning him in the sun or leaving him tethered between two boats [Gk. skaph (“boat”) + -ism]
Scazon: : a classical verse with a limping or halting movement; limping verse [Gk. skázō (“I limp”)]
Schesis: deriding an opponent’s argument by referring to his or her way of thought; mocking the habitude of an adversary [Gk. skhésis, (“state”; “condition”; “attitude”)]
Schoenobatist: a tight-rope walker [origin unknown(?) poss. from MidDutch. schoe, (“shoe”; “footwear”)]
Schoenobatist
Sciapodous: having large feet [Gk. Skiapodes, from skia (“shadow”) + -pod-, -pous (“-foot”) + -ous] (cf. Sciapods: (aka Monopods) (Greek mythology) a tribe of one-legged, giant-footed Libyan (some references say Ethiopian or Indian) men whose foot was so big they could raise it in the air to provide shade against the hot southern sun)
Sciapodous: the Sciapods/Monopods
Scholarch: head of a school; (Hist.) the leader of an Athenian school of philosophy [LateGk. scholarchēs (“scholar”)] school 🏫
Scible: that which is knowable (origin unknown)
Scientaster: a petty or inferior scientist [L. sciēns (“knowing”), from sciō (“know”) + -aster] 👨🔬
Sclerotic: grown rigid or unresponsive especially with age; unable or reluctant to adapt or compromise; hardening (eg, of emotions) [Gk. sklērōtos, from sklēroun (“to harden”)]
Scoliotropism: a diminished desire to attend school [origin uncertain(?), Gk. skoliós (“crooked”) + –tropḗ, (“turn”); “solstice”; “trope”) + -ism] ✎ᝰ.📖
Scolist: (someone) who pretends to have more knowledge than they really do; a superficial show of learning [LateLat. sciolus (“smatterer”; “pretender to knowledge” from L. scius “possessing knowledge”; “expert”) derivative of scīre (“to know”) —perhaps as back-formation from nescius (“ignorant”)— + –ist]
Scopophile: a person whose sexual pleasure is derived from watching others in a state of nudity, undressing, or engaging in sexual activity; (Psych.) one with a sexual dependency on openly observing genitalia and sexual acts (distinguished from a voyeur who watches in secret) [Gk. skopós, “watcher”) + -phile] 👁️👁
Scortation: fornication; lewdness [L. scorṯarī (“to consort with or like a harlot”)]
Scriniary: archives-keeper; archivist [from L. scriniarius “keeper of the scrinium” (“chest or box for keeping books, papers, letters”, etc)]
Scriniary: on the records (source: planitplus.net)
Scriptory: by, in or pertaining to writing [L. scriptorius, from scriptus, scribere (“to write”) + -orius (“-ory”)] (cf. Scripturient: having a violent desire to write) 📝 ✍️
Scurrier (also sp. Scurriour): a scout (origin unknown, possibly French)
Sebastomania: religious insanity [Gk. sebastos, “reverenced”; “mania”; madness”) + -mania]
Sectiuncle: a little or petty sect [nebulous etymology: L. secare (“cut”)(?) + –uncle (“small”; “little”)]
Secundogeniture: custom where second-oldest child inherits property; a dependent territory given to a younger son of a princely house and his descendants [L. secundus (“following”; “second”) + –genitus (“born”)] (cf. Tertiogeniture: third-oldest child is a beneficiary (rarely applied))
Sederunt: sitting of an ecclesiastical court (in Scotland); gathering; long discussion (cf. Sedent: seated or inactive) [L. from sedēre (“to sit”)]
Sedulous: accomplished with careful perseverance (craftsmanship); diligent in application or pursuit [L. sedēre (“meaning”; “to sit”) + -ous]
Selenic: of, like or pertaining to the Moon [Gk. selḗnē, (“moon”)] 🌒
Semelincident: (of a disease or ailment) occurring only once in the same individual [[L. semel, (“once”), + -incido, (“to happen”), from cado, (“to fall”)] (cf. Semelparous: reproducing only once in its lifetime)
Sempervirent: evergreen; always fresh [L. semper (“always”) + –virent, -virēre (“to be green”)]
Sempiternal: of never-ending duration; eternal [L. from semper + –æternus (“eternal”)]
Sempster: (also Seamster) a man who sews; tailor [OldEng. seamestre “sewer”; “tailor”; ”person whose work is sewing”)]
Senectitude: old age [L. senectus (“aged”; “old age”), senex (“old”)] (cf. Senectuous: very old)
Senient: conscious; perceiving; able to perceive or feel things [L. sentient-, sentiens, (“to perceive”; “feel”)]
Septentrional: to the north; northern [L. From septem (“seven”) + –triō (“plow”; “ox”)]
Septimanal: weekly [L. septi- + -manal(?)]
Sequacious: ready to follow a leader or authority; (pliant) compliant; tractable [L. sequac-,sequax– (“inclined to follow”) from sequi, (“to follow”) + -ous]
The sequacious will inherit a leader (photo source: esquire.com)
Seraglio: harem [It. serraglio, modification of Turkish saray (“palace”)]
Sermuncle: a little sermon [L. sermo, sermonis—serĕre, (“to join”) + –uncle]
Sesquipedalian: (of a word) polysyllabic, long [L. sesquipedalia verba (“words a foot and a half long”) from sesqui- (“one and a half times”)]
Sexdigitated: (Med.) six-fingered or -toed [L. sex, six, + -digitus, finger or toe]
Sexotropic: obsessed with sex [L. sexus + –tropḗ]
Shenango: a casually employed dock worker [probably from the Chenango river and canal in south-central New York state]
Shunamitism: (Med./Psych.)) the rejuvenation of an old man by sleeping with a young woman, although not necessarily having sex with her [from Hebrew. Shunem (small village mentioned in the Pentateuch) + -ite]
Sialoquent: spitting or emitting saliva excessively while speaking [blend of sialic + –eloquent, from Gk. (“síalon”; “spittle”; “saliva”)]
Sibylline: characteristic of a sibyl (a pagan female oracle); prophetic; oracular; mysterious [Gk. Síbulla + -ine]
Sibylline: a matter of sybils
Sicarian: murderer; assassin (origin unknown)
Siffleur: whistler, esp an animal (such as the whistling marmot) that makes a whistling noise [Fr. siffler (“to whistle”) + -eur -or] (cf. Siffilate: to talk in a whisper)
Signate: distinct; distinguished; designated; identified; having markings like letters [L signatus, signare (“to mark”; “seal”; designate”)]
Significs: (Semiotics.) science of meaning [L. from significare (“to indicate”; “signify”) from signum (“sign”)]
Sillograph: one who writes satires; a satirist [Gk. from Sílloi (satirical poem) of Timon of Phlius, (circa 280BC) + -graph; etymology uncertain, poss. relating to “silhouette”]
Simous: having a flat; upturned nose [L. simus (“snub-nosed”)]
Skoptsy: self-castration [from Rus. skopets (“castrate”) (the Skoptsy were a Christian Spiritualist sect during the Russian Empire who practised male castration and female mastectomy in accordance with their beliefs]
Smellfungus: a person who finds faults with everything; a grumbler; a complainer [after Smelfungus, a hypercritical traveler in Laurence Sterne’s 1768 novel A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy]
Smellfungus
Sociogenesis: origin of human societies[NewLat. from socio- + L. genesis]
Soldatesque: soldierlike; soldierly [from It. soldatesco]
Somnambulist: a person who walks about in their sleep; a sleepwalker [from L. somnus (“sleep”) + –ambulō (“to walk”)] (cf. Somniloquent: someone who talks in their sleep) (cf. Somnophile: someone who’s sexually aroused by the sight of sleeping or unconscious people) (cf. Somnifacient: sleep-inducing ⟺ Somnorific: causing sleep; soporific)
Soubrette: coquettish and intriguing maid; a female theatrical role in opera and drama [from L. superare (“be above”)]
Spadassin: swordsman; fighter [from It. spadaccino (“swordsman”)]
Zorro was a master spadassin
Specious: superficially plausible but actually wrong; having deceptive attraction or allure [L.speciosus, (“beautiful”); “plausible,”)]
Sphairist: (cf. Sphairistikè: game that evolved into “tennis”) tennis-player [Gk. sphairistike techne, (“the skill of playing with a ball” (coined by Maj. Walter Wingfield (1874) inventor of a form of modern tennis incorporating aspects of earlier ball and racket games Badminton and Rackets)
Sphairist: Lawn tennis player from the pioneering era (photo source: Getty Images)
Splenetic: bad-tempered; malevolent; spiteful [L. splen, (“bodily organ responsible for storing and filtering blood”)]
Stagiary: a resident canon; a law student [MedLatin. stagium, estagium (“term of residence”) + –arius (“ary”)]
Stallenger: (Hist.) keeper of a markets stall (Scotland (18th.) [OldScots. stallangear, from O.Fr. estalagier, (“one who pays stallage, a stall-tax at a fair”)]
Stasiology: study of political parties [Gk. stasis (“faction”; “discord”) + -ology]
Sthenolagnia: sexual arousal from displays of strength or muscles [Gk. sthénos (“moral or emotional strength”; “might”; “power”)+ -lagnia (“lust”)]
Stochastic: of, like or pertaining to a sequence of random events; having a random probability distribution [Gk. stochastikos (“skillful in aiming”) from stochazesthai (“to aim at”; “guess at”) from stochos (“target”; “aim”; “guess”)] 🎲
Stomatiferous: having an orifice or mouth [Gk. stóma (“mouth”) + –ferous (“bearing”)]
Storiograph: writer of folk tales [LateLat. storia from L. historia (“history”; “account”; “tale”; “story” (+ Gk. –graphia (“writing”)]
Stratocrat: a military ruler; despot [Gk. stratos (“an army”)] (cf. Stratonic: of or relating to an army)
Struthious: of, relating to, or resembling the ostrich or related ratite birds [from Gk. strouthos (“ostrich”)] 𓅦
Suggilate: to beat until bruised [L. suggillo (“to beat until bruised”)]
Supernaculum: drink to the last drop; wine or alcohol so good you want to drink to the last drop; (Hist.) a drinking game [from L. super (“over”; “on”) + NewLat. nagulum, naculum (“nail”) from German nagel (“fingernail”)]🍷🗿
Sybarite: person devoted to pleasure and luxury; hedonist [Gk. Subarī́tēs, (“inhabitant of Sybaris (city in Magna Graecia (ancient Italy); (adj.) (“decadent”; “self-indulgent”)]
“Lux” lifestyles of the ancient Sybarites (image: calabria-mediterranea.tumblr.com/)
Symmachy: an alliance of disparate parties fighting jointly against a common enemy [Gk. sym (“with”) + –machy (“fight”)]
Symposiarch: (Hist.) master of a feast (Ancient Greece); a master of ceremonies [Gk. from symposium ➠ sumpósion, (“drinking party”) + -arch] (cf. Symposiast: someone engaged in banqueting and merrymaking with others; a fellow-drinker)
² “Sartorial”, specifically the phrase “sartorial elegance” became such a cliche in the 1970s that it almost doesn’t qualify to be a compendium of obscure and unusual words – except for the fact that its usage as a stock phrase has greatly diminished now
“R” is the 18th letter of the modern Latin Alphabet. It corresponds to the ancient Semiticresh and is perhaps derived from an earlier hieroglyph representing a human head. From the Egyptian symbol the letter evolved into a triangular flag shape and then to a rounded “P” under Greek influence, before the descending, angled stroke of “R” was added in the 3rd century BC, giving the letter the form we recognise today. The standard English pronunciation is ar. R-words can be fun and surprising – “r” is the letter of the dictionary we turn to when we decide to open the dictionary at random! Or they can be positive and uplifting – why else would we describe a day that signifies a special significance or opportunity to us as a “red-letter day”?
<Word> <Meaning> <Derivation>
Rabelaisian: coarsely humorous; bawdy; ribald [after Francois Rabelais, (16th cent. French writer and satirist]
Rabelaisian: Rabelais’ most famous comic novels (Gargantua and Pantagruel)
Rebus: picture puzzle representing a word (a combination of a picture and an individual letter prompts a particular word) [from L. res (“thing”)]
Rebus: (playbill.com)
Reciprocornous: (Zool.) having horns that turn backward and then forward (like a ram’s) [L. poss. from re- (“back”), prō(“forwards”) and -que (“and”)╰┈➤ (“back and forth”) + -ous]
Recondite: out of the way; little known or obscure; difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend [L. from recondere, [“to conceal”)]
Rectigrade: moving or proceeding in a straight line or course [L. rectus (“straight”) + -gradus (“step”)]
Rectopathic: one who is easily hurt emotionally [L. rectus + –pathic (“suffering”)]
Recumbent: lying down; representing a person (or effigy) lying down [L. re– (“back”; “again”) + -cumbere, “to lie down”]
Recumbentibus: a knockout blow, either verbal or physical [L. recumbent-, recumbens + -ibus (?)] 🥊
Resipiscent: (Literary) acknowledgment that one has been mistaken; to learn from experience and have one’s sanity restored; a change of mind or heart (often prompting a return to a sane, sound, or correct view or position) [LateLat. resipiscere (“to recover one’s senses”; from L. “sapere (“to know”)]
Redact: edit for publication, esp censoring or obscuring part of a text for legal or national security reasons [L. redigō (“to lead back, collect, prepare, reduce to a certain state”)] (cf. Redactophobe: someone who has a fear of editing or editors)
Redact: the editor strikes through ✍️ (photo: alamy)
Remontado: a person who lives in the forest or mountains and avoids civilisation [Spanish. remontado (“to flee or go back to the mountains”)]
Rittmaster: captain of a troop of horse (cavalry) [part. transltn. of German rittmeister, from ritt (“troop of horsemen”) from reiten (“to ride”), from Old High German rītan + -meister (“master”)]
Rittmaster
Rixatrix: a scolding or quarrelsome woman; a common scold [L. rixārī (“to quarrel”) + –trix (Latinate fem. agent noun)]
Rurigenous: one who has been born in the country [L. rus, ruris (“the country”) + –genere, –gignere (“to bring forth”; “to be born”)]
Rusticate: go, live in the country for a time; live a rustic life [L. rūsticor (“live in the countryside”)] (cf. Rusticity: rustic manner; simplicity; rudeness)
Ruth: (also Ruthful) a feeling of pity, distress or grief [Hebrew. Ruth (“friend” or “companion”) Biblical figure (Old Testament)]
“Q”, (pronounced cue), is the 17th letter of the alphabet. The letter is from the Phoenician equivalent of Hebrew koph, qoph, which was used for the deeper and more guttural of the two “k” sounds in Semitic. The letter existed in early Greek (where there was no such distinction), and called koppa, but it was little used and not alphabetized; it mainly served as a sign of number (90). Correspondingly, the root base of English Q-words is uniformly Latin and characterised by the total absence of Greek prefixes and suffixes, which is in sharp contrast to other letters. The form of the letter “Q” could have been based on the eye of a needle, a knot, or even a monkey with its tail hanging down… /q/ is a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in many European languages. One view is that the form of the letter “Q” is even more ancient: it could have originated from Egyptian hieroglyphics. And “Q”, like “M” before it, is of course a character in the never-ending James Bond franchise.
<Word> <Meaning> <Derivation>
Qua: in the capacity of [Latin. qua “which way”; “as”. From qui (“who”)]
Quab: something unfinished or immature (origin unknown)
Quacksalver: one who falsely pretends to knowledge of medicine
Quadratary: relating to a square [L. quadrātus from quadrō (quadrat),(“make square”) + -ary] (cf. Quadrate: to make square; to make to agree)
Quadrigamist: someone who has been married four times or is married to four people simultaneously (polygamy?) [L. from quattuor (“four”) + -gam (“married”) + -ist]
Quadriliteral: relating to a word with four letters; a 4-letter word [L. quadri + –littera, –litera (“a letter”)] (cf. Quadrilateral: a four-sided figure)
Quaestuary: seeking money or trying to make money; concerned with profit 💰[L. quaestus , quaerere (“to seek”; “gain”; “ask”) + -arius (“ary”)] (cf. Quomodocunquize: to make money by any means possible)
Quaestor: (Hist.) magistrate; a medieval pardoner (in ancient Rome an official in charge of public revenue and expenditure) [L. quaestor (“investigator”); quaesit (“submit”)]
Temple of Saturn, site of the Roman Treasury, workplace of the Quaestor
Qualtagh: first person you meet after leaving the house; first person you meet on New Year’s Day [from Manx. quaaltagh, cognate with Old Irish. com (“co”) + -dál (“meeting”)] 🏠
Qualtrayle: one’s great, great, great grandfather (origin unknown)
Quantophrenia: obsessive reliance on statistics and mathematical results [LateLat. quantitātīvus (“quantity”) + –phrḗn (“mind”) + -ia]
Quantophrenia (image: proprofs.com)
Quantulum: a very small quantity [L. quantus (“how much”) + -lum]
Quaquaversal: facing or bending all ways [L. quaquaversus (“turned wheresoever”)]
Quassation: act of shaking or being shaken [L. quassō (“shake repeatedly or violently”) + -tiō]
Quatch in Shakespeare
Quatch: a word, a sound; squat, plump (Shakespeare) (origin unknown) (cf. Sasquatch: (in Canadian folklore) a hairy beast or manlike monster said to leave huge footprints)
Quarternity: fourness; any set of four things [L. quattuor (“four”) + -ity]
Quean: a lewd woman; hussy; an impudent or badly behaved female of ill-repute [Old English. cwene (from “queen”)]
Querulant: (Psych. & Legal) a person who obsessively feels they have been wronged, particularly about minor cases of action [L. querulus (“complaining”)] (NB: a Querimony is a complaint) (cf. Querent: one who asks a question)
Questmonger: one whose occupation is to conduct inquests [L. quaesta (“tribute”; “tax”; “inquiry”; “search”) + –mangō (“dealer”; “trader”)]
Quickhatch: a woverine [from East Cree (Algonquian language) kwi˙hkwaha˙če˙w]
Quidditch: fictional sport for broomstick-riding mavens in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy book series [NB: the etymology of “quidditch” long predates Harry Potter, poss. derives from Anglo-Saxon cwæō-dīc (“mud-ditch”)]
Quidditch (source: Forbes.com)
Quiddity: (also Quidditative) eccentric; quirky; unique essence; (a sort of “x-factor” — whatever makes something the type that it is) [MedLat. quidditat-, -quidditas (“essence”) from L. quid (“what”) neuter of quis (“who”) + -ity]
Quidfather: father-in-law (origin unknown)
Quidnunc: an inquisitive and gossipy person; a person who always wants to know what’s going on (the latest news and gossip) [L. quid nunc (“what now?”)]
Quincaillerie: hardware store [Fr. clincaille, akin to clinquer (“clink”)]
Quindecad: set of fifteen things [L. quīnque (“five”) + –decem (“ten”)]
Quinquagesimal: consisting of 50 days; a 50-day period [MedLat. quinquagesima + -al]
Quisling: a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying his country; a “puppet” leader propped up by an invading foreign power [after Vidkun Quisling, Norwegian military officer, Nazi Germany’s puppet ruler of Norway during their WWII occupation]
Quisling (source: norwegianamerican.com (drawing by Stig Höök))
Quisquous: difficult to deal with or settle; perplexing; (of a person) of dubious character (origin unknown)
Quixotic: extravagantly and romantically chivalrous; enunciator of wildly impractical, lofty ideals to the point of being ludicrously out of touch with reality [after Don Quixote, eponymous protagonist of Cervantes’ The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha (publ. 1605)]
Quixotic: the daydreaming Don
Quizzacious: satirical; mocking [Eng. quiz (“to mock”), poss. from L. qui es? (“who are you?” + -acious]
Quodlibertarian: a person who is happy to discuss any subject at pleasure [L. quodlibet (lit. “that which is pleasing”) + -arian]
“P” is numerus XVI in the English alphabet letter of sequence. The letter has a special place in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)…the symbol ⟨p⟩ represents a type of consonantal sound used in most spoken languages, the voiceless bilabial plosive or stop (sometimes called the unvoiced labial stop). “P” corresponds to the Semitic pe, perhaps deriving from an earlier sign for “mouth.” The early Greeks renamed this form pi(Π). The rounded shape of the “P”(“p”) is thought to be a Latin borrowing from the ancient Etruscan language. Another feature of the letter p is its use in combination with h in words of Greek origin to denote the unvoiced labiodental spirant expressed in other words by the letter f—e.g., philosophy, phonetics, and graphic (www.britannica.com)
{word} | {definition} | {derivation}
Padrone: (in Italy) an innkeeper; employer, esp one who exploits immigrant workers [It. (“protector”; “owner”) from L. patronus (“patron”)]
Pagophagia: the eating of ice [Gk. pagos (“frost”) + phagō (“to eat”)] 🧊
Palzogony: foreplay; love-play (origin unknown, It. ?)
Pancratic: accomplished all-rounder, good at many sports or games; having a mastery over numerous subjects) [Gk. pankratḗs, “all-powerful”) + -ic]
Pangloss: one who is optimistic regardless of the circumstances [Gk. pan (“all”) + –glossa (“tongue”) from the character “Pangloss”, optimistic tutor in Voltaire’s Candide (1759)] (cf. Panglossian: excessively optimistic; marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds)
Pangloss
Pannapictagraphist: collector of comic books (origin unknown)
Pannapictagraphist
Panoply: a collection or assortment of things; an impressive or extensive array [Gk. panoplia (“full suit of armour worn by hoplite warriors in Ancient Greece”) ]
Pantagamy: married to everybody: practice of intra-communal marriage of all members to each other in some proto-communistic societies such as in certain Amerindian tribes [Gk. pan + -gam + -ic]
Paraethesia: a prickly feeling one gets when your limbs fall asleep; a sensation of “pins and needles” [L. para- (“alongside”, “irregular”; ie, “disordered”) + -aisthēsis (“perception”; “feeling”)] 📍 🪡
Paralian: a person who lives near the sea [Gk. parálios, (“coastal”; “maritime”)] 🌊
Paralipsis: (also called Apophasis) a rhetorical device whereby the speaker emphasises the point they are trying to make by (calculated) denial…example: “I’m not saying that…“ (assertion). By merely suggesting it, they are inferring that it is in fact the case; the ploy involves drawing attention to some issue by denying that you talking about it [Gk. pará, (“by”; “near”) + -leípō, (“I leave”)]
Donald Trump, grandmaster of the artifice of Paralipsis (photo: The Globe and Mail)
Paramnesia: (psych.) a disorder prompting someone to recall events that never happened [Gk. par, para (“beside”; “next to”) + -mnesia (“memory”)]
Paranymph: the best man or bridesmaid at a wedding; a ceremonial assistant or coach to the best man/bridesmaid at a wedding [Gk. para- + -nymphē. (“bride”)]
Parapraxis: a memory lapse, a slip of the tongue, usually revealing a hidden thought (“Freudian slip”) 👅 [Gk. para– + –praxís (“doing”)]
Parateresiomaniac: a compulsive voyeur 👁️ 👁️ [Gk. para + -teresio(?) + -maniac]
Parergon: a piece of work that is supplementary to or a by-product of a larger work [Gk. párergos, (“beside the main subject”; “subordinate”; “incidental”)]
Parthenolagnia: the desire to copulate with virgins [ Gk. parthenos (“maiden”; “virgin”) + –lagneía (“sexual intercourse, -lasciviousness”)]
Partialism: (psych.) a sexual fetish with an exclusive focus on a specific part of the body other than genitals [L. pars (“part”) + -ism] (cf. Paraphilia: a form of sexual arousal caused by objects, situations, or targets that are considered atypical or not of the norm)
Pauciloquent: using a few words as possible when speaking [L. paucus (“little”; “few”) + –loqui, loquor (“to speak”)]
Patavinity: the use of local slang expressions or dialects when writing [L. patavinitas, from Patavium (Padua), Italy (birthplace of Livy) + -itas -ity]
Pedotrophy: the art of raising children properly [Gk. paîs, (“child”) –tréphō, (“I congeal”; “thicken”)] 👧 👦🏽
Pentapopemptic: a person who has been divorced five times [Gk. pent, penta + -apo (“off”; “away”) + –pempē (“to send”) + -ic]
Peristerophilist: one who collects pigeons (origin unknown) (-phily: the art of training pigeons)
Peristerophilist (photo: irishtimes.com)
Pernoctation: someone who stays up all night to work or to party [L. pernoctātus (“having spent the night”) + -iōn (cf. Pernoctator: someone who stays up all night to study) 🎆🌃
Pervulgate: to publish something [L. pervulgo (“to publish”; “to make public”)]
Phanerolagniast: a psychologist who studies human lust [Gk. phaneros (“visible”; “evident”) from phainein (“bring to light”; “cause to appear”; “show”) + –lagnia]
Phillumenist: collector of matchboxes and their labels [Gk. phil- + L. -lumen (“light “) + -ist]
Philodox: one who loves his or her own opinions [Gk. phílo– (“beloved”) + –dóxa (“glory; “opinion”)] (cf. Philoxenist: a person who loves to entertain strangers)
Phosphene: the phenomenon of seeing light without light entering the eye; what occurs when you see ”stars and dots” after rubbing your eyes [Gk. phōs- (“light”) + -phainein (“to show”)] 💡
Phrontifugic: helping to escape from one’s thoughts [Gk. phrēn, (“diaphragm, mind”) + It. -fuga, from Latin, “a running away”; “flight”]
Phrontistery: a place for thinking or study [Gk. phrontis (“thought”; “care”; attention”) + -ery]
Picayune: of little value or significance; petty; a small coin in (18–(19 th. Louisiana with a low monetary value [Occitan. picaioun (“small coin”) from pica (“to jingle”)] 🪙
Picayune
Pictophile: one who gets sexual gratification from pictorial porn or erotic art [ + -phile]
Pictophile: connoisseurs of “adult magazines” (source: AFP via Getty)
Plangonolist: [origin uncertain, one suggestion: Gk. plangon from plaggon (wax dolls in ancient Greek theatre substituting for female roles(?)) + -ist]
Planiloquent: talking plainly about some subject or other [L. planus (“flat”) + –loqui]
Platypygous: having a broad bottom [Gk. platys” (flat or broad) + -pygous, -pugē (“buttocks”)] (cf. Pygephanous: displaying one’s buttocks)
Pleonasm: using more words than necessary; redundancy of words [Gk. pleōn (“more”) + -asm]
Pogontrophy: the practice of grooming a beard or moustache [Gk. pogon (“beard”) + –trophy (“nourishment”; “growth”)(cf. Pogontomy: cutting or trimming a beard)
The art of Pogontrophy (photo: freepik)
Polemologist: student of war [Gk. pólemos (“war; battle”) + -logy]
Polemologist: a war pundit
Politicaster: 2nd-rate or inferior or petty, contemptible politician [polī́tēs (“citizen”; “freeman”) + -aster§](cf. Poetaster: an inferior poet)
Politicaster (source: frankfuredi.substack.com)
Polyoquent: garrulous; loquacious; discourse on many topics [Gk. poly + -loqui (“speak”)]
Polyphage: someone who eats many kinds of food [Gk. poly + –phage]
Polyphasic: consisting of two or more phases [Gk. poly + -phase + -ic]
Propinquity: physical proximity or similarity between things (like attracts like); close kinship [L. prope (“near”) + -quity]
Prosopolethy: inability to remember a face [Gk. prosōpon (“person”; “face” + -lēpsis (“act of taking hold or receiving”; “acceptance”) + -ia -y]
Protean: ever-changing: versatile; mutable; able to change frequently or easily [Gk. from Proteus, in Greek mythology a sea-god with a tendency to shape-shift)]
Protean: from the shape-shifting god of rivers and oceans
Pseudandry: use of a masculine pseudonym by a woman [Gk. pseudēs (“false”) + –andrós (“male”)] (cf. Pseudogyny: use of a feminine pseudonym by a man)
Puellaphilist: (Psych.) one who loves girls (and perhaps sexually desires them) [L. puella (“young girl”) + –phil]
Pusillanimous: lacking courage or resolution; timidly cowardly [Latin pusillus (“very small”) (diminutive of pusus (“boy”) + -animus “spirit”)]
Pyknic: being of stocky physique and a rounded body and head; thickset [Gk. puknos (“thick“) + -ic]
Pysmatic: always asking questions and inquiring (origin unknown)
Pythogenic: coming from garbage [Gk. pytho– from pythein (“to cause to rot”) + -genic]
Pythogenic
Standout P-word in the ALDOOCDO catalogue of lexical merit: Pernickety: fussy, particular; extensive attention to esp trivial or minor detail (an OCD candidate?) [Scots. pernickety, persnickety, of uncertain origin; (resembles in form per- (“intensifying prefix”) + –nick, but might be derived from particular + -finicky)]
↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜
§ the suffix –aster, whenever it pops up tacked on to the end of some base word is invariably pejorative, meaning something that is inferior, small or shallow
People tend to associate the sport of chariot racing with the ancient Romans, thanks in part to Hollywood and movies like Ben-Hur…chariot racing was a fundamental part of ludi circenses (circus entertainment) for the Roman public, together with gladiatorial combats, mock hunts and wild animals pitted against each other. Chariot racing however wasn’t an activity that originated with the Romans, the ancient Greeks and the Etruscans were right into the sport long before them𝔸. It emerged in the Hellenic world at least as early as 700BC with contests taking place in stadia known as hippodromes (“horse course”). The sport features in the Iliad and by 684BC it was so popular it debuted as an event in the proto-Olympic games. In Greek chariot races the competitors were the owners of the rigs and horses, and with Spartan women entitled to own property, this allowed some women to participate in the popular sporting spectacle. Success in the four-horse races was well remunerated, with prizes for the winner such as 140 ceramic pots of olive oil (‘Ben-Hur: The Chariot Race’, A Historian Goes to the Movies, 16-Sep-2016, http://aelarsen.wordpress.com).
Spartan woman winning a chariot race (vase decoration)
The premier venue for Roman chariot racing, the epicentre of the sport in antiquity, was the massively-proportioned Circus Maximus, a specially-constructed race course located between the Aventine and Palantine hills in Rome. The course was an extended oblong shape along a 2,037-foot-long sand track (spatium) with sharp 180° turns at each end (a race comprised seven laps with the top speeds nudging 40 mph) (Encyclopedia Romana, Upd. 21-Nov-2023, www.penelope.uchicago.edu). The rage for currus circenses (chariot racing) as a spectator sport was such that the Roman went from having 10-12 races a day on 17 days of the year only in Emperor Augustus’ time to 100 races per day during the reign of Domitian. The standard “horse power” for racing chariots was four horses—called a quadriga or quardigae𝔹—piloted by older, more experienced horsemen called agitatos, whereasnovice drivers (auriga) were usually assigned a bigae (two-horse vehicles). Less common but not unheard of were six, eight and ten-horse chariots. The best horses for currus circenses were sourced from the Roman provinces of Lusitania and Hispania and from North Africa (‘Chariot Racing: Rome’s Most Popular, Most Dangerous Sport’, Patrick J Kiger, History, Upd. 17-July-2022, www.history.com).
All that remains today of Circus Maximus
To the Roman masses, the chariot drivers were above all entertainers, just like actors or musicians of the day, but there was a duality to how they were viewed by society. The elite drivers were lauded and lionised by the public (just like elite sportsmen today), but at the same time they were cursed as witches or magicians (this conclusion was drawn because how else could you explain their repeated victories?)(Kiger). Not all social elites in Rome were as gung-ho about the sport as the populus Romanus, although the egregious and unstable emperors Caligula and Nero were both big fans.
To the victor, laurels…and “big bucks”
Charioteers faced a high danger of injury or death from their profession, but the lure was the prospect of fabulous wealth…for the best race drivers. The prize money for a single victory ranged from 15-30 thousand sesterces up to 60,000 sesterces. If you were successful on the track and survived, you could earn a fortune and set yourself up for life…one such ace driver was Portuguese-born Gaius Appeuleius Diocles whose 24-year career netted him upward of 36,000,000 secterces from 1,462 victories. Diocles’ race winnings, valued today as equivalent to US$17 bn, would place him far above the superstar earnings of the Michael Jordans and Novak Djokovics of the modern era in sport (Kiger).
Diocles, champion of the Red team (source: earlychurchhistory.org)
Charioteers competed in teams under the aegis of factiones (factions) which like Formula One racing today, were under the control of team bosses/owners – these were different associations of contractors. The four principal factions, each one associated with a particular season and god, were known as the Reds, Blues, Greens and Whitesℂ. Each faction team had its own talent scouts whose job it was to find the most promising charioteers and horses, and each team had its own passionate tribal supporters base, much as we see today in professional football𝔻 (‘Chariot Races’, The Roman Empire in the First Century, www.pbs.org).
The four “colour” factions
The faction bosses bankrolled the whole operation of their teams, including the engagement of medical and veterinary staff, in return they took a cut of the drivers’ winnings. With customarily 12 charioteers in a race (three drivers from each team), teams pursued a stratagem of using their two lesser drivers to try to manoeuvre and block their opponents to maximise the chances of success of their team’s star driver (Formula One and contemporary professional cycling adopt similar team tactics in races) (‘Chariot Racing’, Travels Through Greco-Roman Antiquity, http://exhibits.library.villanova.edu).
A Roman mosaic of two famous race horses (source: earlychurchhistory.org)
Chariot racing revolved around money, not just for the drivers and factiones, betting on the outcome by the race-going “punters” was big business too. The Circus Maximus didn’t have on-course bookies or the TAB or Ladbrokes but betting was widespread on an individual basis. Prior to a race spectators in the seated areas or in the refreshment arcades would make private wagers with each other on the upcoming race.
Footnote: Hollywood does currus circenses ⟴⟴⟴ Most movie-watchers would have seen the 1959 biblical era blockbuster Ben-Hur, the Charlton Heston version immortalised for its epic 20-plus minutes chariot race. The race is a thrilling climax to the movie, accurately capturing the danger and drama of a real chariot contest in Ancient Rome, however much of what is shown veers away from historical verisimilitude…there are nine bronze dolphin lap counters, not seven, though the chariots are comparatively light as they needed to be. In Roman charioteering the race drivers were formed into teams (as outlined above), whereas in the film this is completely ignored with each competitor singularly representing different ethnicities (Jew, Roman, Arab, etc). Roman chariot races had staggered starts and starting gates (carceres) to negate the advantage to drivers nearest the inner wall or barrier (the spina), the movie is again historically out-of-kilter. First, the contestants line up one abreast, backing on to the the spina which seems to be borrowed from the way Formula One car races used to start in the 1950s, then they wheel round and start in a straight line across the sand-strewn track. Having Ben-Hur’s antagonist the elite Roman soldier Messala as a charioteer, is also all wrong…chariot drivers were recruited from the lower orders, slaves, freedmen, foreigners, they were infamis, the disreputable in society, men with a black mark against them. Lastly, Ben-Hur and Messala and the other drivers all hold the reins of their horses during the race, unlike what the Romans actually did, which was to tie the reins around the charioteer’s waist during the race (‘A Historian”).
‘Ben-Hur’, the iconic chariot race scene
𝔸 and the Byzantines continued the sport after the fall of Rome
𝔹 the quadriga races were the main event of the ludi circenses race day
ℂ the Blues and the Greens, the two largest factions, engaged in a fierce rivalry
𝔻 there were also occasionally spectator riots, as in football
The sixth letter in the alphabet is the consonant “F”. Pre-English, the Phoenicians used to write “F” with a symbol that looked a lot like “Y,” and pronounced it waw. The ancient Greeks changed it into digamma and put a tip on the “Y”, transforming it into the sixth letter in the alphabet we readily recognise today. The “f” sound has a kindred spirit in the “ph” as the two can be interchangeable in spelling, eg, people who live in the Philippines are called “Filipinos”. “F” for frank and forthright and “F” for frivolous and fickle…it would however be remiss of us to not acknowledge that the expression “F-word” has another, polarising, connotation which for many in society is still is a taboo one, as, to use a somewhat old-fashioned-sounding term, a “swear” word… “fuck” and its many derivatives such as “motherfucker”, “fucker”, etc. ad nauseam. So there you have it, “F”, all in all a letter for all seasons and dispositions!
Falerist (or Phalerist): someone who collects and studies medals, badges, pins, ribbons and other decorations [from the Greek mythological hero Phalerus: Gk. Phaleros]
Farraginous: consisting of a confusing mixture, orig. of grains for cattle feed (cf. Farrago); jumbled; messy; heterogenous[L. far “spelt” (ie, grain)]
Favonian: pertaining to the west wind (esp mild, gentle) 💨 [L. fovēre (“to warm”)] (cf. Zephyr)
Firmament: (Relig.) the vault or arch of the sky; the heavens; the field or sphere of an interest or activity [Late Latin. firmamentum, from L. firmare (“support”)]
Firmament
Flâneur: a man who saunters around observing society; a stroller (fem: approx comparable to Flaneuse). [Old Norse. flana (“to wander with no purpose)]
A metropolis full of flâneurs (image: The Art Story)
Flexiloquent: speaking evasively or ambiguously [L. flexibilis (“that may be bent”) + –loquēns (“speaking”; “talking”)]
Florilegium: an anthology esp excerpts of a larger work; collection of flowers [L. flos (“flower” +-legere (“to gather”)] 🌺
Frotteur: (Psycho-sex.) a person who derives sexual gratification—Frottage—thru contact with the clothed body of another person in a crowd [Fr. frotter (“to rub”)]
Funambulist/Funambulator: a tightrope walker; an acrobat who performs balancing acts on a taut, high horizontal rope (also known as an Equilibrist [L. funis (“rope”) + –ambulare (“to walk”)]
Funambulist ice-veined Philippe Petit with his flares at full mast, at his day job, Twin Towers 1974 (photo: Alan Welner/AP)
Fusilatelist: someone ( with a lot of time on their hands) who collects phone cards from telcos (origin unknown)
Fuselatelist: UK £5 telco cards (source: chinarfidfactory.com)
Futilitarian: a person devoted to futile pursuits; one who believes that human striving is futile [(19th neologism, a portmanteau word formed from blending “futile” and “utilitarian”]
Fysigunkus: a person devoid of curiosity [Scot. Eng, (19th. origin unknown]
“Words, Words, Words”, mused Shakespeare’s brooding and enigmatic eponymous protagonist in Hamlet [Act II, Scene II]. Indeed, for those wordsmiths, verbivores and aficionados in the grips of logolepsy (fascination or obsession with words), words, lexemes, morphemes, lógos, verba, call it whatever you like, are the very stuff of the world. If you are like me and take a delight in being exposed to new words, always looking to add to the building blocks of your vocabulary, then your interest might be piqued enough to browse the following list of words, a select lexicon with entries which include the obscure, the archaic, the unusual, the peculiar and (sometimes) the downright creepily weird. To begin at the beginning, the letter “A”, primus intra pares among the strictly-ordered glyphs. “A” in the Latin alphabet is similar in shape to theAncient Greek letterAlpha, from which it derives.
Word
Meaning
Derivation
Abactor
cattle thief or rustler
L Late Latin abigō ('drive away')
Achloropsia
[cf. Acyanopsia colour-blind blue]
colour-blind green
Gk a + clor ('green') + -podia (rel. to 'sight')
Acephalous
lacking a (clearly defined) head
Gk akephalous ('headless')
Acersecomic
one who has never had his or her hair cut
Gk akersekómēs ('young with unshorn hair')
Acrologic
pertaining to initials; using a sign to represent a word denoting its initial letter or sound, assoc with hieroglyphics & acronyms
Fr acrologique
Adelphogamy
a form of polyandry; marriage of 2 or more brothers & 1 or more wives (context: Royal marriages in Ancient Egypt, usually between siblings)
occurring as a result of an external factor or by chance, rather than by design or inherent nature; coming from outside, not native
L adventicious (coming to us from abroad")
Agelast
someone who never laughs; a humourless person
Mid Fr agélastos ('not laughing')
Agersia
not growing old in appearance
Gk a ('not') + geras ('age')
Agnomen
an epithet; an appellation appended to a name (eg, Rufus the Indolent)
Anc Rome a 4th name occasionally bestowed on a citizen in honour of some achievement
Agnosy
ignorance esp universal ignorance; unenlightened; bereft of spiritual understanding or insight
Gk agnōsia ('ignorance')
Aleatory
something dependent on the throw of dice or on chance; random; (esp in indurance)
L alea a kind of dice game
Amanuensis
Iiterary or artistic assistant, in particular one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts
L amanu + -ensis ('slave at handwriting') + 'belonging to')
Ambivert
someone who a balance of extrovert & introvert features in their personality
L ambi ('on both sides') + vertere ('to turn')
Aneabil
unmarried; single
origin unknown
Anecdotage
someone with a tendency to be garrulous; anecdotes collectively
Gk anekdota ('unpublished') + -age
Anemocracy
government by the wind or by whim
Gk anemo ('wind') + -cracy ('rule')
Anhedonia
inability to feel pleasure in normally pleasurable activities
Fr anhédonia+ ('without pleasure')
Animadvert
criticise or censure; speak out against
L animadvert-ere ('to notice or remark on a subject')
Antanaclasis
a literary trope whereby a single word is repeated, but in 2 different senses (for effect, a common form of punning)
Gk antanáklasis ('reflection'; 'bending back')
Antelucan
pre-dawn
L ante ('before') + luc ('light')
Antemundane
existing before the creation of the world
L ante ('before') + Fr mondain ('of this world')
Antipudic
covering one's private parts
anti + L pudendum ('genitals'; shame')
Apodysophilia
feverish desire to undress (a form of exhibitionism)
origin unknown
Appurtenance
accessory associated with particular lifestyle, eg, luxury
OFr from L appertinere ("belong to")
Aptronym§
the name of a person which neatly matches or is amusingly appropriate to their occupation or character (eg, possessor of the highest-ever recorded IQ, Marilyn vos Savant; a Russian hurdler by the name of Marina Stepanova)
neologism, purportedly coined by US columnist Franklin P Adams
Archimage
great magician, wizard or enchanter 慄♂️
New Latin from Late Gk archimagus
Aristarch
a severe critic
after Aristarchus of Samothrace, a Greek grammarian, (2nd BC)
§ the concept of aptronym gives legs to the theory of nominative determinism which hypotheses that people tend to gravitate towards jobs that fit their surname, eg, a BBC weather presenter with the name Sara Blizzard ️
ALTHOUGH computerised ATM machines didn’t emerge as a mainstream feature of the urban landscape until the 1970s and 1980s, the first Automated Teller Machine was opened as early as 1967. Barclays Bank introduced the ur-ATM machine (branded as Barclaycash) which was located at its Enfield Town, London, branch, with popular 1960s TV comedy actor Reg Varney (above, performing the “celebrity opening”) selected in the role as “Customer No 1”. Designed by John Shepherd-Barron, the DACS machine lacked one essential ingredient of the modern ATM – no magnetic plastic card! Instead, customers inserted a cheque-like token impregnated with a radioactive compound which when matched with the customer’s ID dispensed money (initially limited to a maximum of £10).
Barclaycash (Source: deccanchronicle.com)
The need for ATMs grew out of the service limitations of the highly regulated banking system in a changing modern world. Banks in the UK and elsewhere were hamstrung by quite restricted business hours, often open only around ten to three weekdays. Customers who worked during these hours found their access to personal banking severely curtailed, especially when it came to the withdrawal of cash. In the Sixties project teams in banks in the UK, Sweden and Japan were all working at developing a form of automated cash dispenser. The successful introduction of the ATM in public locations solved the problem, offering instant, 24-hour access to cash.
After the Enfield ATM and it’s successors opened their windows there was some initial reluctance by customers to embrace the radical new way of banking⌖…a wait-and-see attitude prevailed, but not for long. Today ATMs swamp the commercial retail world, at a rough estimate there is over three million units operate globally (there’s even one in Antarctica!)
The pioneer of the PIN 📌 As with the debate over the invention of the first flying machine, Shepherd-Barron’s claim to originality has its challengers. Around the same time development engineer James Goodfellow came up with his own version, a Chubb machine❂ which worked on a PIN number associated with a code token in the form of a plastic card with punched holes. Goodfellow’s innovation was installed in branches of the Westminster Bank one month after the Barclays ATM.
Innovative Scanda
🏧
But can we categorically say with 100% surety that Goodfellow was the sole originator of the PIN? Sweden has a claim here too for pioneering recognition. The Metior Company’s Bankomat came into operation at Uppsala Sparbank just one week after the Barclays’ machine. The Swedish technology, on display at a Stockholm fair in 1964, presented a plastic-coated card and linked PIN. It seems likely that Shepherd-Barron, Goodfellow and the Swedes all devised their ATMs at around the same time independently without any connexion to or cognisance of each other’s projects.
ATM pioneer Simjian (Source: alchetron.com)
Neither Shepherd-Barron or Goodfellow are credited with devising the concept of the ATM itself. The consensus tends to attribute this to Armenian-American inventor Luther George Simjian. Simjian’s Bankograph, patented in 1960 but never fully commercially developed, came up with the idea of a “hole-in-the wall machine” that would allow customers to make financial transactions.
As with the debate over the invention of the world’s first manned flying machine, Shepherd-Barron’s claim to prototype creation has its challengers. Around the same time as the Shepherd-Barron innovation development engineer James Goodfellow came up with his own version, a Chubb machine❂ which worked on a PIN number associated with a code token in the form of a plastic card with punched holes. Goodfellow’s innovation was installed in branches of the Westminster Bank one month after the Barclays ATM.
Introduction of the ATM in America 🏧 The first American ATM was introduced in 1969✪ at the Chemical Bank’s branch in New York’s Rockville Centre (in the US they are sometimes referred to as “cashpoints”). The pioneering 24/7 US ATM (designed by Donald Wetzel) the Docuteller utilised reusable magnetic coded cards.
Lloyd’s Cashpoint (Source: deccanchronicle.com)
On the road to digital banking 🏧
These early dinosaurs of the alternative to face-to-face banking, the 1960s generation of ATMs, were of course all offline. The world’s first computerised ATM, introduced by Lloyds Bank, didn’t have its genesis (again in the UK) until December 1972…installed in Brentwood, Essex, the ATM cash machine was developed in partnership with IBM.
—————————
⌖ prior to the introduction of the ATM and in its formative stage there was unsurprisingly a degree of resistance to them from banking employee unions
❂ the Chubb cash dispensing machine in its earliest iteration retained the user’s card (as proof of receipt), which later was posted back to the owner
✪ coincidentally the same year of the first operating ATM machine in Spain
“Pedestrian”, just a fancy word for walker, you say? Its certainly got nothing to do with the vocational activity we euphemistically call “street walker”, a very different kind of “pedestrian”. As we understand the term today, It’s hard to imagine that pedestrian with the suffix -ism added was the name of a highly popular and seriously competitive sporting pastime 150 years ago.
⟡ ⟡ ⟡
Like golf, outdoor tennis, association football and the rugby codes, pedestrianism, a historical name for organised, competitive walking, has its origins in Britain Something of its sort was around in the 1600s but the activity reached a fuller expression in the 18th century, becoming a regular fixture at regional fairs along with horse racing and running.
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Image: Victorian-era.org
One such instance of pedestrian racing involving the exchange of money was within the purview of upper class gentlemen making carriage journeys between English cities and towns. Wagers would be laid by groups of gentlemen on their travels as to which of their footmen can beat the others to the intended destination, going on foot in advance of their masters’ carriages.
⟡ ⟡ ⟡
Foster Powell (Poster published by C. Johnson n.d.)
◔⟡
Fore-walkers of the ultra-marathon
By the late 18th century we start to learn the names of individuals like Foster Powell who devote all of their time and energy to great feats of walking endurance for monetary reward. Powell, the star of long distancing walking in his day (flourished 1760s–1790s) is considered the first leading exponent of the activity, prefiguring the rise of the professional ultra-marathoners in the late 20th century. Powell’s greatest accomplishment was a 640km distance walk—London/York/London—in five days and 18 hours in 1792, the fourth and final time he had attempted and completed the feat [‘Foster Powell, the Great Pedestrian’, Andrew Green, gwalter, 26-Jun-2020, www.gwalter.com].
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Often leading pedestrians would go head-to-head in wagered races (Image: US Lib. of Congress)
⟡Multi-day walkingLater in the 19th century the British enthusiasm for pedestrianism spread overseas to Canada, the US and Australia. In the last quarter of the century Six-day races including for women pedestrians were very popular both in the US and the UK, attracting up to 70,000 paying visitors during the event. The leading exponents included George Littlewood (the Sheffield Flyer) whose 1888 world record for the six days—623 miles, 1,320 yards—remained unbeaten for 96 years! In America serious money could be made…Edward Payton Weston won a $10,000 prize in 1867 for completing a walk of 1,828 km in 30 days (Portland, Maine to Chicago). Powell didn’t achieve the hoped-for riches from his marathon walking, he died in an impoverished state, but many others that followed him found that success in the activity could pay handsomely. Captain Robert Barclay Allardice in 1809 earned himself the sobriquet the “celebrated pedestrian as well as a purse of 1,000 guineas for walking 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours, an amazing test of (strength), stamina and sleep denial” [‘Captain Robert Barclay-Allardyce’, www.nationalgalleries.org]. For Allardice’s numerous extraordinary exploits on the road, the title of “father of modern race-walking” has been ascribed to him.
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Pedestrianism was exceedingly popular in post-bellum USA, drawing great crowds of paying spectators (Image: Alamy/BBC)
Professional pedestrianism in the Victorian era was not confined to males, the most famous and successful woman pedestrian was probably Londoner Ada Anderson. Her accomplishments, particularly the breaking of Capt Allardice’s “1000 in 1000” record prompted the Leeds Times to dub her “Champion Lady Walker of the World” in 1878. Anderson whose preparation included training in severe sleep deprivation, after dominating UK pedestrianism, found great acclaim on the American walking circuit.
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Source: 7 News
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Curbing the proclivity for “speed walking”
As pedestrianism became codified, the “fair heel and toe” rule was established for races. This meant that “the toe of one foot could not leave the ground before the heel of the other foot touched down”𝖆, however in practice “rules were customary and changed with competition” and walkers got away with jogging and trotting in races. [Pedestrianism’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The controversy over what constitutes legal walking has continued to dog the modern sport of race-walking to the present with disqualification of athletes in Olympic 20,000 and 50,000 km road events for “lifting” still a common occurrence.
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Olympic final (men), 3500m Walk, 1908
By the 1890s the Victorians’ vogue for pedestrianism had given way to cycling and other organised team sports. The 1800s activity of competitive walking for monetary gain morphed into the amateur sport of race-walking which found a permanent home in the Summer Olympics in the 1908 London Games. The IAAF/World Athletics organises a series of elite walking events for both men and women including the Olympics and world championships.
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Johnny Day with Nimblefoot 1870 Melb Cup (Image: Herbert James Woodhouse)
Footnote: Prodigy day walker nonpareil
It was not unusual for competitive walkers in the 19th century to turn their hand to other pursuits, some took up cycling, even a few like Ada Anderson ventured into the theatre. In the case of Australian walking wiz-kid Master Johnny Day, he transitioned from wonder boy pedestrian to Melbourne Cup-winning jockey in 1870𝖇. Day by age 10 had won a remarkable 101 walking contests (never beaten) and was hailed as world champion juvenile walker, before pursuing a career as an apprentice jockey in his teens [‘Master Johnny Day, Australian Champion Pedestrian’, National Portrait Gallery, www.portrait.gov.au].
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𝖆competitive walking in thst era was all about technicalities…as well as keeping one foot on the ground at all time walkers were required to ensure that their leading leg remained straight until passed by the trailing leg
𝖇 the premier race on the Australasian racing calendar
❝ It is the prohibition that makes anything precious ❞ ~ Mark Twain
࿐ྂ࿐ྂ࿐ྂ
Prohibition, an international movement (Source: PBS)
IN the early decades of the 20th century a number of countries passed laws to restrict the domestic consumption of alcoholic beverages, most notably the US with its interwar Prohibition injunction. Typically the ban only lasted for limited periods of time in these countries before the laws were repealed. One country that was an exception to this was Iceland which established a countrywide “dry” era that lasted, officially at least, for over seven decades. Following advocacy from the country’s temperance and pro-independence movements1⃞ a referendum was held in 1908 in which adult male Icelanders2⃞ voted 60% in favour of outlawing alcohol, to take effect from 1915.
Denmark and Iceland
No to alcohol, no to Danish interdependence Part of the anti-alcohol drive emanated from political motives, prohibition coincided with the struggle of Icelanders to gain its independence, by rejecting alcohol they were distancing themselves from the parent, Denmark, and the Danish lifestyle (Danes have traditionally been among the heaviest drinkers of beer) (‘Why was Beer Banned in Iceland?’, Reykjavík Tourist Info, 27-Feb-2022, www.blog.rekyjaviktouristinfo.is).
The ban on wine was lifted in 1922, partly at least due to economic imperatives and the effect on Iceland’s GDP. Pressure came from its Iberian trading partners. The loss of their Icelandic market for red and rosé wines prompted Spain and Portugal to threaten to cease importing Iceland‘s salted cod. Lifting of the ban on spirits followed in 1935. Internally, a relaxing of the law was facilitated by the medical profession as doctors began prescribing the consumption of wine as a medicinal measure for the population. The banning of bjor (beer) however remained in force (‘Why Iceland Banned Beer’, Megan Lane, BBC, 01-Mar-2015, www.bbc.com).
Skál! (Photo: Scandification)
A ban on beer but not on all “beer products” Like what happened elsewhere, consumers of beer were still able to access and imbibe the frothy ale from several sources. The Icelandic war on beer was targeted at full-strength beer…beer (usually of the pilsner kind) which didn’t exceed 2.25% alcohol was not deemed illegal. The watered-down variety and “beer substitutes” were available, such as brennivin (distilled “beer-like” potato vodka). Home-brew (Landi) flourished, as did smuggling of the amber substance (fishermen could get their hands on a case or two easily enough). If you were a diplomat you could get access to beer as part of your official state duties.
The Prohibitionists’ reasoning The 20th century rolled on and the Icelanders’ ban on beer persisted. With beer less expensive than either wine or spirits, the authorities’ worry was that if cheap beer was freely available, this would lead to a contagion of heavy drinking in the community, especially among adolescents. By the 1970s there were signs of societal attitudinal change. Duty-free liquor could be purchased at airports by airline crews and foreign travellers, by the end of the decade this dispensation was extended to returning locals.
Icelandic White Ale 5.2% ABV (Photo: Muse on Booze)
End of the beer drought
Finally by 1988 more liberal attitudes towards the alcoholic brew’s place in modern Icelandic society prevailed. Polls in the 1980s showed that 6 in 10 citizens favoured beer’s legalisation…a groundswell of rising opinion against the ban’s continuance pushed the Althingi (Icelandic parliament’s) hand3⃞. The upper chamber of the national legislature voted (fairly narrowly, 13–8) to repeal the ban on beer, effective from 1 March 1989 (which henceforth became celebrated annually in Iceland as “Beer Day”).
Traditional sour Gose beer, Icelandic style (Photo: issuu.com)
Today the beer flows in Iceland, especially at this time in late January when Thorri Seasonal Beers are made available to the public4⃞. At any time of the year city locals can freely drink the latest Euro-fashionable craft beers infused with herbs and Arctic blueberries and just about anything else imaginable in microbreweries. Regulation of beer however has not entirely vanished…outside of airports citizens can only buy beer at the government-owned Vinbúdin stores and if you are under 20 the law still bars you from purchasing any grog in the stores or airports.
Endnote: government monopolies on consumer items are a bit of a thing in Iceland. Between 1910 and 1977 the only outlet where you could buy that staple of domestic sustenance, milk, was the Mjólkurbúò, a state-owned milk store (‘Fun facts about Iceland — Strange customs, weird laws and interesting facts’, Reykjavik Excursions, 15-Aug-2022, www.re.is). Tobacco sales are also regulated by the same state monopoly company as alcohol, Vinbúdin.
1⃞ at the time Iceland was in a “Personal Union” with Denmark, not securing full sovereignty and independence until 1944
2⃞ women were not permitted to vote in the poll although overwhelmingly they were in support of the liquor ban
3⃞ legislators were also persuaded by the tax revenue boost that legalisation of the popular brew would bring
4⃞ during Thorrabjór Icelanders can drink traditional beer brews flavoured with, for instance, smoked whale testicles (5.1% alcohol) – a drop decidedly NOT popular with conservationists though!
MORAL and physical decay was a preoccupation consuming the minds of Victorians in the late 19th century. Many Britons harboured nagging doubts that the world’s foremost empire might be in decline? The fear manifested itself in the art and literature of the day, especially in Gothic novels such as Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. Contemporary commentators, social campaigners, liberal imperialists and advocates of ”national efficiency” proffered a raft of varied explanations for the alleged condition of society. Blame was attributed to the rising crime rate, insanity, poverty, unemployment, immigration, radicalism, sexual deviance, feminism, VD, the transformation away from rural life to the disease-ridden towns and the very stresses of modern civilisation (labelled “the dark side of progress”) (‘Deviance, disorder and the self’, www7.bbk.ac.uk).
The Second Boer War, erupting in 1899, did nothing to settle these concerns. Imperial Britain’s early sub-par performance in the conflict against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of British fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. The first portends emerged even before the hostilities began – in the recruitment halls of Britain. The early Boer victories required British reinforcements from home leading to a manpower dilemma – the unhealthy British cities and slums churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men. At the time of the Boer War the average British soldier was of diminished stature, shorter than that of 1845…40% of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for military service. By 1901 the percentage had increased even moreⓐ.
Afrikaner guerrilla warfare
Once the fighting began the lacklustre efforts of the British soldiers struggling to gain the upper hand left their Australian and New Zealand counterparts with a negative impression of the home country’s martial capability. While British soldiery laboured, the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. Colonial troops from Australia and New Zealand possessed natural ability to shoot and ride, equipping them to perform well in the open war on the veldt…this plus their ‘bushman’ capacity to live off the land, meant that they clearly adapted to the South African conditions better than the British soldiersⓑ.
The Australian and NZ dominion soldiers’ take-home message from the South Africa affair was that the “old Britons” were in decline, and that they, the “new Britons”, represented the “coming man”. This view fed into earlier established myths and assumptions – Australia benefitted, it was said, from a climate infinitely better than Britain, a lavish land … making for a vigorous and healthy ‘race’. WK Hancock described the Australian ‘type’ of man as a harmonious blending of all the British types, nourished by a “generous sufficiency of food (good diet) …breathing space (vast countryside) and sunshine”. At the same time British voices were ominously warning of “racial suicide” and the waning of the nation’s “racial energy”, the self-styled “Better Britons” of Australia and New Zealand were talking up their own supposed “racial vigour”.
Britannia saving the world from barbarism (Source: http://teachmiddleeast.lib.uchicago.edu/historical-perspectives/middle-east-seen-through-foreign-eyes/islamic-period/image-resource-bank/image-07.html)
Footnote:“Degeneracy” out of vogue As Victorian Britain evolved into Edwardian Britain, the fears of racial deterioration didn’t diminish, birth-rates which were already in decline going back decades had plummeted dramatically since the Victorians. However, by the time of World War I degeneration theory had lost favour, advances in the understanding of genetics and the vogue for psychoanalytic thinking had prompted its obsolescence (‘Degeneration theory’, www.artandpopularculture.com).
Source: Pinterest
Postscript: Decadence and decay “Decay” is closely related to the word “decadence” (Latin, decadentia, meaning ‘fall”. In 19th century imperialist thinking decadence and decay was a characteristic associated with the colonial anxieties of empire. The phenomenal success of the imperial powers, it was thought as in the case of past examples like Rome, made the elite complacent and weak, thus the seed of its downfall. The response of contemporary Europeans was a preoccupation with the morality and cultural values of their own societies (‘Decline and Fall’, William Rees, History Today, January 2023).
ⓐ one contemporary commentator, cricket writer Albert E Knight, thought the remedy for the physical and moral degeneration of Englishmen lay in cricket – advocating for the creation of more playing fields as an antidote to the decline of young working class men, so that they could be the beneficiaries of the ”cricket way of making honest and healthy Englishmen”
ⓑ a report conducted in 1904 with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration” confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested
THE absence of cars in cities during the coronavirus lockdown has been a boon to cyclists, both for the recreational kind and for commuter cyclists. There has been an “unprecedented surge in popularity” of bicycle traffic—even in the land of the automobile, the United States—with many bike shops reporting a doubling of their average sales…such is the demand now that bike manufacturers can’t build them fast enough [‘Cycling ‘explosion’: coronavirus fuels surge in US bike ridership’, (Miranda Bryant), The Guardian, 13-May-2020, www.theguardian.com; ‘Australia is facing a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ as cycling booms, advocates say’, (David Mark), ABC News, 16-May-2020, www.abc.net.au].
Starley’s Rover (Source: sewalot.com)
The renewed present enthusiasm to take up bike-riding in response to the pandemic recalls earlier periods of “bike-mania”in the West—late 1860s to mid-1870s and the 1890s—as the humble bike was evolving into its modern form. Credit for the basic look of the standard, no-frills bicycle as we we think of it today is generally given to John Kemp Starley for his 1885 invention, the “Rover Safety Bicycle”. The Rover’s similar-sized wheels, chain drive attached to the crankshaft and rear wheel, diagonal frame and relative lightness (20kg) retains the basic design of the modern bicycle [‘Pedal Your Way Through the Bicycle’s Bumpy History’, [Evan Andrews), History, 30-Jun-2017, [www.history.com].
1889 Ladies Rover Safety Bike (Image: bicyclehistory.net)
The Rover was seen as a curiosity at first, but when two years later John Boyd Dunlop manufactured the pneumatic tyre, it was a game changer for the new bicycle. Starley’s prototype and all two-wheelers that followed now had a smoother, cushioned ride on the typically bumpy roads of the 19th century. Being lighter the new bike also went faster [‘How bicycles transformed our world’, (Roff Smith), National Geographic,17-Jun-2020, www.nationalgeographic.com].
Most folk are aware that before the modern bicycle there was the penny-farthing – also known as the high-wheeler or by the all-purpose term, the ‘ordinary’. The farthing, whose feasibility owes much to French mechanic Eugène Meyer’s innovation of the tension-spoked wheel, was popular through to the end of the 1880s but prone to accidents❉. The lineage of the modern bike however goes back still further – to the bulky, all-wood laufmaschine (“running machine”), invented by Karl von Drais in 1817 in western Germany. The laufmaschine⌧ was the first mode of transport to utilise the in-line, bi-wheel principle, but slim-lined and graceful it wasn’t! Bereft of pedals, brakes and chains, it was propelled by the rider pushing against the ground. The addition of pedals came with another German inventor, Philipp Moritz Fischer, and modified by a French blacksmith/ inventor, Pierre Michaux, both contributing to the development of the modern bicycle. The 1860s brought a variant on the velocipede known as the ‘boneshaker’ (aptly describing the experience for the rider). Nonetheless, with its stronger and malleable metal frames it sparked the first bicycle craze in France which then spread worldwide. By the 1870s the ordinary was state-of-the-art in bikes with its hollow steel tubular frames and forks, steel rims and solid rubber tyres. By now the bike epicentre had crossed the Channel to England and the new standard became the ‘Ariel’ model designed by James Starley of Coventry (uncle of John K Starley), who added centre pivot steering, tangent spokes and a mounting step [‘A Beautifully Illustrated History of Nearly Two Centuries of Bicycle Design and Technology’, (Tony Hadland & Hans-Erhard Lessing), Slate, 22-Jul-2014, www.slate.com; ‘From boneshakers to bicycles’, Britannica, www.britannica.com].
The Drais Laufmaschine, 1817
1890s, the world gone crazy for the bicycle
By the 1890s demand for the new safety bicycle saw mass production take off. The earlier “high rollers” were now past tense. Bikes were now practical and stable vehicles with gears and brakes, the earlier serpentine-shaped frame replaced by a diamond pattern. By the decade’s end most bicycles were only 11 to 16 kg in weight (Britannica). Another technological breakthrough making riding easier for the cyclist came in 1898 when Briton William Reilly invented the prototype for variable gears, a two-speed gear called “The Hub”. Columbus Bicycles in Hartford, Connecticut, could make a bicycle a minute due to the speed of its automated assembly line – a technological innovation later successfully copied by the automobile industry⟴. The transfer of technology from bicycles could be seen in various ways. Both Henry Ford and the Wright brothers started as bike mechanics before making the switch to the invention and production of other, more advanced forms of transport (Smith).
Instrument of freedom and independence
The bicycle gave the masses mobility, it no longer mattered that the less well-off couldn’t afford to travel by horse and carriage…bicycles were affordable, lightweight and easy to maintain. Ordinary folk suddenly were able to explore the countrysides, visit towns and places – far and near. Just about everyone, it seems, got into the act of riding bicycles – royalty and rulers in places like Russia, Zanzibar and Afghanistan took up cycling; First-wave feminists – Susan B Anthony declared that “bicycling emancipated women more than anything else”; women were especially enthusiastic as the activity allowed them to escape their voluminous and cumbersome Victorian skirts for more practical attire such as bloomers. When the lighter, less unwieldy safety bicycles came along, police in the UK were quick to adopt them in their work. Likewise, the NYC police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt mounted the city police on bikes to apprehend the new “public danger” of ‘scorchers’ (“speed demon” cyclists ) (Smith).
Source: Pinterest
The new craze for bicycles got the nod of approval from the US medical fraternity as well…advocated by doctors as “a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality” [David McCullough, The Wright Brothers: The Dramatic Story Behind the Legend, (2015)].
The conventional explanation for the demise of the bicycle boom is the rise of the commercially-viable automobile, but other factors may have contributed to the bicycle’s decline, such as the rapid growth of the early mass transit systems such as streetcars and trams which were a more practical alternative to bikes, especially in bad weather (Britannica).
1971 Tour de France (Source: Profimedia)
Endnote: in 2020 with the wholesale disruption to international sport due to COVID-19, the world’s premier event in the cycling calendar, the Tour de France was in a very select group of major sporting events given the green light to go ahead as normal, albeit delayed.
Columbia Bicycles, Connecticut (Source: etsy.com)
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❉ the penny farthings were inherently unsafe hence the name applied to Starley’s improved-design bike, the Rover safety bicycle. Also appearing around this time were the tricycle and the unicycle
⌧ it also went by other names, draisienne and vélocipède, and by the derogatory name, “dandy horse”
⟴ Columbia Bicycles got into the business in the 1870s when its proprietor and bike enthusiast Albert A Pope starting importing Excelsoir Duplex ordinaries from England, the manufacturer also formed the League of American Wheelmen to advocate for better roads in American for bicycling – the “Good Road Movement” of the 1890s [‘Albert Augustus Pope’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
❝I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream❞
~ the words of a popular 1927 novelty song…prompting numerous later references to the refrain dotted throughout American popular culture, eg, ads for Hersey’s ice cream; a prison chant in Jim Jarmusch’s cult 1986 indy film Down by Law; etc., etc.
‘Down by Law’.
🍦🍦 🍦 🍦 🍦 🍦
Source: truelocal.com.au
For anyone growing up in suburban Melbourne or Sydney or one of the larger conurbations in 1960s and 1970s Australia, the familiar strains of the “Greensleeves” tune permeating the local neighbourhood in Spring or Summer-time could mean only one thing – the approach of a Mr Whippy ice cream van. Within seconds queues of animated parents and children would form in anticipation of indulging in their favourite soft-serve frozen ice delight.
Like most popular commercial trends the mobile ice cream van was an import to these shores. The archetype Mr Whippy emerged from the English Midlands city of Birmingham in 1958, starting with a modest six vans and copying the formula, look and business plan of America’s Mister Softee ice cream trucks (see below). By 1961 the homegrown Mr Whippy fleet on the road had extended to 150 vehicles. Mr Whippy came to Australia when company founder Dominic Facchino shipped six pink and white Commer Karrier vans out to Sydney in 1962. Two years later Mr Whippy vans landed on the shores of New Zealand. By this time Facchino had sold the business which was eventually acquired by industry giant Unilever. By the 1970s the Mr Whippy franchises down under were sold to private operators who varied the vans’ styling and colours (‘1962 Mr Whippy arrives in Australia’, Australian Food TimeLine, www.australianfoodtimeline.com.au). The NZ Mr Whippy operators switched vehicles (to Isuzu Elfs) as well as colour schemes (a common choice became orange and white with a yellow stripe)𝟙.
The ubiquitous Mister Softee (Photo: Elena Kadvany)
1956 was Year Zero for the mobile ice cream vendor. The first soft whip ice cream truck to venture onto the streets of suburbia✱ was the brainchild of two Irish migrants to America, William and James Conway, living in Philadelphia. The initial ice cream run was prompted by St Patrick’s Day celebrations with the two brothers selling green-coloured ice cream in cones to the local West Philly community𝟚. The single van quickly morphed into a franchise business under the name “Mister Softee”, with headquarters in Runnemede, New Jersey, since 1958. At the height of the Mister Softee phenomena (late 1960s) they were operating 1,000 trucks across 15–18 American states. Today, the Mister Softee operations, still owned today by the Conway family, has scaled back the number of trucks as a consequence of both the growth of competing business and a national drop in the consumption of ice cream𝟛 (‘A Brief History of Mister Softee’, Daniela Galarza, Eater, 17-Jul-2015, www.eater.com).
Marchetti Bros ice cream van, 1980s Glasgow
A deadly serious side to the business
The sensory pleasures, the nostalgia, associated with the iconic ice cream van masks a darker chapter in its history. Glasgow in the UK in the 1970s and 80s was blighted by the growth of vast housing estates in its peripheries. With massive unemployment and a lack of infrastructure servicing these estates, the city’s ice cream van vendors experienced a boom in business𝟜. The success elicited interest from Glasgow’s organised criminal gangs who sought to muscle in and use the trade’s popularity to sell drugs, bootleg commodities like cigarettes and even weapons. Rival gangs vied for a piece of the action, resulting in turf wars. The gangs employed intimidation and violence to coerce van drivers and owners into cooperation…in a notorious incident one local driver, Andrew Doyle, refused, with fatal consequences. Doyle worked for one of the “competing ice cream factions” (Bloomberg) in Glasgow, Marchetti Bros. After a failed attempt to kill Doyle on his ice cream van route, a rival gang succeeded in murdering the recalcitrant driver along with five members of his family in an arson attack on their home. Two men were convicted and sentenced, but were ultimately released on appeal after spending two decades in prison.
Mr Whippy Clones (Photo: 9Nine.com.au)
Generic Mr Whippy and the Clone Cone Vans
The popularity of Mr Whippy unsurprisingly has spawned numerous imitators wherever the original has had a retail impact. So much so that the name “Mr Whippy” today is a generic term for any ice cream truck selling the familiar soft-mix in single cones. Trademark holders of the name—such as Mr Whippy P/L/Franchise Food Co in Australia—have attempted to make small, independent operators in the field comply with their exclusive right to use the name and the playing of ‘Greensleeves’. Consequently, many imitators resort to using names that echo the famous original, eg, “Mr Softy”, “Mr Soft Serve”, and “Miss Whippy”, whilst continuing to offer up the standard menu of soft-serves, sundaes and milkshakes.
NYC’s ice cream turf war
Across the Pacific the premier US soft-mix seller Mister Softee has been embroiled for years in an acrimonious turf war with an upstart competitor. A disgruntled former employee started his own rival ice cream truck business which infringed Mister Softee‘s trademark by blatantly copying it’s blue and white colour scheme, cursive lettering, mascot and distinctive jingle, not to mention ripping off its name. Mister Softee took the copycat “Master Softee” to court, forcing it off the road. Master Softee responded by rebranding itself as “New York Ice Cream” and allegedly launching a campaign of intimidation against Mister Softee drivers (‘As Summer Begins, NYC’s Soft-Serve Turf War Reignites’, Stefanie Tuder, Eater, 30-May-2017, www.eater.com). For its part, Mister Softee hasn’t been entirely squeaky clean in the affair, it resorted to hiring private eyes to spy on the movements of New York Ice Cream’s drivers.
early Good Humor vending truck (Source: mahoninghistory.org)
Endnote: From special treats for the elite to mass consumption item
The ice cream van made the frozen confectionary more accessible to more people but it wasn’t responsible for its popularity with the public. The treat itself goes way back. Imperial rulers in antiquity such as Alexander the Great and Roman emperors Nero and Claudius were known to have a sweet tooth for snow and ice concoctions flavoured with honey and nectar and other fruits. “Cream Ice” desserts graced the royal dinner tables of English and French monarchs in the 1600s. US presidents Washington and Jefferson were big fans (‘The History of Ice Cream’, IDFA (International Dairy Foods Association), idfa.org ). In the 20th century the imposition of prohibition in America—together with technological improvements—more efficient refrigeration and better ice cream production methods—were a catalyst for the widespread popularising of ice cream in society…the nationwide ban on booze and bars left a void which ice cream and ice cream parlours rapidly filled (‘Why Ice Cream Soared in Popularity During Prohibition’, History Channel, 28-Jan-2021, www.history.com).
Photo: Manchester Evening News
𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽
✱ not necessarily the first mobile ice cream vehicle though…in 1920 Harry Burt in Youngstown, Ohio, began selling his “Good Humor” chocolate-coated ice cream bars from Ford trucks equipped with rudimentary freezers
𖡽𖡽𖡽𖡽𖡽
𝟙 in New Zealand the franchise passed into the hands of ice cream manufacturer Tip Top
𝟚 William and James at the time worked for Sweden Freezer, a leading manufacturer of ice cream machines in the US
𝟛 to about 350 franchisees and 625 trucks
𝟜 the ice cream vendors also were purveyors of household staples (milk, bread, newspapers, etc) for the estates’ residents
When it comes to Hollywood horror cinema, zombies, vampires and Frankensteinish monsters seem to take pride of place in the Pantheon of celluloid supernatural “baddies”. The werewolf𝟙 on the other hand has tended to be find himself assigned to a backseat in the screen horror caper, often consigned to a secondary role, “second banana” to some other omnipotent monstrous brute, eg, as in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)𝟚.
Wolfmania ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ Cinema-goers got their first glimpse of werewolf horror in 1935 in a Universal film called Werewolf of London…storyline: an English botanist contracts lycanthropy after being bitten by a Tibetan werewolf, result, werewolf terror in London. But it was another Universal movie six years later, The Wolf Man𝟛, written by Curt Siodmak, that elevated the werewolf character to horror flick star status, making its star Lon Chaney Jr into an icon of the genre. The Wolf Man is a sympathetic “portrayal of a man who has no power over the raging beast within “ (Jim Vorel, ‘The 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time’, Paste, 5-Oct-2022, www.pastemagazine.com.
Chaney & Evelyn Akers in ‘The Wolf Man’
The premise in The Wolf Man and its various spin-offs is that the main character (Larry Talbot) is transformed into a therianthropic (hybrid) wolf-like creature, the result of either a curse or a bite or scratch. The film popularised many of the planks of werewolf mythology. The lycanthrope’s metamorphosis is triggered by a full moon; the werewolf is killed only by a silver bullet; the protagonist’s silver-headed walking cane, etc. Although there has been werewolves depicted on the silver screen before The Wolf Man, Chaney’s portrayal was “the incarnation that solidified much of the (werewolf) lore as we know it today” (‘The Werewolf Classic That Defined A Genre’, Stephanie Cole, Nightmare on Film Street, 28-Jan-2019, www.nofspodcast.com).
The Wolf Man formula was eminently copyable…Chaney reprised his Wolf man role in a sequel Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, described as Universal’s first “Monster Mash”𝟜 (‘Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man’, TV Tropes, www.tvtropes.org), and then in 2010 there was a remake of Wolf Man with Benicio Del Toro in the title role. All three movies are serious flicks, straight-up pure horror movies. Many other Hollywood versions of the werewolf legend however have been out and out comedies or horror/comedies. Box office-topping comedy duo of the Forties and Fifties Abbott and Costello were unenthusiastic about a Monster Mash movie, however the producers wanted to exploit the emerging screen popularity of “Franky” and “Wolfie” – the result: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) (with the Wolf Man thrown into the mix). The movie didn’t radiate much joy with the critics but proved a massive hit with fans, spawning a series of Abbott and Costello horror-themed comedies.
One werewolf comedy-horror flick emanating out of Hollywood that has scored some critical kudos is John Landis’ 1981 An American Werewolf in London 𝟝. The film’s successful blending of comedy and humour and its innovative if grisly makeup made it a cult classic and a box office triumph, returning over ten times its original outlay. More blandly prosaic is Teen Wolf (1985) with Michael J Fox as an average high school kid who shape-shifts into a werewolf. Described as a romantic, coming-of-age fantasy movie, it got mixed reviews but struck gold at the box office, taking in over $US80 million on a budget of just $US1.2 million.
Folklore: Werewolves in the popular psyche⌖ ⌖ ⌖ The werewolf may have been a subject for fun and even derision in the world of cinema, but in past times it has been viewed with total seriousness, especially in Europe. The genesis of the werewolf legend is nebulous, but the notion of a human taking a (malevolent) animal form is millennias old. Depictions of and references to men taking on a lupine appearance goes back to antiquity. From Medieval times folklore-driven fear of the werewolf was common in Europe and led to werewolf panics, especially in areas such as France and Germany which contained large populations of wild wolves (“A German Werewolf’s ‘Confessions’ horrified 1500s Europe”, Isabel Hernández, National Geographic, 13-Oct-2022, www.nationalgeographic.co.uk).
While Hollywood favoured the view that potent curses, wolf bites and full moons were the transformative agents for human to werewolf form, German folk tales from centuries ago reveal that all a man needs to do to turn into a ravaging lupine monster doing the Devil’s work is to don a belt or strap made from wolf’s fur (‘Werewolf Legends from Germany’, edited & translated by D.L. Asliman, www.sites.pitt.edu).
Lycanthropy/witchcraft nexus ⌖ ⌖ ⌖
In the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern era the hunting down and persecution of alleged werewolves and alleged witches to some extent went hand-in-hand. It was not uncommon for people accused of being witches by the church to be vilified for supposedly also being werewolves. The supposed ability of both to “shapeshift” seems to be at the nub of this guilt by association (‘Werewolves and Witchcraft’, Danny Sargent, Llewellyn, 13-Oct-2021, www.llewellyn.com).
London pamphlet (1590), primary source for Stumpf trial
Werewolf of Bedburg ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ If you were outed as a putative werewolf in this age of werewolf hysteria you could expect swift and savage, even barbaric, retribution from inquisitors, witchfinder-generals and other coercive control mechanisms of the state. One of the worst instances came from the Nordrhein-Westfalen region of Germany in the late 16th century. Peter Stumpf (or Peeter Stubbe), an alleged serial killer was accused and tried for werewolvery, witchcraft and cannibalism in 1589. Stumpf’s execution was one of the most brutal recorded – torn apart limb by limb on a wheel, beheaded and his body burned𝟞. Stumpf may or may not have been a serial killer𝟟, what he wasn’t is a werewolf. The wealthy farmer’s “confession” was extracted under torture and there is a suggestion that he might have the victim of political sectarianism. At a time of heightened Catholic/Protestant antagonisms, Stumpf is believed to have been a convert to Protestantism, so it may have been payback (‘Peter Stumpp: The Werewolf of Bedburg’, Darcie Nadel, Exemplore, 17-Aug-2022, www.exemplore.com; ‘Zum Fall Peter Stump’, www.elmar-lorry.de).
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𝟙 Old English: “wer” + “wulf”, literally “man/wolf”
𝟚 not to neglect a raft of others, minor supernatural fiends on the big screen, such as The Invisible Man, The Mummy and Gillman
𝟛 highly commended for its special effects by makeup artist maestro Jack Pierce who had provided FX for earlier classics of the horror genre, Frankenstein and The Mummy
𝟜 a coming together of monsters
𝟝 influential critic Roger Ebert was a dissenting voice on the movie’s merits
𝟞 it was believed that burning was another of the very few ways a werewolf could be killed
On August 12 this year Booker Prize-winning novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times while giving a lecture in the lake resort community of Chautauqua in western New York State. It remains unclear to what extent Rushdie’s assailant was motivated by the Iranian fatwa against the Anglo-Indian author who suffered serious if not life-threatening injuries in the attack. The attempt on Rushdie’s life for engaging in free speech occurring at the Chautauqua Institution is ironic, given that organisation’s long tradition of the free exchange of ideas. [‘Chautauqua, where Salman Rushdie was attacked, has a long history of promoting free speech and learning for the public good’, Charlotte M. Canning, The Conversation, 25-Aug-2022, www.theconversation.com].
Source: the guardian.com
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For all the wrong reasons the crime has shone a light on the Chautauqua Institution with its nearly 150-year-old history. The organisation was the brainchild of a Methodist minister and a Midwest businessman, initially established in the 1870s to provide training to Sunday school teachers and church workers. The first Chautauqua ”event” organised was at Lakeside, Ohio (1873), quickly followed the next year by Chautauqua, New York. Although founded by Methodists the Chautauqua concept was from the start non-denominational in spirit [‘Chautauqua‘, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In the tranquil lakeside outdoor setting of Chautauquaⓐ, the roots what would grow into an institution of seasonal (summer) education and culture programs for adults took shape.
Source: the attic.space
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Non-sectarian Chautauqua
From its parent base in western New York a movement soon spread across the US with “Daughter Chautauquasas” springing up everywhere…at the movement’s peak, around 1915, there were about 12,000 such rural-based communities, all independent of the parent institution. While some Chautauquas remained religious-oriented, the movement as a whole became more secular and wider in its scope, coinciding with the Progressive Era (circa 1890–1920), a time in which political and social reforms were flourishing in America (Canning). A factor in this was that Chautauquas tended to foster free thinking which was incompatible with the strain of evangelical Christianity permeating the organisation. Chautauqua philosophical emphasis was on life skills, self-improvement and transformation of lives, ‘What is Chautauqua, the site of the Rushdie attack has a long history’, Kelsey Ables, Washington Post, 13–Aug–2022, www.washingtonpost.com).
