Emily Whalen, Author at Not Even Past

Longfellow’s Great Liberators: Abraham Lincoln and Dante Alighieri

“We breathe freer. The country will be saved.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others.

Five years earlier Longfellow was one of many who believed the time for peace had passed with John Brown’s execution for attempting to arm slaves with weapons from the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. “This will be a great day in our history,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1859, the day of the hanging, “the date of a new Revolution” needed to move the nation farther toward the Constitution’s goal of “a more perfect Union.” Even “Paul Revere’s Ride,” his famous poem on the Revolutionary War, was “less about liberty and Paul Revere, and more about slavery and John Brown,” writes historian Jill Lepore, “a calls to arms, rousing northerners to action.” This rallying cry serendipitously appeared on newsstands on Dec. 20, 1860, the day South Carolina seceded from the Union.

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (via Wikimedia Commons).

Longfellow had voted early on Nov. 6, 1860 and was overjoyed by the news of Lincoln’s “great victory,” calling it “the redemption of the country.” His diary marks steps toward fulfilling the promise of this victory, from enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 (“A great day”) and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolishing slavery, on January 31, 1865 (“the grand event of the century”) to General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865: “So ends the Rebellion of the slave-owners!”

Longfellow had gained notice in abolitionist circles two decades earlier with publication of his Poems on Slavery. He judged his verses “so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast,” but still they triggered a “long and violent tirade” in a South Carolina newspaper and were left out of an 1845 edition of the author’s collected works to avoid offending readers in the south and west.

First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1864 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In 1863, New York’s Evening Post cast Longfellow as the nation’s prophet. Crediting the poet’s “discerning eye” for foreseeing “the inevitable result of that institution of American slavery which was the black spot on the escutcheon of our republican government,” the paper lamented that his words had gone “unheeded, until the black spot spread into a cloud of portentous dimensions, and broke over the land in a storm of blood and desolation.”

1863 also saw Longfellow complete a draft of his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Working closely with Dante’s poem helped him cope with the traumatic loss of his beloved wife. On July 9, 1861, Fanny had suffered fatal injuries when her dress caught fire as she melted wax to seal a lock of her daughter’s hair. The translation provided “refuge” from an ordeal “almost too much for any man to bear,” he wrote to a friend.

Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, a detail of a painting by Domenico di Michelino, Florence 1465 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Living with Dante’s vision of the afterlife also gave Longfellow some perspective on the war. On May 8, 1862, soon after translating Paradiso, he reflected, “Of the civil war I say only this. It is not a revolution, but a Catalinian conspiracy. It is Slavery against Freedom; the north against the southern pestilence.” The reality of this moral disease hit home when he visited a local jeweler’s shop. There he saw “a slave’s collar of iron, with an iron tongue as large as a spoon, to go into the mouth.” “Every drop of blood in me quivered,” he wrote, “the world forgets what Slavery really is!”

The war to eradicate slavery by suppressing this “conspiracy” brought its own set of horrors. Longfellow was acutely aware of the high toll of death and mutilation on both sides, the destruction extending far beyond the war zone. “Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not only on the battle-field,” he lamented, “but in faraway homes, North or South, carrying dismay and death. What an infernal thing war is!”

Charles Longfellow in Uniform (1st Massachusetts Artillery), March 1863. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

The hell of war weighed heavily on Longfellow’s mind when he finally turned to translating Dante’s Inferno—he saved this first part of the Divine Comedy for last—on March 14, 1863. He began during an especially “sad week”: Charles, his eighteen-year-old son, had left home, unannounced, to join the Army of the Potomac in Washington. Initially attaching himself to an artillery regiment, “Charley” benefited from family connections to receive a commission as second lieutenant in the cavalry. “He is where he wants to be, in the midst of it all,” wrote the worried father. During this first month of Charley’s military service, Longfellow translated a canto of Inferno each day. Amid “many interruptions and anxieties,” he completed all thirty-four cantos by April 16, 1863. Two weeks later Charles Norton, Longfellow’s friend and fellow Dante expert, urged him to hold back publication of the translation until 1865 so it could be presented during Italy’s celebration of the poet’s six-hundredth birthday in Florence.

On December 1, 1863, Longfellow received a telegram from Washington saying his son had been “severely wounded.” He immediately left Cambridge with his younger son Ernest and headed south to find Charley and learn the extent of his injuries. The soldier, who had already survived a bout of the ever-dangerous “camp fever” the previous summer, made another “wonderful escape,” as his relieved father put it. Fighting near the front lines in the Mine Run Campaign, Charley took a Confederate soldier’s bullet in the shoulder. He returned home in one piece and slowly recovered from his wounds, but his fighting days were over.

As the war continued and congress worked to repeal the fugitive slave acts of 1793 and 1850, Longfellow resumed editing his translation in preparation for the Dante anniversary. He admired Charles Sumner’s speech on the proposed amendment to abolish slavery: “So long as a single slave continues anywhere under the flag of the Republic I am unwilling to rest.” Longfellow shared his friend’s relatively expansive view of liberty, observing on April 20, 1864: “Until the black man is put upon the same footing as the white, in the recognition of his rights, we shall not succeed, and what is worse, we shall not deserve success.” The following year Longfellow asked Sumner for assistance in having a privately printed edition of the first volume of his translation delivered to Italy in time for the Dante festivities. In the same letter of February 10, 1865, he thanked the senator for his role in abolishing slavery, proclaiming that “this year will always be the Year of Jubilee in our history.”

Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Inferno took its place among the works by eminent foreigners on display in Florence to honor the poet’s birth. Three days of festivities in 1865 doubled as a celebration of Italy’s independence while the nation awaited the additions of Venice (1866) and Rome (1870) to complete the unification begun in 1859-61. At a banquet for foreign dignitaries, an American speaker drew rousing applause from his Italian hosts and their guests when he toasted the “Re-United States”—a poignant reminder that Italy was taking its first steps as an independent and (mostly) unified nation just as America emerged from the greatest test of its own unity and promise of freedom.

The statue of Dante Alighieri that today stands in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence was unveiled in 1865 during the festival (via Wikimedia Commons).

Dante’s prominence in these parallel national struggles was clear to Longfellow, as it was to the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, and other black “freedom readers,” the title of Dennis Looney’s book on the African American reception of Dante and his poem. Longfellow wrote six sonnets on Dante to accompany the commercial publication of his translation of the Divine Comedy in 1867. The final sonnet, composed on March 7, 1866, glorifies Dante as the “star of morning and of liberty,” his message of freedom reaching “all the nations” as his “fame is blown abroad from all the heights.”

“Hideous news.” This was Longfellow’s reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s death on the morning of April 15, 1865, from the bullet fired by John Wilkes Booth the night before at Ford’s Theatre. Star of morning and of liberty: Longfellow’s epithet for Dante would have sounded like a fine description of Abraham Lincoln to millions of Americans who mourned the slain president.

