JF Ptak Science Books

The "Secret" Life of the Pronunciation of the Word "Nuclear"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Non-post 3

The word"nuclear" has never had such a hard as it has during the past eight years or so. Mr. Bush has mispronounced it thousands of times, somehow; but I thought that with his leaving,, "nookuler" would seem like a lumpy bag of trash receding in the rear view mirror.

I thought this until two evenings ago during the cordials shared by two vice presidential candidates.  Gov. Palin, in trying to cozy up a little to whatever is left of the 1980's-ghost Ronald Wilson Reagan crowd with repeated allusions to the old man bumped into that lumpy bag of useless Bush fat at least nine times (not that I was counting), pronouncing "nuclear" in the old, creative Bushian way, and then some.  Though I have little doubt that the governor can read the word, it leaves me cold that she can't actually pronounce the word on the great big red button that her finger might actually touch some day. 

Empty Memory: Telephone Number 20080 (Warsaw), Nazi Occupied Poland and the Holocaust, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 296

 I've felt that a great history lesson for school kids would be to make them keep a diary for some other kid from some other time, introduce them to the minutiae of life from another time and perhaps another place.  With some guidance they could make interesting entries in their diary for, say, 15 June 1897, writing about chores, the daily schedule, what they studied in school, how they were dressed, how they got food on the table and kept the house clean, how they would spend 25 cents, what they would see from some given vantage point, and on and on.  This could take place in their very own home town; it could be multi-generational, requiring them to talk to the scary white hairs, or it could reach far back into history and be of an entirely different place altogether.  After they were assigned a particular place in time and space, you could give the kid subtle hints, like this one (below), asking them what they thought it might mean by dialing the phone number 200 80 in Warsaw in 1941.  And what did that pair of lightning bolts mean, anyway?  I think that once they were made to figure it out for themselves, as though they might've been there, and then could record their feelings and observations in a diary might actually bring history to life (especially once they had their "holy crap" (and probably worse) moment at what these numbers implied). 

This is one of the ideas that came home again uncovering this odd booklet, which is a Nazi diary for those stationed in the Generalgouvernment (Tascehnjahrbuch 1941 fuer den Deutschen im Generalgouvernement) ,  for the year 1941. The General Government (or more fully the Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) was one administrative section of occupied Poland, the country being divided in 1939 after the German invasion of 3 September 1939, with the western section being retained by the Germans and the Eastern given over to occupation by the Soviets via the Non-Aggression pact between the USSR and Germany.   

This looks like an every day diary for the period, except for the Nazi (or NSDAP) regalia and German imprint of Generalgouvernment in Krakau.  And, all of the annotated highpoints of the year for the most overly voracious parts of German militarism as well as for the hotpoints of Nazi history.  Hitler, (above) Goering, Goebbels and other leaders' birthdays are highlighted, not to mention seminal points in the development of the Nazi party and party-adoptees (Richard Wagner has a number of entries for suggested celebrations). 

There are also helpful directories in the back pointing to any number of cafes located in a growing number of "Adolf Hilter Platz's" throughout Poland (including three in Radom), as well as fares for the use of the railway and postal system. 

We also see the following telephone number:  23075.  That's for the Literarische Kaffee Stefansgasse I, Krakau. This is the location that the Reichsminister and administrator Hans Frank (about whom we'll read inb a moment) decided to hold a chess tournament in 1941, to satisfy his own need for chess while freshly in the pursuit of the murder of millions of people.

‘Frank was extremely interested in chess. He not only possessed an extensive library of chess literature but was also a good player, and he even “received” the Ukrainian chess master Bogoljubow at the castle. On 3 November 1940 he organized a chess congress in Cracow. Six months later he announced the setting-up of a chess school under Bogoljubow and the chess master Dr Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine, and he visited a chess tournament in October 1942 at the “Literary Café” in Cracow."--Hans Frank (subtitle: Hitlers Kronjurist und Generalgouverneur) by Dieter Schenk (Frankfurt am Main, 2006) "and quotes a reference to chess on page 177 (given below in our translation)..."[Source: Chesshistory.com., here.]

For the record, the Generalgouvernement was proclaimed in October 1939 just after the invasion of Poland and included most of what was left of Poland, which was gone again, barely 20 years after it returned to the map following WW1.  In March 1941 Hitler made a decision to "turn this region into a purely German area within 15-20 years". He also explained that "Where 12 million Poles now live, is to be populated by 4 to 5 million Germans. The Generalgouvernement must become as German as Rhineland".  Following the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942, the Secretary of State of the Generalgouvernment, Dr. Josef Buhler (Warsaw # 222 05, a listed number in this book) began implementation if the Final Solution in Poland; by the time the Soviets entered and took control in late  1944, more than 4 million people—most of them Jewish—had been killed. 