Redpath Chautauqua, “circus like promo” (Source: Culture Under Canvas, Harry P Harrison)
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Chautauquas under ”the Big Top”
By the early 1900s Chautauquas were evolving away from permanent independent assemblies to a new variant (aided by the expansion of railways), the spawning of itinerant Chautauquas, where promoters took the Chautauqua idea on the road, travelling to different country regions and setting up temporary “circuit” or “tent” Chautauquas with an itinerary of week-long programs packaged as “culture” experiences. A host of “performers” would be engaged to appear on the circuit at these events—lecturers and speakersⓑ, showmen, singers, musicians and dancers, politicians, opera stars, magicians, preachers—comprising a series of “travelling talent circuits”ⓒ. These Chautauquas added entertainments to the traditional serving of education and religious instruction intended to be “morally uplifting” and culturally enhancingⓓ [‘“The Fourth American Instiution” Understanding Circuit Chautauquas‘, Brittany Hayes, U.S. History Scene, www.ushistoryscene.com]. The tent Chautauquas, the most prominent of which were the Redpath Chautauquas, were in competition with the popular entertainment of the day, vaudeville. The Chautauqua circuit sought to elevate itself above vaudeville which it viewed as a baser and more vulgar form of entertainment (Wikipedia). The tent Chautauqua circuit catered for a wide variety of entertainment, resulting in a wide gulf in quality…at the lower end its engagement in animal acts and slapstick comedy blurred the line with the vaudevillian world [The Chautauqua Movement’, The Colorado Chautauqua, (2020), www.chautauqua.com. Some observers in fact characterise the tent circuits as “Chautauqua” in name only, having appropriated it to add cachet to their business enterprise [‘The Lingering Magic of Chautauqua’, Paul Hendrickson, Washington Post, 01-Jul-1978, www.washingtonpost.com.
Kansas Tent Chautauqua, 1906
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Chautauquas made a contribution at the local level to the enrichment of rural Americans‘ social lives and fostered individual self-improvement. Some observers also saw the movement as a buffer against the effects of rapid urbanisation in that period by giving support to local communities and their traditional values…a counterweight to the centripetal forces luring especially the young to the cities, emphasising the virtues of small town “good life” in rural America (Canning).
Source: joplinglobe.com
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Decline of the Chautauqua
The 1920s was the last great decade of Chautauquas. By the Thirties with the devastating economic impact of the Depression taking its toll, the movement’s popularity was on the wane. Hastening its fall was a combination of factors – the rise of the car culture made extended travel more accessible for rural dwellers; other forms of entertainment were supplanting the Chautauquas’ appeal, especially the advent of sound movies and commercial radio; new educational opportunities for women were opening up; etc [‘Chautauqua in Santa Barbara’, Michael Redmon, Santa Barbara Independent, 14-Sep-2016, www.independent.com; Ables].
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Criticism of Chautauqua
Chautauqua’s cachet at its high water mark was undeniable—President Theodore Roosevelt described the movement as ”the most American thing in America”—however it was not without its detractors. Famed novelist and Noble laureate Sinclair Lewis was dismissive of the Chautauquas’ educational merit and intellectual pretensions. Lewis’ Main Street describes the movement as a “combination of vaudeville performance, Y.M.C.A. lecture, and the graduation exercise of an elocution class…” (Hayes). Chautauquas in their heyday effected positive change in the lives of people, helping working class and middle-class women in particular to acquire the educational and vocational training to allow them “to launch ‘real careers’ (‘Chautauqua Movement’). The movement nonetheless had its limitations. Chautauqua enunciated freedom of expression and thought but did not have an overt political stance. It never challenged the White Protestant hegemony in American society…(it) was “not revolutionary and never led the charge on issues like suffrage or civil rights” and racial inequality (Canning).
Still in the business of providing adult education today, the Chautauqua Institution was a pioneer of the principle of what we call life-long learning, which takes many worldwide forms such as TED Talks, University of the Third Age, and a raft of other continuing education programs.
Photo: oldsite.chq.org
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Endnote: the Chautauqua circuit movement was to some degree a throwback to the earlier Lyceum movement which flourished before the American Civil War. Public lyceums anticipated the Chautauquas by organising circuits of adult public education programs involving travelling lecturers and teachers – featuring 19th century American luminaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and even Abraham Lincoln.
Chautauqua (pronounced “Shuh-TAW-Kwa”) etymology: believed to be an Iroquois (Seneca) word, possibly meaning either or both “a bag tied in the middle” and/or ”two moccasins tied together”.
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ⓐ the idea of an outdoor setting was gleaned from camp meetings in rural South and West
ⓑ giving literary readings and drama recitals
ⓒ speakers who featured on the Chautauqua circuit included the women’s suffragette leader Susan B Anthony, inventor Thomas Alva Edison and national politician William Jennings Bryan
ⓓ “look up and lift up” was a slogan of Chautauqua
Brazil’s bold experiment in creating a new capital city from scratch in five years, Brasília, won much praise as a modern architectural marvel upon its inauguration in 1960. With project town planner Lúcio Costa’s radical, artistic urban plan (the Plano Piloto) for the central city in the shape of a bird in flight⦑a⦒, and the symmetry and spacing of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s stark white, curvilinear, futuristic structures with sculptural silhouettes⦑b⦒, Brasília was heralded as “a modern utopia (expressing) optimism and trust in the future” and a demonstration of Brazil’s capacity for modernising progress (Dr Steffen Lehmann, cited in ‘60 Years Ago, The Modernist City of Brasília Was Built From Scratch’, Stefanie Waldek, AD, 21-Aug-2020, www.architecturaldigest.com).
↟ Costa’s plan for Brasília (Source: nickkahler.tumblr.com)
Bland homogeneity?
Detractors of the futuristic urban ‘miracle’ in Brazil’s central west however have been many and varied. Brasília’s inner city residential zones comprising superquadras (“superblocks”) were characterised by French writer Simone de Beauvoir as all exuding “the same air of elegant monotony”. The city’s large open lawns, plazas, and fields have been likened to wastelands. Structures intended 65 years ago to represent the future, now crumbling, accentuate this sense of decay and obsolescence (‘Brasília, national capital, Brazil’, Britannica, www.britannica.com)
↟ Highway hell? (Photo: BBC)
The car is king!
In a city built for the automobile, Brasília is uber-pedestrian-unfriendly. “With long distances and harrowing six-lane highways connected by spaghetti junctions, Brasília presents challenges for walkers” (Lonely Planet) – which is good news at least for the city’s car hire firms! Transport options for the non-driver in Brasília have been meagre…the subway was basically an afterthought; footpaths are confined to a scanty few, where they exist they are dwarfed by the criss-crossing gargantuan highways; the first set of traffic lights in Brasília didn’t get installed until the 1970s (‘Lost and Found – Brasília’, Blueprint, ABC Radio (broadcast 21-Jan-2022).
Source: airshipdaily.com
A lack of a pulse?
Some critics point to the Brasília lifestyle’s deficit in “humanness”. The city centre is bereft of “the typical street life of other traditional Brazilian cities”. It is merely a place to work…night life is unstimulating, city workers tend not to hang around after hours, few stay to “live and play in the Pilot Plan” centre (Kobi Karp in Waldek). According to Prof. Ricky Burdett (LSE), Brasília flounders on the basics of what constitutes a city…no messy streets, no people living above shops, no mixed use neighbourhoods – rather it’s “a sort of office campus for a government” (‘Niemeyer’s Brasilia: Does it work as a city?”, Robin Banerji, BBC News, 06-Dec-2012, www.bbc.com). The scope for improvement is hamstrung as a result of restrictions on development and expansion in accordance with the city’s world heritage covenants.
↟ Taguatinga, one of Brasilia’s irregular satellites (Photo: Frederico Holanda/ Researchgate)
The creation of two segregated communities
Overpopulation is part of the Brasília problem…designed as a city for 500,000 people, it has five times that many residents today, hence the growth of satellite towns which the poorer residents of Brasília have been shunted into⦑c⦒. Allocation of resources is another…whereas in the centre everything was zoned, over-organised city blocks to the point of impracticality, the satellite towns have been neglected and left in a disorganised state without adequate infrastructure, services and civic spaces (Britannica; ‘Lost and Found – Brasília’). Accentuating the imbalance between the centre and the outliers, only 300,000 of the 2.5 million Brasiliense live in the Pilot Plan area where the jobs are!
Source: modern diplomacy.eu
”A monument to technocratic rationalism”
One of the biggest savagings of Brasília’s architectural merit came from trenchant art critic Robert Hughes who brutally summed up the capital city’s shortcomings: “a ceremonial slum…this is what you get when you think in terms of space rather than place and about single rather than multiple meanings, when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. Miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens” (The Shock of the New, Ep. 4 (BBC documentary, 1980). The “utopian” city of Niemeyer and Costa, lauded at its onset as ilha da fantasia has acquired other, less glowing epithets such as “concrete carbuncle” (‘fast:track’, BBC News). For Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of American Cities, the failure of Brasília and other such utopian dreamscapes was in making the mistake of trying to substitute art for life – with unworkable consequences for the inhabitants. Brasília has also come under fire on environmental grounds, the impact of its footprint has contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon region.
Postscript: the whole purpose of Brazil’s new capital in the interior for President Kubitschek⦑d⦒ and the urban planners was to create a modern city that avoided the excesses of Río and São Paulo (overcrowded slums, the preponderance of favelas). Costa’s “grand vision” envisaged a new urban centre that was deliberate, orderly, rational, dignified and systematic. In practice, the endgame to the myopic focus on the Plano Piloto was a city of inequality (with a good quality of life only for a minority of the inhabitants), congestion and urban sprawl (‘Inside Brazil’s ‘cautionary tale’ for utopian urbanises’, Diana Budds, Curbed, 07-Jun-2019, www.archive.curbed.com). Rather than being transformed into the shining exception, Brasília is “a mirror of Brazilian society…those with power live in a little island or cocoon. Those who don’t—which is the majority—live on the outside” (Prof. Vincente Del Rio).
⦑a⦒ alternately it has been likened to the Crucifix, to an airplane or even to a bow and arrow
⦑b⦒ and avant-garde landscape design by Roberto B Marx
⦑c⦒ 90% of the Brasiliense, in the lower or lowest income brackets, live outside the centre in satellite towns
⦑d⦒ the politician in power who initiated the Brasília project in the mid-1950s
At the conclusion of World War Two no one was seriously of the opinion that Glasgow didn’t need to urgent address the acute housing and quality of life dilemmas besetting the city’ inhabitants. For their part, the planners focusing on the city certainly had (or at least professed) good intentions in their efforts to ameliorate what was for tens of thousands of Glaswegians a polluted, congested and thoroughly unpleasant living environment. For all the planning and the vast sums of money poured into redevelopment however, the results were and continue to be more than disappointing. As discussed in the first two parts of this blog series, the uncoordinated approach of having two rival sets of planners trying to implement conflicting visions of a new Glasgow didn’t help matters at all.
Map credit: Glasgow City Council.The Clyde Valley Regional Park Plan with the umpf of the UK government behind it got more of its planned restructure of Glasgow off the drawing board than the discredited Bruce Plan. The core of CVRP’s plan was the “overspill policy”, relocating the surplus population away from the slums of inter Glasgow to new, modern, sanitary, green and spacious accommodation far from the inner-city. There were two planks to the planners’ intended re-housing fix – the creation of five purpose-built “New Towns” outside of Glasgow, at East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Irvine and Livingston, and the establishment of four new housing ‘schemes’ (ie, estates)«A̴» on the outskirts of Glasgow — Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok. Irvine new town (Image: earlyooters.blogspot.com).Avoiding the city slums only to find a brand new set of problems
What looked good on paper (modern flats, heating, indoor toilets, more space, etc) transpired in reality for many of the relocated residents into a deeply dissatisfactory and frustrating experience. Flaws soon surfaced in many of the flats and houses, shoddy construction«B̴», poorly designed heating and ventilation, crumbling housing stock (eg, Castlemilk and Drumchapel). For these residents, the initial hopes and optimism floundering on what Florian Urban calls “a sculpture park of failed modern utopias”. There were grounds for hopefulness at the beginning. After the poky, dirty, overcrowded tenements of Glasgow central, the former inner city residents you imagine would have welcomed living in the housing schemes, many of which were “the equivalent size of many towns in Scotland”, but their positivity were cut asunder by infrastructure realities – there was nothing like an equivalent level of facilities provided to cope with the large implants of population. In a catastrophic piece of non-planning the areas of the schemes had hardly any places for residents to shop or to meet new people and socialise (no pubs, no dance halls, no cinemas, etc) and the promised open spaces for leisure activities failed to materialise. Public transport to take estate residents to the city centre did not run frequently enough and was relatively expensive. The promised local employment opportunities for the new estates were not forthcoming, so unemployment became a major problem for the schemes’ residents (‘Overspill Policy and the Glasgow Slum Clearance Project in the Twentieth Century: From One Nightmare to Another?’, Lauren Paice, IATL Reinvention, Vol 1 Issue 1, May 2013, http://Warwick.ac.uk; ‘Billy Connolly classically described the new estates as “deserts wi’ windaes”’, The Herald, 07-Nov-1998, www.theheraldscotland.com). Scheme in Easterhouse.Scourge of Easterhouse
Easterhouse has the unwanted distinction of embodying the most dire consequences of the failings of Glasgow scheme planning. Physically isolated on the eastern edge of Glasgow, the severity of Easterhouse’s housing estate social problems and their persistence in the 21st century, has drawn a lot of concerned celebrity attention…. Princess Diana, PM Tony Blair and French President Chirac et al all made special visits to its notorious “sink-estates” (‘What’s Happened To Easterhouse: the Most Notorious Housing Scheme in Glasgow’, Francisco Garcia, Vice, 14-Nov-2016, www.vice.com). So depleted was its basic amenities, so lacking in a sense of community spirit, its infrastructure and housing problems magnified by a unemployment rate calamitously high (31.9% cf. a national average of 13.7% Hansard, 3 May 1985), the suburb’s schemes became a case study for social planners on what not to do to create a successful housing development (Paice). Easterhouse’s continuing woes have been compounded seemingly by a corresponding lack of political will to effect meaningful change (Hansard). Rather than leaving their problems and worries behind in the toxic slum tenements of the city, the dispersed Glaswegians found in the peripheral, facilities-deficient housing estates and towns a raft of new social problems…spikes in incidences of drunkenness and family violence, suicide, etc. Alienated and bored youth reacted to the lack of things to do by engaging in vandalism and petty crime (with young gangs perhaps no where active in the late Sixties than in Easterhouse and it’s so-called “Ned culture”)..
Family dislocation
Relocation to the edges from the city led to other unforeseen or unaddressed problems, including a major disruption to the extended family network…many residents in the new projects were now too far away from their past abodes and cut off from their extended families and friends, resulting in a heightening of a sense of isolation (Paice). This outcome was even more perturbing for those Glasgow citizens who had been forced into relocating to the schemes and New Towns.
Cumbernauld Town Centre: “the rabbit warren on stilts”.Though the Glasgow schemes and the New Town project have been widely maligned as abject failures and disasters by both observers and residents, not everyone has come away with a negative perception: the people of Cumbernauld in a 1980s poll gave the program an 87% approval (of course some schemes and some New Towns did better than other). At the very least, the housing experiments did free thousands and thousands of Glaswegians from the abomination of slum life in the city and transported them into new and better if still far from perfect living conditions… certainly anywhere after the Glasgow slum tenements had to be a step up, although some would argue that after fifty or sixty years, the New Towns with their persisting ailments, no longer new, were showing the clear signs of the foundations of new Glasgow slums«C̴» [‘Neighbourhoods New Towns’, (W Hamish Fraser), The Glasgow Story,www.theglasgowstory.com]. Craigshill 1960s (image: Livingston Devlt Corp).Divine right of technocrats
Nonetheless, a deep sense of dissatisfaction was and continues to be the general feeling about the two housing programs. Both plans for Glasgow’s regeneration, both the Scottish Office and Glasgow Corporation, were guilty (unsurprisingly) of taking a technocratic, “top-down’ approach to the re-housing solution. Both groups of planners failed to consult the residents themselves on what they wanted, the very people whose futures were riding on the experiments’ success and would be most affected by the results…a blind “focus on processes and numbers rather than people and their lives” (‘Modernizing Glasgow – Tower Blocks, Motorways, and New Towns 1940-2010’, Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Arts,www.radar.gsa.ac.uk). In hindsight, had they done so, at least some of the chronic and systemic problems may have been averted.
Social engineering, the “Glasgow Effect”
Glasgow’s 20th century standing as the British Empire’s “Second City” and an economic and industrial powerhouse in the region came at a cost. Studies have long revealed that Glaswegians have a proportionately higher early death-rate—and not accountable by poverty alone—than other comparable great cities«D̴». A 2016 report by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (‘History, politics and vulnerability: explaining excess mortality’) concluded that the combined historic effects of overcrowding, poor city planning (1960s-’80s) and “a democratic deficit–a lack of an ability to control decisions that affect their lives”—were the causes of the city’s susceptibility to premature death (“Revealed: ‘Glasgow effect’ mortality rate blamed on Westminster social engineering”, Karin Goodwin, The Herald, 16-May-2016, www.heraldscotland.com). The SO took this tact, the GCPH asserted, knowing full-well that the policy would be damaging to the long-term health of Glaswegians (Goodwin).
Castlemilk ca.1965 (Source: Gordon Waddell (Pinterest))
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“Skimming the cream”
The evidence points to a deliberate government policy of social engineering experiments in Glasgow…Scottish Office documents released under the 30-year rule reveal a calculated policy in determining which inner city residents were relocated where. ”Skimming the cream” (rehousing the best preferred preferred citizens in the choices parts of the new settlements) was practiced. Skilled workforce and young families were chosen to reside in East Kilbride and the other New Towns while the centre was left with “the old, the very poor and the almost unemployable”. This tactic and the steering of economic investment away from Glasgow resulted in a “serious population imbalance” (Goodwin) and putting the vulnerable ’stayers’ in a jeopardy.
Murray Drive (Photo: Stonehouse Heritage Group)
Postscript: Belatedly aborted Stonehouse – New Towns become surplus to needs
There was meant to be a sixth New Town built to absorb overspill population from Glasgow…the small village of Stonehouse was slated to accommodate 22,000 new homes and 35,000 people, in fact local farmers had their land compulsorily purchased and the first 96 homes in Murray Drive were not only constructed«E̴» but in 1976 the first residents were already two days in occupancy before the Scottish Office suddenly got “cold feat” and pulled the plug on the development! Why was Stonehouse New Town axed and why did it occur so late in the process? Originally proposed in the early Sixties when planners had identified a continuing need for new houses on the periphery, by 1973 two developments had prompted a policy change — Glasgow city had depopulated dramatically as a result of the dispersals (1970-73: 58,000 Glaswegians left) and the authorities were concerned that too many young people were leaving the centre. The emphasis for the inner city refocused on renovating rather than demolishing and rebuilding and the SO began redeploying resources towards regenerating and rehabilitating the East End of Glasgow. Roger Smith’s answer to the obvious question of why the authorities still kept going with Stonehouse after it was apparent by 1973 that the project was a “no-goer” is that the government machine at both the centralised and local level was simply incapable of “respond(ing) quickly to changing events and new understandings of existing situations”…which seems to sum up many of the urban planning missteps made in postwar Glasgow (Roger Smith (1978) Stonehouse—an obituary for a new town, Local Government Studies, 4:2, 57-64, DOI: 10.1080/03003937808432733; ‘The Scottish town that never was’, Alison Campsie, The Scotsman, Upd. 04-Jun-2020, www.scotsman.com.au).
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«A̴» which initially were unfortunately called “townships” until someone pointed out Apartheid South Africa’s use of the same term to delineate non-white homelands
«B̴» the haste of the estate building program contributed to this
«C̴» as a result of multiple factors including lack of investment, cost-cutting on building materials and techniques, poorly maintained estates, apathy and neglect, pollution, loss of community pride, etc.
«D̴» 30% greater risk of dying before 65 than comparable deindustrialised cities like Liverpool and Manchester (Goodwin)
«E̴» everything else planned remained unbuilt, schools, swimming pools, sports centre, factories, etc.
”Greetings everybody, this is your number one enemy” (typical sign-on for“Tokyo Rose”)
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Image: National WWII Museum
In just about every movie and television series Hollywood has made involving Japan and WWII the name of “Tokyo Rose” invariably seems to pop up. Its a standard trope in American war dramas and TV comedies like McHale’s Navy. The San Francisco Chronicle called Tokyo Rose “the Mata Hari of radio”. However, unlike Mata Hari(ǟ), there was no actual “Tokyo Rose”. The name was generic, applied to some dozen or so English speaking Japanese women radio broadcasters who penetrated the airways of American, Australian and New Zealand servicemen in the Pacific theatre of war. Tokyo Rose wasn’t even confined to Tokyo, the female propagandists operated from several cities in the Japanese Empire including Manila, Shànghâi and Tokyo(ɮ).
Many Tokyo Roses but one message
The Tokyo Rose broadcasts would follow a familiar pattern…in between spinning American pop records (to remind the GIs of home), the women in conversational manner would make jokes and taunt the servicemen in an attempt to sap their morale and blunt their appetite for war(ƈ). Paradoxically, for some of her American GI audience the Tokyo Rose radio broadcasts had an opposite effect, they were popular as entertainment and “a welcome distraction from the monotony of their duties” (‘How ‘Tokyo Rose’ Became WWII’s Most Notorious Propagandist’, Evan Andrews, Upd. History, 26-Nov-2019, www.history.com).
Listening to Tokyo Rose on Zero Hour (Source: psywarrior.com)
As stories of Tokyo Rose were spread between GIs, she took on a mythic element in American minds, it was said her snippets of information were “unnervingly accurate (about the Allies), naming units and even individual servicemen” (‘Tokyo Rose (1944)’, www.publicdomainreview.org). The ramifications of this belief were to prove momentous later on for one of the women identified as Tokyo Rose — see Note (ɖ).
Iva at the mike
Iva Toguri/“Orphan Ann”, the ‘real’ Rose?
American opinion hit on a surprising candidate for the real identity of Tokyo Rose, Iva Ikuko Toguri (D’Aquino). Toguri was one of its own, a US citizen of Japanese descent born in Los Angeles who found herself stuck in Japan as hostilities broke out between the two countries. Coerced into broadcasting on Japan’s ‘Radio Zero’ shortwave station as a disc jockey, Toguri played records and performed comedy sketches. She did appeal in her friendly American voice to lonely GIs to return to their loved ones in the US but her propaganda value to the Japanese was considered limited. Returning to the US after the war Toguri, labelled by the press as “the one and only Tokyo Rose”, was eventually tried in 1949. Toguri’s conviction for treason was dubiously arrived at and it was widely felt she was made a scapegoat (‘Tokyo Rose’, Upd. 6-Oct-2020, www.biography.com). The supposed “Tokyo Rose” was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000, serving six years and two months. On release she spent overs 20 years living in Chicago ‘stateless’ before a fresh investigation of the case discovered two of the prosecution witnesses had been coerced by the Justice authorities into perjuring themselves…consequently President Ford pardoned her in 1977 (‘Iva Toguri Patriot’, American Veterans Center, (YouTube video, 2021)
Endnote: Anti-RoseA parallel but very different story to Tokyo Rose is that of Mitsu Yashima. In the 1930s Mitsu (born Tomoe Sasako), a Japanese artist, was pro-peace, anti-military and anti-imperialist in an increasingly militaristic right wing Japan. After imprisonment and torture for her left-leaning views she and her husband escaped to the US in 1939. Once America committed to the World War Mitsu joined the war effort – working for the Office of Strategic Services, she used her language skills to broadcast anti-Japanese propaganda through the airwaves. On radio she made a particular pitch to the women of Japan, urging them to commit acts of sabotage aimed at helping to bring the Japanese military machine to a halt (‘Mitsu Yashima’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘The Epic Lives of Taro and Mitsu Yashima’, Greg Robinson, Valerie Matsumoto, Discover Nikkei, 11-Sep-2018, www.discovernikkei.org).
Credit: IMDb
Postscript: Hollywoodised Tokyo Rose
As the war in the Pacific was reaching its climax the US made its own propaganda capital out of Tokyo Rose with a 1946 potboiler of a movie of the same name. Tokyo Rose exploited and sensationalised the story, The feature was “not merely a fiction, but a dangerous distortion of the truth”…according to Greg Robinson, it depicts the title character‘s radio propaganda as being “directly responsible for the death of demoralised American soldiers” and thus contributed to the jaundiced atmosphere that pervaded the subsequent trial of Iva Toguri (‘Tokyo Rose: The Making of a Hollywood Myth’, Greg Robinson, Discover Nikkei, 01-Nov-2021, www.discovernikkei.org).
▓ See earlier posts on Lord Haw-Haw and Axis Sally in this series of war radio propaganda broadcasters, WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves, Part 1 and Part 2
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(ǟ) ”Mata Hari”, the nom de plume of a Dutch exotic dancer executed by the French for allegedly spying for Germany during WWI
(ɮ) none of the female radio hosts ever referred to themselves as “Tokyo Rose” on air (it was purely an American invention”)
(ƈ) and as with her Axis counterpart in Europe, Axis Sally, the Tokyo Roses would try to sow little seeds of doubt in GI minds about the fidelity of their wives and girlfriends in America
Current Lord Chamberlain Andrew Parker (fmr MI5 head) (Source: The Times)
The Lord Chamberlain (LC) is the most senior member of Queen Elizabeth II’s Royal Household retinue. The office has been around in Britain for over 600 years, the incumbent is usually a peer and traditionally has always been male. Today, the LC handles the organisation for the Queen’s attendances at garden parties, state visits, looks after HM’s thoroughbred horses and he supervises the annual upping of the Royal swans. For much of its history though the LC had another, controversial role, censor of the British Theatre with virtual dictatorial powers — he “was answerable to no-one, not even parliament, and was not obliged to justify his decision to playwrights or theatre managers” [NICHOLSON, Steve. Theatre Censorship in Britain (1909-1968) In: Les censures dans le monde: xixe-xxie siècle[online]. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016 (generated 17 novembre 2021). Available on the Internet: . ISBN: 9782753555495. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.45008.] A much aggrieved George Bernard Shaw characterised the LC as the “Malvolio of St James’ Palace” [‘The Censorship of the Stage in England’, G. Bernard Shaw, North American Review, August 1899, Vol 69, No 513, pp.251-262, www.jstor.org/stable/25104865].
Walpole, the first PM (Source: History Today)
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The politics of early Georgian drama
Theatre censorship had existed in England since the 16th century but institutionalising its practice as a function of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (LCO) was a political manoeuvre by the ”First Minster“ Robert Walpole in the 1730s to blunt the weapon of satire which was being effectively used theatrically against his government. The 1737 Licensing Act handed the LC the “power of god” over the English theatre, remarkably this legislative arrangement stayed in force until as recently as 1968. Hitherto to the crackdown critics🄰 of the ruling Whig Party were relatively free to make satirical attacks through the theatre of the day to expose the political corruption of Walpole’s government. The LC’s new carte blanche powers were designed to silence a theatre increasingly hostile to Walpole and the Whigs🄱 [‘The Licensing Act of 1737’, Eliza Hay, www.ericsimpson.sites.grinnell.edu].
1737 Licensing Act
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Examiner of Plays
The LC was provided with two officers to put the spadework, a Examiner of Plays🄲 and a Deputy Examiner of Plays (the offices remunerated by yearly stipends of £400 and £200 respectively). The examiners’ task, assisted by secretaries and other auxiliary staff, was to read the plays that came before them (the LC himself did precious little of the actual reading of the plays) and write “Reader’s Reports” for the LC. They were also required to visit theatres to check on their safety and comfort and to ensure that the LC’s licensing rules were being observed. Theatres without a licence were liable for prosecution and financial penalties [‘Licensing Act 1737’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Although the ultimate decision on a license rested with the LC, the recommendations to make or break a new play came from the examiners, little wonder then that Bernard Shaw called the examiner “the most powerful man in England or America”.
Above and beyond the spoken word and the text
Censorship was not confined to bowdlerising the texts and banning plays outright🄳, the scope of the Royal censors extended to the actors’ gestures, the costumes, the sound and lighting effects, the set and the stage directions (Nicholson).
Osborne’s 1965 play ‘A Patriot for Me’, the controversy of the dramatist’s refusal to make cuts helped end the LC’s censorship
The view from within the Lord Chamberlain’s Office bubble
The LCO saw themselves as licensors rather than censors. They never really grasped why any reasonable dramatist or manager could object to their control, concluding that playwrights who did so were just trying “to exploit an unsavoury incident or fact”. In the LCO’s Pollyanna-like world view authors of “ordinary decent plays” on the other hand had nothing to fear. The LCO took a disparaging and contemptuous view of the modern playwrights who would rail against their invervention (such as John Osborne and Edward Bond🄴). The LCO tended to justify its censoring role in patronising terms, seeing itself as a moral watchdog, protecting the average playgoer from unsavoury plays, custodians of good taste on the English stage (Nicholson).
Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Source: architectsjournal.co.uk)
Zero guidance for the artist
The Act’s vagueness placed playwrights in an additional dilemma, the office of the LC never really spelt out explicitly what constituted a play’s suitability or unsuitability for a licence, leaving dramatists and the actor-managers of theatres guessing as to the basis of the objection. Plays rejected for a licence or having their manuscripts blue-pencilled for wholesale cuts were usually generically herded under a non-specific catch-all of being either ”immoral or improper for the stage”.
St James’ Palace, home of the Lord Chamberlain (Source: Pinterest)
An effort at codifying
The 1843 Theatres Act made a partial effort at codifying and limiting the LC’s powers, stipulating that a play could only be prohibited if “it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace”. A joint select committee in 1909 advising the LC provided further clarification of the powers, the following were said to be “no-nos” in plays: indecent subject matter; (if a play contains) “offensive personalities”; (if it infers) “violence to sentiments of religious reverence”; “represents invidious manner of living persons”; “calculated to conduce crime and vice”; “impairs friendly relations with foreign powers”🄵 [‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Plays with British Library Curator Dr Alexander Lock’, People of Theatre, (Vlog, 2021), www.peopleoftheatre.com].
‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ (Photo: V & A Museum)
Plays that dealt seriously with contemporary issues especially sexuality were severely blue-pencilled, eg, prostitution in Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. The continuing influence of religion saw the LC come down heavily on blasphemy, the portrayal of biblical figures were taboo (eg, Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Obscene language in plays was a serious infraction of the code. Into the 20th century the censorship of the LC maintained its prescriptive role, plays that earned the ire of the examiners included such classics of the modern theatre as Waiting for Godot (bodily functions or parts, even mere sexual suggestiveness) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (homosexuality) which had already had a successful run on Broadway in the US. Increasingly as a result the LC was seen to be out of touch with modern concerns and realities.
Source: WNYC
Self-censorship and censorship by proxy
The LC held such control over theatrical performances in Britain that it even prompted an element of censorship by proxy. Rudolf Weiss has noted that fear of the LC‘s wrath led some playwrights to self-censor their work to secure a license and thus a hearing in Britain. Some of the autocratic actor-managers—fearful of financial losses arising from an aborted production—have done the LC’s work for them [‘“Unsuitable for theatrical presentation”: Mechanisms of censorship in later Victorian and Edwardian London Theatre’, Rudolf Weiss, www.ler.letras.up.pt].
Lord Chamberlain in 1960s, Baron Cobbold, resisted calls to abolish censorship (Artist: George JD Bruce)
End of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship authority
Opposition to censorship was in the air in the 1960s with the emergence of a permissive society…a new generation of young playwrights like Osborne, Pinter and Bond were exploring increasingly polemical subjects in modern society. The Arts Council of Great Britain described the LC’s veto power as having “a contraceptive effect on the development of British drama” (Nicholson). The coup de grâce for theatre censorship came from the reformist Wilson Labour government🄶. The 1968 Theatres Act was part of a broad sweep of modernising legislation during the Sixties, along with the end of capital punishment, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the introduction of the pill and the legalisation of abortion [‘50 years after Theatres Act, censorship has evolved’, Sandra Osei-Frimpong, Index on Censorship, 14-Aug-2018, www.indexoncensorship.org]. The repeal of stage censorship opened the floodgates for creativity and bold innovation – just one day after the ban ended, the controversial US counterculture musical Hair (New Age nudity, drug-taking) opened on London’s West End.
G Bernard Shaw (Source: thefamouspeople.com)
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Footnote: Loophole in the system
The LCO’s net was wide but there were ways to get round the expurgator’s ban…when one Shaw play was banned in Britain for perceived profanity, the Irish playwright simply resorted to staging it in Liverpool and then Dublin. Later on some playwrights avoided the public theatre circuit altogether and put on their work exclusively at (private member) club theatres around the country. Even British drama institutions, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, frustrated by the LCO’s persistent interference, “threatened to turn themselves into private clubs for specific productions to evade the LC’s rulings” (Nicholson), which contributed to the groundswell of groups and individuals campaigning to end theatrical censorship.
Arts Theatre Club production, 1955 (Photo: V & A Museum)
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🄰 with dramatist Henry Fielding in the forefront along with the Jacobite opponents of the Whigs
🄱 in theory the LC’s authority was limited to Westminster but effectively its jurisdiction applied to all Theatre Royal playhouses [‘Theatrical Oligarchies: The Role of the Examiner of Plays’, Oxford Scholarship Online, www.oxford.universitypressscholarship.com]
🄲 sometimes called ‘Comptroller’, in the 20th century they have mainly been military men-turned courtiers
🄳 each year relative few plays actually got banned, expurgation was the common recourse
🄴 whose play Saved was one of the last to be banned
🄵 these grounds would prove very controversial in the 1930 when the LC Lord Cromer banned a number of English plays which were hostile towards Nazi Germany (a manifestation of London’s appeasement approach to relations with Berlin). Cromer even send some scripts to the German Embassy for their ‘approval’! [‘Theatre of War: how the monarchy suppressed anti-Nazi drama in the 1930s’, Steve Nicholson, The Guardian, 22-Jul-2015, www.theguardian.com]
🄶 the previous Labour (Attlee) government had unsuccessfully tried to pass an anti-censorship bill in 1949
Between 1899 and 1902 Britain and the Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State were locked in conflict in the Second South African War, more commonly known as the Boer War (or more accurately the Second Anglo-Boer War). With the overconfident British failing to secure the expected quick victory over the Boers’ “citizen army”, the war dragged on into a long guerrilla engagement. In 1901, in the middle of the conflict in South Africa, of all things a cricket team from South Africa visited England and Ireland to take part in a series of international matches. How did this sporting incongruity take place while the two countries were engaged in a controversial, bitterly fought and increasingly divisive war?
Lord Hawke’s MCC tourists to SA 1898-99
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Making it happen: JD Logan, the “Squire of the Southern Karoo”
In fact, the tour of Britain had been originally meant to occur in 1900ⓐ, but was cancelled due to the outbreak of hostilities, understandably enough. At this point in stepped Cape Province-based expat entrepreneur and cricket patron James Douglas Logan with his (long-cherished) plan to organise a new tour. Logan negotiated with the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) through the highly influential Lord Hawke, who managed to persuade the MCC to give the tour the green light. Despite the war still very much raging and the outcome far from decided, it was rescheduled for the following year. The announcement for the tour to take place in 1901 unleased opposition and misgivings from within both countries.
Newspaper cartoon of James Logan (Source: hermanus-history-society.co.za)
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The South African press lambasted the team chosen–a mix of “socialite-gentleman” cricketers (including Logan’s own son who had never played first-class cricket!) and more skilful players—for being overall well below par. Moreover, the press criticised the private venture by the “Laird of Matjiesfontein” as being not legitimate because the touring players predominantly from the Cape Colony had not been officially selected by the South African Cricket Union (which had suspended the Currie Cup and disbanded with the onset of war) {Sport Past and Present in South Africa: Trans(forming) the Nation, Scarlett Cornelissen, Albert Grindingh (Eds.), (contributor Dean Allen) 2013; Peter Wynn Thomas, The Complete History of Cricket Tours At Home and Abroad, 1989}.
Sherlock’s creator: make war, not cricket
From the host country, probably the most vociferous critic was world renowned author (and cricket fan and amateur player) Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle, in the forefront of countering the anti-war propaganda within the British homeland with his own pro-war propaganda, was incensed that a team of predominantly English-speaking cricketers should be coming to Britain to play when they should be stay in South Africa and fight the Boers. The vexed authorof Sherlock Holmes called it “a stain on their manhood” (Cornelissen, Grindingh).
Conan Doyle in cricket gear, definitely a “gentleman” (Source: arthur-conan-doyle.com)
Despite the dissenting voices, what ultimately clinched it for Logan’s private tour was the MCC and the major English county clubs’ agreeing to give the tour matches first-class status. Even then there were second thoughts on the South Africa side and a suggestion made that the tour should not go ahead…this was scotched by the MCC who insisted it proceed to prevent the dislocation of the 1901 English season (Cornelissen, Grindingh).
Jimmy Sinclair (Photo: Cricket Weekly Record)
The crickettour 🏏
Logan’s 14-man team was predominantly Uitlanders (‘foreigners’, immigrants, mainly British in composition but from other countries as well)…it included one Afrikaner cricketer Johannes Kotze who proved one of the more accomplished performers. The South Africans’ ‘gun’ batsman coming in to the tour was JH Sinclair, however his batting never really got going on the tour (unlike his bowling which was quite effective). Sinclair had been captured by the Boers but escaped in time to make the trip to Britain. Maitland Hathorn was the most successful “willow-wielder” on the tour (827 runs, average 35.95). Overall the team performed moderately though it did beat five of the major counties and tied one. Financially, Logan lost a substantial sum on the venture.
1901 Sth African tourists (Source: ebay.com)∘
Cricket’s special role serving the Empire
To the English, cricket, the game they invented, was the quintessential sport, and an essential companion of empire building. This was the “golden age“ of cricket (1895-1914) with WG Grace’s shadow still very much dominating the sportⓑ. The Victorians revered cricket as an established institution, it was integral to the ethos of the English gentleman and a sign of his cultural supremacy. Moreover cricket was considered educative, part of an Englishman’s training. Spreading the game to the Empire, to Australasia, the West Indies, the Indian Sub-continent and Southern Africa, symbolised the “civilising mission of the Englishman abroad”. Participation in cricket was equated with the civility of English Victorian society and an endorsement of Anglo-Saxon values. Cricket tours by the MCC, the sport’s governing body in England, stimulated the colonies‘ interest in the English game, but its deeper purpose was to “promote imperial ideology”, extolling the virtues of allegiance to Britain, Empire and patriotic duty {Dean Allen, Empire, War and Cricket in South Africa, Logan of Matjiesfontein, 2015}. Allen’s thesis is that cricket was injected by the English ruling classes into South Africa “as much for political and propagandistic reasons as for sporting ones”
War an instrument of empire with cricket the mentor
The late Victorians affirmed that “manly games” were integral to training for life. Above all the ‘school’ of cricket taught lessons of “discipline, self-abnegation, a sense of fair play and team-work”, it built character. Britain’s willingness to engage in the 1899 War to enlarge the Empire—the scramble for colonies in Africa in competition with Germany and France—brought the cricketing fraternity squarely into the frame. Cricketers, to the English mind, were “made of the right stuff” for mortal combat, they were up for martial challenges (Donaldson, Peter (2017) ‘We are having a very enjoyable game’: Britain, sport and the South African War, 1899-1902. War in History, 25(1). ISSN 0968-3445). Many cricketers enlisted in the South African War (some former teammates found themselves on opposing sides), and there were cricketing casualties in the conflict {Dean Allen (2005) ‘Bats and Bayonets’: Cricket and the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902, Sport in History, 25:1, 17-40, DOI: 10.1080/17460260500073033}, including some fine players of the day like Anglo-Australian test bowling ace JJ Ferris.
Australian troops playing cricket at the front in SA (Photo: awm.org.au)∘
Endnote: Pioneering South African XI on the Sub-continent
An unintended co-occurrence of the Boer War was that it led to the staging of the first cricket match between South Africans and local cricketers on Sub-continent soil, 90 years before Apartheid sport ended in South Africa. ‘Representing’ South Africa were Afrikaner POWs incarcerated in Ceylon…Diyatalawa Camp v Colts XI, Nondescripts Club ground, Colombo 1901. The local XI won! {‘The First South Africa. side to play in the sub-continent: Boer Prisoners of War in 1901’, CricketMash, 4-Jul-2020, www.cricmash.com}.
Mafeking reported in (not exactly balanced) cricketing terms (source: independentaustralia.net)∘
Postscript: 1899 South African War, cricket as antidote to physical and moral degeneration
The poor health of many Boer War recruits and Britain’s early reversals in the war added weight to prevailing concerns about national and ‘racial’ degeneration {Robb, George. “The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics, and the Gospel of Free Love.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 6, no. 4, University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 589–603, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4617222.} Some commentators of the day, bemoaning the ”neglect of an active athleticism“, called for more playing fields as an antidote to the decline of young working class men, so that they could be the beneficiaries of the ”cricket way of making honest and healthy Englishmen” {Anthony Bateman, Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire, 2016}.
𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽
ⓐ the English MCC side had just concluded their own tour of South Africa in April 1899, just six months before the war commenced
ⓑ Dr Grace loomed larger than life in cricket during this period as the sport’s first genuine superstar
The first two decades of the 21st century have been witness to a raft of passing fads and rages, we’ve seen the likes of Planking, Twerking and Tebowing, etcad nauseam, it makes me wonder whatever happened to the wholly sedentary craze of pole-sitting? Like most crazes, I guess, it was of its time and the shelf life is never infinite. It’s day, or its heyday, was in the 1920s up to around the early 1930s when the peak of the craze subsided.
‘Shipwreck’ Kelly at work ▙
Pole-sitting
The initial exponent of pole-sitting or specifically flagpole-sitting, so far as we know, was New Yorker Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly. Prior to his preoccupation with pole-sitting, Kelly was a jack-of-all-trades, trying his hand as a steelworker, steeplejack⋖a⋗, high diver, boxer and movie double. He also was a naval ensign during WWI and held a pilot’s licence and performed aerial stunt flights. Opinions differ on how ‘Shipwreck’ got into the business of pole-sitting, one view goes that the habit came early, scrambling up a pole at the tender age of seven, others attribute it to a dare or to a publicity stunt for a Philadelphia department store [‘Body of ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly Lies Unclaimed in Morgue’, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 13-Oct-1952, (Google News Archive)]. In January 1924 his ‘career’ took off with a record-setting sit atop a pole for 13 hours and 13 minutes to help promote a Hollywood film. Kelly’s best-ever effort was 49 days and one hour, Atlantic City 1930.
AK keeping up with the news at ground-level ▙ (Photo: Everett/Fine Art America)
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At the height of his popularity Kelly was earning $500 a day, coming from charging money to people to watch his feats of endurance, from books about his life, from endorsements and personal appearances. His fame also led to a 28-day tour of the United States, sitting on poles in a different city on each day of the tour. But the glory days did not last, the onset of the Great Depression saw his popularity plummet rapidly, Americans quickly lost interest in spending precious money watching men sit on poles with more serious and urgent concerns taking centre stage in their lives (Saratosa Tribune).
▙ ‘Dixie’ Blandy (Source: Facebook)
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Pole-sitting became competitive with Richard ‘Dixie’ Blandy challenging and even besting Kelly’s 49-day record. Brandy’s accomplishment, 77 days, was the stuff of legend, sustained as it was on a diet of bottles of whiskey and three packs of cigarettes a day [‘The Mad 1920s: Fad of Pole-Sitting’, Messynessy, 25-Sep-2020, www.chic.com]. Interestingly, prior to being bitten by the pole-sitting bug Blandy, like Kelly, tried an assortment of jobs including circus worker, boxer, house painter, steeplejack, riveter, merchant marine, salesman and (wait for it) flagpole painter. Unlike Kelly though, the Louisiana-born Blandy didn’t become inactive because of the Depression, continuing the activity and even breaking his 1933 record twice more, the second time in Stockholm, Sweden, added to Dixie’s legend – a sit of 125 days in a chair affixed to a pole 200-feet above the ground, while consuming 92 bottles of whiskey and his customary diurnal 3 packs of cigs⋖b⋗.[‘Richard Ernest “Dixie” Blandy’, Findagrave, www.findagrave.com]. Blandy actually died on the job, killed in 1974 when the flagpole supporting him collapsed.
▙ Publicity shot: Dixie was popular with the ladies, married 6 times (all his wives met him via the phone at his pole-sitting events) (Source: Dayton Daily News)❕
▙ Paalzitten (Noordwijkerhout)
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Blandy notwithstanding, the fad had seen its day after the Depression bit hard. Since then there have been attempts from time to time to revive the pole-sitting caper. In the Netherlands for example pole-sitting became a competitive sport In the 1970s – the Dutch call it Paalzitten (literally “sit tight”). This is a world away from the pursuit that made Alvin and Dixie famous, the poles in the Netherland sit above not solid ground but water and nose-bleeds are uncommon as Dutch derrières are perched barely two arm lengths from the level of the water…“a tourist attraction more than a spectator sport”. [‘Paalzitten Is A Dutch Competitive Sport Where You Have To Sit On A Pole For Hours’, The Engineer, www.wonderfulengineering.com].
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Stylites
The fad of Pole-sitting originated in the 1920s as we have seen, but there are historical precedents for this curious pastime. In the early Christian period certain ascetic monks of a particularly fanatical bent practiced something broadly analogous to pole-sitting. These holy men of Late Antiquity were called ‘Stylites’ (from Greek stylos, ‘pillar’). Stylites were “pillar-dwellers” not pole-sitters, and their motivation was spiritual salvation rather than money and fame which spurred on ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly and his ilk. Stylites’ also differed from the pole-sitters in modus operandi, standing on the pillars was their preferred position. Sitting was something they tended to resort to only when overcome by fatigue or perhaps sleep.
▙ 6th century depiction of Ur-Simeon Stylites
The ‘poles’ in question were in fact narrow columns or towers atop which were small platforms which housed the Stylite. The platform were usually encircled by a railing of sorts to prevent the hermit-preacher from falling off. The most famous of the practitioners—the ur-Stylite—was Simeon Stylites the Elder whose early zeal for Christianity led him to ascend a pillar in Syria in AD 423. Later he relocated to a second, nearby pillar more than 15 metres above the ground, apparently staying in it till his death 37 years later⋖c⋗.
▙ Icon depicting both Simeon the Elder & Simeon the Younger
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Simeon’s devotion to the practice made him quite a celebrity in the Christian world, he corresponded with the high and mighty including the Eastern emperors Theodosius II and Leo I, even exerting some influence on ecclesiastical matters, such was his standing. Visitors flocked to observe him praying, preaching and fasting on his high platform. Pilgrims and sightseers sought spiritual counselling, healing for the sick, intervention on behalf of the oppressed, etc. Simeon was too popular, a double wall had to be constructed around his pillar to keep the thronging multitudes from getting too close and disturbing his prayer sessions [‘St. Simeon Stylites’, Britannica, www.britannica.com].
▙ Luke the Stylite
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The pre-Medieval Christian lifestyle caught on among the more ascetically inclined of the early Byzantine clergy (including women) with many following the prototypical Stylite, some even adopting his name. The more notable of these include St Daniel of Constantinople, St Simeon Stylites the Younger (Antioch), St Alypius of Paphlagonia (north-central Anatolia) and St Simeon Stylites (III) of Lesbos. As this list shows, prominence in the Stylite calling was a passport to sainthood. The Stylites needed to be a stoical lot as they were exposed to all kinds of weather at the top (although some were fortunate enough to be furnished with a small hut to escape into in time of severe inclemency).
▙ Georgian hermit headquarters (Source: Vintage News)
Footnote: If you think the Stylites were confined to the so-called “Dark Ages”, think again! The practice has not entirely been extinguished in the 21st century. A monk in Georgia (Maxime Qavtaradze) in 2013 celebrated 20 years of lofty solitude as a ascetic hermit atop a mountain pillar a la the Stylites⋖d⋗. The original Stylites however would not recognise their barest of existences in the Georgian pillar set-up…Maxime lives in a small cosy cottage with adjoining church house on the top of his pillar, and the monk descends twice a week to the village below to say prayers with his parishioners [‘Georgian Monk Renews Tradition, Lives Atop Pillar’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11-Sep-2013, www.rferl.org].
⋖a⋗ perhaps serving as a kind of altitude training for his later pole-sitting marathons
⋖b⋗ to avoid a calamitous outcome in marathon stints, the pole-sitters tied their legs to the vertical structure when wanting to sleep
⋖c⋗ meagre parcels of food were fetched to Simeon by his disciples
The first time I wandered through Waverley Cemetery in the chic, beachside eastern suburbs of Sydney I was somewhat bemused to find in the midst of the congested maze of gravesites of famous Australians—poets, politicians and judges, sports men and women, aviation pioneers among others—a large, impressive marble, bronze and mosaic memorial to the martyrs of the 1798 Irish Rebellion.
Honouring the sacrifices of 1798
The connexion only became clear to me later when I did some research on the ‘mystery’. The nexus linking the heroic but lost cause of nascent Éireannach 18th century insurrection against the indignities of English rule to a Sydney cemetery turned out to be one Michael Dwyer, whose remains along with those of his wife are buried within the grand monument. The memorial was constructed for the 100-year anniversary (1898) of the uprising, the plot and monument paid for by the local Irish community in New South Wales.
Michael Dwyer, hero of Wicklow resistance
Dwyer in the ‘Pantheon’ of Irish independence heroes
Native Wicklow man ‘Captain’ Dwyer fought in the ‘98 Rebellion, later leading an effective guerrilla campaign against the British army in the Wicklow Mountains. Dwyer held out till 1803, earning himself the sobriquet “the Wicklow Chief” before his eventual capture and transportion to the NSW colony (not America as he had been promised). In any event Dwyer got off pretty lightly compared to many of the rebels – given his freedom and a land grant of 100 acres on Cabramatta Creek. Dwyer’s life in Australia was a roller coaster of a ride and colourful to put it mildly…twice imprisoned and tried for plotting an Irish insurrection against the British authorities in NSW, a highly dubious charge that that he was acquitted of (though he still had to do time in Norfolk Island and Van Diemens Land penal colonies). When the NSW Corps overthrew Governor Bligh in the Rum Rebellion, Dwyer was reinstated as a free man, fortune favoured him again a couple of years later when he was made chief constable of police at Liverpool, NSW, and then it deserted him once more when Dwyer ended up in debtors’ prison (Ruan O’Donnell, ‘Dwyer, Michael (1772–1825)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dwyer-michael-12896/text23301, published first in hardcopy 2005, accessed online 9 September 2021; O’Sullivan, Michael, 1798 Memorial, Waverley Cemetery, Dictionary of Sydney, 2012, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/1798_memorial_waverley_cemetery, viewed 10 Sep 2021).
First steps on a long road to liberty
The inspiration for a surge in Irish nationalism and a sovereign republic free of English domination came from the French and to a lesser extent American revolutions. Ireland had a parliament of its own in Dublin but democratic participation was strictly limited by religious and property entitlements, squeezing out Catholics and Presbyterians and leaving the “Protestant Ascendency” in control of the country. The Society of United Irishmen (SUI), a secular organisation not restricted to Catholics¹,was formed to push for real autonomy for the Irish. Some reforms were forthcoming such as the franchise for non-Protestants but this was not near enough for the more radical elements of SUI.
Wolfe Tone
The SUI leader (Theobald) Wolfe Tone forged links with French republicans aimed at overthrowing English rule, leading to a 1796 invasion of Ireland by a nearly 14,000-strong French army. Unfortunately nature intervened and the invasion fleet ran into storms off the Irish west coast, loss of vessels and lives forced the abandonment of the invasion. The response of the government in Ireland—symbolically known as Dublin Castle—was to crack down heavily on the SUI radicals. The SUI was driven underground in a wave of repression culminating in the imprisonment of many of the organisation’s leaders. Though the Irish republicanism of SUI was a popular sentiment in the country, it didn’t have universal support even on the Catholic side, the Catholic Church strongly opposed what it saw as the ‘atheistic’ United Irishmen (‘The 1798 Rebellion – A Brief Overview’, John Dorney, The Irish Story, 28-Oct-2017, www.theirishstory.com).
Battle of Vinegar Hill
An uncoordinated insurrection
The Irish rising in 1798 was ill-timed and badly organised – most of the SUI leadership was still incarcerated. The insurgents’ planning was strategically inept, the rebellion was intended to be nationwide, but was largely confined to isolated pockets – Wexford, Leinster, Mayo, Antrim and Down. Dublin which should have been central to the revolt played virtually no part in it (Dorney). Historian Thomas Bartlett disputes the commonly held view of the rebellion being a localised affair…he argues that far from being confined to the east coast, the uprising produced “tremors throughout the country” with disturbance occurring in a very large number of counties (Bartlett, Thomas. “Why the History of the 1798 Rebellion Has Yet to Be Written.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr15 (2000): 181-90. Accessed September 8, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30071449). The rebels had some brief, early successes (especially the Battle of Oulart), but superior English troops and weaponry overwhelmed the poorly equiped Irish force inside a month. A subsequent incursion from a small French expeditionary force offered a momentary flicker of hope for the rebel cause but this was quickly snuffed out as the English-led forces took complete charge of the country. Retribution against the rebel leaders was swift and uncompromisingly brutal, most were summarily executed (or in Wolfe Tone’s case took his own life while awaiting execution). Atrocities were committed on both sides. A large number of the insurgents (like Michael Dwyer later on) were transported to the penal colony in New Holland. The failed ‘98 rising left a mixed legacy, intensifying the level of sectarian bitterness in Ireland but also inspiring countless Irish republicans and revolutionaries to continue the struggle for a free Ireland (‘The 1798 Irish Rebellion’, Thomas Bartlett, BBC, 17-Feb-2011, www.bbc.co.uk).
1800 Act of Union
In the wake of the crushing of the rebellion by the Marquis Cornwallis², fundamental political changes were enacted. The Irish Parliament was dissolved and direct British rule imposed by virtue of the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland, a situation that would stay in force until the Irish Free State came into being in 1922.
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¹ in fact many of the leaders like Wolfe Tone, Harvey and Keogh were Protestant
² the same (Lord) Cornwallis in the forefront of the ignominy associated with the 1781 English surrender at Yorktown which ended the land conflict in the American War of Independence
When the first men managed through repeated trial-and-error to get manned “flying machines” off the ground, the first women pioneers weren’t that far behind them in getting into the skies. The first woman got her flying licence (Elise Deroche in France) less than nine years after the Wright brothers made their epic 59-second ‘hop’ – see the 2017 brace of articles elsewhere on this blogsite, Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I (May 27, 2017) and Part II (May 31, 2017).
Baroness Derouche (Source: This Day in Aviation)🔺Reitsch testing the FW-61 (Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images)
While many women overcame obstacles on the way to a career as an aviatrix, those of their sex wanting to become helicopter pilots have found it even more difficult and onerous. The prospects around 1940 when the world’s first modern rotary-wing copter became fully functional looked bright enough for women. Nazi Germany’s pioneering aviatrix Hanna Reitsch was leading the way. In 1938 Reitsch☸ became the first woman to test fly a helicopter, Focke’s FW-61 helicopter, even going on to set a distance record for helicopter flight of 109km. She followed that up with the record (shared with another pilot) for being the first in the world to fly a copter in an enclosed space❇ (Sophie Jackson, Hitler’s Heroine, Hanna Reitsch (2014)).
🔺 Reitsch’s 1955 autobiography
Unfortunately, as the industry has grown since those formative days, female helicopter pilots trying to follow the trajectory of Reitsch’s stellar achievements in the air have found it much harder to penetrate the masculine preserve of the helicopter world. Today women still lag far behind in the gender stakes, in 2019 according to the Civil Aviation Authority women made up only 4.5% of the helicopter pilots in the UK, with just the single female instructor-examiner for the whole country (“International Women’s Day: ‘I’m teaching other women to fly helicopters’”, BBC, 08-Mar-2019, www.bbc.com).
(Photo: Stephanie Wallace/IMdiversity)
The statistics are hardly more encouraging in the US. The Helicopter Association International puts the number of female pilots at around 5%, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) which pointedly has no specific data on women helicopter pilots estimates the figure at a perhaps generous 7.9%. (‘How These 2 Women Became The Helicopter Pilot and Reporter Inside Skyeye’, ABC13, 11-Mar-2021, www.abc13.com). Even more concerning, the percentage of women behind the controls has been stagnant over recent decades✴.
But it’s not from the lack of trying to effect change on the part of women aviators! The barriers to female entry into both the commercial and military fields of helicopters led pilot Jean Ross Howard Phelan (above), the 8th US woman to gain her helicopter accreditation, to form Whirly Girls International in 1955—an association dedicated to the advancement of women in helicopter aviation—with just 12 other charter members🈂. Today the group has 72,000 members from 44 countries.
The minuscule inroads made by women inside the sanctum of the “male cockpit” isn’t confined to rotary-wing aircraft. Women pilots have barely had more success in cracking the fixed-wing aircraft industry, their share of the jobs in the US has hovered somewhere between five and six-and-a-half percent. Despite all the efforts of women’s aviation bodies including the Ninety-Nines (the Whirly Girls’ “older sister” organisation) to make headway in rectifying the imbalance, women today constitute just 7% of the world’s certified pilots for all types of aircraft (‘Female Helicopter Pilots on The Rise’, Claire McCann, Prestige Helicopters, Inc., Upd.11-Nov-2020, www.prestigehelicopters.com).
Women in Aviation International: best strategy, targeting girls at a young age to foster the ‘bug’ for a flying career
The reasons flying has continued to be a male stronghold are many and varied. With so few women pilots—only 13 credentialed to fly helicopters by 1955—young women and girls have been bereft of visible role models and mentors to show the way. At school-level not enough effort have been made to make teenage girls aware of the opportunities there are in a flying career. The preponderance of male pilots perpetuates the “highly masculine image of aviation“, reinforcing the stereotype that the profession is “not a woman’s job” (Why There Aren’t More Female Pilots’, Katherine LaGrave, IMdiversity 08-Mar-2018, www.imdiversity.com). This in part comes back to a prevailing mentality of “Top Gun” chauvinism. Female pilots have commented on aviation still being an “old boys’ club” and the lack of support, bias and intimidation they experienced from men in the industry during their training (‘Chances Are Your Pilot Isn’t a Woman. Here’s Why’, Kimberly Perkins, Seattle Business, (nd), www.seattlebusinessmag.com). The issue of unhelpful male pilots for some women has led to another road block, the paucity of female instructors in the industry.
🔺 Ret.Col. Sally D Murphy, 1st female copter pilot in US Army
Once in the industry some women pilots have found themselves facing static career paths, the sheer lack of opportunities to attain seniority has eventually led a number of women in military and commercial aviation to prematurely leave the profession. Another criticism of the aviation industry is that it hasn’t embraced the change in work rules and conditions that other industries have…getting the work/life balance right is an issue of more importance to women who usually have to bear the brunt of child-rearing activities (‘Why are there so few women in aviation?’, Kathryn Creedy, CNN, 20-Nov-2019, www.cnn.com).
🔺 Cessna 172
Research suggests the prohibitive costs involved can be a barrier for women. Aircraft training in the US can cost up to US$150,000, add to this the soaring price of purchasing an entry-level commercial plane today…the (adjusted) price of buying a new Cessna 172 is four times greater than it was in 1960 (‘Why Are There So Few Female Pilots?, Rebecca Maksel, Air and Space, 06-Feb-2015, www.airspacemag.com).
🔺 Malaysia’s 1st female copter pilot (Photo: The Star (Mal.)
What makes the persistence of multiple barriers and obstacles blocking women from realising their professional pilot dreams maddeningly vexatious is the dilemma now facing the industry as a whole, a looming worldwide shortage of qualified pilots to take the reins of the big airliners. Some airlines like United in the US recently have flagged the introduction of quotas to increase pilot numbers for women and for minorities, but much more fundamental structural change is required before we see real progress in tackling the gender imbalance.
(Photo: PPRuNe Forums)
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☸ having already been appointed a flugkapitän (flight captain), a position till then exclusively reserved for male German pilots
❇ later Reitsch was also the first woman to fly a rocket plane
✴ numbers in the US did initially rise from the 1960s to the 1980s but have plateaued since that point (Maksel)
🈂 member #1 was appropriately enough Hanna Reitsch
In 1953, two years after George Whitman resurrected Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the bookshop that was to become its trans-Atlantic soul mate, City Lights, opened its doors in the North Beach area of San Francisco🄰.
(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Two landmark ‘indie’ bookshops
The story of Shakespeare and Company’s evolution into an legendary bookshop has been sketched in a previous blog piece: ‘Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company’, 21-July-2021. On the other side of the Atlantic another distinctive stand-alone bookshop was staking it’s undeniable claim for iconic status in the world of independent booksellers.
A literary community
Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisaged City Lights as “a literary meeting place”—just like Whitman and Shakespeare and Company—a haven for aspiring writers to hangout and find creativity. A poet himself, Ferlinghetti attracted an emerging group of fiction writers and poets that coalesced into the “Best Generation”, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso. The Beat writers and poets found themselves a comfortable niche hanging out together in the basement reading room of City Lights.
(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Not only that, Ferlinghetti was proactive in his support for the Beats’ budding careers by starting a publishing arm at City Lights, bringing to the public collections of poetry, offbeat and radical books ignored by the mainstream press. Ferlinghetti’s disavowal of the commercial mainstream saw him promote alternative newspapers and magazines as well (‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights bookshop, dies aged 101’, Sian Cain, The Guardian, 23-Feb-2021, www.theguardian.com).
(Image: citylights.com)
Maverick bookseller
City Lights was always an innovator in the bookselling biz. It arose with the onset of the paperback revolution, a wave that the San Fran bookshop happily rode. Hard covers were expensive so City Lights became the first all-paperback bookshop in the US (co-founder Paul Martin’s idea). The bookstore bucked the bookselling status quo – before City Lights came along readers could only buy paperbacks from drugstores, bus stations and newsstands (‘The Beat Generation in San Francisco’, Bill Morgan, www.citylights.com). Ferlinghetti’s store was a democratising force in US bookselling, City Lights’ paperbacks were cheap, all budgets could afford their quality pocket books. City Lights’ innovativeness extended to opening hours. Unlike the bulk of mainstream American bookshops who usually closed early in the Fifties, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night.
🔺 the ’emperor of City Lights
Bookshop outreach
The bookshop extended outreach activities to the local community. The store maintained a community bulletin board, disseminating info for the North Beach literary set, thus helping to foster the local counterculture community. Ferlinghetti also furnished the City Lights store with letter racks for itinerants who frequented the triangular storefront to collect their mail.
The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).
🔺 Ferlinghetti outside City Lights, 1950s
Politicalpoetics
The character of City Lights reflected Ferlinghetti’s own political and social activism. The “philosophical anarchist” was a bulwark for left causes, eg, using the bookshop venue to host many sit-ins and protests against the Vietnam War (“books, not bombs”). Ferlinghetti believed that poetry was a social force capable of raising the consciousness of the people.
Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)
Precarious business model?
Profitability was not City Lights’ raison d’être. Staying out of “the red” was a constant challenge. To stay afloat sometimes the publishing side needed to bail out the retail sales which was losing money and at other times it was vice versa (Cain). What didn’t help matters financial were the activities of shoplifting gangs in the Seventies which targeted the bookshop. And if it wasn’t them it was insiders like poet Gregory Corso helping himself liberally to the till (Morgan).
Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)
Footnote: the extent to which Shakespeare and Co and City Lights can be called sister bookshops comes down largely to the personal visions of their founders Whitman and Ferlinghetti🄴 who were both lifelong book tragics🄵, “(sharing a) love of literature and poetry (and a) devotion and commitment to the power of words” (‘The Beats go on…’, Alix Sharkey, The Guardian, 02-Mar-2002, www.theguardian.com). For Whitman and Ferlinghetti however, the bookshop was more than a receptacle for selling books, it filled the roles of haven and incubator in nurturing new writers as well as a hub for the local literary community. Sister bookstores they may be but they are clearly not identical twins when it comes to the interiors and decors of the two bookshops…City Lights’ book displays are neatly-ordered and arranged whereas Shakespeare and Co is clutter central to the max!
City Lights (Photo: Literary Hub)
𓂉𓂊𓂉
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights. The New York born, Paris educated, bookseller and publisher, died on 22nd February 2021, aged 101.
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🄰 City Lights’ address, 261-271 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco 94133, places it technically within Chinatown but the store identifies with the adjoining precinct of North Beach
🄱 ‘Howl’, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ was a thunderbolt against the conservative poetry establishment of Fifties America, the prototype for a new poetry which immersed itself in “wide-eyed truth-telling”
🄲 the basis of the acquittal was a precedent called on in later attempts to overturn bans on works like Tropic of Capricorn and Naked Lunch
🄳 although often associated with them, City Light’s publishing arm never confined itself to the beat writers, it also publishes the work of non-Beat luminaries like Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Malcolm Lowry
🄴 strictly speaking Ferlinghetti wasn’t the founder of City Lights, that was sociology academic Paul D Martin but Ferlinghetti got into the business on the ground floor in 1953 and took sole charge of the bookshop within two years after Martin left
🄵 Whitman literally slept in a room in the store overflowing with books
Beach on the SeineA must-visit in Paris for the literary and artistic set or even the mildly book-curious is the iconic “Shakespeare and Company” bookstore situated near the Latin Quarter and across from Notre Dame. It’s address is 37 rue de la Bûcherie 75005, V, but it wasn’t always there. Shakespeare & Co founder, American expat Sylvia Beach, started the legendary Left Bank bookshop at 8 rue Dupuytren in 1919. Within three years Beach moved the shop to the 6th Arrondissement at 12 rue de l’Odéan, across the street from La Masion des Amis des Livres owned by Beach’s future ‘bestie’ and amour Adrienne Monnier. This bookshop was the template Beach used for her own serious literature bookshop-cum-lending library.
𐅉 Ulysses – Joyce and Beach at Shakespeare & Co
Beach’s lifeline for Joyce’s untouchable manuscript
Beach is probably best remembered for giving James Joyce his big breakthrough in the literary world, publishing Ulysses in
1922 when nobody else would touch it…the abstruse, controversial novel went on to become a masterpiece of modern literature. Over time Shakespeare and Company acquired a more lasting fame as the hub of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Aspiring British, Irish and American writers, prompted by a post-WWI favourable pound and dollar exchange rate against the French franc, flocked to the creative milieu of Paris where they discovered the unique appeal of Beach’s Anglophone bookshop🄱 (The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham, 2014).
𐅉 Hemingway & Fitzgerald (www.pinterest.fr)
“The Lost Generation”
In the interwar years Beach’s bookshop became a haven for the Anglophone literati…habitués included the likes of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the “Lost Generation” of American intellectuals, modernist writers and artists including Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ford Maddox Ford, Man Ray, etc. Hemingway and other illustrious names belonged to the store’s lending library, borrowing books when they couldn’t afford to buy them. At the same time French intellectual writers such as Gidé and de Beauvoir also benefitted from Sylvia’s efforts to get their work better known in the US. The bookseller also gave crucialassistance to various avant-garde ‘little magazines’in getting their publicationsoff the ground by distributing their editions (Shakespeare and Co: The world’s most famous bookshop at 100‘, Cath Pound, BBC, 19-Nov-2019, www.bbc.com).
𐅉 a young George Whitman
Shakespeare and Company redux
In 1941 with occupied Paris under the Nazi swastika, the shop was closed down and Beach interned for a period after Sylvia refused to sell the last copy of Finnegan’s Wake to a German officer. The closure was permanent but the phoenix of Beach’s bookstore did rise again, reinvented by another American expat a decade later. In 1951 WWII veteran George Whitman opened a new, independent English-language bookshop – effectively “Shakespeare and Company Mach II“, though originally called Le Mistral. Later Sylvia Beach apparently anointed Whitman’s bookshop as the true and worthy successor to her original Shakespeare and Company (after Beach’s death in 1962 Whitman renamed the bookshop “Shakespeare and Company”) (‘Bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Paris’, by Els, www.flickr.com).
(Source: another mag.com)
“The Beat Generation”
Within a short time Whitman’s Mistral bookshop was fulfilling the same service to Paris-based Bohemians as Beach’s had for the Lost Generation of writers. Le Mistral, the second coming of “Shakespeare and Co”, became a mecca for a new literary generation in the Fifties, the ’Beat’ Generation and its writers including Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Greg Corso. Other English-language expats to frequent the bookshop at this time include Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Ray Bradbury (‘Shakespeare and a Company (Bookshop), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).
𐅉 Quote from medieval Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz
Tumbleweed Hotel‘s quirky tariff
George Whitman maintained Sylvia Beach’s tradition of putting aspiring young writers up for the night (or several nights)…in return for a very basic cot or even a bench, the guests were required to work in the store, read a book and write a one-page autobiography🄲 (‘A Brief History of Shakespeare and Company, Paris’ Legendary Bookstore’, Alex Ledsom, Culture Trip, 26-Feb-2018, www.theculturetrip.com.
𐅉 Sylvia Whitman (Photo: nicethingspalomas.com)
Generation-and-a-half change
George Whitman died in 2011 at 98…the last 10 years of his life was a struggle of wills as the increasingly wildly eccentric George sought to push back against the attempts of his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman🄳 to modernise the bookshop🄴. Since becoming sole proprietor, Sylvia has moved Shakespeare and Company forward with the times—web-based online transactions, modern accounting practices, the addition of a café, etc—but she still runs a lending library and a second-hand book section, hosts book launches and regular author readings by Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, etc in the shop (‘In a bookstore in Paris’, Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair, 21-Oct-2014, www.vanityfair.com).
(Photo: www.minute.net)
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Some takes by visitors on the physical layout of Whitman’s bookshop:
° “a Tardis – modest enough on the outside, a labyrinth on the inside” ~ Jeanette Winterson
° “Shakespeare and Company has the rambling lucidity of an unkempt boudoir” ~ Penny Watson, ‘A tale of two bookshops’ [SMH, Dec 1-2, 2007]
° “a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books” ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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𐅉 Sylvia Beach (Source: ricorso.net)
Footnote: for the literary expatriates who frequented Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop served a number of purposes. It functioned as a sort of support network club where the expat writers could meet other members, could draw inspiration from its environs, they could read a wide range of quality literature including books banned in the US and UK, and they could write in its rooms🄵.The bookshop was a “sanctuary for progressive writers and a hub for innovative publishing” (Pound). Some of the expat artists and writers even used Beach’s bookshop as their postal box for receiving mail in Paris (Birmingham).
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🄰 Joyce ‘repaid’ Beach by later defecting to a new publisher at a time the bookseller was in a financial jam
🄱 Beach couldn’t however replicate the triumph of getting Ulysses into print with DH Lawrence’s controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover
🄲 the senior Whitman described these blow-in visitors as ’Tumbleweeds’, estimated to number around 30,000 since 1951
🄳 named in honour of the original Sylvia Beach
🄴 George was resistant to changing even one iota of the seemingly chaotic structure of the shop; he didn’t believe in phones or credit cards or computers (Handy)
🄵 Whitman gave the store’s rooms whimsical names like “Old Smoky Reading Room” and “Blue Oyster Tearoom”
In his semi-autobiographical, Australian novel Kangaroo, DH Lawrence’s protagonist Richard Somers remarks that he’ll “probably repent bitterly going to America”. This echoes Lawrence’s own equivocation about America. In correspondence, Lawrence thought America “the land of his future” but this was tempered by a pessimism that the United States would be ‘barbaric’ and he would hate it⌖ (Letters IV:141, 151, ‘Manuscripts and Special Collections’, D. H. Lawrence Research – The University of Nottingham, www.nottingham.ac.uk).
The call of Pueblo lifestyle
In the end what clinched it for Lawrence was an invite from New York art patron Mabel Dodge Sterne to visit Taos, New Mexico. The promise of Taos captured DHL’s imagination…remote (7,000 feet-high, 23 miles from the nearest railway), 600 free Indians unspoilt by western capitalism and modernity, “sun-worshippers and rain makers” (D. H. Lawrence and the American Indians’, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56, Issue 2, Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).
DHL was enchanted with the idea of the primitive lifestyle of native Americans, their spiritual faith and traditional connexion with the earth.
Taos Pueblo (Source: http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/)
Lawrence envisaged that this could be the utopian community, the free and open, instinctive society, ‘Rananim’, that he had been trekking around the world trying to find. Mabel also lured Bert to Taos with the prospect of dazzlingly spectacular scenery.
Mabel Dodge (Luhan) & her Amerindian husband (Photo: Santa Fe New Mexican)
In search of healthy air
DHL had another motive for choosing New Mexico, being potentially beneficial to his precarious health. His tubercular condition was not diminishing at allq. The climate in Taos—high and dry with famously good and clean air— was one that might bring about a cure for his infected lungs (‘Looking for Lawrence’, Henry Shukman, New Mexico Magazine, (nd),www.newmexico.org).
Desert Rananim?
As his letters show, Lawrence was in love with the desert landscape of New Mexico to an intoxicating degree – overwhelmed by the strangeness and beauty of the place, even a bit awestruck and fearful. When the writer visited the wilderness of Western Australia earlier, he experienced similar vibes from the bush environment (‘Looking for Lawrence’).
DHL waxed lyrical on the experience later, ” I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever …. the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend”: he wrote how the person who lives there “above the great proud world of desert will know, almost unbearably how beautiful it is, how clear and unquestioned is the might of the day” (‘Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers is D. H. Lawrence’, (2017)).
At Taos Lawrence found himself the unwilling object of a love triangle with host Mabel vying with wife Frieda for his attention, which stiffled his creativity somewhat. He did however manage to finish the final chapter of Kangaroo during his initial sojourn in Taos.
The Lawrence Ranch
Ranch life in the high country
Lawrence returned to England in 1923 keen on recruiting members of the British artistic fraternity for his New Mexico ‘Rananim’. He returned the next year but with only the one recruit, artist Dorothy Brett☼, whose presence added a further tension to the feminine rivalries at Taos. This led to Mabel giving the Lawrences their own ranch way up in the mountains (8,600 feet above sea-level) and about 20 miles from Taos—the only property the couple would ever own—the Kiowa Ranch (now the D.H. Lawrence Ranch)✪. When not beavering away on new manuscript projects, Bert kept busy at the ranch chopping wood and constructing log cabins, as well as taking hikes in the mountains.
(Photo: www.taos.org)
Ambivalence towards Amerindian culture
Once Bert got to see Amerindian religious ritual and customs up close, much of his pre-visit enthusiasm dissipated (“not impressive as a spectacle”, he noted). He still admired the “Red Indian” but felt the native American culture had been debased by American ‘progress’ and modernity, reduced in Taos to that of a tourism attraction (essay ‘New Mexico’, (1928); ‘D.H. Lawrence and the American Indiana’s, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56 Issue 2, Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).
⇪ ‘St Mawr’ set partly in New Mexico mountains juxtaposes the vitality of nature with modern degenerate civilisation
Lorenzo’s literary output in the Southwest
DH Lawrence visited Taos, NM, three times during the period 1922-25 but only for a total of 11 months altogether. ‘Lorenzo’, as his patron and admirer Mabel Dodge fondly called him, never fulfilled the fervent hopes of Mabel by writing the great novel of the Southwest or even of New Mexico…but he did manage to produce a solid body of work while residing in NM including the novellas St Mawr and The Woman Who Rode Away, the travel book Mornings in Mexico, as well as writing part of the novel The Plumed Serpent at the ranch (after research conducted in Mexico).
Lawrence’s TB condition worsened in Europe and the novelist died in 1930 in the south of France, still proclaiming to friends a heartfelt desire to return to his beloved Taos. Frieda, who returned to live in Taos, afterwards had her late husband’s remains exhumed and shipped back to be interred on Taos soil.
Kandy, 1925 (Photo:www.lankapura.com)
End-note: Lawrence in the tropics
Lawrence’s global search for an alternative to modern, industrialised ‘civilisation’ landed him in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on route to America. Lawrence’s anticipation of a good time in Ceylon was dealt a harsh blow by reality. The Lawrences stayed on the edge of the forest in Kandy, their attempts to sleep plagued by unbearable heat—”the terrific sun … like a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you”, and the local fauna —“horrid noises of the birds and creatures … hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day” (Letters IV: 214, 227 Notts U). The one bright spot was the Raj Pera-Hera festival which DHL enjoyed, inspiring him to write a poem, ‘Elephant’, the sole literary fruit of his five weeks in Ceylon.
Huxley & Lawrence in Taos
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⌖ San Francisco, the Lawrences’ entry point to the US, Bert, pernickety as ever, found less than prepossessing – “noisy and expensive”
☼although writer Aldous Huxley did visit Lawrence in NM
✪ in return the Lawrences gave Dodge the MS for Sons and Lovers, which proved to be far more valuable than the ranch
Next year marks the centenary of the visit of acclaimed writer DH Lawrence to the Antipodes … the author of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love spent some 99 days on the southern continent travelling from its west to its east coast and writing the bulk of his great Australia novel, Kangaroo. The 1922 visit by the English novelist and poet has attracted new interest both within Australian literary circles and the general public over the past couple of decades. The tortuous saga of the vicissitudes of Lawrence and his wife Frieda’s house in Thirroul, NSW, after the Lawrences departed Australia, has been canvassed elsewhere on this blog site – “Lawrence of Thirroul: Creating Kangaroo at ‘Wyewurk’”, November 10, 2014.
DHL at Taos (Source: New Mexico Magazine)
Lawrence”s Weltanschauung (World view and moral vision)
Lawrence’s unquenchable wanderlust emerged from a disavowal of the dehumanising and degenerating effects of modernity and industrialisation. To his moral eye, people’s natural feelings including sexuality had been “dulled by the mechanical routine of ‘civilisation'”, making their responses coldly cerebral, not warmly instinctive and spontaneous. Lawrence’s answer to the dilemma was for society to embrace the anima (vital energy or spirit force) to be found in primitive cultures (eg, among the ancient Etruscans)…only by doing this would modern civilisation achieve the necessary revitalisation (‘D.H. Lawrence World Literature Analysis’, upd.05-May-2015, www.enotes.com). Later after the Australasian leg, DHL believed he had discovered in Taos, New Mexico, the utopian place he had been searching for (“a new part of the soul woke up suddenly and the old world gave way to a new”)⌖.
⏏ ‘Women in Love’, set against the modern industrial Britain so loathed by Lawrence
Travels with DHL
DH Lawrence’s arrival in Australia was a stage in the writer’s global quest to find a new world in tune with his sensibilities. Dissatisfaction with his homeland had prompted voluntary exile from the industrialised rat race of Britain and launched Lawrence on a country to country “savage pilgrimage” across the world.
Coming to the southern continent, DHL’s hope was that Australia, free from the old society’s ills, would deliver the ‘nirvana’ he was seeking (a utopian construct he called ‘Rananim’) (D.H.Lawrence’s Australian Experiment’, Susan Lever, Inside Story, 21-Oct-2015, www.insidestory.org.au).
Deep dissolution down under
As the text of Kangaroo reveals, these hopes were swiftly extinguished during the sojourn in Australia. Taking an instant dislike to urban Sydney Lawrence swiftly escaped to the south coast town of Thirroul. Though the beauty and awe of the Australian bush and landscape (its “spirit of place”) left a deep impression on him, Lawrence found disfavour in what he took to be the Australian character. What galled Lawrence was the “profound Australian indifference” … “hollow, modern people, living in a society so democratic that it denied all superiority and depth of intellect and feeling”… “exemplifying the degenerative nature of industrial society” that DHL abhorred (David Game, DH Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire, 2015).
DH Lawrence, technophobe
Australians’ material modern-ness irked Lawrence, their slavish craving to be up-to-date with the most modern conveniences, be it electric lights, tramways or whatever (‘The beard of the prophet’, Tom Fitzgerald, Inside Story, 30-Oct-2018, www.insidestory.org.au). Australians, Lawrence/Somers opined, were too materialistic, too outward-looking, to the exclusion of their inner lives…”like so many mechanical animals” (“‘Harmless Eden”: Revisiting D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo“, Julian Hanna, 3:am Magazine, 28-Oct-2014, www.3ammagazine.com).
In Kangaroo, Richard Lovat Somers’ dalliance with the right wing paramilitary Diggers movement serves as a warning of the coming peril of fascism. But Somers is equally distrustful of democracy in modern, industrial society⧆ and is also alienated from socialist sentiments he encounters – embodied in the character Willie Struthers※. Typically contrarian (and at times contradictory) in his views, DHL was notorious for being what one journalist called “something of a world champion in hypercritical, hard-to-please invective (Fitzgerald)֎.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Lawrence in New Zealand, hit and run
The Lawrences left Sydney in August 1922 , sailing “four days to New Zealand over a cold, dark and inhospitable sea”. A minor run-in with an immigration official upon arrival in Wellington prompted in Bert an instant negative reaction to New Zealand. Spending just one day in “cold and stormy Wellington” and seeing very little of the place♤, the couple left abruptly for San Francisco via Rarotonga and Tahiti (also not to DHL’s taste, Papeete: “dead, dull, modern”). Lawrence’s parting shot at NZ/Aeotoroa (based on a single day’s stay in the capital city) was that he had no desire “to stay in a cold, snobbish middle-class colony of pretentious nobodies” (‘Katherine Mansfield: DH Lawrence’s “Lost Girl”. A Literary Discovery’, Sandra Jobson Darroch, Rananim, 2009, www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au).