Featured Image: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his study, 1868. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

Sources: “Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”; “Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” ed. Samuel Longfellow; “Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, ed. Andrew Hilen; “Poet’s Warning,” The Evening Post Jan. 20, 1863; Henry Clark Barlow, “The Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante Allighieri in Florence and at Ravenna”; Dennis Looney, “Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy”

For more information on Dante and Longfellow, see the special edition of Dante Studies on this topic (vol. 128 in 2010), edited by Arielle Saiber and Giuseppe Mazzotta.

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, by David France (2016)

By John Carranza

In the 1980s, the United States experienced a new disease that seemed to target young, gay men living in New York City and San Francisco. From the beginning, those doctors and scientists willing to treat members of the gay community remained perplexed as to why these men, their ages ranging from their early twenties to their thirties, were falling ill with rare diseases that would not ordinarily affect someone their age. The earliest name given to this new epidemic was gay related immune deficiency (GRID) before it took the name acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), which was caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The push for scientific advancement and treatment was not readily available to these young men, and many government officials at the state and national levels refused to acknowledge the epidemic that soon spread across the United States and affected groups other than gay men.

David France’s How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS is a complementary work of history to the 2012 documentary of the same name that documented the early years of the AIDS epidemic to the successful discovery a decade later of combination drug therapies that brought people with AIDS from the brink of death back to life. The main actors in France’s sweeping narrative are a group of men and women who formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-UP, devoted to demanding action from the government and pharmaceutical companies for treatment. Their initiatives were influential in saving thousands of lives by the early 1990s.

ACT-UP buttons from the 1980s (via Wikimedia Commons).

ACT-UP began as an informal group of gay men who were dying of opportunistic infections related to the compromised immune systems associated with AIDS. However, as time went on, the epidemic took more lives and the government remained silent, so they took it upon themselves to learn about their illnesses in order to demand government intervention and the development of medical treatments. In this way, many of them became citizen-scientists. They compiled the scientific data made available to them by competing scientists and used it to educate one another and the government officials that they lobbied. They pushed for medications that would treat their opportunistic infections, as well as the virus that causes AIDS once it was discovered. They were also first in realizing the safe sex might lessen the chances a person had for catching this new and mysterious disease.

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AIDS activists in the 1980s (Curve Magazine via the Odyssey Online).

France recounts the activism necessary to win visibility not just for gays, but also for other populations who became affected, such as intravenous drug users and women. ACT-UP’s activism undertook public demonstrations as a means of demanding more scientific research, access to drugs, and lower prices for those drugs once they were identified as possible treatments. In its earliest years of activism, the group modeled itself on the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s by practicing nonviolent civil disobedience and going into traditionally conservative parts of the United States to educate people. ACT-UP petitioned members of Congress for AIDS funding for research, fought with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow lifesaving drugs onto the market faster, set up needle exchanges for intravenous drug users, and protested on Wall Street. The early stages of ACT-UP’s activism included using the infamous symbol of the pink triangle with SILENCE = DEATH written beneath it, which was made into bumper stickers and posters that could be plastered all over the city, as well as hats and T-shirts. One of the enduring symbols of their activism is the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was created in San Francisco to remember the lives lost in the epidemic. It made its first appearance on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1987 when it included more than 1,900 panels.

The AIDS Quilt on the National Mall in 2011 (via Wikimedia Commons).

David France’s book is a great achievement in that he details the events and lives of the people who lived through the AIDS epidemic over the course of approximately thirteen years. France achieves this not simply as a researcher with an eye for historical detail, but also as a person who lived through those events as a journalist. His ability to document the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s resulted in the ability to keenly observe developments while still keeping a certain level of objectivity. France uses extensive archival research, including the papers of the most visible activists and he draws on his own experience. Where possible, France conducted oral interviews with members of ACT-UP who are still alive today. France captures the emotion and frustration of the members of ACT-UP who pushed for access to life saving drugs while negotiating alliances and feuds among members of the group and the scientific community. How to Survive a Plague is essential reading, not only for members of the LGBTQ community, but for everyone who may have been too young or not have been alive during the 1980s and early 1990s when the fight for visibility and medication was still happening. How to Survive a Plague is an excellent example for understanding how activism works, how advocacy for those marginal members of society can be effective, and to show government and public health officials how not to handle a plague.

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Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

By Christopher Babits

Good historians keep an open mind when doing archival research. Our reading of the relevant literature, not to mention the preliminary research we conduct, provides a general understanding of our topic, but we have to prepare ourselves for surprises. This is the most exciting part of research — examining documents no one has seen and making connections others have not made. Research has a funny way of bringing the unforeseeable into one’s life, though.

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National Archives (via Wikimedia Commons).

There was little reason I should have anticipated coming across Hitler in my research. I am a historian of the United States and my dissertation examines the history of sexual orientation change therapies from the Second World War into the twenty-first century. A wide-range of stakeholders have practiced, sought out, been forced to undergo, and challenged the ethics of therapeutic practices aimed at changing a person’s homosexuality. Needless to say, researching this topic has brought me into contact with some disturbing history. This has included graphic descriptions of men and women being electrocuted or even lobotomized because of their sexual orientation. I expected to come across these accounts in the archives. They are an integral part of the history I want to tell. Hitler was a different story.

I first came across the infamous German dictator while conducting research in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas. I was going through an extensive LGBT collection and came to a folder devoted to Paul Cameron. In the 1980s, Cameron earned acclaim for being expelled from the American Psychological Association (APA). The reason? He falsified data in order to push an anti-gay agenda. After being expelled from the APA, Cameron doubled his efforts to discredit LGBT activists by continuing to conduct and disseminate research. This included a 1985 pamphlet called “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality: Homosexuality is a Crime against Humanity.” Cameron’s organization, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (yes, they were called ISIS), mailed thousands of these pamphlets across the nation.

Envelope from a promotional Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality mailing (via UNT Digital Library).

In “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality,” ISIS included a section with the title “German History Repeats Itself in the U.S.” According to the pamphlet, “gays [in 1920s and 1930s Germany] were seeking a political party to carry their lifestyle to power. They threw their weight behind the Nazis and were rewarded with leadership of the stormtroopers (SA).” The pamphlet continues: “Over time, Nazi youth organizations and camps became notorious for homosexual molestations. Open homosexuality, pornography, drugs and prostitution turned Berlin into the San Francisco of Europe.”

(via Wikimedia Commons)

I had no clue what to think when I first read these sentences. Did I not pay attention in my world history courses? Were my teachers and professors woefully ignorant of the past? I sent pictures of the pamphlet to colleagues who know German history much better than I do. We were all confused. Despite this confusion, I knew that I would not be free from Hitler.

I was proven correct repeatedly as I conducted research at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville. In 1993, Cameron’s organization, now called the Family Research Institute, sent out a newsletter with an article that asked, “Was the Young Hitler a Homosexual Prostitute?” The authors pointed to Samuel Igra’s 1945 work, Germany’s National Vice, as evidence that Hitler was a homosexual artist before rising to power. Other publications, including Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams’ The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (1995), give the same warning: the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals who desired a fascistic takeover of their country. Importantly for my research, proponents of sexual orientation change therapies have referred to not only Cameron’s pamphlets but also the works of Igra and Lively and Abrams. If I truly want to understand the intellectual rationale for sexual orientation change therapies, I had to know how and why someone would want to believe that the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals. But first, I needed to see if there was any historical basis for these accusations.

