Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

History is Messy Work. And That’s OK.

“The Cause Of Her Grief”: The Rape Of A Slave In Early New England

[Trigger Warning: as the title suggests, this post contains discussion of rape]

“The Cause of Her Grief” is an article by Wendy Anne Warren that was published in the March 2007 issue of The Journal of American History.

In 1638, John Josselyn, a traveler to New England recorded a report of a slave woman just outside of Boston who was raped by a fellow slave at the behest of their owner. Warren’s article attempts to recreate the world of this enslaved woman, who arrived in the Massachusetts Bay colony on the very first ship that brought slaves there.

There are many reasons to like this article but more than anything else Warren’s honesty in trying to tell this story is poignant and powerful. Much of the article consists of questions. Warren is open about the gaps in our knowledge when it comes to topics like this. At the end she says, “At some point every historian decides how to frame her argument: I deliberately chose a method that makes visible gaps in my evidence.” This is unusual for historians, who typically try to highlight the ways they fill historical gaps and seek to persuade the reader that their interpretations are persuasive and airtight.

Warren acknowledges that we will never be able to reconstruct the rape through available historical sources. Instead, in the section where she wants to describe the rape itself, she writes:

“How did the attack occur? When? Where? Did Samuel Maverick [the slave owner] watch? Why didn’t he do it [rape her] himself? Did his skin crawl at the thought of racial mixing? Or at the thought of fathering children fated to be slaves? Did Amias Maverick [Samuel’s wife] refuse to allow another woman’s blood to stain her marriage bed? Did the Maverick daughters know what was happening? Were they being raised by the woman now being attacked? Everyone in that house knew her name, a luxury we do not share. Did any of them question what was happening?”

As a historian of slavery, this framework was breathtaking for me. At first I was uncomfortable with it. Is this history, asking unanswerable questions?

But it made me think of discussions at last year’s conference on Sexuality & Slavery: Exposing the History of Enslaved People in the Americas at the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin (where I am currently a PhD candidate in the History Department). To be honest, this might have been said at a panel I attended at the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians, which featured some of the same main people at the IHS conference. I want to give credit to whomever said these things but I can’t remember specifically who it was (though I want to say it was Barbara Krauthamer).

Anyhow, while I can’t remember precisely who said it, I remember what they said: even if we can’t answer the questions, we need to be asking them; the way you change the juggernaut of a historical paradigm is simply to ask questions that are outside of the comfortable and known. I do remember Leslie Harris saying at the Berkshire conference that she no longer allows her students to avoid answering historical questions by saying, “It’s not in the archive” because often (though, of course, not always) the answer is somewhere in the archive, just no one has looked because no one ever bothered to ask the question in the first place.

Wendy Warren asks questions. And no, probably many will never ever be answerable no matter how hard one digs in the archive. But there is worth in simply asking.

This asking of questions goes hand in hand with the…I struggle with the best word to use here…political decision Warren made to tell this story. She is upfront about it in the article:

“One story of one rape opens a view into a larger world of Anglican-Puritan rivalries, of gritty colonial aspirations, of settlement and conquest in the early modern Atlantic world, of race and sexuality and how those two constructs combined to determine the shape of many lives. But there are more compelling and human reasons to tell this story. This woman’s life deserves to be reconstructed simply because too many factors have conspired to make that reconstruction nearly impossible. Brought against her will to a foreign continent populated by peoples speaking unfamiliar languages, sold as property, raped, and then ignored in the public record, her story mirrors that of millions. Still, her individual resistance touches me; violated but not beaten, she ‘in her own Countrey language and tune sang very loud and shrill’ to a passing stranger and thus ensured her life would be remembered.”

It’s not often that reading historical scholarship makes me cry. I’ll admit, even now re-reading this passage and typing it out onto my computer screen, there’s a sheen across my eyes as I hold back tears. We need to tell the stories of people that history has conspired to silence. I take those words and hold them close to my heart.

But it wasn’t even that passage that made me want to write this post today. It is actually how Warren ends the entire piece that inspired me.

“Without imagination, how can we tell such stories? We are not scientists; we cannot test our hypotheses; we cannot recall our subjects to life and ask them to verify our claims or to provide more information on the topics they fail to discuss. We make our way among flawed sources, overreliant on written texts, hopelessly entangled in our own biases and beliefs, doing the best we can with blurry evidence, sometimes forced to speculate despite our specialized knowledge. The very beauty of history lies in that messiness, the fact that [as Hayden White put it]“unless two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened.”