♠ ♠ ♠
A note on place names in ‘Kangaroo’
Lawrence freely identifiesthe various places the Somers come across on their travels—Manly, St Columb (Collaroy), Narrabeen, the Quay, North Sydney, Murdoch Street (Cremorne), Mosman Bay, Como, Bulli, etc—but he alters the names of where the couple live…Thirroul becomes ‘Mullumbimby’ and their beach-cliff bungalow on the Illawarra coast, Wyewurk , is renamed ‘Coo-ee‘ in the novel.
The Lawrences’ mini-Odyssey in Sydney through the lens of ‘Kangaroo’
In DHL’s Roman à clef Australian novel, Richard and Harriet Somers re-trace Bert and Frieda’s perambulations from the city to the Northern Beaches on their first full day in Sydney, before the escape to Thirroul .
Royal Botanic Garden
”A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass beside Macquarie Street … they had that air of owning the city that belongs to a good Australian”❧
Circular Quay ferry across the harbour
“The harbour … was an extraordinary place … like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly, with its hidden and half-hidden lobes intruding among the low, dark brown cliffs”
⏏ The Corso
The Corso, Manly
“You land on the wharf and walk up the street , like a bit of Margate with seaside shops and restaurants … at the end … is the wide Pacific rolling in on the yellow sand”
⏏ Lagoon at Narrabeen (Source: DH Lawrence Society Aust.)
Narrabeen Lagoon, beach
”They seemed to run to leg … three boys, one a lad of fifteen or so, came out of the warm lagoon in their bathing suits, to roll in the sand and play … extraordinary like real young animals, mindless as opossums”
Footnote: what ultimately comes through in the pages of Kangaroo is an ambivalence about Australia. In the final chapter added when living in New Mexico, Lawrence talks about loving Australia but at the same time needing to rail against it. There’s a constant struggle in Somers’ mind, a tension between his love of the place (the bush)⌧ which is “in his marrow”, and the suffocating apathy of the people surrounding him.
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⌖ Taos’ native pueblos, the “earth-centred culture”, Lawrence’s new ‘elemental’ civilisation, the wellspring of regenerative potential for contemporary civilisation (‘Looking for Lawrence’, Henry Shukman, New Mexico Magazine, (nd), www. newmexico.org)
※ possibly modelled on Australian communist agitator and unionist Jock Garden (Robert Darroch, Rananim, Dec 1999)
⧆ “a self-convinced opponent of the levelling-off effects of democracy“ (John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider 2005)
֎ DHL’s hyper-critical reflex was seemingly boundless – California on first impression was summarily dismissed as “a queer place…turning its back on the world (looking) into the Pacific void …absolutely selfish, very empty” (DH Lawrence, 1923 letter)
♤ the experience was mutual, Lawrence’s fleeting stopover in the “Land of the Long White Cloud” went unnoticed by the New Zealand press or public
❧ the overt egalitarian ‘mateship’ of workers in Australia was a trait that certainly got stuck in Lawrence’s craw
⌧ love, that is, mingled with a sense of dread of the bush both in Western Australia and the “bush-covered dark tor” of the Illawarra escarpment
Hitler-Tagebücher, the discovery of diaries, hitherto unknown, claimed to be written by Adolf Hitler, the most talked about man of the 20th century, who wouldn’t want to find out more about a scoop with such history revising ramifications?
The news, when it surfaced in the early 1980s, certainly caused quite a sensation internationally. After eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) declared the diaries legit on a first sighting (though later he walked that back a bit), newspaper editors in Germany and the UK unhesitatingly bought the ruse. Rupert Murdoch, after forking out £250,000 to buy the serialisation rights from Der Stern magazine for the diaries, ordered their immediate serialisation in the Sunday Times.
Trevor-Roper: his damaged academic reputation never really recovered from the humiliating affair
With everyone so enthusiastically “gung-ho” about them, the spoiler was that the diaries were fakes, the work of one Konrad Kujau, an East German petty crim and recidivist forger. Kujau’s “Hitler Diaries” were acquired by a ‘Naziphile’ journalist with a bent for Third Reich memorabilia, Gerd Heidemann❶, who was the go-between in selling the diary rights to Stern for somewhere in the region of $2–$3 M. In the transaction Heidemann purloined something considerably north of a tidy sum for himself.
Gerd Heidemann, subsequently jailed for fraud for his part in theforgeries ▼
An incredible lack of credibility
On the face of it the Hitler forgeries had the hole-ridden texture of Swiss cheese. The German Federal Archives eventually pronounces them “clumsy fakes” after two weeks of commotion, described as a “14-day historical mystery-thriller, in which experts changed their minds, Jewish leaders were horrified at an apparent attempt to whitewash Hitler”❷ (Schwarz and van der Vat). There was a “thoroughly incomplete vetting of the diaries” (McGrane). In the flurry of activity as interested parties competed for the diaries, no one thought to test the ink, paper and string of the supposed ‘personal’ seals of the Führer (when three volumes in the form of small notebooks were eventually examined it was shown that they dated from after WWII – Kujau used modern paper which he stained with tea to give it an aged appearance!). Nor did they think to scrutinise the text of the diaries more closely – if they did they would have detected the plagiarism, Kujau copied (word for word) large chunks of a book on Hitler’s proclamations and speeches by Max Domarcus (McGrane).
▲ Some of Kujau’s handiwork (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Then there’s the handwriting which didn’t match, an oversight not immediately picked up on. Initially Kujau produced some 27 volumes of the ‘lost’ diaries…the sort of money these fetched was irresistibly tempting, suddenly Kujau ‘discovered’ a whole new vein of Hitler writings, a further 35 diaries and a third volume of Mein Kampf, alarm bells still didn’t ring❸.
Likewise, the simple fact that there had been absolutely no previous record of the diaries’ existence, in an area of historical research which has been so inexhaustibly and copiously trawled for decades, somehow escaped all of those with their eyes on the prize. Another clue missed was Kujau’s careless labelling of each volume ‘FH’ in Gothic letters rather than ‘AH’. The editors of Stern fatally failed to press Heidemann to divulge his source for the diaries, the employee only giving up the name of the known fraudster when the jig was virtually up. The catch-up forensics, when they came, quickly verified the bogus nature of the ‘documents’.
Konrad Kujau (got four-and-a-half years jail for his crime) ▼
Clarity comes with hindsight
Self-recrimination for such egregiously bad judgement followed. With hindsight Lord Dacre reproached himself for being seduced by the find of such a historical treasure…”I should have refused to give an opinion so soon” (Schwarz and van den Vat). 30 years on, Felix Schmidt, one of the three editors-in-chief at Stern❹, reflected that the very thought that Hitler kept diaries triggered “a kind of collective insanity in the upper echelons Stern’s editorial offices”, adding that “delusional secrecy” and “illegitimate mystification” about the affair prevailed.
(Source: Business Insider)
There was in such an intoxicating atmosphere “simply too much money at stake for anyone to come to their senses”.(McGrane). Clearly the newspapers were blindsided by the dollar (and Deutschmark) signs dangling before their eyes, hence their inordinate haste to rush in where cooler and wiser heads would have proceeded with great caution❺.
Postwar German generation
A persuasive argument for why the participants wereso easily duped comes from Die Zeit editor Giovanni di Lorenzo, who attributes their ready acceptance of the flimsy evidencefor the diaries‘ authenticitytogenerational fixation with Hitler of those who lived through the Nazi era.This fascination, Lorenzoconcludes, would have been unimaginable to later German generations (McGrane).
PostScript: Hitler Diaries on the celluloid screen
The celebrated hoax has been translated twice to the screen, the first a 1991 British mini-series based on Robert Harris’ book Selling Hitler with the same title (Alexei Sayle is a comfortable fit as the cheerful and uncomplicated ‘Conny’ Kujau). The second, a satirical German-made film, Schtonk!, released in 1992.
▲ Dictator diarists, courtesy of their ghostwriters
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❶ Heidemann’s devotion to Nazi memorabilia extended to purchasing the late Field Marshal Göring’s yacht
❷ in the diaries Hitler is incredulously depicted as being almost blissfully unaware of the atrocities committed against Jews
❸ Kujau sold his first faux Hitler diary to a collector in 1978
❹ all three summarily sacked for their failings
❺ the Sunday Times especially should have been treading warily given it had been scammed before in 1968 when it spent $250,000 trying to get its hands on the equally fraudulent “Mussolini Diaries”
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Bibliography:
‘Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax’, Sally McGrane, The New Yorker, 25-Apr-2013, www.thenewyorker.com
‘Hitler Diaries proved to be forged — archive’, Walter Schwarz and Dan van den Vat, The Guardian, 07-May-1983, www.theguadian.com
‘The Hitler Diaries: How hoax documents became the most infamous fake news ever’, Adam Lusher, Independent, 05-May-2018, www.independent.co.uk
I went to the ‘Student Prince’ in the 1970s, only the once I think. The pub was pretty well packed with students from across the road, befitting its reputation as the unofficial watering hole of Sydney University students in those days (I was probably one of the few people there who were not actually going to USyd).
The interior was dimly-lit, the furniture well-used and the place definitely not decorated in the fashion of Old Heidelberg. I recall music playing however it was not a Mario Lanza record but a scrawny-looking band out the back playing something that wasn’t the “Drinking Song’ from the 1954 movie bearing the hotel’s name.
(Source: G’day Pubs)
The public house changed hands several times in the years before 2001 when it closed its doors for good, having been the perennial refuge for countless undergrads after a day spent in the mental grind of lecture halls and swotting up in Fisher Library. While many former patrons of the pub no doubt fondly recall their time drinking and waxing lyrically about some newly-acquired parcel of esoteric knowledge, other habitués associate the Student Prince with other memories – Russell Crowe for instance confessed to the Twitterati in 2010 that the roof of the pub was where his ten-year-old self first got his nicotine addiction!
The Student Prince after loitering on the market for a protracted period of time was bought by what the Sydney Morning Herald called “a mysterious consortium of Asian businessmen” who spent two years and $11 million turning the old uni student watering hole into an upmarket brothel (‘Sexclusively yours’, SMH, February 17, 2003).
‘Stiletto’ (the name it trades under) was described on the DA (development application) as an “adult entertainment facility”, or translated into street parlance, a “very high class knocking shop”. In 2011 plans to expand Stiletto into a “42-room megaplex” (the “largest short-stay bordello in the world”) ran into a hitch when Westpac the principal financier got cold feet. The establishment went ahead with the new development, but after a moral backlash (‘Sydney sinking into sin’, Daily Telegraph, November 12, 2010), the eventual expansion was appreciably more limited in size than initially proposed by the developers.
(Photo: ANU Open Research)
Footnote: There was an earlier pub dating from the 1880’s on the site at 82 Parramatta Road, Camperdown, called the ‘Captain Cook Hotel’ (‘Former Student Prince Hotel in Camperdown (NSW)’, www.gdaypubs.com.au).
In 1937 the Nazi regime organised two art exhibitions in Munich concurrently, separated only by a park and a few hundred metres. One was intended to hammer home to the German volk the inequity of the type of art that the führer Adolf Hitler found abhorrent, ie, anything in art that even hinted of modernity. The other representing all that Hitler found good in art was the complete antithesis of this – a paean to traditional, realistic painting and sculpture and art that conformed to classical themes and forms.
⇧ A Hitler, landscape (Source: Widewalls)
Hitler’s early experiences and his perceived emotional pattern suggest a motive of personal revenge contributing to the Nazis’ fanatical war on the modern and the avant-garde in art. As a young man Hitler dreamed of a career as an artist but a double rejection by the Vienna art academy saw those aspirations dashed. His paintings were summarily dismissed as passe by the art establishment in favour of abstract and modern styles (Burns), leaving the future Reich leader with a bitter aftertaste and a grudge①.
In Mein Kampf Hitler avers that “Cubism and Dadaism are symptoms of biological degradation threatening the German people”, Werckmeister, O. K. “Hitler the Artist.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 270–297. JSTORwww.jstor.org/stable/1343984. Accessed 2 March 2021.
The purging of so-called “degenerate art”
The Degenerate Art Exhibition (Entartete Kunst) in 1937 was the culmination of a concerted campaign waged by the Nazis to root out all manifestations of avant-garde art in Germany. The first efforts by Hitler’s henchmen were a reaction to the preceding liberal and permissive Weimar era which had embraced the modern style in art and especially Expressionism. In 1933 the Nazis held their first art exhibit of the supposed “degenerate art” in Dresden. Allied to this, the systematic confiscation of modern artworks from museum across Germany took place. Hundreds of thousands of the plundered art pieces including works by modern masters were sold by the Third Reich (some of the proceeds were siphoned off into armament production)②. Much of the minor, less marketable art works were ultimately burnt.
⇧ Beckmann: ‘The Night’
The “wrong type” of art
Hitler rejected the avant-garde and modernity in part for aesthetic reasons. Hitler like many of his Nazi followers had an innate conservative aesthetic taste in art. Politics and ideology also played a part, the führer associated modernism with Jews and communism, and by extension, with democracy and pacifism. Jewish influences, Hitler held, had contaminated the classical art styles so beloved by him. At the same time he denounced what he called “cultural Bolshevism” for weakening German society. Modern art, the Nazis believed was an evil plot against the German people, a “dangerous lie” which would poison German minds. In chilling words given the Nazis’ later unbridled lethal use of eugenics Hitler stated that “anyone who paints a green sky and fields blue ought to be sterilised”.
⇧ Kokoschka: ’Portrait of a Degenerate Artist’
“Sick art” and culture as a propaganda tool
Hitler and the Nazis believed that art played a critical role in defining society’s values. Expressionism③ and the group Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) and artists like Oscar Kokoschka and Ernst Kirchner got singled out for extra repressive measures. The Nazis depicted avant-garde art as the lowest of the low—”impure and subversive”, it’s artists ‘diseased’ specimens corrupted by mental, physical and moral decay—conversely they elevated classical Greek and Roman art to a sublime place, the highest of cultural planes.
⇧ Hitler viewing the ‘Degenerates’
The Degenerate Art Exhibition
The Nazis’ 1937 exhibition was carefully stage-managed as a propaganda vehicle to mock and deride the modern art Hitler so detested. The exhibition comprised Expressionist, Dada, Cubism, Abstract (allocated its own room designated the “Insanity Room”) and New Objectivity artworks. Paintings were hung in a careless, haphazard fashion, with graffiti scrawled on the walls which defamed the artists. Actors were hired to prowl through the gallery loudly denouncing the “Modernist madness”. Adolf Ziegler, the Reich”s top arts bureaucrat and Hitler’s favourite artist, declared the displayed works “monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration”. And to ram home the degeneracy point, the vilified artworks were juxtaposed alongside paintings by the enfeebled and the disabled, by psychotic patients and the like. According to the Nazis, degenerate art was the product of Jews and Bolsheviks, but interestingly only six of the 112 artists whose work was displayed in the exhibition were Jewish. The 650 paintings, prints and sculptures included works by Grosz, Dix, Klee, Beckmann, Nolde, Chagall, Picasso, Wandinsky, Marc and Mondrian.
⇧ Führer taking in the “good art”
Exhalting in the “pure Aryan art”
To provide Germans with a favourable point of comparison, the Nazis simultaneously held the Great German Art Exhibition in the same Munich neighbourhood. This displayed ‘Ayran’ art➃, the type of art Hitler approved of. Often gargantuan in scale⑤ – statuesque blond nudes, idealised heroic and duty-bound soldiers and imagined pastorals and idyllic landscapes (reflecting Hitler’s predilection for realistic paintings of outdoor rustic settings). Characteristically the favoured Nazis’ male figures in art represented the concept of the Übermensch (an idealised ‘superman’). Hitler’s intention was that the Groß deutsche Kunstausstellung propaganda would help mobile the German people behind the Nazis’ values.
Footnote: The outcome of the dual 1937 exhibitions was not anticipated by Hitler and the Nazis: Entartete Kunst proved wildly popular, attracting more than two million visitors, whereas Groß Kunstausstellung only managed less than a third of this number. The “Degenerate Art” show was such a hit that it was toured on display throughout the German Reich after the Munich premiere closed.
☬☬☬
Postscript: German artists deemed ‘degenerate’ understandably were more at risk of persecution from the Nazis from those outside the country. Special attention was given to artists like George Grosz and Oscar Dix who were openly critical of the totalitarian regime. Grosz mocked Hitler on canvaswhile Dix earned the enmity of the Nazis for his excruciating depictions of the horrors of war. As one writer put it, “the Nazis labeled Dix a ‘degenerate,’ but the term is better applied to the society he depicted—cannibalizing itself and hurtling toward destruction” (Alina Cohen).
Dix’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (1933)
•◣______________________________◢•
① Hitler’s own preference for subject matter as an artist was for painting buildings and largely unpopulated pastoral landscapes (the future “world leader” had no talent for capturing the human form)
② Hitler and the National-Socialists’ notion of modern art as being the product of entartung (degeneracy) can be traced to a Jewish Austro-Hungarian social critic Max Nordau who decried the new art and literature in 1890s Europe as being the work of diseased minds
③ the focus on Expressionism as a target for the Nazi “culture police” proved a particular problem for Joseph Goebbels. The propaganda minister had early on championed the Expressionist movement and had to backtrack swiftly on this to avoid the führer’s opprobrium
➃ Ayran art uniformly infuses a celebration of youth, optimism, power and eternal triumph
⑤ the Nazi taste for mega-scale art reached its apogee in architecture, massive structures like ‘Germania’. “Monumentality and solidity (exuding power), simplicity and timeless eternity” were the bywords of Nazi architecture
𓇬 𓇬 𓇬
Bibliography
‘Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism’, (Lucy Burns), BBC News, 06-Nov-2013, www.bbc.com
‘Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937’, (Jason Farago), The Guardian, 13-Mar-2014, www.theguardian.com
In Robert Harris’ speculative novel Fatherland—a “what if”/alternative view of postwar European history set in 1964—Adolf Hitler is very much alive, having won the Second World War. Through his “Greater German Reich” the Führer rules an empire stretching from “the Low Countries to the Urals” with Britain reduced to a not-very-significant client state. In the novel’s counterfactual narrative Hitler’s architect Albert Speer has completed part of Hitler’s grand building project for Berlin – including the 120m high “Triumphal Arch” and the “Great Hall of the Reich” (the “largest building in the world”). We know that none of the above scenario came to fruition, but we do know from history that part of Hitler’s plans post-victory (if he won) was to radically transform the shape and appearance of his capital city Berlin.
Weltreich or Europareich?
Under a future German empire, Berlin, to be known as Germania※, would be the showcase capital. Historians are divided over whether the Nazis’ ultimate goal was global dominance (Weltherrschaft)—in which case Germania would be Hitler’s Welthauptstadt (‘world capital’)—or was more limited in its objective, intent on creating a European-wide reich only (as posited by AJP Taylor et al). Either way, Hitler’s imperial capital was to be built on a monumental scale and grandeur which reflected the “1,000-Year Reich” and its stellar story of military conquests and expansion – in effect a theatrical showcase for the regime [‘Story of cities #22: how Hitler’s plans for Germania would have torn Berlin apart’, (Kate Connolly), The Guardian, 14-Apr-2016, www.theguardian.com].
Nazi utopia Showing off Germania to the world for the Führer was all about one-upping the capitalist West. Immense buildings symbolising the strength and power of Nazism convey a message of intimidation, a declaration that Hitler’s Germany could match and exceed the great metropolises like New York, Paris and London. Accordingly, the Hamburg suspension bridge had to be on a grander scale than its model in San Francisco, the constructed East-West Axis in Berlin had to outdo the massive Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires [Thies, Jochen, ‘Hitler’s European Building Programme’, Journal of Contemporary History, July 1, 1978, http://doi.org/10.1177/002200947801300301].
Hitler & Speer: (Source: www.mirror.co.uk)
The architect/dictator Hitler put Speer in charge of the massive project but always fancying himself as having the sensibility of an architect, Hitler retained a deep interest in its progress✪. Rejecting all forms of modernism▣Hitler’s architectural preferences were rooted in the past – “Rome was his historical model and neoclassical architecture was his guiding aesthetic” [Meng, M. (2013). Central European History. 46 (3), 672-674. Retrieved October 24, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43280636]. The Germania building projects writ on a gargantuan scale, were an unmistakable statement, a means for the dictatorship “to secure (its) place in history and immortalise (itself) and (its) ideas through (its) architecture [Colin Philpott, Relics of the Reich: The Buildings the Nazis Left Behind, (2016)].
On the Germania drawing board
Taking pride of place, the architectural centrepieceof the Germania blueprint, was the Volkshalle (‘People’s Hall)✦, a staggeringly large edifice inspired by the Pantheon in Rome—a dome 290m high and 250m in diameter—which had it been completed would have been the largest enclosed space on Earth, capable of holding up to 180,000 people. Linking with the Volkshalle via an underground passageway similar to a Roman cryptoporticus was to be the palace of Hitler (Führerpalast). The monolithic domed People’s Hall would have dwarfed and obscured the close-by, existing structures, the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate.
Among a host of other uncompleted buildings in Germania was the Triumphal Arch (Trumpfbogen)…at over 100m high three times the size of the iconic arch in Paris it was modelled on. Hitler’s utopian Berlin metropolis was scheduled for completion in 1950, the onset of war however delayed construction which then ceased for good after the Wehrmacht suffered serious setbacks on the Russian Front in 1943 [‘Hitler’s World: The Post War Plan’, (Documentary, UKTV/SBS, 2020]. The Nazis planned thousands of kilometres of networks of motorways spanning the expanding empire (linking Germania with the Kremlin, Calais to Warsaw, Klagenfurt to Trondheim, etc). These too remained unrealised under the Third Reich (Thies). Another project reduced to a pipe dream was the Prachtallee (Avenue of Splendours), a north-south boulevard which was intended to bisect the East-West Axis.
Model of ‘Germania’
Costing Germania
The projected cost of all the regime’s building projects has been estimated at in excess of 100 billion Reichsmarks (Thies). But for the Nazis, how to bankroll a building venture of such Brobdingnagian proportions, was not a major concern. Their reasoning was that once victory was attained, the conquered nations would provide all of the labour and materials necessary for the construction projects (Connolly).
A slave-built GermaniaGerman historian Jochen Thies’ pioneering study, Hitler’s Plans for World Domination: Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims’ (English translation 2012), argues that as well as reintroducing the architectural solutions ofantiquity for its mega-city, the Nazi elite sought to replicate “the society and economy of that time, i.e. a slave-owning society”, as the basis for Hitler’s “fantasy world capital” (Thies). For a venture of such scale the program firstly needed ein großer Raum (a large space), requiring thousands of ordinary Germans, both Jews and Gentile, to be forcibly evicted from their homes which were then bulldozed✮. Concentration camps were established deliberately close to granite and marble quarries to facilitate the building projects…in proximity to Berlin, the Nazis used Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Oranienburg) for the slave and forced labour force⌖ [‘Inside Germania: Hitler’s massive Nazi utopia that never came to be’, Urban Planning’, (Chris Weller), Business Insider, 24-Dec-2015, www.businessinsider.com].
Germania – a Nazi utopia to see but a nightmarish dystopia to live in
The plan if it had been realised would have seen huge swathes of the city torn down to make way for the mega-construction mania. With a multiplicity of ring-roads, tunnels and autobahns, Germania would have been pedestrian-unfriendly, lacking in amenities for city-dwellers, sterile, not green (outside of the grand stadium there was no parks or major transit lines)…a city almost completely bereft of human dimension – what was once an attractive living space would have disappeared under the Third Reich’s urban planning imperatives (Roger Moorhouse in Weller).
Nuremberg: Macht des dritten Reiches (Source: The Art Newspaper)
Of course Berlin wasn’t the only city in the German Reich singled out to get an extreme physical makeover. Four other cities were also awarded special Führer City Status and earmarked for the same grandiose Nazi treatment – Linz (where Hitler grew up), Hamburg, Munich and Nuremberg. The last city, made famous for holding the mass Nuremberg party rallies, its Zeppelin Field Grandstand, now a racetrack, had a capacity for up to 150,000 party faithfuls.
Endnote: A neo-German city on the Vistula
The newly acquired lands of the empire were also subjected to the NSDAP urban transformation template. Warsaw was to be rebuilt as a new German city (the Pabst Plan⊞) – a living space for a select number of ‘Ayran’ Germans, while its more numerous, “non-Ayran” Polish residents were to be shepherded into a camp across the River Vistula, a separate but handily located slave labour force for the ‘renewal’ (i.e. rebuild) of Warsaw…had the Pabst Plan proceeded historic Polish culture in the city would have been obliterated in the upheaval (‘Hitler’s World: The Post War Plan’).
※ ‘Germania’ was the name ascribed to the lands of the Germanic peoples in Ancient Roman times
✪Hitler had always been intrinsically interested in architecture, back in his Linz days the failed artist had been advised to take up architecture instead
▣ the same applies to art, Hitler rejected the modern movements like Cubism, Surrealism and Dada, labelling them “degenerate art”
✦ also known as the Große Halle, the ‘great hall’
✮leading to a housing crisis in Berlin, aggravated by some over-zealous officials who destroyed houses prematurely and unnecessarily, simply in the hope of earning the Führer’s approval (Thies)
⌖ as demands for labour intensified, the Nazis widened the pool of forced labour to include PoWs and anyone deemed deviant by the state, ie, beggars, itinerants, Gypsies, leftists, homosexuals(Connolly)
After Wonder Woman’s creator Bill Marston dies in 1947, Robert Kanigher takes over the writing duties, the first of many subsequent writers to take on pop culture’s most famous female superhero. DC Comics wastes little time in ringing the changes with Wonder Woman, both to her physical appearance and to her abilities, disposition and purpose.
There are several reasons for the change. One motive is simply commercial, Wonder Woman like her male superhero counterparts, experiences a fall-off in popularity after the war. Another relates to expectations of gender roles in America. So much of America’s manhood is away during the world war on the front line engaging the enemy. Born of necessity, American women move into the work force, invading traditional male domains of employment as never before. With the war’s end, men return to their jobs relegating thousands of women back to unpaid work in the home. There is a re-solidifying of the traditional gender roles. A casualty of this is Wonder Woman herself. In Marston’s hands she reflects empowerment, ie, freedom from male domination. The feminist overtones she embodies are a challenge as the US attempts to re-establish the status quo ante order [‘The Fitful Evolution of Wonder Woman’s Look’, (Diana Martinez), The Atlantic, 07-Jun-2017, www.theatlantic.com].
Superhero Nazi hunters
Wonder Woman’s superhuman exertions and physicality—as with everyone else in the superhero comic universe—have an aptness during WWII. The superheroes in the comics spearhead the fight against the Nazis, promoting a patriotic agenda and helping to boost morale. When the war is won, this agenda loses its relevance for the American readership [‘Women of Comics: Objectified, Sexualize and Disempowered’, (Nia Aiysha), Wild Black Orchids, 07-May-2016, www.wildblackorchids.wordpress.com].
Making the iconic feminist warrior a bit less super
In wanting to rein in Wonder Woman’s powerful persona DC Comics are responding to prevailing (male) society’s anxieties about women’s independence. By 1950, the toning down is well underway, WW’s crime-fighting exploits are taking second fiddle – in Sensation Comics #97 she is the editor of a newspaper lonely hearts column❋. During the decade WW becomes a reluctant superheroine, love-struck and longing to settle down with her beau Steve Trevor [‘Publication history of Wonder Woman’, Wikipedia,http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine, Tim Hanley (2014)].
Wonder Woman is not just a feminist, she’s also a sexy feminist! Accordingly, there is a lot of scrutiny on her salacious attire as well by the “morally self-appointed” in society. Eventually, the raunchy bathing suit and sexually-confident red boots will be traded in for a more demure look. Psychologist Fredric Wertham’s full-on crusade against the deleterious effects of comics on children in the early 1950s includes WW in its cross-hairs. WW’s sexually provocative bondage fetish (involving herself or other females) leads Wertham to ‘blacklist’ the depicted character as a promoter of lesbianism (which he took as evidence of misandry)(Martinez), pressuring DC Comics to remove Marston’s message of WW as a harbinger of matriarchy (Hanley).
The Amazonian princess returns to ‘civies’ – “Emma Peeled”
In the 1960s other comic book action heroines come forward such as secret agent Modesty Blaise. Reflecting the early rumblings of what would evolve into the second wave feminism of the Seventies, Blaise exhibits Wonder Woman-like “badass fighting capabilities” to triumph in a male world. At this time however WW loses that same original verve✪, getting a Sixties ‘mod’ makeover which transforms her into an Emma Peel clone (from the cult British TV series The Avengers), complete with martial arts moves, jumpsuits and Carnaby Street attire〥 [‘Four-Colour Yesteryears: Wonder Woman – the Emma Peel Years’, (Rob N), Paradox Comics Group, 22-Aug-2009, www.paradoxcomicsgroup.com; Hanley].
1970s, the women’s movement and empowerment
Gloria Steinem and the burgeoning women’s movement comes into the story at this time. Steinem, dismayed at DC Comics’ relegation of Wonder Woman to a “powerless 1950s car hop”, lobbies DC to restore WW’s superheroine stature. Steinem puts WW on the cover of the first edition of Ms. magazine in 1972, tagging it “Wonder Woman for President”. [‘How Gloria Steinem Saved Wonder Woman’, (Yohana Desta), Vanity Fair, 10-Oct-2017, www.vanityfair.com]. WW in Ms. becomes a kind of masthead to promote sisterhood and equality among women (the magazine depicts WW confronting store owners who deny their female employees equal pay and defending abortion clinics against male thugs [‘How A Magazine Cover From The 1970s Helped Wonder Woman Win Over Feminists’, (Katie Kilkenny), Pacific Standard, 21-Jun-2017, www.psmag.com]. Steinem and Ms.’ agitation on behalf of WW forces DC to restore her special powers including the “Lasso of Truth” and re-draw her in her original voluptuous form.
With the critical spotlight turned on DC’s portrayal of Wonder Woman, DC made further concessions to the comic. Diversity was introduced —a nod to the Black Power Movement in the US and perhaps belated recognition of a lack of ethnic diversity in its comics—with the inclusion of Nubia, WW’s African half-sister (Martinez). The perception of Wonder Woman as a feminist icon is given a further boost along by the cult success of the 1975-79 television series. WW, played by Lynda Carter, embodies the qualities of strength, fearlessness, wisdom and determination, restored in the comics post-1972✧.
PostScript: The Wonder Woman comic books over the past 40 years has seen the WW character and image undergo sundry transitions, a procession of “conflicting and seemingly incompatible versions” of WW – alternating between ramped-up raunchiness and less overt sexuality, between a muscular Amazonian physicality and a “heroin chic” fashion model (Martinez).
❋ in other Fifties comics Wonder Woman or her alter ego Diana Prince appears as a model and a film star
〥 WW becomes younger and thinner too. She also gets labelled as a “female James Bond” during this period
✪ DC Comics’s hegemony in the superhero comic popularity stakes in the late Sixties is seriously being challenged by Marvel Comics, a factor in the decision to revamp WW along with the entire ‘stable’ (Rob N)
✧ subsequent interpretations of Wonder Woman on the screen follow, the most recent in 2017 (with a sequel slated for release this year) sees WW reconnect with her Amazonian roots
The United States over the years has had a mania about banning lots of things—there’s been an unspoken exemption granted to bad taste—but one of the more curious prohibitions in the 20th century was that on the seemingly innocuous pinball machine.
In the early 1930s the Gottlieb Company of Chicago introduced the first coin-operated, machines, the “Baffle Ball”. The timing was right, the Great Depression had hit, playing pinball was a cheap and accessible form of entertainment for the financially impoverished masses, and the machines caught on. A few years later machines became electromechanical and automatic score counters were added, making games more appealing [“The History of Pinball Machines and Pintables”, BMI Gaming, www.bmigaming.com/].
The moral legislatorsBy the time of America’s entry into WWII pinball’s popularity had grown exponentially. Not all sectors of American society however were enthusiastic about the game. Churches and school boards harboured a perception of pinball as corrupting the morals of American youth, asserting that children would steal coins and skip school to play❋. Lawmakers too viewed pinball negatively because they saw it a game of chance and thus was a form of gambling. They shared the view that it “a time and dime-waster for impressionable youth”. Legislators were also suspicious that it may be a “mafia-run racket” because of Chicago’s centrality in pinball machine manufacturing, a “hotbed of organised crime” [“That Time America Outlawed Pinball”, (Christopher Klein), History, upd. 22-Aug-2018, www.history.com ; “11 Things You Didn’t Know About Pinball History”, (Seth Porges), Popular Mechanics, 01-Sep-2009, www.popularmechanics.com].
⍌ City authorities vandalising the machines
(Source: Chicago Sun-Times)
New York City’s crusade against the pinball
The mayor of NYC, Fiorello LaGuardia, took these perceptions to heart, launching a very proactive approach to rid the city of these “insidious nickel-stealers” by ordering the police force to make “Prohibition-style pinball raids” on candy stores, bowling alleys, speakeasies, cigar stores, drugstores, amusement centres, etc [“The Mayor Who Took a Sledgehammer to NYC’s Pinball Machines”, (Conor Friedersdorf), The Atlantic, 18-Jan-2013, www.theatlantic.com]. Illegal pinball machines and slot machines were confiscated and some were smashed in staged, publicity-conscious showcases (Klein).
LaGuardia’s anti-pinball machine crusade took on extra zeal after Pearl Harbour, which allowed him to characterise it as a patriotic cause…the line run by the NYC mayor was that the copper, aluminium and nickel components of the outlawed machines could be better utilised in the materiel requirements of America’s war efforts (Klein). This didn’t prevent many machines ending up dumped in NYC harbour.
⍌ 1963 ‘Swing Time’ Gottlieb machine
Banned, but not eliminatedOther cities were quick to follow NYC’s example, Including Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and New Orleans, with pinball bans extending across the country. Other cities like Washington DC didn’t go as far but prohibited children from playing it during school hours. The inevitable consequence of banning was to drive pinball activity underground (resurfacing in places like the back rooms of ‘porno’ book shops). Thus marginalised, pinball become “part of rebel culture”⧆ (Klein).
⍓ Roger Sharpe, “calling the shot!”
(Source: IFPA)
The long ban, ended by a ‘Sharpe’ player Remarkably, the outlawing of pinball machines persisted until the 1970s – despite the technical innovation of “flippers” (pivoted arms activated to propel the ball back up the table) introduced in Gottlieb’s 1947 “Humpty-Dumpty” machine which made the game more one of reflexes (skill) than of chance. Finally, in 1974 the Californian Supreme Court, accepting the skill component, overturned the prohibition in that state. In 1976 NYC councillors were still skeptical about pinball and it took a spectacular courtroom demonstration by one of the game’s top exponents, Roger Sharpe, to break the impasse. Sharpe won over the doubters by nominating beforehand which lane he would propel the ball through and then making the shot, demonstrating that patience, hand-eye coordination and reflexes, not luck, were the ingredients for success in the game◰[“How One Perfect Shot Saved Pinball From Being Illegal In The US”, (Matt Blitz), Gizmodo, 19-Aug-2013, www.gizmodo.com.au].
⍓ An “Indiana Jones” Williams machine with revolver for plunger
With the ‘liberation’ of pinball, player interest revived in the late Seventies, but it was a short-lived triumph. The advent of video games provided compelling competition (the newer technology requiring fewer repairs and less space). By the Nineties the writing was on the wall for arcades and the coin-op industry, as home video-games and the internet were rendering them obsolete [“The First Family of Pinball: Meet the local wizards behind the game’s huge resurgence”, (Ryan Smith), Reader, 03-May-2018, www.chicagoreader.com]. In any case, the repealing of the prohibition wasn’t uniformly implemented…Chicago city authorities resisted, still associating pinball machines with “nests of gangs and drugs” for juveniles [“Chicago once waged a 40-year war on Pinball”, (Ryan Smith), The Bleader, 03-May-2018, www.chicagoreader.com]. Prohibition in Kokomo, Indiana, was not ended till 2016✦ [“Pinball—once a source of vice and immorality—now, legal in Kokomo, Ind., after 61-year ban”, (Ben Guarino), Washington Post, 15-Dec-2016, www.washingtonpost.com].
PostScript: Surviving if not exactly thrivingToday, the Stern Pinball Co (Chicago) is the only manufacturer of machines left in the business in America. If not played by casual gamers in anything like its numbers in the “Baby Boomer” era (except in video game mode), it has experienced a resurgence of sorts – as an annual series of professional tournaments (Stern Pro Circuit) (among its internationally ranked seeds are Roger Sharpe’s two sons).
⍓ Roger Daltry (Tommy “Pinball Wizard”) at the controls
❋ Seth Porges identifies something quasi-religious in the anti-pinball position, a “temperance-fuelled” belief that the activity was “a tool from the devil” corrupting young people (Friedersdorf)
◰ the councillors were also persuaded to overturn the ban by the eloquent testimony mounted by Sharpe, who went on to be a pinball star witness in subsequent, successful hearings in other states. Another factor in the outcome may have been revenue-raising, eg, Mayor Daley in Chicago wanted to lift the ban so as to tax individual machines and licensing operators (Smith, “Chicago once waged”)
⧆ the rebel image remained into the late 1960s and ‘70s with the anti-establishment tone of The Who’s rock opera about a “pinball wizard”, Tommy
✦ it was a similar story in Nashville, TN, for anyone under 18, and in some places and times it is still illegal – such as on Sundays in Ocean City, N.J. (Porges)
As all of us are only too aware, COVID-19 has cut a swathe through public gatherings, large aggregations of people are a “no-no” in 2020. Across the globe all manner of events have been on the receiving end of a different sort of cancel culture treatment. The superhero-studded world of comic book conventions has not been immune to this contagion. Comic-cons everywhere, including the San Diego Comic-Con International, America’s oldest comic book convention, have been red pencilled in this year of the plague. But if we turn the clock back some 70 years we might observe a time when the existential threat was directed at the product itself, the actual comic books.
There were no organised comic-cons in the more cautious and conformist 1940s and 50s, but this in no way equated with a lack of popularity of comic books. In fact the Forties had been a Golden Age, especially for American comic books, Comic strip creators were riding high with a slew of superhero characters—including Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Captain America, the Avengers and Captain Marvel—proving lucrative for companies like Detective Comics (DC Comics), Entertaining Comics (EC Comics) and Timely Comics (Marvel Comics). By mid-decade comic books were the most popular form of entertainment in the US (with 80 to 100 million copies being sold per weekBy the late 1940s comic books were well and truly being marketed towards adults as well…”fed by the same streams as pulp fiction and film noir, titles (began to tell) lurid stories of crime, vice, lust and horror” [David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, (2008)].
♦️ Wonder Woman (Sensation Comics, 1942)
‘Seduction of the Innocent’ Dark clouds appeared over the comics industry’s blue skies in 1954 with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by a Bavarian-born neurobiologist Fredric Wertham. The book was “a full-throttled attack on the lurid contents of various crime, horror, and even super-hero titles, (with an emphasis on) graphic illustrations of wife-beatings, sado-masochism, and gruesome murders”⁕ Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, (2012)]. Wertham’s inditement of the American comics of the day was that they corrupted impressionable youth, inveigling them into fanaticising about evil, leading them on a ruinous path to criminal behaviour, etc.[‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 1’, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Crime SuspenStories, 1950
1940s, North and bonfires Wertham was not the first critic to take aim at the US comic book industry. In the view of CBLDF✥, since the 1930s “the comics medium has been stigmatized as low-value speech”. In 1940 conservative commentator Sterling North urged parents and educators to guard against the influx of “mayhem, murder, torture and abduction—often with a child as the victim” in contemporary comic strips. North also decried the incidence of “voluptuous females in scanty attire, machine gun (-wielding hoodlums) and “cheap political propaganda” in the comics. The effect on children, he went on to say, of these “badly drawn, badly written and badly printed” strips was “a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems” as well as constituting “a violent stimulant” to them [North, Sterling. “A National Disgrace”. Childhood Education. 17.1, 1940: 56. Print.]. During WWII religious and patriotic organisations conducted public burnings of ‘disapproved’ comic books in American neighbourhoods – in ironic juxtaposition of the war being fought overseas concurrently against Nazi Germany (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
♦️ Dr Wertham, researching
“>
“Pop culture McCarthyite” But it was Seduction of the Innocent that struck the strongest chord in a 1950s America “looking over its shoulder” for real or imagined enemies of society in the grip of a hysteria heightened by McCarthyism. It triggered a public outcry, prompting an investigation into the industry by a Senate sub-committee. Publicity from the hearing was damning and the fallout was devastating. Comic books were denounced by Wertham and other moral crusaders as contributing to juvenile delinquency⚉. At the height of the moral panic, comic book publishers were sometimes treated as though they were mobsters, and the cartoonists, as if they were pornographers [‘The Caped Crusader’ (Jeet Heer), Slate, 04-Apr-2008, www.slate.com; ’Comic Censorship, Part 1’].
The emasculated comic book Threatened with both public and government censure, the comics industry choose to self-regulate, introducing the Comic Code Authority, “a censorship code that thoroughly sanitized the content of comics for years to come”. The new code (something analogous to the film world’s draconian Hays Code) was taken to ridiculous lengths, it forbade comics from showing zombies, vampires, ghouls and werewolves; words like ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ couldn’t be mentioned in the story lines; nor could criminals be portrayed sympathetically and the institution of marriage could not be seen to be disrespected (Howe).
♦️ The imprimatur of the self-censor
Comic book publishers were forced to produce ‘purified’ comics suitable for a younger market—more infantile and tamer stories, squeaky-clean but ‘dopey’ heroes replacing the previous super-overachievers—in short, “safe fantasies” for the youngest readers (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
The economic and human toll The new reality of the world of comic books decimated the industry’s hitherto prosperity…between 1954 and 1956 the number of titles produced was cut by more than half – from 650 in 250 over that two-year period!✧. By summer 1954 15 comics publishers in the US went belly-up. EC Comics, up to then one of the market leaders, discontinued all its comics lines…its much-vilified publisher William Gaines switching production solely to the satirical Mad magazine. Over 800 jobs in the industry vanished more or less immediately (Howe; Hajdu). Many talented inkers and pencillers left the industry for good, many for economic reasons but others due at least in part to the stifling of their creative artistic output.
Endnote: Demise of adult comics Both Wertham and North in their hatchet jobs on the comics genre made the error of completely disregarding the significant adult readership of comic books. The recovery of the industry, the winning back of that readership, took many years…it didn’t really happen until the emergence of ‘Underground’ comics in the 1960s with publications like Zap Comics and comic artists like R Crumb§ [‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 2, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Detective Comics, 1945
PostScript: The Wertham thesis unpacked After it became accessible in 2010 Wertham’s research on comics books was investigated and his conclusions found largely baseless…Wertham was said to have manipulated data, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence. A further weakness of his work was that he used non-representative samples as the basis for his conclusions. Scorn was also poured on Wertham’s contentions that the comic character Superman harboured Nazi SS tendencies, that the Batman/Robin relationship had homoerotic overtones, and that Wonder Woman was a lesbian role model (Wertham saw this as wholly undesirable)[‘Fredric Wertham’,Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Heer].
________________________________________________
⁕ that serious comics of the period were laden with violence, misogyny and racism, could not be disputed (Heer)
✥
⚉
dislike of popular comics. Wertham considered their consumption blocked children from an appreciation of literature and fine arts(Hajdu; Heer)
✧
§ the fashionability of adult readership was further advanced by the advent of graphic novels
Captain Marvel and protege
⁕ that serious comics of the period were laden with violence, misogyny and racism, could not be disputed (Heer)
✥ Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
⚉ a sense of elitism also coloured Wertham et al’s dislike of popular comics. Wertham considered their consumption blocked children from an appreciation of literature and fine arts
✧ in excess of 100 pieces of anti-comic book legislation came into effect in the Fifties (Hajdu)
§ the fashionability of adult readership was further advanced by the advent of graphic novels
Who’d have thought that it’d take a pandemic to bring to light just how many cynics and crazies are out there? Before COVID-19 we only had the climate change deniers and the occasion conspiracy peddler to cope with. Since the virus first descended, coronavirus deniers have been coming out of the woodwork, a contagion not confined to the USA.
Human rights or human life?
Recently, a new phenomena has popped up on social media and TV screens – from the “Republic of Covididiocy”. Provocateurs have taken to filming themselves confronting police and retail shop personnel during lockdown – provocatively refusing to wear masks, not giving their personal details and declaring loudly that their human rights were being transgressed. The extreme position adopted by these protesters connects them to conspiratorial views held by fringe extremists in the US✱.
Conspiracy heaven ⍌
A universal scofflaw mindset
These individuals are part of a loosely-organised movement of people who call themselves “Sovereign Citizens” (or “Sov-Cits” or just ‘Sovereigns’, for short), whose purpose is to assert some set of existing natural rights which, they purport, places them outside of the jurisdiction of the government and the law. In a climate of pandemic-induced restrictions many of these people may just be (over)reacting to the state’s clampdown on their freedom of movement and activity, a knee-jerk libertarian impulse. However the concept of Sovereign Citizenry long pre-dates the current pandemic as a conspiracy-driven stratagem, with its origins, unsurprisingly, found in America.
The world according to Sovereign Citizens
“The Sovereign Citizens Movement promotes the tantalising fantasy that anyone can declare himself or herself above and beyond the jurisdiction of the government by invoking arcane legal terminology”.
~ Southern Poverty Law Center
(Source: www.radicalisationresearch.org)
In the 1990s the SCM picked up the earlier Posse Comitatus movement’s baton of unrelenting enmity towards the federal government, portraying themselves as the “true defenders of the Constitution”. Sov-Cit beliefs rest on the same premise as that established by Posse Comitatus. They believe that the US government is illegitimate…it is, they say, a corporation that has duped ‘natural’ citizens (read “Sovereign Citizens”) into an unlawful contract. Sovereign theorists cite the 14th Amendment in 1868 and FD Roosevelt’s 1933 abandonment of the gold standard as a back-up to the paper currency as historical ‘proof’ of federal deception.
Gurus and methods
The SCM is a loosely organised group of litigants, commentators, tax protesters/deniers and financial scheme promoters…leadership comes from “redemption gurus” who advise Sovereigns to use ‘legal’ phrases to remove themselves from the jurisdiction of government (BBC).
Prison recruitment, outreach and education Gurus and other Sovereign ‘mentors’ incarcerated for fraud or for not paying taxes have found prison an ideal environment to indoctrinate and recruit new adherents. Imprisoned drug dealers and embezzlers were particularly willing recruits to the cause, jumping at the chance to put Sov-Cit theories into place in the hope of getting out of jail, or to retaliate against the public officials and law enforcement officers who put them there! The pseudo-legal strategy employed by Sov-Cits (again following Posse Comitatus) is based on the ludicrous “Theory of Redemption”—a secret (and mythical) fund of money created for everyone at birth by the US government—which Sov-Cits can supposedly redeem or claim to pay debts [‘Sovereign Citizens Movement Resurging’, Southern Poverty Law Center, Spring Issue 2009, 26-Feb-2009, www.splcenter.org].
“American National”, the preferred nomenclature for Sovereigns ⍌
Before the advent of the internet training of Sov-Cits took place at seminars held at remote extremist compounds. Now recruits learn via online videos and forums (like You Tube and MySpace) which disseminate SCM doctrine and tactics. Some Sovereign groups sell booklets like “The Prison Packet” which purports to guide inmates towards the realisation of their freedoms. Religious outreach, through the agencies of numerous Christian fundamentalist fringe organisations in the US, is another avenue for recruiting Sov-Cits into the fringe fold (Southern Poverty Law Center).
Paper terrorism
Sovereigns employ what are saturation methods, submitting countless bogus court filings containing hundreds of pages which are virtually indecipherable. The purpose? “To punish, to harass and mislead public officials”. The paper terrorism may take the form of elaborate scams, the generation of fake letters of credit or tax forms, frivolous law suits or other faux legal documents [‘Understanding the sovereign citizen movement: a guide for corrections professionals’, The Free Library, www.thefreelibrary.com/].
Law-enforcement officers in the Sovereigns’ cross-hairs
Some Sov-Cits are out and out “con artists”, transparently pure 100% charlatan, but as Michael Barkun warns, others are politically-motivated anti-government extremists⧆…and dangerous! In 2010 a Sov-Cit duo, father and son, killed local police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas. A New Hampshire shootout in 1997 resulted in the death of five people including the Sovereign provocateur acting as a “lone wolf”❂. Cop killing by Sovereigns is not confined to America – in 2016 a Reichsbürger, the German version of the Sov-Cit, shot dead a policeman in that country. The FBI has declared some Sovereign Citizens to be domestic terrorists. Often inmates utilise the Sov-Cit strategies from within the prison system to carry out protracted vendettas against judges, IRS officials, prosecutors and local sheriffs (Southern Poverty Law Center).
(Source: www.bbc.com/)
The lengths a Sov-Cit will go to
Your dedicated Sovereign is not adverse to creating fake car licence plates or printing his or her own currency and then trying to pass it off as real money. One SCM provocateur in Florida, in acrimonious conflict with his local Bank of America branch, sent it a bogus foreclosure notice and even barricaded the branch during opening hours (SPLC).
Francis: “It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression”
Reg: “Its symbolic of his struggle against reality”
~ Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Sovereigns don’t believe they need to hold a licence in order to drive (or to fish for that matter). When stopped by police patrols they have been known to deny that they are driving and affirm rather that they are in fact merely travelling⚅ (Dr Kaz Ross, interview, ABC Radio). And travelling, Sovereigns insist, is “a God-given right”. Some Sovereigns go even further than just mouthing the mantra that they are outside of federal jurisdiction, proclaiming to be citizens of other entities, eg, the Montana Freemen, the “Republic of Texas” (The Free Library)✫.
Anti-government protest in Oregon ⍓(Source: http://m.dk.com)
Endnote: Sovereign Citizens are one of a panoply of Alt-Right, conspiracy-obsessed fringe hate groups in the US which might loosely be subsumed under the umbrella term “patriot movement”. There is a lot of blurring of the lines between SCM, QAon, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Bois, the Proud Boys, the Anti-Vaxxer groups and various others of a similarly contrarian ilk. In particular, the Sov-Cits’ emphasis on the duality of US citizenship echoes the philosophy of another group – the Freemen-on-the-Land movement. The latter proclaim that “with special knowledge and careful language, we can circumvent these laws and regulations and live freely as an alternative vision of ourselves under our own ‘natural‘ laws” (a virtual identikit image of the SCM’s credo and tactics) [’What is the ‘sov cit movement?’, BBC News, 05-Aug-2020, www.bbc.com; ’The seriously weird belief of Freeman on the Land”, (Shelley Stocken), News, 09-Jul-2016, www.news.com.au].
xxxx
PostScript: Black separatism
On the surface you might think Sov-Cits would be an exclusively Caucasian phenomena, given its links to White Supremacist outfits like Christian Identity. But there is an African-American separatist subset that adheres to the Sovereign Citizens credo. Given their disproportionate representation in US prisons, Black inmates not surprisingly have been attracted to the SCM ideology. A clique of African-American drug-dealers on trial for murder in the 2000s in Baltimore employed its obstructionist ploys to delay proceedings for years [‘Too Weird for The Wire’, (Kevin Carey), Washington Post, May/June/July 2008].
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✱ the great danger here “is when fringe beliefs and proponents begin to slip into the mainstream”, eg, President Trump’s spruiking of alleged coronavirus cures which are not scientifically proven and possibly harmful, ‘The threads that don’t connect: Covid gives Australian conspiracy theorists a home’, (Michael McGowan), The Guardian, 02-Aug-2020, www.theguardian.com.au]
⊞ a right to hold possession of property owned by another until they discharge the debt (www.lexico.com/)
⧆ Barkun describes them as “a stubbornly resilient sub-culture, a community of the alienated”
❂ many Sovereign groups are thought to be aligned with militia groups
⚅ ‘driving’, they assert, is what a truck driver or a taxi driver does for a living
✫ it’d be stating the obvious to say that Sovereigns have a cockeyed notion of the rule of law, one based on the false premise that an individual can choose which law they consent to, and which they don’t (SPLC)
When testosterone-charged visitors to coastal Belgian towns began strolling around the shops and cafes bare-chested in 2015, locals objecting to this aesthetic blight on the landscape took to labelling the offending blow-ins “Tarzan tourists”. References to that archetypical, mesomorphic white hero of amorphous jungle habitats, Tarzan, have permeated popular culture for over a century. Since the time pencil-sharpener salesman Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) turned his hand to writing his first story in 1912, the aura of Tarzan, carefully cultivated by the author into a cultural icon, has extended from pulp fiction, to various media including comic strips, films (over 90!), radio shows, TV series, Broadway musicals, computer games and a raft of commercial merchandise𝓪.
Celluloid Tarzan – from urbane gent to LCD savage
The phenomenal success of ERB’sTarzan of the Apes and follow-up pulp novels provided prime adventure material for a rapid transition into cinema, starting with a silent movie in 1918. Later sound film interpretations, especially those with former American Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, departed radically from Burroughs’ original conception of the heroic jungle adventurer as a cultured, multilingual, erudite aristocrat (John Clayton II, Viscount Greystoke). Weissmuller’s “dumbed-down” depiction of Tarzan was as an innocent and noble savage, the “strong and silent” type given only to monosyllabic utterings (“Me, Tarzan, you, Jane”).
⇩ERB at home in Tarzana, California
White skin, white supremacist
As successful as the books and later franchises have been, Tarzan’s character has engendered a persistent stream of controversy. ERB’s creation, from the start, was an obvious target for accusations of racism – a white boy/man𝓫 thrown into a dangerous and alien environment (the “dark continent”), who manages not only to survive but to triumph over hordes of dark-skinned peoples and over numerous wild animals. Tarzan emerges from the pages as a “consummate colonial-era adventurer” – “a white man whose novel civility enabled him to communicate with and control savage peoples and animals…using appropriate technology” to help natives who “cannot solve their own problems” [RJ Gordon in Tarzan was an Eco-Tourist … and Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure, (edited by Luis A Vivanco & Robert J Gordon), 2006]. The world that Tarzan creates in the jungle is in effect a “white supremacist Eden parable”, the books and films completely omit the point-of-view of the indigenous people who live in the African jungle (or the Amazonian rainforest𝓬) ‘[‘The Only Good Tarzan is a Bad Tarzan’, (Aaron Bady), Pacific Standard, 08-Jul-2016, www.psmag.com; ‘From Tarzan to Avatar: the problem with “the white man in the jungle”’, (Steve Rose), The Guardian, 06-Jul-2016, www.theguardian.com].
⇧TV Tarzan (loin-clothed Ron Ely) translocated to Mesoamerican climes (Source: www.nbc.com)
A white world of comfortable racial assumptions Tarzan’s brand of chivalrous “white masculinity” precludes him from engaging in sexual violence against women, but he is utterly implicated in the negative racial stereotyping of Africans, an explicit feature of the books – black men aredescribed as “lithe, ebon warriors, gesticulating and jabbering”, Arabs are “surly looking”. Without holding back, ERB tells us, Tarzan is “a killer of many black men”, revelling, shockingly for modern sensitivities, in the act of ‘lynching’ blacks [Gail Bederman, quoted in ‘Tarzan’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
The mystique of Tarzan: Green mascot, eco-warrior and proto-expat
Part of Tarzan’s durability as a cultural icon might lie in his versatile utility. It has been noted that Tarzan possesses an “ability to adapt to the zeitgeist of different eras”. In seamlessly managing an environment that is unnatural and unfamiliar to him, he demonstrates a flair for “ecological sustainability”, we are shown the ape-man’s apparently impeccable “green credentials” [‘The Untamed Image of the Perfect Savage’, (Bram Wicherink), Efnofoor, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp.90-97. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25758188. Accessed 10 July 2020]. For Paul Theroux, who hadhands-on experience of being part of the ‘invasion’ of Africa by Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s, Tarzan is “in the jungle, but notof the jungle”…therefore he was the “first expatriate”𝒹[Theroux, P.“Tarzan Is an Expatriate.” Transition, no. 32, 1967, pp. 13–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2934617. Accessed 10 July 2020].
⇩The first screen Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, 1918
Tarzan as metaphor – defender of masculinity
The period in which ERB wrote the first Tarzan books (just before, through and after WWI) saw the emergence of a challenge to the hegemony of white masculinity – from the Suffragette Movement…according to Robert Gordon, Burroughs’ creation of the all-conquering jungle superhero constituted a buffer against that perceived threat. This held sway again in the 1960s and 70s when the advent of women’s, LGBT and civil rights movements loomed as a threat to (white heterosexual) masculinity. Tarzan, as “the archetypal white-manhood fantasy” represented a “refuge of sorts for white audiences”. What they could observe in the story of Tarzan was an ideal of manliness, a he-man proving himself physically in the most testing of circumstances [Gordon; ‘Me, Tarzan. You, Really Still Doing This?’, (Devon Maloney), Mel, 11-Jul-2016, www.melmagazine.com.
PostScript: An attempt at a politically-corrected Tarzan
The talkies motion picture era has seen a string of mostly forgettable actors taking on the role of Tarzan, as well as a TV series or two and even Disney animation versions of the vine-swinging king of the jungle. In recent decades the Tarzan phenomenon has appeared to be running out of steam, although a recent entry, a 2016 screen production, The Legend of Tarzan, sought to present a Tarzan with ‘woke’ politics and more psychological complexity. Tarzan is this time avowedly anti-colonial, taking to task the odious slave-based Congo empire of Belgian king Leopold II, and displaying his capacity for “racial sensibilities” in the endeavour. Resurrecting a Tarzan who is more nuanced is still in itself problematic for its contemporary tone-deafness – “propagating…a white saviour narrative during the charged era of Black Lives Matter” is not the most prudent or politically savvy card to play [Glenn Kenny, ‘The Legend of Tarzan’, (01-Jul-2016), www.rogerebert.com]. The hero’s mate Jane departs from her character’s standard “eye-candy” function and exhibits a “feisty proto-feminist” defiance and the film gives a nod to environmental and conservationist concerns. Unfortunately the movie got at best only mixed reviews and basically bombed at the box office [‘The Legend of Tarzan’ Falls Well Short of the Tree Tops’,(David Edelstein), Vulture, 01-Jul-2016, www.vulture.com].
Footnote: Tarzan, very much “all-American”
Oddly, in all the graphic representations of Tarzan—in films, on book covers and illustrations—he is presented as clean-shaven, always sans beard, somewhat of an anomaly considering he is almost always off the grid, cut off from all the usual paraphernalia and comforts of life.
⇧Just your average Middle American family – the Weissmullers
𝓪 Tarzan was “the first fictional character to be multi-mass-media marketed…the growth of a veritable Tarzan industry, with “Tarzan Clubs” rivalling the Boy Scouts (Gordon). But not just boys, famed ethnologist and world chimpanzee authority Jane Goodall was captivated by the mystique of Tarzan, his impact on the primatologist’s childhood imagination “set her on a path to Africa to work with wild animals” [‘How Tarzan created Jane Goodall and how Goodall then repaid the favour’, (Shawn Thompson), The Ethical Ape, (2013), www.news.mongabay.com]
𝓫 in the books Burroughs explains that the name given the eponymous hero, ‘Tarzan’, means (in African “ape language”) “white of skin”
𝓬 occasionally for plot variety the setting for Tarzan’s adventures diverts from the customary (vaguely) African location to Latin America and India
𝒹 apparently he was the inspiration for future adventure junkies – for many restless souls in the West who flocked to join the Peace Corps in an Africa emerging from colonialism, as well as for later devotees of the ongoing craze for adventure tourism (Gordon)
The absence of cars in cities during the coronavirus lockdown has been a boon to cyclists, both for the recreational kind and for commuter cyclists. There has been an “unprecedented surge in popularity” of bicycle traffic—even in the land of the automobile, the United States—with many bike shops since March reporting a doubling of their average sales…such is the demand now that bike manufacturers can’t build them fast enough [‘Cycling ‘explosion’: coronavirus fuels surge in US bike ridership’, (Miranda Bryant), The Guardian, 13-May-2020, www.theguardian.com ; ‘Australia is facing a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ as cycling booms, advocates say’, (David Mark), ABC News, 16-May-2020, www.abc.net.au ] ⇧
The renewed present enthusiasm to take up bike-riding in response to the pandemic recalls earlier periods of “bike-mania”in the West—late 1860s to mid-1870s and the 1890s—as the humble bike was evolving into its modern form. Credit for the basic look of the standard, no-frills bicycle as we we think of it today is generally given to John Kemp Starley for his 1885 invention, the “Rover Safety Bicycle”. The Rover’s similar-sized wheels, chain drive attached to the crankshaft and rear wheel, diagonal frame and relative lightness (20kg) retains the basic design of the modern bicycle [‘Pedal Your Way Through the Bicycle’s Bumpy History’, [Evan Andrews),
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The bike by various other names
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1890s, the world gone crazy for the bicycle
(Image:
Instrument of freedom and independence
Health-wise physicians gave their approval. And ordinary folk suddenly were able to explore the countrysides, visit towns and places – far and near. Just about everyone, it seems, got into the act of riding bicycles – royalty and rulers in places like Russia, Zanzibar and Afghanistan took up cycling; First-wave feminists – Susan B Anthony declared that “bicycling emancipated women more than anything else”; women were especially enthusiastic as the activity allowed them to escape their voluminous and cumbersome Victorian skirts for more practical attire such as bloomers. When the lighter, less unwieldy safety bicycles came along, police in the UK were quick to adopt them in their work. Likewise, the NYC police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt mounted the city police on bikes to apprehend the new “public danger” of ‘scorchers’ (“speed demon” cyclists ) (Smith).
The conventional explanation for the demise of the bicycle boom is the rise of the commercially-viable automobile, but other factors may have contributed to the bicycle’s decline, such as the rapid growth of the early mass transit systems such as streetcars and trams which were a more practical alternative to bikes, especially in bad weather (Britannica).
While Brazil has the unenviable title of the worst coronavirus hotspot in Latin America sown up, Mexico has steered a similar course to disaster in the face of the pandemic. As Brazil’s coronavirus count climbs to well over 1.1 million confirmed cases and closing in on 53 thousand fatalities, the galloping toll in Mexico—60% the size of Brazil population-wise—now registers 191,410 cases and 23,377 deaths(as at 24-June-2020).
(Source: www.lonelyplanet.com)
False security?
Among some Mexicans there seem to be a sense that the country’s demographics which are skewed toward the young—around 85% of the population is under 55—may act as a barrier against coronavirus. This confidence may be misplaced due to several factors: pre-existing health conditions in Mexico which affect younger cohorts as well—make the population more vulnerable to the ravages of coronavirus, as the table below indicates [‘Many young Mexican at risk from Covid-19’, (James Blears), Vatican News, 31-March-2020, www.vaticannews.va]. the death-rate from COVID-19 among maquiladora workers in the border region of Baja California was found to be 25 times higher for the age bracket 40-49 than in the corresponding San Diego County, [‘COVID-19 killing young maquiladora workers, study shows’, (Salvador Rivera), Border Report, 11-Jun-2020, www.borderreport.com].
A league of populist leader ‘bedfellows’?
The way Mexico under its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has approached the pandemic has disturbing parallels with that of Brazil’s leader Bolsonaro, and with the US under Trump. Despite a difference of ideological orientation—Obrador (who’s commonly known within Mexico as AMLO) is a Left-populist whereas Bolsonaro and Trump are Right-populists—the Mexican leader has pursued much the same course with similar outcomes. AMLO’s government was slow to engage in the fight against COVID-19 in the critical early period. The virus apparently entered Mexico via overseas returnees, primarily wealthier Mexicans returning from business trips to Italy and skiing holidays in Colorado, and then spread to low-income groups [‘Mexico’s Central de Abasto: How coronavirus tore through Latin America’s largest market’, (Mary Beth Sheridan), Washington Post, 21-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
🔺 AMLO, pressing the flesh (Photo: Mexico’s Presidency Handouts/Reuters)
How not to contain a pandemic
Like his US and Brazilian counterparts, AMLO justified his inaction by being dismissive of the disease, continually downplaying its risk to people, and he was negligent by example. After the outbreak Obrador toured the country, holding rallies sans face masks, nonchalantly meeting and greeting supporters, freely shaking hands, embracing people and even kissing them✱. The president’s advice to the Venezuelan people was simply to continue to “live life as usual”…until late March he was encouraging people to go out, attend fiestas, dine in restaurants and go shopping, airports remained open◘– a clear indicator that Obrador’s priority was the health of the economy rather than the health of the public [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times, 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘AMLO’s feeble response to COVID-19 in Mexico’, (Vanda Felbab-Brown), Brookings, 30-Mar-2020, www.brookings.edu].
Abject lack of medical preparedness.
Obrador’s dangerous indifference to the crisis extended to a half-hearted medical intervention. Testing for COVID-19 has remained woefully low, no program of widespread testing or of contact tracing – these vital measures dismissed as being impractical for a population of 128 million (Sheridan; Stott & Schipano). The reluctance to test extensively is no doubt also related to Mexico’s health care incapacity. Despite having gone through the experience of the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, subsequent Mexican administrations have permitted the country’s health sector to run down, funding to hospitals and medical centres have been cut by millions. Mexico has only 1.4 hospital beds for every 1,000 persons and just over 2,000 ventilators all up. The shortfall extends to physicians, medical equipment including PPE and coronavirus test kits [‘Mexico’s coronavirus-sceptical president is setting up his own country for a health crisis’, (Alex Ward), Vox, 28-Mar-2020, www.vox.com].
Shooting the messenger
Inevitably AMLO has copped a lot of internal criticism for his irresponsible response to the crisis. Rather than taking positive measures to try to undo the disaster of his own creation, Obrador has gone on the attack against the Mexican independent media. Again invoking the Trump playbook, he has railed against the “fake news” and “Twitter bots” who have opposed his government’s handling of the situation. Independent investigations in fact have brought to light the clandestine activities of Notimex (the state-owned news agency) which has created a network of bots and fake accounts to discredit prominent journalists and label them as ‘criminal’ [‘Mexican President López Obrador frets about the spreading virus of fake news, but not COVID-19’, (José Miguel Vivanco), Dallas News,16-Jun-2020, www.dallasnews.com].
AMLO has taken to giving regular video ‘sermons’ to the masses (he calls them“Decalogues to emerge from coronavirus and face the new reality”)…these are not as you might surmise updates on how the government is attempting to counter the pandemic, but an uninspiring mish-mash of banalities about staying positive, eating corn and getting sun and fresh air. With the unchecked escalating death toll from the disease, many believe Obrador has given up any pretence to even trying to combat the virus [‘Mexico’s president has given up in the fight against the coronavirus’, (León Krauze), Washington Post, 19-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com]. In this most unpropitious context AMLO is now taking an imprudent gamble by lifting restrictions – despite the curve of Mexican infections continuing to shoot upwards.
🔻 Mega-mercado, Mexico City
Footnote: Mexico City epicentre
Mexico City accounts for about one quarter of all COVID-19 deaths in Mexico. The officalcounts however are only starting points to explain the catastrophe. A Mexico City study by Nexos magazine found that there was an “excess mortality” of more than 20% unaccounted for by the official figures [‘8,000 ‘excess deaths’ in Mexico City as coronavirus rages: study’, Ajazeera, 26-May-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. One of the capital’s biggest clusters is the wholesale mega-market, the Central de Abasto. The enormous mercado providing 80% of the city’s food is a petri-dish for the virus which has cut a scythe through its 90,000-strong workforce, infecting its tomateros, chilli vendors and other workers whose need to keep working is often greater than their fear of the pandemicφ. The vendors and carters have another reason for continuing working even when they become ill – working class Mexicans are accustomed to poor quality health care and often harbour a distrust of hospitals (Sheridan).
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(Image source: www.studentnewsdaily.com)
Venezuela: Showcase numbers but a lack of transparency
Although the available statistics relating to Venezuela don’t reflect the dramatic numbers in Mexico, the situation in the South American country is peer bit as parlous. Venezuela has fessed up to 4,186 cases and 35 deaths (24-Jun-2020), but these figures have little credibility with independent observers. Venezuela has done very limited testing for the disease with the testing data guarded very carefully by the government [‘Hunger, Infection, and Repression: Venezuela’s Coronavirus Calamity’, (Stephanie Taladrid), The New Yorker, 29-May-2020, www.newyorker.com]. Doubters outside the country have noted that Venezuela’s health system was already in a state of collapse before COVID-19 arrived, citing as evidence:the country‘s functioning intensive care beds are estimated to number between 80 and 163; nil or intermittent supply to water to two-thirds of hospitals; power cuts off at regular intervals; shortages of gloves and face masks in 60% of hospitals; 76% of hospitals shortage of soap and 90% were short of sanitising gel [‘Venezuela’s Covid-19 death toll claims ‘not credible’, human rights group says’, (Tom Phillips), The Guardian, 27-May-2020, www.theguardian.com].
🔺 Maduro: “People, we are identity”
President Maduro—already embroiled in a political and socio-economic crisis acerbatedby long-term US trade sanctions on Venezuela—imposed a national lockdown in March. A side benefit to the lockdown (now extended to July) is that it allows the regime more scope to crack down on its critics…the obvious targets being opposition politicians and increasingly journalists, doctors and nurses who report adversely on Maduro’s handling of the pandemic (especially if they query the reported official numbers). [‘Venezuela’s Zulia State emerges as coronavirus hot spot’, Reuters, 24-Jun-2020, www.news.yahoo.com].
Footnote: Rich and poor, a widening of the divide
At the point of corona impact, the contrast between Venezuela’s masses and the elite have sharpened even more. The brunt of the economic crisis has fallen squarely on the poor and middle-class citizens – skyrocketing prices, scarcity of necessities, a greatly devalued Venezuelan bolivar, the oil price plunge (oil accounts for 98% of Venezuela’s export revenues), and over-reliance on the informal economy by the lower socio-economic classes [‘Why coronavirus could be catastrophic for Venezuela’, (Katy Watson & Vanessa Silva), BBC News, 12-Apr-2020, www.bbc.com]. With corruption, cronyism and nepotism ingrained in Venezuela, the Maduro regime and its acolytes—the heirs of Chavismoism—continue to benefit lavishly from black-market and other illicit financial activities◊ [‘Freedom in the World 2020: Venezuela’, Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org].
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✱ AMLO preferring to travel and mingle accompanied only by his personal amulets for ‘protection’
◘only in the last week of March did the government retreat a bit and start to urge the public to stay-at-home
φ the CDMX-run market only acted, bringing in health workers, ramping up testing and contact tracing, after workers starting dropping in significant numbers (Sheridan)…as with the rest of Mexico, too little, too late
◊ beneficiaries of this state largesse and privilege include the bolichicos, the wealthy children of the regime’s top leaders
As Europe starts to pull itself out of the worst of the coronavirus outbreak, the Americas for the most part are still firmly mired in the devastating crisis of the pandemic…more worryingly, COVID-19 cases continue to rise and even accelerate in some countries as Latin America seems to be turning into “pandemic central”, the ‘new’ Europe❅. This is occurring despite the continent comprising only eight percent of the world’s population and having had the advantage of time to prepare for the virus which reached its shores some six weeks after ravaging Europe.
(Source: www.maps-of-the-world.net)
Smallness helps The picture of Central and South America is not uniformly bleak. Some of the smaller countries, such as Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador, have managed to restrict their nation’s outbreaks to low levels of infection and casualties. This last mentioned country was surveyed in an earlier blog entitled Courting Controversy in Coronavirus Country: Belgium and El Salvador– June 2020). Among the Southern Cone countries, Argentina and Uruguay stand in contrast to their neighbours Chile and Brazil. Argentina (population of >45 million)—its commendable performance vs the virus slightly tarnished by a recent upsurge following an easing of the lockdown—has a total of 39,557 COVID-19 cases and only 979 deaths, compared with Brazil (whose leader Jai Bolsonaro has taken a recklessly dismissive attitude towards the pandemic). Even on a per capitabasis Argentina‘s figures are still a fraction of the human disaster befalling Brazil which has racked up 1,038,568 cases and 49,090 deaths (population: 212 million). The Argentine Republic’s results are also way better than Chile’s record of 231,393 cases and 4,093 deaths (from just 19 million) [‘Argentina’s president enters voluntary isolation amid coronavirus surge’, (Uni Goñi) The Guardian, 18-Jun-2018, www.theguardian.com].
Uruguay: Stellar success of an outlier Uruguay has fared as well as anyone in Central/South America in avoiding a pandemic catastrophe on the scale of some of its neighbours. A tiny population (3.5 million) helps immeasurably but the sheer lowness of its corona numbers stands by themselves – just 1,040 confirmed cases and 24 deaths. This has been achieved despite a demographic profile that should have made it highly vulnerable to the disease: the largest regional proportion of elderly citizens and a population which is 96% urban. And an outcome secured not by lockdowns and quarantines (allowing Uruguay to preserve its national economic health cf. the stricken economies of its large neighbours Brazil and Argentina), but by eliciting the voluntary compliance of its citizenry – and through the luxury of having a near-universal, viable health care system✺ [‘Why Is Uruguay Beating Latin America’s Coronavirus Curse?’, (Mac Margolis), Bloomberg, 30-May-2020, www.bloomberg.com].
Uruguay (Photo: Daniel Rodrigues/adhoc/AFP via Getty Images)
Peru: Aside from Brazil the country in the region most in strife due to the pandemic at the moment is probably Peru. Peru’s statistics are stark – over 247,925 confirmed cases and 7,660 deaths in a population of 32 million. What is particularly troubling about Peru is that, unlike Brazil, at onset it seemed to be pulling all the right reins, implementing one of Latin America’s earliest and strictest lockdowns. Months of enforced lockdown have however failed to flatten the curve of infections. Peru finds itself in a demoralising “double whammy”, the public health catastrophe continues unabated❈ while the recourse to a tough national lockdown has further crippled the economy [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times (UK), 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘Peru’s coronavirus response was ‘right on time’ – so why isn’t it working?’, (Dan Collyns), The Guardian, 21-May-2020, www.theguardian.com]✪.
⇑ Andean pabluchas patrol Cuzco streets to enforce social distancing and mandatory mask measures (Photo: Jose Carlos Angulo/AFP/Getty Images)
Indicators of the poverty trap The economic predicament Peru finds itself stems from the country’s high reliance on an informal economy (reaching some 70%). What Peru has in common with Brazil—and has been exacerbated by the pandemic—is very high social inequality. The poorest Peruvians cannot afford to stay home, to isolate as they should. Many are without bank accounts and under the informal economy have to travel to collect their wages, those without home refrigerators also need to shop frequently – all of which makes them more vulnerable to be exposed to the virus [‘Latin America reels as coronavirus gains pace’, (Natalia Alcoba), Aljazeera, 15-Jun-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. Disease and impoverishment have converged in Peru to make the predicament more acute for those of the poor who need life-saving oxygen of which there is now a scandalous critical shortage – the situation being exploited by profiteering hit men (the sicarios) controlling the black market oxygen supplies [‘In Peru, coronavirus patients who need oxygen resort to black market and its 1,000 percent markups’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 18-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
Ecuador and Guayaquil ⇓
Ecuador: In Ecuador the pandemic epicentre is the western city of Guayaquil, the country’s largest city. This is thought to be due to a couple of factors, the city’s sprawling slums where “many residents live hand-to-mouth and routinely violate the government lockdown…in order to work”, and because many Guayaquil exchange students and migrant workers came back to the city from Spain and Italy in March [‘COVID-19 Numbers Are Bad In Ecuador. The President Says The Real Story Is Even Worse’, (John Otis), NPR, 20-Apr-2020, www.npr.org]. The unpreparedness and inability of the authorities to cope with the crisis has affected the woeful degree of testing done, the lack of hospital facilities for patients and even the capacity to bury the dead as the bodies of coronavirus victims were left piling up on the city’s streets. In the wake of the disaster the Guayaquil Council entered into a slinging match with Quito (the national government), asserting that the government has under-represented the city’s death toll by as much as four-fifths, that it failed to provide it with the health care backup demanded of the disaster, as well as calling out the corruption of public utilities which has accentuated the crisis (Alcoba). Ecuador currently has 49,731 confirmed cases and 4,156 fatalities in a population of 17 million.
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End-note: The hypothesisof virus protection at high altitude Among the multitude of worldwide research projects triggered by the pandemic, a multi-country study looking at Bolivia, Ecuador and Tibet has advanced the theory that populations that live at a height of above 3,000 metres have significantly lower levels of susceptibility to coronavirus than their lowland counterparts. The study attributes the capacity of high altitude to nullify the disease down to the fact that living at high altitude allows people to cope with hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the blood), and that the altitude provides a favourable natural environment—dry mountain air, high UV radiation and a resulting lowering of barometric pressure—reduces the virus’ ability to linger in the air. The COVID-19 experience of Cuzco in Peru seems to corroborate this hypothesis, being lightly affected compared to the rampage elsewhere in the country – the high Andean city has had only 899 confirmed cases and three deaths. Similarly, La Paz, Bolivia, the world’s highest legislative capital, has recorded only 38 coronavirus-related deaths to date⊠ [‘From the Andes to Tibet, the coronavirus seems to be sparing populations at high altitudes’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 01-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
<Þ> all country coronavirus counts quoted above are as at 20-June-2020
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❅ for week ending 20th June 2020, confirmed cases for Latin America represented half of all new coronavirus cases (Source: WHO) ✺ a like-for-like comparison to Uruguay might be Paraguay – also a small population (6.9 million), only 1,336 cases and 13 deaths but at the cost of a draconian lockdown with an economy-crippling end-game. ❈ even prior to COVID-19 striking, the Peruvian public health system was struggling due to “decades of chronic underinvestment” (eg, spending <$700 a day on health care) (Tegel, ‘In Peru’) ✪ the strict lockdown has been less rigorous when removed from the urban centres…in outlying areas, in the northern coast and the Amazonas region (particularly bad in the Amazonian city of Iquitos) it was less “honoured in the breach than the observance” leading to the formation of new virus clusters (Collyns) ⊠ other experts discount the study’s findings noting that most coronavirus infections occur indoors, negating the relevance of UV levels (Tegel, ‘From the Andes’)
Three months ago when the COVID-19 outbreak started to move around the globe, the World Health Organisation issued a warning to the continent of Africa whose nations were just starting to feel its impact [‘Coronavirus: WHO tells African countries to ‘prepare for the worst’, Eye on Africa, 18-Mar-2020, www.france24.com]. The pandemic was late in reaching Africa and initially slow to make inroads, taking 98 days to register its first 100,000 confirmed cases but is now accelerating – only taking 18 more days to hit the 200,000 mark of cases [‘COVID-19: WHO warns of virus acceleration in Africa’, Vanguard, 14-Jun-2020, www.vanguardngr.com]. Overall African fatalities sit at 6,793 (16-Jun-2020) with just five countries (Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Nigeria) accounting for 70% of the deaths✹.
Southern Africa:
To date South Africa has been the nation most heavily affected by the public health emergency – over 73,000 confirmed cases and 1,568 deaths (16-Apr-2020). The Western Cape province has become the epicentre of the RSA pandemic, recording so far around 75% of the country’s fatalities. The province’s high incidence of cases has been attributed to the presence of poor, densely populated townships like Khayelitsha, a shantytown of 500,000 people. Cape Town’s thriving tourism (before the closedown) has also been advanced as contributing to the outbreak’s toll. South Africa, with a more developed economy and better health care system, has conducted more a million virus tests, while many other African countries have racked up only a few thousands. The clear implication of this is that ”the disease is spreading undetected elsewhere on the continent” [‘Cape Town becomes South Africa’s coronavirus hotspot’, (Jevans Nyabiage), South China Morning Post, 12-Jun-2020, www.amp.scmp.com].
South Africa’s smaller, northern neighbour Zimbabwe has done surprisingly well on paper in the crisis (four deaths recorded only), but with the rider that testing for the disease—hampered by a critical shortage of health equipment and infrastructure—has been very limited…by 10th April it had tested a mere 392 people [‘In Zimbabwe, lack of tests sparks fear COVID-19 goes undetected’, (Chris Muronzi), Aljazeera, 10-Apr-2020, www.aljazeera.com].
(Image: SABC News)
West Africa:
Results of the fight against the pandemic in West Africa have been mixed. Senegal began its counter-measures early in January, closing the borders, implementing contact-tracing, etc. The country was able to produce a test kit for COVID-19 costing only $1 per patient and has managed to accommodate every coronavirus patient either in hospital or in a community health facility. African countries who experienced the 2013/14 Ebola virus outbreak like Senegal put that experience to good use, prohibiting large gatherings, strict night-time curfews, banning intercity travel, etc. Côte d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast) followed Senegal’s approach, declaring a state of emergency and trying to impose curfews in it’s main city Abidjan, but the country’s buoyant economy has taken quite a hit from the coronavirus crisis. Ghana has utilised an extensive system of contact-tracing and a “pool-testing” mechanism which follows up only on positive results [‘Why are Africa’s coronavirus successes being overlooked?’, (Afua Hirsch), The Guardian, 21-May-2020, www.theguardian.com; ‘Women unite against COVID-19 in Senegal’,Relief web,10-Jun-2020, www.reliefweb.int].
The speeding up of coronavirus cases in a small African country like Guinea-Bissau has occurred notwithstanding it’s small population and limited testing, reflecting a reality stretching across the whole continent, the sheer incapacity of weak and under-resourced national health infrastructures to cope with the pandemic [‘West Africa facing food crisis as coronavirus spreads’, (Emmanuel Akinwotu), The Guardian, 16-May-2020, www.theguardian.com].
⍐ Kano (Photo: Reuters/Luc Gnago)
In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, the most worrying hotspot has been the north in Kano state and metropolis. The pandemic has gotten out of hand here because of a confluence of factors, including the state government’s early failure to admit the presence of coronavirus (which it initially tried to pass off as an upsurge in other illnesses), costing it vital lost time in the fight against the disease; the closure of Kano’s only testing centre for a week in April; acute shortages of PPE; and the pre-existing displacement of 1.8m people in the region [‘Covid-19 Outbreak in Nigeria Is Just One of Africa’s Alarming Hot Spots’, (Ruth Maclean), New York Times, 17-May-2020, www.nytimes.com].