[Photograph of a Jewish policeman, from the Jost collection.¹]

The man in charge of it all here in Poland, Hans Frank, has his photographic portrait as the frontispiece, and his number is listed, too. He was an horrendous butcher who was tried and convicted and executed for his crimes against humanity (at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946, aged 46--the decision of the court read, in part, that Frank was "...a willing and knowing participant in both the use of terrorism in Poland, as in the economic exploitation of Poland in a way that led to the starvation of a large number of people, also in the deportation of more than one million Poles as slave laborers to Germany and in execution of a program that had the murder of at least three million Jews. ").  In a speech December 16, 1941, Hans Frank said:"We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews [in Poland], we cannot poison them, but we will take measures that will somehow lead to successful destruction; and this in connection with large-scale procedures which are to be discussed in the Reich, the Government-General must become as free of Jews as the Reich .....We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is at all possible, in order to maintain the whole structure of the Reich..." Frank did his share of annihilation of Polish Jews and Polish citizens--almost as much as any other Nazi official, government or military leader--over the six years (1939-1945) that he ruled over this territory.

[Another image from the Jost collection.]

Josef Buhler, by the way, was tried after the war by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland for crimes against humanity, condemned to death on July 10, 1948, and executed in Kraków.

This is really a fetid little booklet, its empty pages waiting for some sort of horror, all of which was actually taking place in real life, escaping  their record.

Distribution of food in General Government as of December, 1941

Nationality	Daily calorie intake
Germans	2310
Foreigners	1790
Ukrainians	930
Poles	654
Jews	184

I wonder where all of those conversations went, exactly, after they were ended.  Did they sink into the copper wire like auditory signals (very very slightly trapped) in clay pots?  I think not of course. But all of those phone numbers in this book to all of the special police and propaganda police and racial police and SS and on and on, all of those calls and conversations about this horrific undertaking, just seem to me as though they should've gone somewhere, caught in the myth of the machine, somewhere in the electromagnetic world, like a primitive internet.

I really can't stand what those simple phone numbers meant.

Footnotes:

1.  The Generalgouvernement was the central part of three general districts of the divided Poland, and it proved to be the terminal for millions of people deemed as undesirable or threatening.  It was particuarly impossible for Jews, the Generalgouvernement proving to be the place where they were collected in ghettos and housed under mniserable and starvation conditions until they began to be shipped out to concentration camps in early 1942.  By 1944 all of the ghettos had been liquidated, and with them, their inhabitants.  The Soviets did finally liberate the Generalgouvernement (from the Nazis) under delayed conditions in the winter of 1945, initiating Pogroms against the Jews by summertime.

Notes:

The Wannsee conference (I will not use a capital “C) was a meeting of leading  Nazi officials and treacle who formed the decision to implement the Final Solution t the “Jewish problem” in Germany— it was the real beginning of the Holocaust.

The men who made this determination to begin with the wholesale destruction of human beings included:

SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (Chief of the RSHA and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia), presiding
Dr Josef Bühler (Government of the General Government)
Dr Roland Freisler (Reich Ministry of Justice)
SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann (Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA)
SA-Oberführer Dr Gerhard Klopfer (NSDAP Chancellery)
Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery)
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Lange (Commander of the SD for Latvia)
Reichsamtleiter Dr Georg Leibbrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
Martin Luther (Foreign Office)
Gauleiter Dr Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller (Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo), Reich Security Main Office (RSHA))
Erich Neumann (Director, Office of the Four Year Plan)
SS-Oberführer Dr Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (SD, assigned to the General Government)
Dr Wilhelm Stuckart (Reich Ministry for the Interior)
SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann (Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo), minutes secretary

1. “German soldier Heinz Jost strolled through the Warsaw Ghetto taking illegal pictures. Almost 50 years later, they resurface in a disturbing exhibition.”

“An enfeebled urchin lies clutching the sidewalk like a breast. Three people pass by behind it; only one of them, a malnourished woman, looks down at the child. In a second or two, they will be gone and the child will be alone again, even more helpless, if that is possible. Did such dying children (there were thousands of them in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941) know that something was horribly wrong with the world? Or did they think that squalid suffering is all that this disappointing life has to offer? wrote children, Mary Berg wrote in her diary of the ghetto, "no longer have a human appearance and are more like monkeys than children. They no longer beg for bread, but for death." Terribly, the child on the sidewalk cocks its eye at the camera, unable to ward off the final cruelty of being photographed by a German soldier.

