Showing posts tagged as: USA
Lawrence’s New Mexico “Shangri-La”
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
⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑
⌖ 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
Late Communist Era Capitalist Cravings: The Pepsi Swap
During the Cold War not many people outside of the USSR knew of the Russian penchant for it’s ideological rival’s second most popular cola drink. The Soviet Union’s love affair with Pepsi-Cola started with a meeting between Premier Khrushchev and US Vice-President Nixon in 1959. As part of what was a rare cultural exchange for the time, Khrushchev was introduced to the sugary, carbonated beverage, the taste apparently meeting with the Soviet premier’s approval.
⏏️ Pepsi’s role in the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate
So began a novel bilateral trade. With Russian rubles not valued outside of the USSR, a barter system was forged. The Russian and other Soviet people got to drink Pepsi, in return vodka (in the form of the state-owned brand Stolichnaya) was made available in the US market.
Things went smoothly enough until 1980…the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan threatened the Pepsi deal. Americans boycotted Soviet goods including Stolichnaya…the popular vodka’s sales plummeted in the US. In the late 1980s the Pepsi company—mindful that seven billion Russians were drinking Pepsi each year—hit upon a new and more unorthodox US/Soviet exchange deal.
To keep the Pepsi flowing to Russian consumers, Pepsi accepted a flotilla of ageing Soviet warships in lieu. Taking possession of 17 rusty Soviet warships plus a few other auxiliary naval vessels. The fleet was far from being in A1 shipshape condition, but it enabled the soft drink giant to boast that it possessed the world 6th most powerful navy at the time – on paper if not on water!
(Source: www.naval-encylopedia.com)
Pepsi’s move earned the displeasure of the US military but the company CEO’s slightly disingenuous rejoinder to the Pentagon was that it was dismantling the Soviet fleet faster than they were!*
Pepsi didn’t hang on to the decidedly decrepit Russian fleet for long, selling the warships to a Swedish scrap-recycling business in the early 1990s. A few years later Coca-Cola usurped it’s place in the Russian market.
____________________________
* undoubtedly Pepsi’s billion-dollar stake in the USSR remained it’s primary motive
Sites/works consulted: 👁🗨👁🗨👁🗨
’When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships’, (Anne Ewbank), Atlas Obscura, 12-Jan-2018, www.atlasobscura.com)
‘ How Pepsi became the 6th largest military in the world‘, (Tom Kirkpatrick, We Are The Mighty, 28-Jan-2019, www.wearethemighty.com
‘Pepsi Navy: When the Soviets Traded Warships for Soft Drinks’, Sandboxx, 06-Nov-2020, www.sandboxx.com
A Doomsayers’ Day Out: The Manic Panic of 1910 over a Passing Celestial Event
We take our leave of the year of Corona, 2020 and enter a new, who-knows-what-will-bring year. With the renewed intensity of the 2nd wave pandemic across the globe, we’ve seen echoes of a return to the panic-buying and manic hoarding of household essentials that characterised the middle months of 2020. But of course there is panic and there is panic! Covid-19 doesn’t hold a candle to the doom-cringing that accompanied the approach of Halley’s Comet to Planet Earth in 1910.
Astronomer Edmond Halley set the whole phenomena of comet prediction in motion back in the early 18th century when, using Newton’s laws of gravity and motion, he determined the periodicity of the recurring comet that came to bear his own name. Halley calculated its return to Earth occurring every 74 to 79 years, marking the first time that science, wresting control from the astrologers and prophets, predicted a future occurrence in nature❆ (prior to Halley astronomers viewed the periodic appearance of the comet as distinct and separate occurrences) [‘Apocalypse postponed: How Earth survived Halley’s comet in 1910’, (Stuart Clark), The Guardian, 20-Dec-2012, www.theguardian.com; ‘Halley’s Comet: Facts about the most famous comet’, (Elizabeth Howell), Space.com, (2017), www.space.com/].
Talking up planetary peril With Halley’s Comet due to return in 1910, in February of that year the Yerkes Observatory undertook spectroscopic analysis and announced that there was cyanide (poison gas) in the tail of the approaching comet. When he became aware of this, French astronomer Camille Flammarion observed that the comet “could impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life all life on the planet”. The “Yellow Press” of the world seized on this, sensationalising the claim (the Comet was depicted as “the evil eye of the sky”). Flammarion’s comment and the alarmist reporting generated widespread public fear and hysteria, triggering all manner of drastic actions in response to the Comet’s imminent arrival. Some people in despair of impending doom went on dangerous alcoholic binges, one person in Hungary even suicided convinced of the probability of global immolation. In America, forebodings of doom accorded with a particular interpretation of the Bible in the Midwest and Rockies states and prompted intemperate reactions to the Comet (farmers selling off all their property, slaughtering their livestock, etc) [‘Halley’s Comet: Topics in Chronicling America’, Library of Congress Research Guides, www.guides.loc.gov/; ‘Memories of Halley’s Comet (1910) – Group Oral History Interview’, SCARC, Oregon State University, www.scarc.library.oregonstate.edu].