Dakar, Senegal (Photo: John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images)
PostScript: A young and rural population
Africa’s avoidance of the worse excesses of COVID-19 thus far has prompted the theory that the continent’s demographics is working in it’s favour. A study in the journal BMJ Global Health attributes this to Africa’s young, rural-based population▣ …60% of the population is under 25, cf. Europe (95% of its deaths from the virus have been people over 60). BMJ hypothesises that Africa will likely suffer “more infections but most will be asymptomatic or mild, and probably (go) undetected” [‘Africa’s young and rural population may limit spread and severity of coronavirus, study says’, (Jevans Nyabiage), South China Morning Post, 28-May-2020, www.amp.scmp.com].
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✹ Egypt and South Africa alone account for nearly 48% of the entire continent’s corona-related deaths
When a pandemic or some similar “Black Swan” event sweeps the world, hitting many countries with great intensity, particularly in Western societies with a high degree of religiosity, comfort and solace is often sought within the spiritual “safe house” of the church. As soon as the novel coronavirus landed and spread, it was apparent the church services especially where high rates of attendance was commonplace, would pose a public health risk.
(Source: www.newslocker.com)
Yet in the US eleven state governors chose to maintain freedom of worship over community safety by exempting religious institutions from the general prohibition on public gatherings, notwithstanding that some of the states registered the biggest clusters of COVID-19. Even in other states there was a pushback by church men and women against government bans on assembly in places of worship. As a consequent 71 members of a single church in Sacramento were infected by the virus [‘Pastor who refused to close church due to coronavirus killed by outbreak’, (Rebecca Nicholson), Express, 15-Apr-2020, www.express.co.uk].
This was mirrored in overseas scenarios, in South Korea in February, one infected churchgoer infected at least 37 other members of her church on a single contact [“‘Superspreader’ in South Korea infects nearly 40 people with coronavirus’, (Nicolette Lanese), Live Science, 23-Feb-2020, www.livescience.com].
South Korean choir with face masks (Source: AP)
The choral petri-dish
The holding of packed sermons in churches and other places of worship, like any close contact between confined, concentrations of people, breaches the prescribed social distancing guidelines and exacerbates the incidence of coronavirus infection. But just as dangerous and with even more potential to transmit the viral disease through communities is the choral activities of churches. The activities of choirs initially continued unabated in the early stages of the pandemic but an incident in Washington state in early March brought home how risky choir practice is. 61 people attended a choir practice at a Presbyterian church in Skagit County, within a short time 45 of the group had been infected by COVID-19 and two had died. Other choir outbreaks, some fatal, have occurred In Calgary (Canada), Amsterdam (Netherlands) and in South Korea [‘Scientists to choirs: Group singing can spread the coronavirus, despite what CDC may say’, Richard Read), Los Angeles Times, 01-Jun-2020, www.latimes.com].
Infectious diseases experts have pinpointed the obvious dangers of contagion associated with choir singing…unrestrained vocal activity at close quarters in often poorly-ventilated, confined space. The vocalists exhale and inhale deeply to sing which makes them highly susceptible to the passage of airborne particles. Through the process of aerosolisation, the virus floats freely in the air (and has been observed to survive for up to three hours) [‘Churches can be the Deadliest Places in the COVID-19 Pandemic’, (Kevin Kavanagh), Infection Control Today, 03-Apr-2020, www.infectioncontroltoday.com; Read].
Inexplicable change of stance by CDC
With eyes fixed on the November elections and the need to shore up vital support from the Evangelical Christian Right, President Trump from his White House ‘pulpit’ intensified his call in May for governors to reopen religious institutions as an essential service, eliciting pushback from some governors. At the same time, surprisingly the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided to drop their warnings against choral singing despite the inherent danger it poses. CDC justifies this change of position by downplaying the likelihood of airborne transmission beyond six feet⊞ [‘Behind Trump’s demands to reopen churches: Slipping poll numbers and alarm inside his campaign’, (Gabby Orr), Politico, 22-May-2020, www.politico.com; Read).
Heightening the risk of unleashing ‘super-spreaders’
CDC’s controversial move has drawn broad criticism from medical experts including specialists in bio-aerosol research who have refuted CDC’s claim, calling it “hazardous, very dangerous and irresponsible”, and that it exposes America to new waves of super-spreading from the activity of choir members (Read).
⇑ With religious singing relegated to the home, some American churches have tried to get round the prohibition on in-house congregational services by organising drive-in sermons
Fallout from the churches
Although many parishes and parishioners in the US have adjusted well to the new world of online sermons, some traditional congregationalists worry that the new ‘norm’ will spell the disappearance of the in-person church experience altogether [‘How the Pandemic Will Change Us’, (Rod Dreher), The American Conservative, 13-Mar-2020, www.theamericanconservative.com].
(Photo: www.stjohnswhitchurch.org.uk)
Endnote: The economics of the choral closedownThe halt to choral activities due to COVID-19 has led to a whole bunch of “knock-on” problems worldwide. Like anybody else with their income source impacted adversely by the crisis, choristers, classical musicians and organists attached to the churches affected have been deprived of livelihood. But it goes even beyond that. As the Royal School of Church Music in the UK indicated, the pandemic ”has literally ripped apart the many close-knit groups of singers and instrumentalists who (need to) spend significant amounts of time together”. Church musicians who rely on the service are especially hard hit. It is doubly hard for self-employed church organists who have lost their access to practice – unlike other musicians who keep their instruments at home, they rely on “using instruments in public buildings for the vital practice which enables them to maintain their hard-earned skill” (Royal College of Organists). [‘Pandemic has ‘ripped apart’ church choirs’, (Hattie Williams), Church Times, 01-Apr-2020, www.churchtimes.co.uk].
(Source: eBay)
PostScript: There is another side problem resulting from the non-use of organs in churches. Like the raft of airplanes grounded due to the coronavirus, complex and expensive organs require continual attention. They need “regular playing to ensure that the fragile technical components are kept in good working order“ and free from damage (Williams).
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⊞ the Washington Post states that CDC acted on a White House directive to omit the choir warning from it’s website guidance information. CDC may have also relied on earlier statements from WHO contending that “there is no evidence of transmission of the virus as an airborne pathogen”. WHO’s conclusions have themselves been debunked as “decades-old dogma that held that droplets only travel an arm’s length in the air” (Read)
Boththe medical experts and the empirical evidence on the ground tell us that the elderly are the cohort in the community most susceptible to COVID-19. The Office of National Statistics (UK) calculates that people aged 80 and over have >59% risk of dying from coronavirus (www.ons.gov.uk/). The pandemic’ age bias skewed against older populations is one explanation, in the absence of much hard data, put forward to explain the African continent’s current low rate of mortality due to the virus – overall 111,812 confirmed cases and only 3,354 deaths (as at 25-May-2020) [‘Coronavirus in Africa tracker’, BBC News, www.bbc.co.uk/]. The percentage of the African population aged under 25 is 60% (in sub-Saharan Africa the number over 65 is only 3%)[‘Coronavirus in Africa reaches new milestone as cases exceed 100,000’, (Orion Rummler), Axion, 22-May-2020, www.axios.com].
And if we needed any more empirical proof of the salience of the age factor, there is the tragic example of Italy’s corona-toll. 32,785 dead✤ from COVID-19 in a country with the oldest population in Europe. Nearly 58% of the country’s deaths in the pandemic have been Italians aged 80 and over [Statistica Research Department, (22-May-2020), www.statista.com/].
With Italy’s grim corona-death tally falling disproportionately heavily on the country’s senectitude, you would think that it would not bode well for Japan which has the world’s highest percentage of older people (28.2% aged 65 and more) [Population Reference Bureau, www.pbr.org/]. When you add in other demographic factors relevant to Japan, this would seem doubly ominous for the “land of the rising sun” – a population of >126 millions on a land area of 377,944 sq km, including the mega-city of Tokyo✪ with its notoriously packed commuter trains. On top of all these is Japan’s proximity to China, the virus’ original causal point.
Sardine distancing (Source: www.quora.com)
Japan, unpropitious conditions for avoiding a global epidemic?With such cards stacked against it, worried Japanese health officials might have feared a catastrophe eventuating on the scale of that befalling the US, Italy and UK. And Japan has not come out of the pandemic unscathed but the result-to-date (25-May-2020)—16,550 confirmed cases and 820 deaths—is much better than many comparably sized and larger countries. Of course, Japan’s public health authorities are very mindful, as is every country, of being swamped by a second wave of the coronavirus.
(Photo: www.english.kyodonews.net)
How has Japan done as well as it has? Good question! The Japanese themselves can’t really explain how they’ve managed to escape a major outbreak of the virus⌧. WHO has called it a “success story”, but it’s one that continues to mystify. In so far as explanations were forthcoming from Japan’s health ministry, it was attributed at least in part to a raft of cultural factors. First, hygiene and cleanliness is something ingrained in the Japanese psyche, Japanese people tend not to shake hands and hugs others, preferring to bow as the form of greeting. Second, the practice of wearing face masks was already the norm in Japan ante-COVID-19 (the Japanese go through 5.5bn a year, averaging 43 per head of population) [‘Most coronavirus success stories can be explained. Japan’s remains a ‘mystery’’, (Jake Sturmer & Yumi Asada), ABC News, 23-May-2020, www.abc.com.au; ’How Japan keeps COVID-19 under control’, (Martin Fritz), DM, 25-Mar-2020, www.dm.com].
Other cultural factors Other suppositions put forward to explain the Japanese success include the practice of inoculating young children with BCG vaccinations, which according to its advocates give Japanese people a basic immunity which helps their defence against coronavirus. Physiology was also cited as a factor in guarding against the disease, the low obesity of Japanese is thought to help, as is the Japanese diet (eg, natto, a soybean yoghurt, is thought to boost the immune system) [‘’From near disaster to success story: how Japan has tackled coronavirus’, (Justin McCurry), The Guardian, 23-May-2020, www.msn.com/; ‘Has Japan dodged the coronavirus bullet?’, Richard Carter & Natsuko Fuhue, Yahoo News, 14-May-2020, www.au.news.yahoo.com; Sturmer & Asada].
(Photo: www..Forbes.com)
The “Diamond Princess”In addition to all of the domestic factors hindering Japan’s fight against COVID-19, an external element exacerbating the early outbreak in Japan was the debacle of the “Diamond Princess” cruise ship. When the international ship docked at Yokohama in February, the Japanese authorities injudiciously prevented healthy passengers and crew on-board from disembarking during the quarantine – with no separation made between well and contaminated passengers, and no self-isolation of the sick! This led to a blow-out of virus contamination which eventually infected 712 passengers, creating the first big cluster of coronavirus outside of Wuhan [‘How lax rules and missed warnings led to Japan’s second coronavirus-hit cruise ship’, (Ju-Min Park), The Japan Times, 07-May-2020, www.japantimes.co.jp].
A cautious reaction from politicians, one eye on the XXXII Olympiad?Let’s look in detail at what Japan did – or didn’t do! When the disease first arrived, the government took a cautious approach to tackling the virus. Borders initially remained open and Chinese visitors were still allowed into the country in huge numbers, 89,000 came in February (after the first outbreak), which was on top of the 925,000 who visited during January! Prime Minister Abe came in for a lot of flak, some including a former PM, Yukio Hatoyama, accused him of holding off from going full-tilt against the pandemic so as to preserve the Tokyo Olympics event (Fritz). Critics railed against a lack of leadership from the Abe government, criticising its failure to appoint anyone to take firm control of the crisis, and that those efforts to counter the virus were hamstrung by the multiplication of bureaucratic silos [‘A Japan divided over COVID-19 control’, (Hiromi Murakami), East Asia Forum, 08-Mar-2020, www.eastasiaforum.org].
Lockdown-lite, testing-liteThe Abe government’s belated state of emergency saw sport suspended and schools closed, but overall only a partial lockdown was imposed✺, many businesses, restaurants were permitted to stay open, albeit with reduced hours. Citizens were asked to stay home but compliance was only on a voluntary basis, with no surveillance technology deployed and no punitive action taken against anyone failing to adhere to the government’s request.
(Image: www.japantimes.co.jp)Targeted testingIt was in testing that Japan adopted a very different crisis approach to most of the leading western countries. Rather than going for high volume, it deliberately tested under capacity. By mid-May it had tested a mere 0.185% of the country’s population, averaging two tests per 1,000 people, cf. Australia, >40 per 1,000 (Sturmer & Asada). It was highly selective, only those with serious virus symptoms were tested. The rationale for such a low-testing regime was concern for the capacity of widespread testing infrastructure, by limiting testing this would lighten the load on testing centres. Rather than mine-sweep the country with testing, the Japanese pursued a strategy of targeting virus clusters as they were identified to pinpoint the sources of the infection [‘Has Japan found a viable long-term strategy for the pandemic’, (Kazuto Suzuki), The Diplomat, 24-Apr-2020, www.thediplomat.com; Gramenz].
Consequently, Japanese medical experts concede that the official counts may be well short of the reality, which puts a rider on the country’s achievement. Even with a smaller number of cases Japan found itself lacking in IPUs (only five per 100,000 people cf. 35 in the US) , there was also a shortage of PPE as well as face masks which were rationed out only two per household (and derided as “Abe-no masks”). This calls into question the faith that the Japanese placed in the robustness of the nation’s health system [‘Japan’s Halfhearted Coronavirus Measures Are Working Anyway’, (William Sposato), Foreign Policy Magazine, 14-May-2020, www.foreignpolicy.com]⊚.
Self-complying social distancing?Social distancing, a nightmare to try to enforce in people-dense Tokyo, was not a major focus for authorities. This was largely left to the goodwill of the individual, aided by some subtle social shaming – government workers walking through Tokyo nightlife areas with signs asking people to go home (Sposato). In any event the authorities’ measures were only partly effective – Japanese people continue to flock to the cherry blossom spring events in large numbers. Where social distancing was more manageable was in shutting off obvious potential hotspots, closed spaces with poor ventilation (karaoke clubs and pubs), crowded places with many people people in the immediate vicinity and other close, intimate contact settings (Suzuki).
Cherry blossom time: no voluntary social distancing here (Photo: www.bloomberg.com)Tokyo transportTokyo’s mass transit network is a petri dish in-waiting for coronavirus, but it appears that preventive measures (some pre-planned) have lessened the impact on public health. Tokyo business working hours have been staggered and large companies like NEC started to adopt telecommuting and teleworking, as well as a big increase of people riding bikes to work occurring. Consequently, transits at Tokyo’s central station on May 18th was down by 73% on the corresponding day in 2019 [‘Remote possibilities: Can every home in Japan become an office?’, (Alex Martin), The Japan Times, 23-May-2020, www.japantimes.co.jp].
(Image: Getty Images/AFP. P Fong)
Most pundits and observers conclude that Japan, with its ageing population and all its drawbacks and encumbrances, has (so far) warded off the worst of the pandemic. With no “silver bullet” in sight, we are left to speculate whether that they have achieved this outcome by sheer good luck, by good judgement, by the personal habits and cultural traits (especially hygiene) of its citizens, or by a combination of all of the above (McCurry).
Endnote: Low tester, early starterAnother Asian country which has mirrored Japan’s pattern of choosing not to test in high volumes is Taiwan. The Taipei China republic, commencing measures to counter the virus as early as anyone did, had tested only 2,900 people per million of population (Worldometer, as at 20th May), but it’s mortality rate (deaths per million) was only 0.3 (total of seven deaths) compared to Japan which was 6.0 per million.
✪ the largest metropolis prefecture in the world, around 14 million people
⌧ Japan’s health officials had themselves projected a worse-case scenario of up to 400,000 deaths (Gramenz)
✺ to be fair, there are constitutional impediments in Japan that prevent the declaration of a full, European-style lockdown (McCurry)
⊚ a Kyodo news poll indicated that 57.5% of people were unhappy with the government’s handling of the emergency. In so far as Japanese people have given credit to the success, it has gone to medical experts for efficiently managing Japan’s cluster tracing and containment efforts, rather than to Abe who many view with distrust based on its past track record [‘Time to Give Japan Credit for its COVID-19 Response’, (Rob Fahey & Paul Nadeau), Tokyo Review, 18-May-2020, www.tokyoreview.net]
The Coronavirus outbreak has brought out both the good and bad in human nature, but as everyone tries with varying success to cope with the strange and new reality of lockdowns, closures, social distancing and restrictions on movement, it has brought out the downright weird and bizarre as well. In 1929 when Wall Street collapsed, triggering the Great Depression and a devaluing of the money currency, there was a run on the banks as people desperately tried to salvage their evaporating savings. In March when people in the ‘burbs heard the pandemic was not likely to go away any time soon, there was a run on the supermarkets, efficiently stripping the shelves bare (like locusts in a corn field) – of toilet paper! Somehow, the crux of what is needed for civilisation to sustain itself during an enforced hibernation has been reduced to this, apparently now the most precious of household commodities in a lockdown survival strategy. Widely circulated media footage of shoppers coming to blows in supermarket aisles over the providence of a single roll of loo paper and profiteering hoarders trying to flog bog rolls on eBay at an insane $100 a shot, is surely proof of the arrival of a new and dynamic currency (what price the toilet roll futures market?)✥.
(Source. www.mix1023.com.au)
Once the epidemic got in full swing, the demand for face masks, especially in those countries with a culture of wearing protective masks, quickly outstripped supply. Accordingly some people have resorted to ‘improv’, mask substitutes – scarves and bandanas, face shield visors and so on. Sometimes people are a bit creative, eg, converted bras, vacuum bag filters, and sometimes grossly inappropriate (and utterly gross) or bizarrely impractical.
KKK hood shopper, an injudicious choice of replacement for a face mask, San Diego, Ca. (Image: Tiam Tellez (FB))
A comfy 15L plastic bottle-head in lieu of face mask (Source: www.dailystar.co.uk)
Agencies tasked with enforcement all over the world struggle to come to grips with the need to make everyone social distance. India’s efforts at least have resulted in some comical outcomes (light relief perhaps from all the descending gloom). In India’s west coast tourist spots, foreigners found at the beach by local police have been forced to write out apologies 500 times for breaching the stay-at-home rules. Elsewhere, in southern India, in one village the mandated use of umbrellas outside (in any weather) is the prescribed method for enforcing social distancing.
(Photo: Hindustan Times, source: UGC)
Meanwhile, officials in the Swedish city of Lund, confronted with the Herculean task of stopping the multitudes ignoring voluntary social distancing guidelines, have gone for the unorthodox! To discourage people from crowding together in outdoor recreational areas, a frustrated LundsKommun (city council) has resorted to the somewhat “left-field” measure of dumping chicken manure all over the city’s main park.
(Source: www.internewscast.com)
Has any other natural or unnatural phenomenon ever inspired such an array of whacky bizarre headlines (a la “Ripley’s believe-or-not!”) as this minuscule spiky particle pathogen has? In an atmosphere heightened by anxieties over a sense of that which we cannot control, “miracle cures” have saturated social media channels, everything from Llama Antibodies Could Help Scientists Stop the Coronavirus Pandemic? to Does JK Rowling’s breathing technique cure the coronavirus? to Colloidal silver toothpaste will fix your Covid virus. Then there’s the “contributions to the debate” from the White House, a kaleidoscope of quack cures being incredulously recycled by “The Donald” who continues to be in the thrall of non-scientists sprouting convenient opinion to him (“UV light and disinfectant injections killing the virus inside human bodies”, “hydroxychloroquine and bleach“, etc). The Covid-19 pandemic has been somatotropin for conspiracy theorising, with no handbrake applied to how asinine they can get…the 5G network is an ‘accelerator’ of coronavirus; Bill Gates Foundation’s COVID-19 Vaccine is a Satanic Plot; Not a pandemic but a plan-demic; Coronavirus hoax is an Agenda 21 plot to microchip us; etc. ad nauseum⌖. (‘Miracle ‘coronavirus cures’ haven’t changed in 700 years’, (Jennifer Wright), New York Post, 18-Apr-2020, www.nypost.com)◨.
Suspicious-looking 5G mobile towers
PostScript: the coronavirus crisis leads to some surprising scenarios. A report on a news bulletin a couple of weeks ago disclosed the trials of tribulations the super rich have had to endure at this time. Because of social distancing measures, many of society’s wealthy burghers have for safety concerns dispensed with the services of their house maids and auxiliary staff. This has resulted in grievous inconvenience and vexation for the plutocrats as they are now forced to learn for themselves how to use washing machines and other appliances in their palatial homes…ahh, those eternal First World problems – they just never let up.
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✥ when Covid-19 first hit the US,eight of the eleven states in which cannabis is legal, declared ongoing access to the narcotic an essential service for medicinal and recreational users. This prompted, in microcosm, a similar run to that on toilet paper, on marijuana outlets by aficionados of the weed. Consumers flocked to their local dispensers to stock up on essential ‘pot’ for the long, hard days of confinement ahead. This panic-buying of cannabis led some with a vested interest in the industry to talk up the prospects of a medicinal marijuana-led recovery of the US economy once the cloud of coronavirus disperses (‘Aurora Cannabis and Tilray set to detail hoarding of marijuana during COVID-19’, (Max A Cherney), Market Watch, 09-May-2020, www.marketwatch.com)
◨ plucking supposed panaceas out of the ether in time of pandemic has been ever thus…in the Black Plague they tried onions to ward off the disease, in the coronavirus crisis the equivalent recommendation is garlic (same degree of effectiveness)
⌖ the authors of these expressions of coronavirus denial, once thought largely confined to the United States, are spreading to different parts of the world, ironically enough, like a virus in themselves. They are drawn from different groups of society—anti-vaxxers, 5G truthers, sovereign citizens, QAnon believers and other Alt-Right, fringe conspiracy theorists—that have through ”cross-pollination” of their beliefs, converged into “a virulent if not entirely coherent umbrella movement against coronavirus lockdown measures“ (’Why Are Australians Chanting “Arrest Bill Gates” At Protests? This Wild Facebook Group Has The Answers’, (Cameron Wilson), BuzzFeed, 11-May-2020, www.buzzfeednews.com.au)
When a novel virus comes along, such as we are facing now, there is no medical vade mecum, no universal guidebook to follow, no one proven route to safely navigate the crisis. Governments weigh up the choices, then in consultation with medical experts, decide on a strategy and do modelling on how to chart the optimal course through the unpredictable straits of COVID-19. Local factors in each country, the conditions, the capacity to respond, the culture, all shape what direction the fight against the virus takes.
The following focuses on just two of the 212 countries and territories which have reported cases of the novel coronavirus disease. The two countries, Sweden and Vietnam, have very different societies, cultures and political systems. Each has followed its own distinct strategy and have produced results that are polarities apart from each other.
🇸🇪SwedenOne thing you can’t accuse the home of ABBA and Ingmar Bergman of is sheepishly following the flock. While countries like the US and the UK ‘sleepwalked’ for precious weeks at the start of the crisis, Sweden went out on a limb. From the get-go, Sweden identified itself as an outlier, a contrarian country in the coronavirus war. It adopted a particular course and implemented it. Or to put it another way, Sweden opted for a “change very little”, “wait and see” position, which amounts in effect to the pursuit of a “herd (or community) immunity” approach. Put simply it means you intentionally expose as many people as possible in the community to infection and so (the theory goes) the majority become immune to the virus. It’s effectiveness hinges on (quickly) minimising the number of high-risk people overall. For it to work, there needs to be an infection rate of at least 60%. Critics of herd immunity, and there are many in both the medical and non-medical world, describe it, among other things, as a “let it rip” strategy✱.
Getting back to Sweden’s experience, the Social Democrat government under Stefan Lofven, and state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, were at the outset confident of success with a “let it happen ASAP” approach. Sweden stopped organised sporting fixtures and closed university buildings but it eschewed a strategy of mandatory lockdowns (restaurants, bars, cafes and schools for pupils under 16 all stayed open) for a libertarian-like “principle of responsibility”, trusting the Swedish populace to “behave like adults” and do the right thing voluntarily.
The figures tell a different and disconcerting story: Sweden with a population of just 10.33 million has a reported Covid death toll of 3,225 (as at 10-May-2020) – with capital Stockholm overwhelmingly the primary hotspot. As illustrated below, compared to it’s Nordic neighbours Sweden’s mortality figures resonate like a distress beacon in the ocean, and in per capita terms it even outstrips the horrendous, spiralling toll of the US.
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The mortality rate for Sweden has prompted even the Swedish chief medical scientist Dr Tegnell to comment that it is now a “horrifying large number” [‘Sweden’s near “horrifying” death toll of 3,000 from coronavirus with 87 new fatalities, including a child under ten’, (Ross Ibbotson), Daily Mail (UK), 07-May-2020, www.dailymail.co.uk]. The body responsible, the Swedish Public Health Agency has come under mounting pressure (increasingly internal) for the current situation. A group of 22 scientific researchers from Swedish universities and institutes have called on the SPHA for a rethink of the strategy and a more cautious approach [‘Sweden: 22 Scientists Say Coronavirus Strategy Has Failed’, (David Nikel), Forbes, 14-Apr-2020, www.forbes.com].
A consequence of “granny-killer metrics” A leading molecular virologist from Sweden’s Karolinska Insitutet has accused the government of taking unnecessary risks and sacrificing the elderly (half of the total deaths are from aged care homes), as well as placing the health of their carers and hospital workers in jeopardy [‘Sweden urged to reconsider controversial coronavirus advice as infections rise sharply’, (John Varga), Express, 07-May-2020, www.express.co.uk].
A Stockholm bar: elbow distancing only
Defending the hard to defendThe Swedish authorities have tried to defend its strategy—citing dramatic drops in the use of public transport and a survey which the agencies conclude is evidence that people are practicing safe distancing from each other during the crisis (Ibbotson)—unfortunately the visual evidence from photos and videos within Sweden suggests otherwise with crowded restaurants, bars and parks still the norm and few people seeming to be social distancing. So far, the government for the most part is holding the line and appears to be committed to the long haul, although they have now given some ground, banning outdoor gatherings of more than 50 (Nikel)ㅁ.
There are some outside observers who still take a sanguine view of outlier Sweden’s methods of dealing with the crisis. Stanford School of Medicine (US) professor, Michael Levitt, has been critical of other countries with a different approach, the so-called “first mover” countries like Australia, Austria, New Zealand, Denmark, Czech Republic, Israel and Greece, who he says have paid too heavy a price for locking down their communities – resulting in severe damage to their economies, social upheaval, the loss of an academic year for students, and still having not attained herd immunity [‘Granny-killer metrics don’t add up in Australia’s costly coronavirus battle’, (Andrew Probyn), ABC News, 08-May-2020, www.abcnews.com.au]. No doubt the decision-makers in Sweden would find this external support comforting, and of course Sweden could turn around and say to the growing number of doubters that it’s approach is keeping people in jobs, keeping businesses from closing down, and the economy afloat … but at what a human cost! This is the Solomonic trade-off.
(Source: www.irishtimes.com)
Update since originally published: (information updated to 21-May-2020) SWEDEN has overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium to record the highest coronavirus per capita death rate in the world. Sweden has recorded 6.08 deaths per million inhabitants, higher than the UK, USA and Italy (www.express.co.uk/).
☤~ ☤~☤
🇻🇳VietnamWith international media attention on the COVID-19 dilemma focused largely on the US and the Eurocentric world, the efforts of Vietnam in the war against coronavirus has garnered little notice till recently. Many observers would be surprised to discover that the South-East Asian country has had zero recorded deaths from the virus, out of a total of 288 confirmed cases (10-May-2020). Surprising…for a few reasons. First, it seems a bona fide claim, unlike some of it’s S.E. Asian neighbours who claim also to have done well with little to substantiate it. As a general rule, S.E. Asian numbers, even more so African numbers, are often problematic as there has been an inadequate amount of testing carried out to gauge progress accurately✮.
(Photo: AP)
Second, Vietnam shares a (northern) border with China, the country of coronavirus origin, plus in normal times Vietnam is a busy destination with frequent international flights from nearby Taiwan, Hong Kong and China itself, leaving it, one would think, quite susceptible to to the importation of the infection. Third, Vietnam has an estimated 97 million people but for a medical emergency of this magnitude it lacks the allocatable resources and health infrastructure of the more economically dynamic Asian states. It simply can’t afford to engage in the level of mass testing that say South Korea has managed [‘Vietnam shows how you can contain COVID-19 with limited resources’, (Sean Fleming), World Economic Forum, 30-Mar-2020, www.weforum.org].
Why has Vietnam done so well in the war against the “invisible enemy”?Part of the explanation is that Vietnam has approached the crisis very much like a military campaign. In fact war rhetoric has been employed by the government, which constantly speaks of “fighting the enemy”. The country’s response was early and proactive, border closures, rigorous mass quarantines of whole towns for weeks, were implemented up front, not just as a last resort like some places elsewhere [‘How Vietnam is winning its “war” on coronavirus’, (Rodion Ebbighausen), DW, 16-Apr-2020, www.dw.com]. The authorities conducted targeted testing and thorough contact-tracing procedures. To compensate for the country’s limited resources they created low-cost test kits for wide distribution (“70-minute rapid test kits”).
“Rice ATMs” initiative: Made available 24/7 to Vietnamese people during the time of pandemic
(Photo: www.vietnamnet.vn)
An ingrained culture of compliance The key to what Vietnam has achieved is the central government’s ability to secure almost universal integration into the fight against the disease. Communist Vietnam’s authoritarian one-party state structure with a highly organised army and security apparatus makes this task more easily obtainable (whereas in a liberal society where plurality is the norm this would be nigh on impossible). The regime can much more easily mobilise the people to adhere to it’s rules and restrictions…there is a prevailing culture of compliance, and a range of effective mechanisms in the hands of Hanoi to attain that compliance. The government-controlled media and the high numbers of Vietnamese people exposed to social media have facilitated this. Apps have been a standard part of the public information campaign to get the government message out – and the degree of transparency about COVID-19 and the government’s plan to counter-attack it, has raised public confidence and made it more receptive to what Hanoi is saying [‘The Secret to Vietnam’s COVID-19 Response Success’, (Minh Vu & Bich T Tran), The Diplomat, 18-Apr-2020, www.thediplomat.com].
The government has called on a raft of idiosyncratically-Vietnamese cultural devices to creatively drive home it’s theme. ”Viral hand-washing” songs have been popularised among the people and most effectively, the regime have resorted to propaganda art, something with a long tradition in communist Vietnam. Calling on the familiar slogan, “In war, we draw” (again, invoking the war metaphor), the government has fostered a patriotic response in Vietnamese to get 100% behind the war on the virus (#TogetherWeWillWin), resulting in the production and dissemination of visually-powerful and meaningful posters like these two (above and below). COVID-19 has also prompted the release of special stamps to help unify the Vietnamese people [‘“In a war, we draw”: Vietnam’s artists joint fight against Covid-19’, (Chris Humphrey), The Guardian, 09-Apr-2020, www.theguardian.com; Fleming].
Coercion and collaborationAnother side of Vietnam’s use of “soft power” to get everyone thinking as one can be seen at work in the coronavirus emergency. The socialist ethos in Vietnam operates on one level as a “surveillance state“…ordinary Vietnamese are conditioned, not just to obey rules, but to help the authoritarian regime’s realisation of it’s goals by spying on neighbours and reporting back to the authorities the activities of non-conformists or of anyone breaching the public health regulations (Humphrey).
Notwithstanding this further encroachment on civil liberties, the Vietnamese people as a whole, having accepted the seriousness of Hanoi’s fight against coronavirus, are on board, and appear genuinely proud of their country’s success in avoiding thus far any serious outbreak of the epidemic in a country with a healthcare system woefully ill-equipped to deal with harmful effects on it’s large population (Ebbighausen).
The Vietnamese achievement, having been successful so far in keeping a lid on the epidemic, might lead it’s citizens to feel or at least hope that they are out of the woods. But even if they are in the clearing now, there’s another forest looming largely in the shape of the economy, which of course is another matter entirely. Over 85% of Vietnam’s enterprises have been adversely effected by the crisis. Tourism, which Vietnam like so many is highly dependent on, could be looking at a loss of $US3 to $US4 Bn in 2020, and so on down the line of the country’s businesses. At the moment business leaders in Vietnam are preoccupied with exploring new economic opportunity that may arise for the country post-crisis [‘Vietnam is set to lose billions due to coronavirus, and it’s already feeling the impact of the deadly outbreak’, (Kate Taylor), Business Insider Australia, 25-Feb-2020, www.businessinsider.com.au].
EndNote: Peering inside that can of worms
The UK Johnson government initially toyed with the idea of going the herd immunity route, before being awakened to it’s senses by a vociferous chorus of British medical experts recounting the dire ramifications of such a gamble.After chief epidemiologist Prof Neil Ferguson did some remodelling, the UK government (belatedly) switched to a suppression approach. The Netherlands in March announced it would follow Sweden’s strategy but the Dutch prime minister then walked back the herd immunity line, opting instead for what has been described as “lockdown light” [‘Caught Between Herd Immunity And National Lockdown, The Netherlands Hard Hit Bt Covid-19 (Update)’, (Joshua Cohen), Forbes, 27-Mar-2020, www.forbes.com]
𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟
✱ the medical critics would be quick to point out that, if herd immunity can’t be accomplished by vaccination (and there is no vaccine for coronavirus yet, not even on the horizon), then it is an extremely risky business to dabble in. It puts the old and vulnerable into the position of sacrificial pawns for the greater good; it can also expose a country’s health-care system to intolerable demands on its resources (not to neglect the heightened personal danger for nursing staff and medics); a third drawback with the approach is that mortality from coronavirus is a reality for the under 70s and under 60s as well
ㅁ in an implicit admission of a failure of it’s voluntary compliance arrangements, Sweden announced recently that it would close bars and restaurants which flaunted the social distancing guidelines [‘Sweden is shutting down bars and restaurants where people defied social distancing guidelines’, (Kelly McLaughlin), Business Insider, 28-Apr-2020, www.businessinsider.com]
✮ like Myanmar for instance which admits to only six deaths from the virus. A population of 55 million, according to a World Bank estimate it has only 249 ventilators in the whole country. The Myanmar regime’s lack of transparency, the sheer logistics of trying to safely social distances and the attribution of it’s very low fatality level to the country’s diet and lifestyle, cast more than reasonable doubts on the true extent of the epidemic in the republic [‘Zara’s Billionaire Owner Was Praised For Helping in the Coronavirus Crisis. Workers In Myanmar Paid the Price’, (Nishita Jha), BuzzFeed News, 07-May-2020, www.buzzfeed.com]
The majority of countries where coronavirus infection rates have experienced an upward curve have resorted to locking down the community to varying degrees. In the USA, more than elsewhere, this has tested the faith of those of a libertarian disposition. In recent weeks we have seen the mega-massive jolt to the economy and enforced closures of businesses resulting in millions of workers finding themselves in the dole queues. Many libertarians, albeit with reluctance, accept the inevitability of the present state intervention as the only means available of providing the fiscal stimulus to keep people and businesses afloat.
Its when it comes to the matter of mandatory quarantine as a counter-virus measure, then the issue becomes more thorny for libertarians. The classic libertarian position would see voluntary self-isolation as the ideal solution in an ideal (ie, libertarian) world… compulsory quarantine is the last resort to them. Some of a libertarian mind would reject it outright – on ideological grounds, while also claiming it to be an ineffective measure as a social curative. Others accept it as a legitimate move given the uniqueness of the Covid-19 crisis situation, but with a very clear rider that the measures taken need to be temporary only. As shown below, this aspect of libertarianism is a “hot-button” issue currently for many in the US with skin in the game [‘What libertarians would do in response to coronavirus’, (Bonnie Kristian), The Week, 13-Mar-2020, www.theweek.com].
Gadsden flag: associated with libertarianism & the American Tea Party
Social distancing as an imposed, mandated practice during the pandemic, fails the libertarian test. The pure libertarian much prefers to see voluntary compliance by the individual, in the expectation (or hope) that most people will ultimately do the right thing [‘Libertarianism and the Coronavirus Pandemic’, (Andy Craig), Cato Institute, 25-Mar-2020, www.cato.com]. Accordingly, a small minority of US states (five?) have not enforced the distancing and stay-at-home edicts, their leaders pledging to hold fast to the “sacred liberties” of their citizenries. But most everywhere else the pandemic has hit, certainly in urban areas, the civil authorities have gone for some form of lockdown.
Escape from Lockdown 13For the average “Joe and Joanna Citizen” in Main Street, Anywheresville, being locked down inside four walls indefinitely is one of the hardest things to cop. For most people “cabin fever” will inevitably set in…confined at home, unable to congregate and socialise in cafes, eateries and bars with friends and colleagues or do road trips. In First World societies such as the US, Western Europe or the Commonwealth of Nations, freedom of movement is such an inherently natural expectation, once deprived, resistance to these rigid controls can reach a tipping point which easily spills over into increasingly bold attempts to subvert or defy the government’s edicts. Recently we have witnessed this perhaps at its apogee in the Midwest and Southern states of the US. Protest groups, the new scofflaws of Trumpian America, have mushroomed in particular in “rust-belt” states such as Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia✷.
Pro–Trump demonstrators trying to intimidate Democrat Gov. Whitmer (photo: AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
As the lockdowns extend from weeks into months bunches of pro-Republican conservatives∎ have more and more blatantly violated the stay-at-home orders of mostly Democratic governors (in contrast serving GOP governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, continue to play the libertarian card, steadfastly refusing to implement a stay-at-home order regardless of virus outbreaks within the state). For the protesters, egged on by the schizophrenic tweets❂ of President Trump, a call to “Liberate Michigan” (Virginia, etc) and amplified by the Fox press, one prime target of their vitriol has been Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer who has mandated a strict ”stay home, stay safe” executive order to counteract the virus. This month organised gatherings of protesters have assembled outside the Capitol building and the governor’s home, flaunting the restrictions and demonstrating their displeasure at Whitmer’s policies. Some of the dissenters have been armed with AR-15s and AK-47s, very few wearing face masks but brandishing Confederate and Gadsden flags and even Nazi emblems (loosely equating the state “governor/tyrant” with Nazis). Some protesters have held up signs such as “The cure is worse than the virus” (which, if you have watched the president’s coronavirus press briefings ‘sideshow’, has a faintly familiar ring to it).
(Photo: REUTERS/Alyson McClaran)
This orchestrated “Operation Gridlock”, in Michigan and elsewhere, is organised by a conservative patriot/militia group with connexions to Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos. One of its objectives (successful) was to grind city centre traffic down to a standstill, including the blocking of ambulances conveying patients. Protesters in various states have also tried to intimidate health workers engaged in the frontline of the fight against the pandemic. So far Whitmer has remained resolute in maintaining a strict state lockdown, pointing to the gravity of the state’s health predicament (Michigan has had 37,778 confirmed cases and 3,315 deaths due to coronavirus, as at 27-April-2020) [‘Conservative group linked to DeVos family organises protest of coronavirus restrictions in Michigan’, (Igor Derbyshire), Salon, 16-Apr-2020, www.salon.com; ‘Trump Supporters Are Staging Armed Protests to Stick it to Coronavirus’, (Caleb Ecarma), Vanity Fair, 16-Apr-2020, www.vanityfair.com].
🔻 Gov. Whitmer (Photo: U.S. News & World)
What’s motivating the scofflaw behaviour?Researchers at the University of Maryland have concluded that “quarantine fatigue” has set in. Increasing numbers of fed-up or plain bored Americans are venturing outside of “the box” in defiance of state stay-at-home orders. Many of these are exercising, or as the weather gets warmer, going to the beach (most of the escapees are doing these things without bothering to practice safe distancing)⌖ [‘Quarantine fatigue is setting in: Smartphone data shows thousands are fed up after weeks under lockdown’, (Ralph R Ortega), Daily Mail, 27-Apr-2020, www.dailymail.com].
The inalienable right to be ‘selective’ The gatherings of those discontented with the status quo in America have exercised their right to protest against their state’s political leaders. Interestingly, their decision to protest on this occasion, as has been noted, does not signify their endorsement of the right to protest per se – a perfectly admirable and consistent libertarian trait. Previously when sectors of the Left in America took to protesting issues such as climate change and police brutality, these Right-wing elements were vigorously supporting the conservative politicians’ endeavours to bring in legislation to outlaw protests [’The hypocrisy of the anti-lockdown protests’, (Anthony L Fisher), Business Insider Australia, 22-Apr-2020, www.businessinsider.com.au].
🔺The ‘tyranny’ avengers
(Photo: Nikolaus Kama/AFP via Getty Images)
These insurrectionists and those who facilitate and encourage them, argue that they are motivated, nay compelled, by the (temporary) loss of their basic liberties… evoking the First Amendment and the Founding Fathers, they portray Whitmer and other governors as tyrants, preventing their right to come and go as they wish, to work and leisure untrammelled. Thus, it comes back to that same nub at the core of libertarian values, the right to do as one pleases — (with the rider)…so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. This added qualifier is fundamental to the credo of libertarian theory.
“Inviolable freedom”…so long as it doesn’t harm harm anyone elseThe casualty toll of the Covid-19 health crisis in the US—the worse in the world by far—is rapidly overtaking that of the total of American lives lost in the ten-years of the Vietnam War. Disproportionally, the pandemic everywhere is killing the older and the most vulnerable, people with co-morbidities. Coronavirus, the epidemiologists have shown us, is transmitted from a human host to a human recipient, the more people interacting with each other, the more likelihood of transmission, the greater the incidence of morbidity and mortality from the virus, simple as that!
An unavoidable trade-offThe temporary suspension of liberties is the price to pay to preserve lives. Yes, the measures are inconveniences and hardships on individuals, but they’ve been imposed on the population for a health safety reason – the greater good of the community and the health of all. Yes, the libertarians have some grounds to quibble, a few of the measures taken have been over-the-top and seem disproportionate. Even Gov. Whitmer, a rising Democrat star on the national political scene, has at times pulled the wrong rein (eg, barring people from purchasing garden equipment and baby restrainers for cars seems to be over-zealous) [‘Quarantine Protesters Are No Heroes of Civil Disobedience’, (Jonah Goldberg), National Review, 22-Apr-2020, www.nationalreview.com].
🔺 Colorado protestersvisualising a totalitarian pivot by their governor?(Photo: AP)
FN: Heat in the kitchenDemocrat governors in “swing states” like Gov. Whitmer—caught in a pincer of intimidatory Scofflaw defiance, demands from business to re-open and constant sniping from a divisive chief executive at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave—are not the only ones feeling the mounting pressure of the moment. Florida’s GOP governor, Ron DeSantis, has copped plenty of flak himself. He was very late in issuing stay-at-home orders, having rejected calls to close Florida’s crowded beaches, citing the libertarian manta of free choice. When the lockdown finally came, church services got a “go free” card from the restrictions. Consequently, the state’s coronavirus ‘scorecard’ is now 32,138 confirmed cases and 1,088 deaths (27-April-2020). The current virus “hot spots” in Florida don’t augur well for a lifting of it’s restrictions any time soon. On top of this gloomy prognosis, Florida, being a ‘bellwether’ state, Trump will be expecting DeSantis to deliver it to the Republicans in the November elections [‘Anti-quarantine protests, Trump pressure on governors on political tightrope over coronavirus’, (Deidre Shesgreen & Maureen Groppe), USA Today, 23-Apr-2020, www.amp.usatoday.com].
⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿
✷ the protests have by no means been confined to these states – such happenings have been increasingly the done thing from Pennsylvania to Nebraska to California. Nor have lockdown protests been confined to America, ‘Berlin police anti-lockdown protestors accusing Angela Merkel of “banning life”’, SBS News, 25-Apr-2020, www.sbsnews.com.au∎ the same kind of pro-Trump people that Hillary Clinton (unwisely) labelled a “basket of deplorables” in the 2016 presidential campaign❂ ”schizophrenic” because at the same time the president at his daily podium is officially asking Americans to adhere to the prescribed Covid-19 safety measures⌖ there’s obviously other underlying factors in the tendency towards civil disobedience in Midwestern states and perhaps more so in the South – greater religiosity (and associated with that) scepticism towards scientific evidence and government experts, and even the “Siamese twins” attachment of many Americans to car culture (especially in suburbia and rural regions), ‘The American South has resisted social distancing measures — and we’re all going to pay the price’, Raw Story, 03-Apr-2020, www.rawstory.com
The spectacle of sport—either viewed from the bleachers, the corporate box, or beamed into punters’ lounge rooms—is in a COVID-induced drought just about everywhere in the world. The sports’ governing bodies find themselves in the “Twilight Zone”, sustaining a massive hit to their revenue sources and at the same time desperately trying to keep their sport relevant to the aficionados. How well they’ve managed to keep their heads above water varies from sport to sport and from country to country.
All the world’s domestic cricket leagues are in indefinite abeyance and all upcoming test fixtures have had the red-ink drawn through them. National bodies like the ACB (Cricket Australia), suddenly with time on their hands, have more carefully examined their finances and discovered worrying “bottom-lines”. Many are anxiously pondering how they are going to connect all the dots moving forward (as they say). Meanwhile, international cricket’s online bible, ESPN Cricinfo, has taken to filling its content with nostalgia trips – substituting the now non-existent live scores with scoresheets of some of the more memorable past world cups.
Boxing has also delved back into the sport’s history, not to re-project grainy footage of epic bouts from the pugilistic past onto screens, but to stage simulations of the fights that could never be …pitting the heavyweight greats of different eras against each other in contests to ‘decide’ who is boxing’s GOAT, leaving fans to agree or disagree with the computerised outcome. The overriding objective, to keep the fans’ appetites whetted – until the actual thing becomes a reality again. Motorsport, with the Formula One series a non-starter, has followed boxing into simulation substitution, staging its first “Virtual Grand Prix”, E-racing proving a real hit for for the “petrol-head” fandom [‘Coronavirus: The sports turning to gaming during lockdown’, (Joe Tidy), BBC News, 26-Mar-2020, www.bbc.com/]. In contrast to boxing, the theatricality of professional wrestling in the US gets the go-ahead…in Florida at least that’s the case, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has deemed WWE wrestling an “essential service” to Floridians and has has given the ‘sport’ his gubernatorial blessing✱ [‘Pro wrestling company WWE is an essential business during the coronavirus pandemic, Florida Gov. DeSantis says’, (Yelena Dzhanova), CNBC, 14-Apr-2020, www.cnbc.com].
(Image: virtuair.com)
The rugby codes have pulled down the shutters everywhere the game with the odd-shaped football is played. In Australia the 15-a-side game, rugby, has had its ongoing revenue source cut off, like everywhere else, but the difference is the ARU (Rugby Australia) was already in a parlous financial situation…before the virus hit. Now the code in Australia is undergoing an existential crisis, its own trial-by-fire. For the bedevilled ARU, massive player pay-cuts plus a wholesale bail-out from the IRB is the most likely end-game. The rugby league variant of football is in a state of flux as well. With the NRL, the sport’s national body, discovering that, despite its annal multi-million dollar TV and Foxtel revenue streams, it has found its cash reserves are sorely depleted. The NRL at least has a plan for restarting games, which it has styled the “Apollo Mission”. Mustering up the unilateral front of a Donald Trump, it announced early in April that it’s target date to resume playing was 28th May. Unfortunately, it didn’t consult with the relevant government authorities before taking this solo step. Given that, a) the state borders remain closed in Australia, and b) rugby league is a heavy body contact sport, the NRL’s 28th May quest may just turn out to be “mission impossible”. South of the Murray River, the AFL, custodian of the football code known colloquially as “Aussie Rules”, having formed a coronavirus ‘cabinet’ to chart the way forward is thinking aloud about different options for a possible winter restart (another “watch this space” scenario) [‘Mid-winter return likely for AFL restart after coronavirus shutdown’, (Mark Duffield), The West Australian, 17-Apr-2020, www.thewest.com.au].
(Source: ESPN.com)
Interestingly, about the only sport in Australia at the elite level given the green-light to continue is horse-racing (and it’s offshoot harness racing) – sans on-course spectators❂. This is perhaps surprising considering that horse-racing seems to fail the social distancing test (involving as it customarily does a conga-line of 16 jockeys in pretty close proximity). But the so-called “Sport of Kings”, if no longer seeped in the landed aristocracy, is intimately connected with the corporate “Mr Bigs” of society. Considering this and the kind of very serious money thoroughbred racing attracts, that it’s managed to secure a special exemption shouldn’t really surprise. Money talks, as the cliche goes [‘Why racing is so keen to avoid shutting its doors’, (Damien Ractliffe), Sydney Morning Herald, 25-Mar-2020, www.smh.com.au].
The sports calendar’s prospects for the rest of 2020 are looking at the moment pretty much a blank slate. Most of the sporting tournaments around the globe once the COVID-19 crisis, were catapulted into a state of suspended animation… some not officially abandoned at this stage but just kind of hovering in the ether, nothing really happening. After much hand-wringing Japan and the IOC finally swallowed a bitter dose of reality and pulled the plug, postponing the Tokyo Olympics for 12 months (although it’s still going to be called the 2020 Olympics whatever year it’s done). This year’s Wimbledon has been cancelled, so the strawberries and cream set will need to find another diversion for June-July. US basketball and baseball were among the first franchises to be halted. The US Masters has been canned for the year and the remaining golf majors have been postponed to a (fingers-crossed) TBA date. The IPL was postponed indefinitely but the scale and magnitude of India’s struggle against the coronavirus doesn’t bode well for its 2020 chances. The cricket T20 World Cup for later this year, a case of wait and hope.
🔺 In a game in Brazil in March before pro-football was suspended, the Gremio team took the field wearing masks to protest the dangers players were exposed to during the pandemic
What of the world game, football, what’s it’s current state of play? Well, just as gloomy in the main, all of the world’s major leagues have been suspended. The showcase EPL is optimistically hoping to resume in summer, none of the clubs more so than Liverpool FC, which having dominated the season up to the disruption, sit tantalisingly close but still short of claiming the league title. But world soccer is not entirely without ‘premier’ league football in the time of coronavirus. A handful of maverick countries have ploughed on regardless, or should I say, in disregard (or even denial) of the virus crisis. Belarus, with it’s “gung-ho” president, continues to play football⊰ – in stadiums with supporters in attendance, shoulder-to-shoulder, despite having recorded nearly 4,800 corona cases to date. The Vysshaya Liga, virtually unknown outside Belarus prior to the crisis, has by default, been elevated implausibly to the centre of the football universe. Fans from other soccer-starved countries like England have adopted Belarusian teams and now keenly follow the fortunes of these proxy clubs from afar. Both Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, the governments of which have buried their heads in the sand over the COVID-19 pandemic, have followed Belarus’s lead in keeping their peoples sated with bread and association football [‘In Belarus, unlike most places, soccer plays on despite virus’, (Yuliya Talmazan), NBC News, 20-Apr-2020, www.nbcnews.com].
🔺 Taiwanese baseball: synthetic “seat-fillers”, creating the illusion of making the stadiums look less empty during games (Photo: Cronkite News)
Some mass-supported sports played a few games behind closed gates before calling a halt to the season due to the pandemic. Many of the players commented on the strangeness and the flatness, the lack of atmosphere in the games. Taiwan, one country which has managed an effective response to coronavirus, has come up with a novel and innovative way of countering this problem. The country’s new baseball season opened a week ago with a ban on spectator attendance…in a bizarre move the organisers have installed dummies and cardboard cut-outs of fans in the bleachers, a contrivance intended, I guess, to make the players out on the diamond feel like they’re not all alone [‘Dummies replace fans at baseball in Taiwan’, Reuters, 14-Apr-2020, www.mobile.reuters.com].
Postscript: Odd man out in the Americas
All the football-obsessed countries of Latin America have suspended their 2020 competitions due to the Covid-19 crisis except one, Nicaragua. The refusal of the Central American state’s president, Daniel Ortega, to halt Liga Primera soccer games (and other sporting events) is in keeping with his general, ‘ostrich’ stance of not taking any preventive measures against the pandemic✧ [‘Nicaragua Not Backing Down Despite Criticism Over Lax Measures During Pandemic’, (Carrie Kahn), NPR, 18-Apr-2020, www.npr.org] .
⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳
✱ which no doubt pleased President Trump, a longtime friend of WWE head ‘honcho’ Vince McMahon
❂ horse-racing has been suspended in New Zealand, the UK, Ireland and South Africa among others, but still receives the thumbs-up in horseracing-crazy Hong Kong and California
⊰ and ice hockey, another favourite game of the president
✧ the only other country that didn’t close down it’s domestic football competition, the tiny African nation of Burundi, finally called a temporary halt to matches earlier in April
I remember where I first heard about the Weatherman, or as they later came to be called, the Weather Underground (Organisation). Some time during the 1970s I was thumbing through the pages of the 1973-74 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia❈ and came across an entry on this oddly named group subsumed under the section on “Ideas and Beliefs”…the meteorological sounding nametriggered my curiosity. As the Pears editornoted of the name: a “rather incongruous name for the most radical and volatile of the many groups making up the so-called ‘underground’inthe United States of America“⊡.
What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that“the Weathermenappear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.
(Source: Yale University)
The origins of the Weather Underground lie in the tumultuous politics of Sixties America—the emergence of the “New Left” and the “Counterculture”, the struggle for civil rights and the growing anti-war movement of those disaffected by the growing catastrophe of Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had assumed the mantle of leadership of the “youth rebellion” in America and of the anti-war movement. The Weathermen, dissatisfied with the SDS’s limited, reformist approach to curing the ills of modern capitalist society (with its emphasis on disruption and non-violent student demonstrations), split off from the SDS, who they labelled “movement creeps”, in 1969. After the Chicago “Days of Rage” riot, the Weathermen determined on a new, direct and revolutionary approach to changing a society that they avowed hatred for.
Bombed interior of Capitol (Wash DC) (Photo: Washington Post) 🔻
1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics.
1971, the assault on the “Amerikan war machine” continues
The following year brought no let-up by the Weather arsonists and incendiaries. The International Association of Chiefs of Police declared 1971 the worst year for bombings in US history. Despite causing such upheaval, the Weathermen failed abjectly to achieve any of their avowed aims [Daniels, Stuart. “The Weathermen.”Government and Opposition, vol. 9, no. 4, 1974, pp.430-459. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/44482282. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020].
A giant fail
The Weather faction (WUO) failed for a multiplicity of reasons fundamentally arising out of a muddled understanding of how to effectively use political discontent to build a mass movement. The Weathermen aspired to be the revolutionary vanguard to lead the revolution that overthrew US imperialism and capitalist society. Yet it laid none of the groundwork necessary to achieve it! WUO established no popular support base for its leadership and it stayed numerically small, a “Prairie Fire” that failed to ignite!₪
Finally, in 1974, the folly of this omission was recognised within Weather and some members tried to re-orient the organisation to a policy focused on wooing the American working class. The hardliners in WUO however resisted and predictably clung to the old guerrilla war tactics, with the result of a splintering and further weakening of Weather [‘How the Weather Underground Failed at Revolution and Still Changed the World’, (Arthur M Eckstein), Time, (02-Nov-2016), http://time.com].
Rather than the Weathermen’s actions and tactics leading to a crystallisation of the (new) left in America as a cohesive force, its recourse to the nihilism of violence, the pattern of random bombings, alienated it from other sections of the far left such as SDS (Daniels). The greatest damage of the group’s bombings in fact was a self-inflicted one, when three of the Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970⊕.
🔺 Scene of the WUO terrorists’ backfiring bomb (Source: Bettmann/GettyImages)
The middle-class dilemma
The Weathermen were essentially middle-class kids who took inspiration from grass-roots radicalsand authentic working class militants like the Black Panthers. Therefore, they knew that to be taken seriously they needed to lose the bourgeois tag, to ‘declass’ themselves (to use Michael Miles’ term). Hodgdon has suggested that they were motivated partly by the “guilt arising from members’ acute consciousness of their own white privilege” [Hodgdon, Tim. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 144–146. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/41887583. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020]. The outcome was a resort to high focus violence by WUO which it equated with the demonstration of revolutionary commitment. Ultimately, violence became a habitual self-indulgence for the Weathermen. Fascinated with the idea of terrorism per se, their actions became more anarchic and nihilistic and only served to further isolate them from Middle America (Daniels).
Weather logo 🔺
A junket of romance and fantasy
Studentsof the WUO phenomena have noted how remarkably detached the group was from the realities of contemporary USA. Exhibiting a romantic view of Third World Liberation Movements, importing the urban-guerrilla tactics of the Tupamoros of Uruguay, of whom the Weathermen were only ever pale imitations. For ideological underpinnings, the Weathermen cherrypicked from Marxist political theory (Mao, Guevara, Marighella, Debray, etc) to forge a blueprint for extreme militant action. The often immature and at times infantile Weather members revelled in their status as deviants in society…and in their notoriety as politicised “bad-boy rock stars” of crime. Clearly, more than a few of the members gained a huge thrill from being publicly portrayed as fugitives, enemies of the state [‘”Prairie Fire” Memories’, (Jonah Raskin), Tablet, 18-Jul-2019, www.tabletmag.com].
🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comicis based on Weatherman Mark Rudd
Their ready resort to acts of violence was one manifestation of this, as was their indulgence in drug-taking (wholeheartedly embracing LSD and ‘grass’) and “free love” as integral to what they saw as liberating themselves from the strictures of a rigid and corrupt society (Daniels).
PostScript:WeatherUnderground, fade to black
Having failed to make the slightest dint on the fortress of the American political and economic elite, the Weathermen reduced their bombing acts after 1971 and continued to scale back through the rest of the seventies. The Weather Underground lingered on for several years before eventually petering out. This however did not stop the FBI from pursuing the home-grown terrorists long after they had ceased to be active. As Eckstein noted, the FBI’s responses to the Weather phenomena had caused the Bureau embarrassment. The FBI, the nation’s chief law enforcement organisation, continued to get them wrong…initially they underestimated Weather’s seriousness as a hostile element, then they overestimated its effectiveness. The FBI persisted with a misreading of their strength, thinking there were around 1,000 Weathermen guerrillas at large in the US, overstating the reality by a factor of ten. The FBI also illegally botched the evidence against the group so none of the Weathermen could be prosecuted for conspiring to bomb government buildings [‘The Americans who declared war on their country’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, (21-Sep-2003), www.theguardian.com ; Eckstein, Time; ‘Bad Moon Rising’, AM Eckstein, www.yalebooks.yale.edu].
❈ an annual British publication (first published 1897, now discontinued), a one-volume compendium of general and specialised knowledge in a select number of different fields
⊡ the original name, ‘Weatherman’, was taken from the lyric of a 1960s Bob Dylan song
✥ Bernadine Dohrn – who with Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones,Trevor Robbins, Kathy Boudin, Karen Ashley, Howie Machtinger and John Jacobs, founded the Weathermen. Jonah Raskin points out that a significant number of the members were, like him, Jewish (Raskin). Dohrn also headed up a Women’s Brigade within WUO
✪ a ‘symbolic’ war as Todd Gitlin described it
₪ Prairie Firewas the name of WUO’s 1976 published political statement, and a metaphor that the organisation was fond of using (eg, “a single spark can start a prairie fire”)
⊕ the three WUO bomb assemblers were the only victims of Weathermen bomb explosions as the group always forewarned the target locations so that humans could be evacuated from the spot in time
❝Such days as when the Royal Mail was run by Cobb & Co❞ ~ Henry Lawson
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Cobb and Co is a name that still has much currency within Australian and New Zealand society. In New South Wales in the rural tourist industry there is the “Cobb & Co Heritage Trail” which invites travellers to take the “historical self-drive” following the outback route from Bathurst to Bourke that the celebrated erstwhile coach service once trekked. Queensland holds a Cobb & Co festival each year to honour the historic Surat to Yuleba route. There are touring bus and coach businesses operating that have also appropriated the name…in addition there are “Cobb & Co hotels” and “Cobb and Co bottle shops” scattered around regional areas of the eastern states※.
⇓ Cobb & Co Heritage Trail
All of this is testimony to the fame of the original Cobb & Company which was once a household transport name, etching for itself a place in the folklore of Australia’s outback regions. The company’s story begins in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s. In 1853 the American Adams & Co coach firm despatched Freeman Cobb and three American colleagues⚀ to Melbourne with the objective of establishing a local operation which would capitalise on the hordes of fortune seekers flocking to the Victorian gold rushes. As things transpired, Cobb ended up starting his own coach service together with the other Americans🔰, thus was born Cobb & Co.
Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)
The first trip (January 1854) of Cobb & Co carrying passengers, goods and equipment went from Collins Street (Melbourne city) to the Forest Creek goldfields (now Castlemaine) and to Bendigo✫. Cobb & Co was a winner pretty much from the outset…by 1856 the company was worth £16,000 (in 2011 values around $2.1 million). Freeman Cobb however didn’t stick around to see the full flowering of it’s success, after three years he sold out of his eponymous company, moving on to other (less successful) ventures. Cobb & Co changed hands a couple of times, and then in 1861 it was purchased by a consortium of nine US and Canadian businessmen for £23,000 ($3.4m in 2011) [‘Cobb & Co: historical transport’, (Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].
The driving force of the firm under the consortium was another American immigrant, James Rutherford. Rutherford began by organising all of the company’s lines (the different routes), making them more profitable concerns. Under his leadership Cobb & Co expanded into NSW and Queensland (the NSW operations were based at Bathurst). At the company’s peak in the 1870s, it’s coaches were covering a distance of nearly 45,000km a week with routes stretching from the very top of Queensland (the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cooktown) down to southern Victoria [ibid.; ‘In the Days of Cobb & Co’, Sydney Mail, 20-Apr-1921, www.trove.nla.gov.au]. As one one chronicler of the iconic transport company’s story observed, Cobb & Co was many things combined – “the Qantas, the Australia Post, the TNT and the Holden of its day” [Sam Everingham, Wild Ride, The Rise and Fall of Cobb and Co, (2007)].
James Rutherford⇓
(Photo source: State Library of Queensland)
What accounted for Cobb & Co’s spectacular success in the coach transportation business?
The decisive factors were manifold but basically Cobb & Co beat it’s competitors in several logistical areas. It’s coaches were faster and more efficient…while the rivals used heavy, rigid English coaches for their runs, Cobb imported American Concord coaches (made in New Hampshire and used in the American West) which were rounded and lightweight and had supple coach bodies – far more suited to the rugged Australian landscape than the cumbersome English coaches. Consequently Cobb & Co’s coaches gave a smoother, faster ride [Riley, loc.cit.] (the Concords, though superior, apparently didn’t always deliver that smooth a ride as they were known colloquially as the “red bone-shakers”).
A replica C & C Concord coach on display at Timbertown, NSW ⇓
The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].
A master stroke by Cobb was to establish a series of changing stations every 16-32km along the routes. This gave Cobb & Co journeys the big advantage of always having fresh horses, enabling the drivers to maintain high speeds over long distances.
Cobb & Co coachmen – risky adventures, pitfalls and hazards of the job
The drivers themselves employed by the company were possessed of extraordinary skills in managing their horses and vehicles. They had to be to negotiate all the difficulties and obstacles in their paths and still keep on schedule…atrocious roads made worse by inclement weather, flooding of creeks and rivers, and unpredictable encounters with dangerous bushrangers◘, were all recurring events that challenged the mettle of the coach drivers. The dangers aside, experiencing the thrills and (near) spills and the full-on ‘wildness’ of a Cobb & Co journey through “the bush”, must have been an exhilarating experience for colonial travellers in the day.
Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019].
Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine ⇓
(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)
Similarly, Cobb & Co’s grooms played an integral role in the highly organised operation…each groom was personally responsible for eight to ten horses and for their gear. The clockwork operation saw the drivers sound a bugle when they were one mile from the next staging post, this alerted the grooms to have the fresh team of horses primed and ready the minute the coach arrived. The pay-off for such a high level of efficiency, superior speed and dependability was that Cobb & Co scored lucrative mail contracts from the colonial governments [ibid.].
Cobb diversifies from its passenger and goods transport base
General manager Rutherford was the catalyst for Cobb & Co’s diversification into new businesses. Initially this payed dividends with its first move, appropriately enough, into coach and buggy building at Bathurst, NSW. Just four years into this activity Cobb & Co could boast that it was the largest coach-maker in Australia [ibid.].
Rutherford also acquired pastoral properties for the company, another profitably step for Cobb & Co. By 1877 they had nine sheep and cattle stations across NSW and Queensland covering an area of 11,000 square kilometres and turning a net profit of £77,500 (equivalent to $11.3M in 2011)…this was at a time that the company’s revenue from coaching – the principal business – was yielding only £11,500 ($1.7M) a year by comparison [ibid.].
By the end of the 1870s Cobb & Co had been in business for 25 years and had already established itself in the eastern mainland states as something of an institution in the “wide, brown land”. It had undergone diversification and experienced growth, but as I will show in Part II, the remarkable good fortunes of Cobb & Co was about to take a decided turn for the worse.
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PostScript: Exporting the Cobb & Co model
Unsurprisingly, the spectacular trajectory of Cobb & Co’s rise in fortune and fame drew imitators elsewhere. A number of coaching services, some using the same name (although totally unrelated to the original eastern Australian company), sprang up independently in South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Africa. This last concern was started up by Freeman Cobb himself in 1871, hoping to cash in on the discoveries of diamonds and gold in the Kimberley and the Transvaal (unfortunately Cobb couldn’t reproduce his Australian success, dying in South Africa still in his 40s) [K. A. Austin, ‘Cobb, Freeman (1830–1878)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cobb-freeman-3237/text4883, published first in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 29 May 2019].
‘Kiwi’ Cobb & Co
The New Zealand version was begun by Charles Cole, who’d previously ran Cobb & Co’s Smyth’s Creek to Ballarat line in Australia❎. As in Victoria and NSW the impetus for the initiative in NZ was the gold rush in Otago (1861). Cole’s Otago coach proprietorship was in partnership with the Hoyts brothers (operating as Cole, Hoyt & Co., proprietors of Cobb & Co. Telegraph Line of Coaches)…later the service was extended to Christchurch and Canterbury. The legendary Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine worked at one time for the New Zealand outfit, driving the Dunedin to Palmerston and Oamaru routes [Austin, ‘Ned Devine’, loc.cit.; ‘Cobb & Co (New Zealand)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
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※ in fact there are all manner of commercial enterprises in Australasia using the “Cobb & Co” handle as a trading name – restaurants, bars, B ‘n Bs, screen printers, clockmakers, kitchen manufacturers, etc.
⚀ the others were James Swanson, Anthony Blake and John Murray Peck (who later became a successful stock and station agent in Melbourne and a vice-president of the Essendon Australian Football Club)
🔰 the average age of the four American founders was just 22 – although they did have combined experience working for Adams, Wells Fargo and other coach companies in the US
✫ Cobb charged £5 per passenger for the roughly 110 ml journey [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.]
◘ one of the best known bushranging incidents involving Cobb & Co was the 1863 holdup at Eugowra (in the NSW central west)…notorious bushranging gang led by Frank Gardiner and Ben Hall robbed a Ford & Co coach (the firm was takes over by Cobb & Co one week later) of £14,000 in gold and banknotes from the goldfields [‘Details of the Robbery’, (Welcome to Eugowra in the heart of bushranger country), www.eugowra.aus.net]
❎ Colebrought one of the custom built Concord coaches across the Tasman with him to Otago
The Brits are nothing if not traditionalists. Take one of the primest examples of their fidelity to tradition – royalty! Putting aside the interregnum of the Cromwellian Commonwealth (1649-1660) as an aberration, the people of GB have faithfully stuck with the monarchy as the preferred form of rule for the long haul. Kings or queens have ruled Britain, or at least England, since the Anglo-Saxon King Egbert unified various regions of England and Wales around 830 to be recognised with the title Bretwalda (“ruler of the British/Anglo-Saxons”) [‘Kings and Queens of England & Britain’, (Ben Johnson), Historic UK, www.historic-uk.com].
Despite the small island in the North-eastern Atlantic not having been the most ‘united’ of kingdoms of late (witness Brexit, Scottish secessionist moves, etc), the British monarchy still possesses a very healthy pulse indeed. There remains a British queen, though now a nonegenerian, one with a clearly defined line of succession to follow her. The contemporary Windsors seem determined to uphold the prediction of Egyptian king, Farouk I, who upon being deposed from the Alawiyya dynastic throne in 1952, remarked with graveyard humour: “Soon there will be only five kings left…the king of spades, the king of clubs, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds…and the king of England!”
So given that Britain has the stability of a long-reigning queen and the institution of monarchy is firmly rooted in Anglo-Celtic soil, then it should not really come as a surprise to discover that the queen retains a team of “secret mission” messengers who are at her beck and call 24/7. The title queen’s (or king’s) messenger does have an anachronistic ring to it – when you conjure up images of darkly-clad couriers (perhaps spies), secretly scurrying from castle to castle across Medieval Europe on royal business.
A long tradition of HM service
The role of messengers as part of the English monarch’s contact network appears to stretch back a whole millennium. The 13th century monarch, King John, younger brother of the more flamboyantly heroic Richard the Lion-Heart, apparently used his messengers for less orthodox missions (such as transporting part of the dismembered body of Norwich traitor Henry Roper). The earliest recorded King’s Messenger was one John Norman, appointed by Richard III in 1485 to deliver his private letters [Marco Giannangeli, ‘Queen’s Messengers face the axe, heroes who resisted all tyrants, honeytraps and pirates’, Daily Express (UK), 05-Dec-2015, www.dailyexpress.co.uk].
‘
‘Silver Greyhounds’
The royal messengers are colloquially known as “silver greyhounds”, a name bestowed on them by the Stuart king Charles II who to aid their identification at their scheduled destinations, gave each of his messengers one greyhound figurine which he had broken off from a silver breakfast platter [’The Silver Greyhound – The Messenger Service’, (Keith Mitchell), 25-Mar-2014, (History of government blog), www.history.blog.gov.uk ]. These days the tradition continues with the appointed QMs being issued with silver greyhound badges or tie-clips.
After the establishment of the British Foreign Office in 1782, the role of the King’s Messenger took on an enhanced importance, and from 1795 with the resumption of war with France, a greater hazard for the couriers. Journeying through enemy France on secret mission was especially frought with danger for the messenger…one such silver greyhound, Andrew Basilico, when caught by the French, had the foresight to eat the part of the paper containing the covert message to ensure the integrity of the message [‘Queen’s Messenger’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
In the 19th century royal messengers could claim expenses for their journeys on behalf of the Crown. Some canny messengers supplemented their earnings on the side by selling the empty seat in their carriage (a practice the government tried – albeit unsuccessfully – to outlaw in the 1830s) [Mitchell, loc.cit.].
In the 20th century with East-West political tensions on the rise, KMs and QMs continued to play an important role against a backdrop of tense Cold War espionage encounters. George Courtauld, a retired silver greyhound, in his memoirs recounts some of the hazards of smuggling the confidential messages of Queen Elizabeth through communist countries, including the tricky business of dealing with Eastern Bloc “femme fatales” (the ‘honeypots’) [Giannangeli, loc.cit.].
A QM vade mecum: apparently the book of choice for aspiring King’s and Queen’s Messengers in the 20th century (Courtauld) ⇩
The modern day Queen’s Messenger
QMs (officially in Whitehall protocol known as the Corps of Queen’s Messengers) in Britain today are employed by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Despite the glamourous image of the world of international spies, as portrayed in popular culture, today’s QMs live a decidedly “un-James Bondian” lifestyle, no luxury accommodation in the Bahamas, no first-class travel, nor the trappings, thrills and supposed sexual exploits of jet-setting secret agents!
A peak under the dusty sheets of the service
The QMs Corps, as with all “cloak and dagger” official organisations with a culture of high security, functions on a “need-to-know” basis. A 2015 Freedom of Information request to Whitehall did shed some light (but no insights into the inner workings) of the obscure world of QMs. The FCO communique revealed that the QMs dress in plain clothing and are not particularly well remunerated, being paid at only C4 officer scale (£25,200-£33,250); at that time the QMs were 18 in number and all males in the age range 40 to 70✴. The FCO in true intelligence protocol would “neither confirm or deny” if QMs were armed✲. The requisite skill-sets of QMs stated in the document include the capacity to travel on short notice; work overseas for extended periods; work independently or within a team; think quickly on one’s feet; and remaining calm under pressure (occasionally extreme pressure)⌽ [FCO written reply, FOI Ref: 0315-15 (27 April 2015), http://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk].
‘Queens Messenger’ (2001): a modern attempt to use the QM motif to make a James Bond style post-Cold War action flick⇩
Is there still a role for the Queen’s Messenger in the 21st century?
The “hands-on”, person-to-person couriering of QMs seem out of place in the world of modern state communications, a “snail mail” approach compared to the instantaneous transference of information via electronic platforms. Unsurprising then, that in recent times, whenever a critical eye is routinely turned to British government spending, the microscope fixes its gaze on the QM service – which thus far survives despite seeming to habitually “fac(e) the chop (from) cost-cutting Foreign Office mandarins…(viewed as a) “legacy of a by-gone age” [Giannangeli, op.cit.].
An uncertain new world of unsecured information
The mechanism of modernity, those same communication innovations of the online world also create the very justification for the continuance of the QM service. Today we are awash with online crime, cyber-hacking, code-breaking and security interceptions by groups like Wikileaks. In such an environment Buckingham Palace is faced with a choice – trust those who you trust, the loyal silver greyhound retainer, or take the odds on the random anonymity of the vast, ungovernable cyberspace. On an ad hoc basis the royals will continue to find merit in relying on QMs, “safe-hands” who can get the task done seamlessly, rather than always leaving it to the quicker but potentially more chancy method of transferring the message electronically [ibid.].
Footnote: the official case carried by the silver greyhound, presumably containing “the message”, has its own diplomatic passport and therefore cannot be opened, x-rayed or inspected by airport staff when transiting customs – although the QM himself and his personal luggage are subject to the normal airport procedures [‘Her Majesty Queen’s Messengers – History and Current Status’, (Passport-collector.com, 22-Mar-2016), www.passport-collector.com]
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✴ in the main, in practice QMs tend to be men and recruited from the ranks of retired army or police officers
✲ these days QMs almost certainly would never carry guns on missions. Apocryphal or not, it has been suggested that the greyhounds are however ‘armed’ with an excellent, aged bottle of Scotch on their travels [Giannangeli, op.cit.]
⌽ QMs receive core training which comprises induction, mentoring, security, IT and SAFE training
Banana republic: In politics the term “banana republic”✱ describes a politically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the exportation of a limited-resource product such as bananas or minerals. The term was coined in 1901 by American author O. Henry as a depiction of Honduras and neighbouring countries under intense economic exploitation by US corporations as typified by the United Fruit Company of Boston [‘Banana Republic’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
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When I first heard the saccharine, content-lite melodies of “Bubblegum Pop’s” 1910 Fruitgum Company, I didn’t realise that the name of this innocuous, syrupy 1960s musical group was a corny pun on a historic commercial entity that I did not know of at the time…this commercial enterprise was in fact something much less edifying and infinitely more sinister and consequential – the United Fruit Company of Boston, Mass. As the following will show, the United Fruit Co would come to epitomise the high degree of hegemony established by US business interests in the tropical regions of the Americas after the late 1890s.
Boston Fruit C°’s ‘Golden Vale’ plantation, Jamaica⬇From railroads to plantationsThe United Fruit Company had its origins in 1899 from a merger of various fruit exporting concerns (including the Boston Fruit Company which had already embedded itself in the banana trade in Jamaica) controlled by American railroad constructor and entrepreneur Minor Cooper Keith. Earlier Keith stumbled into the banana trade virtually by accident. In 1872 Costa Rica defaulted on it’s bank loans and was unable to pay Keith for constructing the country’s railroad. In lieu of part of what it owed Keith, he was granted over 5% of vacant Costa Rican land. Accordingly the American used the land to establish banana farms alongside his newly finished railroad. The crops when yielded had a ready-made, on-the-spot transport line to carry the produce to port. Keith’s early banana experiments in Costa Rica proved a lucrative earner and paved the way for United Fruit’s later role as producer and exporter of the fruit. From that base in Costa Rica Keith the banana trader looked further afield in Latin America for other openings.
Monopoly, oligarchy? Other players in the tropical banana tradeAlthough classically monopolistic in its practices, United Fruit Co (UFCo) was not the only player (American or foreign) in the Central American/Caribbean banana game. In fact at the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition in bananas, in 1899 some 114 firms were engaged in importing bananas to the US via New Orleans [Davies 1990, cited in S Striffler et al, (Eds.), Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, (2003)]. UFCo grew by acquisition, quickly adding 20 smaller banana export firms to its list of business holdings.
United Fruit’s main rival during this time was the Standard Fruit Company. This company was first known as the Vaccaro Bros & Co✧. The Vaccaros began by importing fresh produce – initially coconuts and then bananas – from Honduras. After establishing a beachhead in the region the company diversified into operating steamships✪ and eventually provided the ice for onboard refrigeration❅. In 1924 Vaccaros Bros reformed into the Standard Fruit Company (in 1926 renaming itself ‘Standard Fruit and Steamship Co)…during this period Standard Fruit and United Fruit maintained competitive relations with each other for the lucrative banana trade in New Orleans – the principal marketplace in the US for banana sales. Like its gargantuan rival United Fruit, Standard Fruit’s profound impact on the economies of Latin American countries like Honduras courtesy of the high degree of control it was able to exert over the supposedly sovereign governments, contributed to the perception of these nations as banana republics. Hondurus was particularly vulnerable to the Banana barons with its banana monoculture and economic reliance on a single export crop. In the 1960s Standard Fruit was acquired by the Castle & Cooke Corporation (which in 1991 was renamed the Dole Food Company). [‘Standard Fruit Company’,‘Vaccaro brothers’, Wikipedia entries].
United Fruit Co soon extended its tentacles (the Latin American press was fond of labelling the firm El pulpo – “The Octopus”) beyond the Caribbean littoral, establishing banana exporting concerns in Columbia, Panama, Spanish Honduras, British Honduras (Belize), Jamaica and elsewhere in the region. Everywhere it invested, UFCo would rely on its famous “dollar diplomacy” to induce the local elites to grant it concessions which allowed the company ever increasing monopoly control over the banana trade.
Rivalry with mutual benefitsIn addition to Standard Fruit, another US rival of United Fruit was the Cuyamel Fruit Company. Cuyamel started in transportation as the Hubbard-Zemurray Steam Ship Co and morphed into a large New Orleans-based agricultural corporation (see ‘Sam the Banana Man’ below). The three American companies in the Central and South American banana business (United Fruit, Standard Fruit and Cuyamel) were separate business entities, each in competition for bananas et al products from the same tropical region. And yet there was something slightly schizophrenic about the relationship between the three…concurrently with the earnest rivalry was the existence of a cartel-like cooperation between the companies – which was of mutual benefit financially, eg, being able to launch joint business efforts in advertising and in increasing banana agricultural outputs in Honduras. United Fruit Co’s dominant position in the triangle (always the senior player) facilitated this arrangement…it had both a 60% stake in Cuyamel and a 50% stake in Vaccaro Bros⊠ [Ralph Lee Woodward Jr, Central America, a Nation Divided (3rd ed. 1999), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry].
‘Sam the Banana Man’Schmuel Zmurri was an immigrant from the Russian Empire (born in Bessarabia, in modern Moldova) who changed his name to Samuel Zemurray after coming to the United States. Zemurray was to become a major player and shaper in the banana republic phenomenon, a seminal figure who contributed to the massive imprint left on the tropics by American banana barons.
Zemurray, establishing himself in Honduras around 1908, was to have a career as a “recidivist Yankee intervener” that made him one of the most controversial figures in the Central American banana republics’ tainted and sorry history. When the current Honduran regime favoured the rival Vaccaro Bros over Cuyamel, Zemurray agitated to foment a series of coups against President Dávila. The first coup failed but Zemurray in 1911 having chosen former president Manuel Bonilla to replace the elected Dávila government, bankrolled two Americans (“soldier of fortune” Lee Christmas and New Orleans gangster Guy “Machine Gun” Molony) to overthrow Dávila. With the malleable Bonilla back in charge, Zemurray’s Cuyamel was soon the beneficiary of generous land and tax concessions [‘The ousting of the president of Honduras, 1911’, (Stephen Kinzer), www.libcom.org]. Zemurray’s unconscionable incursion into the domestic politics of an independent state by hijacking its political process was to set a dangerous precedent for other banana republics.
Zemurray’s company made deep inroads into the Honduran banana trade (Zemurray became universally known as “Sam the Banana Man”), but at great cost to the national sovereignty of the country and to the detriment of the local economy✥. In 1930 Zemurray was able to sell his company to United Fruit for $31.5M in stock, after a short retirement he returned to active banana involvement, managing to join the board of UFCo and eventually take the helm of it (CEO and president until retiring for good in 1951) [K Norsworth & T Barry, Inside Honduras, (2nd Ed. 1994), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry)].
United Fruit “a state within the state” of Guatemala: another intervention by Zemurray in the banana republicsAlthough no longer UFCo president, Zemurray wasn’t quite finished meddling to gain a financial advantage for United Fruit, he had one last contribution to the destabilisation of Central American regimes. The Guatemala banana trade had long been one of United Fruit’s most prized possessions…from the early 1900s President Manuel E Cabrera’s cosy relationship with UFC saw him grant the company a 99-year concession in Guatemala. United Fruit’s role in Guatemala has been described as “a state within a state” [William Blum, cited in ‘1954 Guatemalan coup d’être’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In 1953 Zemurray enlisted UFCo in a US State Department propaganda campaign to overthrow the left-leaning but democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. The campaign together with the active intervention of the CIA paved the way for a coup the following year which ousted Arbenz and replaced it with a military junta which immediately reversed Arbenz’s decision to expropriate a portion of the unused land owned by the United Fruit Co [‘Sam Zemurray’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The fallout from the 1954 coup – for which the contribution of Zemurray and UFCo was no small part – was long-term destabilisation for the Guatemalans. The country, through a succession of military rulers, descended into three decades of civil war, 200,000 deaths including genocidal outrages against the native population [‘Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past’, (Stephen Schlesinger), New York Times, 04-Jun-2011, www.nytimes.com].