Nürnberg, Reichsparteitag 1933. Adolf Hitler und Stabschef Röhm.

Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm, 1933 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Research into the history of Nazism brought me to Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA. Röhm, who had convinced Hitler of his political potential in 1919, was homosexual, a fact that Hitler knew about his political and military subordinate. Over the next fifteen years, Hitler and Röhm worked closely as they grew the Nazi Party. Although Röhm and a few other SA leaders were open about their homosexuality, their rise to power was not due to their sexual orientation. What’s more clear, however, is that the downfall of Röhm and the SA prefaced the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. In 1934, Hitler, with the help of other aides (like Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler), orchestrated the arrest of Röhm and other SA leaders because the latter challenged Hitler’s authority. After Röhm was murdered in his prison cell (Hitler gave him the option of taking his own life, which he refused to do), homosexuals became a group targeted by the Nazis. A pink triangle, not a pink swastika, soon singled out (mostly) homosexual males in concentration camps.

Although I was not prepared to find Hitler in the archives, it is clear that people like Cameron had easy-to-discern motivations. They were able to use parts of the past, even if they took liberties with what had happened, to discredit LGBT activists and claims for equality. What better way to do this than compare them to the Nazis?

More by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:
Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy
Review of The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Historical Perspectives on The Birth of a Nation (2016)

“They killing people everywhere for no reason at all but being black.”

—Cherry (the wife of Nat Turner played by Aja Naomi King)

By Ronald Davis

The number of books, novels, articles, plays and movies committed to the life and times of Nat Turner is vast. None of these sources is without controversy. It should be no surprise that Nate Parker’s latest rendition has found its way into the controversy surrounding the life of Nat Turner. Turner and the insurrection he led challenged the perception of the enslaved as passively accepting their enslavement. Early twentieth-century scholars of African-American history often ignored or dismissed the Turner rebellion as an anomaly, as not representative of the institution of slavery in the United States. These writers — U.B. Phillips, Frank Tannebaum, and Stanley Elkins, to name a few — point to the prevalence of revolt in the Caribbean and South America, where large-scale rebellions of the enslaved took place. These scholars deduced that slavery in the United States was mild in comparison to the other slave societies in the Americas because here, in the United States, there were only two or three insurrections of note. Besides the Turner revolt, most early twentieth-century scholars only considered the Denmark Vesey conspiracy and the John Brown slave revolt at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia as evidence of slave discontent and evidence of martial organization. All these revolts, including that of Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia always stood as a reminder that some enslaved people would kill, bleed, and die to establish freedom.

Illustration of Nat Turner’s capture (via Wikimedia Commons).

Nate Parker refashions the memory of Nat Turner, in a sense reclaiming the “fiend,” as described by Thomas R. Gray in The Confessions of Nat Turner, and creating a hero. Parker is not the first (nor I suspect the last) to attempt this revision of Turner. In his 1947 seminal work on enslaved resistance, Herbert Aptheker describes Nat Turner as one of history’s greatest leaders because “he sensed the mood and feelings of the masses of his fellow beings, not only in his immediate environment but generally.” Aptheker’s Nat Turner is an undervalued hero, a man of revolution and liberty: a leader who was able to rouse his compatriots and create in them the desire to fight, and eventually die, for their liberty.

Throughout his life, Nat Turner was the human property of Benjamin Turner, Samuel Turner, Putnam Moore and Joseph Travis. However, in Parker’s film, the audience is presented with only one enslaver, Samuel Turner. Parker portrays Samuel Turner through several different lenses. As children, Nat and Sam are depicted as playmates. Several narratives of the enslaved recount how, in childhood, they played with their enslaver’s children. As Nat and Sam aged, their relationships began to reflect the societal differences between the races. James Curry, a successful runaway from North Carolina, related playing with his enslaver’s children and the feeling of brotherhood between black and white as children. Curry relates that as the children aged they were separated, with white children attending school and black children remaining on the plantation. According to Curry, the children “learn that slaves are not companions for them…the love of power is cultivated in their hearts by their parents, the whip is put into their hands, and they soon regard the negro in no other light than as a slave.” (Slave Testimony 130). After depicting childhood friendship, throughout the remainder of the film, Parker’s Nat Turner wields an almost supernatural influence over Samuel Turner. Parker demonstrates Nat’s psychological influence over Samuel when Nat convinces Samuel to purchase an enslaved woman who eventually became his wife. The depiction of influence continues until Samuel Turner realizes he can commodify not only Nat Turner’s physical labor, but also his mental labor as a preacher to the enslaved.

Armie Hammer as Samuel Turner and Nate Parker as Nat Turner in The Birth of a Nation (Fox Searchlight Pictures via wbur).

Perhaps the most historically accurate portion of The Birth of a Nation is Nate Parker’s depiction of various enslavers. Parker sketches the enslavers as violent, when enslaved men are forced fed during a hunger strike; as paternalistic, in the case of Samuel Turner; and as sexually predatory, when Samuel Turner offers the wife of an enslaved man for intercourse with one of the guests at his party. The different types of enslavers portrayed are not all-encompassing; however, within the limitations of movies and film, Parker made specific choices to expand the American public’s understanding of slavery’s cruelties and daily life.

Given the limitations of filmmaking (budget, time constraints on character exploration, and film length) Parker simplified some aspects of slavery while complicating enslaved masculinity and resistance. At times Parker’s representation of enslaved women simplifies the complexities of womanhood in the Antebellum South, leaving much to be desired. Although his movie is essentially one of raw masculinity, the decision to minimize the intellectual influence of enslaved women does a disservice to the strength of women as agitators, resistors, and participants in the Antebellum South’s peculiar institution. By contrast, some women play a very important role in the film; Nat’s mother, grandmother, and wife are integral to his life. However, Parker makes the decision to limit the viewer’s understanding of enslaved women’s complex humanity. There are moments in the film where it appears that Parker forgets that mothers, wives, and daughters performed the same arduous labor as men.

Aja Naomi King as Cherry (via NCR).

Nat Turner was a father, husband, son, and revolutionary. No one word can describe him except “complex.” Parker, however, makes no attempt to complicate Nat Turner; he wants to create a hero. Parker’s Nat Turner makes this reviewer wonder if slavery is a pretext to depict contemporary African-American masculinity in the film. Parker’s desire is to demonstrate that enslaved men were not passive receptors of slavery but active fighters against an unjust institution. The filmmaker emphasizes one trope of masculinity: to fight until the death for freedom. He inscribes his Nat Turner with this type of masculinity and creates a character full of compassion for the downtrodden and rage at injustice. In one scene, when Nat Turner is helping a young white child, the child’s father notices and begins to hit Turner. Turner does not flinch from the blows but stands tall in the face of injustice. Parker’s Nat Turner begins his insurrection because his wife is raped and beaten beyond recognition (the image of Cherry, Nat Turner’s wife, is reminiscent of the beaten face of deceased Emmett Till). Parker makes the impetus for revolution not the rape of his wife but the power structure that would allow this type of brutality to go unpunished. Although there is no evidence to suggest that this was the historic Nat Turner’s inspiration, it remains plausible that Turner or his co-conspirators fought for the mothers, sisters, and daughters sold or raped by enslavers.