⤵ 1910 Comet over Gary, Indiana
Altering nature and the environment Elsewhere the (irrational) fear of a huge ball of toxic gas hurtling towards Earth at 190,000 km per hour led some folk to wildly predict dire consequences for the planet – in France the River Seine would be flooded, it was said, it would cause the Pacific to change basins with the Atlantic, and so on [‘Halley’s Comet, Covid-19, and the history of “miracle” anti-comet remedies’, (Sylvain Chaty), Astronomy, 09-Oct-2020, www.astronomy.com/; ‘Fantasically Wrong: That Time People Thought a Comet Would Gas Us All to Death’, (Matt Simon), Wired, 01-Jul-2015, www.wired.com/].
In China the comet kerfuffle contributed to the social and political unrest that culminated in the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, which brought to a close the reign of the last Chinese emperor [James Hutson, Chinese Life in the Tibetan Foothills, (1921)].
⤴ Postcard, 1910 Comet (Source: www.sciencesource.com)
Art anticipates life Interestingly, just four years earlier, pioneering science-fiction novelist HG Wells had provided what many, over-stimulated by the Comet’s presence, saw as a different omen. Wells’ novel In the Days of the Comet pictured a “green trailing trail” plummeting inexorably to Earth…the only difference being that the destruction that the socialist Wells’ comet was going to inflict on the world was on the “voracious system of capitalism” [’The Doom of the World’, (Vaughan Yarwood), New Zealand Geographic, www.nzgeo.com/].
The impending cataclysm brings out the fraudsters Right on cue with the diffusion of hysteria was the emergence of charlatans and scammers peddling ”sure-fire” remedies to counteract the devastating effects of Halley’s Comet’s impact with Earth (cf. the Donald Trump-endorsed bleach and other quackery claiming to be an antidote to Covid-19). in 1910 there were ‘miracle’ anti-comet pills (comprising sugar and quinine) and a cure-all “Halley’s Comet elixir” (Chaty). Just as Coronavirus 2020 prompted a run on toilet paper and hand sanitiser in the supermarkets, people started panic-buying gas masks while some flocked to their churches to seek divine intervention to save them from the Comet [‘The Halley’s Comet Fuss of 1910’, (Jacob vanderSluys), Jacob vanderSluys, 18-Aug-2020, wwe.jacobvsndersluys.medium.com].
⤵ 1986 Comet (Image: NASA)
As things transpired the reality turned out to be something of an anti-climax…Halley’s Comet safely passed by Earth, missing it by at least 400,000 kilometres (as it had done previously every 75-76 years for millennia!)✧ and normality returned to everyday life across the globe (Chaty).
⤵ Bayeux Tapestry depicting 1066 Comet 
Footnote: All down to Halley’s Comet Coincidences occurring during the periodic passage of the Comet has provided fertile ground for doomsayers. Edward VII’s death in May 1910 during the period Halley’s Comet was visible, was ‘proof’ to many of the Comet’s ‘paranormal’ power to wreak havoc and destruction on the Earth♉︎. Similarly, it was noted that author Mark Twain’s lifespan encompassed the exact duration between the 1835 and the 1910 comets. People in 1066 saw the passage of Halley’s Comet as a foreboding sign…for English king, Harold II, this premonition preceded his loss and death in the Battle of Hastings later in that year. The Great Comet of 1680 facilitated a scientific breakthrough, in this year German astronomer Gottfried Kirch was the first to sight Halley’s Comet through a telescope.
⤴ 1680 Comet over Rotterdam (Lieve Verschuier)
𖥸 𖥸 𖥸
the next perihelion of Halley’s Comet is predicted for 2061
……………………………………………………………… ❆ Unfortunately Halley himself didn’t live long enough to witness the next cycle of his eponymous comet (1758)
✧ subsequent scientific testing confirmed that the tail of the Comet contained no toxic gas
♉︎ In Julius Caesar Shakespeare wrote, “when beggars die there are no comets seen, The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”
Wonder Woman’s Oscillating History in Comics
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).
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❋ 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
Pinball in the Drain: The Peoples’ Arcade Game On Tilt for Three Decades
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 legislators By 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 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).
⍓ 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 thriving Today, 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)
The Moral Guardians’ War on ‘Pernicious’ Comic Books
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.
(Photo source: www.theverge.com/)
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 week!) By 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].
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⁕ 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 (Hajdu; Heer)
✧ over 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