United Fruit thrives in neo-colonial conditionsUFCo and Zemurray’s banana export and production triumph in the equitorial Americas owed in no small measure to the compliance of the countries’ political elites. In some instances, compliance, especially from right-wing authoritarian/military regimes, was bought. The neo-colonial charge against the banana republics and against UFCo as an employer, also concerned a claim of exploitative treatment of its labour force. In Part 2 I will focus on a case study of the United Fruit Company in one country which is instructive in detailing the pattern of how United Fruit went about securing and consolidating its “banana hegemony” in much of the region in the period.
PostScript: Banana WarsThe banana as a metaphor for the region lends itself to the pattern of American imperialist intervention in Latin America over the course of the 20th century. Coined by Lester D Langley in the early 1980s, the “Banana Wars” descriptor has been applied collectively to a sequence of ‘backyard’ US military occupations and police actions – these include the ‘1000 Days War’ (American intervention in support of Panamanian independence from Columbia/protection of US future interests in construction of the Panama Canal); the Spanish-American War (US invasion and occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico); Dominican Republic (ongoing and intermittent occupations between 1903 and 1924); Nicaragua (an in/out pattern of occupation 1912-1933); the Border War with Mexico (1910-1919, including the occupation of Veracruz 1914); Haiti and the 1st and 2nd Caco Wars (occupation 1915-1934); and Honduras (seven interventions between 1903 and 1925). Aside from that, between 1869 and 1897 the US sent it’s warships a total of 5,980 times into Latin American waters to protect its national commercial interests [Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, (2005)].
✱ in political taxonomy, ‘republics’ they may (nominally) be, but in practice most so-called banana republics are grotesquely dysfunctional ‘republics’, typically, thinly masking what effectively are dictatorships and or regimes of ruthless military juntas
✧ the founders being three Italian-American businessmen brothers from Sicily (and their brother-in-law)
✪ expansion of fleet ownership was achieved by buying surplus steamships at a discount…by 1935 Standard Fruit had 35 ships in operation
❅ ultimately earning company president Joseph Vaccaro the sobriquet “Ice King”
⊠ this was a characteristic stratagem of United Fruit’s upward trajectory in Central America…the stake-holdings in Cuyamel and Vaccaro’s enterprises in Honduras were an initial import foothold on the path to becoming a direct producer in its own right – when United Fruit later acquired its own Honduran plantations in Trujillo and Tela [Woodward]
✥ as a disadvantaged party in its business dealings with UFCo, Honduras was worse off than all other banana republics in that it was unable to either urbanise or diversify its economy beyond the banana industry (for which its equatorial location was ideal) [Norsworth & Barry]
Monopoly: (n.) a market situation where one producer (or group of producers acting in unison) controls supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted; “exclusive possession” of the commodity is customarily implicit in the term [www.businesssdictionary.com; www.en.oxforddictionaries.com]
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As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler✱, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.
Pilon’s book starts with two very different Americans, one an out-of-work Eastern Seaboard “average Joe” wallowing in the depths of the Depression, the other a fairly nondescript, left-leaning economics professor at a Californian public university –– Charles Darrow, the individual identified as the putative inventor of Monopoly, and Ralph Anspach, the man who almost inadvertently exposed Darrow as the faux inventor of the game. The unemployed Darrow learned the game from friends during his enforced leisure time…then with the germ of an idea in his head, got other friends to provide artwork (especially political cartoonist FO Alexander) and a written set of rules. Darrow crafted a version⊚, copyrighted it and eventually sold “his” game of Monopoly (without acknowledging or recompensing the contributions of his friends) to games manufacturers Parker Brothers who mass-produced and distributed it – and the rest is blockbuster games sales history!✥
Ralph Anspach comes into the story in 1973, six years after Darrow—made a multi-millionaire by the runaway success of Monopoly—had died. Anspach is an avowed anti-monopolist, by conviction a “trust-buster” who is mightily annoyed at the OPEC oil cartel’s stranglehold over that essential world commodity at the time (the 1973 Oil Crisis). He pursues his ideals by creating an Anti-Monopoly game in opposition to Parker Brothers’ über celebrated game. Parker Brothers sues Anspach for breach of copyright and so begins nearly ten years of legal battles with Parker Bros (in fact by this time the company was controlled by the General Mills corporation)…Anspach’s tireless research for the case leads him to the true, albeit convoluted, origins of Monopoly☸.
The Monopolists recounts Anspach’s monumental efforts and endlessly time-draining “detective work” in minute detail. Anspach traces the game back to one Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (long pre-dating Darrow), and here’s where the story gets really interesting! Magie, an independent-thinking, politically progressive Midwestern woman, was a staunch supporter of Henry George. George was the author of Progress and Poverty, a widely influential text which fuelled the introduction of the Progressive Era in the US (1890s-1920s). George advocated the introduction of a Single Tax on land and property (AKA Land Value Tax). Ms Magie invented and patented a board game in 1903-1904☯, called the Landlord’s Game, based on Georgist principles of wealth redistribution. Magie’s game was in her words, “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all the usual consequences” [Single Tax Review, 1902], the Landlord’s Game was intended to educate Americans about the dangers of unbridled capitalism (ie, ultimately resulting in the monopolisation of business, benefitting only one player)⌑.
When I played Monopoly in the 1960s the takeaway message for me always aligned with the “Gordon Gecko/Greed is Good” world view…gold standard instruction on how to win at capitalism – with ruthlessness and a certain degree of luck! Pilon points out the fundamental irony of Magie’s “thought-child” – once Parker Bros got their hands on Monopoly, the company left not a single stone unturned in the pursuit of eliminating any rival claims to “their game”⊡. Monopoly, under the aegis of Parker Bros, a game with the sole raison d’être of annihilating all business competitors, leaving a solitary victor, was the complete opposite of what the game’s prototype inventor intended it to be! Moreover, to further underscore the irony, the game became controlled by a company (Parker Bros) that “fought tooth and nail to maintain its own monopoly over it”.
Back to Ralph Anspach’s anti-monopoly crusade – as well as introducing or reintroducing Lizzie Magie to the world, the economics professor’s years of searching, digging in archives, interviewing people of interest across the United States, word-of-mouth, friend-of-a-friend, sometimes down blind alleys, etc, revealed that the games (or games) of Monopoly had been played in various forms and under various names for decades before Charles Darrow’s Pennsylvanian neighbours introduced him to the game. Pilon ties together all the threads of Monopoly’s antecedents – as unearthed by the indefatigably never-say-die Ralph Anspach. What came to light was that Magie’s game, either in its original published form (‘The Landlord’s Game’) or in derivative ‘backyard’ versions, had been played (prior to the publication of Darrow’s Monopoly) as follows:
⌲ among members of the early 20th century rural community of Arden (Delaware), an “alternative lifestyle” arts and crafts colony of “Single Taxers” (including the influential writer Upton Sinclair and the radical economist Scott Nearing who spread the word about Magie’s game to other locations)
⌲ among members of the Quaker community residing in Atlantic City in the 1920s (many Quaker families held “Monopoly nights”)
⌲ among left-wing university students and college “frat boys” on the Eastern Seaboard
⌲ among couples and families in urban Philadelphia (including those neighbours who first taught the game to Charles Darrow)Unbeknownst to Lizzie Magie, many versions of her ‘Landlord’s Game’ had sprung up in the North-East of the country, often these early, widely dispersed players made their own homemade versions of Monopoly using hand-painted oil cloths, local street names and substitute tokens. In addition George Layton created and sold his own commercial version (which he called ‘Finance’) in the early 1930s. By the thirties a version of the game had spread to Texas – Rudy Copeland’s published board game of ‘Inflation’.
Parker Brothers’ whole claim on Monopoly was based on the contention that the game had no precedents to its 1935 patent with Darrow. Anspach’s pains-taking spade work proved that the game in various guises and forms existed “in the Public Domain” years and years before the Parkers and Darrow came on the scene!
Pilon injects many diverse strands in the narrative, even Abraham Lincoln makes a brief (oblique) appearance in The Monopolists – in the late 1850s Lizzie’s father James Magie, a newspaper editor and abolitionist, was an instrumental part of Lincoln’s political campaigns for office…this digression has a very tenuous connexion with Monopoly! The various currents traversed by the author takes the story beyond the purview of being a straightforward account of plagiarised copyrights and game inventions. The book illuminates the position of women in late 19th/early 20th century American society by positing what made Magie stand out from others of her sex at the time and what she was able to achieve – taking on a number of vocations and pursuits, retaining her autonomy and avoiding the “marriage trap”, becoming an inventor (in addition to the Landlord’s Game she held patents for inventions in the realm of stenography as well).
The three Parker Brothers➚
Another strand follows the career of George S Parker, the founder of the eponymous games empire. Parker published his first board game (‘Banking’) at 17, and from the get-go was determined to establish a monopoly, systematically building up a catalog by buying up other manufacturers’ games (leading him headlong into an ongoing rivalry with fellow games giant Milton Bradley). In Parker’s zeal to totally tie down the company’s ownership and control of Monopoly, the company even went round buying up old (Pre-Parker) Monopoly sets. Eventually George Parker talked Lizzie Magie (by this time now Elizabeth Magie Phillips) into parting with her patent for the Landlord’s Game, and paying her a pittance for it with no residuals (despite inventing the archetypical business game Magie lacked business acumen and naively trusted Parker’s intentions to do the right thing by her and her invention, which he didn’t!)
The author takes the reader on another diversion, straying away from the origin controversy to surprisingly explore Monopoly’s role in World War II! The US Military purchased Monopoly sets to be sent to POWs detained in German prisons (and elsewhere in Europe). The intent behind this practice had a dual purpose: to boost morale for the imprisoned soldiers, but also a practical one –
Coda: The after-affects of Ralph Anspach’s 1983 victory over Parker Brothers in the US Supreme Court (including the ruling that the word monopoly was in fact generic) hasn’t brought any sense of closure to supporters of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. The public acknowledgement warranted her as the true and original inventor of Monopoly has not been forthcoming. Pilon points out that in the 1980s Parker Bros “quietly began to massage its Monopoly history”…a 1988 history of the company by a former Parker Bros R & D head admits that Darrow was not the game’s inventor, but neglects to mention Lizzie Magie. Similarly, on the official Monopoly website in the Nineties, Hasbro, Inc, which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, starts the Monopoly story at 1933 with Darrow and scantly acknowledges the influence of the Landlord’s Game (again without mentioning Lizzie by name!) No plaque for Lizzie’s prototype of the Monopoly game exists anywhere (although there is one in Atlantic City recognising the contribution of that city’s Quaker players to the invention of the game!)
FN: Mary Pilon’s research for The Monopolists is nothing if not thorough. In the end-piece she includes a long, long list of acknowledgements of her sources, helpers and supporters, she even gives a hearty shout-out to coffee shops in seven different cities (I said she was thorough!)…one very notable exception missing from the author’s acknowledgement of research help is Hasbro! Hasbro denied Pilon’s request to access the Parker Brothers’ archives and outright refused to answer any of the many fact-checking queries she submitted to the world’s largest toy and games company. Zero marks to Hasbro for the cause of corporate transparency…ummm, given how much she gleaned from other sources, I wonder what else they didn’t want her to discover?
The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, by Mary Pilon [Bloomsbury New York: 2016 p/b ed.]
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✱Pirate and Traveler later got relaunched with some modifications and an updated aviation theme as a game called Pan American which I played with equal relish. The idea of these two games was to spin a number or roll a dice, collect a destination card and progress from one city to another city somewhere in the world. When you completed a requisite number of destinations, you hightailed it back to a home base city (Godthab, Greenland), first one there was the winner! The games educated me on political geography and I learnt the distance (in miles in those days) between different places on the world map
⊚ with Atlantic City street names on the earliest editions of the Monopoly sets (later editions of the game utilised New York City streets and London streets on their boards)
✥ a comparison of the visuals of Magie’s original 1904 patented game and Darrow’s 1935 patented Monopoly reveals profound continuities…Darrow’s replicates essential features of Magie’s – a square board, a space “for the emblematic GO TO JAIL”, a “Public Park” space (anticipating the Parkers’ “Free Parking”), ‘chance’ cards, the use of tokens representing money, deeds and properties
☸ Parker Bros, when taking on Darrow’s game, accepted and promoted the myth that Darrow had fed them, ie, HE invented the game from his own head in the early 1930s, and that there were NO precedents for it
☯ by a remarkable happenstance of history Lizzie filed her patent claim on the same day in 1903 as the infinitely more famous Wright brothers filed their “flying machine” patent
⌑ interestingly Magie devised two versions of the Landlord’s Game – version 1, the objective was to crush all of your opponents (= the contemporary game of Monopoly produced by Parker Bros), and version 2 – the objective was to create wealth for all to share
⊡ the three Parker brothers (especially George) were evangelically zealous about this because, as the author explains, the company had been “badly burnt” twice before with two products that they had thought that they held exclusive control and ownership of – ‘Tiddlywinks’ and ‘Ping Pong’
I had lots of old books when I was a kid growing up, but maybe only one or two books that would possibly generate the curiosity of an antiquarian✲. One of these books was given to me by my mother when I was about ten or eleven…a most unwise move on her part as it transpired.
‘1922 Wilson’s Director’
The humble but rarely spotted 1922 street directory
This book was the Sydney street directory for the year 1922, to give it it’s correct and full title, Wilson’s Authentic Director, Sydney and Suburbs 1922. This small but squat little publication (5½” x 4½”, 735pp), the original owner of which was almost certainly my carpenter-builder maternal grandfather (an early owner of a motor vehicle I believe), came into my hands in something approaching pristine condition, notwithstanding that the directory was then already more than 40 years old!
Today although I still possess it, it is an almost unrecognisable shadow of its once immaculate state! As my juvenility slowly gave way to adolescence I managed to write (things entirely unrelated to Sydney street maps), scribble and doodle on its quasi-virginal pages. Equally as bad, I haphazardly tossed the book around with such careless abandon over the decades that the front cover (a orangey-brown hard cover) became separated from the spine and eventually disappeared forever. Of course if cornered I could sheet home part of the blame for my repeated if unintended acts of vandalism to my parents who showed such egregiously bad judgement in trusting such a historically valuable tome to a ten-year-old Visigoth in the first place! But ultimately mine was the hand that caused the damage…I suppose if I was scratching round to find any compensating factors, I might say that at the very least no one can accuse me of neglecting my parent’s gift. Far from it! As a “child-distractor” Wilson’s Street Director performed yeoman’s service! I certainly made extensive, if not good, use of it.
The directory maps
The maps of each area of Sydney are neatly and clearly drawn by hand, but lack the computerised preciseness and uniformity of a map today…the cartographers in an effort to make the street names stand out by using large, bold type, have the effect of some disproportionality in the maps…streets look a bit out of alignment with each other (refer also to Eastwood below). Moreover, a critical flaw of the maps is the absence of a distance guide.
Curiously there are some variances in the kinds of type-face used in different maps, some use a Gothic font in contrast to the classic style. ◀ The Redfern-Darlington map at left differs from the type used in most maps. On a few seldom occasions maps make reference to the traditional, nineteenth century British land concept of parishes (eg, the Parish of Gordon)…this seems extraneous as the maps and the book largely follow a division by municipalities.
Gordon Rd – in the days before the upgrade to a highway and renaming
Very many of the street names that were current then survive to this day, although with some surprising little twists – the Pacific Highway, the seminal road leading north from the harbour bridge out of Sydney, was then called Gordon or Lane Cove Road. After Wahroonga it becomes Peat’s Ridge Road. Church Street, Parramatta, traditional haunt of car yards, was at the time alternately called Sydney Road.
Similarly Liverpool Road, starting from Parramatta Road, bears the alternative name “Great Southern Road” on the map (now the Hume Highway). The Princes Highway, the longest road in South-east Australia, is not to be seen! Curiously some suburbs or parts of suburbs are not shown on the maps at all!
The colliery (deepest mine shaft ever sunk in Aust.) in the 1940s (still operating at that time)
The suburb descriptors
One of the most interesting parts of the directory are the brief summaries of individual suburbs. Newtown is described as “thickly populated suburb adjoining the city” (well, no change here!), but its “numerous works and factories” have made way for the suburb’s relatively recent gentrification of modern living spaces☸. St Peters, just to Newtown’s south, is noted in the directory as being “for years the chief brick-making centre for the city” (these days the remaining, redundant kilns and chimneys are a historical curio within the undulating, expansive Sydney Park). Balmain, aside from its “fine public buildings” is “noteworthy as being the location of the deepest coal shaft in the Southern World – 3000 ft” (Balmain Colliery, corner of Birchgrove Rd and Water St, Birchgrove; an exclusive residential estate, Hopetoun Quays, today sits atop the former mine).
The Glebe
The map on page 223 details inner city Darlington (which in 1922 included the locale “Golden Grove”), then as now a suburb most approximate to the University of Sydney…the map shows that the grounds of the University had not at that time encroached onto the eastern side of City Road. The directory describes Darlington as “essentially a workers’ suburb, and being in close proximity to the City, is favoured by workers, who chiefly preside therein”.
Mascot with a racecourse where the airport should be!
Botany and Mascot are old adjoining suburbs in South Sydney. Map 151 (of Botany) and Map 405 (of Mascot) both document the existence at that time of Ascot Racecourse in Mascot…it was located on land adjacent to Botany Bay that now forms part of Sydney Airport⌽. Drummoyne is “a picturesque suburb which has made rapid strides since the tram was opened in 1902”.
Killara on Sydney’s leafy North Shore earns itself a stellar wrap that would make the burghers of the suburb today glow with pride: “(Killara) may justly claim to be both attractive and select. There are many substantial residences, the homes of the well-to-do citizen, and altogether the dwellings are of a superior class” (but not entirely exclusive because prestigious Hunters Hill also had “well-to-do citizens”).
East Subs’ residential paradise
Not to be outdone by the North Shore, the Eastern Suburbs gets even more of a ringing endorsement…the directory goes overboard with Vaucluse, and especially Watson’s Bay, lavishly portrayed as a “romantic looking and historical region, (standing) perhaps highest on the list of Australian ‘beauty spots’ “. Waxing lyrical, the writer ends with a frenzy of capitalisation extolling “the FORTIFICATIONS, LIGHTHOUSES, LIFEBOAT, SIGNAL STATION, and the WORLD-FAMED GAP, near the scene of the wreck of the ill-fated Dunbar” (a disastrous shipwreck occurring off South Head in 1857).
The other side of Strathfield municipality
Strathfield, seven miles west of the GPO, was lauded for its “numerous magnificent and substantially built dwellings (today we wouldn’t hold back, we’d simply say ‘mansions’), the homes of the wealthy citizen”. Strathfield’s maps include the locale of ‘Druitt Town’, now called South Strathfield. The map on page 583 includes the less salubrious side of the municipality (the Government Abattoirs and Rookwood Necropolis), a striking contrast with the world of Strathfield’s croquet-playing set.
Eastwood map, p235: site of future MQ University just to the south of Lane Cove River
On the other side of Parramatta River, Ryde (which in 1922 encompassed present-day West Ryde, North Ryde and Macquarie Park) is described as a “famous fruit-growing district on the Parramatta River”. The present location of Macquarie University in the northern reaches of the Eastwood district (set on generous acreage between Marsfield and North Ryde) was in earlier days the site of largely Italian market gardens and (citrus) orchards, interspersed incongruously with a greyhound racing track. An interesting feature shows a preponderance of street names around the present site of the campus with a martial theme – named after overseas battles (or campaigns) including Balaclava, Waterloo, Crimea, Culloden, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Sebastopol, Khartoum. When Talavera Rd was added later, this brought the number of streets commemorating the Crimean War alone to four.
Mosman, still today a suburb whose affluence makes real estate agents salivate at the prospect of dollar symbols followed by multiple zeros, was ever thus the sought-after destination for the cashed-up aspirational denizen…”(a thriving suburb) situated on a charming arm of Port Jackson…on the abrupt sides nestle red-tiled villas in many quaint styles of architecture…but a few years since the tramway rendered its beauties easily accessible to city men”, etc.⊡
Dee Why
Freshwater (on the Northern Beaches) is depicted as being a “pleasant one-half mile walk” from the Brookvale tram stop at Curl Curl, (comprising) “permanent camps and excellent surf-bathing”. Similarly, close-by Dee Why, reflecting its use as a vacation destination in the day, is a “delightful and charmingly situated sea-side resort (with) a lot to be proud of” – one factor of which presumably is the safety of its beach of which “drowning casualties are up to now unknown”.
Manly, by 1922 already long-established as a “must go-to” day trip for Sydneysiders, is described as a “delightful (ferry) trip down the harbour”…the writer is unrestrainedly fulsome in praise of its virtues, “Few resorts offer such a diversity of attractions – bathing in surf and baths, riding, driving, cycling, and motoring; while golf, cricket, football, la crosse, rifle, rowing, sailing, tennis, croquet, bowling clubs are all in full swing. Open air entertainments and band concerts nightly, and the usual attractions of a popular watering place”.
Vying with Manly for the beachside glamour stakes (then as now) was Bondi (subsumed under Waverley in the directory). Bondi Beach, in the words of Wilson’s, was equipped with baths and municipal “surf sheds” which accommodated 4500 men and 1500 women (clear evidence that 1922 was indeed a pre-feminist era devoid of the slightest pretence to gender equality!)…the (beach) park, the writer went on, “remodelled with the construction of the sea wall” was “now a rendezvous for natural pleasure seekers”. Beach accessible suburbs are always in demand with homebuyers, as underlined in the description of Maroubra – “a favourite place for surf bathers and is advancing with lightning rapidity and they are building fast there” (no hyperbole spared!)
South Kenso & Daceyville
Page 513 illustrates how much can change over lengthy periods of time. In 1922 Sydney’s second university, the University of New South Wales, was still 27 years away, but the future UNSW site was then occupied by Kensington Racecourse✾ and Randwick Park. Nearby was Randwick Asylum, now the Prince of Wales Hospital, and the Randwick Rifle Range, further south on Avoca St, is no more. Anzac Pde runs through the present suburb of Kingsford which in 1922 was called South Kensington with a small part of this suburb forming the locale of Lilyville.
Penrith & the (“world-class”) Nepean
Even suburbs located far the city CBD were given a positive spin by Wilson’s – Penrith, 34 miles from the GPO is described as “the centre of a fertile agricultural and fruit-growing district” only one hour’s journey by rail. The township is “well lighted with electricity and excellent water supply”. Among its attractions are the Nepean River, “world famed for its championship sculling courses, which is recognised by many as the best course in the world” and beautified by its “rugged grandeur of mountain scenery (which draws in) tourists and camping parties”. It also offers short day trips to the “delightful villages” of Mulgoa, Wallacia and Luddenham for shooting and fishing.
The township of Hornsby in the north-west of Sydney is the “centre of a prosperous district”. And with its high elevation (594 ft above sea level), Wilson’s Directory talks up Hornsby as a “metropolitan sanitarium”. The country of its environs “abound with charming drives and magnificent scenery”. Galston is “seven miles north by good metal road” (the “famous Galston ZIG-ZAG”).
Hurstville is depicted as “the centre of a large and progressive district…charmingly situated nine miles south by rail from Sydney”. It includes Mortdale, a township of recent growth, most of the property owned and occupied by the working class”. Also within the Hurstville municipality, the book refers to the suburb of Dumbleton – now called Beverley Hills (conspicuous today for its plethora of restaurants favouring Cantonese Hong Kong and Guangzhou cuisines).
The cover of my edition is long gone but the 1926 edition is very approx.
Pertinent omissions
There is an arbitrariness to the scope of the 1922 directory, it doesn’t extend to most peripheral districts like Liverpool, Blacktown, Campbelltown and Windsor/Richmond, all of which are included within the perimeters of contemporary greater Sydney. This perhaps provides a pointer to the trajectory of the early development patterns and communications of Sydney. Significant population and urban infrastructure reached districts like Penrith and even to parts of the Blue Mountains before it got to Windsor for instance☉.
‘ Gregory’s’ 1st street directory of Sydney 1934
PostScript: Swallowed up by Gregory’s expanding empire of streets? ‘Gregory’s’ before there was a Gregory’s?
In 1934 Gregory’s Street Directory (of Sydney Suburbs and Streets) made its debut, it was not long after this the Wilson’s Street Directory discontinued its annual publication and went out of business. I haven’t been able to ascertain for sure but I suspect a correlation between the two…it is quite feasible that the demise of Wilson’s was linked to the rise of Gregory’s, the latter becoming a household name in metropolitan street directories (and until the advent of GPS an unwaveringly constant companion of the majority of automobile glove-boxes).
Footnote: Taking the Eastwood map (above) as an example of the deficiencies of scale of the directory’s maps, the block between Herring St and Culloden Rd bisected by Waterloo Rd, encompasses the land occupied today by the rump of the campus of Macquarie University. This is some 16 hectares in area, but due to the use of large bold fonts for streets which condenses the sizes of blocks, the area seems quite small on the map!
More nomenclature change: the maps refer to the Municipality of Prospect and Sherwood, later the council was renamed ‘Holroyd’. Prospect retains its identity as a suburb but there is no longer a ‘Sherwood’ locality.
≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘
✲ is Wilson’s Authentic Director, Sydney and Suburbs 1922 an antiquarian book? The key words in any definition of a antiquarian book are ‘old’ and ‘rare’. The perception of ‘what is old’ is subjective and can be related to a given individual’s experience. To me (even way back when I first got hold of it) it was old then and is ancient now! The quality of ‘rareness’ though might be harder to attribute to this book, short of conducting a survey of the remaining second-hand bookshops in this city (these days an increasingly less difficult task to accomplish) I have no earthly idea of how many copies there are in existence. It is certainly the only hardcopy of the publication that I have encountered in its physical state, however I am aware that multiple copies exist online in microfiche form. I suspect then that strictly speaking it probably falls short of the standard definition of antiquarian, so I am happy to go with any variation on a theme that retains that association…quasi-antiquarian, semi-antiquarian, even pseudo-antiquarian!
⌽ Mascot’s Ascot Racecourse (named after the premier horse-racing course in Britain) was the site from where the first aeroplane flight in Sydney took place (1911), [‘Ascot Racecourse, Sydney’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org]
⊡ appropriately enough to match its elite and exclusive status, Mosman, along with North Sydney, are afforded the only inset maps in “three colors” in an otherwise entirely black-and-white publication (alas these too were casualties of my cavalier treatment of the book during my juvenile years – the tricoloured inset maps of the two suburbs were torn off long ago!)
✾ the maps of the South Sydney area indicate how littered it was with racecourses in 1922…in addition to Kensington and Randwick, there were racecourses at Ascot (see below) and at Eastlakes (Rosebery Racecourse) now occupied by The Lakes Golf Course
☸ the locale of South Kingston gets a nod in the book but these days this name for part of the Newtown suburb has long fallen into disuse and is obsolete
☉ the Penrith and Windsor districts are both roughly equidistance from Sydney (moreover, Windsor was settled as early as 1791, a mere three years after the British takeover of the continent!). Blacktown’s omission is even more puzzling, being considerably closer to the GPO than Penrith!
Ball court at Chichén-Itzá ⌂ (southern end-zone & temple)
Our group tour of Yucatán’s archaeological Maravilla, Chichén-Itzá, ended with an informative stroll through the long-abandoned ball court. As we slowly walked from one end of the former playing field to the other, we got a feel for the atmosphere of the place as our guide Henrique told us about the religious symbolism and the savage practices associated with the court. Chichén-Itzá’s Gran cancha de pelotá (the Great Ball Court), the venue in pre-modern times for Mesoamerica’s Jugeo de Pelotá (literally: “Game of ball”), is the best surviving example of the court used by the Maya and other indigenous Mesoamerican peoples for their ancient versions of the ball game✱.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image-20.jpg”> Olmec heartland – arcing from San Lorenzo to the Gulf[/
Roots of competitive sport?
Much about the game, thought to be the world’s first organised team sport, is uncertain. The Mesoamerican ball game (MBG) seems to have had its origins with the Olmecs, the earliest known major civilisation in Mexíco, around 1,600 BCE✺. The Olmecs, whose empire centred around the Gulf of Mexíco’s southern coast area, were renowned producers of rubber (the raw material that the latex balls used in the game were made of). Most of the evidence for what the sport was about, comes from the discovery of items such as the bog-preserved balls themselves, and from ceramic pieces interred in tombs – figurines portraying ball players, sculpted miniatures of the game and its paraphernalia, or from architectural decorations, carvings and the like on the ball court walls (around 1,300 erstwhile ball courts have been discovered in or around Central America – the northernmost in the US state of Arizona).
ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image-22.jpg”> The basic ‘⌶’ shape of the Ancient Mexícan ball court[/cap
The non-standardised Mesoamerican ball court
The dimensions of the ball court at Chichén-Itzá are quite large, at least 545’L x 225’W, a long, roughly rectangular space with an ⌶-shaped playing surface…whilst this ⌶-shape is the norm for Mesoamerican ball courts, other ball courts discovered elsewhere in the region show that there was no standardised size for courts, some are tiny by comparison to Chichén-Itzá, effectively alleys rather than fields. Tikal’s ball court (in present-day Guatemala) for instance is only ⅙th the size of the Chichén-Itzá field [‘Mesoamerican ballcourt’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The courts themselves were masonry structures, composed of stone, rubble, abode, etc materials.
“http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image-23.jpg”> The court with the Bearded Man Temple (L) & the Jaguar Temple (R)[/captio
The C-I court’s side walls
The side walls at Chichén-Itzá are high (a full 8m) and completely perpendicular except for a small sloping bench which extends a metre-and-a-half up from the ground. The walls are decorated with bas-relief carvings which mirror Mayan society. Many other court walls elsewhere in Meso-America are considerably lower and some have angled walls which are much more acutely diagonal, sloping sharply inward. Forming part of one of the side walls at Chichén-Itzá is a famous, two-tiered temple, Templo del jaguar (Temple of the Jaguar). At both ends of the field there are small temples, the best known being the Templo de hombre barbado (Temple of the Bearded Man).
⌂ Clay model of ball court from Nayarit: more spectators than players! [LA County Museum of Art]
Rules of the game?
No lists of codified rules for the sport have survived…leaving the notion of how games were conducted open to speculation. Many theories abound…the most common view is that the players used their right hip to strike the ball…the traditional game of ulama still played in Central America today with the hip is believed to have descended from the archaic indigenous game. Other views postulate that players could use their chests, shoulders, elbows, knees and forearms to propel the ball, or a hand-stone called a manopla or even some kind of racket or (hockey-like) stick. Possibly all of these are correct…the rudimentary ball game seems to have had differences from region to region, and between the different civilisations. An echo of this can be seen in the varying names used for the sport – pok-ta-pok and pitz, Pelotá Maya and ōllamaliztli (the Aztec ball game). Each team had a capitan (team captain) but again there is variance as to how many players constituted a team, some sources say between two to four athletes, although others say six or seven✥. Players (and officials) often donned flamboyant, feathered head-dresses for the games [‘Mesoamerican ball game’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⌂ Feathered serpent stone ring
Scoring and winning?
On the high walls at the Chichén-Itzá court, seven metres up, are stone-rings which the Maya introduced to the ball court. Because they resemble hoops, many observers have speculated that these rings decorated by intertwining feathered serpents are goals. While they may well be, it is problematic as to how significant the circular goals may have been in the context of a match…players at Chichén-Itzá, unable to use their hands and feet, would need a Herculean effort to propel a heavy ball through the relatively small hoops seven metres high, it would be extremely difficult to manoeuvre the (basketball-sized) ball through the hole!✾ The more likely avenue of scoring was to propel the ball over a centre line into your opponents’ territory, if it bounced more than twice before they played it or if they failed to return it to your side, you were awarded points. Victory therefore, unless a player was lucky enough to land a ringer, tended to be determined by the number of points each side scored [‘The Ball Game of Mesoamerica’ (Mark Cartwright), 16-Sept-2013, Ancient History Encyclopedia, www.ancient.eu (‘Pre-Hispanic City of Teothihuacan (UNESCO/NHK) video)].
Another version of how MBG was played, favoured by the Maya warriors, involved putting the ball in motion by using only the right hip, right knee and right elbow and players were penalised for letting the ball hit the ground…sometimes this involved bouncing it off the side wall, and eventually getting it through the stone ring to win the contest. Surviving artwork from different Mesoamerican communities suggest that hip-players also exclusively used the right hip [‘Mayan ball game’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⌂ MesoAmer ballplayer (with ball approx the size of a 10-pin bowling ball) [Source: MMA]
MBG equipment:
The way ball-players dressed to take part in games was a product of the ball used in Meso-America – balls were made of solid rubber and weighed up to nine pounds (about four kilos). Some were as large as a basketball, others more the size of a softball. Propelled through the air at a good rate of knots the heavy orb could inflict a lot of harm on the human body, so from (an attempt at) self-preservation, players wore protective gear…including a sort of yoke or a loincloth reinforced with leather (occasionally they also wore a sort of girdle); sometimes helmuts; gloves and guards on their arms, legs and torsos⌖. Even so, serious injuries from the hurtling ball were known to be common, even on occasions death resulted.
MBG, real life and death ball games
George Orwell said that football was “war by other means” – a description that might be as apt for MBG as it is for modern football. Ball games for indigenous Mesoamericans served several purposes. The Maya used ball games as a proxy for war, to settle territorial disputes, and to foretell the future. Games were appended to religious ceremonies involving human sacrifice…some but not all culminated in the ritualistic execution of the captain or players on the losing side. Our guide at Chichén-Itzá pointed out the ball court’s carved stone friezes which depicted the winners making human sacrifices by decapitating the losing captain…conveyed both graphically and imaginatively with spurts of blood from the victim’s severed head turning into wriggling serpents! MBG had many martial associations, warriors took part in the games, war captives were forced to play in rigged games which inevitably resulted in their being sacrificed to the gods [‘The Bloody and Brutal History of the Mesoamerican Ball Game, Where Sometimes Loss was Death’ (Monica Petrus), Atlasobscura, 09-Jan-2014, www.altasobscura.com].
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PostScript: An inclusive, multi-purpose sport – religious, political, conflict resolution, cathartic, social, astronomical
The games could be social and recreational⊟ (allowing women and children to play) but normally they were formal and ceremonial events. The Maya elite for example would use them to act out their creation myths, MBG featured in their sacred legends – such as the Hunahpu Hero Twins Myth in which twin boys get lured into Xibalba (the Maya underworld) while playing the game… within the framework of the Maya religious beliefs, ball courts like at Chichén-Itzá were thought to provide (symbolically at least) a portal into the Underworld. MBG was tied into cosmological events, the orbits of the sun and the moon, and games were performed with symbolic resonance, as allegorical battles between “good and evil” [‘The Maya Ball Game’, History on the Net, www.historyontheney.com]
▲ Ball court at Xochicalco (Morelos, Mex.): note the vast difference to Gran cancha de pelotá…Xochicalco is on an infinitely smaller scale, characterised by low, staggered side walls comprising earth mounds
⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯
✱ one of the panels on the side wall depicts the leader of one team with the decapitated head of his opposing captain
✺ the earliest unearthed ball court ruins is at Paso de la Amada in the Soconusco region of Chiapas (circa 1,400 BCE)
✥ seven – the Maya lucky number. More plausibly there may have been six-a-side plus a referee
✾ although pictorial evidence indicates that the stone rings in the Aztec ball game were at ground level and much more accessible
An exploration of the archaeological sites of Mexíco’s Yucatán Peninsula cannot be said to be complete unless it includes a trip to Chichén-Itzá (see footnote for etymology) – essential even for those with only the barest of interest in the archaeological significance embodied in its stepped pyramids and celestial-viewing platforms…according to UNESCO Chichén-Itzá represents “one of the most important examples of (the blend of) Mayan-Toltec civilizations”. An outcome of the Toltec invasion of Yucatán (and of Chichén-Itzá) in the late 10th century is that visitors to the ruins of the city can see in the city’s ancient structures a fusion of icons and styles from the two Pre-Hispanic cultures✱.
Zona arqueología
In relation to Mérida (where we were based), Chichén-Itzá is in San Felipe Nuevo, a drive of 115km along Highway 180. Predictably for somewhere lionised as a “modern wonder of the world”, the place was brimming with tourists when we arrived. Our guide for the day, Enrique, took us through the complex’s turnstiles and we made our way from the entrance through a phalanx of clamouring vendors hawking their memorabilia merchandise. After an obligatory baños stop, we headed for the large temple in the centre of the site, the Temple of Kukulcán. “El Castillo” as it is known, is 25 metres high and decorated with carvings of plumed serpents and Toltec warriors. The pyramid was roped off to prevent visitors climbing it (the consequence of a female tourist falling to her death from it in 2006).
The Kuk
The chirping bird phenomenon
Whilst we were taking in the ambience of the eleven hundred-year-old El Castillo temple, guides leading other groups of tourists would demonstrate the acoustics of the pyramid by standing at the base of the stairway and clapping their hands loudly (we were already familiar with this stage show, having first seen the clapping trick performed at Teotihuacán on the outskirts of Mexico City). It seemed a bit gimmicky to me but some pyramid researchers and acoustical engineers apparently believe that the echo effect that this generates from the ancient structure replicates the chirping noise made by the sacred Quetzal bird (the kuk), native to Central America [‘Was Maya Pyramid Designed to Chirp Like a Bird?’ (Bijal P Trivedi)
National Geographic Today, 6-Dec-2002, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/]
Templo de Kukulcán
Measuring the scientific achievements of the Maya
Chirping Quetzals aside, the Temple of Kukulcán at the height of the Mayan empire power was salient to how Mayans lived their everyday lives and planned their future endeavours. The 365◘ step pyramid demonstrates how important astronomy was to the Maya and how remarkably accurately they were able to measure mathematically (eg, the 365-day Maya calendar devised centuries before the West!). The alignment of structures like El Castillo affirms the advanced understanding the Maya had of astronomical phenomena such as solstices and equinoxes.
El Caracol
Observing the clear blue sky
Walking around the ruins we discovered from our guide that the Maya put to use different buildings to make serious astronomical observations (without the aid of telescopes) of the sky above…the Plataforma de Venus (near the Temple of Kukulcán) is a platform used by the Maya elite to track the transit of Venus. The planet Venus was important to the Maya both theologically, as a deity (god of war), and practically, to use its movements to decide when to make raids and engage in battles with enemies. On the southern axis of the city is the Observatory or El Caracol (“the snail”), a small building with a circular viewing tower in a crumbling condition, also integral to studying planetary movements [‘ChichenItzaRuins’, www.chichenitzaruins.org].
Spot the iguana!
We spent a very liberal and leisurely amount of time wandering around the various excavated remnants of the site…off to the sides were several smaller and apparently less important temples and a couple of cénotes (unlike the others in the Peninsula we swam in, these were sans hoods, fully exposed). In another minor temple (in a poor state of repair) we were able to observe that some of the native non-human locals had made a home in the crumbling stone structure, in this case a well-camouflaged iguana (above)!
La Iglesia
An elaborate multi-layered “jigsaw puzzle” in Chichén Viejó
Of those we saw, I found La Iglesia (The Church) the most interesting building, architecturally and visually. One of the oldest buildings at Chichén-Itzá (and it looks it!), the building is oddly asymmetrical with an elaborately decorative upper part sitting incongruously atop an untidy foundation “made up of hundreds of smaller stones fit(ted) together like a huge jigsaw puzzle” [Chris Reeves, ‘La Iglesia’, American Egypt (All about Chichen Itzá and Mexico’s Mayan Yucatan), www.americanegypt.com]. The upper section is dazzlingly and elaborately decorated with bas-relief carvings comprising a composite pattern of animal symbols – armadillos, crabs, snails, tortoises (representing the four bacabs who in Maya mythology are thought to hold up the sky). The other dominant sculptural feature of La Iglesia’s facade are masks of the Rain God Chac [‘Chichén Itzá – The Church’, Mexíco Archeology, www.mexicoarcheology.com].
The Great ball court
The final highlight of the ancient city that we got to see on our visit to Chichén-Itzá was the Great (or Grand) Ball Court. The Gran cancha de pelotá, one of thirteen ball courts unearthed at Chichén-Itzá, is the best preserved and most impressive of all such ancient sports stadia in Mexíco. It is known that, from as early as 1,400 BCE, Mesoamericans played a game involving the propulsion of a rubber ball which may have incorporated features of or partly resembled football and/or handball. I will talk about what the Chichén-Itzá ball court reveals about this indigenous Mexícan game and its significance to native Pre-Columbian society in a follow-up blog.
Footnote: Nomenclature
“Chichen Itza”, a Maya word, means “at the mouth of the well of the Itza.” The Itzá were a dominant ethnic-lineage group in Yucatán’s northern peninsula. The word ‘well’ probably refers to the nearby cénote sagrado – the sacred limestone sinkhole around which the Maya city was constructed.
Chichén-Itzá vendors hard at it! Sombreros for a hot day.
Last week I received, among the usual array of unsolicited online communications, something from a researcher from the London-based social communications company, Breakthrough Media. The pro forma email said that BM (my abbreviation, not theirs) was casting a new online TV series and were on the lookout for people aged over 50 (that’s me!) to be in the show…apparently they were particularly interested in folk in that demographic “who love to chat, have a laugh and would like to know how to Email, Skype, Facebook, Online Shop, Online Bank, or use the Internet” (capitalisation all hers!).
The message went on to say that they were “also looking for tech savvy friends, family members, or colleagues, who could team up with the Over 50 candidates to be their teaching buddy, during filming” (in August). What they specifically wanted from me was leads on “great potential candidates” for the program. Now, taken on face value, this all sounded innocent, admirable even, very community minded.
Elizabeth House: BM’s ‘anonymous’ London location
I had never heard of “Breakthrough Media”…just another of the new media start-ups in the ever mushrooming world of social networking I supposed, and usually I ignore such online pitches. But somewhat intrigued I decided to try to find out a bit about them. Their website would be a good place to start, I thought❈. It was however unsurprisingly jargon-laden and disappointingly short on substance…the website’s description of what BM was about, went “we design and build award-winning campaigns that tackle some of the world’s toughest social issues, helping our clients counter misinformation, prevent violent extremism, promote democracy and protect the environment”. Full of jargony generalities such as “our strategic thinking and our creativity are joined-up and informed by real-time audience engagement…(and) inspiring positive social change” (www.breakthroughmedia.org). In its job advertisements the company describes itself thus: “Breakthrough is a communications agency and production company. We specialise in conflict resolution, society building and countering violent extremism”. Again, the message resonates with progressive, international goals and desirable outcomes.
I turned to other, independent, commentators and observers of Breakthrough Media…frankly there wasn’t much on the web about the media company, but one fairly thorough dissection of BM’s role and its background was contained in a 2016 report by The Guardian on Britain’s RICU (the Research Information and Communications Unit) [‘Inside Ricu, the shadowy propaganda unit inspired by the cold war’, The Guardian, 03-May-2016, (Ian Cobain, Alice Ross, Rob Evans & Mona Mahmood)]. RICU was created in 2007 as an arm of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OCST) and funded by the Home Office. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue defines RICU’s function as “coordinating government-wide communication activities to counter the appeal of violent extremism while promoting stronger grass-roots inter-community relations [www.counter-extremism.com]. RICU’s work is a key part of Westminster’s anti-radicalisation program, ‘Prevent’.
The relationship between RICU and Breakthrough Media
Where does BM fit into the picture of RICU and its fight against extreme fundamentalism, terrorism and ISIS? The two have a contractual arrangement: RICU pays BM to produce digital materials, films, Twitter feeds, Facebook profiles, YouTube clips, and the like, which promote the UK government’s anti-terrorism policies. The propaganda, emanating from BM on behalf of the Home Office (BM unsurprisingly prefers the term “strategic communications”) is aimed at Muslim communities, the desired outcome being “a reconciled British Muslim identity”. As The Guardian report revealed, BM’s stratagem is to “influence online conversations by being embedded within target communities via a network of moderate organisations that are supportive of its [sic] goals”.
An uncomfortable and problematic relationship?
BM is well remunerated by OCST for its counter-terrorism work (earning a reported £11.8M during 2012-2016), but its role as a conduit for RICU has some disquieting aspects. BM’s contacts with Islamic communities, either directly or through its PR team Horizon Public Relations, is not transparent. BM represents its work to the public without disclosure of its connection to the British government. At least one former government minister has conceded (to The Guardian) that deception in the dissemination of the messages could damage trust between the government and Muslim citizens. Other outspoken critics of this practice include human rights lawyer Imran Khan and the vice-chair of the Institute of Race Relations Frances Webber who saw it as giving an appearance that Muslim groups had been co-opted to a government agenda [‘Revealed: UK’s covert propaganda bid to stop Muslims joining Isis’, The Guardian, 03-May-2016, (Ian Cobain et al)].
Advocacy groups and critics of the Home Office policy have complained that RICU/OCST uses the Muslim Civil Society Organisations (MCSO) as mouthpieces for their government counter-narratives, irrespective of whether the MSCO are aware of it or not [‘The Home Office is Creating Mistrust within Muslim Civil Society’, (CAGE, 16-May-2016), www.cage.ngo.
The Guardian also showed how RICU (as the paymasters) have an editing role in the finished work of Breakthrough…RICU’s head Richard Chalk is an occasional visitor to BM’s Lambeth office – Chalk can be found at times sitting in the edit suites and monitoring the BM productions. One source of the newspaper indicated whilst Breakthrough projects are not strictly scripted by RICU, they’ll “make it clear that they want a particular form of words to be used at a particular point in a film”⚀.
RICU and BM are also linked in a veil of secrecy in regard to the media, as The Guardian discovered. Neither parties allow their staff to talk to the newspapers about their roles in counter-terrorism. BM cited reasons of ‘confidentiality’ and ‘NFP’ to the The Guardian for its reticence. The paper’s investigative team did unearth the fact that even some of the freelancers employed by Breakthrough to do RICU’s clandestine bidding were unaware of BM’s (covert) connection with the British government.
Given the scale of the threat posed, the majority of Britons would have few qualms about the Home Office using its agencies to engage in “industrial scale propaganda” in a bid to counter ISIS’s propaganda machine and its success in poisoning the minds of some young Muslim Britons [B Hayes & A Qureshi, ‘Going global: the UK’s government’s “CVE” agenda, counter-radicalisation and covert propaganda’, (Open Democracy UK, 04-May-2016), www.opendemocracy.net]. BM have undeniably produced some good work in getting the message across, but where it becomes ethically questionable is when contractors like Breakthrough Media and co-opted NGOs present their counter propaganda whilst in the guise of being “independent, community-based campaigns”, when the reality is that the information they are disseminating to schools, university ‘freshers’ and the like is backed (and guided in most cases) by the government.
❈ a number of the links on the website menu were broken at the time I accessed it…that internet know-how training they were talking about might have come in handy in the BM IT department!
⌖ OCST itself was the successor to IRD (Information Research Department), a top-secret body set up by Britain’s Foreign Office in 1948, during the early dawn of the Cold War, and wound up the same year Elvis died (1977).The Independent has drawn attention to IRD’s questionable record during its existence of disseminating anti-Communist propaganda routinely exaggerating stories of Soviet atrocities and anti-British plots, S Lucas, ‘REAR WINDOW : COLD WAR :The British Ministry of Propaganda’, The Independent, 26-Feb-1995, www.theindependent.co.uk
⚀ The Guardian also disclosed that BM’s founding directors have pre-existing links to the governing Conservative Party
The big players in US supermarkets in 2017 are names like Kroger, Costco and Safeway❈ but long before Costco, Safeway and Walmart existed and whilst Kroger was still a cash-and-carry grocer, there was King Kullen.
Founder of King Kullen
The entrepreneur behind the King Kullen story was Michael J Cullen – Cullen was an ex-employee of the Kroger Company (and before that he had worked for the famous Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, better known simply as A & P Tea). The manner by which Cullen came to start up his own supermarket chain is a classic story of turning rejection into a virtue. Cullen was managing a number of small Kroger stores in the late 1920s and identified a raft of improvements to the way Kroger did business that he believed, if implemented, would increase the company’s revenue tenfold. Cullen wrote to the Vice President of Kroger with his suggestions for a new, revolutionary type of dry goods/grocery store. In his letter Cullen envisaged “monstrous stores, size of same to be about forty feet wide and hundred and thirty to a hundred and sixty feet deep…located one to three blocks from the high rent district with plenty of parking space, and same to be operated as a semi-self-service store – twenty percent service and eighty percent self-service”, low prices and cash sales[1].
Kroger’s VP, whether through indifference, complacency or sheer lack of business nous, did not reply to his branch manager’s suggestions. Cullen, rebuffed but confident in the efficacy of his own store model, resigned from Kroger and set about realising the kind of new revolutionary grocery store he had envisaged. Settling his family in Long Island, Cullen found a vacant warehouse in Jamaica (Queens) with 6,000 square feet of space, which he chose as the optimal retail location. Cullen’s new store, which he dubbed “King Kullen”, opened its doors for business in August 1930[2].
King Kullen, Queens
Billing itself as the “World’s Greatest Price Wrecker”, King Kullen was an instant success in New York with its formula of high volume and low cost…KK’s slogan was “Pile it high, sell it low!” Customers were willing to travel up to 30 miles to the Queens store to cash in on the bargains[3]. The American Food Marketing Institute (FMI) Identified the contribution of King Kullen as “serv(ing) as a catalyst for a new age in food retailing” and the Long Island-based grocery company is widely thought to be the first example of the modern supermarket. King Kullen’s reputation as the prototype form of supermarket (or at the very least a strong candidate for being so) rests in part on the endorsement given it by the Smithsonian Institute…FMI in 1980 with funding from the Heinz Corporation) initiated research by the Smithsonian which concluded that King Kullen met its five-point criteria for a supermarket, viz. it provided separate departments for produce; it offered self-service; it offered discount pricing; it conducted chain marketing; and it dealt in high volume quantities[4].
Under Cullen’s leadership the supermarket chain grew exponentially…8 stores by 1932 (each new store bigger than the preceding one), 17 stores by 1936 with annual sales of $6 (this despite a climate of economic depression)[5]. To match the “belt-tightening” days of the Depression and deliver the lowest possible prices, Cullen took a “no frills” approach to his King Kullen stores – facilities were simple, service was minimal. Unexpectedly though, just as he was about to expand King Kullen nationally and into franchising, Cullen died suddenly in 1936, aged only 52 [6].
Cullen’s wife and children continued King Kullen after his death. In 1961 it was listed as a public company however the family retained a controlling interest. King Kullen, after going through a static period, not changing with the times, was revamped and modernised from 1969, growing the business to a total of 55 New York stores by 1983[7].
King Kullen eventually diversified into bakeries, delicatessens, florists, pharmacies and health products, in addition to its staple of produce lines. Today it maintains a modest but healthy market position in New York, operating a chain of supermarkets (around 35 in total) in the Long Island area, concentrated in Nassau and Suffolk counties.
(Photo: www.newsday.com)
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
❈ Walmart in groceries and food sales are the overall dominant competitor in the market but its retail outlets tend to be hypermarkets rather than supermarkets
[1] ‘About King Kullen Supermarkets’, (King Kullen: America’s First Supermarket), www.kingkullen.com
[2] ‘King Kullen’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[3] ‘King Kullen Grocery Co., Inc. History’, (Funding Universe), www.fundinguniverse.com
[4] D Simionis [Ed], Inventors and Inventions, (2008);
Funding Universe, op.cit.
[5] King Kullen: America’s First Supermarket, loc.cit.
[6] ‘Michael J Cullen’, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[7] Funding Universe, op.cit.
In an episode of the 2012 series of The Hairy Bikers, the English BMW-riding celebrity chefs from “Oop North” do a road trip through the gastronomical delights of America’s Mississippi River Valley. Whilst the two girth-challenged biker-chefs are in Memphis, Tennessee, to check out the local speciality of soul stew and fried chicken, they make a visit to a Piggly Wiggly store, or at least to a replica of the famous original store encapsulated in a local museum, formerly the pink palatial mansion (pictured above) of Piggly Wiggly’s founder.
Piggly Wiggly (established 1916) and its 1930s successor Keedoozle were the brainchild of businessman Clarence Saunders – these stores were thought to represent the first forays into self-service grocery retailing. Prior to Saunders’ innovation, grocery store customers (in a typical corner store) would line up with their grocery lists, the clerk would take their lists in turn and scoot around the store collecting the orders whilst the customers waited. When completed, the clerk would bag all their items, and then go on to the next customer. Saunders’ revolutionary self-serve idea was: customers enter the store through a turnstile, collect a shopping basket which they’d cart round the shelves selecting the items they want and then proceed to the checkout.
ref=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/image-5.jpg”> Piggly Wiggly’s foundation store ca 1916[/ca
For 100% self-service to work, the store’s layout of merchandise had to be completely rearranged. As Ashley Ross put it, “the products had to do the tempting”, the store owner had to draw the shopper’s attention to the merchandise. Candy and impulse items were strategically placed at the checkout where they would be easily noticed[1]. All items in the Piggly Wiggly (PW) store were price-marked for the shopper’s convenience, the clerks no longer required to do the fetching were freed up to keep the shelves stocked with dry goods and to assist customers. Another innovation, the shop attendants were issued with uniforms, as was the use of refrigerated cases[2]. Because PW operated on a high volume/low profit margin, lower costs were passed on to the customers. By drawing customers away from speciality retail stores the prices could be further lowered. PW Saunders’ self-serving store was the “supermarket franchise model” of the future, and as John Stanton (professor of the history of food marketing at Saint Joseph’s University, Pennysylvania) noted, the PW merchandise model was basically “the origin of branding”[3].
Early PW (Photo: Dick Whittington Studio/Corbis via Getty Images)
Copycats of the self-serve template
Saunders’ self-service stores were an immediate success…by 1922 there were 1,200 stores across 29 US states, 10 years later this number had ballooned out to 2,660 stores[4]. PW’s financial bonanza (over $180m turnover by 1932) spawned numerous imitators in the US retail industry – Handy Andy, Helpy Selfy, Mick-or-Mack, Jitney Jungle – all operating under Saunders’ patent system earning him royalties[5]. Another of the rival chains won no commendations for subtlety or originality in calling its derivative store idea, Hoggly Woogly!
‘Sole Owner of My Name’
Saunders’ substantial wealth derived from PW received a blow when the company’s share price on the New York Stock Exchange bottomed out after a bear raid by market speculators. Consequently Saunders lost $3 million and was forced into bankruptcy in the 1920s❈, ending his involvement with the company. The ‘Piggly Wiggly’ brand still operates with over 600 stores in 17 states, but it has no connection with Saunders’ family or descendants. In 1928 Saunders started up a new grocery chain which he called the Clarence Saunders Sole Owner of My Name Stores…the business initially flourished, accumulating 675 stores⚀. However with the onset of the Great Depression it also went into bankruptcy in 1930[6].
⍗ Keedoozle vending machine 1949
The indefatigable Saunders was soon at it again, devising a new take on his idea of a revolutionary grocery enterprise. In 1937 this materialised with Keedoozle – the prototype of an automated store. The name apparently a contraction of “key-does-all”✾…it worked like this, upon entering the store customers received a key which they used to access the merchandise. The complicated sounding process involved taking the items and a ticker tape from glass-enclosed cases (resembling vending machines) to the cashier who inserted the tape into a “translator machine” which had a two-fold action: it triggered electrical impulses which transported the goods down a conveyor belt, and at the same time adding up the customer’s bill. The added benefit for the customer, apart from convenience and speed, Saunders claimed would be 10-15% cheaper prices than Keedoozle’s competitors[7].In practice though, things didn’t go to plan. The electrical circuits couldn’t cope with the traffic during peak hours, there were breakdowns (unreliable machinery, high maintenance costs)…and delays (compounded by a tardy conveyor belt system). Customers regularly got someone else’s orders. In all Saunders had three attempts at getting the automated service right. In 1948 he came up with (another) new, ‘improved’ version of Keedoozle…again the re-launch was accompanied by Saunders’ penchant for extravagant claims[8]. Alas, this venture also met the same fate of the earlier projects, eventual bankruptcy.Foodelectric
All of the grocery store projects that Saunders launched went pear-shaped in the end. One last hurray for the grocery pioneer was meant to be his Foodelectric concept. As heralded by Saunders, Foodelectric would take retail automation to another level – the customer would “act as her own cashier”, doing the collecting and wrapping of the purchases herself. According to Saunders, it would “cut overhead expenses and enable a small staff to handle a tremendous volume”. Saunders’ new innovation with Foodelectric was the “shopping brain”, a portable primitive computer which allows the shopper to select and despatch the items, whilst registering the prices on the computer window[9].Clarence Saunders, grocer ⍗
Unfortunately Saunders (left) died in 1953 before he could open the first Foodelectric store. The track records of Piggly Wiggly, Sole Owner Stores and especially Keedoozle were not stellar success stories in the world of retail grocery, the notion of triple-bankruptcy does not connote good business acumen. But Saunders was a visionary thinker-outside-the-box, his concepts and novelties in the field were decades ahead of their time…the Memphis grocer is remembered today for pioneering a nascent sales model of self-service which paved the way for the development of the modern supermarket.
PostScript: Piggly Wiggly or Alpha Beta?
PW’s and Saunders’ claim to being the originator of American self-serve stores could be contested by Alpha Beta a Southern Californian grocery chain which opened its doors in 1914 (two years before PW). Alpha Beta also experimented with self-service – goods in its stores were arranged alphabetically (hence the company’s name). Alpha Beta merged with American Stores in 1961 and by 1973 it could boast to having over 200 supermarkets in California (unlike PW though, AB remained a regional, Californian phenomena). After a further merger with Lucky Stores in 1988 the “Alpha Beta” brand name ceased to exist[10].
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❈ also lost by Saunders due to his financial woes was the Georgian marble “pink palace” mansion, today the Memphis Pink Palace Museum and Planetarium which the Hairy Bikers visited on their American South culinary quest
⚀ Saunders established his own professional (American) football team to promote the new grocery venture, predictably the team was called the “Clarence Saunders Sole Owner of My Name Tigers”
✾ Saunders seems to contradict this explanation of the name’s origin in the ‘Life’ magazine article cited below
[1] A Ross, ‘The Surprising Way a Supermarket Changed the World’, Time, 09-Sep-2016, www.time.com
[2] B Saar, ” ‘Keedoozle’ evolving into swiping”, (The Hawk Eye), 03-Aug-2003, http://sparky.thehawkeye.com
[3] Ross, loc.cit.
[4] ‘Piggly Wiggly’, Wikipedia, http://wikipedia.org
[5] PH Nystrom, Economics of Retailing (1930), cited in ibid.
[6] ‘Clarence Saunders (Grocer)’, Wikipedia, http://wikipedia.org
[7] B Cosgrove, ‘We Hardly Knew Ye: Remembering America’s First Automated Grocery Keedoozle’, Time, 25-Aug-2014, www.time.com
[8] “In five years”, he boldly (and unwisely) asserted in 1948, “there will be a thousand Keedoozles throughout the U.S. selling $5 billion worth of goods” (in reality there was only ever three (Memphis) built between 1937 and 1949!), ‘Saunders is sure Keedoozle will build his third fortune’, Life, 3-Jan-1949; Cosgrove, ibid.
[9] Life, loc.cit.
[10] ‘A Quick History of the Supermarket’, Groceteria.com Exploring supermarket history, www.groceteria.com
Progressive advocates and activists for a more just and equal society in the US view the Port Chicago❈ naval disaster and mutiny in July 1944 as a crucible for the cause of civil rights. African-American seamen, the majority still in their teens, revolted against the entrenched discriminatory practices they encountered in the Navy during WWII, and although vilified and punished by White authority at the time, their stand was to be a key factor in the eventual decision to abolish segregation in the US armed forces[1].
Devastation on the PC pier after the explosion
The catalyst for the subsequent ‘mutiny’ (as the Navy and White society generally characterised it – see also the follow up blog) was a catastrophic series of explosions whilst two naval carrier vessels were being loaded at the naval dock with ammunition for transportation to the Pacific theatre of war. The mega-blast killed 320 sailors and civilians (the bulk of the sailors were African-Americans), plus a further 390 personnel were injured❧. It was the worst home front disaster of WWII (the cost included nearly $9.9m worth of damage to dock, ships and buildings). The fireball engulfing the Port could be viewed from miles away, triggering a quake felt as far away as Boulder City, Nevada. Such was the force of the explosion that one 300lb chunk of steel was ‘cannonballed’ a distance of 1.5 miles, landing in the main street of the Port township[2].
The disproportionate toll of African-American enlisted men in the disaster was the result of the Navy assigning them to the most menial, labouring jobs as stevedores, basically “pack mules” loading the munitions. The Navy made casual racist assumptions about their ‘limited’ vocational capacity, despite the fact that at the Navy boot camp the black sailors had each completed specific training for one or other of the naval rating occupations[3].
Navy double standards
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the Navy treated of the two groups of seamen involved markedly differently – the White officers and sailors were given a 30-day “survivor’s leave”, whereas all the Black sailors (despite being severely shaken and traumatised by the incident) were denied the leave – despite it being standard procedure in such instances. This proved a very sore point for the African-Americans at Port Chicago. African-American seamen enlisted in the US Navy, aside from motives of patriotism, for the promise of recognition as full American citizens – a chance to escape the South’s Jim Crow segregation policies or the North’s institutionalised “second citizenship”[4]. Unfortunately what they found, and Port Chicago was no exception to elsewhere in the military, was that they were still segregated and marginalised, despite the fact they were serving in the defence of their country.
Adding insult to injury: Compensation for African-American victims watered down
That the loss of Black lives in the Port Chicago catastrophe was of diminished importance in American society at the time was even more starkly underlined in the subject of restitution. The Navy asked for $5,000 to be paid to each of the families of the 203 dead African-American sailors. Extraordinarily, after a vigorous and forthright protest from Mississippi Democrat representative, John Rankin (a White Supremacist sympathiser) that the sum be reduced to $2,000, Congress caved in to his pressure and awarded the families $3,000 each[5] … a brazenly unequivocal acknowledgement from the authorities that Black lives in America at the time were not worth as much as White ones!
The Naval Board of Inquiry
The Inquiry into the explosion would give the surviving Black seamen (and the victims’ families) more cause for grievance. The report never established the cause of the disaster❖, but implied that an error by the enlisted men may have led to the explosions. As for the white officers and the base commander, they were all absolved of any blame for what happened[6]. The Naval Board effectively ‘white-washed’ the whole episode, choosing not to cast a critical eye over the glaring pre-conditions that contributed to the disaster. Both training and safety was lax at Port Chicago Naval Magazine. Deeply significantly, the Black assigned stevedores were not given instruction in ammunition loading. Training deficiencies were in fact common at Port Chicago – the White loading officers themselves had only minimal training in supervising enlisted personnel and in handling munitions. As well, the Port’s commander Captain Merrill Kinne himself had no training in the loading of munitions and very little experience in handling them[7].
Diagram of pier & the two cargo carriers prior to the explosion
Sowing the seeds of catastrophe
Safety requirements were not observed and unsafe practices abounded: there was a complacency about the maintenance of key operational equipment; safety regulations were not widely distributed for the staff to familiarise themselves with. The practice at Port Chicago was to force the stevedores, working around-the-clock, to load the explosive cargos[8] at a pace that would imperil safety – the rate was set at 10 short tons per hatch every hour (higher than commercial stevedores✾). Facility commander Kinne encouraged a climate of competitiveness between the different crews (which they called ‘divisions’) by keeping a tally of each crew’s hourly tonnage on a chalkboard … leading to the junior officers surreptitiously laying bets on which crew would win the “speed loading contests”[9].
PostScript: Was the explosion a nuclear detonation?
In the early 1980s investigative journalist Peter Vogel postulated the hypothesis that the explosion at Port Chicago was likely to have been a nuclear one. Vogel noted the continued secrecy surrounding the naval base site and pointed to the specific characteristics of the fireball (as described by eyewitness accounts) – a “brilliant flash of white” and the mushrooming effect of the explosion’s dispersion (ie, a Wilson condensation cloud). Vogel also asserted that the force of the actual blast was greater than the reported 1,780 tons of high explosives on board the two Liberty carriers (E.A. Bryan and Quinault)[10].
Whilst Vogel’s theory would hold obvious appeal for conspiracy theorists, it has been not gained traction among historians. Its detractors, especially nuclear historians Badash and Hewlett, point to Vogel’s lack of hard evidence to support his claim, and his inability to explain why the US Government would want to detonate a nuclear device on populated home soil. Badash and Hewlett have noted in particular the absence of any residual radioactivity and resultant harm to the local community – which suggests that only conventional weaponry was involved[11].
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❈ the town of Port Chicago, now called Concord, is located about 30 miles north of San Francisco on the Sacramento River
❧ toll for Black Navy servicemen: 203 dead, 233 injured – representing 15% of all African-American casualties for the entire war
❖ it was a bad time for the Navy, PR wise. Just two months prior to the Port Chicago disaster, another calamitous explosion at West Loch (Pearl Harbour) resulted in the death of 163 seamen and hundreds injured … and like Port Chicago the disaster remained unexplained
✾ the quota set on the main base at Mare Island for instance was only 8.7
[1] President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order officially desegregating the American armed forced, United States of America Congressional Record (106th Congress), Vol 146-Part 4 (April 3, 2000 to April 25, 2000)
[2] 430 miles to the south, ‘Port Chicago Mutiny (1944)’, www.blackpast.org; ‘Port Chicago disaster’, Wikipedia, http://Wikipedia.en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘A Chronology of African American Military Service. From WWI through WWII.’ (U.S. Army, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. History), www.redstone.army.mil/history/integrate/chron36.htm
[3] RL Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History, (1989)
[4] ibid.
[5] M Moorehead, ‘The Port a Chicago Mutiny’, (Workers World), Feb 1995, www.hartford-hwp.com
[6] Allen, op.cit.
[7] ibid.
[8] The White officers used wilful deception to gain acquiescence, lying to the Black loaders as to the inherent dangers of the work – telling them the ammunition was not live which was catastrophically wrong, I Thompson, ‘Mare Island mutiny court-martial changed Navy racial policies, Daily Republic (Solano County), 23-Feb-2014, www.dailyrepublic.com
[9] Allen, loc.cit.
[10] Vogel, P (1982). THE LAST WAVE FROM PORT CHICAGO. The Black Scholar, 13(2/3), 30-47. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41066881
[11] L Badash & RG Hewlett, cited in ‘Port Chicago disaster’, Wikipedia, op.cit.
On 17th July 1944 a catastrophically massive explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California resulted in the loss of 320 lives, the majority African-American sailors. Less than four weeks after the worst wartime disaster on American home soil, the Navy, without regard for the sensitivity of the situation, instructed the surviving Black sailors to resume loading munitions onto the USS Sangay standing at the dock. 258 of them refused, contending that the conditions at the dock being still unsafe, and commenced a work stoppage. Threatened with court-martial (and a possible death penalty) 208 of the sailors eventually backed down. The navy authorities subsequently took punitive measures against these seamen (forfeiture of pay, pension entitlements curtailed) and they were eventually returned to service elsewhere[1].
The remaining 50 were charged by the Navy with mutiny. The defence counsel and the African-American men themselves denied this charge all through the proceedings, arguing that at no time were they attempting to seize control from the frontline commanders or overthrow the authority of the Navy (as argued by the prosecution team), but were refusing to work in what was clearly an unsafe environment, a protest against their being used as “guinea pigs”[2]. As Robert Allen explained, the mutiny charge was levelled against the defendants because the rightful description of what they were doing, striking against deleterious working conditions, only applied to the civilian sphere[3].
The trial of the “Port Chicago 50”
A court-martial was arraigned to be held on the Navy’s administrative facility at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The conduct of the trial was a travesty of equality before the law for the African-American servicemen involved … the accused black sailors were ridiculed as ‘primitive’ in their intellectual abilities, and “unreliable, emotional, lack(ing) capacity to understand or remember orders or instructions” (as the official ‘Finding of Facts’ stated[4]. The court hearings disintegrated into a shambles at times, eg, the judge fell asleep during the testimonies. After a six-week trial and a deliberation of only 60 minutes, a verdict was reached with unseemly haste – all 50 of the accused were found guilty of mutiny. The 50 convicted seamen were sentenced to between eight and 15 years imprisonment with hard labour as well as being on the receiving end of dishonourable discharges from the Navy[5].
Treasure Island court-martial site
One keen observer who attended the day-to-day court proceedings was NAACP❈’s Thurgood Marshall (later to become the first African-American judge on the US Supreme Court). Marshall was publicly critical of the trial, announcing: “This is not 50 men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy towards Negros. Negroes in the Navy don’t mind loading ammunition. They just want to know why they are the only ones doing the loading!”[6]. In 1945 the NAACP produced a pamphlet entitled ‘Mutiny? The Real Story of How the Navy Branded 50 Fear-shocked Sailors as Mutineers’. Marshall and the NAACP focussed the issue very squarely on the racial dimension … the treatment of the convicted men was symptomatic of a broader pattern of discrimination by the Navy against African-Americans – by mid-1943 there were 100,000 Black men serving in the Navy, but not a single Black officer among them[7]. Marshall organised an appeal on behalf of the 50 prisoners, however in June 1945 the original verdict was reaffirmed by the naval authorities.
Aftermath and consequences of the mutiny trial
The Port Chicago mutiny had an immediate punitive outcome for the 50 Black sailors who were prosecuted, but in the long run it was a Pyrrhic victory for scientific (sic) racists and White supremacists (covert and overt) both inside and outside the military. The whole episode served in the long run to raise national consciousness about practices of racial discrimination within the US military forces. And it was to prove a catalyst and inspiration for the postwar Civil Rights movement[8]. For the Navy the ramifications of Port Chicago made itself felt in short time. By the end of the World War the Navy had, in piecemeal fashion, initiated its own reforms of discriminatory practices, anticipating President Truman’s official decreeing of desegregation of the American armed forces – which did not come into law until 1948. With the world war over the Navy found it untenable to justify the continuing incarceration of the Port Chicago 50 … in January 1946 all of the men were released and assigned to other details overseas. Significantly though, none received pardons for their ‘crimes’, the convictions remained on the books[9].
A dangerous job – for White servicemen!
The Port Chicago episode – a closed book reopened?
As Erika Doss has noted, “for decades the full story of the Port Chicago disaster of July 1944 was declared “classified” information and rendered virtually absent from historical narratives of the “good war”, as patriotic Americans like to call WWII[10]. The egregious treatment of African-American seamen remained an inconvenient chapter in America’s war history, one best forgotten (Port Chicago’s subsequent name change seems intended to support this objective of burying the thorny facts of the episode).
By the 1990s the whole shameful business had started to become more openly addressed … in 1994 a memorial to the Port Chicago 50 was created on the former base’s site. But in the same year these good intentions were turned on their head by a fresh Navy inquiry which found (unbelievably) that “race was not a factor” in the 1944 court case – a finding that would not be out-of-place in the annals of the “Flat Earth Society”!
Port Chicago Naval Magazine
(Photo: National Park Service)
A number of the convicted African-Americans then still alive agitated for a just resolution, a reversal of the wrongs perpetrated against them. One of “the 50”, Freddie Meeks was talked into requesting a pardon which was finally granted in 1999 by President Clinton[11]. However five others including Joe Small refused to request the same, steadfastly insisting that as they had committed no criminal act, they was no question of seeking a pardon.
PostScript: High hopes for justice with Obama
The continued denial of justice for the Port Chicago 50 led it to become a cause célèbre in the US. This remains the case in 2017 despite the fact that all of the convicted African-American sailors are now dead. Their relatives were among those calling on the Black president, Barack Obama, to exonerate “the 50” and overturn their verdicts. Disappointingly, Obama’s outgoing powers of presidential pardon, recently enacted, did not include any of the Port Chicago 50 in its number – though this was more to do with the Obama administration’s inability to find a legal mechanism to make this a reality, rather than any lack of will on the part of the president[12].
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❈ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
[1] ‘Port Chicago mutiny’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[2] Joe Small, one of the survivors of the disaster and labelled as a ‘ringleader’ by the Navy, summed up the position taken by the 50 defendants,
“(we) weren’t trying to shirk work. But to go back to work under the same conditions, with no improvements, no change, the same group of officers…we thought there was a better alternative”, E Doss, “Commemorating the Port Chicago Naval Magazine Disaster of 1944: Remembering the Racial Injustices of the ‘Good War’ in Contemporary America’, American Studies Journal, Number 59 (2015), www.asjournal.org
[3] B Bergman, “War, ‘mutiny’ and civil rights: Remembering Port Chicago”, Berkeley News, 10-Jul-2014, www.berkeley.edu
[4] A Gustafson, ‘The Port Chicago Disaster: Race and the Navy in World War II’, (Turnstile Tours), 29-Aug-2014, www.turnstiletours.com
[5] Bergman, loc.cit.
[6] Marshall, quoted in NA Hamilton, ‘Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States’, (2002)
[7] Doss, loc.cit.
[8] ibid.
[9] US Secretary of the Navy James V Forrestal and Admiral Ernest King, working together, were instrumental in getting the wheels of integration in the Navy going forward, S Sundin, ‘Port Chicago – Desegregation of the US Navy’, (Sarah’s Blog), 28-Jul-2014, www.sarahsundin.com
[10] Doss, op.cit.
[11] C Nolte, ‘Clinton Pardons Wartime ‘Mutineer’ / Port Chicago black sailor of 50 in infamous case’, (SFGate), 24-Dec-1999, wwwsfgate.com
[12] ‘Full list: Obama pardons these 78 people, shortens 153 prisoners’ sentences’, (Pix 11), 19-Dec-2016, www.pix11.com
John Clarke: Trail-blazing Parodist, Lodestar, Daggstar
John Morrison Clarke died, most unexpectedly, in the Victorian wilderness a day-and-a-half ago. An ordinary looking man with an ordinary (unremarkable and yet distinctive) voice, but an ‘Everyman’ with a towering gift for communicating parody and travesty with coruscating clarity!
John Clarke, born and raised in Palmerston North, New Zealand, but domicile in Melbourne, Australia, for the last 40 years, was a uniquely talented satirist, TV comedian, comic writer and actor. The word ‘genius’ gets carelessly bandied around way too much these days, but in appraising the oeuvre of Mr John Clarke it finds a true home.
Daggstar completely out of the box
Whilst in New Zealand Clarke developed and refined the character of Fred Dagg, a stereotypical, blunt-speaking farmer from the North Island, with long straggly hair and perpetually clad in a black singlet and gumboots. Fred Dagg got Clark’s idiosyncratic brand of humour into the spotlight of New Zealand television. By 1977 Clark had outgrown both NZ and (so it seemed) Fred Dagg and moved to the bigger canvas of Australia❈. Clarke wasn’t however quite done with Fred Dagg – in Australia Fred resurfaced as a real estate ‘expert’ with his guide for would-be home buyers providing the “good oil” on avoiding the pitfalls inherent in the spiel of property agents – as the following “bullshit-busting” sampler of his trenchant wit testifies:
• a “cottage” is a caravan with the wheels taken off
• “genuine reason for selling” means the house is for sale
• “rarely can we offer” means the house is for sale
• “superbly presented delightful charmer” doesn’t mean anything really, but it’s probably still for sale!
• “privacy, taste, charm, space, freedom, quiet, away from it all location in much sought-after cul-de-sac situation” means that it’s not only built down a hole, it’s built at the very far end of the hole
• “a panoramic, breathtaking, or magnificent view” is an indication that the house has windows, and if the view is “unique”, there’s probably only one window
Fred Dagg AKA John Clarke was no admirer of the realty and property game and the proclivity of estate agents to be “fast and loose with the truth”, and he gave us the following memorable job description of what they really do:
“The function of the agent basically is to add to the price of the article without actually producing anything” (gold!)
(and how to recognise an actual estate agent when you see one)
“If you’ve got gold teeth and laugh-lines around your pockets, you’re through to the semis without dropping a set”.
There was so much to the creative output of Clarke comma J, and so much variety too … screenplays, film acting, radio, stage work, television, songs, books. Clarke’s art didn’t fit into any one particular mould, he was, to use Martin Luther’s expression, an “irregular planet which cannot be fixed among the stars”, always inventing, moving on and reinventing, exploring something new that had piqued his interest.
My personal favourite John Clarke masterwork is the Complete Book of Australian Verse⌖. This nugget of gold is a series of early Nineties recordings in which Clarke audaciously and imaginatively reinvents the “Canon of Great British Poets”, relocating it to regional and outback Australia. Clarke ‘discovered’ the existence of an Aussie poet “laureate-hood” comprising “dinky-di” Australian poetry ‘greats’ with Antipodean-sounding names like ‘Shagger’ Tennyson, ‘Stumpy’ Byron V.C, ‘Gavin’ Milton and “Fifteen Bobsworth” Longfellow⊛.
Clarke’s sublime riff on these fictional masters of Australian poetry is incisively, deeply humorous, and both wise and pretentious-sounding at the same time! Absurdly funny stuff, especially when uttered in John’s wonderful flat, disinterested, monotone voice (“he was sentenced to three years jail for insulting a lobster in a Sydney restaurant”) … Clarke’s clinical dissection of (then) Leader of the Opposition John Howard is a devastatingly savage takedown the future PM…to paraphrase playwright Simon Gray, it “made me laugh so much that I was prepared to overlook its essential cruelty”. Clarke’s poem entreats Howard—who had failed twice to win the top job in Canberra—to change his vocation:
‘To a Howard’ by Rabbi Burns
Wee, sleekit, cowerin, tim’rous beastie,
I know tha’s probably doing thy bestie,
…………………….
Thou’ll try wi’ th’ gunnery up at the range,
Thou’ll no have much truible, thou’ve dun it afore,
Thou’s an expert for a’ that; look, ‘Wanted: Small Bore’.
With ‘A Child’s Christmas in Warrnambool’ Clarke produces a poetic tour de force by turning Dylan Thomas’ classic winter-scene ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ on it’s head, transforming it into a children’s nostalgic celebration of Australian summers past:
“The smell of insect repellant and eucalyptus and the distant constant bang of the flywire door”/”the fridge of imperishable memory”/”the wide brown bee-humming trout-fit sheep-rich two-horse country”/”some middle-order nephew skipping down the vowel-flattening pitch and putting the ball into the tent-flaps on the first bounce of puberty”.
The Complete Verse‘s eclectic compilation includes a coruscating if excruciatingly painful piece by “Sylvia Blath” which is both riotously funny and disturbingly harrowing at the same time. Clarke weaves into the poem Sylvia’s harangue of her dead father who “danced upon my cradle, as I Annexed the Sedatenland” and ends with an unexpected and wicked twist (a crossed-phone line channelling of Germaine Greer!!!): “Daddy Daddy I’m through, Hello? Germaine … I can hardly hear you, this is a very bad line.”
Since the 1990s Clarke had been an on-screen constant feature with his famous series of mock political interviews (“two-handers” with Bryan Dawe as the straight-man ‘innocently’ asking questions which were fodder for Clarke’s witty retorts) … the one-liners just rolling off Clarke’s golden and acerbic tongue, skewing high-profile politicians left, right and centre:
(pricking at the bluster of an overbearing state premier)
“I’m not interested in doing the most intelligent thing … I’m JEFF KENNETT!
Prime Minister Hawke’s robust “Alpha male”, over-enthusiastic response to the question of how fit he was after a recent op:
(I’m so fit that)
“I’m a danger to shipping!”
Clarke was a wordsmith that other satirists and comic writers in Australasia must have looked at with a mixture of admiration and envy … he simply had such a razor-sharp, punchy, economical and hilarious way with words.
And there was much more to John Clarke’s stellar CV – such as his ‘invention’ of the cliché-ridden ‘sport’ of farnarkeling for The Gillies Report, and not to forget the manifold brilliant riffs on finance, business, the economy, the public service and the environment (“the front fell off (and) we towed the ship outside the environment”). Clarke was a trail-blazer in television comedy … his “on the money” take on the crazy, shambolic world of Olympics bureaucracy The Games was a template for other later projects which explored the thorny terrain of corporations and officialdom (such as Utopia) and it informed the BBC’s contribution to the 2012 London Olympics campaign.
John Clarke’s sudden, most untimely death leaves a Sydney Opera House-sized hole in Australian and New Zealand satire – and I shall never forget that voice – as with Billy Bragg’s, so distinctive, and as with Joe (Dragnet) Friday’s, so deadpan matter-of-fact … or his trademark mischievous grin and the sparkle in the eyes.
⚜⚜⚜
Vale John Clarke … thank you for entertaining and delighting us for so long and enriching the lives of so many people all the way from Palmerston North to Perth and far beyond. John’s song lyrics were wrong in one respect … there are countless people in the two Trans-Tasman countries that he lived and worked in who do know “how lucky” they were to have him, albeit for too short a time✥.
Footnote: I didn’t realise until now that Clarkey was responsible for introducing that quintessentially Australian term “budgie smuggler” into the vernacular lexicon of the nation, to the regret of one former PM (not Howard) and the joy of everyone else!
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❈ his unusual accent didn’t really fit the clipped English speech pattern of “Nu Zillunders” anyway
⌖ the success of which was followed up by the Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse
⊛ other ‘Oz’ poet-luminaries include b.b.hummings, TS (Tabby Serious) Eliot, Ewen Coleridge, Ted Lear and many more
✥ one of the incomparable Fred Dagg’s best-known songs was entitled “We don’t know how lucky we are”
The seeming ubiquity of Woolies?Woolworths is an internationally known name synonymous with traditional merchandising budgeted within the reach of the average consumer. When I was a kid I thought that the Woolworths variety store-cum-supermarket chain in cities and towns strewn all around Australia and New Zealand was an offshoot of the famous pioneering Woolworths “dime and nickel” company in the US. Until I actually went to South Africa I wasn’t even aware that there was Woolworths in that country as well. When I did discover its existence travelling around the RSA garden route I initially assumed that it too was a spoke in the far-reaching American F W Woolworth imperial retail wheel.