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Henry Moore’s 1862 picture of slaves on James Hopkinson’s plantation (via Wikimedia Commons).

The Nat Turner of historical record is somewhat different than Nate Parker’s representation. Much of what we know of Nat Turner relies on his confession to the attorney Thomas R. Gray (available for free from Project Gutenberg). It is important to interrogate this source, to question Turner’s voice as presented in the text and the motivations of Thomas Gray: was it profit, fame, or a desire for truth that led him to Turner’s prison? As with much of the story of the enslaved, the historical record is woefully incomplete and often clouded in mystery.

Can a movie created for entertainment and education accurately reflect a historical record full of silences? Do the archival silences (i.e. Nat Turner speaking for himself, not as interpreted by another person) of Nat Turner’s life give license to an entertainer; license to create a hero and remove the stain of villainy associated with his memory? Parker does not hesitate to refashion Nat Turner.

Historical marker in Southhampton, VA (via TheClio).

Scholars can and should take issue with many aspects of The Birth of a Nation’s historicity. The film takes wide liberties with history while portraying underrepresented aspects of slavery accurately. However, as a film it also moves into the realm of popular history and some members of the audience inevitably will absorb the film as a factual representation of nineteenth-century Virginia. This is a problem of the film and filmmaking about historic events in general. However, I would challenge myself and other scholars to view Parker’s movie as an opportunity to further affect the public’s understanding of history. It is an opportunity for historians to have a dialogue with the nation about America’s past and to better explain the complexities of American institutions.

Is Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation historically accurate? No. But what historical drama can lay claim to 100% accuracy? Nate Parker did not set out to make a documentary, nor did he write a history of American slavery. He created a movie at a particular moment in American history. A moment where black lives are confined to prisons at disproportionate rates. A moment when much of the African-American population is frustrated with the callousness of society. The Birth of a Nation is a beginning; it is a chance to continue the conversation about racial inequality. Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation should be seen not for its historic content but for its commentary of this moment in American history.

Sources:
John W. Blassingame, ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (1977).

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History Calling: LBJ and Thurgood Marshall on the Telephone

By Augusta Dell’Omo

When President Lyndon B. Johnson called Thurgood Marshall to offer him the position of Solicitor General of the United States, Johnson reiterated his commitment to doing the job that Abraham Lincoln started by “going all the way” on civil rights, but he warned Marshall that the appointment would cause the Senate to go over him with “a fine tooth comb.” In the July 1965 phone call, Johnson speaks on a wide variety of issues including the image of the United States abroad, the state of the Civil Rights Movement, the importance of “Negro” representation in the justice system, and finally, his thinly veiled, ultimate goal of placing Marshall on the Supreme Court. A monumental historical moment, LBJ’s call to Marshall set in motion a series of events that would culminate in Marshall becoming the first African American Solicitor General and the first African American Supreme Court Justice of the United States.

Thurgood Marshall talks to President Johnson at the White House (via Wikimedia Commons).

Thurgood Marshall rose to fame in the 1940s for his work with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, created by Marshall as the legal arm of the NAACP, designed to assault discrimination and segregation. Amassing a huge array of legal victories such as in Smith v. Allwright (1944), Shelby v. Kraemer (1948), and most famously Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Marshall came to be known as “Mr. Civil Rights.” At the time of Johnson’s call, Marshall was serving on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, having been appointed in 1961. Johnson, however, had his attentions focused on not just the Civil Rights Movement, but also the growing war in Vietnam. Throughout June and July of 1965, Johnson was forced to consider raising the number of active ground forces and found himself continually at odds with his advisors and the American public. Coupled with the public resignation of the US Ambassador to South Vietnam, Johnson, who often did not want to focus on foreign affairs, found himself facing a series of political and military losses. Johnson hoped to focus his moral idealism and religious convictions on the civil rights struggle, and when told he should de-emphasize civil rights, Johnson remarked, “well, what the hell is the presidency for?”

This recording of the telephone conversation between LBJ and Thurgood Marshall is included in a collection LBJ’s White House telephone conversations made on Dictaphone Dictabelt Records between November 1963 and November 1969. Johnson initially began recording conversations and speeches while in the Senate and continued that practice as President. The recording of presidential meetings and phone calls was first begun by Franklin Delano Roosevelt who aimed to improve consistency in White House public statements and messaging, while also having the option for conclusive proof in the case of false claims made about the administration.

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President Johnson meeting with Dr. King and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement (via Wikimedia Commons).

The recording elucidates the tensions Johnson felt between the morality of the Civil Rights Movement and the practicalities of the political climate that he experienced throughout his presidency. Johnson’s actions during the Civil Rights Movement have been a subject of intense study by historians, who seek to understand where the motivations for Johnson’s involvement came from, and how strongly moral and religious principles guided him in comparison with political realities. Randall B. Woods argues that Johnson’s moral and ethical idealism drove both his home front and war front actions, while Sylvia Ellis contends that pragmatism and realism governed Johnson’s racial and foreign policies.[1] Johnson began the phone call to Marshall with an exasperated sigh stating that he has “a very big problem,” which he hopes Marshall will help him with. His tone seems exhausted and his choice to view the appointment as a problem, points to his pragmatism and recognition that the political climate made Marshall’s nomination very challenging. Throughout the call, Johnson never refers to the position as a great honor, but rather an opportunity to raise the character and image of the United States abroad, (he even tells Marshall that he “loses a lot” by taking the position). He seems to view the nomination of Marshall as a duty as well as a politically calculated choice of a “Negro” who is also “a damn good lawyer.” The pragmatic influence takes hold, and Johnson’s political calculations continue to be apparent, as he expresses the difficulties with pushing Marshall’s nomination through Congress, and not wanting to be “clipped from behind.”

Thurgood Marshall in 1967 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Johnson’s comments, however, could be viewed through the lens of morality, rather than pragmatism. His statements about Marshall being a symbol for the “people of the world” could reflect his view that Marshall would be an important beacon of equality across the world. Furthermore, his obvious admiration for Marshall’s political abilities and his strong conviction to back him regardless of what anyone else said, could show Johnson’s commitment to making a decision that reflects his own moral compass. Johnson says that he “doesn’t need any votes” and that he isn’t doing this for the votes, but rather because he wants “justice to be done.” This recording does not solve the debate on Johnson’s ambiguity, but rather continues it, with Johnson’s statements supporting both pragmatism and morality, depending on how one hears the recording.