“Eerie approximation: Heinz Jost, a small-town hotelkeeper serving in the German Army, had the day off on Sept. 19, 1941. It was also his birthday. For reasons lost to history, Jost decided to spend the day inside the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. He carried a camera and, contrary to regulations, took 129 photographs of the ghetto and its doomed inhabitants. The pictures lay unseen in a dresser drawer for four decades before Jost rediscovered them. He gave them to the German magazine Stern, which donated them in 1987 to the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem.

“What Jost found in this neighborhood consecrated to death was an eerie approximation of normal daily life that only gradually (especially as the exhibition is arranged) reveals its ghastliness. At first, street life seems no more deprived than that in lower Manhattan earlier in the century. And the jackbooted soldiers relaxing in a touring car appear more arrogant than evil. But surely they must have known, as Chaim Kaplan recorded in his Warsaw diary, that "Anywhere a tree has been planted, or a bench has been placed, Jewish children are forbidden to derive enjoyment." Elsewhere, peddlers hawk bread, grubby vegetables and coal by the individual lump, one woman sells Star of David armbands in varieties from printed paper to embroidered linen. "These armbands are very much in demand in the ghetto because the Germans arevery `sensitive' on this score, and when they notice a Jew wearing a crumpled or dirty armband, they beat him at once," Mary Berg observed. After these images, the pictures of gaunt bodies on morbid rickshaws, the merciless common graves and the catatonic attendants are but numbing epilogue.

“There are those who say that to measure any other barbarism against the Holocaust is to trivialize the unequaled tragedy that befell the Jews. Looking at these pictures, however, it is hard not to be struck by resemblances that suggest that the horror of the Holocaust has not been obliterated, but simply broken up, crushed into powder and raked into the soil of contemporary life. Even in our very rich country, the number of tattered beggars, slumped in despair on city streets, grows steadily greater. The bearded, skull-like heads of the Warsaw Ghetto's interned are remindful of AIDS victims in the last stages of the plague. And it is almost impossible not to realize that we have seen, and still see, pictures of bodies of innocents lying dead under perversely meaningless advertising signs, at the feet of blase soldiers who think they're just doing their jobs.”

And another, shorter review:

Heinrich Jöst's Photographs. In the Ghetto of Warsaw: Heinrich Jost's Photographs, edited by Gunther Scharberg,  published by  Scalo, distributed  by D.A.P. 2001.

“Among the many books released on the Holocaust, the complete set of Jöst's photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto is a valuable resource for scholars. Jöst, a hotel owner and sergeant in the Wehrmacht, took photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1941, which he shared with the journalist Schwarberg in 1982. Originally exhibited at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, these photographs are now available, along with Jöst's recollections, to a wide audience (Jöst died in 1983). Although the graphic nature of the pictures is disturbing they show, for instance, starving children dying in the streets they provide a record of the Warsaw Ghetto separate from official Nazi propaganda and as such are extremely valuable. Recommended for all libraries.”
--By Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati.

Empty Cows with Empty Eyes: Blank and Empty Things Department #12

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 295

I’ve made several posts about Blank and Missing People and Empty Things which seem to me—having had long exposure to images over the last 30 years—to be quite unusual in the history of popular-published prints. This may actually be a simple corollary to a wider category of Blank Things, or Missing Things.  Like Dark Matter.  Or white, open, blank spaces on early, honest, maps. (And this may be part of another larger story on The  Spaces in Between, (a concept in German known as Zwischenraum), but that’s another story, identifying where the missing stuff might actually “be”.  Like the idea of "negative space", or unused space, in, say, a Zen painting, or the sue of quiet in a musical composition--generally, it is a period of space or transition in thought, the distance between ideas....)

Since it really is so unusual to bump into these images I'll just make a quick post on this one--it is simply (in a not-so-simple way) an illustration of a cow-blind from the wonderful and problematic masterpiece of Abraham Rees' Encyclopedia, this print being completed in 1812.  I should point out that the hunters--who would level their muskets through the empty eye socket--are not hunting cows; I'm not aware of what they would be hunting, but I know that it wasn't Bessie. So the image is really just a relatively mundane hunting tool, though pretty elaborate, set among other hunting tools--there is nothing mundane whatsoever about its presentation, though. 

(Detail above, and from the full sheet, below)

Peculiar, Found-Art Image: Hight Rises, Straight Stubby NYC Ferry and a Lonely Tank

JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Post 294

It is unusual in my experience to stumble upon three unusual, found-art images (as in the three below) that are found on one page of a magazine.  In this case, it is the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig), issue 4299 (page 178) for 1915, and the three photographs are all quite atonal, somehow--they're just not quite "right", and all perhaps for different reasons.