Only much, much later did I learn of the total absence of any business or corporate connection between the three ‘Woolworths’ entities (sometimes displayed in singular form, sometimes plural, sometimes with an apostrophe). Both the retail chain in Australasia and the one in South Africa got the name ‘Woolworths’ through the same legalistic loophole. When a collection of businessmen began the Australian retail enterprise they acquired the name because the original American company had not registered the name in NSW (or anywhere in Australia). Thus the first store in Sydney CBD’s Imperial Arcade in 1924 was called Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement. The transition to the eventual nomenclature used (simply ‘Woolworths’) was not quite that simple. Before settling on ‘Woolworths’, the first notion that came to Percy Christmas (Woolworth’s inaugural CEO) and his directors was to call it ‘Wallworths Bazaar’, a pun on the American retailer’s name[1].
Somerset Mall ‘Woolies‘
Western Cape RSA
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Similarly, the South African ‘Woolworths’ acquired the name because there was no legal trademark impediment to it using the name in South Africa. Founder Max Sonnenberg and his son Richard started the first Woolworths store in Cape Town in 1931, and like the Australian namesake it has never had any financial connection to the prior existing F W Woolworth Co business. Woolworths South Africa-style was a different sort of retail animal, modelling itself on the upmarket British Marks and Spencer rather than the F W Woolworth bargain basement store concept[2].
Woolworths ground zero: Creating the retail templateThe American phenomenon started in 1878 when Frank Winfield Woolworth, son of a poor potato farmer, started his first store in Utica, New York, the basis of his business strategy was to sell a wide selection of items at low price (initially all the merchandise was set at 5 cents each). The store was poorly located and failed abjectly but Woolworth persisted, opening a second dry goods and variety store the following year in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the formula eventually caught on. The entrepreneur expanded his store concept to a “five-and-dime” one (items set at 5¢ and 10¢ each).
The early F W Woolworth & Co
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Woolworth’s brother Charles (known as ‘Sum”) got in on the business, starting up his own retail stores soon after his older brother’s. Frank expanded F W Woolworth Co into a chain by mergers and partnerships with his cousin Seymour Knox I and with other relatives and friends❈. By gathering together a little club of owners Woolworth could purchase large quantities of goods directly from the manufacturers. As the US stores multiplied and prospered, Frank, remembering his own disadvantaged childhood, took pride in the fact that the “ordinary man” could afford to buy from Woolworth stores[3].
From 1890 FWW would embark on annual (sometimes biannual) large-scale buying trips to Europe, always paying the suppliers in cash on principle. Exposure to European manufacturers promoted awareness of market potentiality in other countries and may have prompted Woolworth’s eventual decision to branch out internationally. Anglophile Frank had his eye firmly on Britain as his 1890 trip diary indicates: “a good penny and sixpence store, run by a live Yankee, would be a sensation here”[4]. The chain had already extended north to Canada and subsidiaries were launched in the UK, Germany, Austria, Mexico and Cuba. The UK Woolworth sub-set itself opened stores in the Republic of Ireland, Palestine, Cyprus, the British West Indies and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
FW Woolworth store in Glasgow (Source: Pinterest UK)
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British F W WoolworthWoolworths came to Britain in 1909 with the first store, selling clothing, stationary and toys, opening in Liverpool in northern England (family cousin Fred Moore Woolworth was the British arm’s first managing director). The pricing strategy matched the US “five-and-dime” one with items selling at 3d and 6d. The British chain flourished from the 1920s on, becoming a household name through the UK, so much so that most consumers in Britain and Ireland believed that their ‘Woolies’ shops were a local invention, “where sixpence once went a long way”[5].
Like the parent company in America, British Woolworths proved a retail innovator. The Liverpool store introduced lunch counters (followed by Blackpool and other large UK stores)回, which were the precursor to the standard food courts which became integral to shopping malls later in the 20th century[6]. The Woolies restaurants also adhered to the 3d and 6d price formula, although by 1941 there had been some increases, eg, a split lobster salad had risen to the princely sum of one shilling (12d or 1/-)[7].
Woolworth UK’s rise and fallThe 1930s marked a high point for Woolworth in the UK … outside of the Christmas season the chain was opening a new store every five days! During the price inflation of the late 1930s the Woolworth giant kept the sixpence limit on its prices by asserting its buying power to coerce suppliers into accepting lower margins for their goods¤. By 1958 F W Woolworth Co had amassed 1,000 branches in Britain[8].
The first signs of the downturn in Woolworth UK’s fortunes can be traced from the 1960s, the parent company forced the British arm into introducing Woolco, a series of one stop shops usually located out-of-town. These did not succeed, as they had in America because the UK lacked the US’s higher car ownership which suited out-of-town shopping. This was also an unwise move away from Woolworth UK’s strength, its high street stores. The UK business’ problems continued in the 1970s – Britain’s decimalisation in 1971 caught Woolworth unprepared because unlike other retailers it had resisted the move to self-service. The upshot was costly to Woolworth (£5 million and a five-year process trying to replace their over-abundance of store cash registers. Also in the 1970s a number of Woolworth stores in Britain and Northern Ireland burned down, attributed at least in part in incompetent and short-sighted management … resulting in brand damage to the trusted F W Woolworth name from which it never entirely recovered[9].
Closing down: Bromsgrove store (Worcs.)
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British elements (principally Kingfisher plc) finally gained a controlling interest in the UK enterprise in 1982, but Woolies, this British institution on the retail landscape ultimately fell foul of intense competition from cut-price retailers … many customers defected to British supermarket giants Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Falling sales❀ and a cash-flow crisis affected its entertainment arm. The downturn was exacerbated by the adverse effects of the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s. In 2007 Britain’s Woolworth Co experienced its first trading loss in 95 years … and much worst was to come. Over Christmas 2008 807 stores in the UK closed. With Deloitte’s administrating, the whole Woolworth chain had a complete shutdown over a 41 day period (months short of what would have been 100 years of operation in the UK). The carve-up saw restructure specialists Hilco Capital acquire the retail business and the Shop Direct Group (owned by the Barclay brothers) taking over the online retail sector … this too however was closed down in 2015[10].
Rise and fall of the prototype organisationThe America parent Woolworth company was spectacularly successful in creating a chain of “cash-and-carry” dime stores. By 1977 there were 3,414 stores in the US, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and 1,884 outside of the US[11]. The pioneering merchandising methods of F W Woolworth with the founder’s emphasis on sales and customer service, and direct purchasing, established a solid base to enable his successors as CEO to continue to sustain and grow the Woolworth retail empire. However after WWII there was shift in the nature of shopping propelled by the burgeoning car culture … retailing in America and elsewhere moved on from the high street stores which had been the mainstay of Woolworth to the new malls located in the suburbs. Woolworth tried slowly to adjust but found itself less able to adapt to this change than its major competitors.
Woolco, Canada (Photo: Reddit)
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By the 1960s the original five-and-dime stores had morphed into other commercial entities: whilst the Woolworth flagship was retained there was a move into speciality stores and the large discount retail chain Woolco, which had a measure of success. Through the eighties and into the nineties the ailing FWW giant lingered on.
La Crosse (Wisconsin) store, 1992 (Source: La Crosse Tribune)
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In 1997 F W Woolworth Co in the US folded, following years of diminishing competitiveness with its rivals (the chain in 1996 posted a crippling loss of $US37 million). The Venator Group took its place and F W Woolworth ceased to be a trading name. Venator’s retail focus fixed on the foot ware market with Foot Locker and Kinney Shoes. This was a sudden end to a gradual process by which Woolworth Five-and-Dimes were overtaken by the likes of more dynamic enterprises, Wal-Mart, Kmart (formerly Kresge), Target and other commercial players who adapted to change far better than the veteran Woolworth[12].
F W Woolworth Co ultimately suffered the same fate as the British Woolworth – an accumulated obsolescence. As Jennifer Steinhauer summarised its plight, it had “faded in the collective memory of a nation warmly nostalgic for old stores but not willing to shop in them”. The pioneering retailer had become increasingly irrelevant to American consumers … the advantage of convenience it once possessed (where shoppers could get “lipstick, diapers and a milk shake at a discount, all under the one roof”) was now all-too-easily available at the abundance of handy drugstores, supermarkets and discount stores popping up everywhere[13].
PostScript: South Africa and Australia – Higher and HigherWhilst the Woolworths brand name no longer decorates the urban commercial landscape in the US and Britain, the Woolworths name in the Southern Hemisphere is a different story. Over the last 20 years both Woolworths Holdings Limited (RSA) and Woolworths Limited (Australia) have experienced impressive growth through expansion and diversification.
Woolworths Holdings Ltd (WHL) achieved a net income of R3.12 billion in 2015 as a provider of clothing, footwear, accessories, groceries, beauty products, home wares and financial services. WHL has pursued an aggressive campaign of expansion, taking over companies in South Africa (Mimco, Trenery) and Australia (David Jones stores, Country Road, Witchery).
Woolworths Casula (NSW)
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Woolworths Limited (WL) made a net surplus of A$1.2 billion in 2016 with its variety stores (Big W), supermarkets (Countdown, Food For Less, Safeway, Flemings, etc), grocers (Thomas Dux). Part of the company’s impressive growth has come from diversification – into petrol stations (Caltex-Woolworths) and into liquor stores (taking over BWS and Dan Murphy’s), hotels and gambling (Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group)[14]. The Aussie Woolworths brand currently maintains a presence in Australia, New Zealand and India▤. Business success aside, it has not been all smooth sailing for the RSA and Australian companies … both WHL and WL have been embroiled in controversies in their home countries from time to time. In 2010 WHL removed Christian magazines from its shelves (a financial decision by Woolworths), provoking a huge outcry from the powerful Christian community in South Africa with WHL having to back down[15]. WL’s move into alcohol has been extremely profitable (together with Coles it is estimated to account for ¾ of Australian liquor sales). Allied to this is Woolworths’ impact on poker machine gambling … through its ALH arm it has in excess of 12,650 pokies in pubs. Anti-gambling campaigners have accused WL of targeting children to push up pub sales by offering loyalty reward cards to frequent gamblers (and placing “Kid’s Club” playgrounds close to the poker machine areas in its hotels)[16].
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌❈ FWW’s mergers absorbed Knox & Co, Kirby & Co, Charlton & Co, C S Woolworth & Co and Moore & Co
回 the concept was an elaboration on F W Woolworth’s ‘Soda Fountain’ introduced in his Lancaster (US) store in 1907
¤ a similar bullying practice to that used by Woolworths Australia (and its rival Coles) this decade against local manufacturers
❀ one exception being the old Woolies favourite, the pick ‘n’ mix confectionary lines
▤ in 1989 Industrial Equity Ltd (IEL), part of the AdSteam Group (Adelaide Steamship Company), successfully took over Woolworths Australia … however the Woolworths company was subsequently publicly floated several years later
[2] after WWII the South African firm actually had a business relationship with Marks and Spencer for a number of years, ‘Woolworths (South Africa)’, Wikipedia, http://em.n.wikipedia.org
[3] One incident in particular resounded with him, being unable to afford an item in a Watertown store as a child, ‘Biography of F.W. Woolworth’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[4] J Robinson, ‘Woolworths: the rise and fall of the departmental store giant’, The Guardian (London), 20-Nov-2008, www.theguardian.com
[5] ‘Christmas Past and Christmas Presents’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[6] ‘The British Lunch Counter 1938-41’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[7] ibid.
[8],’A potted history of F.W. Woolworth’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[9] ibid.;’Preparing for decimalisation “D-Day” on 15 February 1971′, in ibid.
[10] ibid.; Robinson, op.cit.
[11] J N Ingham, Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders, Vol. 4
[12] F W Woolworth also tended to cling to outmoded lines, eg, in its toy department old-fashioned puzzles and no action figures, J Steinhauer, ‘Woolworth’s Give Up the Five-and-Dime, New York Times, 18-Jul-1997, www.nyt.com
[13] Woolworth Co’s competitors ultimately offered more choice of products, quicker checkouts and often lower prices,ibid
[14] Woolworths’ move into hardware stores via Masters Home Improvement was far less successful with the retail giant getting badly singed, E Stewart, ‘Masters: Five reasons Woolworths is pulling the plug on struggling hardware chain’, 18-Jan-2017, ABC News, www.mobile.abc.net.au
[15] ‘Woolworths (South Africa)’, op.cit.
[16] L Mulligan, ‘Woolworths under fire from anti-poker machine groups for introducing gambling rewards card in pubs’, ABC News, 17-Sep-2015, www.abc.net.au
Today hardly anyone advocates the ideology and practice of eugenics, not openly anyway and certainly not using the prejudicial language of the past. Which is not to say that the notion of eugenics is a buried and long-forgotten relic❈. The vocabulary of human biology and biotechnology these days is about human gene editing, genetic engineering, genetic modification, genetic enhancement, germline gene experimentation, gene therapy, the human genome, sociobiology, reprogenetics, a Brave New World of molecular cloning, “saviour siblings”, “donor eggs” and “designer babies”.
DNA
The scientists and technocrats who enthuse about scientific progress and future technology and in particular genetic engineering[1], tend to be “gung-ho” about the desirability of genetic intervention in human life which they see as an inevitable process◙. To them it equates with and even defines progress – the curative and preventative promise of medical genetics is for breakthroughs in a host of life-threatening diseases.
Designing a better baby?
For many geneticists and parents, the latent capabilities of human genetic engineering (HGE) is an enticing prospect, a chance for the realisation of new medical therapies to prevent and treat the multitude of diseases that plague contemporary society[2]. Put in these terms, something akin to a “motherhood statement”, few would at least in principle find grounds for objection. Naturally the vast majority of parents wish for a better future for their offspring and descendants, so leaving affordability aside for a moment, using biotechnology to eliminate the risks of genetic disease would appear to have broad community if not quite universal support. But as shown below, when you take a step beyond the fixing of genetic disorders and try to use that advanced science to augment your children’s physical or intellectual attributes it opens up a myriad of complex and perplexing dilemmas, both ethical and medical.
A world of environmental, manufacturing and agricultural panaceas
Aside from the controversial question of genetic manipulation there is already a range of successful genetic applications in society. There is the environmental role – genetically engineered bacterium can and is used to clean up oil spills (and for creating insulin to treat diabetics). Genetic science can reduce the human footprint on the environment. With the population of the globe predicted to rise by 2.4 billion in the next 34 yearsΔ, its advocates argue that biotechnology and genetic engineering can help address the inevitable and critical world food shortage … growing new crops and effecting pest control of existing food sources[3].
Pre-natal counselling and screening of foetal abnormalities
Pre-natal screening for embryo defects like Down syndrome, Trisomy 18 (Edward’s disease) and spina bifida, has a seductive lure for parental planners, these are already commonplace procedures for mothers in advanced societies. Human geneticists trumpet this as a boon to parental choice, allowing the family to produce a baby free of life-threatening and restricting conditions. Preimplantation genetic screening takes this a step further.
The snowballing effect of genetic screening
IVF technology enables the screening of embryos for inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease or Tay-Sachs disease … many view this as the start of a continuum which could usher in an “era of designer babies”[4]. The market in this area has created a consumer-driven demand for “eugenic services”. IVF testing for mitochondrial DHA has been exponential … in 2011 there were 580,000 medical genetic tests in Australia, a 280% jump on the 2006 figure![5]. Currently we test for Down syndrome and similar defects, next might be Parkinson’s disease, beyond that? If given the green light there is potentially no end in sight … will they test with a view to eradicating autism? Down the track it might be dwarfism, even homosexuality?[6]. This may sound alarmist to some, but unchecked, it is plausible that gene tampering could ultimately infiltrate these areas.
This is the perspective of many detractors of genetic testing who question what the limits are and even if there are any limits to the relentless juggernaut of genetic research and experimentation. Some opponents of screening for genetic defects have described its ultimate purpose as “race cleansing”, echoing the fanatical purification goals of the discredited eugenics movements of the past. Human geneticists for their part proffer the reassurance that HGE has built-in safeguards that prevent excesses from occurring, that the entire process is highly regulated and intensely scrutinised to precisely stop it going too far[7]. Opponents refute this, highlighting the dangers and uncertainties of risky human experimentation … unpredictable effects of gene transfer, the effects of gene insertion on other genes, the chance of off-target mutations (unintentional edits to genomes such as occurred in recent Chinese CRISPR-Cas9 experiments on the genome), and other unknowns, all not properly understood at this time[8].
Genetic enhancement and the danger of a perfectibility fixation
Genetic engineering to detect embryonic abnormalities and erase them is widely accepted in the West, genetic enhancement (practiced as a matter of course in agriculture) for humans remains a much harder sell. Genetically modifying your future child to prevent, say, a detected autoimmune disease, is one thing, but screening with the purpose of altering your child’s appearance, eye colour, etc, making him or her taller, more intelligent, more athletic, etc. … the imperative of achieving a Stepford Wives world of perfectibility could take over. This would propel medical genetics into a whole different realm, a techno-eugenic future fraught with menace and worrying ethical implications[9].
The ethical or moral dimension
Ethical or moral objectors to HGE seem to divide along religious and non-religious lines. Many professing a religious faith argue that the practice runs counter to the “will of God”, whilst those of a secular disposition might view it as “tinkering with nature”. The genetic engineering detractors argue that humans are inviolable, endowed with individual rights, and that such interventions are unnatural and trample all over those rights[10]. Some academics with an interest in science ethics however dispute the merit of the ‘naturalness’ argument[11].
Geneticists and biotechnologists would characterise a call for a blanket ban on human genetic experimentation as a conservative, “knee-jerk” reaction which seeks to close off the door to scientific inquiry and medical advancement, but the obverse, an open slather, unchecked approach to genetic intervention seems an imprudent one, given the unknown consequences of gene editing and of venturing too deeply into a genetic minefield that is almost certainly irreversible.
Concerns with non-therapeutic abuse in genetics has a wide ambit: another peripheral issue pointing to likely future genetic manipulation lies in the realm of sport, an area already plagued by the increasingly widespread use of steroids for performance enhancement. The development of gene therapy has elevated the disturbing likelihood of gene doping – inserting or modifying DNA for the purpose of enhancing the performance of athletes. Gene doping is still in an experimental phase but is particularly concerning both to doctors and to Olympic administrators because it is hard to detect and it’s nature is unpredictable and potentially dangerous[12].
Whilst the possibility of misuse and harm of gene editing technology is a barrier for many, others opposing genetic manipulation from a humanist viewpoint and have called out the human genetics industry for discriminating against and undermining the dignity of the disabled and the mentally ill. Opponents say that there is a common element at the core of both eugenics and human genetic engineering – the devaluing of (some) human life. Contemporary geneticists, they say, start from the same philosophical standpoint as the old-style eugenicists: a view of the disabled and other “genetically challenged” people that is essentially negative and pessimistic, conveying the idea that they are extraneous and to be done away with. Many critics see these advocates of HGE as intolerant of those with genetic impairment, refusing to accept the disabled in particular for how they are (which is part of the diversity of the human condition)[13]. These detractors believe that the normalisation of human genetic modification would lead to an erosion of respect for the disabled.
A fundamental shift in the parent/child relationship?
Another objection to human gene policy revolves around its perceived adverse effect on the traditional bond between child and parent. Brendan Foht, from a conservative perspective, has hypothesised that in a situation where parents decide to dip into the gene pool to create the kind of offspring they want, the child becomes a product of his or her parents’ desires and wishes … their acceptance of and love for the child is provisional upon the child stacking up to that ‘wish-list’. This, Foht points out, upturns the optimal relationship in which the child is the beneficiary of his or her parents’ unconditional love[14].
Some opposed to the genetic engineering of humans have emphasised the absence of consent by future descendants, ie, the ethical issues raised by “altering the germline in a way that affects the next generation without their consent” (Francis Collins, US National Institute of Health). This objection has been dismissed as a nonsense by John Harris who contends that parents “have literally no choice but to make decisions for future people without considering their consent”, this happens every day, without it life would not function properly [15].
Proponents of HGE have made attempts to salvage the reputation of the new eugenics, eg, Nicholas Agar’s concept of Liberal eugenics which leaves the decision to the consumer (ie, the parents) rather than to public health authorities, thus avoiding (argues Agar) the repugnant consequences of past eugenics practices. But as Robert Sparrow has noted, any emphasis “on pre-determined genetics of future persons leads to assumptions about the relative worth of different life plans”[16].
The politics and economics of HME
Some opponents of HGE have focussed on the political and economic element: their argument runs, if genetic engineering was given free rein to intervene into the human sphere, the result would be free market eugenics, so that access to genetic modification or enhancement would come down to the ability to pay and inequalities within society would exacerbate. The fear is that in this scenario the elites of society would have a monopoly of both biological and financial control[17].
The thorny issue of genetic engineering of humans, especially with its uncomfortable link with the pernicious effects of the eugenics movement of last century, remains a highly controversial one. Scientific advancements in biotechnology has created a receptive market for genetic screening for defective embryos, but the genetic enhancement of humans, with its Frankenstein-ish overtones, remains a bridge too far for most people in western democracies✥.
PostScript: Genetic Enhancement – Ask an expert
In December 2015 Washington DC hosted the ‘International Summit on Human Gene Editing’ in which scientists, bioethicists and other stakeholders from the US, the UK and China debated issues around the use of the human gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9. The summit’s committee adopted a “precautionary principle” re the technology and resolved to avoid any unknown, unintended consequences. It acknowledged the value of CRISPR gene editing research as an aiding the knowledge of basic biology but advocated a cautious approach in its utilisation. It called for more research to be completed on the technology before any more ambitious applications were considered[18]. To date 40 countries have rejected human germline modification using gametes (genetically altered embryos)[19].
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
❈ which is not to say that there is no one today who advocates eugenics, eg, some elements of contemporary society couch their ideology in terms like ‘humanitarian’ eugenics, see ‘Future Generations’ (www.eugenics.net) which reproduces the work of pro-eugenics scientists such as Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton. Similar sentiments are also apparent in the published work of Helmuth Nyborg
◙ this is at the core of the transhumanism philosophy, the belief that “the human species in its current form does not represent the end of (it’s) development”, and posits that continuous, radical change in science and technology will lead to that future (‘What is Transhumanism?’, www.whatistranshumanism.org)
Δ according to a 2015 United Nations DESA report
✥ cloning in particular remains the greatest taboo in medical genetics. A recent Pew study in the US found that the overwhelming number of its respondents oppose brain chip implants; surveys and polls in various western countries over the last 25 to 30 years have echoed this rejection of human cloning, G O Schaefer, ‘The future of Genetic Engineering is not in the West’, The Conversation, 2-Aug-2016, www.theconversation.com
[1] the science of altering living things by changing the information encoded in their DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), ‘Genetic Engineering’, (A Guide to the Future by Christopher Barnett), www.explainigthefuture.com
[2] human germline editing will decrease and even eliminate many serious genetic diseases, reducing human suffering worldwide, (Emeritus Prof. Harris), J Harris, ‘Pro: Research on Gene Editing in Humans must continue’, in ‘Pro and Con: Should Gene Editing be Performed on Human Embryos?’, National Geographic, www.nationalgeographic.com
[3] D Koepsell, ‘The Ethics of Genetic Engineering’ (A position paper from the Center for Inquiry, Office of Public Policy, Washington D.C.) August 2007, www.centerforinquiry.net
[4] F Nelson, ‘The return of eugenics’, The Spectator, 02-Apr-2016, www.thespectator.com.au
[5] S Saulter, ‘Trusting the Future? Ethics of Human Genetic Modification’ (Op-Ed), 6-May-2014, Live Science, www.livescience.com; R Gebelhoff, ‘What’s the difference between genetic engineering and eugenics?’, Washington Post, 22-Feb-2016, www.washingtonpost.com
[6] it is a matter of trust, their argument runs, Saulter, loc.cit. Proponents place much faith in the new, cutting edge gene-editing technology, CRIPR-Cas9, which is reputed to have a lower error rate than other technologies
[7] ‘Q & A about Techno-eugenics’, (HG Alert), www.hgalert.org; B P Foht, ‘The Case against HG Editing’, Nation Review, 4-Dec-2015, www.nationreview.com
[8] M Darnovsky, ‘Con: Do Not Open the Door to Editing Genes in Future Humans’ in ‘Pro and Con’, op.cit.; HG Alert, loc.cit.
[9] Moreover opponents of HGE see such modifications as unnecessary, C J Epstein, ‘Is medical genetics the new eugenics?’, Genetics in Medicine, (2003) 5, www.nature.com. A 36-nation survey by D C Wertz in the 1990s found that both patients and health care professionals held a pessimistic view of the disabled, D C Wertz, ‘Eugenics is alive and well: a survey of genetic professionals around the world’, Sci Context, 1998 Aut-Wint. 11(3-4), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[10] HG Alert, loc.cit.
[11] Prof. Harris contends that what is ‘natural’ is not inherently good, diseases for example are natural with millions dying prematurely from them. Gene editing therapies, he says, could prevent these illnesses and deaths, Harris, op.cit.
[12] L A Pray, ‘Sport, Gene Doping, and WADA’, Scitable Mobile, (2008), www.nature.com; T Franks, ‘Gene doping: Sport’s biggest battle?’, BBC News, 12-Jan-2014,www.bbc.com
[13] HG Alert, loc.cit.
[14] Foht, op.cit.
[15] Harris, loc.cit.
[16] R Sparrow, ‘Liberalism and eugenics’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(3) 2011,www.philpapers.org
[17] David Koepsell has speculated that a monopolisation of power and wealth on the mechanisms of genetics could eventuate in a science fiction-esque future in which the human race is divided into two species, comprising ‘super-humans’ and ‘sub-humans’, Koepsell, op.cit.
[18] it concluded that editing the human germline would be ‘irresponsible’ without resolving the safety and efficacy issues, and without obtaining a “broad social consensus” on the technology’s use, T Lewis, ‘Hundreds of scientists just met in DC and had heated discussions about whether or not they should alter genes in human babies’, Business Insider Australia, 05-Dec-2015, www.businessinsider.com.au
[19] Darnovsky, loc.cit.
By the mid 1930s the allure of “scientific racism” was on the wane in advanced western countries❈. Although scientists were in the thick of the movement both as eugenicists and as propagandists, significant numbers of scientists and politicians never bought the shonky scientific approach of the eugenics movement☫. Many in the science community never accepted the methodology for the eugenicists’ grand schemes[1]. Information on heredity was far from comprehensive in that era, the science was misguided and there was a vastly imperfect understanding of genetics, at best rudimentary, at the time. Eugenic hygiene organisations were unable to produce reliable statistics. As John Averell pointed out, “proof’ of research” in the field comprised “primarily statistical correlation within conveniently constructed ‘races’ rather than individual case studies to see if the desirable characteristics were actually inherited”[2].
The scientific genesis of the 20th century eugenics movement was located in the rediscovered research of 19th century Austrian monk Gregor Mendel. Mendel experimented in plant hybridisation and his laws of inheritance based on the crossing of garden peas✥ were the foundation for the theories of eugenicists like American Charles Davenport. Davenport et al applied the Mendelian method to human traits such as eye colour which he argued was inherited (as the colour of Mendel’s pea plants were). The eugenicists employed an overly simplified dominant/recessive scheme to account for complex behaviours and mental illnesses, this was a fundamental flaw in their thinking (derived from ‘pedigrees’ based on Mendelian inheritance), a single-gene explanation of human characteristics and conditions. Contemporary science unequivocally accepts that these traits are in fact shaped by (many, many) multiple genes, ie, the existence of polygenic traits[3].
Although eugenics was portrayed by its adherents in the early 20th century as a “mathematical science”, a clinical method of predicting traits and behaviours and controlling human breeding, its drew criticism from scientific quarters on a number of levels. The ‘evidence’ was typically shoddy, such as the research into determining just who was to be classified as being ‘feeble’ and ‘unfit’ in society. The eugenicists relied often on subjectivity, second-hand accounts and hearsay to establish the lineages of the ‘undesirable’ gene pool (see PostScript 1), or on visible observable (physical) features (the resort to phrenology and the like). The theories of eugenics did not seem adequate to explain some traits, such as shyness – rather than being an immutable genetic condition, this could be subject to change over time (ie, some people grow out of shyness!). In addition eugenicists took no account of factors external to a person’s gene makeup in the categorisation of the ‘unfit’, such as his or her contracting a transmissible disease such as syphilis[4].
The scrutiny on eugenics, its growing characterisation as a pseudoscience unable to stand up to academic scientific rigour, prompted some proselytisers of eugenics to claim that eugenics was more than merely science, that it was tantamount to a new religion or moral code[5]. One of the eugenics practitioners who typified this was Alexis Carrel, an American-based French surgeon and Nobel Laurette biologist. Carrel’s eugenics was a strange mix of science, religion, clairvoyance and ultra right-wing politics … his extreme ideas were infused with an anti-materialist, holistic spiritual mysticism. In his 1935 international best-seller, Man, the Unknown, Carrel warned against the degenerative effect of modernity and outlined his notion of an autocratic utopia in which the dysgenic elements were eradicated from society[6].
The eugenics scene in Australasia mirrored Europe and America in questioning the correctness of the ‘science’. The scientific community although entrenched in the vanguard of the eugenic movement threw up its share of dissenters from within its ranks. One such was geographer Griffith Taylor who championed “racial hybridity” and cast serious doubts on the goal of race purity and its assumptions that underpinned eugenics. Moreover there was a lack of cohesion and camaraderie among the individual eugenicists who are often rivals of each other … this of itself did not make for a strong, lasting movement in Australia[7].
J B Watson, Behaviourist (image: Practical Psychology)
The Behaviourist counterpoint:
The rise of behaviourism in the West as a valid analytical tool for explaining human nature was a counterweight to the biological determinism of eugenics whose advocates preached that biology was destiny. The behaviourist backlash against the persuasive eugenics ideology was led by pioneering American psychologist John B Watson▣ around the time of the Great War. Watson, rejecting Freudian concepts of the unconscious mind, or that mental states or ‘instincts’ were significant, arguing instead that observable behaviour was the key to explaining human traits and complex mental states. In doing so, Watson was also refuting the view that heredity played a role in this construct. For Watson, and for B F Skinner who later took up his mantle as a radical behaviourist, the environment, modelled behaviour, was the source of human change. The work of Watson and Skinner and other behaviourists undercut the eugenics movement’s singular reliance on nature by shifting the debate to the significance of nurture in the process[8].
PostScript 1: ‘Feeble’ family studies template
The belief of eugenicists that all social ills – poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, criminality, venereal disease, epilepsy – could be traced back to one genetic flaw, and that intelligence was determined by heredity, was shaped by seminal pioneering studies in the field. One of the most influential was by psychologist Henry Goddard (1912) who analysed the genetic pattern of one man’s lineage (known as “Martin Kallikak” – fabricated name derived from the conjunction of ‘kallos’ beauty and ‘kakos’ bad). ‘Kallikak’ produced two widely divergent types of families (one ‘good’, one ‘bad’), which despite being nurtured in two radically different environments, the patterns of which Goddard concluded was solely the result of heredity[9].
PostScript 2: Polygenism debunked
The polygenists accepted that the species had more than one origin (cf. monogenism – deriving from one, common ancestor). Morton (see FN 2 below) believed that races were arranged in order of intelligence … the fairer the skin the more intelligent. DNA evidence, tracing human markers, has disproved the theory by proving that all Eurasians, Americans, Austronesians, Oceanians and Africans, share the same, common ancestor[10].
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
❈ Scientific racism uses ostensibly scientific or pseudoscientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify racial inferiority or superiority, Scientific racism’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
☫ Scientific racism was denounced by UNESCO in a 1950 statement on race
✥ for what Mendel described as ‘factors’ (the “heredity unit”), the early eugenicists substituted the word ‘genes’
▣ Watson’s life reads like some kind of early 20th century Mad Men persona (influential ad man, marital infidelities, monumental falls from grace, self-exile, etc)
⛩︎⛩︎⛩︎⛩︎
[1] for instance in the interwar period, Thomas Hunt Morgan, a Noble Prize winning evolutionary biologist, rejected the eugenicists’ inadequate methodology, ‘Eugenics in the United States’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[2] this view prescribed a hierarchical order of races, an Anglo-Saxon ‘race’, a Nordic ‘race’, and so on down the line. Polygenists in the 19th century like Samuel G Morton contended that different races were in fact different species, each with separate origins, ‘Science: 1770s-1850s: One Race or Several Species’, RACE, www.understandingrace.org; J Averell, ‘The End of Eugenics … or is it?’, Melrose Mirror, www.melrosemirror.media.mit.edu
[3] ‘Mendelian genetics cannot fully explain human health and behaviour’, DNA from the beginning, www.dnaftb.org; ‘Rocky Road: Charles Davenport’, www.strangescience.net
[4] Eugenics and scientific racism had been described as “folk knowledge validated by scientific inference”, S A Farber, ‘U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement
(1907-39): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective’, Zebrafish, 2008: December; 5(4), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[5] A H Reggiani, ‘Drilling Eugenics into People’s Minds’, in S Currell [Ed.],
Popular Eugenics, National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s
[6] ibid
[7] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’ (Unpub. PhD, Dept of History, University of Sydney, July 1996), www.kooriweb.org
[8] ‘Eugenics movement reaches its height 1923’, A Science Odyssey (PBS), www.pbs.org; ‘John B. Watson’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
Decline of eugenics in AustralasiaUnlike the US the eugenics movements in Australasia failed to even make legislative inroads, let alone implement their theories with any measure of success. Mandatory sterilisation did have genuine community support – from eugenicists, the medical profession, the health bureaucracy, racial hygiene and feminist organisations – but its extreme agenda did not secure the acquiescence of the general public behind it. Moreover, Claudia Thame concluded in her 1974 paper that only a “small minority of zealots” in Australia (some members of the BMA – British Medical Association) held an extreme position on sterilisation[1]. Most practitioners of eugenics in the country tended towards the segregation approach.
Eugenics ideas continued to have some credence after World War II – although not legislated by state authorities, sterilisations continued to be performed on the disabled, especially those with an intellectual disability. Commonly in rural Australia this was done without proper consent (or only with the consent of a third party). Girls from impoverished backgrounds unfortunate enough to be chosen for sterilisation often were told they were having appendectomies. In an era of deinstitutionalisation the eugenic motive for sterilisation tended to be overridden by that of contraception. It was an easier alternative for medical authorities to resort to hysterectomies and tubal ligations than to spend money on educating disadvantaged parents on how to handle their children’s sexuality[2]. There remains a continuity with present practices❃.
ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/image-7.jpg”> 1928 Mental Defectives Bill: New Zealand[/cap
In New Zealand the 1928 Mental Defectives Amendment Bill was the eugenicists’ best legislative hope for Aeotearoa. It provided for the establishment of a national eugenics board and its sterilisation clauses came close to being law but failed to pass due to a combination of government doubts about the public support for sterilisation and the concerted political opposition to it from Peter Fraser and the Labour Party and intellectuals like university professors Thomas Hunter and Arthur Fitt[3]. Subsequently, the Act’s provision for the registration of mental ‘defectives’ was pursued by the state “without enthusiasm or notable result”[4].
As with Australia and other western countries the lack of legislative support for sterilisation did not prevent its continued ad hoc practice in NZ. Data on involuntary sterilisations of the disabled in postwar New Zealand is sketchy but the numbers of women involved are thought to be significant … like elsewhere, the eugenic motives of the prewar period have a diminished importance, in their place the demand for sterilisation is driven by the priority of managing the sexuality and reproductive capacity of disabled girls and women (also as “an adjunct to the management of bodily hygiene”)[5].
Many churches went along with the eugenics orthodoxy and some Protestant clergymen actually advocated eugenics✥. The Catholic Church however, with its large Irish-Catholic working class following in Australia as well as New Zealand, staunchly opposed eugenics on theological (moral) grounds (the Vatican condemned artificial methods of birth control which interfered with “natural reproduction”)✦. Another formidable institution with class-based objections to the goals of eugenics was the trade union movement. Although not operating as a unified opposition against the spread of eugenics, there were significant sections of organised labour who were concerned that laws affecting mental defectives would heavily target working class children and withheld their support for it[6]. There was considerable skepticism within the Australian and New Zealand working classes about eugenics, many on the left saw it as espousing “elitist definitions of unfitness”[7].
IQ tests continued to be fashionable in the 1950s & beyond: giving ‘scientific’ credence to the stigmatising of those in society labelled as “less intelligent” (Source: The Creativity Post)
By the 1950s in Australasia eugenics had become unfashionable and had fallen out of favour with the public at large … biologists and other scientists, distancing themselves from the discredited eugenics tag, were shifting their focus and energies to working in the dynamic and burgeoning field of human genetics.
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❃ incapacity for parenthood is still used as a valid justification by the Australian judiciary to authorise sterilisations – eg, the ‘burden’ of parents having to deal with the menstrual management of their disabled daughters, even in some cases where the girl was pre-menstrual!, ‘Fact Sheet: Forced Sterilisation – People With Disabilities Australia’, (C Frohmader, Women With Disabilities Australia, submission, 53rd Session of the Committee Against Torture, Geneva, Nov 2014)
✥ non-Catholic church support for eugenic aims in Australia and New Zealand was not as powerfully concentrated as it was in the United States
✦ practicing Catholics as a block tended to oppose eugenics, including writers of the faith such as G K Chesterton, Graham Greene and James Joyce
⛨⛨⛨⛨⛨⛨
[1] C Thame, ‘Health and the State: the Development of Collective Responsibility for Health Care in Australia in the first half of the Twentieth Century’, (PhD dissertation, ANU, 1974)
[2] J Goldhar, ‘The Sterilisation of Women with an intellectual disability’, ‘Law and Society Conference’ (Brisbane, December 1990), www.austlit.edu.au
[3] T Taylor, ‘Thomas Hunter and the Campaign Against Eugenics, NZJH, 39(2) 2005
[4] M Finnane, ‘From dangerous lunatic to human rights?: the law and mental illness in Australian history’ in C Coleborne [Ed.], Madness in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum
[5] C Hamilton, ‘Sterilisation and intellectual disabled people in New Zealand – still on the agenda’, Kōtuitui: the New Zealand Journal Social Sciences Online, 7(2), Nov 2012
[6] S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[7] ibid.
As egregiously bad as the atrocities committed by the German National Socialists under the guise of “eugenics science” were, it would surprise some to learn that it did not put a death knoll on the practice and advocacy of eugenics in western countries. After the war governments and some eugenicists tended to be a bit more circumspect in talking about the subject but in countries like Great Britain and the United States, rather than disappearing, eugenic ideas and (especially in the US) programs continued to flourish.
The British Welfare State and National “Social Efficiency”
Comparatively, Britain never remotely matched that the eugenics legislative zeal of the US, after WWII however UK policy-makers’ enthusiasm for and belief in eugenics remained high. In 1946 influential English macroeconomics guru John Maynard Keynes was still proclaiming that eugenics was “the most important and significant branch of sociology”[1].
The British Eugenics Society (BES) adopted a manoeuvrable position in the wake of the widespread discrediting of eugenics after the war. BES directed its efforts towards the “rebrand(ing) of race … by arguing that it remained a valuable concept for study” and dismissing the Nazi experience as an aberration which distorted and abused the concept of eugenics. The restrained, liberal stance taken by BES in the United Kingdom ensured the continued support for the Society of progressive and respected scientists like Julian Huxley and J B S Haldane[2].
Clare Hanson characterises eugenics as less a science than a social and cultural movement, drawing its power from its “dissemination across a range of discursive fields”[3]. Hanson notes that eugenics played a key role in post-war British reconstruction, its ideas sustained and incorporated into the development of the country after 1945. The national efficacy goals of eugenics were visible in the Attlee Labour government’s endorsement of the ‘meritocratic’ ideal. Postwar education reform in the UK illustrates this: the division of secondary education into three strands – grammar, technical and modern – was a philosophical approach geared to the needs of social efficiency, not social justice. A further connexion with pre-WWII’s eugenics was the seminal roles in public policy in the postwar reconstruction and foundation of the welfare state played by eugenics advocates William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss[4].
America: controlling the reproduction of minorities
Across the Atlantic in the US there seems to have been broad support for sterilisation prior to WWII. This was inferred by two polls taken in 1937 … one by Fortune magazine found that 66% supported the existing sterilisation laws, the second, a Gallup poll found 84% in favour of sterilising the chronically mentally ill[5]. Eugenics programs continued to have a vitality after the war. Moreover in a number of states of the US there was a continuance (albeit a reduction in numbers) of forced sterilisations (over 64,000 American people were sterilised under eugenics legislation between 1907 and 1963[6]. The word ‘eugenics’ was removed or downplayed but eugenics ideas still circulated in public discourse (as in Britain) – in the 1950s it manifested in the emphasis placed on family values and child rearing (ie, concerns about the quality of the population). US eugenicists who had flourished in the 1930s reinvented themselves postwar as “genetic scientists” and “marriage counsellors”, some using the term “genetic counselling” to explain what they did[7].
Dr Gamble
One of the leading American eugenics propagandists was Dr Clarence Gamble (heir to the Procter and Gamble “Ivory Soap’ fortune). Gamble funded ‘Birthright’, a birth control organisation, and embarked on a sterilisation drive through the South and Midwest in the 1940s, having most success in North Carolina where he established a ‘showcase’ sterilisation program. Gamble had an intense personal involvement (and financial investment) in the compulsory sterilisation cause, spearheading a saturation campaign of national television ads. Significantly, eugenics activities in postwar America, in a shift from prewar, targeted minorities for remedial action (ie, sterilisations). Enforced sterilisation programs in California were directed primarily at Asians and Mexicans whilst the southern states’ preoccupation was with controlling the African-American population[8].
The end of eugenics? … or a new, ‘better’ form of eugenics by a different name?
As indicated above, revelations of the horrors of Nazi eugenics during the Third Reich and the news of the worse excesses of sterilisation in the US and elsewhere did not put an end to belief in the supposed efficacy of eugenics or to the practice itself. The term was in the main quietly sidelined but the thing itself is like Ulysses’ “bag of winds” or Pandora’s Box – once opened, it is virtually impossible to stop. The desirability of breeding better humans has continued to exercise the minds of the scientifically curious. Eugenics may have passed out of the lexicon (in any positive sense at least)❈ but interest in genetic arguments and ideas remain✥. Many in the scientific community agree with evolutionary theorist R A Fisher that “technically advanced civilisation is unsustainable without eugenics” (The genetical theory of natural selection. A complete variorum edition, 1930)[9].
Public opinion in Britain and America after the war, influenced by a growing recognition of civil and human rights of citizens, became increasingly disaffected with the illiberal idea of coerced sterilisation. Consequently the practice largely came to a halt in the US around the early to mid 1960s[10]. However isolated calls for ad hoc voluntary sterilisation continue to be voiced—often under the guise of “social protection”—regarding people labelled as “low IQ”, “mentally defective” or with large welfare-dependent families[11].
PostScript: A comparative look at the exceptionalism of Scandinavian eugenics
The pattern of legislation on eugenics in the Nordic countries was quite different to the experience of politicians in other western countries. At the height of the eugenics phenomena in the twenties and thirties, sterilisation and marriage bills had an easy passage into law in Scandinavia, with surprisingly little opposition. In the case of Sweden especially, the 1934 Act was not repealed until 1975, by which time there had been upward of 63,000 sterilisations performed on citizens deemed ‘unfit’ by the state to procreate (the great majority on women)回. Scandinavian historians have tended to attribute this to a combination of factors many of which were peculiar to the pheripheral region of North-eastern Europe. These include the rapid industrialisation and modernisation of towns from the late 19th century … the emerging secular and scientific nature of life in Scandinavia contributed to this easy acceptance. Other factors in the explanation for why there was general consensus with the eugenic objectives was the commonality of the Lutheran faith and culture and the relatively egalitarian character of the Scandinavian social structure[12].
Sweden’s eugenic practices stretched from the mid 1930s to the 1970s, with the targeted groups of people coming from the poor, of mixed racial quality or of non-Nordic stock. Often the victims were labelled as educationally ‘inferior’, their sin being that they had learning difficulties such as poor eyesight preventing them from reading the class blackboard[13].
Nils Roll-Hansen has pointed out that Scandinavian society was quick to reject the excesses and unscientific attitudes of eugenics (eg, in Nazi Germany), whilst not rejecting the basic ideas and beliefs of eugenics. The political structure inherent in the Nordic countries was considered conducive to the success achieved by proponents of eugenics. The dominant labour parties (especially the Swedish Social Democratic Party) elicited effectively co-operation from the labour organisations in implementing social policy (as part of the country’s “social contract”). Roll-Hansen has contended that the region’s liberal-democratic tradition with its stress on the rights of the individual ensured that the eugenic practices that were put in place were moderate only[14]. The unearthing of Roll-Hansen and Broberg’s ‘bombshell’ had a big effect on Scandinavians, especially the Swedes … in 1999 Sweden agreed to compensate victims of forced sterilisations, offering each individual affected up to 175,000 kronors[15].
┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅
❈ to be replaced with terms like “human genetic science” or “human genetic engineering”
✥ eradicating disease, lengthening the human lifespan, the human genome project, genetic enhancement, environmental and food applications, etc.
回 Sweden was the only one of the Nordic states with a national eugenics society
[1] V Brignall, ‘The eugenics movement Britain wants to forget’, New Statesman, 9-Dec-2010,www.newstatesman.com
[2] G Schaffer, Racial Science and British Society, 1930-1962. With the name ‘eugenics’ becoming a taboo word post-WWII the BES eventually changed its name to the Galton Institute … likewise in the US, the American Eugenics Society finally changed its name in 1973, becoming the more neutral-sounding Society for the Study of Social Biology
[3] C Hanson, Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain; S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: laboratories of racial science’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Eugenics has also been described as a straight out political movement, a form of ruling class consolidation, M Quigley, ‘The Roots of the I.Q. Debate. Eugenics and Social Control’, PRA (Professional Research Associates), www.publiceye.org
[4] ibid.
[5] Also, the New York Times in 1933 opined that the US policy on sterilisations was “harmless and very humane”, P Levine, Eugenics: a Very Short Introduction
[6] states leading the way were California, Virginia and North Carolina, ‘Eugenics in the United States’, op.cit.
[7] L Ko, ‘Unwanted Sterilizations and Eugenics programs in the United States’, PBS, 29-Jan-2016 www.pbs.org; P Lombardo, ‘Eugenic Sterilization Laws’, in the Eugenics Archive, www.eugenicsarchive.org; Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, Ed. by I Ness (D Hoff, ‘Survival of Euugenics’). Genetic counselling had the same euphemistic usage in Britain after the war with the first genetic counselling clinic in the UK opening in 1946
[8] K Begos, ‘The American eugenics movement after World War II’ (3 parts), Indy Week, www.indyweek.com. Paul Ehrlich’s highly influential Population Bomb (1968) in advocating world population control derives its premise from eugenics thought and rhetoric
[9] F K Salter, ‘Eugenics Ready or Not’, Quadrant, 11-May-2015, www.quadrant.org.au
[10] although it has been revealed that as recently as the mid 1970s over 3,000 native American women were involuntarily sterilised by the IHO (the US Indian Health Service), G W Rutecki,’Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies’, Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, 8-Oct-2010,www.cbhd.org
[11] ‘Compulsory Sterilization’, Wikipedia, www.em.n.wiki.org
[12] N Rolls-Hansen, ‘Conclusion: Scandinavian Eugenics in the International Context’, in G Broberg & N Rolls-Hansen [Eds], Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policies in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland
[13] ‘Sweden admits to racial purification’, The Independent,, 25-Aug-1997, www.independent.co.uk
[14] Rolls-Hansen, op.cit.
[15] ‘Sweden to reflect on eugenics past’, The Local (Sweden), 21-Dec-2005, www.thelocal.se
Australia’s “impure origins” as a convict colony in 1788 cast a shadow over the country’s European inhabitants which stayed with them long after transportation to the colonies was halted (with the exception of South Australia whose citizens have take a perhaps inflated self-satisfaction from its status as the sole free colony from its foundation)[1]. The deep imprint of the “convict stain” was a difficult burden to throw off but as Australia became more involved in world events especially external wars, this dubious tag started to recede and a new, more estimable self-identity started to take shape in the consciousness of Australians. A catalyst for this gradual change of self-perception was the roll-call of British Empire wars in which valiant Australians distinguished themselves on the field of battle – South African War, WWI (Gallipoli, the Western Front, Palestine). The feats of Australian soldiers in war worked as an antidote to the lingering convict inferiority complex[2].
Geo. Wood, “Convict Stain” debunker
The ‘stain’ of colonial Australia continued into the Federation era but in 1922 the intervention of a Sydney University history professor into this debate presented a new (positive) perspective for Australians to build on. George Arnold Wood in his highly influential book, The Discovery of Australia, reassessed the early colonial era, repudiating the “convict stain” and argued that Australia’s convict legacy should elicit admiration rather than being the enduring object of shame for Australians. Wood tapped into a powerful Antipodean undercurrent of the time, by exulting the convict heritage and raising up the current generation of their descendants, he was emphasising a (superior) point of difference with the character of Britons back in the mother country. Wood contended that Australians were free of the environmental drawbacks that was sapping the vitality of the working class Briton (industrial grime, overcrowded tenements in cities, etc). From the late 19th century some observers had started to view the Australian and New Zealand “White Dominions” as being the region of “the coming man” vis-à-vis the mother country[3].
New Zealand, unlike Australia, did not have the stigma of a convict society to overcome, but New Zealanders had been cultivating their own distinctive image of the country which set it apart from Britain. New Zealanders nourished a national myth that NZ was peopled by highly selected stock, “Better Britons” or “Britain of the South”❈ as New Zealanders described themselves and the country that they inhabited (the claim to possess exclusive racial stock was referenced in NZ medical journals of the time)[4].
The “coming man” hypothesis bought into a number of prevailing Antipodean myths of the period. The 1850s phenomenon of the gold-rushes in Eastern Australia led some to conclude that only the best men from Britain migrated to Australian goldfields, having what it took to make the journey and prosper … the thinking was that Australia had attracted the “pick of Britain’s stock” and therefore it was somehow better than Britain[5]. Immigration patterns have contributed to the modified sense of Australian identity. With migrants being drawn predominately from the British Isles and Ireland until the 1950s, James Jupp has argued that a belief has persisted that Australians (especially native-born ones) were both of British racial and cultural descent and “superior to the British”. The ‘ordinary’ English working and lower-middle classes were often seen as “dirty, servile, unhealthy, inferior” and held in low regard by Australians[6].
Conditions in Australia were often cited as a building block for the construction of a ‘superior’ cut of British man. Australia benefitted, it was said, from a climate infinitely better than Britain, a lavish land … making for a vigorous and healthy ‘race'[7]. W K Hancock (Australia, 1930) described the Australian ‘type’ of man as a harmonious blending of all the British types, nourished by a “generous sufficiency of food (good diet) … breathing space (vast countryside) and sunshine”, endorsing a view of environmental determinism[8]. A sense of ‘racial vigour’ was a recurring motif in contemporary references to the coming or ‘new’ man in Australasia✤.
South African Boer War – coming crisis in British Manhood?
Imperial Britain’s performance in the Boer War (especially early on) against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of Britain’s fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. Britain’s sudden reverses in the war required reinforcements from home, leading to a manpower dilemma – unhealthy British cities and slums, from where the foot soldiers were drawn, churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men[9]. The average British soldier in 1900 was shorter than that of 1845 and over three-fourths of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for service[10]. This crisis gave further credence to the idea of Australia and New Zealand as embodying the coming man. Whilst British soldiery seemed to struggle and its martial supremacy stumbled (albeit temporarily), the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. The Boer War reversals only accentuated anxieties about the racial deterioration of working class Britons[11]. A report conducted in 1904, with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration”, confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested.
The “proof” of Gallipoli
The valour and skill exhibited by Australian and New Zealand soldiers in WWI vis-à-vis the perception of the British troops, reinforced the coming man stereotype[12]. Even English social Darwinists such as Randolf Bedford (London Times, 1915) described the ANZAC troops as a “race of athletes”. These ‘athletes’, it was claimed, were scientifically superior to their British cousins. Prominent in the myth-making was Great War correspondent C E W Bean who attributed Australian achievements on the battlefield to a sense of mateship and the democratic culture bred in the Australian bush[13]. Regeneration of the white stock was only achievable through the “new Anglos” to be found in Australasia amongst its soldiers and athletes, so this myth went.
Depletion of racial stock
The Great War, and specifically the Gallipoli campaign, was a “defining moment” for New Zealanders and Australians, a “global test that proved the manhood” of those “representatives of the ‘coming man'”[14]. The war was also a devastating loss of that same manhood … both countries lost a “chunk of their tallest and healthiest A1 stock” with New Zealand suffering casualties of 59% of its entire forces¤. In a talk in Australia NZ eugenicist-physician Truby King, lamenting the loss of manhood, implored white women to “repair the war wastage” by producing more babies from good stock and preventing infant deaths[15].
⍗ The 1905 champion All Blacks (“the Originals”)
(source: www.telegraph.co.uk)
This Antipodean sporting life … demonstrating superior prowess through sport
Manhood through the testing experience of war – imperial and global – helped shape Australians and New Zealanders’ sense of their own national identities, another definer of character was sport. The dominant performance of the 1905 All Blacks (New Zealand rugby team) in the UK, with its formidable physical power and skill proving too much for the best of the British Isles and Irish rugby … the Kiwis’ display of “muscular manhood” on tour made an unmistakeable impression at home. For many the All Blacks’ triumph was confirmation that NZ was “the best place to build strong bodies”. Prime Minister Richard (‘King Dick’) Seddon attributed the team’s dominance to the country’s “natural and healthy conditions of colonial life (which produced such) “stalwart and athletic sons” as the NZ players in the rugby touring team[16].
The following year, 1906, the South African tour of the British Isles saw the South African ‘Springboks’ triumph over the rugby home countries as well (two years after that the Australian ‘Wallabies’ toured Britain and Ireland, also winning the great bulk of games it played). As rugby was considered in Britain as “a sport of the elite” (played by gentlemen), defeat at the hands of these ‘colonial’ teams was a savage blow to British pride and another indicator for many of the home nation’s racial decline[17].
Not all contemporary observers accepted the distinctiveness and pre-eminence of the ‘new’ Australian and New Zealander as espoused by Wood and Bean et al. John Fraser, a visitor from Britain, observed in Australia: the Making of a Nation (1910), that the native-born Australian lacked vim and vigour, and would degenerate without “infusion of British blood”. Fraser concluded that Australians were “just transplanted British people”, albeit “modified by the influence of climate” and social environment[18].
The race card: immigration and border control
Backers of the eugenics movements and believers in the notion of the “coming man” in Australia and New Zealand tended to view new immigrants as suspect. In the reasoning of the authorities it was imperative that the numbers of the ‘unfit’, the “social undesirables” already in Australasia do not swell further. A watertight immigration control, determining who is ‘fit’ and appropriate to enter the country, would compliment the eugenic measures of sterilisation and segregation. Accordingly in 1899 New Zealand, and 1901 Australia, passed Immigration Restriction Acts. Australia’s legislation barred permanent entry for non-white people. The White Australian Policy reflected Australian fears of invasion from the north … Australia’s sense of isolation and vulnerability at the proximity of what racists depicted as “teeming hordes of Asiatics” (concerns intensified by Japan’s population spurt coinciding with a trend towards low rates of birth for Australia)[19].
In a work breaking new ground Alison Bashford in Imperial Hygiene has focused attention on the function of quarantine in Australia’s racially motivated immigration policies that came into force after Federation. Positioning quarantine as an integral part of the White Australia Policy, Bashford argues that the quarantine line on Australia’s border was also a “racialised immigration restriction line”, and together with the immigration restriction measures, part of an “international hygiene”. In an effort to block so-called “racially impure” and “unfit” immigrants from entering the country, Australia wrote mental health and hygiene criteria into its immigration laws and regulations (as did other western nations including Britain, the US and Canada)[20].
PostScript: D H Lawrence and Australia
DH (Bert) Lawrence in his novel Kangaroo, written entirely with the exception of the final chapter while the peripatetic English novelist was in Australia (1922), fleetingly entertained the possibility of Australia becoming a new and uncorrupted Britain. One of Lawrence’s enduring preoccupations, informed by his readings of Herbert Spencer and other early eugenics proponents, was the degeneration of western industrial society. In other works also Lawrence subscribed to the notion of the coming man, eg, in Aaron’s Rod (written before his visit to Australia) Lawrence described an Australian character as a “new and vital version of an English man”[21].
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❈ with such fidelity did New Zealand uphold the notion of being (better) Britons, that it wasn’t until 1948 that New Zealanders ceased to be British citizens and became “New Zealand citizens”
✤ the idea of the common or new man in society and its association with eugenics was not confined to Australasia, the Southern Hemisphere or even to the Anglo-Saxon world, for an account of the Italian eugenics movement see F Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy
¤ this was an imperial anxiety for the British and the Dominions, the loss of the best or fittest elements killed on the battlefield, a diminution of the “pool of fit white stock”, J M Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760-2010
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[1] J Hirst, ‘An Oddity from the Start: Convicts and National Character’, The Monthly, July 2008, www.themonthly.com.au
[2] D Walker, ‘National Identity’, in J Jupp [Ed.], The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins
[3] S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science’ in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[4] A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, Race and Colonial Identity: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, Unpub. thesis, MA in History, 2001 (University of Canterbury, NZ)
[5] J Jupp, quoted in A Jamrozik, Chains of Colonial Inheritance: Searching for an Identity in an Subservient Nation
[6] ibid.
[7] Walker, op.cit.
[8] Walker, op.cit.
[9] C Hitchens, ‘Young Men in Shorts’, (The Atlantic Monthly, June 2004), www.theatlantic.com
[10] P Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke and Culture in Britain since 1800,
[11] S Dubow, ‘Placing Race in South African History’, in W Lamont [Ed], Historical Controversies and Historians
[12] the Great War in Bean’s vision was the fulfilment and defining feature of Australia’s manhood – shaper of the nation’s character, S Garton, ‘War and Masculinity in Twentieth Century Australia’, JAS, 22:56 (1998)
[13] Garton, ibid
[14] P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand (2nd ed. 2011)
[15] ibid.
[16] the British press noted that the All Blacks rugby players (the ‘Originals’) possessed superior fitness (and utilised professional training techniques), T Weir, ‘Professionals, Cheats and Superior “Muscular Madhood”: British Domestic Responses to the 1905 New Zealand “All Blacks” Rugby’, (University of York, 2011), www.academic.edu; P M Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand
[17] ‘The Boer War: British Fears of Physical Deterioration and the Build up to World War I’, www.boerwar.weebly.com
[18] Fraser noted as further evidence of decay the country’s birth-rate decline from 1901, Walker, op.cit (Fn: Although according to Statistique Internationale the downward trend in Australia, NZ and GB began in the 1870s)
[19] Garton, ‘Eugenics in Aust & NZ’, op.cit.. As David Walker has noted, from the 1880s on there emerged a “powerful, masculinising and racialising impulse in Australian nationalism” which coincided with the advent of a “geo-political threat (from an) awakening Asia”, D R Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939 (1999)
[20] A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health
[21] D Game, D.H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire (2015)
The period in the first part of the 20th century when advocates of eugenics solutions ran rampant, “playing God” with the lives of society’s powerless unfortunates, was an abomination on many levels. Deeply flawed by racial and class biases, self-righteous eugenicists categorised a typology of ‘lesser’ humans. They then arbitrarily assigned certain of their country’s citizens to this ‘underclass’ of ‘unworthies’, trampling all over their human rights and liberties in the name of an allegedly ‘scientifically’ determined inferiority. The inequity of individuals being singled out for ‘special’ treatment based on perceived racial stereotypes, mental or physical capacity or because of ‘inherited'(sic) criminality, and the denial of their basic human rights, cannot be overstated, nor can the devastating consequences for its victims (segregation, removal from birth family, sterilisation, even liquidation in extreme cases).
The harm and wrong-headedness of eugenics ideology with its ‘scattergun’ approach lies fully exposed to scrutiny today, and is viewed with the opprobrium it deserves. The eugenicists in all countries practicing eugenics were offering nothing less than a recipe for racial cleansing. Notwithstanding the ‘bad'(sic) eugenic applications of that era, it is important to note that the phenomenon paradoxically did lead to changes in Australian and New Zealand health practices that were significant, progressive and far-reaching to society. As cogently argued by Diana Wyndham, putting aside eugenics’ alarming consequences for a moment, the movement in Australia also involved a genuine attempt to “increase national efficiency and vitality through enlightened state intervention programs” in areas such as “sanitation (eg, cleaning up or eradicating slums) town planning and quarantine” … and of course in health[1]. The Queenslander in 1914 praised its state health authorities for pursuing what it called “practical eugenics”, vital pre-natal and after-birth care for the infant, a pre-condition for a “strong and healthy race”[2].
Eugenics as preventative care
Those who enthusiastically took up the banner of eugenics in the early 20th century were in the main well-meaning if ill-conceived in their reasoning. The scientist-eugenicists genuinely saw themselves as engaging in science for the benefit of “social efficiency”, and what they were doing, targeting the “unfit and feeble-minded”, was in accordance with Benthamite principles of the greater good of society. They believed that breeding a higher calibre of person was ‘proof’ of rational, social progress and civilisation … eugenics was just such a simplistically enticing blueprint for society’s ills and problems, eliciting the support of social reformers as well as leading international intellectuals including J Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell☼, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence and the Fabian socialists H G Wells, G B Shaw and the Webbs, as well as businessmen and politicians, eg, Alexander Graham Bell, the Rockefellers, Teddy Roosevelt (see PostScript) and Winston Churchill[3].
Dr Cumpston: advocated making Australia “a paradise of physical perfection”
The Australian and New Zealand medical practitioners who sought to introduce eugenic programs (such as Dr. John Cumpston, first director-general of the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health) believed that by stopping the ‘unfit’ from breeding they were in fact practicing preventative medicine (or that’s at least how they rationalised it)[4]. Eugenics in Australasia was the domain of scientific experimenters and social reformers as well as the governors[5], and touched areas which included child welfare, birth control, sex education, moral purity, temperance advocacy and urban planning.
1930s Australian poster warning against VD
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National fitness and advances in health care
Emphasising one of the eugenics movement’s objectives as national fitness, Wyndham identifies a number of positive spin-offs of in Australia – it put the focus on maternal care and on the care of the child❈; it played a part in the fight against both VD and TB; in the provision of sex education and birth control; it stimulated the study of genetics (before 1938 not part of the university training of Australian doctors). Eugenics influenced the advancement of Australian health services, especially in family planning and public health (introduction of baby health centres, child endowment schemes, a national health bureaucracy, etc.)[6]. New Zealand eugenicist and health reformer Dr Truby King established the Plunket Society (pioneering early childhood health and development service) as well as introducing innovative child-rearing techniques.
Bjelke-Petersen School of Physical Culture, exercise demonstration(Syd) during WWII (Source: Nat Lib of Aust)
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Embracing physical culture in Australia
Stephen Garton has noted other positive developments that grew out of the eugenics movement, most prominently a push for citizens to engage in more outdoors, healthy activities. As an antidote to the confining and often unhealthy milieú of urban life, eugenics encouraged people to take to the outdoors and to partake in physical exercise. Bush-walking and hiking clubs were formed, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides associations were encouraged and Police Citizens Boys Clubs sprang up. The establishment of gymnasiums and fitness centres (especially in NSW and Tasmania by the Bjelke-Petersen brothers) extended the emphasis on physical culture, allegedly important to maintain eugenic health[7]. An emphasis on physical culture as the method of attaining good genes also flourished in New Zealand, largely inspired by one German eugenicist.
Sandow the Strongman’s ‘System‘
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Environmental eugenics and physical culture in New Zealand
Eugenics is commonly described as “the belief in the power of nature over that of nurture”, reducing it to a question of a person’s character being shaped by heredity[8], this is the eugenics orthodoxy. But environmental eugenicists like Eugen Sandow sought to improve the human condition by improving the external factors of one’s environment✤. Sandow, a Prussian-born strongman based in London from the turn of the 20th century, was a eugenicist who believed that the flagging racial stock of the white race could be improved by nurture, which would overcome any natural flaws in a person[9]. He pioneered the art of body-building, developing his own training regime involving repetition and barbells (which he called the “Sandow System”) which he sold to the public by mail order. Sandow toured the world giving “artistic performances” in music halls, including an extended stint in Australasia in 1902-1903. Sandow was principally responsible for popularising the physical culture movement and giving it a kick-start in New Zealand. After his successful tour of NZ Sandow-inspired gymnasiums and physical culture institutes sprang up all over the country[10].
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As elsewhere in the advanced western nations, New Zealanders were plagued by the notion of their supposed physical inadequacies (especially after the Anglo-Boer War in 1899-1902). The disclosure that half of the young NZ men seeking to serve in the British navy were rejected as medically unfit reinforced the view that New Zealanders had poor physiques. Physical culture was presented as a panacea, a remedy to ward off the possibility of physical and mental infirmity. As Caroline Daley has shown, the potentiality of Sandow’s exercise program led to shifts in the way New Zealanders viewed their bodies. Men, with the correct dedicated training, could achieve the “He-man” physique of Sandow. The Sandow technique also pitched its message to middle class NZ women, in line with the eugenic goal of increased procreation by the elite, mothers-to-be could be trained to develop the right muscles for childbirth. After the passage of the Physical Welfare and Recreation Act in 1937 physical culture became “a state sanctioned leisure activity” in New Zealand. The Act was a boost to sport for adults, and with the outbreak of WWII the government promoted the idea that New Zealanders had “a duty to be fit”, it was now patriotic. From its initial eugenic wellspring physical fitness and culture had become firmly entrenched in the mainstream of NZ life[11].
The physical underdevelopment of the nation’s young was much in the mind of New Zealand eugenicists in the early 20th century. In this milieú school physician Elizabeth Gunn pioneered the health camp movement for school age children. An avowed eugenicist, Gunn was instrumental in getting schoolchildren out of indoors, either into active camp life or into classes conducted in the open air [12].
PostScript: Racial fitness in America – EROAgain, like the British eugenicists’ pronouncements, new ideas from America fell on receptive ears in Australasia. The centre of the American eugenics movement revolved around biologist Charles Davenport and his Eugenics Records Office whose activities reached eugenicists worldwide. Davenport and his ERO eugenicist associate Harry Laughlin were both chicken breeders illustrate the link of agriculture to eugenics[13]. Race reinvigoration in the US was championed from the very highest quarters. At the turn of the century soon-to-be president, Teddy Roosevelt, appealed to his country’s citizens to take up “the strenuous life” (his message was aimed primarily at native-born Americans of good Anglo-Saxon stock). And Americans did heed his words: many took up sports for the first time, American (college) football became popular as the ultimate physical test of manhood, competitive athletics and cycling were taken up in the quest to demonstrate masculine physical strength and endurance. Roosevelt’s urgings led to the popularity of hiking, hunting and mountain climbing among Americans. Behind all of these feats of physical exertion lurked the same self-doubts of the dominant white race as elsewhere. The depression of the 1890s and the enervating affects of industrial society accentuated these anxieties. The US was experiencing a shift in immigration patterns at this time which had started to favour especially Southern and Central Europe over immigrants from Britain and Northern Europe⚀. The more affluent, native-born Americans predictably called for a halt to immigration[14] with the purpose of stopping the ‘poorer’ stock of immigrants coming into America (Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc). The pattern of restricting particular ethnic groupings was duplicated concurrently in other western countries (eg, the WAP in Australia).
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☼ Nietzsche was another leading philosopher who earlier embraced the theory of eugenics as a panacea
❈ in New Zealand as well, “national efficiency” was high on the agenda … degeneracy anxieties (c.1920 NZ had the world’s 2nd highest mortality rate for mothers, much worse than its (Pākehā) infant mortality rate) prompted a safe maternity campaign in NZ. Eugenic concerns led the state to intervene in maternity services (P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand)
⚀ immigration from the British Isles, Ireland, Scandinavia and Germany fell dramatically from 1900, replaced by immigration surges from Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and the Baltics
✤ Known as the science of euthenics (AKA “the science of controllable environment” (Ellen H Richards) – cf. eugenics “the science of controllable heredity”)
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[1] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’ (Unpub. PhD, Dept of History, University of Sydney, July 1996), www.kooriweb.org
[2] The Queenslander (Bris,), 11-Apr-1914, quoted in E Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, (Unpub. PhD, Dept. of History, University of Queensland) www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
[3] in a memo to the prime minister in 1910 Churchill said: “The multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race”, V Brignell, ‘The eugenic movement Britain wants to forget’, New Statesmen, 9-Dec-2010,www.newsratesmen.com. Churchill is on public record for even more unequivocal and explicit statements of pro-eugenics sentiments, eg, “I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia… by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race… has come in and taken its place” (1937)
[4] Wyndham, op.cit
[5] as well as that of socialists, feminists and other radicals, S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: laboratories of racial science’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[6] Wyndham, op.cit
[7] Garton op.cit.; the physical culture school founder, Lt-Col. H C Bjelke-Petersen, exploited the anxieties around eugenics at the time to promote the B-J brothers’ physical fitness schools, E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, (Unpub. PhD, Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003), www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
[8] C Daley, Leisure and Pleasure: Reshaping and Revealing the New Zealand Body, 1900-1960
[9] the emerging physical culture movement dovetailed neatly into eugenics thinking at the time. Latching on to the prevailing perception that the “racial stock” of white settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand had become “soft and weak”, the tangible positive benefits of an active exercise plan (as illustrated by Sandow) presented itself as the obvious counter to this growing ‘feebleness’ on a national level. The popularisation of the Japanese self-defence skills, judo and ju-jutsu, for women in Australasia early in the 20th century also grew out of the ‘race’ anxieties (athlete and entertainer Florence LeMar toured Australasia with a ju-jutsu vaudeville act in the 1910s), C Macdonald, Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935-1960
[10] Sandow inspired a generation of home-grown NZ bodybuilders who opened gyms, such as Fred Hornibrook and Dick Jarrett, Daley, op.cit.
[11] ibid.
[12] M Tennant, ‘Gunn, Elizabeth Catherine’, TEARA – The Encylopedia of New Zealand, (Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume 3 1996), www.teara.govt.nz
[13] S A Farber, ‘U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907-39): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective’, Zebrafish, 2008: December; 5(4), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[14] J Murrin, P Johnson, J McPherson, A Fahs, G Gerstle, Liberty, Equality, Power: Volume II: Since 1863 (Enhanced Concise Edition)
Probably the most iniquitous part of the eugenics movements’ social engineering, certainly in Australia and New Zealand, was the policies and practices of state governments towards their indigenous populations in the first half of the 20th century. The measures against aboriginals and Māori are the most manifest examples of the premise, the assumption, on which eugenics sits, that “some human life is of more value than other human life”[1].
The systematic discrimination and abuses of native Australians was conducted in the main by paternalistic, middle class white men who believed, or convinced themselves that they believed, they were doing the right thing, the humane thing, for the black people of the continent who were thought to be “irreconcilably backward”.
The perception of the “aboriginal issue” in Australia was fed by the prevailing eugenics ideologies at the time, and the treatment of aborigines was typified by the approach adopted in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. All chief protectors of aborigines in Queensland during the years 1900-1942 advocated a policy of racial segregation❈. Whilst governments and administrators emphasised that this was a ‘protective’ measure for the ‘good’ of the aboriginals themselves, the self-serving eugenic motives of the power wielders was always very close to the surface of public policy.
f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/image-6.jpg”> Orphanage of removed children, WA c1930[/capt
The perimeters of white Australia’s assimilation policy for indigenous peoples was set in the 1937 Commonwealth and states conference which agreed on the policy objective of absorbing at least “the natives of Aboriginal origin but not the full blood”[2]. Australian political leaders and administrators generally followed an assimilation approach which had two planks to it – a mandatory biological assimilation (to ‘outbreed’ the blackness of aborigines), and a cultural assimilation aimed at “half-caste” aboriginals (removing them as children from their indigenous familial environment and nurturing them into the white ways of Australian society and ‘civilisation'[3].
Emily Wilson has shown the extent to which miscegenation and racial contamination was an overriding concern for decision-makers in Queensland✤. There was an inordinate and obsessive fear of “half-castes” whose numbers many thought were on the rise◈. Queensland eugenicists believed this imbalance’ threatened the supposed “inviolate purity” of the White Australian Policy. Marriages or unions between other coloured minorities, such as the Chinese, and aborigines was also frowned upon by the Queensland authorities. Governments went sometimes to extreme lengths to keep whites and blacks separate to spare whites from the dangers of supposed aboriginal degeneration. This meant moving indigenous people out of the cities and into rural reserves where they could be better controlled.
Apprehension of miscegenation played on white minds constantly … fears were voiced on the street and in parliament about that worst of all fates, the mixing of different racial blood, be it black-on-white or coloured-on-white. The political class in Australia, left, right, protectionist or free trader, were all on a unity ticket in the debates on the necessity of achieving a White Australia, eg, (John) Chris Watson, Labor Party leader of the house, vented against the mixing of the coloured and white peoples (resulting in) “the possibility and probability of racial contamination” [Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 6-Sep-1901]; as did Issac Issacs, high court judge and future governor-general, warning of the need to avoid “the contamination and the degrading influence of inferior races”[Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12-Sep-1901].
With Aboriginal protectors like these …
Colonial attitudes of “white supremacy” of the protectors(sic) were at best transparently disguised under the thinnest of veneers … Cecil Cook, the Chief Protector of Aborigines for the Northern Territory, called for authorities to “breed out the colour” of aborigines – making a mockery of his job title![4] Cook also endorsed segregation of black Australians, favouring forcible institutionalisation of aboriginals … Cook argued this was integral to public health policy, describing it as “a prophylactic measure” for white health.[5]. Cook as chief medical officer of NT had a great fear that blacks would with the aid of health interventions come to outnumber the white population in NT. Accordingly his view on aboriginal women with gonorrhoea was to leave them untreated and leave them to die out, putting a hold on aboriginal numbers in the Territory[6].
“Smoothing the dying pillow”
The white majorities in both countries believed that the “full-blood” tribal aborigines and the Māori people were racially inferior and destined to die out[7], and that the country should be inhabited by “good white stock” who would be capable of defending the Empire. The European elite pursued assimilation policies towards its indigenous minorities, the plan was to ‘absorb’ and ‘uplift’ the “half-castes” in society. The indigenous population bore the brunt of policies of eugenics ideology enacted by the government. In Australia A O Neville, an avid proponent of eugenics and Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia for 25 years from 1915, was responsible for the controversial policy of removing aboriginal children from their families (the “stolen generation”). Neville’s two-pronged approach to ‘controlling’ the indigenous population involved “biological absorption” – deciding just who aboriginals under his control could marry, and by ‘assimilating’ the offspring of those marriages into white society.
Neville, like Cook in the Northern Territory, was haunted by the prospect of aborigines eventually swamping Western Australia with their numbers … his master-plan for realising an “all-white” WA involved the diluting of the skin colour of aborigines – a deliberate but controlled (‘progressive’) miscegenation, so that each succeeding generation would have lighter skin. After two or three generations the result would be an appearance acceptable to the non-indigenous community, aboriginals would be “perceived as white” and the indigenous settlements could be closed … the process would eradicate all aboriginal characteristics from white society. Neville’s scheme was thwarted by the hostile opposition of racist white people in WA who refused to countenance the planned mixed marriages[8].
Early 20th century Maori village
In New Zealand the race planners crafted a fail-safe policy to deal with the Māori ‘issue’ – assimilation was proposed for those Māoris who did not succumb to what polygenists thought would be their ultimate destiny, extinction. NZ’s Taranaki Herald of 1852 proclaimed almost triumphantly, “The Maori race is doomed wherever the Anglo-Saxon appears”. The perception of the Māori in NZ as transitory was underlined by the fact that in NZ ‘Official Yearbooks’ prior to 1940 the national population figure was given “exclusive of Māori”. Even after demographic trends had demonstrated that the Māori birth rate was again on the ascent (Māori population rose from 40,000 in 1896 to 50,000 in 1911), many white eugenicists clung on to this prejudicial and outdated notion of ultimate extinction of the race[9].
PostScript: Pākehā Pseudo-medicine, Craniology
The New Zealand eugenicists assumed that the Māori would be fully absorbed into the dominant and supposedly superior Pākehā culture[10]. The dominant Pākehā society accepted the untested conventional wisdom that the Māori had inferior mental capacity, and army surgeon Dr A S Thomson ‘proved’ this in reaching the conclusion after random testing that Maori heads were smaller than European heads![11]
❈ in the 1940s the Queensland absorption policy on aborigines gave way to one of assimilation
✤ the eugenics preoccupations of the governing class in Queensland were further exacerbated by climate conditions. The tropics of Northern Queensland were widely thought unsuitable for white men and women, whereas they were believed to suit the “different constitution” of aboriginal and other coloured peoples (eg, Kanaks) … thus raising another source of anxiety for whites already fearing that their potency was waning
◈ the white elite enunciated this concern whilst completely sidestepping the uncomfortable reality that it was white men who brought about any such increase in “half-castes” by raping and impregnating black women
☣︎☣︎☣︎☣︎☣︎☣︎
[1] be the value of that preferred life to the state, the nation, the race, or to future generations, Levine and Bashford described this as the “evaluative logic” at eugenics’ core, A Bashford & P Levine, ‘Introduction’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[2] ‘No 3. Aboriginal Societies: The Experience of Contact. Changing Policies Towards Aboriginal People’, (Australian Law Reform Commission), www.alrc.gov.au
[3] What Stefan Haderer accurately if somewhat dramatically calls “the white supremacist biological and cultural assimilation project of the twentieth century”, S Haderer, ‘Biopower, whiteness and the Stolen Generations: The arbitrary power of racial classification’, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 9(2) 2013, www.acrawsa.org.au
[4] E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, Unpub. PhD thesis, (Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003),
www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
[5] Cook in 1930 government report, quoted in A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, National and Public Health
[6] ibid.
[7] this myth lingered on far past its use-by-date, in Queensland still maintaining some currency as late as 1949, Wilson, ibid.. The white colonialists in both countries (Aust. & NZ) subscribed to the notion of “smoothing the dying pillow” (a term popularised by anthropologists Daisy Bates and A P Elkin). To the European mindset aborigines and Māori were assumed to be doomed races and the ‘best’ thing was to facilitate their demise, a miscegenation solution resulting in a hybrid race but one dominated by the “biologically superior” white stock, ‘Smoothing the Pillow of a Dying Race. A.A. Grace’, Maoriland : NZ Literature 1872-1914 (NZ Electronic Text Collection), www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz
[8] ‘Bring them home – chapter 7’, Australian Humans Rights Commission, www.humanrights.gov.au; G R Robertson, ‘Well-intentioned Genocide’, www.geoffreyrobinson.com
[9] ‘Page 2 – Overview of Māori and Pākehā relations in the twentieth century’, New Zealand Race Relations, NZ History, www.nzhistory.govt.nz;
C Leung, ‘Australia’, 24-Feb-2014, (Eugenics Archive Aust). Retrieved 8-Nov-2016 from www.eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/530b8d09acea8cf99a0000000001, J Stenhouse, ‘The Darwinian Enlightenment and New Zealand Politics’, in R M MacLeod & P F Rehbock [Eds.], Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific
[10] J Belich, ‘European ideas about Māori – the dying Māori and Social Darwinism’, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/European-ideas-about-maori/page-4 (assessed 6-November-2016)
[11] Stenhouse, op.cit.
In this age of deregulated, worldwide passenger flight with more commercial airlines in the game than there are countries in the world (or so it seems anyway), its interesting to reflect that back in 1906 two American brothers had a monopoly on the very concept of human flight. Of course in 1906 there was no commercial flights – being still at the first dawn of aviation endeavour, but the only attempts at flight at all then (in a legal sense at least) were with the express say-so of those same two brothers.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/image-12.jpg”> The 1906 Patent[/
In 1906 the Wright brothers – Orville and Wilbur – were granted a patent by the US Patent Office (after two earlier failed applications) for their “flying machine”, or more precisely, for their demonstrated method of controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight. The bicycle shop owners-cum-aviation inventors had managed to demonstrate some measure (albeit minimal) of aerial control of the third version of their Wright flyer in all three axes of aerodynamics – pitch, yaw and roll[1]. The basis of the patent was the Wrights’ experiments in 1902-1903 and the successful (852 feet/59 seconds) glider flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903.
⇓1903 Wright Flyer at the Smithsonian
The Wright brothers defended their exclusive aircraft patent against all-comers (“copiers and imitators” as they saw everybody else in the game) with a monomaniacal religious zeal that would have befitted their overbearing United Brethren minister father Milton. Orville and Wilbur freely sued and issued writs against anyone who attempted to construct and fly a new aircraft without purchasing a licence from them. As this was the pioneering era of aviation there were a lot of inventors trying to do just this[2]. Accordingly, the Wrights spent a lot of time locked in legal disputes with other manufacturers in America and overseas who were trying to avoid the patent fee. The Wrights staunchly defended their world monopoly over flight in unequivocal terms as a ‘moral’ and a ‘legal’ right, treating all other contemporary inventors in the field as in effect “hobbyists”![3].
Glenn Hammond Curtiss, a New York engineer and aviator, was one of many inventors who fell foul of the litigious Wright brothers when he added ailerons (French: “little wing”), a movable attachment to a fixed wing for greater control, to his experimental aircraft. Unfortunately for Curtiss he became the main focus of the Wrights’ wrath and in their eyes their greatest nemesis … in 1913 the Wrights won lawsuits for patent infringement against Curtiss et al, when US courts ruled that ailerons fell under the ambit of the Wright patent. Consequently Curtiss and his business partners (Aerial Experiment Association – AEA) were forced into bankruptcy[4].