What is left unsaid is just as interesting. Marshall says very little throughout the conversation. When Johnson describes Marshall as a symbol for “negro representation,” Marshall does not really respond. The question of Marshall’s role as a “race man,” who clearly defines his identity as “black” and seeks to bring about the progression of black people, has been a subject of much debate among historians and legal scholars that is not resolved by this conversation.[2] But this telephone call offers a snapshot of the struggle between practicality and morality would dominate the careers of both Thurgood Marshall and Lyndon Johnson.

Audio recording of this phone call may be found on Youtube. The original is housed at the LBJ Library: Recording of Telephone Conversation between Lyndon B. Johnson and Thurgood Marshall, July 7, 1965, 1:30 PM, Citation #8307, Recordings of Telephone Conversations – White House Series, Recordings and Transcripts of Conversations and Meetings.

Other Sources:
Wil Haygood, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (2015).
David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000).
Abe Fortas, “Portrait of a Friend,” in Kenneth W. Thompson, ed., The Johnson Presidency: Twenty Intimate Perspectives of Lyndon B. Johnson (1986).

[1] Randall B. Woods “The Politics of Idealism: Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam,” Diplomatic History Volume 31, Issue 1, 2007. Sylvia Ellis, Freedom’s Pragmatist: Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2013).

[2] Sheryll D. Cashin “Justice Thurgood Marshall: A Race Man’s Race-Transcending Jurisprudence,” Howard Law Journal, Vol. 52, No. 3, 2009.

Also by Augusta Dell’Omo on Not Even Past:
Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman (1992).

You May Also Like:
Jennifer Eckel reviews the HBO production Thurgood (2011).
Not Even Past contributors provide an overview of the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

Foreign Policy from Candidate to President: Richard Nixon and the Lesson of Biafra

By Roy Doron

On November 19, 2016, President Barack Obama, speaking on the transition of power to Donald Trump said “once you’re in the Oval Office … that has a way of shaping … and in some cases modifying your thinking.” The 2016 election will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most unconventional and even bizarre elections in American history. When Trump emerged victorious, he did so on a platform that promised to rethink virtually every aspect of American foreign policy, from free trade agreements to environmental treaties. Though the scope of Trump’s promises are unprecedented, his election was not the first time a candidate openly challenged U.S. foreign policy goals.

Richard Nixon campaigning (via Wikimedia Commons).

On September 8, 1968, Richard Nixon, then Republican candidate for president, issued a statement calling on the United States to take a central role in intervening in the Nigerian Civil War and the growing humanitarian catastrophe that was unfolding in secessionist Biafra. Titled “Nixon’s Call for American Action on Biafra,” the candidate called the Nigerian government’s war against Igbo secessionists a genocide and demanded that the United States take a leading role in stopping what he termed “the destruction of an entire people.” “While America is not the world’s policeman,” he declared, “let us at least act as the world’s conscience in this matter of life and death for millions.” (Kirk-Greene, 334-5). But the clarity of the candidate’s call to arms soon had to confront the realities of the office of President. The demands of America’s Vietnam-era foreign policy forced Nixon to abandon his personal sympathy for Biafra.

Many in the United States and in Nigeria and Biafra saw candidate Nixon’s statement as a call for active intervention in the war, which by the end of 1968 had turned increasingly in Nigeria’s favor. Nigeria’s civil war began when Biafra declared independence on May 30, 1967 after a protracted crisis that included two coups and ethnic violence that claimed the lives of thousands, mostly Igbo from Nigeria’s southeast. Though Biafra enjoyed several early successes, the war quickly turned into a protracted blockade against the Igbo heartland, with thousands of civilians dying every day from starvation and disease in the beleaguered enclave that Biafra had become.

Children receive a food ration in Nigeria in 1968 (via Wikipedia Commons).

To counter the military losses, the Biafran leadership embarked on a global public diplomacy drive spearheaded by MarkPress, a Swiss public relations firm owned by the American William Bernhard, calling the blockade and ensuing starvation genocide. MarkPress’ access to global media outlets helped the Biafrans garner significant attention in an already chaotic year in world history. The Tet offensive in February 1968 created a seismic shift in American support for the war in Vietnam, turning the majority of the population against it for the first time. This was followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy only two months apart; the latter’s occurring in the middle of a tumultuous election campaign. In Europe, student protests in Paris almost brought down Charles De Gaulle’s government, while a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August ended Alexander Dubcek’s “Prague Spring.” However, with nightly news broadcasting images of starving children directly into homes around the world, many groups rallied to the Biafran side, with protests in cities around the world and benefit concerts featuring Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez.

The Prague Spring was part of the global crisis of 1968 (John Schulze via Flickr).

These efforts, however, had little effect on government policies, because the Nigerians and their allies in the Organization of African Unity (OAU), eager to prevent a repeat of the Katanga Crisis in Congo, blocked most deliberations on the war in the United Nations, insisting that the matter was an internal African one. Biafra, led by the eloquent and charismatic Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, sought to use the humanitarian crisis to create a global outcry that would force Nigeria to come to terms with the secessionists and guarantee Biafra’s independence. Failing that, Ojukwu hoped for internationally recognized relief corridors that would be protected from the Nigerian military. However, any large scale international intervention would require either a ceasefire or a demilitarized zone. For the Nigerians, led by General Yakubu Gowon, any agreement for relief was preconditioned on Biafra renouncing secession and the ending of the war. In fact, despite frenetic efforts at two hastily convened OAU peace conferences in May and August 1968, the sides could not agree on either an end to the war or on any agreement to address the humanitarian concerns.

In the United States, the Lyndon Johnson administration was inundated with demands to help Biafra but could do little but support relief efforts led by the Red Cross, Joint Church Aid and Caritas. Walt Rostow, Johnson’s National Security Advisor, summed up the administration’s effort by saying “we are doing everything we can, which is very little.” Nixon’s statement, coming from a candidate that most believed would win the election in November, gave hope to many on the Biafran side that a new American administration would take a more active role in helping the beleaguered secessionists. For Ojukwu and Biafra, Nixon the candidate was a friend and they hoped that President Nixon would continue to be one.

Biafran leader Chukwuemeka Ojukwu (via Logbaby).

Though Nixon was personally sympathetic to Biafra, once he became president he could do very little to change the course of the conflict or to influence humanitarian efforts beyond what Johnson had done before him. In fact, like Johnson, Nixon attempted to assist in convening another round of peace talks, but, according to Nigerian historian George Obiozor, during a visit to London in February 1969, Nixon sacrificed his commitment to Biafra in order to secure British support for America in Vietnam. Nixon continued to personally support Biafra, despite his inability to translate it into policy. In one briefing document, he wrote in the margins “I hope Biafra survives!”

Candidate Nixon’s comments on Biafra showcase the limitations of a serious presidential candidate’s ability to transform foreign policy once they arrive in the White House. Many in Biafra hoped for a more interventionist United States and Nixon’s election gave hope for Biafra to hold out well into 1969, until it became clear that Nixon’s policy would closely mirror Johnson’s. When the war ended on January 15, 1970, the death toll, by most accounts, had reached a million people, most from the humanitarian crisis, and helped create organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières. Though the effects of Nixon’s 1968 comments cannot be quantified, his inability to translate them into policy illustrates the limitations of even the world’s most powerful executive.