The first image shows this unusual private ferry in New York City harbor--how this made any sense, I don't know, especially since that water is pretty choppy and this vessel looks not terrifically seaworthy.  The passenger (or driver at least) and the boatman are also very, very straight!  I honestly just don't know anything about single-car ferries in the harbor so late in the game as 1915.

I'm not sure why this image strikes me as being so peculiar in the second image--perhaps it is simply the retreating perspective, or the fact that it looks like a drawing, or the placards along the construction fence at the bottom of the photo; or maybe its the only solitary-looking  figure set against all of those (strangely opened) windows.  Whatever it is, that is odd or somewhat "off", I like it.

The third image is just quite and odd.  Is that bridge portable and expandable?  Is it actually supporting the tank and not failing? It is just a flat-out uncommon composition.

Perhaps the unifying factor here is the very apparent "quietness" of the pictures, and their solitude, even in the midst of the NYC harbor.

 

Hidden, Odd Actions in Empty Spaces

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This engraving (on copper) of an interior of a structure houses
some interesting perspective, as well as a very unusual pose by one of the four gentleman who were added to the image to give a sense of depth and scale.  I've written earlier about such hidden artistic virtues and micro-sub-arts, and this print fits nicely for its naive oddness of character placement.

One just has to wonder what in the world the artist had in mind by placing this figure in such an uncommon stance?  I cannot remember seeing a three-square hat like this looking at it straight on from the top; more important, though, is what is this fellow doing?  I'd suspect measuring, but under very close inspection he's holding nothing at all in his hands.  Also that unit of measurement would be pretty short for a job measuring a room such as this.
So:  what is he doing?

A River of Men: French Prisoners in Laon, May, 1918

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I came across this impossible  image in the 6 June 1918 issue of Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig)  It is almost unbelievable that the bumps and twists and angles of this mass were humans, though at least they were alive. The original was taken on 21 March and shows part of the  210,000  prisoners that were being held in Laon--they seem, at least by their helmets, to be French soldiers.  (The 210,000 figure is German and wartime and intended for German readership; it seems that the real figure was 85,000--still massive.)

Laon is a French Medieval city of magnificent architecture--its cathedral can be seen in the background, in stark contrast to this human blanket. Looking at this image with a magnifying glass, I can see virtually no open ground space in the mass of men.  I estimate that in this photo are 7500 men:  I also figure that the area that we see here (to the left of the open path)  is approximately 400 feet long and 40 feet wide, or roughly a third of an acre.  I'm not sure what was going on here, though it looks like they might be on the move, with the men in the right-hand part of the image stretching off into the distance.  What is also troubling is that so many of these men seem to be asleep, and judging from the way the shadows have fallen it seems to be mid-morning (not early).  Perhaps they've just been marched in from battle and are totally exhausted.  I just don't know--they just don't look like people.

Ships in the Skyline Part III

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 291

In another unlikely-to-be-added-to category, Ships in the Skyline, I've found, surprisingly, a third installment. (I guess that there are many more as I've found these guys without actually looking for them, though perhaps that is the trick to finding things (that you don't need).)  The comparisons that we see here for the ship The Cunarder, appeared in The Illustrated London News for 29 September 1934, and the skyline that it  is favored against is  London's Big Ben.  Interestingly, the graphic goes on to compare the powertrain of the ship to 100 "Cock o' the North type locomotives" to generate its 200,000 horsepower; also, the amount of steel frame found in the ship  (32,000 tons) is comparable to the steel framing of the brand-new Empire State Building (58,000 tons in the steel framework).  Of further interest is the relief of a human set against the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square and the top of the ship's fore funnel (reaching 170').  This is just fantastic design and some good thinking about how to make the dimensions of the ship more understandable in everyday terms, and thus compares it in size and capacity to stuff that people see most every day, or at least know.

   

Electric Surf and the First Touch of the Ocean by Blind Children; Coney Island, 1878

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 290

This woodcut is from the Leipzig equivalent of LIFE or The Illustrated London News:  Illustrirte Zeitung, and was published in August 1878.  It appeared in the same issue as the very first image of Edison's phonograph in a European publication (just two pages away)  It was a big issue for Edison in Germany, as he was of course principally responsible for not only integrating minor discoveries of others into a revolutionary discovery of his own (the electric light and light bulb), but was also reasonable in the largest part for the physical distribution of energy to those light bulbs.  And so it came to be that the beach at Coney Island--one of metropolitan New York's greatest recreational sites--was lighted by a  portable electric "floodlight"  (though I don't know what the illuminating part was--perhaps it was a carbon-arc something or other, as I'm pretty sure it wasn't a light bulb" as we would think of it...nevertheless the source was electrical).  It had never in human history happened before that people could frolic in the surf under an artificial source of illumination--it had to have been an extraordinary sensation.  The light appeared in the same year that the The Camera Obscura Observatory was established (borrowed from 1876 Philadelphia Exposition) and just nine short years after the "great" Charles Feltman invented the Coney Island hot dog (though my favorites of the boardwalk was Nathan's big crinkly french fries in a paper cone).