The Wrights’ broad litigious reach was generally less effectively outside of the USA. Many European inventors were able to escape paying the patent fees, sometimes with the aid of sympathetic European courts. The Wrights’ demands for royalties were ignored or evaded, or if they were contested, one strategy was to stretch the case out until the patents had expired[5].
The Wright brothers’ obsession with enforcing their legal patent❈ had wider ramifications for the industry to the point of retarding progress in the development of US aviation. Beyond the early breakthroughs in lateral control, the brothers did not really add much to their aviation achievements (consequently in these years Curtiss pulled far ahead of them in design innovation). After America entered the Great War in 1917, the brothers’ perversely rigorous enforcement of the patents left America woefully short of new airplanes at a time they were desperately needed. The upshot was that the US forces in WWI had to secure French fighter planes for their military pilots[6].
Because of the Wrights’ unwavering stance on their patents (after 1912 Orville alone, as Wilbur died that year), resentment towards the brothers was strong, they were accused of being greedy by licensees, eg, by demanding “money first” from prospective buyers BEFORE giving a demonstration of the prototype flyer, or by setting too high a royalty fee (at one point demanding 20% of sales); after a string of fatal air crashes in Wright planes Orville Wright lost sympathy with the public by attributing the accidents solely to “pilot error” (characteristically giving no consideration to the fact that the Wrights might be at fault for not having tried to make improvements to their prototype Flyer’s basic design[7].
Eventually, inevitably, the US authorities moved to close down the Wrights’ monopoly. A patent pool system was introduced in 1917 whereby all aircraft manufacturers in the country joined an association requiring the payment of a relatively small fee for patent use. The pooling of the aircraft patents signalled the end of the Wrights’ patent wars … by this time Orville had already sold his interest in the Wright Company at handsome profit and moved on to other (non-aviation) ventures[8].
PostScript: Curtiss-Wright parallels
Intriguingly, Curtiss shared a common background with the brothers Wright, like them he began as a bicycle shop owner, designing, building and repairing bikes in small-town USA. But before moving into aviation Curtiss excelled in another area, motorcycles … he began designing V-8 powered motorcycles. The adventurous Curtiss even raced them, winning several races and setting a world record speed of 136 mph (earning himself for a brief period the tag of “the fastest man on earth”).
Despite the early setbacks at the hands of the Wrights, Curtiss went on to have a stellar career in aviation (and in naval aviation), designing practical seaplanes and airplanes, the viability of which he happily demonstrated in public (cf. the Wrights who tended to shroud their aircraft projects in secrecy). With financial backing from the famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell and from Bell’s wife, Curtiss’ international prize-winning planes (“The June Bug”, “The Albany Flyer”, “The Jenny”) completed the first publicly witnessed flight and the first long distance flight in North America (220 km, Albany to New York City). Curtiss, far superior to the Wrights as a pragmatic, go-ahead businessman, quickly became a multimillionaire. Curtiss possessed a flair for publicising and promoting his inventions that the brothers did not exhibit, and turned his inventions into rapid sales of units[9]. In a superb irony given Orville’s fierce, lifelong antipathy to Glenn Curtiss, the two aviation companies eventually merged in 1929❦ to form the Curtiss-Wright Corporation[10].
◖◗ See also the related November 2014 blog article ‘Wright or Not Right?: the Controversy over who really was “First in Flight?” ‘
▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂
❈ the stock joke the Curtiss people liked to tell at the time went … (the two brothers were so litigious that) every time somebody jumped in the air and waved his arms, the Wrights would demand a patent royalty or threaten to sue!
❦ by which time neither man had active roles in their respective companies any longer … Notwithstanding that Orville still objected to the new corporation’s title listing Curtiss’ name first!
[1] activating the pitch (moving the aircraft’s nose up and down) and yaw (moving the nose side-to-side) of the projectile was the previous, understood (but unsuccessful) method of controlling flight … the Wrights reasoned that these worked only in unison with the third element of rotation, roll (lateral movement through the novel wing-warping feature of the Flyer). Warping (twisting) of part of the wing on either side causes the plane to roll or bank in that direction, Phaedra Hise, ‘The 1903 Wright Flyer’, Air & Space Magazine (Smithsonian), March 2003. The addition of twin-rudders to the rear of the 1902 model of the Flyer helped stabilise it and prevent it spinning out of control, ‘Rudder – Yaw (Wright 1903 Flyer)’, (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), www.wright.nasa.gov
[2] as W J Boyne described it, the Wrights went about “systematically sueing anyone suspected of infringing their patents, which really meant everyone attempting to make a living from building or flying airplanes”, Walter J Boyne’s “World Aviation History”, (‘The Wright Brothers: The Other Side of the Coin’), 2008, www.wingsoverkansas.com
[3] Sparks of Invention: Need for Speed, (Series 1, episode 5, TV documentary 2015, 9-NOW Network, screened 23-Oct-2016); ‘Wilbur Wright to Octave Chanute’, (letter, Dayton, Oh. 20-Jan-1910), cited in ‘Wright Brothers patent war’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[3] ibid.
[4] ‘Wright Brothers patent wars’, ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] ibid.
[7] Boyne, op.cit.; Phaedra Hise, ‘How the Wright Brothers Blew It’, Forbes, 19-Nov-2003, www.forbes.com
[8] Wright Brothers patent wars’, op.cit.
[9] ‘About the Man – Glenn H. Curtiss’, Glenn H. Curtiss Museum, www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org
[10] Flying (magazine), ‘Century of Flight’, 130(12), Dec 2003
On our last day in the United Arab Emirates our tour guide took us on an afternoon drive for a spot of dune-buggy “rally driving” in the sandhills. Well, that was the pretext for the decision to first head for the hinter-hills … desert dwellers with SUVs?
Desert City
Actually, when we got to the designer desert track we spent an hour or so hot-footing it up-and-down in 4WD land rovers. The first time our Emirati driver drove over the edge of a steep ‘wave’ of sand and the vehicle dropped straight down, it did feel pretty ‘hairy’ … but it was all quite safe as the 4WDs were equipped with roll bars and the drivers kept completing the same circuit countless times till we got rather bored with it. We then stopped on a sand ridge and admired the sunset for a while.
After the desert romp we went to a camel park and Bedouin fort camp … I wondered if this was a “fair dinkum” Bedouin encampment or if it had been slightly sanitised or ‘Disneyfied’ for tourists. Seeing the old wooden walls of the fortification though, did manage to conjure up a sense of the Beau Gestes for me!
Those visitors that didn’t want to do the camel ride (speaking personally, I had sated my taste for camel rides striding high atop a collection of even-toed ungulates in Egypt on an earlier occasion), went for a combined dinner and show. The eating conditions were pretty rudimentary (one tick for authenticity at least!) – we were seated on large sand-filled cushions which were resting on ancient-looking strips of carpet bleached dry of colour by endless exposure to the harsh sun … however I would concede that the meal was quite good (falafel & kebab roll) except for the rather tasteless penne.
The show itself was only of short duration – the main part was a bearded male dancer in a colourful, traditional costume, a Arab tunic and a sort of umbrella dress (come to think of it he looked a bit like Max Klinger from Mash, or at least he seemed to share the TV character’s wardrobe tastes!).
The dancer twirled around in circles – in one direction – ever more frenetically. He did this for so long I thought he would surely have to unwind in the opposite direction for the equivalent amount of time before he would be able to regain his balance! … but he was OK. Halfway through his twirling performance his whole outfit lit up like New Year’s Eve … at this point for some reason, randomly, the idea of suicide bombers came into my mind – maybe it was the way he was self-activating the light show (ie, himself) by repeatedly flicking a switch on and off! Fortunately for all the show ended peacefully and we eventually returned to our more comfortable beds in the hotel.
Eighty years ago this month the IOC’s most controversial Olympiad was held. 1936 was a momentous year for the Olympic movement – the official Summer Olympic Games were held by the Nazis in August in Berlin. Back in February of that year another part of Germany, Garmisch-Partenkirchen*, had hosted the Winter Olympiad[1]. And in July there had been, or should have been, an alternative, anti-Nazi Olympiad in Barcelona … more of that later.
Never before had a modern games been manipulated for propaganda purposes to the extent that the Germans under Hitler did at Berlin. When the Summer Games were awarded in 1931 Germany was still under the governance of the democratic (but ill-fated) Weimar Republic, but with Hitler coming to power two years later Germany swiftly took on a more unsavoury and increasingly sinister complexion. The Third Reich was soon savagely attacking the liberties of Jews, communists and the Roma (gypsies) … and much worse was to come!
(Image: www.olympic-museum.de)
As it got closer to the event there were questions asked within the Olympic community about whether the Games should go ahead in Berlin. The Nazi regime’s transparent violations of human rights at home, and it’s failure to behave like a good international citizen (eg, pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, illegally occupying the Rhineland in March 1936, etc), prompted a number of nations to consider boycotting the event.
In America public opinion was far from consensual on the issue. 500,000 Americans signed petitions demanding an alternate site” to Berlin and several newspapers, including the New York Times registered objections to US participation [Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, (1994)].
f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/image-18.jpg”> Berlin olympischstadion 1936[/capt
The US Olympic Committee debated the issue at great length. American Olympic association heavyweight, Avery Brundage (later controversial head of the IOC) was “gung-ho” for going ahead with participating, running the (now hackneyed) line that politics had no place in sport. The head of the American Amateur Athletic Union, JT Mahoney, and many others, were in favour of boycotting. The authoritarian patrician Brundage was widely thought to be anti-Semitic and racist (in 1935 he alleged there was “a Jewish-communist conspiracy” trying to prevent the US team’s participation in Berlin). Ultimately Brundage’s lobby narrowly carried the AAAU vote in favour of going. The American decision to participate in Berlin was pivotal in salvaging the Games for the host city[2].
Brundage, defender of the Nazi OlympiadInternational opposition to the Nazi Olympics remained very vocal in the lead-up to the event. Spain and Barcelona in particular had a vested interest, having lost the bid to hold the 1936 Games to Berlin (the German city won easily, 43 votes to 16)♔. SASI (the international federation of workers’ sports) decided to hold the next instalment of its Workers’ Olympiads (see my previous post) in Barcelona in 1936. The Catalan Committee in Favour of Popular Sport (CCEP), boosted by the election of the leftist Popular Front in Spain in February 1936, worked with SASI to plan and prepare the Barcelona Olympiad♕, scheduled to begin just two weeks before the start of the official (Berlin) Games … clearly timed to steal Nazi Germany’s (and the Führer’s) thunder!
(Source: Bernard N. Danchik Papers; ALBA 033; Box 2; Tamiment Library / Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, NYU)
In the end, although only two countries, the USSR and Spain, withdrew from the Berlin Games in favour of the Barcelona Olympiade, support for the Barcelona alternative games was widespread. The Olympiad was not state-sponsored in the fashion of the IOC carnival but backing came from progressive bodies and associations within western countries (trade unions, socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists, etc.). The Peoples’ Olympiad was also supported by various individuals – eg, dissident Germans with first-hand experience of the Hitler state and Jewish-American athletes opposed to Nazism[3].
SASI preached a cooperative and fraternal spirit to the 6,000 athletes from 22 countries who committed to participate. Whereas the Berlin Games were perceived as an affront to the Olympic ideals, Barcelona was intended to be based on a foundation of international solidarity that would elevate the “brotherhood of men and races” and “show the sport-loving masses (a Olympiad) that is neither chauvinistic or commercialised”, one devoid of the “sensational publicity of stars” that was characteristic of the IOC-run Games[4].
The organising committee for the Peoples’ Olympiad employed an emblem which reinforced the SASI themes of solidarity, brotherhood and world peace … three male athletes standing defiantly side-by-side, one white, one coloured and one (to all appearances) of mixed or Asian ethnicity (no females in the poster to be seen however … inclusiveness apparently hadn’t extended that far by then!)[5].
Most of the mainstream IOC sports had been slated for inclusion in Barcelona and one or two former ones like amateur rugby revived. Also tacked on to the Olympiad were a variety of cultural activities such as folk dancing, theatre, music, chess♚ and an “Art Olympiad” (the promoters advertised the event also as a “Folk Olympiad”)[6].
Avery Brundage and the IOC were not alone in condemning the ‘rebel’ Olympiad in Catalonia, the Spanish right-wing press slammed the idea saying, variously: it would be a “second class Olympics” because it was open to all-comers, it was a “Jewish-communist” games, etc.[7]. On the Left the Spanish Marxist Workers’ Party (POUM) opposed the Peoples’ Olympiad on two grounds – the preoccupation with sports was “a waste of time” distracting the working class from its ‘proper’ objectives, and they mistrusted the motives of the democratic socialists (ie, SASI)[8]. Another instance of the lack of unity of the European Left in the face of the threat from the totalitarian Right.
El Estadio de Montjuic
In July 1936 on the eve of the games opening, the Peoples’ Olympiad was thwarted when the Spanish military led by General Franco staged a coup against the republican government. The outbreak of a full-scale civil war in the country resulted in the Olympiad’s cancellation. It was a double blow for the city of Barcelona as it had earlier also lost out on the 1924 Olympic bid (to Paris). Some of the overseas athletes A number of the overseas athletes who had already arrived in Barcelona stayed, joining the Republic side and fighting in the International Brigades against Franco’s Falange forces. The Berlin Olympics kicked off as planned on 1st August with the politics indeed overshadowing the sport[9]. Barcelona and its Montjuïc Stadium had to wait another 56 years before it finally got its chance to hold the Olympic Games in 1992.
_________________________________________
* the infrastructure for the sports tournament was already in place – the main stadium and hotels (to be converted into a state-of-the-art Olympic village) had been constructed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition and upgraded for the city’s bid for the 1936 Games
♚ Chess has a long tradition (since 1924) of staging its own brand of international Olympics, the Chess Olympiads, now held biennially
─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─
[1] such was the furore that surrounded the Berlin Olympics, the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Games, comparatively, have been largely overlooked by history … Hitler did take a more low-key approach to the Bavarian event, however it was not entirely without controversy, eg, the “Jews not wanted” signs prominently displayed in the town had to be hastily removed from sight (albeit only temporarily); the German army undertook military manoeuvres in the vicinity during the Games, A Meyhoff & G Pfeil, ‘Garmisch-Partenkirchen’s Uncomfortable Past: German Ski Resort Represses Memory of 1936 Winter Olympics’, Spiegel International Online, 22-Jan 2010, www.spiegel.de
[2] H Gordon, Australia and the Olympics ; ‘The Movement to Boycott the Olympics of 1936’, (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), www.ushmm.org
[3] British support of Barcelona (and opposition to Berlin) was formidable, promising a big representation of UK athletes for the Olimpíada Popular, TUC (Trade Union Congress), ‘Labor Chest – Opposition to the Nazi Games, British Workers’ Sports Associations’ (Press Release), 9-Jun 1936), in Documents on the Popular Olympiad from “Trabajadores: The Spanish Civil War through the eyes of organised labor”, BTU Congress (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www.contentdm.warwick.ac.uk
[4] ibid.
[5] J Freedland, ‘The Anti-Nazi Games that never were’, Evening Standard (Lon.), 16-Jul 2012
[6] ‘The Peoples’ Olympics in Barcelona’, http://iberianature.com/
[7] G Calomé & J Sureda, ‘Sport and Industrial Relations’ (1913-1939): the 1936 Popular Olympiad’, (1995), www.ddd.uab.cat
[8] ibid.
[9] Photos of the Berlin Games at the time of the event capture how completely Nazi propaganda lorded it over the ideals of the Olympics – the massive Nazi swastika symbol is seen to dwarf the Olympic Rings at venues, ‘The Olympics: Playing Political Games’, (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www2.warwick.ac.uk
1936 was a momentous year for the Olympic movement, the official, IOC-sanctioned Olympic Games was hosted by Nazi Germany’s Berlin. Never before had a modern games been manipulated for propaganda purposes to the extent that the Germans under Hitler did in Berlin 80 years ago this month. When Berlin was awarded the Games in 1931, Germany was still under the governance of the democratic Weimar Republic, but with Hitler coming to power two years later Germany swiftly took on a more unsavoury and increasingly sinister complexion. The Third Reich was soon savagely attacking the liberties of Jews, communists, the Roma (gypsies) and other targeted groups of German society … and much worse was to come!
As it got closer to the event there were questions asked within the Olympic community about whether the Games should go ahead in Berlin. The Nazi regime’s transparent violations of human rights at home, and it’s failure to behave like a good international citizen (eg, pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, illegally occupying the Rhineland in March 1936, etc), prompted a number of nations to consider boycotting the event.
The US Olympic Committee debated the issue at great length. American Olympic association heavyweight, Avery Brundage (later controversial head of the IOC) was “gung-ho” for going ahead with participating, running the (now hackneyed) line that politics had no place in sport. The head of the American Amateur Athletic Union, JT Mahoney, and many others, were in favour of boycotting. The patrician Brundage was widely thought to be anti-Semitic and racist (in 1935 he alleged there was “a Jewish-communist conspiracy” trying to prevent the US team’s participation in Berlin). Ultimately Brundage’s lobby narrowly carried the AAAU vote in favour of going. The American decision to participate in Berlin was pivotal in salvaging the Games for the host city[1].
Catalonia’s Olympiad Stadium
International opposition to the Nazi Olympics remained very vocal in the lead-up to the event. Spain and Barcelona in particular had a vested interest, having lost the bid to hold the 1936 Games to Berlin (the German city won easily, 43 votes to 16)♔. SASI (the international federation of workers’ sports) decided to hold the next instalment of its Workers’ Olympiads (see my previous post) in Barcelona in 1936. The Catalan Committee in Favour of Popular Sport (CCEP), boosted by the election of the leftist Popular Front in Spain in February 1936, worked with SASI to plan and prepare the Barcelona Olympiad♕, scheduled to begin just two weeks before the start of the official (Berlin) Games (clearly timed to steal Nazi Germany’s thunder!).
Politics and sport, the National Socialist way
In the end, although only two countries, the USSR and Spain, withdrew from the Berlin Games in favour of the Barcelona Olympiade, support for the Barcelona alternative games was widespread. The Olympiad was not state-sponsored in the fashion of the IOC carnival but backing came from progressive bodies and associations within western countries (trade unions, socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists, etc.). The Peoples’ Olympiad was also supported by various individuals – eg, dissident Germans with first-hand experience of the Hitler state and Jewish-American athletes opposed to Nazism[2].
SASI preached a cooperative and fraternal spirit to the 6,000 athletes from 22 countries who committed to participate. Whereas the Berlin Games were perceived as an affront to the Olympic ideals, Barcelona was intended to be based on a foundation of international solidarity that would elevate the “brotherhood of men and races” and “show the sport-loving masses (a Olympiad) that is neither chauvinistic or commercialised”, one devoid of the “sensational publicity of stars” that was characteristic of the IOC-run Games[3].
Olimpíada Popular poster: International worker-athlete brotherhood
The organising committee for the Peoples’ Olympiad employed an emblem which reinforced the SASI themes of solidarity, brotherhood and world peace … three male athletes standing defiantly side-by-side, one white, one coloured and one (to all appearances) of mixed or Asian ethnicity (no females in the poster to be seen however … inclusiveness apparently hadn’t extended that far by then!)[4].
Most of the mainstream IOC sports had been slated for inclusion in Barcelona and one or two former ones like amateur rugby revived. Also tacked on to the Olympiad were a variety of cultural activities such as folk dancing, theatre, music, chess♚ and an “Art Olympiad” (the promoters advertised the event also as a “Folk Olympiad”)[5].
Avery Brundage and the IOC were not alone in condemning the ‘rebel’ Olympiad in Catalonia, the Spanish right-wing press slammed the idea saying, variously: it would be a “second class Olympics” because it was open to all-comers, it was a “Jewish-communist” games, etc.[6]. On the Left the Spanish Marxist Workers’ Party (POUM) opposed the Peoples’ Olympiad on two grounds – the preoccupation with sports was “a waste of time” distracting the working class from its ‘proper’ objectives, and they mistrusted the motives of the democratic socialists (ie, SASI)[7]. Another instance of the lack of unity of the European Left in the face of the threat from the totalitarian Right.
Estadio Montjuïc
In July 1936 on the eve of the games opening, the Peoples’ Olympiad was thwarted when the Spanish military led by General Franco staged a coup against the republican government. The outbreak of a full-scale civil war in the country resulted in the Olympiad’s cancellation. Some of the overseas athletes A number of the overseas athletes who had already arrived in Barcelona stayed, joining the Republic side and fighting in the International Brigades against Franco’s Falange forces. The Berlin Olympics kicked off as planned on 1st August with the politics indeed overshadowing the sport[8]. Barcelona and its Montjuïc Stadium had to wait another 56 years before it finally got its chance to hold the Olympic Games in 1992.
유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유
♔ a double blow for Barcelona as it also earlier had lost the 1924 Olympic bid (to Paris)
♕ the infrastructure for the sports tournament was already in place – the main stadium and hotels (to be converted into a state-of-the-art Olympic village) had been constructed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition and upgraded for the city’s bid for the 1936 Games
♚ Chess has a long tradition (since 1924) of staging its own brand of international Olympics, the Chess Olympiads, now held biennially
─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─
[1] H Gordon, Australia and the Olympics ; ‘The Movement to Boycott the Olympics of 1936’, (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), www.ushmm.org
[2] British support of Barcelona (and opposition to Berlin) was formidable, promising a big representation of UK athletes for the Olimpíada Popular, TUC (Trade Union Congress), ‘Labor Chest – Opposition to the Nazi Games, British Workers’ Sports Associations’ (Press Release), 9-Jun 1936), in Documents on the Popular Olympiad from “Trabajadores: The Spanish Civil War through the eyes of organised labor”, BTU Congress (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www.contentdm.warwick.ac.uk
[3] ibid.
[4] J Freedland, ‘The Anti-Nazi Games that never were’, Evening Standard (Lon.), 16-Jul 2012
[5] ‘The Peoples’ Olympics in Barcelona’, http://iberianature.com/
[6] G Calomé & J Sureda, ‘Sport and Industrial Relations’ (1913-1939): the 1936 Popular Olympiad’, (1995), www.ddd.uab.cat
[7] ibid.
[8] Photos of the Berlin Games at the time of the event capture how completely Nazi propaganda lorded it over the ideals of the Olympics – the massive Nazi swastika symbol is seen to dwarf the Olympic Rings at venues, ‘The Olympics: Playing Political Games’, (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www2.warwick.ac.uk
The second week of the Rio Olympics is now in full swing with the track and field disciplines having taken over from the swimming events. The conspicuous media coverage of the ‘unofficial'(sic) medal tallies in these games and the keen, vicarious interest of patriotic supporters in the performances of their national teams is as high as ever. By way of contrast to today’s highly competitive and commercialised IOC Olympics, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a very different kind of Olympiad, one lacking in individual competitiveness, centring largely round the Second World in the 1920s and 1930s.
During the interwar period (1919-1939) the newly-communist state of the USSR isolated itself from the capitalist world, this also meant opting out of the western system of sport, including the quadrennial Olympic Games♜. The USSR leaders viewed the Olympics as a capitalist and inherently exploitative and chauvinistic sporting event run by and for the West’s elites¹. The Bolsheviks certainly wanted to engage the Soviet citizenry especially its youth in physical activity, but wanted to create a sporting and physical culture that was ‘proletarian’ in nature to match the state’s avowed ideological position². Eschewing the IOC games’ ‘bourgeois’ individualism and record-seeking, the Soviets envisaged a sporting movement that would be class-based, collectivist and mass-oriented³.
Spartakiad 1931
As an alternative to the Olympics the Soviet Union in the early 1920s introduced the Spartakiad⁴, an ongoing, international multi-sports event sponsored by itself. The state organisation responsible for organising the event was called Red Sport International♔ (RSI or Sportintern), under the aegis of the powerful Comintern (the Communist International). The Spartikiad was the brainchild of RSI’s first president, Nikolai Podvoisky who came to the position from being Vsevobuch (responsible for organising the military training of Soviet youth).
RSI was formed in opposition to the IOC’s First World-dominated Olympics, but also in opposition to the rival Socialist Workers’ Sport International (Ger: Sozialistische Arbeitersport Internationale, SASI) which was founded as the Lucerne Sport International and based in that German-speaking Swiss city in 1920 (see Postscript). SASI organised a series of Workers’ Olympiads over the ensuing two decades.
The early (unofficial) Spartakiads were purely Soviet Republic affairs involving formations of the Red Army and Spartak Youth Physical Culture. Later participants included trade unions, the Dynamo Physical Culture Sports Society, the Patriotic Defence Society (DOSAAF) and other labour-based sports clubs and associations. From 1928 to 1937 athletes from sports clubs and associations outside of the USSR were invited to take part in the Spartakiads.
RSI Vs SASI
Predictably the separate sports tournaments of the USSR-sponsored RSI and the SASI (backed by the German parliamentary socialist Left and a mixture of independent socialists, syndicalists and anarchists) became vehicles to endorse the virtues of each body’s political stance … the Soviets saw the sporting activities of RSI as opportunities for political education of the masses (although they were quite frustrated at the limited success in this objective). There were calls in the 1920s for SASI and RSI to unify their multi-sport movements and some tentative connections made, but these were made against a backdrop of the non-crystallisation of the Left in Europe. Communists and social democrats committed the fatal political mistake: bickering and fighting with each other rather than focusing on the common enemy, a greater threat to them from fascism and the Far Right in Europe (eg, as happened in Weimar Germany). Ultimately the two workers’ sporting organisations couldn’t bring themselves to merge as the ideological divide between moderate (democratic) Left and Far Left widened⁵.
Both sports internationals were large-scale organisations, each with over two million members by 1928. Both professed to be anti-bourgeois but crucial differences surfaced rapidly. SASI took a strongly anti-militarist stance (the Olympiad’s slogan was “No More War”), and insisted that members follow its policy of political party neutrality (on both counts antithetical to RSI). SASI’s political non-alignment drew hostility from RSI who attacked it for a failure to espouse revolutionary goals, labelling its members as ‘Mensheviks’ and ‘reformists’. RSI also pursued a strategy of trying to ‘white-ant’ SASI by forming communist factions within it. SASI for its part earnestly resisted attempts by RSI to radicalise its movement and impose a communist dominance over it⁶.
Frankfurt WO 1925
SASI held its first Workers’ Olympiad in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1925. Around 150,000 spectators attended and a world record was broken in the 4 x 100 metres women’s relay race. SASI fostered the ideals of international solidarity and brotherhood among athletes, this was in stark contrast to the IOC which had compromised its own Olympic principles by allowing Belgium and France to ban the defeated (so-called) “aggressor nations”, Germany and Austria, from the 1920 and 1924 Olympics♕. The display of national flags and anthems at Worker Olympiads were forbidden … all athletes competed under a single red flag and “The Internationale” was sung at ceremonies which comprised displays of free exercises by a mass of gymnasts. The sense of brotherhood engendered by SASI discouraged the quest for records and the idolisation of individual athletes⁷.
Another feature distinguishing the Workers’ Olympiad from the IOC Olympics was that the best performed athletes were awarded diplomas instead of medals. As well, there was no exclusive accommodation for competitors such as Olympic villages, worker-athletes were billeted with local, working class families⁸.
The 1931 SASI Olympiad in Vienna♚ was probably the most successful tournament, introducing innovative sports such as fitness biathlon (run-and-swim) and “military sport”. It attracted 250,000 spectators (more than attended the 1932 Los Angeles Games), with competitors from 26 countries numbering in excess of 75,000 (cf. a mere 1,410 competing at the LA Games). Workers’ Olympiads were not restricted to elite performers, they were in fact overtly non-elitist … open to participants regardless of ability. SASI’s games had a more socially progressive approach … where the IOC had only 107 women competitors in LA in 1932 (about 7% of the total), Vienna had 25,000 female athletes attend in 1931⁹.
The next Workers’ Olympiad was set to take place in Barcelona in 1936, the same year as the Berlin Olympics, and was intended to be a protest against the IOC’s awarding of the Games to Hitler’s Germany. It was however called off at the 11th hour owing to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (see separate post). Hastily rescheduled for 1937♤ in Antwerp, this Olympiad was considerably reduced in scale (15 participating countries) … no German athletes because the Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Federation of Germany (ATSB) had been outlawed by the Nazi regime upon coming to power. As a partial reconciliation SASI did permit RSI sporting clubs and bodies to take part. Exotic or novel sports at Antwerp included Basque pelota, Czech handball, table tennis, motor cycling and chess¹⁰.
Antwerp WO 1937
The 1937 Workers’ Olympiad was the last of SASI’s sexennial multi-sports labour-centred events, as the outbreak of World War II put paid to plans to hold the 1943 Workers’ Olympiad scheduled to take place in Helsinki. The global war also called a halt to the Moscow-controlled Spartakiads (Red Star International itself was dissolved in the late 1930s).
Emerging from the war as allies of Britain, France and the US, the USSR moved towards a position of greater engagement with the world. Embracing the West, to the extent it did this, was partly a recognition of the need to modernise the Soviet Union, and this was essential if the USSR was going to compete with and overtake the capitalist world in industry, technology and agriculture. A key part of engaging internationally was to integrate into the Western international sports system, starting with the major sports in the USSR, football and weightlifting. The Soviets got themselves onto the world governing federations in these sports and then extended the process to other highly participatory sports¹¹.
As the muscle-flexing of the Cold War was starting up, the USSR recognised the value of using sport to project and enhance great-power status, so a clear aim was re-admission to the Olympic Games fraternity. The Soviets did not try to participate at the 1948 London Games but timed their return for the 1952 Games in Helsinki where they were successful in winning 22 gold medals. At Melbourne in the 1956 Olympics the USSR finished first (above even the mighty USA) in the medal tally. Such a demonstration of communist sporting supremacy over capitalist nations in this world arena brought the Soviet Union a real measure of international recognition¹² (in the same way as Soviet technological breakthroughs in the “Space Race” did).
In the post-war period the Soviet Union continued holding Spartakiads, but they now had new purposes. The Spartikiads and other such massive-scale, multi-sport extravaganzas (kompleksnye sorevnovania) were still PR vehicles to propagate positive values of youth, optimism and world peace. The Spartakiad continued right up to the breakup of the USSR, and its sporting activities bolstered national defence by providing paramilitary training for Soviet youth. But the event was now held one year prior to the Olympics, the Spartakiad became an internal Olympics trial, a mechanism to find and develop new talent for the upcoming Games¹³.
Postscript:
The origins of worker gymnastic and sporting associations and clubs lie in Central Europe in late I9th century and arose out of an increase in workers’ leisure time, eg, Germany led the way with the formation of the Worker-Gymnasts Association (Arbeiter-Turnerbund – ATB) in 1893. Swimming, sailing, athletics and other sports swiftly followed suit. By soon after the turn-of-the century these types of organisations had spread to other European states. In 1913 worker sport associations representing Germany, England, Belgium, France and Austria, met at a congress in Ghent and formed the first International Workers’ Sports Association. The advent of world war the following year however put the IWSA’s activities in abeyance for the duration¹⁴.
₪┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅₪
♜ in this formative stage of the Soviet Union, “Socialism in One Country” was the prevailing strategy of the Party (advanced by Stalin) – consolidating the ‘progressive’ and revolutionary conditions within the USSR, which meant postponing its export to the outside world
♔ originally known as the International Red Sports and Gymnastics Associations, underscoring gymnastics’ place in organised recreational pursuits in this period
♕ both worker sports associations (especially SASI) railed against the IOC for its practice of social exclusion, racist attitudes and failure to promote policies of gender equality at the Games
♚ the same year RSI held an All-Unions Spartakiad in Berlin
♤ the 1937 Summer workers’ event was preceded by an Arbeiter Olympiade Winter in Czechoslovakia
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References:
¹ a succession of aristocratic heads of the IOC (de Coubertin, de Baillet-Latour, Brundage) accentuated the elitist nature of the organisation and the event
² more pragmatically, the government also understood that the proletarian sports meets would provide youth with valuable training for later national military service
³ B Keys, ‘Soviet Sport and Transnational Mass Culture in the 1930s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38(3), 2003, www.blogs.bu.edu
⁴ the Spartakiad took its name from Spartacus, the 1st century Thracian gladiator who led the slave rebellion against Rome, a deliberate contrast with the Modern Olympics movement which took its inspiration from the Ancient Olympics with its aristocratic nod to the mythology of Greek Gods, ‘Spartakiad’, (Wikipedia), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartakiad
⁵ ‘A Workers’ Olympics?’, Workers’ Liberty, 01-Aug 2012,www.workersliberty.org
⁶ DA Steinberg, ‘The Workers’ Sports Internationals 1920-28′, Journal of Contemporary History, 13(2), Apr 1978
⁷ B Kidd, ‘Radical Immigrants and the Workers’ Sports Federation of Canada, 1924-37′, in G Eisen & DK Wiggins [Eds], Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture
⁸ ‘A Workers’ Olympics?’, op.cit.
⁹ ‘Socialist Workers’ Sport International’, (Wikipedia), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SocialistWorkersSportInternational; ‘Red Sport International’, (Wikipedia), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedSportInternational; Kidd, op.cit.
❛❛Life is all right in America,
If you are all-white in America ❜❜
~ Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story
❛❛Travel is fatal to prejudice❜❜ – Mark Twain (inscription on the cover of the 1949 edition of ‘The Green Book’)
“Carry your Green Book with you … you may need it!” (the publication’s motto)
༄࿓༄࿓༄࿓༄࿓
An earlier (and subsequently) a rival publication from the US Black community▼
In the early 1930s an African-American postal employee from New York, Victor Hugo Green, came up with the idea of producing a book for Black Americans to guide them in travelling safely around their own country. Green got some inspiration from the Jewish-American press which for several years had been publishing travel guides for its community’s travellers, and from earlier, embryonic and less successful efforts to service the African-American community (eg, the Negro Business Directories from the early 20th century)[1].
In the 1930s, with the era of “Jim Crow” segregation still very much alive, the experience of Black Americans migrating or travelling around the United States was a very precarious and outright dangerous activity. The notorious white-only “Sundown towns”* were in force, not just in the South but right across the country. The open and legally sanctioned discrimination practiced against Black people in their everyday domestic lives extended to their travel experiences. Victor Green understood that the emerging Black middle class aspired (like all other Americans) to car ownership which held the tantalising promise of individual freedom. For African-Americans, having your own vehicle was the means of escaping a degrading reliance on segregated public transport[2].
▼ American auto dreams!The project like many entrepreneurial dreams started small, The mailman-cum-entrepreneur Green initially focused his efforts on helping African-American motorists and travellers locate businesses (lodgings, restaurants and other food outlets and fuel stations) in the greater New York metropolitan area that would accept their custom. As the business grew (with assistance from the US Travel Bureau) Green expanded his guide to the rest of the US, and to Alaska, Bermuda and parts of Canada and Mexico. The Green Book’s aim was to help Black and Coloured travellers chart a safe path through a segregated America by pinpointing exactly where on route they could stop and get the services they required to make the trip a happy and pleasant one.
In 1947 Green retired from the New Jersey Postal Service, and together with his wife Alma, started their own travel agency in Harlem. International editions of the book followed with the firm also handling air travel business for the Black community. The Green Book gradually added extra service providers including drug stores, barbers and hairdressers, tailors, salons, garages, nightclubs, taverns, liquor stores and doctors’ offices.
According to the civil rights leader, Julian Bond, Green used his network of contacts in the Postal Workers Union to ascertain where Black visitors would be welcome[3]. Early on, Green visited the locations he would include in his Green Book to check them out personally, but when the book took on a national (and international) focus this became impractical[4]. Aside from hotels and motels, other accommodation options advertised in the Green Book included “tourist homes” (the private residences of African-Americans made available to travellers) and the Harvey House hospitality chain[5].
The Green Book, or to give it its full title, The Negro Motorist Green-Book (later called The Negro Travelers’ Green Book), had its debut edition in 1936 with a green-coloured cover. Green’s intention for the book was to equip Black travellers with the information to avoid the pitfalls, the very real dangers and manifold inconveniences of travelling across a landscape still largely hostile to their race. People could use the Green Book as a vade mecum to find African-American friendly services and hospitable havens on their journeys. It gave travellers the assurance that they could travel with dignity, and not have to suffer the ignominy of being constantly turned away and put down by racist accommodation providers. Green in fact advertised his book as making it possible to have a “vacation without humiliation”.
◥ 1949 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
The Green Book circulation was initially 15,000 copies a year. It was sold in the first instance by mail order through participating Black businesses, and later via Esso gas stations[6]. The cost of the 1936 edition was a Depression-conscious 25 cents, rising to $1.95 by 1960. Some Black enterprises, especially newspapers, eventually sponsored the book, as did Esso, whose gas stations had an unusually high number of Black franchisees in this period … this was reflected in its prominent place in the Green Book’s list of friendly businesses. According to historian Gretchen Sorin, under an agreement with Standard Oil, Esso service stations were selling two million copies of the Green Book annually by 1962[7].
◥ 1956 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
The 1956 edition – whose cover bizarrely featured two unmistakably fair-haired, white motorists(!?!) – made the assertion “Assured Protection for the Negro Traveler”, and it did offer Black travellers some element of choice, where hitherto going to an unfamiliar town was a total lottery. In 1955 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, only about six motels out of 100-plus on Route 66 took Blacks – so without a copy of Green’s road trip companion with them travellers could be faced with a long, frustrating and demoralising series of fruitless enquiries[8].
Ernest Green (a member of the defiantly brave band of schoolchildren known as the “Little Rock Nine” which ran the gauntlet of racist bullies at the first desegregated school in the South in 1957) used the Green Book in the 1950s to travel the 1,600km from Arkansas to Virginia. Green, no relation to publisher Victor, later described the book as “one of the survival tools of segregated life”[9]. Other accolades for the Green Book followed … “A credit to the Negro race” (William Smith); “The Bible of Black Travel”.
Undeniably, the book’s popularity for nearly 30 years (spawning imitators as well) is testimony to how appreciated it was by ordinary African-Americans … the practical guidebook was invaluable to travellers by minimising or avoiding inconvenience, embarrassment and harassment whilst on trips and vacations around the US.
Victor Green died in 1960 however his family kept the Green Book going until 1966. Rebranding was tried with the word ‘Negro’ dropped from the title to try to widen the publication’s appeal, but with the implementation of the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the outlawing of racial discrimination in public housing, it’s relevance to 1960s America had dwindled away.
.
Victor Hugo Green ▼
When the resourceful Mr Green published the inaugural Green Book in 1936, he wrote in the preface that he looked forward to the day when “this guide will not have to be published”. That day was a long time happening (sadly not in Victor’s lifetime) … but it did come.
Footnote: In the decades after the publication folded, the story of the Green Books slipped more or less completely out of the public consciousness. It was only by happenstance that it resurfaced after playwright Calvin A Ramsey met an elderly traveller in the South in 2001 who asked him where he could get a “Green Book”. Curiosity aroused, Ramsey did some background research and eventually wrote two books – a children’s story and a play – on the topic. Since then revived interest in the Green Books has amounted to a bit of a ‘Renaissance’ … there has been the Schomburg Center’s GB digitization project (‘Revisiting a Jim Crow Era Guide for Traveling While Black’), the National Parks Service Route 66 Corridor Preservation Project, as well as numerous recent articles, blogs, museum exhibitions, documentaries (including Ric Burns’ current Driving While Black project) and podcasts, all on the Green Books[10].
◩◪◧◨◩◪◧◨◩◪◧◨◩◪◧◨◩◪◧◨◩◪◧◨
* so called because visiting Blacks were systematically warned to be out of town “by sundown” or risk violent reprisals from the local white population. This phenomenon was by no means restricted to backwater redneck, hick towns. Sundown towns included large suburbs such as Warren, Michigan (pop. 180,000), Levittown, New York (80,000) and Glendale, California (60,000).
[1] K Kelly, ‘The Green Book. The First Travel Guide for African-Americans Dates to the 1930s’, Huffington Post, 8 Mar 2014
[2] ibid. Although car ownership was liberating for African-Americans it did lead to other problems such as racial profiling by police (deliberate targeting, harassment and random arrest on suspicion of Black drivers on the street) … still very much a threat to the civil liberties of the African-American community today, T Owen, ‘Driving While Black: Cops Target Minority Drivers in this Mostly White New Jersey Town’, 11-Apr 2016, (Vice News) www.news.vice.com
[3] ‘ “Green Book” Helped African-Americans Travel Safely’, Talk of the Nation, 15-Sep 2010, www.npr.org
[4] C Taylor, ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’, www.taylormadeculture.com
[5] C McGee, ‘The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All’, New York Times, 22-Aug 2010
[6] Kelly, op.cit
[7] McGee, op.cit. Sorin, cited in J Driskell, ‘An Atlas of self-reliance: The Negro Motorist’s Green Book (1937-1964), 30-Jul 2015, www.americanhistory.si.edu
[8] ‘The Green Book Video Transcript – Route 66’, www.ncptt.nps.gov
[9] E Lacey-Bordeaux & W Drash, ‘Travel Guide helped African-Americans navigate tricky times’, 25-Feb 2012, www.edition.cnn.com
[10] See ‘Mapping the Green Book’, (MGB production blog), www.mappingthegreenbook.tumblr.com
Two of the more interesting suffixes borrowed by English and put to good neologistic use are -naut and -nik. The origins of the word ‘naut’ have connotations of travel and water, Naut derives from an Ancient Greek word, translated as ‘naútēs‘, meaning ‘sailor’, sometimes rendered as ‘to navigate’. From naut we get the word ‘nautical’, something nautical relate of course to water and ships, although the root word naut has been employed to form new words which relates more to the sky or to atmosphere rather than to water.
✒︎ The Argonauts
༒
The first use of this suffix in the above sense seems to emanate from Greek mythology and the story of Jason and his crew who sailed according to legend in search of the Golden Fleece – the Argonauts. The etymology is: Classical Latin Argonauta; from Classical Greek Argonautēs; from Argō, Jason’s ship + nautēs, sailor; from naus, ship [Webster’s New World College Dictionary]. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles dates it’s use in English from 1596, so it’s been in currency for a long time.
The post-war phenomenon that has given naut words their impetus and continued relevance was the Space Race from the late 1950s, initially involving only the USSR and the United States. The US space program brought astronaut into common use , a word formed by simply conjoining the prefix astro (= stars) with naut. Far from being newly coined, the word itself has a history that long pre-dates the 1950s and 60s “Race to the Moon”. In 1930 the term was used in a pioneering Sci-Fi short story, ‘The Death’s Head Meteor’ by Neil R Jones (and there are other instances of the word in fiction go back to the late 19th century). The explorations of space fired the popular imagination, propelling astronaut into common usage to describe those (especially American) who ventured into space on behalf of the “Free World”. Astronaut may have been influenced by the term aeronaut (aero meaning air or atmosphere, as in aeronautics, from Ancient Greek aēr = air) in use to describe balloonists dating from the 1780s [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut]. With the long-term goal of reaching the Moon accomplished by the US in 1969 and further Moon missions planned, it was of no surprise that the more precise lunarnaut soon crept into the vocabulary.
As the Soviet Union entered the bipartite race with the intention of ‘conquering’ space and establishing a technological superiority over the US, the Russian Cold Warriors wanted for ideological reasons naturally enough to differentiate their extra-planetary achievements from those of their capitalist foes. So when the first successful spaceman Yuri Gagarin went up in Vostok I in 1961, the word cosmonaut (from Cosmos, the Universe, from Ancient Greek Kosmos = order) came into the lexicon – the New York Times attributed its genesis to Premier Khrushchev “and Soviet publications” [‘Russians coin a word for him: “Cosmonaut”, NYT, 13 April 1961].
✒︎“astroboy” touches down
༒
Astronauts by other names
The expansion of the Space Race to other nations outside of the big two spawned a whole lot of other naut-based neologisms. The first Indian in space (1984) was initially depicted as a cosmonaut (because he flew under the Soviet space program), but Indian pride and patriotism and the advancement of their own, homegrown space program, soon led to the evolution of a distinctive term for Indian space-traveller, vyomanaut (from Sanskrit vyoman (= sky). Although among Hindi-speakers there has been some debate about the rival merits of other terms, eg, there is a measure of support for anthanaut (or antharnaut), derived from anthariksh, meaning ‘space’ in Hindi.
When China joined the “Man-in-Space Club” by launching their own pilot beyond the stratosphere in 2003, the Chinese inevitably found their own term to describe it – tàikōnaut (taikon the Chinese word for space or cosmos, derived from tàikōngrén = spaceman) [‘Taikonaut’, Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/]. Although it was apparently a Chinese-Malaysian who first used the term for Chinese astronaut and the Xinhua News Agency uses it in its English-language publications (but not the Shenzhou space program).
NB: For a pure Chinese rendering of the concept, either hángtiānyuán or yūhángyuán (literally translated as sky navigator or sailor and Universe navigator or sailor respectively) more accurately capture the essence of the meaning [ibid.]
Another word invented to describe the profession of space explorer of a specific country or region is spationaut, meaning a French astronaut, from Fr: spationaute (= space navigator). Spationaut is also used more generally to delineate astronauts from other European states, although a more suitable, generic term for this might be Euronaut.
Along the lines of aeronaut we also have aquanaut which might be a grander way of describing an underwater diver (the prefix ‘Aqua’, from Ancient Greek for water), which is distinct from an oceanaut whose scientific marine exploration is done in a submarine. ✒︎A NASA aquanaut (source: theatlantic.com)
༒
Other -naut-suffixed terms signifying navigation in either a precise or looser sense include:
• chrononaut (a time-traveller – inspired by Doctor Who or Back to the Future?)
• cryonaut (one whose body is preserved by cryonics)
• cybernaut (a voyager in cyberspace; user of the internet or virtual reality. Could also be called an infonaut)
• gastronaut (person with a keen appreciation of food, ie, a more formal name for a ‘foodie’)
• hallucinaut (a hallucinator)
• neuronaut (one who studies the brain especially the effects of psychedelic drugs). cf.psychonaut who explores one’s own psyche under the effects of drugs.
• oneironaut (one who explores dream worlds)
As can be gleaned from the above there is a high degree of artificiality in the construction of many of these naut words. Some involve the choice of a convenient word (eg, gastronaut) rather than involving an act of literal navigation. Another concocted naut word with an interesting medical-related origin is responaut. The term was first applied c.1964 to a group of people at a particular facility in England with severe breathing difficulties whose condition needed them to be attached virtually permanently to the newly invented iron lung (mechanical respirator) in order to preserve their lives. ‘Responaut’ (formed from combining respirator + naut) was chosen because these patients experience similar problems to astronauts and oceanauts in establishing and maintaining communications and vital air supplies [Sunday Times (Lon), 12 January 1964, cited in Word Finder (Oxford English Dictionary), http://findwords.info/term/responaut].
The word Juggernaut contains the form of the naut suffix only by coincidence. It it unconnected to the idea of navigation or sailing, having come into English currency from a difference language group. Juggernaut derives from Sanskrit via a Hindi word, jagannath, meaning literally, world lord or protector. In English it has come to signify anything to which persons blindly devote themselves to or are ruthlessly crushed by [Shorter OED on Historical Principles].
Yinglish and spacerace-speak
Turning to words with the suffix ‘nik’, these come to English from a different path being of Slavonic origin with some Yiddish influence. Nik suffixes are very common in Slavonic languages, we find for example polkovnik (meaning colonel) in Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and so on. Just as the Space Race gave naut words a new impetus, nik also found its way into English from Russian after the Soviet Union’s successfully launched a space craft named Sputnik in 1957.
The word beatnik was coined by journalist Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1958] to describe adherents to the “Beat Generation”, a sort of subculture movement characterised by youthful anti-conformism, rebelling against the mainstream and hip culture (“being cool, man!”) (cf. the word ‘hipster’ as used today). Other traits include devotion to jazz, drug use and Eastern religions, and pseudo-intellectualism. Through the writings of ‘Beat’ leaders such as Jack Kerouac, other neologisms followed the pattern of beatnik … jazznik, bopnik, bugnik [Jack Kerouac, Brandeis Forum, ‘Is there a Beat Generation?’, 8 Nov. 1958, www.wnyc.org/story/.]
The Cold War tensions of the 1970s spawned another new word formed from the root nik – refusenik. Originally, refuseniks were individual citizens (many Jewish but not exclusively so) of the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries who were denied permission by the Communist authorities to emigrate. Over time the application of ‘Refusenik’ in colloquial English has broadened to take on the meaning of “a person who refuses to do something, especially by way of protest” [Oxford English Dictionary (online)].
Peacenik is a word which has often been used in a derogatory way to describe someone who is an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention [www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/peacenik] (cf. “woke”/”wokeism”).The term is thought to have originated in the 1960s [possibly 1962 according to www.wordorigins.org]. Its precise origin is not known but very likely the term arose out either out of the anti-nuclear weapons movement or the anti-Vietnam War movement of the sixties. Peacenik is a synonym for pacifist or dove.
Holics – taking it to the nth degree
An unrelated but similarly manufactured word to peacenik is peaceoholic (sometimes spelt peaceaholic). Peaceaholic and other words with an -aholic or -oholic postfix are back-formed by analogy with the word alcoholic (into English from Arabic via French or Middle Latin). So we have shopaholic, workaholic, chocoholic, sexoholic, etc. which convey the sense of an addiction to or obsession with an activity or object.
Other nik words with a Yiddish flavour to them include Nudnik and Kibbutznik. Nudnik means obtuse, boring, a bothersome person a pest (nudyen = to bore). The Jewish Chronicle reports (18 February 2009) that Nudnik has entered modern Hebrew … “a common and even respected modus operandi in Israeli society”. A nudnik is someone “who is constantly asking you for something or otherwise taking up your time” [www.thejc.com]. Kibbutznik is a name given to workers who are members of an Israeli collective farm (a Kibbutz).
Like the ‘Hot’ War (WWII) preceding it, the Cold War has always been fertile ground for the stuff of Hollywood drama (and melodrama). Right through the era the alleged plots of communists, whether identified explicitly or implicitly, provided inspiration for writers and directors of both film and television. The persona of the vilified communist agitator neatly slotted into the ‘bad guy’ role once occupied by the native American Indian in Westerns, particularly conveniently so at a time when the Western was starting to lose its mass entertainment appeal on cinema and TV screens.
‘The Avengers’: Gentlemen’s bowler hats & sexy black leatherwear
In the political aftermath of the Second World War the USA and the USSR found themselves locked into an international power struggle for global supremacy with the capitalist system pitted against the communist one, culturally as well as militarily and economically. In the prevailing atmosphere of tension and mutual distrust, espionage and counterintelligence flourished. Inevitably the new international “spy game” found its way on to the pages of novels, comic books and into films and television. In the 1960s the interest in the espionage/sabotage dimension of the Cold War escalated into a “spy craze” on both the big and the small screens. On television two successful British spy series, Danger Man and The Avengers❈, both preceded the first film of the cinematic espionage game-breaker, the James Bond series.
The espionage/spy film sub-genre of course did not begin in the 1960s but can be traced back to the pre-war era with its first-wave popularity established to a large extent by suspense king, Alfred Hitchcock, with films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent and Sabotage [AMC Film Site, (Suspense/Thriller Films), www.filmsite.org ]. The driving force for the popularity of the 1960s Spy movie was the extraordinary (and enduring) success of the James Bond Agent 007 series franchise. The Bond movie phenomena spawned a flurry of imitators, including parodies (some good, some mediocre or worse), from the mid-sixties, eg, Our Man Flint, The Silencers (Matt Helm series), The Ipcress File, Agent 8¾, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Spy with a Cold Nose, Torn Curtain, A Dandy in Aspic, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, Get Smart, etc.
Despite the Communism (Soviet Russia) V Capitalism (America) conflict being at the core of the Cold War drama,it’s cessation by the early 1990s did not result in the demise of the TV and film spy genre, far from it! James Bond, post-Soviet Union, pits himself against “an (unnamed) international terrorist network far more amorphous than the KGB”. The ongoing success of the Jason Bourne series of movies in a post-9/11 world sees special agent Bourne foiling the evil schemes of one terrorist ring after another, some with a seemingly Slavic hue to them, others projecting something more generally Middle-Eastern in flavour. It seems, as Tony Shaw put it, “that the Cold War had never really gone away, at least not from our cinema and television screens” (T Shaw, ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 21, No 1, Jul. 2008).
The original on-screen preoccupation with the theme of the Cold War has its origins in the McCarthyist intrigues in Hollywood. From 1947 the House Committee of Un-American Activity (HUAC), spearheaded by Junior Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, turned its attention on Hollywood with a view to systematically weeding out communists and “fellow travellers” from the film industry. As the fear and paranoia generated by the ‘Red Scare’ impacted on Hollywood, the studio moguls responded to HUAC’s pressure by voluntarily climbing on board the anti-communist witch-hunt for ‘subversives’, commissioning films with an undisguised anti-communist message. The upshot of the Committee turning the torch on Tinseltown was sadly the ‘blacklisting’ of many promising actors and behind-the-camera practitioners. Rising actors like Larry Parks and John Garfield had their careers truncated or ended by the activities of HUAC, as did the group of writers, directors and producers known as the Hollywood Ten.
Emerging post-war social realism films stymied
The big studio heads’ decision to focus on films exposing the supposed communist infiltration of the United States also had an adverse effect on social realism films which in that same year (1947) were starting to have an impact. Hollywood’s enlistment in the war against internal communism largely put paid to the trend towards “problem pictures” dealing with social issues such as anti-Semitism (Gentlemen’s Agreement), alcoholism (Smash-Up) and schizophrenia (Possessed)[Daniel J Leab, ‘How Red was my Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War Film, and I Married a Communist‘, Journal of Contemporary History, 19(1), Jan. 1984].
Following 1947 there was an ongoing sequence of crudely propagandist “Reds under the bed” films with titles like Walk a Crooked Mile, The Red Menace, Conspirator, I Married a Communist, Invasion, U.S.A., The Jet Pilot. The movies and especially ones like John Wayne’s Big Jim McLain and My Son John (both 1952 releases) overtly attacked the communist lifestyle and sought to show that subversives were actively at work undermining the American fabric of life. Most of the stock standard B-movies seeking to exploit the Red Scare were abysmal, often completing losing the plot and portraying Communism more as “a variety of gangsterism” than as an alternative ideology systematically trying to achieve world domination [ibid.].
Hollywood domestic shock/horror & scandal 40s & 50s style
Other US anti-Red films took a more indirect if thinly-veiled approach. Them (1954) employed the allegorical device of megasized mutant ants threatening society to convey the communist menace. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was thematically similar, depicting emotionless alien clones (read ‘Communists’ infiltrating Planet Earth). California Conquest (1952) put the issue into a historical context: Spanish Californians circa 1840 thwart a Russian attempt to take over the Pacific Coast colony [ibid.]. I Married a Communist (1950) took the laboured, crude message to a new height (perhaps that should be depth!). This RKO film was a pet project of Howard Hughes, the only Hollywood studio boss who fully shared HUAC’s conviction of the ‘Red Peril’ to heart, fervently launching his own anti-communist crusade within RKO. Hughes went so far as to remove the individual credits from industry persons he suspected of being communists [ibid.].
The television arm of Hollywood similarly wasted no time in jumping on the anti-communist bandwagon. From the early fifties right through the decade the studios turned out a slew of short-lived, jejune Cold War TV dramas with homogeneous-sounding names such as Shadow of the Cloak, The Door with No Name, Foreign Intrigue, I Spy (two distinct series used this title 10 years apart), Secret File, U.S.A., Top Secret, Passport to Danger, Behind Closed Doors. Counterspy was another one, interesting only because it had started life as a WWII radio drama with Nazis as the villains, only to be upgraded in the Cold War, swapping Nazis for communists as the new villains [‘Commie Fighters of the ’50s’, www.for-your-eys-only.com ]. The sole stand-out fifties spy series with any kind of longevity was I Led Three Lives, which dramatised the real-life experiences of American double agent Herbert Philbrick [‘The anti-communist spy as TV entertainer’, www.jfredmacdonald.com].
By around the end of the fifties the Cold War films and TV series of this ilk with their crude, oversimplistic and formulaic style, as West versus East propaganda had become out-of-date. McCarthyism was on the downward slide, détente had started to thaw out international relations with the Eastern Bloc. The ideological enemy to Americans was no longer a singular one, Communist China had cemented itself as the new bogeyman for the self-appointed guardian of democracy. The perception was now, mixing racism with politics, that a yellow threat to the Free World was a factor along with the earlier red one [Leab, op.cit.].
‘The Iron Petticoat’ 1956
The flip side of the McCarthyist-inspired pictures of the 1950s which were driven by the hysteria and paranoia of the communist witch-hunt was a whole host of movies which sought to exploit the Cold War for laughs. Among these pseudo spy/espionage comedies was My Favourite Spy, The Iron Petticoat and The Mouse that Roared (1950s), Carry On Spying and The Russians are Coming,The Russians are Coming (1960s), through to Spies Like Us and Stripes (1980s). These sort of movies tended to portray Russian agents and military types as often bungling, humourless semi-robots (or if female, stereotyped as cold, charmless and unsexed).
‘Casino Royale’ 1967
Note: the ‘spoofiest’ of all Bondesque films was the one based on the book written by the Bond author himself, Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953) (Ex-agent Fleming’s first James Bond novel), with David Niven (Sir James Bond) and Woody Allen (little Jimmie Bond) as the most absurdist of James Bond incarnations! Also see PostScript.
The Cold War has been the subject or inspiration for countless films and TV episodes over the past 60-plus years. The form of the sub-genre has shifted over time. In the black-and-white 1950s we had the crude, sombre “Reds under the bed” films and television programs. In the 1960s the hysteria diminished and celluloid representations of espionage were generally less bleak than in the preceding decade. The Ur-secret agent James Bond Agent 007 was the measure and model of the sub-genre, the unbroken series of films kicking off with Dr No in 1962.
‘Get Smart’: The Cone of Silence, symbol of spy technology malfunction, (source: johndalybooks.com)
PostScript: Spy Spoofery
The increasingly invoked secret agent trope was in itself inverted with the advent of spy spoofs on cinema and TV screens (most famously Get Smart, but also Austin Powers, Johnny English, Spy Hard). The TV and movie spy satires weren’t really interested in peddling an anti-communist message, their creators just wanted to exploit the Cold War genre and its ludicrous scenarios for all its comedic worth!
With the demise of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the slick, transparently escapist Bond film (not to mention it’s myriad of imitators using or misusing the skills of actors like James Coburn, Dean Martin and Dirk Bogarde) reinvented itself by discovering new (non-Soviet) antagonists and dangers, and the franchise continues to be mega-profitable, churning out a new Bond film for a receptive and insatiable global audience every couple of years.
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❈ Christopher Bray makes an intriguing comparison of the motives (or lack thereof) of The Avengers and James Bond. Whereas Bond’s rationale was clear cut, to stop Spectre from achieving its goal of world domination, Steed and Mrs Peel enter a Kafkaesque world each week to avenge the murders of public servants by villains acting for some ‘unseen’ and ‘unknown’ powers whose seem utterly motiveless, Christopher Bray, 1965: The Year Modern Britain Was Born (2014)
Before there was motion pictures, radio or television in Australia, variety theatre and vaudeville flourished as the form of public entertainment. In the first half of the 20th century two performers in the absolute vanguard of Australian vaudeville comedy were George Wallace and Roy Rene. Both these standout comedy stars of the Australasian theatre, at their career high-point, were extremely well paid. Each had his own distinctive style and persona, as well as particular strengths and weaknesses in the differing modes of comic performance attempted.
George Wallace (above) had an early taste of the stage appearing in children’s pantomime at age three, but it wasn’t until after WWI that his career really took off when he teamed up with fellow vaudevillian Jack Paterson to form a knockabout comedy act called “Dinks and Onkus”. The duo performed their “couple of drunks” routine to packed audiences at the Newtown Bridge Theatre for five years before Wallace outgrew the partnership and joined up with bigger enterprises, first that of Fuller’s Circuit and then the Tivoli Theatre Circuit.
George was smallish in stature and quite chubby in build but despite this, on stage he was exceptionally acrobatic and agile on his feet. As part of his very physical act he became acutely adept at landing on his left ear during a deliberate fall. Wallace wrote witty songs and review sketches to perform in theatre, sometimes he told absurd stories about characters such as Stanley the Bull, the Drongo from the Congo and Sophie the Sort [Stuart Sayers, ‘Wallace, George Stevenson (1895–1960)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wallace-george-stevenson-8961/text15765, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 4 April 2015]. The Wallace persona on stage and screen was that of a childlike man, portraying goggle-eyed, innocent characters well down on the social ladder, often farm boys, hicks and yokels ill at ease with women [Paul Byrnes, ‘George Wallace’, www.aso.gov.au]. The country bumpkin-cum-innocent in the big city association was further emphasised by George’s garb, comprising ill-fitting clothes and rumpled hat.
Wallace’s “working class zero” popularity attracted the attention of local film-makers and in the thirties he appeared in a number of films such as Gone to the Dogs, A Ticket for Tatts, mostly for Ken G Hall, Australia’s foremost (Cinesound) director in the interwar period. In his movies (some of which he co-wrote) Wallace reprised his theatre role as a bumbling, disaster-prone innocent. In his performances on the big screen Wallace demonstrated that he was able to make the transition from stage to cinema. After WWII however, finances dried up and the Australian film industry went into steep decline. Wallace returned to theatre including a return to pantomime and to the new medium of radio performance. In 1949 he began a weekly radio show with the Macquarie Network in Sydney. The one setback to Wallace’s career was his unsuccessful attempt in the early fifties to make it in the English theatre as a comedian, but this could be attributed partially to the English audiences’ unfamiliarity with his Australian accent [ibid.].
Roy Rene (born of part-Dutch ancestry, Harry Van Der Sluice) was a rival of sorts for Wallace in the interwar musical comedy theatre. Rene’s stage persona of ‘Mo’ and his successful partnership with Nat Phillips as “Stiffy and Mo” was the inspiration for Wallace to form “Dinks and Onkus”. Like Wallace, Rene started in ‘panto’ at 14 as “Boy Roy” in a Sydney production of Sinbad the Sailor. Rene’s popularity grew in musical comedy reviews all around Australia and NZ in the 1920s and 1930s. His theatrical career however was marked by tempestuous relationships with colleagues and proprietors. He broke up and then reunited with Phillips, and moved (sometimes sacked) from one theatre company to another (Princess Theatre, the National Amphitheatre, Fuller’s, Tivoli, Theatre Royal, etc) from one side of the continent to the other and on to New Zealand throughout his career.
Rene had a very distinctive on-stage appearance, striking black-and-white face paint which gave a nod to the influence of minstrelsy, baggy pants and a battered black top hat. In performance he exuded an extroverted and even exhibitionist style – he was the quintessential lair (the self-promoting “show-off”). Often he would robustly insult the audience with a spray of obscenities, both verbal and gestural. In today’s milieu of political correctness Rene’s act would in all likelihood be characterised as sexist and even racist (in its presentation of a Jewish caricature) and it did alienate some viewers in the day. This did not stop Fuller’s from billing him (pre-war) as “Australia’s foremost delineator of Hebrew eccentricities” [Frank Van Straten, ‘Roy Rene 1892-1954’, Live Performance Australia – Hall of Fame (2007), www.liveperformance.com.au ].
At the height of his career the wider public loved Mo’s humour and feted him as a great clown. The typically unrestrained expressions used by Rene in skits became the vogue, so much so that they entered the Australian lexicon. The numerous ‘Mo-isms’ that still colour the linguistic landscape of Australia include such perennial gems as “strike me lucky!”, ” you beaut!”, “strewth”, “cop that, young Harry”, “you little trimmer!”, “don’t come the raw prawn with me” and “fair suck of the sav” [‘Roy Rene’, www.skwirk.com].
Rene as a live performer was a forerunner of what a later generation would euphemistically call “working blue”. His work, especially in the Stiffy and Mo skits was punctuated with risqué humour and vulgar double entendre. One of their most celebrated routines had Mo, chalk in hand, saying to the “straight guy” Stiffy: “why is that whenever I write F you see K” (the audience apparently never got it at the time). How far Roy could be characterised as a “blue comic” is a moot point. A show biz contemporary of his, Bill Moloney in his autobiography, Memoirs of an Abominable Showman, cautions that this was more in the public’s perception than anything actually evident in Mo’s sketches. Moreover, in the light of the unfettered ‘blueness’ of later comics like Lenny Bruce and Rodney Rude, Mo’s ribald smuttiness comes across as very pale by comparison.
Roy as Mo struck a chord with the public partially perhaps because he was seen as being so far from being a hero, more of an everyman, and also because they saw him in the context of the Depression as a battler, an underdog barking back at his so-called ‘betters’ [ibid.]. At the peak of his fame a measure of his popularity were the stacks of unaddressed mail he received from his fans. Letters would somehow find their way to Roy Rene’s home or office with only the iconic, black and white image of Mo’s face scribbled where the address should appear on the envelope!
Inevitably the popularity of Mo led to attempts to establish Roy Rene as a film star. Strike Me Lucky! (1934) directed by Ken G Hall was not successful either critically or at the box office. The medium did not suit Rene who needed the spontaneity of performing before a live audience to feed off and sparkle at his best. The repetition of takes during scenes in movies was also to his distaste [Lesley Speed, ‘Strike Me Lucky: Social Difference and Consumer Culture in Roy Rene’s Only Film’ (Screening Australia), www.tlweb.latrobe.edu.au].
After WWII, with variety theatre in recession, Rene made a successful transition to radio. He was able to do this having learned from the lessons of his failed venture into films, because he made sure that his radio shows were presented before a live audience to ensure that his performances had that necessary edge. At Sydney radio station 2GB he found a niche as the bombastic “Professor Mo McCackie” of “McCackie Manor” finding a whole new audience for his unique sense of humour.
Because they possessed very different comedic styles, it is hard to detect any influences Rene and Wallace may have had on each other. Rene, hitting the boards a good decade before the younger man, led to him becoming the bigger star in the late 1910s to mid 1920s. The differences in style and content were quite pronounced: Rene’s speech drew on the broad Australian vernacular, he had an urban type of comedy influenced by the traditions of American Jewish (Yiddish) comedy. Roy/Mo was both raunchy and in-your-face in a way the simpler, more laid-back George/Onkus never was. Wallace was more influenced by the traditions and stories of the Australian bush (his adolescent years were largely spent working in the Queensland bush as a cane-cutter, horseman, dairy farming and the like). One critic has identified the influence of Charlie Chaplin on Wallace’s comedy in aspects like the use of athletic slapstick and the choice of costumes [Byrnes, op.cit.].
Wallace and Rene were gigantic figures in the first half of 20th century Australian variety entertainment, both were quintessentially Australian, both had exemplary timing in their comic delivery. The two plied the same trade but stylistically and temperamentally they were very different vaudeville comics. The two comedians did ultimately have one curious connexion: both men died in the same small Sydney suburb of Kensington, six years apart.
‘Mo Mac’ with another great master of comedy, Stan Laurel
Postscript: I have not included Jim Gerald within the purview of this survey. ‘Diabolo’ Gerald, the rubbery-faced clown, a contemporary of Rene and Wallace, was a theatrical performer who rightly deserves a place in the trio of 20th century Australian vaudeville comic greats. Gerald however differs from the other two Australia-focused comedians. He was more international in outlook, sourcing a large amount of his material during trips abroad, and working overseas extensively, eg, touring South Africa, Asia, North America; as part of the AIF Entertainment Unit in the Middle East and the Mediterranean during WWII; plus starring in a series of cinematic shorts in Hollywood during the silent era.
To the vast majority of people, especially in America, the name Wright brothers and the first mechanically-propelled flight in a heavier-than-air craft have always been synonymous with each other. The reality is that the achievement of Orville and Wilbur’s “First Flight” has always been strongly contested from certain quarters within the aviation industry in the United States – and internationally as well.
Not long after the news spread about the momentous event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, the significance of what the Wrights’ had done found itself under challenge, especially as time went on from the European aviation community. French newspapers after 1903 described the celebrated American brothers as bluffeurs (bluffers). Doubts were raised about their achievements when the Wrights failed to release the photo of the Wright Flyer in flight at Kitty Hawk until nearly five years after the groundbreaking 1903 flight … newspapers acerbically asked: “Were they fliers or liars?”, Paris edition of the New York Herald (10 Feb 1906); ‘Wright Brothers: European skepticism’, www.spiritus-temporis.com.
The state of North Carolina has harboured no such doubts, proudly displaying the slogan First in Flight on its car number-plates. Whether you accept the Wrights’ claim to be first in flight, or some other contender (of which there are several), in a sense could depend on what is meant by manned, aeronautical flight. Orville Wright’s first successful if brief powered flight was by no measure the first human flight in history. The genesis of intentional manned air travel can be traced back to the late 18th century with the advent of large hot air balloons (starting with the Montgolfier brothers of France in 1783).
As well, in the 30 years preceding Kitty Hawk, there was a host of aviation pioneers experimenting with monoplanes, biplanes, box-kites and gliders including, 1874: Félix du Temple; 1894: Hiram Maxim; 1894: Lawrence Hargrave; 1898: Augustus Moore Herring [B Kampmark, ‘Wright Brothers: Right or Wrong?’, Montréal Review (April 2013]. These flights however were either pre-power ones, or if motorised, they have been largely discredited as having been either unsustained, uncontrolled or as at the least not sufficiently controlled [P Scott, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919].
The achievements of Orville and Wilbur in their 1903 Wright Flyer moved beyond the brothers’ earlier experiments in motorless gilders, but there are at least two other rival claimants prior to December 1903 whose aeronautical experiments were also mechanically-driven and became airborne albeit briefly – Gustave Whitehead in 1901 and Richard Pearse in 1902/1903. The late 1890s and early 1900s were awash with would-be plane makers, there was a veritable aircraft mania world-wide with people all the way from Austria to Australasia trying to construct workable “flying machines”.
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Richard Pearse ⇓
Pearse’s somewhat erratic aircraft experiments in New Zealand, far away from the salient aeronautical developments in the US Eastern Seaboard and Europe, largely flew under the radar (to invoke an obvious pun!). The evidence suggests that Canterbury farmer Pearse’s home-built glider (equipped with tricycle wheels and an air-compressed engine) made at least one (but probably more) flights, but with little control over the craft. What was to Pearse’s credit was that unlike the Wright Flyer which managed only to travel in a straight line on 17 December 1903, the New Zealander was able to turn right and left during his flight on 11 May 1903 [PS Ward, ‘Richard Pearse, First Flyer’ The Global Life of New Zealanders, www.nzedge.com].
Pearse’s low-key approach to his attempts meant that no photographs were taken, although Geoffrey Rodcliffe identifies over 40 witnesses to Pearce’s flights prior to July 1903 [http://avstop.com]. Pearse did not actively promote his own claims for a place in aviation history (unlike the consistently determined and even pathological efforts of the Wright brothers to consolidate their reputation), and he himself conceded that the Wrights’ flight achieved a “sustained and controlled” trajectory, something that he had not. But Pearse did contribute to aviation’s development nonetheless through the creation of a monoplane configuration, wing flaps and rear elevator, tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel, and a propeller with variable-pitch blades driven by a unique double-acting horizontally opposed petrol engine [G Ogilvie, ‘Pearse, Richard William’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (Te Ara) 7 Jan 2014].
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Gustav Whitehead⇓
G A Whitehead was a German migrant (born Gustave Weisskopf) living in Connecticut who started experimenting with gliders (variations on the glider prototype design developed by aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal) in the mid-1890s, at a time when Wilbur and Orville were still making and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. The case in support of the flight made by Whitehead on 14 August 1901 in what must be noted was an improbable-looking, bat-shaped, engine-propelled glider at Fairfield near Bridgeport, was first taken up in 1935 (in an article in an industry magazine, Popular Aviation, entitled ‘Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World’s First Powered Flight?’)回. Whitehead’s claim lay dormant until the 1960s when army reservist William O’Dwyer, took up the German-American engine-maker’s cause and did his upmost to promote his “flying machine”.
A surprise rival to the Wrights’ crown
Supporters of Whitehead recently received a further boost through the research of Australian aviation historian John Brown who discovered a photo (lost since the 1906 Aero Club of America Exhibition) purporting to be of Whitehead’s № 21 Gilder in flight. Largely on the basis of this, Brown was able to convince the premier aviation journal, Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, to recognise Whitehead’s claim over that of the Wrights’ as the first powered and navigable flight in history [“An airtight case for Whitehead?”, www.fairfield-sun.com, 24 August 2013]. Doubts remain however about the Whitehead thesis. Brown’s reliance on the newly-discovered photo remains problematic, the image even ultra-magnified is indistinct and inconclusive of anything much. In any case the providence is questionable, there is no irrefutable evidence yet unearthed linking it to Whitehead’s 1901 flight. [“The case for Gustave Whitehead”, www.wright-brothers.org]
⇑ Whitehead & his № 21 Glider
Footnote: The newly-acquired kudos of Connecticut arising from Jane’s recognition of Whitehead, has led to the amusing suggestion from some Connecticuters, that the state’s number-plates now be inscribed (at the risk of some serious grammatical mangling), Firster in Flight“, as a counterfoil to North Carolina’s “First in Flight”❈.
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Santos-Dumont’s biplane ⇓
Santos, breaking through for Europe (and Brazil)
A case has also been made for Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian aviator-inventor as the first to fly a mechanised aircraft – the 1906 Paris flight of his 14-bis biplane (Condor # 20). Supporters of the Brazilian aviator argue this on the grounds that it, not the Wrights 1903 flight, represented the first officially witnessed, unaided take-off and flight by a heavier-than-air craft. Brazilians, whilst acknowledging that the Wright Brothers conducted a successful flight earlier, argue that Santos-Dumont should be given pre-eminence because the 14-bis‘ take-off was made from fixed wheels (as was Pearse’s flight in NZ incidentally) rather than catapulted into the air from skids as happened with the Wright Flyer in 1903 [‘The case for Santos-Dumont’, www.wright-brothers.org]. The patriotic Brazilians, always ready to embrace a national hero, sporting or otherwise, have gone to great and amusing lengths to register their pride in Santos-Dumont’s achievement. Many Brazilian cities have an Avenida Santos Dumont named in honour of the aviator. In a characteristically Brazilian vein of jocularity, some Brazilians have taken a “stretch-limo” approach, rendering the street name into English thus: Santos Dumont the True Inventor of the Airplane and Not the Wright Brothers Avenue [V Barbara, ‘Learning to Speak Brazinglish’, New York Times, 8 November 2013].
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Hargrave at Stanwell Tops⇓
Hargrave down under: providing lift
More seriously, Santos-Dumont’s 1906 successful, powered flight in Paris (dismissed by the Wrights as a series of “long hops”) owed a large debt to Lawrence Hargrave, Santos’ Condor biplane being based on Hargrave’s box-kite construction. Not just Santos but many other aviation pioneers, including the brothers Wright, all benefitted from Hargrave’s conscious decision not to patent his designs. The Australian inventor has an under-recognised role in the history of aviation, but he contributed massively to the first successful airplane through the development of three critical aeronautical concepts – the cellular box-kite wing, the curved wing surface, and the thick leading wing edge (aerofoil). The world’s first commercial aircraft built by Frenchman Gabriel Voisin incorporated the stable lifting surfaces of Hargrave’s box kites. In addition, Hargrave invented the radial rotary engine which drew great interest from Europe and was later used extensively in military aircraft [‘The Pioneers: Aviation and Aeromodelling – Independent Evolutions and Histories’ (Lawrence Hargrave 1850-1915), www.ctie.monash.edu.au].
Illawarra’s place in the pioneering story of manned flight: Hargrave started off constructing ornithopters (“mechanical birds’ utilising a ‘flapping’ method) before experimenting with designs based on kites. Hargrave’s cellular or box kites provided the basis for a rigid, stable aeroplane. In 1894 at Stanwell Park in the Illawarra region, south of Sydney, Hargrave tested his own four-kite device which got the inventor airborne for a distance of five metres, the world’s first ”flying contraption” to achieve aerial lift from a fixed-wing [‘Aviation in Australia Hargrave’s flying machines’, State Library of NSW,www.sl.nsw.gov.au].
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Jane’s magazine’s decision in 2013 to jettison the Wrights’ primacy and endorse Whitehead’s claim to be the first powered flight is in marked contrast to the position of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the subject. The key to understanding the Smithsonian’s rigid, on-going refusal to countenance the Whitehead case, or even to have an open mind on it (the Smithsonian dismissively refers to it as the “Whitehead Myth”), has its roots in the testy relationship that prevailed between the Wrights and the Institution. From the start the Smithsonian did not immediately and unconditionally embrace the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk achievement. Instead, the Institute sought to elevate Samuel Pierpoint Langley‘s unsuccessful Aerodrome craft on an equal footing with the Wright Flyer (at one point Langley was Secretary of the Smithsonian – a clear suggestion of a conflict of interest within the Institution). In retaliation the Wrights refused to display their 1903 “First Flight” aircraft in the Smithsonian. Orville, after Wilbur’s early death, eventually shipped it off to England where it was exhibited in the Science Museum in South London instead [‘History of the 1903 Wright Flyer’, (Wright State University Libraries), www.libraries.wright.edu].
The intriguing twist in this story occurred in 1942 when the remaining Wright, Orville, relented on the Smithsonian ban, but only after a deal was struck. The Smithsonian recanted its long-standing statement that Langley’s Aerodrome was the first machine capable of flight in favour of the Wrights’ claim. In return the Washington DC Institution was allowed to hold and exhibit the 1903 Wright Flyer. The rider which contractually committed the Smithsonian stated that if the Institute ever deviated from its acknowledgement that the Flyer was the first craft to make a controlled, sustained powered flight, then control of the Flyer would fall into the hands of Orville’s heirs.
On display at the Smithsonian (National Air & Space Museum)⇓
Critics of the Institute believe that the Smithsonian’s indebtedness to the Wrights’ legacy (the fear of losing the historic Flyer to the estate executors) prevents it from recognising the merits of Whitehead’s pioneering achievement irrespective of the weight of evidence put forward [J Liotta, ‘Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence’, www.news.nationalgeographic.com]. Clearly this is a powerful disincentive to the Smithsonian objectively assessing the merits and new evidence for any rival claims to the Wrights (not just Whitehead’s) which may be unearthed.
The Wright stuff
There were numerous aviation pioneers, engineers and technologists experimenting with new forms of aircraft at the turn of the 20th century, so what was it that made the Wright brothers stand out from the others? The preservation of identifiable photographic evidence and documentation of the December 1903 attempts certainly contributed to the strengthening of the brothers’ argument for being “First”. Another factor is that the brothers scrupulously consolidated and cultivated their reputation as the foremost air pioneers. Clearly the Wrights had an eye on history which contrasts with the less calculated approach of their rivals (especially Whitehead and Pearse). The Wrights vigorously defended the accomplishments of their Flyer against that of competing airships. They also went to great efforts to protect their technologies against intellectual theft … the propensity of the Wrights to resort to lawsuits when they felt their interests (eg, patent preservation) was threatened, pays testimony to this.
The Wrights, unlike most of the competition, kept on improving the quality and capability of their airplanes (at least up until they got bogged down in patent litigation), eg, the development of “wing warping” helped control the aircraft through enhanced aerodynamic balance. [D Schneider, ‘First in Flight?’, American Scientist, 91(6), Nov-Dec 2003]. The patents issue and the brothers’ preparedness to play “hardball” with their rivals led them into questionable ethical terrain, eg, their refusal to acknowledge the influence on their designs of pioneers who came before them, such as the Anglo-Australian Hargrave [‘The Pioneers’ op.cit.].
The credence given to the Wright brothers’ claim to be the first successful flyers should perhaps come with an asterisk, signifying it as heavily qualified, as in David Schneider’s all-inclusive, tongue-in-cheek description: “First in Sustained, Piloted, Controlled, Powered, Heavier-than-air Flight of Lasting Technological Significance” [ibid].
☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬
Many in the public at large would hold with tradition and still attribute the crucial breakthrough in aerial navigation to the Wright brothers…but can we really say that in that start-up era of aeronautics that any one of the countless attempts by aviation pioneers was absolutely the definitive one? The differences between what Whitehead, Santos-Dumont, Pearse, the brothers Wright and Herring achieved with their best efforts seems to be one of degree, not kind.
Augustus Moore Herring, the darling of Michigan aviation enthusiasts, managed a flight of only 73 feet and no more than 10 seconds in duration, no more than an extended hop according to National Air and Space Museum curator, Tom Crouch, but it registered as a lift-off nonetheless [TD Crouch, A Dream of Wings]. “Bamboo Dick” Pearse’s optimal flight in Temuka, NZ, travelled a mere 50 feet or so and abruptly ended 15 feet up in a gorse-hedge! The last and best attempt of Orville in the Wright Flyer on that December day in 1903 lasted 59 seconds and travelled some 852 feet in distance. Gus Whitehead’s best try on 14 August 1901 was half a mile according to him, but it was poorly documented, lacked verification and any pellucid images of the feat.
Did any of the documented early flights per se achieve “sustained and controlled flight”? Human conquest of the sky didn’t happen in one quantum leap, surely it came about in a series of small, measured steps, each building on the one before. It is more meaningful to see the development of viable flying machines as something that happened incrementally, an aerodynamic puzzle put together piece-by-piece. It was an international effort, the culmination of the accumulated efforts of gifted pioneering aeronautical designers such as George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, Lawrence Hargrave and Otto Lilienthal whose experiments made it possible for the Wrights and others to experiment with flight, coming closer and closer to the realisation of successful manned, powered flight.