Roy Doron (UT Austin History PhD, 2011) is an Assistant Professor of History at Winston-Salem State University. He is author, with Toyin Falola, of Ken Saro-Wiwa, part of Ohio University Press’ Short Histories of Africa and a forthcoming history of the Nigerian Civil War with Indiana University Press.

Sources:

H. M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook (1971).

George A. Obiozor, The United States and the Nigerian Civil War : An American Dilemma in Africa, 1966-1970 (1993).

How Washington Helped Fidel Castro Rise to Power

By Jonathan C. Brown

Fidel Castro had two political assets that enabled him to stay in power for a half century. He possessed the knack of turning adversity into an asset and he knew his enemies, particularly the anti-communist politicians of Washington, D.C. His guile and skill became evident early on as he established his revolution under the gaze of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.

fidel_castro_-_mats_terminal_washington_1959-1

Fidel Castro in 1959 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Upon taking control of the Cuban military with his guerrillas acting as the new officer corps, he set out in January 1959 to bring to justice the thugs and killers of the old regime. He ordered Che Guevara in Havana and Raúl Castro in Santiago de Cuba to establish revolutionary tribunals to judge the police and army officers for past human rights abuses. In all, some six hundred convicted men faced the firing squads in a matter of months.

Fidel also instructed the US military mission to leave the country. He accused it of teaching Batista’s army how to lose a war against a handful of guerrillas. Cuba no longer needed that kind of military training, Castro said. “If they are going to teach us that, it would be better that they teach us nothing.”

Castro supporters in Havana joke about US criticism of the executions of Batista’s “war criminals.” (via author)

Cubans applauded these procedures as just retribution for the fear and mayhem that Batista’s dictatorship had caused. But American newspaper editors and congressional representatives condemned the executions as revolutionary terror. Fidel used this criticism to rally his followers. Where were these foreigners, he asked, when Batista’s men were snuffing out “the flower of Cuba’s youth?” Soon thereafter, the guerrilla comandante became the head of government as prime minister.

In his trip to Washington in April 1959, Castro endured the constant questions from reporters about communists showing up his new regime. President Eisenhower found it inconvenient to be in Washington when the new Cuban leader arrived. He arranged a golf game in Georgia, leaving his vice president to meet with the visiting prime minister. It was not a meeting of the minds. Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro differed on just about every subject: the communist threat, foreign investment, private capital, and state enterprise. The vice president tried to inform the new leader about which policies would best serve his people, and he ultimately described the unconvinced Castro as being naïve about communism. Unbeknownst to the CIA, the first Cuban envoys were already in Moscow requesting military trainers from the Kremlin.

Castro and Nixon following their interview in April 1959 (via author).

Then in the summer of ’59, Fidel began the agrarian reform project by nationalizing plantation lands owned by both Cuban and US investors. Without any fanfare whatsoever, communists took control of the new agency that took over sugar production. Chairman Mao sent agrarian technicians to act as advisers. The US embassy in Havana demanded immediate compensation for dispossessed American owners. Instead, they received bonds due in twenty years.

Fidel knew how to provoke yanqui reactions in ways that exposed the big power chauvinism of Washington. He hosted Soviet officials and concluded a deal to take on supplies of Russian crude petroleum. Castro asked the American-owned refineries to process the oil into gasoline, which the State Department advised them not to do. Castro had his excuse to confiscate the refineries.

A French ship filled with Belgium weapons arrived in Havana harbor in March of 1960. It exploded and killed 100 Cuban longshoremen. Castro rushed to the TV station and denounced the CIA for sabotaging the shipment. He gave a fiery anti-America speech at the funeral service in the Plaza of the Revolution to which a host of left-wing personalities flew in to attend. Simone Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre arrived from France, Senator Salvador Allende came from Chile, and ex-president Lázaro Cárdenas traveled from Mexico. At this event, Fidel introduced his motto “Fatherland or death, we will overcome,” and the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda took the famous image of Che Guevara looking out over the crowd.

Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960, by Alberto Korda (via author)

At that point that President Eisenhower ordered Director Allen Dulles of the CIA to devise the means to get rid of Castro’s regime in which Washington’s “hand would not show.” Agents attached to the US embassy in Havana contacted Catholic and other youth groups who objected to Fidel’s communist friends. They received airline tickets to leave the country and salaries to train as soldiers in Guatemala. Fidel had spies in Miami and Central America sending him progress reports on the émigré brigade in training. Now he had Eisenhower’s diplomats on the defensive. They had to deny Castro’s accusations about an upcoming CIA invasion.

In the meantime, Castro announced plans to socialize the economy, a project that Che Guevara headed up. What was the White House to do? The 1960 election had swung into full gear. The Democratic challenger in the first presidential debates famously said that he was not the vice-president who presided over the communist takeover of the island just 90 miles offshore from Key West. Eisenhower responded with toughness. He lowered the amount of sugar the United States imported from Cuba, and Fidel seized upon this provocation to nationalize the remaining US-owned properties, especially the sugar refineries.

By now, the exodus of Cuba’s professional classes had been expanding over the preceding year until it reached a thousand persons per week. Middle-class families formed long lines outside the US embassy in order to obtain travel visas. President Eisenhower appointed Tracy Voorhees, the man who handled the refugees from the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, to manage the resettlement. He established the Cuban Refugee Center in Miami. A mix of American charities and government offices sponsored evacuation flights, housing, job-hunting services, emergency food and clothing drives, educational facilities, and family subsidies. Let them go, Castro told his followers. He called the refugees gusanos (worms), the parasites of society.

U.S. Embassy in Havana, 2010 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Castro benefited from such American interference. It cost him nothing to get rid of his opponents, especially as the US taxpayers footed the bill. He utilized the former privilege of these gusanos to recruit peasants and workers to the new militias. The huge military parade on the second anniversary of the Revolution in January 1961 featured army troops with new T-130 tanks and army units armed with Czech weapons. Thousands of militiamen marched with Belgium FAL assault rifles.

He did not shut down the American embassy but utilized Soviet-trained security personnel to monitor the activities of diplomats and CIA men. He waited until the Americans severed diplomatic ties in order to be able to pose as the victim of US malice. Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations with Cuba to spare the new president, John F. Kennedy. Anyway, the new president very soon would have to preside over the CIA-planned invasion of the émigré brigade whose coming Castro was announcing to the world.

Now the anti-communist onus had passed to Kennedy. He could not shut down the CIA project and return hundreds of trained and irate young Cubans to Miami. Neither could he use American military forces to assist the invasion. Nikita Khrushchev had already threatened to protect the Cuban Revolution with “Soviet artillery men,” if necessary. Also, citizens in many Latin American nations took pride in Cuba’s defiance of US power. Kennedy too was trapped by his own anti-communist bravado during the election campaign. He changed some of the plans and let the invasion proceed.