Right above this image was this extremely emotional wood engraving of blind children being taken to the beach for the first time (at Sheepshead Bay)--my German is pretty rough, but it seems as though they were on a field trip from their  institutional home, which was something like a  "waif" school for the "deaf, dumb and blind" or something 19th-centuryish like that. 

It is a deeply touching image to me, showing tremendous touch and care...these children, drawn tightly together, feeling and smelling the vastness of the ocean, feeling the full sun on their faces, experiencing it together and separately, overwhelmed, gentle--thirteen children and three matrons and not a smile, all deep  in a private world flooded with feeling.

A 117x1 Mile Blanket of Planes: What 185,000 Planes Looks Like

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This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943 (It reminds me too of an earlier post I did with a similar cover for LIFE magazine here.) The caption reads: "185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles" which is actually a double blanket of planes--if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.

The reality of the situation was greater than this:  by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor.  And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year.  The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years.   I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything.  I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well. 

Why Are Mailboxes So Ugly?

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Really--how is it that such ubiquitous American objects are so ugly? Evidently the first public mailbox in the U.S. was a “street letter box” designed and patented by P.B. Downing, and African American inventor, 27 October 1891, 48 years after the first box appeared in Britain; and the design of these things has gone downhill ever since.

I remember reading about this issue being addressed somewhere—I thought it might’ve been Walter Benjamin, buried somewhere in his weirdly beautiful Arcades Project; but, no, it was in Kurt Tucholsky’s Deutschland Deutschalnd Ueber Alles. The Tucholsky book originally appeared in 1929 (the same year the author dumped Germany for Sweden) and was illustrated by photo montage by the great John Heartfield.

Tucholsky stated “for some unknown reason mailboxes have to be ugly. Why?” Addressing the German postal boxes he wrote “these mailboxes were designed in complete ignorance of the principle that simple things an be beautiful if their proportions are related. Because the post office mentality is limited. Because the post office has a monopoly. Because bureaucracies, in their limitless self-importance, will take a single step forward only when the technologies are miles ahead…because there is no reason in the world why the state should employ people for life. Because it is insane to breed apathy, and because the company needs interested workers, not an army of officials…any well run business moves faster. A multitude of bureaucrats is death to the taxpayer.”

“And that’s why mailboxes are so ugly.”

This was one of the least of Tucholsky’s biting, driven observations about his failing state. And still correct.
 

The Beauty of Drill Bits in the Dark Days of 1918

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 This striking ad for Emil Steinrurck's drill bit manufacturing company (Verlangen Sie Spiralbohrer-Katalog und Lagerlisten) appeared in the magazine Motor for July/.August 1918, just a few months away from the German defeat in WWI.  Steinruck's Heidelberg business was making some massive, industrial  drill bits is all I can say, and they had a designer and artist who figured out exactly how to relate this to the motorheads reading this magazine--all care being taken and monies spent just as the guns of August turned into the corrupted plougshares of November.  What self-respecting machinist wouldn't, or couldn't, appreciate the beauty and depth of this thing even if a rusty old railway car was waiting just minutes in the future to spirit away the immediate future of Europe?  The small detail (of the factories and whatever weirdly empty buildings there were in the background) were miniature works in themselves.

 

On the other hand, on the back of this full page ad appears another--a frilly, high-nouveau-y grillwork ad for the Horch automobile, forming the other representative book end to the manufacturing process.  Horch began producing 4.5 hp automobiles as early as 1901, and by 1918 had improve and upgraded to produce high-end luxury automobiles. I can't determine what exact model of Horch this is in the ad, but I can tell that it is massive, with a tremendous wheelbase.  (Horch would merge/found Audi in 1932 and meet its fate in Allied bombing raids during the war.  It survived but in the hands of the Soviets who used the machinery to produce the Yugo-like Trabant (Trabbi") sub-compact "car". I guess that the artwork is sorta beautiful in its way. 

Found Images: Carrying Baby Coffins at London Stone?

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  This image has always been a little troubling to me, and one that I've never figured out.  Unfortunately I cannot now find the original to get a better, deeper scan of the curious object being carried by the oldish man in the center of the picture. This is another in a series of generic topographic prints of famous churches/buildings/streets and so on, decorated with figures some of whom are just going about their daily days as well as others who are quirkily adventurous--but those quirky actions are most often buried in the smallness of their representation. sometimes almost to small to see, especially considering that they are just there for scale.