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PostScript:Pittsburg 1899
In a documentary shown on national ABC television (Australia) John Brown made the case for an even earlier attempt at powered flight by Gus Whitehead, which occurred in the city of Pittsburg in 1899. Brown does not contend that this flight by the German-American should be recognised as the first successful attempt because it was not controlled – to the point that the aircraft actually crash-landed into a brick building, Who Flew First: Challenging the Wright Brothers, (DTV 21, ABC 2016).
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回 freelance writer Stella Randolph was responsible for maintaining interest in Whitehead’s aviation pursuits, researching and writing The Lost Flights of Gustave Whitehead in the 1930s
❈ then there’s the claims of Ohio and specifically Dayton to their part in aviation history, the Wright Flyer being manufactured in Dayton
◖◗ See also the related article on this blogsite (October 2016) – “The Wright Way, the Only Way: the Aviation ‘Patent Wars’ and Glenn Curtiss”
🎭Long, long before megaplex cinemas, massive outdoor theme parks and home entertainment centres, Australians were discovering new outlets of activity to occupy their precious and increasing if hard-earned leisure time. In the 19th century one outlet for Sydneysiders which filled the bill for outdoor entertainment and activities was the suburban pleasure ground.
Europe: The Medieval fair
The origins of pleasure grounds in Australia can be traced back ultimately to British and European antecedents such as the Medieval countryside fairs, whose purpose was primarily trade and commerce but whose rituals included an important element of “merry-making” [www.medieval-life-and-times.info/]. In England these would be occasions to celebrate feast days and milestones in the calendar like Midsummer Solstice and St Swithuns Day, and would involve feasting and drinking, bawdy games, musical interludes, races and other physically active pastimes.The type of pleasure grounds that evolved in Australia also drew inspiration from the great English pleasure gardens of centuries gone by. These pleasure gardens, of which, Vauxhall Gardens in South London, was arguably the most famous in Britain, were the primary providers of mass, public entertainment in the 18th and 19th centuries. Vauxhall (AKA New Spring) Gardens charged admission to see performances of tightrope walkers, hot air balloon ascents, concerts and fireworks. Vauxhall and others such as its closest London rival, Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens, were the forerunners to the modern amusement park, eg, Luna Park/Coney Island, Blackpool Pleasure Beach [‘History of London: Pleasure Gardens’, www.history.co.uk].In Sydney pleasure grounds popped up at all points of the metropolitan compass during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. They could be found in districts as far afield as Prospect Creek/Fairfield (Latty’s Boatshed and Pleasure Grounds), Waratah Bay/Hawkesbury River (Windybanks’ Paradise), Vaucluse (Nielsen Park), La Perouse/Yarra Bay (Howe’s Pleasure Grounds) and the Kurnell Pleasure Grounds at the southern tip of Botany Bay.
🔺 The original Banks Inn
Joseph Banks Pleasure Grounds
One of the earliest such venues was the Botany (or Sir Joseph Banks) Pleasure Grounds (BPG), established along with the Banks Inn on 75 acres of land and seafront in the 1840s by Thomas Kellett. At its peak, BPG was described variously as “zoological gardens”, “a Victorian garden with arbours” and an aggregation of first-rate sporting fields.
BPG was a popular spot for annual St Patrick’s Day Sports Carnivals which comprised, in addition to sports, singing, dancing, drinking, the riding of penny farthings and various circus acts. The road from Sydney to the Pleasure Grounds was of such a poor condition that many visitors came to the Botany attraction by steamer – a round trip fare on the “Sir John Harvey” in the 1850s cost 10/-. An indication of the popularity of the grounds and hotel can be gauged by the fact that over 5,000 people attended on Boxing Day 1852 [‘Australia’s First Zoo’, The World’s News (Sydney), 15 March 1952].
Control of BPG went through many hands with new leasees and owners regularly being turned over. The zoo was introduced by leasee William Beaumont in the early 1850s. It was Australia’s first private zoo with a menagerie acquired from the original colonial zoo at Hyde Park that included Australia’s only elephant, Manila red deers, Indian goats, black Bengal sheep and Bengal tigers, both a Himalayan and a Californian grizzly bear, and an ape.
The Banks pleasure grounds and zoo were purchased in 1875 by Frank Smith, an entrepreneur and publican, and incorporated into the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel complex. A grand ballroom catering for up to 1,000 diners and a bathing house were also added to BPG [M Chaffey, ‘A review of Botany’ (Botany Library local history files) quoted in M Butler, ‘Botany’ (2011), The Dictionary of Sydney, www.dictionaryofsydney.org; ‘Sir Joseph Banks Pleasure Gardens Botany Bay’,www.prowse.com.au].
🔺 Sir Joseph Banks Athletics Track, Botany NSW
Sporting fields for cricket, football, archery and athletics were also appended to the Joseph Banks Gardens. Aboriginal runners from the Randwick/La Perouse area participated in foot races on the Botany track (quaintly known in the day as “pedestrian contests”). In the 1870s and 1880s BPG hosted Australia’s earliest professional footrace, the Botany Bay Gift, which attracted top international athletes and large crowds. 1888 was probably the high point of professional sprinting in Australia with £800 being offered in prize money at that year’s Bay Gift.Wagering on the outcome of the Botany running contests was extensive and eventually the money involved led to some sharp practices occurring which affected the outcome of races. As a consequence, after several years the annual Gift was discontinued, though it was briefly resurrected in the late 20th Century. A well-known running club, the Botany Harriers (later the Randwick-Botany Harriers), had its beginning at the Sir Joseph Banks track [‘History of the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel’, www.thebanks.net.au].Around 1908–1910, after yet another change in ownership, BPG became the Olympic Recreational and Picnic Grounds. In March 1908 the Joseph Banks Ground hosted the first-ever game of rugby league in Australia, a match between a South Sydney Probables team and a Possibles side which preceded the inaugural season of the Sydney Rugby League [‘Centenary of Rugby League’, www.monumentaustralia.org.au].Fairyland Pleasure Grounds
Another suburban pleasure ground that greatly captured the imagination of Sydneysiders in its day was Fairyland Pleasure Grounds. It was situated on the Upper Lane Cove River in an area now incorporated into the Lane Cove National Park. From its inception as a pleasure ground in the early 1900s, up to when a main arterial road in North Ryde (Delhi Road) was linked with it, it was largely only accessible by boat to a wharf specially built by the operators of Fairyland (FPG).The Swan family, owners of the bushland, initially cleared the area for market gardens but also constructed a timber siding on the river which they called “The Rest”. Robert Swan later turned the site into a pleasure ground for day-trippers to visit, adding a kiosk, a playground, a dance hall and picnic area. ‘Fairyland’ was chosen as the name for the pleasure ground apparently because it exuded the atmosphere of a magical and mysterious place, Swan enhanced this theme with fairy-like structures and motifs – quirky fairytale huts, a slippery-dip in the shape of a sleeping giant (thought to be modelled on the character ‘Bluto’ from the ‘Popeye’ comics), and cardboard representations of imaginary and supernatural creatures such as fairies and elves positioned high up in the trees [www.friendsoflanecovenationalpark.org.au].Swan acquired a good deal of equipment from the closure sale at White City Fun Park in Rushcutters Bay in 1917 (from 1922 site of the White City Tennis courts✱). Amongst the items Swan brought to FPG were strength-testing machines, coin-operated machines through which you could view silent movies, and entertainment rides such as the’Ocean Wave’ (a “razzle-dazzle”) and a fairly rudimentary ‘Flying Fox’.
The former ‘Fairyland’, Lane Cove River: now overgrown by coastal bush land 🔺
Just getting to Fairyland in the early days could be quite a lengthy exercise. Walter Baker, a schoolboy during WWI, recalled how it took one hour to get to FPG travelling by motor boat from nearby Gladesville! [reported in The Catholic Press (Sydney), 18 July 1918]. Many associations and organisations held their yearly outings at FPG. In 1963 Sydney radio station 2UW sponsored a “Rock ‘n Roll Spectacular” on the grounds. After WWII there was widespread availability of private cars allowing people to journey further afield, consequently Fairyland’s popularity declined [‘Heritage and History’ (FLCNP), www.froghollow.com.au]. It lingered on as a venue for leisure activities, but falling attendances aided and abetted by a series of floods and more modern leisure choices saw the pleasure grounds close in the early 1970s.A similar pleasure ground to Fairyland was Palmer Pleasure Grounds, also on the northside at Castle Cove. Danish migrant HC Press started his entertainment venue in 1910 (which survived till 1964). Palmer (later renamed Press) PG was replete with picnic area, pergolas, fernery, three dining pavilions, swings and slippery dips, swimming pool, wharf, and a 100-yard sprint track. Press charged for admission with crowds of up to 900 pleasure-seekers visiting daily [Gavin Souter, Time and Tides: A Middle Harbour Memoir, 2012]
🔺 Wonderland in ‘Glamarama’
Tamarama Wonderland
In Sydney’s eastern suburbs, Tamarama was the location of a popular if relatively short-lived pleasure ground, which was known under various names at different times, the Bondi Aquarium (though not situated in the suburb of Bondi), the Royal Aquarium, Wonderland City (this name resonates with the later sobriquet acquired by Tamarama, ‘Glamarama’). The Aquarium, opened in 1887, was the first coastal amusement park in Sydney. It comprised a collection of sea creatures including tiger and wobbegong sharks, seals and a solitary penguin. The distinguishing physical icon of Wonderland was the serpentine-like roller coaster (called the “Switchback Railway”) which weaved around the cliffs of Tamarama beach. The carnivalesque entertainments included a ‘camera obscura‘, ‘merry-go-rounds’ and vaudevillian acts. Later, a waxworks was added to the park.
🔺 Tamarama Beach clubhouse mural
In the early 1900s the Aquarium was purchased by theatrical entrepreneur William Anderson who revamped the complex (now renamed ‘Wonderland City’). Under Anderson, the ‘Airem Scarem’ (an airship tracked on a cable from cliff to cliff), an artificial lake and open-air ice skating rink, was added to the entertainment venue. A haunted house and maze further underlined Wonderland City’s position as a precursor to the later Luna Park at Milson’s Point. The opening night in 1906 lured an estimated 20,000 visitors (during summer-time on weekends 2,000 Sydneysiders regularly attended the Wonderland park).Wonderland was dogged by controversies such as William Anderson’s attempts to block swimmers from the beach by erecting a barbed wire fence across the Tamarama site. After a tic-for-tac exchange between the disaffected local swimmers and management, the NSW Government eventually intervened in the conflict and re-established beach access. The bad press experienced by Wonderland over the blockade of the swimmers was followed by further adverse publicity – safety concerns over breakdowns on the Airem Scarem, complaints made about the treatment of the animals, local resident unhappiness about the disruptive nature of weekend revellers. By 1911, with attendances having declined for several years, Wonderland closed its doors. Anderson was said to have lost £15,000 on the venture [‘Wonderland City’, www1.waverley.nsw.gov.au; J Spedding, ‘Wonderland City’ (2011) in Dictionary of Sydney, www.trust.dictionaryofsydney.org].
🔺 Clontarf Pleasure Grounds (Source: Manly Art Gallery & Museum)Other pleasure grounds in Sydney in the 19th and 20th centuries didn’t have quite the colour or pulling power of Fairyland and Wonderland, but were significant providers of popular leisure pursuits in their own right. The Clontarf Pleasure Grounds (CPG) in Sydney’s north was founded in 1863 by hotelier Issac Moore (see footnote at end of the article for the connexion between pub-owners and pleasure grounds in Australia), who provided an off-liquor license at the grounds. Day-trippers would arrive by ferry to engage in games (quoits, skittles, cricket, etc), dancing, swimming and picnicking. The steamer Illalong ferried visitors from Circular Quay to Clontarf in the last quarter of the 19th century for the sum of 2/-. CPG was a particularly favourite venue for picnics and anniversaries like St Patrick’s Day, and for the celebrations of religious and trade union organisations (eg, Catholics Youngmen’s Societies, United Protestant Societies, Telegraph Construction Branch, Amalgamated Slaughtermen).
🔺 Attempted royal assassination at Clontarf
Clontarf Pleasure Grounds
The Clontarf Pleasure Grounds had another association in the 19th century, this one noted for its infamy. It was the site of an attempted assassination on the life of Prince Albert, Duke of Edinburgh (Queen Victoria’s son) in 1868 by a Irish supposed supporter of the Fenian movement. Issac Moore’s sons took over the family business from their father and continued the Clontarf Pleasure Grounds for over 35 years…at one stage the sons sued The Bulletin paper for labelling the Pleasure Grounds’ dance event an ‘orgy’ [www.manly.nsw.gov.au; www.balgowlahonline.com.au].
St George and Shire Pleasure Grounds
The southern suburbs of Oatley and Como had their own pleasure grounds. Harry Linmark started Oatley Pleasure Grounds in the early part of the 20th century (the park where it was located still retains this name). OPG was popular for fishing and swimming parties and for picnics. When it acquired by Hartlands, they introduced a miniature zoo and a noisy wine bar which earned the ire of local residents. In 1934 Kogarah Council acquired the pleasure grounds and closed down the bar [www.kogarah.nsw.gov.au]. The nearby Como Pleasure Grounds was created in 1895 to celebrate the extension of the southern rail link to the Shire. It boasted a ‘RazzleDazzle’ circular ride (similar to the one in operation at Fairyland on Lane Cove River) which drew the crowds to Como by train [www.sutherlandshireaustralia.com.au].
Pleasure grounds in Sydney came into fashion in the 19th century, providing an outside outlet for people away from their everyday, often unexciting urban existences. The locations of pleasure grounds allowed workers to escape on the weekends by taking a nice train day trip or a ferry boat ride. The venues conveyed a romantic connotation for day-trippers, a kind of rustic paradise which promised carefree social and recreational activities. Some of the operations floundered financially and were closed down within a relatively short interval. Others that managed to achieve a measure of longevity, like Fairyland and the Botany Pleasure Grounds, eventually became simply “old hat”. Society had changed, there were new, slicker forms of entertainment that people preferred. The convenience and proximity of big amusement complexes in the city like Luna Park made them a more attractive option for workers’ leisure time, and as the pace of life quickened, the appeal of pleasure grounds as unhurried, bucolic ‘paradises’ receded.
🔺The Pleasure Garden: translated into Swedish for the title of this 1961 film gives the outdoor entertainment concept a quite different connotation
PostScript: Pleasure Grounds in Melbourne – a lesser feast for the public
Interestingly in Melbourne at that time, pleasure grounds/ gardens for whatever reason didn’t catch on to anywhere near the same degree as in Sydney. Probably the only one that rose to any significant heights, albeit ephemerally, was Cremorne Gardens on the Yarra River at Richmond – which acquired the somewhat pretentious appellation “Cremorne Gardens-Upon-Yarra” (CGUY). Under its proprietor, theatrical entrepreneur George Coppin, CGUY had an amusement park aspect to it, with trapezes, balloon ascents, dances, theatres, a Cyclorama (a panoramic painting set against a concave wall), a bowling alley, a menagerie, firework displays, with a few extra features taking advantage of the Yarra, such as regattas and gondola rides. It also had a hotel on-site as with many of the Sydney pleasure grounds. Coppin’s gardens was inspired by the prototype Cremorne Gardens in London.
🔺 Cremorne Gardens-upon-Yarra, 1865
Though Coppin poured a lot of money into it, CGUY lasted only from 1853 to about 1863, unable to attract the patronage required to sustain it as a viable enterprise. The wowser element in Melbourne played its part in CGUY’s demise, many in the community objected to the presence of alcohol and the use of the Gardens by prostitutes to ply their trade. Dreamland, on St Kilda Beach, was even less successful than Cremorne, winding up after barely three years in 1909 (although the same site became a permanent entertainment fixture a few years later with the advent of Luna Park) [R Peterson, A Place of Sensuous Resort, (Online edition), www.skhs.org.au]. Some people at the time concluded that the Melbourne weather (more inclement than Sydney’s) was not conducive to outdoor amusements [‘# 1933. Cremorne Gardens Plan’ (Picture Victoria), www.pictures.libraries.vic.gov.au].
FN: An intriguing if not exactly surprising footnote to the pleasure grounds in Australia were the large number of proprietors of the operations who were also publicans
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✱ today the White City location is a reconstructed Jewish sporting complex known as Maccabi Tennis
I’ve always thought it absurd that the average punter in the street raises up movie stars (whether it be Hollywood or any other derivative film community) to the status of demi-gods (as they do with pop and rock stars and elité sportspersons). Yes I know that it was ever thus, film stars in the silent era were arguably even more venerated by society given that at that time they did not have to compete with popular singers and sporting stars for the public’s kudos.
The media is of course deeply complicit in this with its obsessive focus on Hollywood box-office stars, especially the popular gossip mags’ hanging on every utterance and info snippet of headline-grabbing Hollywood A–listers like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt – a custom which is jejune and banal in the extreme. If these overblown ‘celebs’ make even a shallow pronouncement on environmental or human rights issues or announce their latest Third World orphan acquisition projects, this receives an inordinate amount of drooling media attention.
This uncritical über-reverence is ridiculously inane given that the majority of movie stars are not necessarily exemplars of propriety and moral rectitude, and sometimes behave like pampered prima donnas, absorbed in their overweening self-importance. Proportionate to the rest of society, movie stars often behave badly, they have equally manoeuvrable morals, they take drugs, they drink too much and beat their wives, extravagantly waste money, are unfaithful, get divorced (disproportionately to society at large in this case!), they are after all onlyactors! And yet media outlets continue to elevate them to the loftiest reaches of societal respect, as if some special higher wisdom is implicit in their trade.
Consequently she was ‘outed’ by the McCarthyists in ‘Red Channels’ (a right wing publication blacklisting suspected ‘subversives’ in the arts and media) and her burgeoning film career suffered accordingly❀. Hunt was a gifted actor, and an accomplished singer. She was also the composer of about 50 songs including one she wrote in the early 1960s, ahead of its time, on the subject of same sex equality in love and marriage – later a hit in the US in the 1980s.
In 1944 she was voted one of the Hollywood ‘Stars of Tomorrow’. However, like others in the industry who refused to recant their earnestly-held political convictions, roles for Hunt dried up. First she was relegated to B movies, then not even that and her film career was effectively over by the time she was 40. From the ’50s, Hunt, like many other Hollywooders including Ronald Reagan (180 degrees apart from her politically) found TV work her only reliable source of income and expression.
Peacenik, social activist
Marsha Hunt, friend to all Democratic presidents from FDR on, was and still is an activist with a capital ’A’. Outside of acting Marsha has pursued a concern for a host of vital humanitarian issues on the global stage—pollution, poverty, peace and population growth—as well as actively working against the blight of social homelessness and supporting the right of same sex equality. Hunt has never lacked for courage or for determination in anything she has done. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The 2014 film documentary, Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity, illustrates the 60-plus years (and ongoing) of active international work (world hunger campaigns, a staunch supporter of the United Nations, UNICEF and other UN humanitarian projects, etc) by a woman known to admirers as a “Planet Patriot“.
Today despite her great chronological seniority she is as committed to and active in the causes of ordinary people as she ever was! Marsha is still in her own principled way making a difference for the planet. Marsha Hunt, talented actor, indefatigable activist, world citizen, a refined woman of principles, a great humanitarian and advocate for universal civil rights – a truly great American.
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⌺ Hunt is the only surviving member of the Committee for the First Amendment
❀ whilst other, more illustrious Hollywood liberals abjectly backed down in the onslaught of HUAC bullying, Hunt was one of the very few ‘Tinseltown’ stars to put her film career on the line by refusing to apologise for her support of the blacklisted ‘Ten’ and for her role in progressive activist causes
ABACTOR (Image: American Fine Art)
ADELPHOGAMY
ARISTARCH: Aristarchus of Samos
Image: Victorian-era.org
Foster Powell (Poster published by C. Johnson n.d.)
Often leading pedestrians would go head-to-head in wagered races (Image: US Lib. of Congress)
Pedestrianism was exceedingly popular in post-bellum USA, drawing great crowds of paying spectators (Image: Alamy/BBC)
Source: 7 News
Olympic final (men), 3500m Walk, 1908
Johnny Day with Nimblefoot 1870 Melb Cup (Image: Herbert James Woodhouse)
Prohibition, an international movement (Source: PBS)
Denmark and Iceland
Skál! (Photo: Scandification)
Icelandic White Ale 5.2% ABV (Photo: Muse on Booze)
Traditional sour Gose beer, Icelandic style (Photo: issuu.com)
Iceland: Whale testicle beer (Source: au.whales.org)
Starley’s Rover (Source: sewalot.com)
1889 Ladies Rover Safety Bike (Image: bicyclehistory.net)
Fischer’s pedal-bike: Tretkurbelfahrrad
(Photo: www.schweinfurtfuehrer.de)
The Drais Laufmaschine, 1817
Sturmey-Archer, 3/4-speed gears (Image: www.sturmey-archerheritage.com)
Source: Pinterest
1971 Tour de France (Source: Profimedia)
Columbia Bicycles, Connecticut (Source: etsy.com)
‘Down by Law’.
Source: truelocal.com.au
Like most popular commercial trends the mobile ice cream van was an import to these shores. The archetype Mr Whippy emerged from the English Midlands city of Birmingham in 1958, starting with a modest six vans and copying the formula, look and business plan of America’s Mister Softee ice cream trucks (see below). By 1961 the homegrown Mr Whippy fleet on the road had extended to 150 vehicles. Mr Whippy came to Australia when company founder Dominic Facchino shipped six pink and white Commer Karrier vans out to Sydney in 1962. Two years later Mr Whippy vans landed on the shores of New Zealand. By this time Facchino had sold the business which was eventually acquired by industry giant Unilever. By the 1970s the Mr Whippy franchises down under were sold to private operators who varied the vans’ styling and colours (‘1962 Mr Whippy arrives in Australia’, Australian Food TimeLine, www.australianfoodtimeline.com.au). The NZ Mr Whippy operators switched vehicles (to Isuzu Elfs) as well as colour schemes (a common choice became orange and white with a yellow stripe)𝟙. 
The ubiquitous Mister Softee (Photo: Elena Kadvany)
Marchetti Bros ice cream van, 1980s Glasgow
Mr Whippy Clones (Photo: 9Nine.com.au)
Mr Softee’s bête noir Master Softee (Photo: Newtown Pentacle)
early Good Humor vending truck (Source: mahoninghistory.org)
Photo: Manchester Evening News
Chautauqua Lake (Image: cullencartography.com)
Source: the guardian.com
Source: the attic.space
Redpath Chautauqua, “circus like promo” (Source: Culture Under Canvas, Harry P Harrison)
Kansas Tent Chautauqua, 1906
Source: joplinglobe.com
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Photo: oldsite.chq.org
↟ Highway hell? (Photo: BBC)
Source: airshipdaily.com
↟ Taguatinga, one of Brasilia’s irregular satellites (Photo: Frederico Holanda/ Researchgate)
Source: modern diplomacy.eu
↟ Niemeyer’s Alvorada (Presidential) Palace, Brasília (Photo: wikimapia.org) 
Map credit: Glasgow City Council
Irvine new town (Image: earlyooters.blogspot.com)
Scheme in Easterhouse
Cumbernauld Town Centre: “the rabbit warren on stilts”
Craigshill 1960s (image: Livingston Devlt Corp)
Castlemilk ca.1965 (Source: Gordon Waddell (Pinterest))
Murray Drive (Photo: Stonehouse Heritage Group)Image: National WWII Museum
Listening to Tokyo Rose on Zero Hour (Source: psywarrior.com)
Iva at the mike
Belated presidential pardon (Screenshot ‘Iva Toguri, Patriot’)
Mitsu Yashima (Source: Densho Encyclopedia)
Credit: IMDb 
Current Lord Chamberlain Andrew Parker (fmr MI5 head) (Source: The Times) 
Walpole, the first PM (Source: History Today) 
1737 Licensing Act 
Osborne’s 1965 play ‘A Patriot for Me’, the controversy of the dramatist’s refusal to make cuts helped end the LC’s censorship 
Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Source: architectsjournal.co.uk) 
St James’ Palace, home of the Lord Chamberlain (Source: Pinterest) 
‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ (Photo: V & A Museum) 
Source: WNYC 
Lord Chamberlain in 1960s, Baron Cobbold, resisted calls to abolish censorship (Artist: George JD Bruce) Arts Theatre Club production, 1955 (Photo: V & A Museum)
▙ Publicity shot: Dixie was popular with the ladies, married 6 times (all his wives met him via the phone at his pole-sitting events) (Source: Dayton Daily News)
▙ Luke the Stylite
▙ Georgian hermit headquarters (Source: Vintage News)
The first time I wandered through Waverley Cemetery in the chic, beachside eastern suburbs of Sydney I was somewhat bemused to find in the midst of the congested maze of gravesites of famous Australians—poets, politicians and judges, sports men and women, aviation pioneers among others—a large, impressive marble, bronze and mosaic memorial to the martyrs of the 1798 Irish Rebellion.
Wolfe Tone
1800 Act of Union 
Baroness Derouche (Source: This Day in Aviation)
(Photo: Stephanie Wallace/IMdiversity)
But it’s not from the lack of trying to effect change on the part of women aviators! The barriers to female entry into both the commercial and military fields of helicopters led pilot Jean Ross Howard Phelan (above), the 8th US woman to gain her helicopter accreditation, to form Whirly Girls International in 1955—an association dedicated to the advancement of women in helicopter aviation—with just 12 other charter members🈂. Today the group has 72,000 members from 44 countries.
The minuscule inroads made by women inside the sanctum of the “male cockpit” isn’t confined to rotary-wing aircraft. Women pilots have barely had more success in cracking the fixed-wing aircraft industry, their share of the jobs in the US has hovered somewhere between five and six-and-a-half percent. Despite all the efforts of women’s aviation bodies including the Ninety-Nines (the Whirly Girls’ “older sister” organisation) to make headway in rectifying the imbalance, women today constitute just 7% of the world’s certified pilots for all types of aircraft (‘Female Helicopter Pilots on The Rise’, Claire McCann, Prestige Helicopters, Inc., Upd.11-Nov-2020, www.prestigehelicopters.com).
Women in Aviation International: best strategy, targeting girls at a young age to foster the ‘bug’ for a flying career
(Photo: PPRuNe Forums)
(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).
Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)
Taos Pueblo (Source: http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/)
Mabel Dodge (Luhan) & her Amerindian husband (Photo: Santa Fe New Mexican)
DHL waxed lyrical on the experience later, ” I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever …. the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend”: he wrote how the person who lives there “above the great proud world of desert will know, almost unbearably how beautiful it is, how clear and unquestioned is the might of the day” (‘Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers is D. H. Lawrence’, (2017)).
The Lawrence Ranch
(Photo: www.taos.org)
‘St Mawr’ set partly in New Mexico mountains juxtaposes the vitality of nature with modern degenerate civilisation
Lawrence’s TB condition worsened in Europe and the novelist died in 1930 in the south of France, still proclaiming to friends a heartfelt desire to return to his beloved Taos. Frieda, who returned to live in Taos, afterwards had her late husband’s remains exhumed and shipped back to be interred on Taos soil.
Kandy, 1925 (Photo:www.lankapura.com)
Next year marks the centenary of the visit of acclaimed writer DH Lawrence to the Antipodes … the author of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love spent some 99 days on the southern continent travelling from its west to its east coast and writing the bulk of his great Australia novel, Kangaroo. The 1922 visit by the English novelist and poet has attracted new interest both within Australian literary circles and the general public over the past couple of decades. The tortuous saga of the vicissitudes of Lawrence and his wife Frieda’s house in Thirroul, NSW, after the Lawrences departed Australia, has been canvassed elsewhere on this blog site – “Lawrence of Thirroul: Creating Kangaroo at ‘Wyewurk’”, November 10, 2014.
⏏ ‘Women in Love’, set against the modern industrial Britain so loathed by Lawrence
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Circular Quay ferry across the harbour
“The harbour … was an extraordinary place … like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly, with its hidden and half-hidden lobes intruding among the low, dark brown cliffs”
⏏ The Corso
⏏ Lagoon at Narrabeen (Source: DH Lawrence Society Aust.)
The news, when it surfaced in the early 1980s, certainly caused quite a sensation internationally. After eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) declared the diaries legit on a first sighting (though later he walked that back a bit), newspaper editors in Germany and the UK unhesitatingly bought the ruse. Rupert Murdoch, after forking out £250,000 to buy the serialisation rights from Der Stern magazine for the diaries, ordered their immediate serialisation in the Sunday Times.
Trevor-Roper: his damaged academic reputation never really recovered from the humiliating affair
▲ Some of Kujau’s handiwork (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
(Source: Business Insider)PostScript: Hitler Diaries on the celluloid screen The celebrated hoax has been translated twice to the screen, the first a 1991 British mini-series based on Robert Harris’ book Selling Hitler with the same title (Alexei Sayle is a comfortable fit as the cheerful and uncomplicated ‘Conny’ Kujau). The second, a satirical German-made film, Schtonk!, released in 1992.
▲ Dictator diarists, courtesy of their ghostwriters 
The interior was dimly-lit, the furniture well-used and the place definitely not decorated in the fashion of Old Heidelberg. I recall music playing however it was not a Mario Lanza record but a scrawny-looking band out the back playing something that wasn’t the “Drinking Song’ from the 1954 movie bearing the hotel’s name.
⇧ A Hitler, landscape (Source: Widewalls)
⇧ Beckmann: ‘The Night’
Dix’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (1933)
In Robert Harris’ speculative novel Fatherland—a “what if”/alternative view of postwar European history set in 1964—Adolf Hitler is very much alive, having won the Second World War. Through his “Greater German Reich” the Führer rules an empire stretching from “the Low Countries to the Urals” with Britain reduced to a not-very-significant client state. In the novel’s counterfactual narrative Hitler’s architect Albert Speer has completed part of Hitler’s grand building project for Berlin – including the 120m high “Triumphal Arch” and the “Great Hall of the Reich” (the “largest building in the world”). We know that none of the above scenario came to fruition, but we do know from history that part of Hitler’s plans post-victory (if he won) was to radically transform the shape and appearance of his capital city Berlin. 
Weltreich or Europareich?
Under a future German empire, Berlin, to be known as Germania※, would be the showcase capital. Historians are divided over whether the Nazis’ ultimate goal was global dominance (Weltherrschaft)—in which case Germania would be Hitler’s Welthauptstadt (‘world capital’)—or was more limited in its objective, intent on creating a European-wide reich only (as posited by AJP Taylor et al). Either way, Hitler’s imperial capital was to be built on a monumental scale and grandeur which reflected the “1,000-Year Reich” and its stellar story of military conquests and expansion – in effect a theatrical showcase for the regime [‘Story of cities #22: how Hitler’s plans for Germania would have torn Berlin apart’, (Kate Connolly), The Guardian, 14-Apr-2016, www.theguardian.com]. 
Endnote: A neo-German city on the Vistula The newly acquired lands of the empire were also subjected to the NSDAP urban transformation template. Warsaw was to be rebuilt as a new German city (the Pabst Plan⊞) – a living space for a select number of ‘Ayran’ Germans, while its more numerous, “non-Ayran” Polish residents were to be shepherded into a camp across the River Vistula, a separate but handily located slave labour force for the ‘renewal’ (i.e. rebuild) of Warsaw…had the Pabst Plan proceeded historic Polish culture in the city would have been obliterated in the upheaval (‘Hitler’s World: The Post War Plan’).
Banned, but not eliminated
Other cities were quick to follow NYC’s example, Including Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and New Orleans, with pinball bans extending across the country. Other cities like Washington DC didn’t go as far but prohibited children from playing it during school hours. The inevitable consequence of banning was to drive pinball activity underground (resurfacing in places like the back rooms of ‘porno’ book shops). Thus marginalised, pinball become “part of rebel culture”⧆ (Klein).
“>
(Source: www.bbc.com/)
The lengths a Sov-Cit will go to
Your dedicated Sovereign is not adverse to creating fake car licence plates or printing his or her own currency and then trying to pass it off as real money. One SCM provocateur in Florida, in acrimonious conflict with his local Bank of America branch, sent it a bogus foreclosure notice and even barricaded the branch during opening hours (SPLC).
When testosterone-charged visitors to coastal Belgian towns began strolling around the shops and cafes bare-chested in 2015, locals objecting to this aesthetic blight on the landscape took to labelling the offending blow-ins “Tarzan tourists”. References to that archetypical, mesomorphic white hero of amorphous jungle habitats, Tarzan, have permeated popular culture for over a century. Since the time pencil-sharpener salesman Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) turned his hand to writing his first story in 1912, the aura of Tarzan, carefully cultivated by the author into a cultural icon, has extended from pulp fiction, to various media including comic strips, films (over 90!), radio shows, TV series, Broadway musicals, computer games and a raft of commercial merchandise
⇧
A league of populist leader ‘bedfellows’?
The way Mexico under its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has approached the pandemic has disturbing parallels with that of Brazil’s leader Bolsonaro, and with the US under Trump. Despite a difference of ideological orientation—Obrador (who’s commonly known within Mexico as AMLO) is a Left-populist whereas Bolsonaro and Trump are Right-populists—the Mexican leader has pursued much the same course with similar outcomes. AMLO’s government was slow to engage in the fight against COVID-19 in the critical early period. The virus apparently entered Mexico via overseas returnees, primarily wealthier Mexicans returning from business trips to Italy and skiing holidays in Colorado, and then spread to low-income groups [‘Mexico’s Central de Abasto: How coronavirus tore through Latin America’s largest market’, (Mary Beth Sheridan), Washington Post, 21-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
Three months ago when the COVID-19 outbreak started to move around the globe, the World Health Organisation issued a warning to the continent of Africa whose nations were just starting to feel its impact [‘Coronavirus: WHO tells African countries to ‘prepare for the worst’, Eye on Africa, 18-Mar-2020, www.france24.com]. The pandemic was late in reaching Africa and initially slow to make inroads, taking 98 days to register its first 100,000 confirmed cases but is now accelerating – only taking 18 more days to hit the 200,000 mark of cases [‘COVID-19: WHO warns of virus acceleration in Africa’, Vanguard, 14-Jun-2020, www.vanguardngr.com]. Overall African fatalities sit at 6,793 (16-Jun-2020) with just five countries (Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Nigeria) accounting for 70% of the deaths✹.
(Image: SABC News)
In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, the most worrying hotspot has been the north in Kano state and metropolis. The pandemic has gotten out of hand here because of a confluence of factors, including the state government’s early failure to admit the presence of coronavirus (which it initially tried to pass off as an upsurge in other illnesses), costing it vital lost time in the fight against the disease; the closure of Kano’s only testing centre for a week in April; acute shortages of PPE; and the pre-existing displacement of 1.8m people in the region [‘Covid-19 Outbreak in Nigeria Is Just One of Africa’s Alarming Hot Spots’, (Ruth Maclean), New York Times, 17-May-2020, www.nytimes.com].
With Italy’s grim corona-death tally falling disproportionately heavily on the country’s senectitude, you would think that it would not bode well for Japan which has the world’s highest percentage of older people (28.2% aged 65 and more) [Population Reference Bureau, www.pbr.org/]. When you add in other demographic factors relevant to Japan, this would seem doubly ominous for the “land of the rising sun” – a population of >126 millions on a land area of 377,944 sq km, including the mega-city of Tokyo✪ with its notoriously packed commuter trains. On top of all these is Japan’s proximity to China, the virus’ original causal point.
(Image: www.japantimes.co.jp)
Targeted testing
It was in testing that Japan adopted a very different crisis approach to most of the leading western countries. Rather than going for high volume, it deliberately tested under capacity. By mid-May it had tested a mere 0.185% of the country’s population, averaging two tests per 1,000 people, cf. Australia, >40 per 1,000 (Sturmer & Asada). It was highly selective, only those with serious virus symptoms were tested. The rationale for such a low-testing regime was concern for the capacity of widespread testing infrastructure, by limiting testing this would lighten the load on testing centres. Rather than mine-sweep the country with testing, the Japanese pursued a strategy of targeting virus clusters as they were identified to pinpoint the sources of the infection [‘Has Japan found a viable long-term strategy for the pandemic’, (Kazuto Suzuki), The Diplomat, 24-Apr-2020, www.thediplomat.com; Gramenz].
Cherry blossom time: no voluntary social distancing here (Photo: www.bloomberg.com)
Tokyo transport
Tokyo’s mass transit network is a petri dish in-waiting for coronavirus, but it appears that preventive measures (some pre-planned) have lessened the impact on public health. Tokyo business working hours have been staggered and large companies like NEC started to adopt telecommuting and teleworking, as well as a big increase of people riding bikes to work occurring. Consequently, transits at Tokyo’s central station on May 18th was down by 73% on the corresponding day in 2019 [‘Remote possibilities: Can every home in Japan become an office?’, (Alex Martin), The Japan Times, 23-May-2020, www.japantimes.co.jp]. 
The government has called on a raft of idiosyncratically-Vietnamese cultural devices to creatively drive home it’s theme. ”Viral hand-washing” songs have been popularised among the people and most effectively, the regime have resorted to propaganda art, something with a long tradition in communist Vietnam. Calling on the familiar slogan, “In war, we draw” (again, invoking the war metaphor), the government has fostered a patriotic response in Vietnamese to get 100% behind the war on the virus (#TogetherWeWillWin), resulting in the production and dissemination of visually-powerful and meaningful posters like these two (above and below). COVID-19 has also prompted the release of special stamps to help unify the Vietnamese people [‘“In a war, we draw”: Vietnam’s artists joint fight against Covid-19’, (Chris Humphrey), The Guardian, 09-Apr-2020, www.theguardian.com; Fleming].
Its when it comes to the matter of mandatory quarantine as a counter-virus measure, then the issue becomes more thorny for libertarians. The classic libertarian position would see voluntary self-isolation as the ideal solution in an ideal (ie, libertarian) world… compulsory quarantine is the last resort to them. Some of a libertarian mind would reject it outright – on ideological grounds, while also claiming it to be an ineffective measure as a social curative. Others accept it as a legitimate move given the uniqueness of the Covid-19 crisis situation, but with a very clear rider that the measures taken need to be temporary only. As shown below, this aspect of libertarianism is a “hot-button” issue currently for many in the US with skin in the game [‘What libertarians would do in response to coronavirus’, (Bonnie Kristian), The Week, 13-Mar-2020, www.theweek.com].
🔺The ‘tyranny’ avengers (Photo: Nikolaus Kama/AFP via Getty Images)
Boxing has also delved back into the sport’s history, not to re-project grainy footage of epic bouts from the pugilistic past onto screens, but to stage simulations of the fights that could never be …pitting the heavyweight greats of different eras against each other in contests to ‘decide’ who is boxing’s GOAT, leaving fans to agree or disagree with the computerised outcome. The overriding objective, to keep the fans’ appetites whetted – until the actual thing becomes a reality again. Motorsport, with the Formula One series a non-starter, has followed boxing into simulation substitution, staging its first “Virtual Grand Prix”, E-racing proving a real hit for for the “petrol-head” fandom [‘Coronavirus: The sports turning to gaming during lockdown’, (Joe Tidy), BBC News, 26-Mar-2020, www.bbc.com/]. In contrast to boxing, the theatricality of professional wrestling in the US gets the go-ahead…in Florida at least that’s the case, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has deemed WWE wrestling an “essential service” to Floridians and has has given the ‘sport’ his gubernatorial blessing✱ [‘Pro wrestling company WWE is an essential business during the coronavirus pandemic, Florida Gov. DeSantis says’, (Yelena Dzhanova), CNBC, 14-Apr-2020, www.cnbc.com].
(Image: virtuair.com)
(Source: ESPN.com)
🔺 Taiwanese baseball: synthetic “seat-fillers”, creating the illusion of making the stadiums look less empty during games (Photo: Cronkite News)
What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that “the Weathermen appear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.
1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics. 
🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comic is based on Weatherman Mark Rudd 
Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)
The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].
Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019]. 
(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)
So given that Britain has the stability of a long-reigning queen and the institution of monarchy is firmly rooted in Anglo-Celtic soil, then it should not really come as a surprise to discover that the queen retains a team of “secret mission” messengers who are at her beck and call 24/7. The title queen’s (or king’s) messenger does have an anachronistic ring to it – when you conjure up images of darkly-clad couriers (perhaps spies), secretly scurrying from castle to castle across Medieval Europe on royal business.
‘
When I first heard the saccharine, content-lite melodies of “Bubblegum Pop’s” 1910 Fruitgum Company, I didn’t realise that the name of this innocuous, syrupy 1960s musical group was a corny pun on a historic commercial entity that I did not know of at the time…this commercial enterprise was in fact something much less edifying and infinitely more sinister and consequential – the United Fruit Company of Boston, Mass. As the following will show, the United Fruit Co would come to epitomise the high degree of hegemony established by US business interests in the tropical regions of the Americas after the late 1890s.
From railroads to plantations
The United Fruit Company had its origins in 1899 from a merger of various fruit exporting concerns (including the Boston Fruit Company which had already embedded itself in the banana trade in Jamaica) controlled by American railroad constructor and entrepreneur Minor Cooper Keith. Earlier Keith stumbled into the banana trade virtually by accident. In 1872 Costa Rica defaulted on it’s bank loans and was unable to pay Keith for constructing the country’s railroad. In lieu of part of what it owed Keith, he was granted over 5% of vacant Costa Rican land. Accordingly the American used the land to establish banana farms alongside his newly finished railroad. The crops when yielded had a ready-made, on-the-spot transport line to carry the produce to port. Keith’s early banana experiments in Costa Rica proved a lucrative earner and paved the way for United Fruit’s later role as producer and exporter of the fruit. From that base in Costa Rica Keith the banana trader looked further afield in Latin America for other openings.
Monopoly, oligarchy? Other players in the tropical banana trade
Although classically monopolistic in its practices, United Fruit Co (UFCo) was not the only player (American or foreign) in the Central American/Caribbean banana game. In fact at the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition in bananas, in 1899 some 114 firms were engaged in importing bananas to the US via New Orleans [Davies 1990, cited in S Striffler et al, (Eds.), Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, (2003)]. UFCo grew by acquisition, quickly adding 20 smaller banana export firms to its list of business holdings.
Rivalry with mutual benefits
In addition to Standard Fruit, another US rival of United Fruit was the Cuyamel Fruit Company. Cuyamel started in transportation as the Hubbard-Zemurray Steam Ship Co and morphed into a large New Orleans-based agricultural corporation (see ‘Sam the Banana Man’ below). The three American companies in the Central and South American banana business (United Fruit, Standard Fruit and Cuyamel) were separate business entities, each in competition for bananas et al products from the same tropical region. And yet there was something slightly schizophrenic about the relationship between the three…concurrently with the earnest rivalry was the existence of a cartel-like cooperation between the companies – which was of mutual benefit financially, eg, being able to launch joint business efforts in advertising and in increasing banana agricultural outputs in Honduras. United Fruit Co’s dominant position in the triangle (always the senior player) facilitated this arrangement…it had both a 60% stake in Cuyamel and a 50% stake in Vaccaro Bros⊠ [Ralph Lee Woodward Jr, Central America, a Nation Divided (3rd ed. 1999), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry].
‘Sam the Banana Man’
Schmuel Zmurri was an immigrant from the Russian Empire (born in Bessarabia, in modern Moldova) who changed his name to Samuel Zemurray after coming to the United States. Zemurray was to become a major player and shaper in the banana republic phenomenon, a seminal figure who contributed to the massive imprint left on the tropics by American banana barons. 
United Fruit “a state within the state” of Guatemala: another intervention by Zemurray in the banana republics
Although no longer UFCo president, Zemurray wasn’t quite finished meddling to gain a financial advantage for United Fruit, he had one last contribution to the destabilisation of Central American regimes. The Guatemala banana trade had long been one of United Fruit’s most prized possessions…from the early 1900s President Manuel E Cabrera’s cosy relationship with UFC saw him grant the company a 99-year concession in Guatemala. United Fruit’s role in Guatemala has been described as “a state within a state” [William Blum, cited in ‘1954 Guatemalan coup d’être’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In 1953 Zemurray enlisted UFCo in a US State Department propaganda campaign to overthrow the left-leaning but democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. The campaign together with the active intervention of the CIA paved the way for a coup the following year which ousted Arbenz and replaced it with a military junta which immediately reversed Arbenz’s decision to expropriate a portion of the unused land owned by the United Fruit Co [‘Sam Zemurray’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The fallout from the 1954 coup – for which the contribution of Zemurray and UFCo was no small part – was long-term destabilisation for the Guatemalans. The country, through a succession of military rulers, descended into three decades of civil war, 200,000 deaths including genocidal outrages against the native population [‘Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past’, (Stephen Schlesinger), New York Times, 04-Jun-2011, www.nytimes.com].
As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler✱, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.
Ralph Anspach comes into the story in 1973, six years after Darrow—made a multi-millionaire by the runaway success of Monopoly—had died. Anspach is an avowed anti-monopolist, by conviction a “trust-buster” who is mightily annoyed at the OPEC oil cartel’s stranglehold over that essential world commodity at the time (the 1973 Oil Crisis). He pursues his ideals by creating an Anti-Monopoly game in opposition to Parker Brothers’ über celebrated game. Parker Brothers sues Anspach for breach of copyright and so begins nearly ten years of legal battles with Parker Bros (in fact by this time the company was controlled by the General Mills corporation)…Anspach’s tireless research for the case leads him to the true, albeit convoluted, origins of Monopoly☸.
The Monopolists recounts Anspach’s monumental efforts and endlessly time-draining “detective work” in minute detail. Anspach traces the game back to one Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (long pre-dating Darrow), and here’s where the story gets really interesting! Magie, an independent-thinking, politically progressive Midwestern woman, was a staunch supporter of Henry George. George was the author of Progress and Poverty, a widely influential text which fuelled the introduction of the Progressive Era in the US (1890s-1920s). George advocated the introduction of a Single Tax on land and property (AKA Land Value Tax). Ms Magie invented and patented a board game in 1903-1904☯, called the Landlord’s Game, based on Georgist principles of wealth redistribution. Magie’s game was in her words, “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all the usual consequences” [Single Tax Review, 1902], the Landlord’s Game was intended to educate Americans about the dangers of unbridled capitalism (ie, ultimately resulting in the monopolisation of business, benefitting only one player)⌑.
When I played Monopoly in the 1960s the takeaway message for me always aligned with the “Gordon Gecko/Greed is Good” world view…gold standard instruction on how to win at capitalism – with ruthlessness and a certain degree of luck! Pilon points out the fundamental irony of Magie’s “thought-child” – once Parker Bros got their hands on Monopoly, the company left not a single stone unturned in the pursuit of eliminating any rival claims to “their game”⊡. Monopoly, under the aegis of Parker Bros, a game with the sole raison d’être of annihilating all business competitors, leaving a solitary victor, was the complete opposite of what the game’s prototype inventor intended it to be! Moreover, to further underscore the irony, the game became controlled by a company (Parker Bros) that “fought tooth and nail to maintain its own monopoly over it”.
Back to Ralph Anspach’s anti-monopoly crusade – as well as introducing or reintroducing Lizzie Magie to the world, the economics professor’s years of searching, digging in archives, interviewing people of interest across the United States, word-of-mouth, friend-of-a-friend, sometimes down blind alleys, etc, revealed that the games (or games) of Monopoly had been played in various forms and under various names for decades before Charles Darrow’s Pennsylvanian neighbours introduced him to the game. Pilon ties together all the threads of Monopoly’s antecedents – as unearthed by the indefatigably never-say-die Ralph Anspach. What came to light was that Magie’s game, either in its original published form (‘The Landlord’s Game’) or in derivative ‘backyard’ versions, had been played (prior to the publication of Darrow’s Monopoly) as follows:
Unbeknownst to Lizzie Magie, many versions of her ‘Landlord’s Game’ had sprung up in the North-East of the country, often these early, widely dispersed players made their own homemade versions of Monopoly using hand-painted oil cloths, local street names and substitute tokens. In addition George Layton created and sold his own commercial version (which he called ‘Finance’) in the early 1930s. By the thirties a version of the game had spread to Texas – Rudy Copeland’s published board game of ‘Inflation’.
Pilon injects many diverse strands in the narrative, even Abraham Lincoln makes a brief (oblique) appearance in The Monopolists – in the late 1850s Lizzie’s father James Magie, a newspaper editor and abolitionist, was an instrumental part of Lincoln’s political campaigns for office…this digression has a very tenuous connexion with Monopoly! The various currents traversed by the author takes the story beyond the purview of being a straightforward account of plagiarised copyrights and game inventions. The book illuminates the position of women in late 19th/early 20th century American society by positing what made Magie stand out from others of her sex at the time and what she was able to achieve – taking on a number of vocations and pursuits, retaining her autonomy and avoiding the “marriage trap”, becoming an inventor (in addition to the Landlord’s Game she held patents for inventions in the realm of stenography as well).
The author takes the reader on another diversion, straying away from the origin controversy to surprisingly explore Monopoly’s role in World War II! The US Military purchased Monopoly sets to be sent to POWs detained in German prisons (and elsewhere in Europe). The intent behind this practice had a dual purpose: to boost morale for the imprisoned soldiers, but also a practical one – 
Coda: The after-affects of Ralph Anspach’s 1983 victory over Parker Brothers in the US Supreme Court (including the ruling that the word monopoly was in fact generic) hasn’t brought any sense of closure to supporters of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. The public acknowledgement warranted her as the true and original inventor of Monopoly has not been forthcoming. Pilon points out that in the 1980s Parker Bros “quietly began to massage its Monopoly history”…a 1988 history of the company by a former Parker Bros R & D head admits that Darrow was not the game’s inventor, but neglects to mention Lizzie Magie. Similarly, on the official Monopoly website in the Nineties, Hasbro, Inc, which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, starts the Monopoly story at 1933 with Darrow and scantly acknowledges the influence of the Landlord’s Game (again without mentioning Lizzie by name!) No plaque for Lizzie’s prototype of the Monopoly game exists anywhere (although there is one in Atlantic City recognising the contribution of that city’s Quaker players to the invention of the game!)
‘1922 Wilson’s Director’
Curiously there are some variances in the kinds of type-face used in different maps, some use a Gothic font in contrast to the classic style. ◀ The Redfern-Darlington map at left differs from the type used in most maps. On a few seldom occasions maps make reference to the traditional, nineteenth century British land concept of parishes (eg, the Parish of Gordon)…this seems extraneous as the maps and the book largely follow a division by municipalities.
Gordon Rd – in the days before the upgrade to a highway and renaming
The colliery (deepest mine shaft ever sunk in Aust.) in the 1940s (still operating at that time)
The Glebe
Mascot with a racecourse where the airport should be!
East Subs’ residential paradise
The other side of Strathfield municipality
Eastwood map, p235: site of future MQ University just to the south of Lane Cove River
Dee Why
South Kenso & Daceyville
Penrith & the (“world-class”) Nepean
The cover of my edition is long gone but the 1926 edition is very approx.
‘ Gregory’s’ 1st street directory of Sydney 1934
▲ Ball court at Xochicalco (Morelos, Mex.): note the vast difference to Gran cancha de pelotá…Xochicalco is on an infinitely smaller scale, characterised by low, staggered side walls comprising earth mounds
Onsite site map
Zona arqueología
The Kuk
Templo de Kukulcán
El Caracol
Spot the iguana!
La Iglesia
Chichén-Itzá vendors hard at it! Sombreros for a hot day.
Elizabeth House: BM’s ‘anonymous’ London location
Advocacy groups and critics of the Home Office policy have complained that RICU/OCST uses the Muslim Civil Society Organisations (MCSO) as mouthpieces for their government counter-narratives, irrespective of whether the MSCO are aware of it or not [‘The Home Office is Creating Mistrust within Muslim Civil Society’, (CAGE, 16-May-2016), www.cage.ngo.
❈ a number of the links on the website menu were broken at the time I accessed it…that internet know-how training they were talking about might have come in handy in the BM IT department!
⌖ OCST itself was the successor to IRD (Information Research Department), a top-secret body set up by Britain’s Foreign Office in 1948, during the early dawn of the Cold War, and wound up the same year Elvis died (1977).The Independent has drawn attention to IRD’s questionable record during its existence of disseminating anti-Communist propaganda routinely exaggerating stories of Soviet atrocities and anti-British plots, S Lucas, ‘REAR WINDOW : COLD WAR :The British Ministry of Propaganda’, The Independent, 26-Feb-1995, www.theindependent.co.uk
⚀ The Guardian also disclosed that BM’s founding directors have pre-existing links to the governing Conservative Party
Founder of King Kullen
King Kullen, Queens
King Kullen eventually diversified into bakeries, delicatessens, florists, pharmacies and health products, in addition to its staple of produce lines. Today it maintains a modest but healthy market position in New York, operating a chain of supermarkets (around 35 in total) in the Long Island area, concentrated in Nassau and Suffolk counties.
In an episode of the 2012 series of The Hairy Bikers, the English BMW-riding celebrity chefs from “Oop North” do a road trip through the gastronomical delights of America’s Mississippi River Valley. Whilst the two girth-challenged biker-chefs are in Memphis, Tennessee, to check out the local speciality of soul stew and fried chicken, they make a visit to a Piggly Wiggly store, or at least to a replica of the famous original store encapsulated in a local museum, formerly the pink palatial mansion (pictured above) of Piggly Wiggly’s founder.
The indefatigable Saunders was soon at it again, devising a new take on his idea of a revolutionary grocery enterprise. In 1937 this materialised with Keedoozle – the prototype of an automated store. The name apparently a contraction of “key-does-all”✾…it worked like this, upon entering the store customers received a key which they used to access the merchandise. The complicated sounding process involved taking the items and a ticker tape from glass-enclosed cases (resembling vending machines) to the cashier who inserted the tape into a “translator machine” which had a two-fold action: it triggered electrical impulses which transported the goods down a conveyor belt, and at the same time adding up the customer’s bill. The added benefit for the customer, apart from convenience and speed, Saunders claimed would be 10-15% cheaper prices than Keedoozle’s competitors[7].In practice though, things didn’t go to plan. The electrical circuits couldn’t cope with the traffic during peak hours, there were breakdowns (unreliable machinery, high maintenance costs)…and delays (compounded by a tardy conveyor belt system). Customers regularly got someone else’s orders. In all Saunders had three attempts at getting the automated service right. In 1948 he came up with (another) new, ‘improved’ version of Keedoozle…again the re-launch was accompanied by Saunders’ penchant for extravagant claims[8]. Alas, this venture also met the same fate of the earlier projects, eventual bankruptcy.Foodelectric
All of the grocery store projects that Saunders launched went pear-shaped in the end. One last hurray for the grocery pioneer was meant to be his Foodelectric concept. As heralded by Saunders, Foodelectric would take retail automation to another level – the customer would “act as her own cashier”, doing the collecting and wrapping of the purchases herself. According to Saunders, it would “cut overhead expenses and enable a small staff to handle a tremendous volume”. Saunders’ new innovation with Foodelectric was the “shopping brain”, a portable primitive computer which allows the shopper to select and despatch the items, whilst registering the prices on the computer window[9].Clarence Saunders, grocer ⍗
Unfortunately Saunders (left) died in 1953 before he could open the first Foodelectric store. The track records of Piggly Wiggly, Sole Owner Stores and especially Keedoozle were not stellar success stories in the world of retail grocery, the notion of triple-bankruptcy does not connote good business acumen. But Saunders was a visionary thinker-outside-the-box, his concepts and novelties in the field were decades ahead of their time…the Memphis grocer is remembered today for pioneering a nascent sales model of self-service which paved the way for the development of the modern supermarket.
Devastation on the PC pier after the explosion
The disproportionate toll of African-American enlisted men in the disaster was the result of the Navy assigning them to the most menial, labouring jobs as stevedores, basically “pack mules” loading the munitions. The Navy made casual racist assumptions about their ‘limited’ vocational capacity, despite the fact that at the Navy boot camp the black sailors had each completed specific training for one or other of the naval rating occupations[3].
Navy double standards
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the Navy treated of the two groups of seamen involved markedly differently – the White officers and sailors were given a 30-day “survivor’s leave”, whereas all the Black sailors (despite being severely shaken and traumatised by the incident) were denied the leave – despite it being standard procedure in such instances. This proved a very sore point for the African-Americans at Port Chicago. African-American seamen enlisted in the US Navy, aside from motives of patriotism, for the promise of recognition as full American citizens – a chance to escape the South’s Jim Crow segregation policies or the North’s institutionalised “second citizenship”[4]. Unfortunately what they found, and Port Chicago was no exception to elsewhere in the military, was that they were still segregated and marginalised, despite the fact they were serving in the defence of their country.
Diagram of pier & the two cargo carriers prior to the explosion
San Francisco Bay
Treasure Island court-martial site
A dangerous job – for White servicemen!
(Photo: National Park Service)
Daggstar completely out of the box
There was so much to the creative output of Clarke comma J, and so much variety too … screenplays, film acting, radio, stage work, television, songs, books. Clarke’s art didn’t fit into any one particular mould, he was, to use Martin Luther’s expression, an “irregular planet which cannot be fixed among the stars”, always inventing, moving on and reinventing, exploring something new that had piqued his interest.
John Clarke’s sudden, most untimely death leaves a Sydney Opera House-sized hole in Australian and New Zealand satire – and I shall never forget that voice – as with Billy Bragg’s, so distinctive, and as with Joe (Dragnet) Friday’s, so deadpan matter-of-fact … or his trademark mischievous grin and the sparkle in the eyes.
DNA
The snowballing effect of genetic screening
IVF technology enables the screening of embryos for inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease or Tay-Sachs disease … many view this as the start of a continuum which could usher in an “era of designer babies”[4]. The market in this area has created a consumer-driven demand for “eugenic services”. IVF testing for mitochondrial DHA has been exponential … in 2011 there were 580,000 medical genetic tests in Australia, a 280% jump on the 2006 figure![5]. Currently we test for Down syndrome and similar defects, next might be Parkinson’s disease, beyond that? If given the green light there is potentially no end in sight … will they test with a view to eradicating autism? Down the track it might be dwarfism, even homosexuality?[6]. This may sound alarmist to some, but unchecked, it is plausible that gene tampering could ultimately infiltrate these areas.
Concerns with non-therapeutic abuse in genetics has a wide ambit: another peripheral issue pointing to likely future genetic manipulation lies in the realm of sport, an area already plagued by the increasingly widespread use of steroids for performance enhancement. The development of gene therapy has elevated the disturbing likelihood of gene doping – inserting or modifying DNA for the purpose of enhancing the performance of athletes. Gene doping is still in an experimental phase but is particularly concerning both to doctors and to Olympic administrators because it is hard to detect and it’s nature is unpredictable and potentially dangerous[12].
Whilst the possibility of misuse and harm of gene editing technology is a barrier for many, others opposing genetic manipulation from a humanist viewpoint and have called out the human genetics industry for discriminating against and undermining the dignity of the disabled and the mentally ill. Opponents say that there is a common element at the core of both eugenics and human genetic engineering – the devaluing of (some) human life. Contemporary geneticists, they say, start from the same philosophical standpoint as the old-style eugenicists: a view of the disabled and other “genetically challenged” people that is essentially negative and pessimistic, conveying the idea that they are extraneous and to be done away with. Many critics see these advocates of HGE as intolerant of those with genetic impairment, refusing to accept the disabled in particular for how they are (which is part of the diversity of the human condition)[13]. These detractors believe that the normalisation of human genetic modification would lead to an erosion of respect for the disabled.
The thorny issue of genetic engineering of humans, especially with its uncomfortable link with the pernicious effects of the eugenics movement of last century, remains a highly controversial one. Scientific advancements in biotechnology has created a receptive market for genetic screening for defective embryos, but the genetic enhancement of humans, with its Frankenstein-ish overtones, remains a bridge too far for most people in western democracies✥.
PostScript 2: Polygenism debunked The polygenists accepted that the species had more than one origin (cf. monogenism – deriving from one, common ancestor). Morton (see FN 2 below) believed that races were arranged in order of intelligence … the fairer the skin the more intelligent. DNA evidence, tracing human markers, has disproved the theory by proving that all Eurasians, Americans, Austronesians, Oceanians and Africans, share the same, common ancestor[10].
IQ tests continued to be fashionable in the 1950s & beyond: giving ‘scientific’ credence to the stigmatising of those in society labelled as “less intelligent” (Source: The Creativity Post)
Clare Hanson characterises eugenics as less a science than a social and cultural movement, drawing its power from its “dissemination across a range of discursive fields”[3]. Hanson notes that eugenics played a key role in post-war British reconstruction, its ideas sustained and incorporated into the development of the country after 1945. The national efficacy goals of eugenics were visible in the Attlee Labour government’s endorsement of the ‘meritocratic’ ideal. Postwar education reform in the UK illustrates this: the division of secondary education into three strands – grammar, technical and modern – was a philosophical approach geared to the needs of social efficiency, not social justice. A further connexion with pre-WWII’s eugenics was the seminal roles in public policy in the postwar reconstruction and foundation of the welfare state played by eugenics advocates William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss[4].
Dr GambleNils Roll-Hansen has pointed out that Scandinavian society was quick to reject the excesses and unscientific attitudes of eugenics (eg, in Nazi Germany), whilst not rejecting the basic ideas and beliefs of eugenics. The political structure inherent in the Nordic countries was considered conducive to the success achieved by proponents of eugenics. The dominant labour parties (especially the Swedish Social Democratic Party) elicited effectively co-operation from the labour organisations in implementing social policy (as part of the country’s “social contract”). Roll-Hansen has contended that the region’s liberal-democratic tradition with its stress on the rights of the individual ensured that the eugenic practices that were put in place were moderate only[14]. The unearthing of Roll-Hansen and Broberg’s ‘bombshell’ had a big effect on Scandinavians, especially the Swedes … in 1999 Sweden agreed to compensate victims of forced sterilisations, offering each individual affected up to 175,000 kronors[15].
South African Boer War – coming crisis in British Manhood?
Imperial Britain’s performance in the Boer War (especially early on) against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of Britain’s fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. Britain’s sudden reverses in the war required reinforcements from home, leading to a manpower dilemma – unhealthy British cities and slums, from where the foot soldiers were drawn, churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men[9]. The average British soldier in 1900 was shorter than that of 1845 and over three-fourths of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for service[10]. This crisis gave further credence to the idea of Australia and New Zealand as embodying the coming man. Whilst British soldiery seemed to struggle and its martial supremacy stumbled (albeit temporarily), the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. The Boer War reversals only accentuated anxieties about the racial deterioration of working class Britons[11]. A report conducted in 1904, with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration”, confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested.
(source: www.telegraph.co.uk)PostScript: D H Lawrence and Australia DH (Bert) Lawrence in his novel Kangaroo, written entirely with the exception of the final chapter while the peripatetic English novelist was in Australia (1922), fleetingly entertained the possibility of Australia becoming a new and uncorrupted Britain. One of Lawrence’s enduring preoccupations, informed by his readings of Herbert Spencer and other early eugenics proponents, was the degeneration of western industrial society. In other works also Lawrence subscribed to the notion of the coming man, eg, in Aaron’s Rod (written before his visit to Australia) Lawrence described an Australian character as a “new and vital version of an English man”[21].
1930s Australian poster warning against VD
Sandow the Strongman’s ‘System‘
°
NZ physical welfare instructors, early 1940sAgain, like the British eugenicists’ pronouncements, new ideas from America fell on receptive ears in Australasia. The centre of the American eugenics movement revolved around biologist Charles Davenport and his Eugenics Records Office whose activities reached eugenicists worldwide. Davenport and his ERO eugenicist associate Harry Laughlin were both chicken breeders illustrate the link of agriculture to eugenics[13]. Race reinvigoration in the US was championed from the very highest quarters. At the turn of the century soon-to-be president, Teddy Roosevelt, appealed to his country’s citizens to take up “the strenuous life” (his message was aimed primarily at native-born Americans of good Anglo-Saxon stock). And Americans did heed his words: many took up sports for the first time, American (college) football became popular as the ultimate physical test of manhood, competitive athletics and cycling were taken up in the quest to demonstrate masculine physical strength and endurance. Roosevelt’s urgings led to the popularity of hiking, hunting and mountain climbing among Americans. Behind all of these feats of physical exertion lurked the same self-doubts of the dominant white race as elsewhere. The depression of the 1890s and the enervating affects of industrial society accentuated these anxieties. The US was experiencing a shift in immigration patterns at this time which had started to favour especially Southern and Central Europe over immigrants from Britain and Northern Europe⚀. The more affluent, native-born Americans predictably called for a halt to immigration[14] with the purpose of stopping the ‘poorer’ stock of immigrants coming into America (Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc). The pattern of restricting particular ethnic groupings was duplicated concurrently in other western countries (eg, the WAP in Australia).
The Wright brothers defended their exclusive aircraft patent against all-comers (“copiers and imitators” as they saw everybody else in the game) with a monomaniacal religious zeal that would have befitted their overbearing United Brethren minister father Milton. Orville and Wilbur freely sued and issued writs against anyone who attempted to construct and fly a new aircraft without purchasing a licence from them. As this was the pioneering era of aviation there were a lot of inventors trying to do just this[2]. Accordingly, the Wrights spent a lot of time locked in legal disputes with other manufacturers in America and overseas who were trying to avoid the patent fee. The Wrights staunchly defended their world monopoly over flight in unequivocal terms as a ‘moral’ and a ‘legal’ right, treating all other contemporary inventors in the field as in effect “hobbyists”![3].
Because of the Wrights’ unwavering stance on their patents (after 1912 Orville alone, as Wilbur died that year), resentment towards the brothers was strong, they were accused of being greedy by licensees, eg, by demanding “money first” from prospective buyers BEFORE giving a demonstration of the prototype flyer, or by setting too high a royalty fee (at one point demanding 20% of sales); after a string of fatal air crashes in Wright planes Orville Wright lost sympathy with the public by attributing the accidents solely to “pilot error” (characteristically giving no consideration to the fact that the Wrights might be at fault for not having tried to make improvements to their prototype Flyer’s basic design[7].
Desert City
Those visitors that didn’t want to do the camel ride (speaking personally, I had sated my taste for camel rides striding high atop a collection of even-toed ungulates in Egypt on an earlier occasion), went for a combined dinner and show. The eating conditions were pretty rudimentary (one tick for authenticity at least!) – we were seated on large sand-filled cushions which were resting on ancient-looking strips of carpet bleached dry of colour by endless exposure to the harsh sun … however I would concede that the meal was quite good (falafel & kebab roll) except for the rather tasteless penne.
The dancer twirled around in circles – in one direction – ever more frenetically. He did this for so long I thought he would surely have to unwind in the opposite direction for the equivalent amount of time before he would be able to regain his balance! … but he was OK. Halfway through his twirling performance his whole outfit lit up like New Year’s Eve … at this point for some reason, randomly, the idea of suicide bombers came into my mind – maybe it was the way he was self-activating the light show (ie, himself) by repeatedly flicking a switch on and off! Fortunately for all the show ended peacefully and we eventually returned to our more comfortable beds in the hotel.
Tourist Town
International bragging rights!
Eighty years ago this month the IOC’s most controversial Olympiad was held. 1936 was a momentous year for the Olympic movement – the official Summer Olympic Games were held by the Nazis in August in Berlin. Back in February of that year another part of Germany, Garmisch-Partenkirchen*, had hosted the Winter Olympiad[1]. And in July there had been, or should have been, an alternative, anti-Nazi Olympiad in Barcelona … more of that later.
Never before had a modern games been manipulated for propaganda purposes to the extent that the Germans under Hitler did at Berlin. When the Summer Games were awarded in 1931 Germany was still under the governance of the democratic (but ill-fated) Weimar Republic, but with Hitler coming to power two years later Germany swiftly took on a more unsavoury and increasingly sinister complexion. The Third Reich was soon savagely attacking the liberties of Jews, communists and the Roma (gypsies) … and much worse was to come!
(Image: www.olympic-museum.de)
International opposition to the Nazi Olympics remained very vocal in the lead-up to the event. Spain and Barcelona in particular had a vested interest, having lost the bid to hold the 1936 Games to Berlin (the German city won easily, 43 votes to 16)♔. SASI (the international federation of workers’ sports) decided to hold the next instalment of its Workers’ Olympiads (see my previous post) in Barcelona in 1936. The Catalan Committee in Favour of Popular Sport (CCEP), boosted by the election of the leftist Popular Front in Spain in February 1936, worked with SASI to plan and prepare the Barcelona Olympiad♕, scheduled to begin just two weeks before the start of the official (Berlin) Games … clearly timed to steal Nazi Germany’s (and the Führer’s) thunder!
(Source: Bernard N. Danchik Papers; ALBA 033; Box 2; Tamiment Library / Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, NYU)
The organising committee for the Peoples’ Olympiad employed an emblem which reinforced the SASI themes of solidarity, brotherhood and world peace … three male athletes standing defiantly side-by-side, one white, one coloured and one (to all appearances) of mixed or Asian ethnicity (no females in the poster to be seen however … inclusiveness apparently hadn’t extended that far by then!)[5].
El Estadio de Montjuic
As it got closer to the event there were questions asked within the Olympic community about whether the Games should go ahead in Berlin. The Nazi regime’s transparent violations of human rights at home, and it’s failure to behave like a good international citizen (eg, pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, illegally occupying the Rhineland in March 1936, etc), prompted a number of nations to consider boycotting the event.
Catalonia’s Olympiad Stadium
Politics and sport, the National Socialist way
Olimpíada Popular poster: International worker-athlete brotherhood
Estadio Montjuïc
Spartakiad 1931
Antwerp WO 1937
In the early 1930s an African-American postal employee from New York, Victor Hugo Green, came up with the idea of producing a book for Black Americans to guide them in travelling safely around their own country. Green got some inspiration from the Jewish-American press which for several years had been publishing travel guides for its community’s travellers, and from earlier, embryonic and less successful efforts to service the African-American community (eg, the Negro Business Directories from the early 20th century)[1].
The project like many entrepreneurial dreams started small, The mailman-cum-entrepreneur Green initially focused his efforts on helping African-American motorists and travellers locate businesses (lodgings, restaurants and other food outlets and fuel stations) in the greater New York metropolitan area that would accept their custom. As the business grew (with assistance from the US Travel Bureau) Green expanded his guide to the rest of the US, and to Alaska, Bermuda and parts of Canada and Mexico. The Green Book’s aim was to help Black and Coloured travellers chart a safe path through a segregated America by pinpointing exactly where on route they could stop and get the services they required to make the trip a happy and pleasant one.
According to the civil rights leader, Julian Bond, Green used his network of contacts in the Postal Workers Union to ascertain where Black visitors would be welcome[3]. Early on, Green visited the locations he would include in his Green Book to check them out personally, but when the book took on a national (and international) focus this became impractical[4]. Aside from hotels and motels, other accommodation options advertised in the Green Book included “tourist homes” (the private residences of African-Americans made available to travellers) and the Harvey House hospitality chain[5].
◥ 1949 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
◥ 1956 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
When the resourceful Mr Green published the inaugural Green Book in 1936, he wrote in the preface that he looked forward to the day when “this guide will not have to be published”. That day was a long time happening (sadly not in Victor’s lifetime) … but it did come.
✒︎ The Argonauts
✒︎ “astroboy” touches down
✒︎ A NASA aquanaut (source: theatlantic.com)
The word beatnik was coined by journalist Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1958] to describe adherents to the “Beat Generation”, a sort of subculture movement characterised by youthful anti-conformism, rebelling against the mainstream and hip culture (“being cool, man!”) (cf. the word ‘hipster’ as used today). Other traits include devotion to jazz, drug use and Eastern religions, and pseudo-intellectualism. Through the writings of ‘Beat’ leaders such as Jack Kerouac, other neologisms followed the pattern of beatnik … jazznik, bopnik, bugnik [Jack Kerouac, Brandeis Forum, ‘Is there a Beat Generation?’, 8 Nov. 1958, www.wnyc.org/story/.]
‘The Avengers’: Gentlemen’s bowler hats & sexy black leatherwear
Hollywood domestic shock/horror & scandal 40s & 50s style
‘The Iron Petticoat’ 1956
‘Casino Royale’ 1967
George Wallace (above) had an early taste of the stage appearing in children’s pantomime at age three, but it wasn’t until after WWI that his career really took off when he teamed up with fellow vaudevillian Jack Paterson to form a knockabout comedy act called “Dinks and Onkus”. The duo performed their “couple of drunks” routine to packed audiences at the Newtown Bridge Theatre for five years before Wallace outgrew the partnership and joined up with bigger enterprises, first that of Fuller’s Circuit and then the Tivoli Theatre Circuit.
George was smallish in stature and quite chubby in build but despite this, on stage he was exceptionally acrobatic and agile on his feet. As part of his very physical act he became acutely adept at landing on his left ear during a deliberate fall. Wallace wrote witty songs and review sketches to perform in theatre, sometimes he told absurd stories about characters such as Stanley the Bull, the Drongo from the Congo and Sophie the Sort [Stuart Sayers, ‘Wallace, George Stevenson (1895–1960)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wallace-george-stevenson-8961/text15765, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 4 April 2015]. The Wallace persona on stage and screen was that of a childlike man, portraying goggle-eyed, innocent characters well down on the social ladder, often farm boys, hicks and yokels ill at ease with women [Paul Byrnes, ‘George Wallace’, www.aso.gov.au]. The country bumpkin-cum-innocent in the big city association was further emphasised by George’s garb, comprising ill-fitting clothes and rumpled hat.
Wallace’s “working class zero” popularity attracted the attention of local film-makers and in the thirties he appeared in a number of films such as Gone to the Dogs, A Ticket for Tatts, mostly for Ken G Hall, Australia’s foremost (Cinesound) director in the interwar period. In his movies (some of which he co-wrote) Wallace reprised his theatre role as a bumbling, disaster-prone innocent. In his performances on the big screen Wallace demonstrated that he was able to make the transition from stage to cinema. After WWII however, finances dried up and the Australian film industry went into steep decline. Wallace returned to theatre including a return to pantomime and to the new medium of radio performance. In 1949 he began a weekly radio show with the Macquarie Network in Sydney. The one setback to Wallace’s career was his unsuccessful attempt in the early fifties to make it in the English theatre as a comedian, but this could be attributed partially to the English audiences’ unfamiliarity with his Australian accent [ibid.].
Rene had a very distinctive on-stage appearance, striking black-and-white face paint which gave a nod to the influence of minstrelsy, baggy pants and a battered black top hat. In performance he exuded an extroverted and even exhibitionist style – he was the quintessential lair (the self-promoting “show-off”). Often he would robustly insult the audience with a spray of obscenities, both verbal and gestural. In today’s milieu of political correctness Rene’s act would in all likelihood be characterised as sexist and even racist (in its presentation of a Jewish caricature) and it did alienate some viewers in the day. This did not stop Fuller’s from billing him (pre-war) as “Australia’s foremost delineator of Hebrew eccentricities” [Frank Van Straten, ‘Roy Rene 1892-1954’, Live Performance Australia – Hall of Fame (2007), www.liveperformance.com.au ].
After WWII, with variety theatre in recession, Rene made a successful transition to radio. He was able to do this having learned from the lessons of his failed venture into films, because he made sure that his radio shows were presented before a live audience to ensure that his performances had that necessary edge. At Sydney radio station 2GB he found a niche as the bombastic “Professor Mo McCackie” of “McCackie Manor” finding a whole new audience for his unique sense of humour.
Not long after the news spread about the momentous event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, the significance of what the Wrights’ had done found itself under challenge, especially as time went on from the European aviation community. French newspapers after 1903 described the celebrated American brothers as bluffeurs (bluffers). Doubts were raised about their achievements when the Wrights failed to release the photo of the Wright Flyer in flight at Kitty Hawk until nearly five years after the groundbreaking 1903 flight … newspapers acerbically asked: “Were they fliers or liars?”, Paris edition of the New York Herald (10 Feb 1906); ‘Wright Brothers: European skepticism’, www.spiritus-temporis.com.
The state of North Carolina has harboured no such doubts, proudly displaying the slogan First in Flight on its car number-plates. Whether you accept the Wrights’ claim to be first in flight, or some other contender (of which there are several), in a sense could depend on what is meant by manned, aeronautical flight. Orville Wright’s first successful if brief powered flight was by no measure the first human flight in history. The genesis of intentional manned air travel can be traced back to the late 18th century with the advent of large hot air balloons (starting with the Montgolfier brothers of France in 1783).
As well, in the 30 years preceding Kitty Hawk, there was a host of aviation pioneers experimenting with monoplanes, biplanes, box-kites and gliders including, 1874: Félix du Temple; 1894: Hiram Maxim; 1894: Lawrence Hargrave; 1898: Augustus Moore Herring [B Kampmark, ‘Wright Brothers: Right or Wrong?’, Montréal Review (April 2013]. These flights however were either pre-power ones, or if motorised, they have been largely discredited as having been either unsustained, uncontrolled or as at the least not sufficiently controlled [P Scott, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919].
G A Whitehead was a German migrant (born Gustave Weisskopf) living in Connecticut who started experimenting with gliders (variations on the glider prototype design developed by aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal) in the mid-1890s, at a time when Wilbur and Orville were still making and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. The case in support of the flight made by Whitehead on 14 August 1901 in what must be noted was an improbable-looking, bat-shaped, engine-propelled glider at Fairfield near Bridgeport, was first taken up in 1935 (in an article in an industry magazine, Popular Aviation, entitled ‘Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World’s First Powered Flight?’)回. Whitehead’s claim lay dormant until the 1960s when army reservist William O’Dwyer, took up the German-American engine-maker’s cause and did his upmost to promote his “flying machine”.
Critics of the Institute believe that the Smithsonian’s indebtedness to the Wrights’ legacy (the fear of losing the historic Flyer to the estate executors) prevents it from recognising the merits of Whitehead’s pioneering achievement irrespective of the weight of evidence put forward [J Liotta, ‘Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence’, www.news.nationalgeographic.com]. Clearly this is a powerful disincentive to the Smithsonian objectively assessing the merits and new evidence for any rival claims to the Wrights (not just Whitehead’s) which may be unearthed.
The credence given to the Wright brothers’ claim to be the first successful flyers should perhaps come with an asterisk, signifying it as heavily qualified, as in David Schneider’s all-inclusive, tongue-in-cheek description: “First in Sustained, Piloted, Controlled, Powered, Heavier-than-air Flight of Lasting Technological Significance” [ibid].
Did any of the documented early flights per se achieve “sustained and controlled flight”? Human conquest of the sky didn’t happen in one quantum leap, surely it came about in a series of small, measured steps, each building on the one before. It is more meaningful to see the development of viable flying machines as something that happened incrementally, an aerodynamic puzzle put together piece-by-piece. It was an international effort, the culmination of the accumulated efforts of gifted pioneering aeronautical designers such as George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, Lawrence Hargrave and Otto Lilienthal whose experiments made it possible for the Wrights and others to experiment with flight, coming closer and closer to the realisation of successful manned, powered flight.
Fairyland Pleasure Grounds
Another suburban pleasure ground that greatly captured the imagination of Sydneysiders in its day was Fairyland Pleasure Grounds. It was situated on the Upper Lane Cove River in an area now incorporated into the Lane Cove National Park. From its inception as a pleasure ground in the early 1900s, up to when a main arterial road in North Ryde (Delhi Road) was linked with it, it was largely only accessible by boat to a wharf specially built by the operators of Fairyland (FPG).The Swan family, owners of the bushland, initially cleared the area for market gardens but also constructed a timber siding on the river which they called “The Rest”. Robert Swan later turned the site into a pleasure ground for day-trippers to visit, adding a kiosk, a playground, a dance hall and picnic area. ‘Fairyland’ was chosen as the name for the pleasure ground apparently because it exuded the atmosphere of a magical and mysterious place, Swan enhanced this theme with fairy-like structures and motifs – quirky fairytale huts, a slippery-dip in the shape of a sleeping giant (thought to be modelled on the character ‘Bluto’ from the ‘Popeye’ comics), and cardboard representations of imaginary and supernatural creatures such as fairies and elves positioned high up in the trees [www.friendsoflanecovenationalpark.org.au].Swan acquired a good deal of equipment from the closure sale at White City Fun Park in Rushcutters Bay in 1917 (from 1922 site of the White City Tennis courts✱). Amongst the items Swan brought to FPG were strength-testing machines, coin-operated machines through which you could view silent movies, and entertainment rides such as the’Ocean Wave’ (a “razzle-dazzle”) and a fairly rudimentary ‘Flying Fox’. 
🔺 Wonderland in ‘Glamarama’
🔺 Attempted royal assassination at Clontarf
🔺 Cremorne Gardens-upon-Yarra, 1865
The media is of course deeply complicit in this with its obsessive focus on Hollywood box-office stars, especially the popular gossip mags’ hanging on every utterance and info snippet of headline-grabbing Hollywood A–listers like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt – a custom which is jejune and banal in the extreme. If these overblown ‘celebs’ make even a shallow pronouncement on environmental or human rights issues or announce their latest Third World orphan acquisition projects, this receives an inordinate amount of drooling media attention.
Consequently she was ‘outed’ by the McCarthyists in ‘Red Channels’ (a right wing publication blacklisting suspected ‘subversives’ in the arts and media) and her burgeoning film career suffered accordingly❀. Hunt was a gifted actor, and an accomplished singer. She was also the composer of about 50 songs including one she wrote in the early 1960s, ahead of its time, on the subject of same sex equality in love and marriage – later a hit in the US in the 1980s.
In 1944 she was voted one of the Hollywood ‘Stars of Tomorrow’. However, like others in the industry who refused to recant their earnestly-held political convictions, roles for Hunt dried up. First she was relegated to B movies, then not even that and her film career was effectively over by the time she was 40. From the ’50s, Hunt, like many other Hollywooders including Ronald Reagan (180 degrees apart from her politically) found TV work her only reliable source of income and expression.
MVH at 95