Kennedy and Eisenhower confer at Camp David following the Bay of Pigs debacle (via author)

The Bay of Pigs landing of April 1961 turned into a disaster. A bomber assault by exile pilots on the Cuba revolutionary air force failed to destroy all of Castro’s fighter planes. The few remaining fighters chased the bombers from the skies and sank the ships that brought the brigade to shore. The fourteen hundred émigré fighters killed as many militiamen as possible before they ran out of ammunition on the third day. Castro put 1200 of the surviving exiles in jail. In the meanwhile, neighborhood watch groups in Havana and other cities cooperated with state security personnel in rounding up thousands of potential opponents, most of whom were processed and returned home in due course.

Che Guevara summed up the result of the Bay of Pigs when he “accidentally” met up with White House aide Richard Goodwin at an OAS meeting in Uruguay. Please convey our thanks to your president for the Bay of Pigs, Che said. “The Revolution is even more ensconced in power than ever because of the US invasion.”

More by Dr. Jonathan C. Brown on Not Even Past:

The Future of Cuba-Texas Relations
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba
A Rare Phone Call from One President to Another

Tatlin’s Fish: Art and Revolution in Everyday Life

By Peter Worger

Tucked into the pages of Nikolai Punin’s diary is a sliver of silver paper made into the shape of a fish. Its scales have been drawn with what appears to be black marker or charcoal in an Impressionist style on one side and in a Cubist style on the other. The fish has two fins along its underside and a pointed tail, most of which have brightly-colored orange tips, and there is a razor-like saw of a fin on its backside. An orange piece of yarn is tied to its mouth as if the fish had been caught with it, making it easy to hang or pull out of a book. The whole object is about the length of a page and, since it was found in a book, one can assume it was made to be used as a bookmark.

Both sides of the fish are decorated in silver and orange (Punin papers, Harry Ransom Center).

The fish was a gift from the famous Soviet avant-garde artist, Vladimir Tatlin, to his friend, the art historian Nikolai Punin. The two men worked together at The Museum of Painterly Culture in Petrograd in the early 1920s just after the Russian Revolution when the diary was written. Punin worked in the Department of General Ideology and Tatlin was producing an experimental play by the poet Velimer Khlebnikov, another friend and collaborator in the circle of Russian revolutionary, avant-garde artists. For Punin, Tatlin represented a particular quality of Russian art that made it surpass the latest Cubist innovations in painting coming from France. In 1921, Punin had already written a polemic entitled, “Tatlin (Against Cubism).” In this short work, he argued that Tatlin made the same innovations in art as the French Cubists, but surpassed them because the tradition of icon painting in Russia gave the Russian avant-garde a particular appreciation of the paint surface. The lack of a Renaissance tradition of perspectivalism, according to Punin, also gave the Russian avant-garde a much freer relationship to space. Punin referred to The Fishmonger, as one of three paintings that represented Tatlin’s start in this direction. In that painting we can see multiple fish that have the silver and orange coloring as the paper fish found in Punin’s diary. Tatlin’s early experiences with church art, painting icons, and copying wall frescoes, was crucial in the development of his style as well as his ideas about the role of art in revolutionary society. The icon was both a work of art and an object for everyday use. This emphasis on the image as everyday object became important in expanding Tatlin’s creative pursuits to include the construction of utilitarian objects to transform the nature of everyday life in the USSR during the transition to socialism.

The Fishmonger, by Vladimir Tatlin, 1911 (via Wikiart).

In 1923, Tatlin became the Director of the Section for Material Culture at the Museum of Painterly Culture. During his tenure there, he authored several documents outlining his general program for the role of material culture in the USSR. In an article written under his direction called “The New Way of Life,” he described a series of new projects and prototypes, namely a new design for a coat, and one of five new designs for an oven that could cook and keep food warm for 28 to 30 hours and also keep the home heated economically. Tatlin incorporated the text of “The New Way of Life” into a controversial work of the same name, a photo-montage showing images of the designs that were meant to depict that revolutionary new way of life. He created it for display in the showroom of the Section for Material Culture and the designs were also shown at the Exhibition of Petrograd Artists of All Tendencies. Punin wrote a favorable review of Tatlin’s work in the exhibition, but other critics who believed that art should occupy a place “beyond the realm of the everyday” found the designs inappropriate. Tatlin’s work was revolutionary in that it challenged this traditional boundary between art and the everyday.

A New Way of Life, by Vladimir Tatlin (via Russian State Archive of Literature and Art).

The fish is an important indication of a close personal and professional relationship between the artist, Vladimir Tatlin, and his admiring critic, Nikolai Punin, and it represents the ways that Tatlin and Punin tried to outline a new revolutionary program for art. It also is an example of that very revolutionary impulse in that it is an object to be contemplated for its aesthetic beauty and also to be used for a utilitarian purpose as a bookmark. Tatlin’s work paved the way for a new interpretation of art as something that could be figurative as well as useful; art in revolutionary society could have a place in the daily lives of every individual and not only in the lofty realm of the art establishment. This little fish offers a window onto the theories of the period of the Russian Revolution, when people sought to rethink the entire Western European model of not only aesthetics but also society.

Tatlin’s fish can be found in The Punin Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Additional Sources:
Anonymous, “New Way of Life,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).
John E. Bowlt, review of O Tatline, by Nikolai Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996).
Christina Kiaer, “Looking at Tatlin’s Stove,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds (2008).
Jennifer Greene Krupala, review of O Tatline by N. Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, The Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 3 (1996).
John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde (1983).
Nikolai Punin, “Tatlin (Against Cubism),” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).

Seeds of Empire, By Andrew Torget (2015)

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Andrew Torget’s Seeds of Empire places the early history of nineteenth-century Texas squarely within the political economy of slavery, cotton, and geopolitics. Torget shows that Spanish Texas had become an utterly dysfunctional polity. A royalist bloody response to the creation of autonomous creole juntas almost led to the annihilation of the Tejano population. Tejas found itself unable to pay the Comanche tribute precisely at the time that the Mississippi River cotton boom required large imports of horses. Comanches raided the already weakened Tejanos.

Tejanos found in Anglo entrepreneurs like the Austin family a viable escape from a decades long crisis. The Austins brought Anglo, land-hungry colonists across the Sabine River into Eastern Texas in the early 1820s by offering legalized slavery. There were many Anglo land speculators around but none delivered what the Austin did, namely, cunning diplomatic work to keep republican, antislavery, federalist Mexicans and pro-slavery Anglo colonists moderately satisfied.

Stephen F. Austin (via Good Free Photos).