Looking at this image of St. Swithin's* and the London Stone, even a quick, noncommittal  look at the people filling up the foreground reveals this most unusual character with an uncommon box, right there at stage-center.

I make this out to be a child's coffin, largely because I want it to be for the sake of the print and also because there aren't many other easy, logical choices.  I remember it looking even more so in the original under 20X magnification, with the figure carrying it buckling slightly from more than just the weight of the box he was bearing.  What else could be in there?  A big set of engineer's scales?  A precision pantograph?  Legs?  I don't know--its kind of too big and bulky to be a carrier for everyday work material, as tools filing the box would make it too hard to hoist to the shoulder. The figure seems sad somehow rather than burden, and the question, again, as in the other posts dealing with this subject matter, is why the artist bothered with some a complicated figure to simply people-up the street at St. Swithin.  Did the artist  or engraver just suffer the loss of a child and is displaying their grief, or is it a reminder of the dance of grim death just outside the doors of the church door?  Or is it just some guy carrying a heavy box filled with table scraps? 

* The famous "London Stone", a solid block of oolite such as used by the Romans in their buildings, is set in a large stone case,     protected by an iron grille, and let into the wall on Cannon Street. It originally stood on the south side of the street opposite St Swithin's Church until it was moved and set  into the wall of the church itself (in 1798). According to Camden, it was a Milliarium or  Milestone from which the British high roads radiated, and from which the distance on them was reckoned, similar to the one in the forum at Rome (16th Street in Washington D.C., once upon a time named Meridian Strete, was also supposed to perform this chore.  Meridian Hill Park, now renamed Malcolm X  Park, is about all that is left of that idea. And it seems like a good notion lost  now that the rest of the world isn't setting their timepieces to an imaginary line running right through a big desk in an oval office at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.)

Food Bomb, 1942

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In an earlier post (The Most LIterary Fireworks Catalog Ever Published?  The Naming of Explosions) I wrote a little bit about names found on shells and the naming of explosions.  The chances for adding to this category are slim, given the ephemeral nature of the item of discussion--I did however stumble upon this Food Bomb, found in the 25 April 1942 issue of The Illustrated London News.  "Guten Hunger", the inscription on this "bomb"  (basically "good appetite" or "eat well" or "down the hatch") was actually "not a weapon of destruction, but an enormous food container" that was going to be dropped on the German soldiers on some slender part of the Eastern Front.  In April the situation was turning now away for the Germans with the Soviet counter offensive, and it was still cold. Something like 3 million German soldiers would be awarded the service medal for the Winterschlacht im Osten 1941/42--not many of them would get to look at it after 1945.   The campaign in the east against their former allies started on 7 June 1941 (and named variously die Ostfront 1941-1945, der Rußlandfeldzug 1941-1945 (Russian campaign) or der Ostfeldzug 1941-1945 (Eastern Campaign)) and lasted to mid-May, 1945, when the campaign line shrunk from as far away as Moscow back down to east Berlin. 

Women's Rights and the Fight for Equality: Force-Fed Torture of Imprisoned Women, 1912

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 284

Lady Lytton was an upper-class Englishwoman who became interested in the ideas of equality and in suffrage for women at the very early part of the 20th century. Her interest in suffrage (which was lost, taken away, from women there in 1832 and to be regained in 1918) led her to join the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), and she became an avid, vocal, participating and socially visible member of the organization. She was arrested in 1909 following a demonstration at the House of Commons and was imprisoned, only to be released shortly thereafter after it was uncovered that she was the daughter of the former Viceroy of India--one cannot have the upper class in a common prison with the common people, so her imprisonment just wouldn't do. Enraged by this treatment, Lady Lytton became an advocate for changing the penal code relating to the treatment of working class prisoners. After disguising herself as a working class woman with the name of Jane Wharton, Lady Lytton was again arrested and imprisoned following a suffrage rally and protest in 1910. In the prison's effort to break her hunger strike, Jane Wharton endured the particularly heinous remedy of being fed through the nose. What happened is that a tube was forced into her nose and down into her stomach, with an assistant quickly forcing gruelly liquids through the tube via gravity into her stomach. She described the feeding as follows:

"[The doctor] put down my throat a tube which seemed to me much too wide and was something like four feet in length. The irritation of the tube was excessive. I choked the moment it touched my throat until it had got down. Then the food was poured in quickly; it made me sick a few seconds after it was down and the action of the sickness made my body and legs double up, but the wardresses instantly pressed back my head and the doctor leant on my knees. 