Torget describes the spatial partition of Texas that ensued. In the west, there were thin communities of Tejanos working as pro-slavery lobbyists in Coahuila and as importers of Anglo goods to satisfy the demands of La Bahia, Goliath, and San Antonio. In the east, there were swelling communities of Anglo settlers setting up plantations along the banks of the Colorado, Brazos, and Trinity, while churning out bales of cotton for New Orleans markets. Torget never explains why Tejanos did not themselves become cotton planters. There were Tejanos in Nacogdoches who monopolized the Comanche trade of horses and there were many well-off Tejano war-of-independence-refugees in New Orleans. Both could have used their political and commercial advantages to push Anglos out of the business of producing cotton with slaves, for Tejanos were not squeamish about slavery. For centuries Tejanos incorporated Apache criados (servants) into their household and drove thousands of Chichimeca captives into the silver mines of Parral and Zacatecas and into the cattle ranches of Nuevo Leon. Tejanos did not hesitate to feed the Caribbean royal galleys and fortifications with slaves. Be that as it may, a deep ethnic chasm did open between east and west Texas. This spatial and political balance, however, unraveled the moment the elites of Mexico City decided that they were losing control over the northern frontiers. Mexican conservatives, therefore, abolished slavery, terminated land contracts, and sent the army to remove the Anglo settlers.

Torget demonstrates that it was a small, fleeting tactical decision by Santa Ana that sealed the faith of Texas in 1835, as thousands of Anglo colonists were in fully disorganized retreat to the safety of the Louisiana border. At the Brazos, however, Santa Ana split his army into two fronts to block the retreating forces of Sam Houston from crossing the Sabine. Houston stopped fleeing and turned around to engage Santa Ana’s forces. This was the moment Texas became an independent republic nobody wanted, including the Anglo colonists. Tejanos were the ones who lost the most as useless lobbyists. They had to give up lands and the rights of citizenship.

William Henry Huddle’s painting, Surrender of Santa Anna, shows the Mexican general surrendering to a wounded Sam Houston after the battle of San Jacinto in 1836 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Torget shows that the Lone Star State remained an utterly nonviable state for a full decade (1835-45), trapped in the logic of much larger geopolitical balances that pitted Great Britain, the USA, and Mexico against one another. Five of these ten years, however, witnessed an unprecedented cotton boom in the Mississippi Cotton Kingdom. It brought tens of thousands of additional colonists and black slaves to the riverine banks of Eastern Texas and new merchant warehouses to the Galveston Bay. But the boom did not bring any changes in riverine infrastructure, a sovereign port, or a national merchant marine. There was no functioning state, no mechanism to collect taxes, and no diplomatic working corps.

Britain sought to convince Texans to gain diplomatic recognition by becoming a free-labor cotton republic. Texans responded by creating a constitution that banned any black person who had been manumitted from residing within the new nation. The United States had no interest in annexing Texas because it would upset the balance between northern and southern states.

Map of the United States, 1845 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The plight of Texas worsened as the cotton boom went bust in late 1839. The only thing that Texas did well was to organize militias to bleed the raiding Comanche. Torget explains how the geopolitical logjam was broken the moment France finally recognized Texas in 1844. To secure one of the most important sources of cotton for its economy, Britain had no choice but to also recognize Texas. It was only then that Anglo Texans got what they had always wanted: annexation into the United States. Incorporation delivered a functioning government, protection against international anti-slavery forces and Mexican invasions, and a windfall for land speculators as land prices rose to the equivalent of those in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Cotton, Slavery, and Empire are categories that explain rather well the origins of Texas as a white supremacist state, utterly dependent on the federal government from its very inception.

Andrew J. Torget. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

More by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra on Not Even Past:
Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014).
Re-Reading John Winthrop’s “City upon the Hill.”
Magical Realism on Drugs: Colombian History in Netflix’s Narcos.
Prof. Cañizares-Esguerra discusses his own book, Puritan Conquistadors.

Dolores del Río: Beauty in Light and Shade, By Linda B. Hall (2013)

By Ann Twinam

Linda Hall provides a compelling biography of one of the most famous and beautiful women of the twentieth century: actress Dolores del Río. She traces critical stages from del Río’s sheltered life as a daughter of a Mexican elite family to her early marriage and transition to Hollywood starlet in the 1920s, where she figured in silent and then talking pictures; to her return south where she became a pivotal actress of the Mexican “Golden Age of Cinema” of the 1940s. In later decades, technology revived del Río’s celebrity, when a new generation viewed her film performances on the newly-invented television.

Hall concentrates on del Río’s professional and personal life through analysis of letters, interviews, film contracts and posters, movie reviews, and local newspapers. These track the ups and downs of her career, her multiple husbands, her real and possible lovers, and her famous friends. Woven throughout, are the pervasive themes of how gender, sexuality, race, transborder crossings, changing technologies and celebrity defined del Río’s career.

dolores_del_rio — Dolores del Río (via Wikimedia Commons)

Every camera loved Dolores del Río. Still, a persistent theme running throughout her career was the continuing mandate to negotiate even her astonishing beauty through the constraints of class, gender, race and Mexican-ness. After her 1925 arrival in Hollywood she, her directors and the studios emphasized her origins as an elite Mexican, her status as a lady playing ladylike parts. In later years, with her celebrity assured, she assumed roles that more emphasized her sexuality or challenged racial norms as she portrayed Native women. When Hollywood parts diminished, del Río returned to Mexico in 1942. She collaborated with director Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez and co-star Pedro Amendáriz to produce some of the classics of Mexican cinema including Maria Candelaria. She sporadically revisited Hollywood including a cameo in 1960 playing the Indian mother of “Elvis.”

Del Río was not only herself a celebrity, she moved in the circles of the famous. Hall traces Hollywood business and social friendships that included Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and William Randolph Hearst. Del Río also maintained her transborder contacts with Mexico, as she counted Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, Pablo Neruda, Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez, and co-star Pedro Armendáriz among her intimate friends.

orson_welles__dolores_del_rio_1941 — Dolores del Rio and Orson Welles in 1941 (via Wikimedia Commons).

If there is any flaw in this marvelous biography, it seems rooted in the very ambiguities and opaqueness of del Río’s life. She never wrote an autobiography. Hall deftly surmounts such challenges by writing “around” the business and personal life of del Río, although questions remain. How did she overcome the dominance of husbands, directors and studios to chart her own path? Were her first two husbands gay? Did she engage in affairs with Greta Garbo or Frida Kahlo? How much wealth did she eventually accumulate, given the fabulous sums paid to pre-depression stars?

edf8dd35e9b8af543baae12727303e47 — Dolores del Río mural by artist Alfredo de Batuc in Hollywood, California (via Picryl).

Linda Hall has offered an engaging look into what historians can likely uncover of this enigmatic star. She concludes that del Río “led a rich, fulfilling up-and-down life that was unusual largely because of her celebrity, her great wealth, her beauty and ultimately her power to shape her own destiny.” Hall’s book proves to be a fascinating resource for readers interested the history of women, gender, sexuality, transborder crossings, celebrity, and film.

Linda Hall. Dolores del Río: Beauty in Light and Shade. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Also by Ann Twinam on Not Even Past:

Purchasing Whiteness: Race and Status in Colonial Latin America.
15 Minute History Episode 52: The Precolumbian Civilizations of Mesoamerica.
No Mere Shadows: Faces of Widowhood in Early Colonial Mexico, by Shirley Cushing Flint (2013).

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