"The horror of it was more than I can describe. I was sick over the doctor and wardresses, and it seemed a long time before they took the tube out. As the doctor left me he gave me a slap on the cheek, not violently, but as it were, to express his contemptuous disapproval."

Another suffragette, Mary Leigh, describes the forced feeding spectacle as follows, following her own episode in September 1912:

 "The Wardresses forced me on to the bed and the two doctors came in with them, and while I was held down a nasal tube was inserted. It is two yards long with a funnel at the end - there is a glass junction in the middle to see if the liquid is passing.  The end is put up the nostril, one one day, and the other nostril, the other. Great pain is experienced during the process ... the drums of the ear seem to be bursting, a horrible pain in the throat and the breast. The tube is pushed down 20 inches.  I have to lie on the bed, pinned down by Wardresses, one doctor stands up on a chair holding the funnel at arms length, so as to have the funnel end above the level, and then the other doctor, who is behind, forces the other end up the nostrils."

"The one holding the funnel end pours the liquid down; about a pint of milk, sometimes egg and milk are used.... Before and after use, they test my heart and make a lot of examination. The after-effects are a feeling of faintness, a sense of great pain in the chest, in the nose and the ears...."

"I was very sick on the first occasion after the tube was withdrawn."

In any event, I had heard of such treatment, but I had never seen a contemporary image of the process; and I was very surprised to find this in the pages of the Illustrated London News for 1912. It was, after all, a pretty sniffy magazine not much given to social reporting of this sort; but this was a pretty strong condemnation of the practice, considering the source. 

The Propaganda of Restricting Infomration: Dorothea Lange's Photos at the Japanese "Relocation" Camp, Manzanar, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books Post 283

After having written a number of pots dealing with overt propaganda issues—surrender leaflets, Nazi pamphlets on the impending invasion of Germany by Poland and Czechoslovakia, American reassurances about how to survive the coming nuclear holocaust by covering yourself with table linen, British home hearts and minds campaign about how well your loved one POWs are being treated by the Germans—I thought to write a little something on the other side of propaganda, which is simply to not publish information.  One case is that of the great social photographer and one of the dozen or so mainstays of perhaps the greatest American photographic collaborative ever—Historical Section of the Farm Security administrations*--Dorothea Lange.  Lange worked for the FSA—which had begun life as the ominously-named  Resettlement Administration, the photographic section of which was to document the good that the government was doing helping the drought and depression refugees find new life and hope elsewhere in the country outside of their own money-ravaged areas—taking mostly landscape and architectural pictures through the height of the Depression.  The time that she broke character (so to speak) and made portraits produced some of the most memorable or at least famous images from this period o American history, the most outstanding of which is the five-photo series of a female bean picker and her three children who were living out of the back of their wheel-less car in a potato-less potato field in California known as the Migrant Mother.  (The making of these extraordinary images is another story for another post—suffice to say that the narrative of the history of that photograph is exceptional.)  I’ve always felt that the Roosevelt administration viewed this image as being just a little too much reality than it wanted to exhibit.

 

This was positively the case with Lange’s photographs of the Japanese at the Manzanar concentration camp (relocation camp) in   where more than 10,000 American citizens of Japanese heritage were forced to live between 1942 and 1945.  This was one of  camps that were established by virtue  Franklin Roosevelt’s  February 1942 Executive Order 9066** to imprison more than 100,000 American (70,000 of whom were U.S. citizens, including children) for the duration of the war (compared to a  few camps that were designated to hold white American citizen of the other countries that were fighting, mainly of German and Italian descent, 1,500 and 300 of whom were actually imprisoned, respectively). It was a grave, undistinguished, embarrassing  move brought on by the hyper hysteria in the months following Pearl Harbor.

 
The Japanese at the Manzanar concentration camp were from the west coast who were bused away from their homes and lives and businesses with extremely limited notice, and who were forced to sell nearly all possessions (including lands and businesses) at what were less than fire sale prices.  They were made to board buses and trains and were shipped to locations (mainly in California) where they were processed and sent further and deeper into the trying hinterlands of the west for their final destinations until the war was won.  (One of the processing centers was the Santa Anita racetrack, where thousands of Japanese were sent to live for periods in converted, just-painted horse stalls.)  Manzanar itself is well enough out there—removed, trying, desolate, difficult.  Beautiful, too , if you weren’t in prison there.  It was a high desert plateau with the snow-capped sierras, ringing the place; no grass, barely a tree, with extreme temperatures and a tough wind that was freezing in the winter and blew hot in the summer…tough enough to make it hard to keep the tar paper on the roof and sides of the thinly constructed barracks that held these people.  While every other relocation camp had barbed wire and guard towers, Manzanar had none—its location was so remote and difficult that it made the construction of these inferior barriers unnecessary. 

As difficult was life was at Manzanar, and having being completely torn off of the American map and their way of life, the Japanese at the camp established irrigation systems and gardens, made their own furniture from bits and scraps, established a newspaper, created a government,  schools, police, and so on, making their life as orderly and hospitable as possible.  Dorothea Lange was allowed, after repeated requests to the US Army, to enter the facility and make a photographic record of what she saw.  And what she saw and photographed was the courage and dignity of the people that she find there in the mists of deprivation and devastation—her photos were remarkable for their sincerity and insight.

And it was for precisely this reason that almost know of them were ever seen.  Bits and piece emerged here and there—four in Survey Graphic in 1942 (Vol. 31, No. 9, Sept. 1942), two others here, two others there—but they were almost entirely restricted.  As a matter of fact they were stamped “Impounded”, and relegated to the future.

The FSA became the Office of War Information in 1942 as well, which might explain why this propagandistic move dismissing their existence for want of fairer reception of the American war effort at home..  It wasn’t until 1972 that 27 more of them were released and received a public showing at the Whitney in NYC in a show called Executive Order 9066, and which were reviewed in the NY Times by A.D. Coleman as  “documents of such a high order that they convey the feelings of the victims as well as the facts of the crime.”

Lange wasn't the only big-name photographer zipping around Manzanar--Ansel Adams was there, too, as a friend of the camp administrator.  Adams had free access to the camp, and could basically come and go as he pleased, which didn't sit well with Lange, who had a hard go of her permissions with the Army.  It was also something that she never let go of, either, as the Adams photos really didn't get into the Being of the place like Lange's did.  Actually, one of the great, iconic images made by Adams comes from this period, and as it turns out, its one of those odd sorts of photos that turns in the opposite direction of what the photographer was there "for".  Mount Williamson is just a drop-dead shot to be sure.  It is also an image of what the Japanese in the concentration camp were looking out at.  Adams turns his camera around, around from the disgrace, and takes one of his greatest images. (I've listened to my wife Patti Digh, who is an (excellent) photographer, talk about photographers "making" photographs; I'm sure that before her I used "taking" and "making" photographs interchangeably.  But "making" it should be, as you're not owning or lifting the image away.)   In this case, however, as monumental as Adams was or is, he definitely "took" this one.  Stole it. 

 An excellent book on these photos is found in Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro, Impounded, Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (W.W. Norton, 2006). 

 

 

*This incredible group included: Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans (up to the summer of 1936), Walker Evans (up to September 1937) Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange (with interruptions up to 1942). Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Jack Delano, John Collier. This group produced upwards of 270,000 negatives, with 77,000 or so prints available at the Prints and Photographs room of the Library of Congress in a row of double-backed file cabinets.  Many thousands are available online at loc.gov  I am told by a reliable historian that I am wrong in thinking that Lange was fired because of her too-intolerably human photos, but for budgetary problems. 
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**The following is the text of 9066, which basically authorized a 60-mile swath of the Pacific Coast as a military zone subject to national defense requirements, the principal object of which was to remove all Japanese residents from the area for fear of them being enemy agents and saboteurs.  To accompany this I mad a WORDLE text map of the document, just to see what popped up. 

Executive Order No. 9066
The President, Executive Order
Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas

Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities as defined in Section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended by the Act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655 (U.S.C., Title 50, Sec. 104);

Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded there from, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order. The designation of military areas in any region or locality shall supersede designations of prohibited and restricted areas by the Attorney General under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, and shall supersede the responsibility and authority of the Attorney General under the said Proclamations in respect of such prohibited and restricted areas.

I hereby further authorize and direct the Secretary of War and the said Military Commanders to take such other steps as he or the appropriate Military Commander may deem advisable to enforce compliance with the restrictions applicable to each Military area hereinabove authorized to be designated, including the use of Federal troops and other Federal Agencies, with authority to accept assistance of state and local agencies.
I hereby further authorize and direct all Executive Departments, independent establishments and other Federal Agencies, to assist the Secretary of War or the said Military Commanders in carrying out this Executive Order, including the furnishing of medical aid, hospitalization, food, clothing, transportation, use of land, shelter, and other supplies, equipment, utilities, facilities, and services.

This order shall not be construed as modifying or limiting in any way the authority heretofore granted under Executive Order No. 8972, dated December 12, 1941, nor shall it be construed as limiting or modifying the duty and responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with respect to the investigation of alleged acts of sabotage or the duty and responsibility of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, prescribing regulations for the conduct and control of alien enemies, except as such duty and responsibility is superseded by the designation of military areas hereunder.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
The White House,
February 19, 1942.