I don’t know anything about the woman who ended up on Noddle’s Island in 1638 -indeed, I suppose it is possible that Josselyn made up the story for reasons we cannot fathom, or that he misunderstood the situation, or that I have misunderstood the situation myself. But I have chosen to believe Josselyn’s version. Someone else, infuriated by my methods, can tell a different story; I embrace that possibility. In the meantime, I offer this: We have known, for a long time, a story of New England’s settlement in which ‘Mr Mavericks Negro woman’ does not appear; here is one in which she does.”

[Picture me standing up, doing a slow clap for Dr. Warren]

Warren’s brutal honesty of what it is historians do (ALL historians, whether they acknowledge the messiness of their practice or not) is, simply, wonderful.

What Warren describes here is what I imagine myself doing in my own work. It is what I strive to do: to embrace the messiness of the process, the incomplete nature of the task, the fact that we are grasping at edges and painting pictures that will forever be fragmentary – this is history. And when we choose to view the field and our work this way, it allows us to open it up to include work like Warren’s piece where gaps are openly acknowledged but in which we re-learn for the better a story that we thought we already knew. We stretch the field and bring more players onto it. We can then tell the stories of the people whose existence has been washed away by the violence of the creation of the archive without having to always answer for how unfinished those stories are.

History, as Warren says, is not science. History is messy work. And that is okay.

Because today I read about an enslaved woman in 1638 New England, about whom I would otherwise have never known.

This essay was revised for posting on Not Even Past. You can find the original on Jessica Luther’s tumblr, here.

Election Fraud! Read All About It!

by Charters Wynn

The week before our presidential elections is a good time to remember one of the greatest political bombshells in history.

On October 25, 1924, four days before the British general election, the conservative mass-circulation newspaper, the Daily Mail, published a letter that caused a political sensation. The front-page headline read: “Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters: Moscow’s Orders to Our Reds: Great Plot Disclosed Yesterday.” These alleged orders from the Soviet Union took the form of a 1200-word “very secret” letter to the leadership of the British Communist Party, from Grigori Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern), whose goal was to spread communism around the world.

The “Zinoviev Letter” instructed British communists on how to promote revolution among the country’s factory workers and armed forces. The letter stated that “agitation-propaganda” cells should be formed in all soldier and sailor units and in munitions factories and military store depots. It also stated that it was essential to organize uprisings in Ireland and the British colonies. None of this is particularly surprising given Comintern policy. What made the letter so inflammatory was its directive that British communists should put pressure on their “sympathizers” in the Labour Party to push for the parliamentary ratification of the recent Anglo-Soviet trade treaty. It was Conservative Party outrage with the treaty that had forced Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Government prime minster, to call the general election, so the issue was central to the political debates of the election. The Conservative charge that the Labour Party leaders were dupes of the Soviet Union already had been at the center of the bitter campaign even before publication of the letter, and then the letter seemed to offer proof that Conservatives were right.

Punch cartoon suggesting that a vote for Labour would bring the Communist revolutionary poor to power

The Soviet government immediately denounced the letter as a forgery, but the damage was done. Since then, controversy has raged over whether the “Red Letter” was genuine or not. It is still impossible to say with certainty who wrote it since the original letter has disappeared. Some historians argued in the 1990s that the letter was genuine, but the preponderance of evidence from British and Soviet documents declassified over the last two decades indicates the letter was forged. That evidence suggests that anti-communist Russian émigrés in Latvia sent the letter to conservative members of the British secret service. They then forwarded it to the Foreign Office and Scotland Yard with the false assurance that “the authenticity is undoubted,” and they leaked it to the press.

Publication of the letter in the last days of what became known as the Red Scare campaign contributed to the sweeping defeat of MacDonald and the Labour Party. Conservatives came back into power and the country’s policy toward the Soviet Union changed dramatically. The Anglo-Soviet treaty was not ratified and in 1927 Great Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia. The outcome of a major election in a powerful country was, in this way, influenced by outright trickery.

Documents:

Photograph of the copy of the letter

Transcript of the copy of the letter

You might also enjoy:

Charters Wynn, “Order No. 227: Stalinist Methods and Victory on the Eastern Front“

Ned Kelley – Australian Folk Hero – in the News

Our friends at History in the Making Journal posted this article, “Peace at Last,” about the exhumation, identification, and reburial of Australian outlaw Ned Kelley.

Kelley was a late-nineteenth-century outlaw whose larger than life exploits have been the subject of many retellings in films and novels. The son of impoverished Irish convicts, Kelley has been embraced as a symbol of the harsh colonial regime; as someone whose violent life was a response to the official violence of the colonial government. For more insight into the Kelley story, you can read one of the first book reviews we posted here on Not Even Past: Kristie Flannery’s review of Peter Carey’s award-winning novel about Kelley, The True History of the Kelley Gang.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson (1973)

“How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

Forty years on, that question still haunts the pages of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 like the ghost of Boss Tweed. First appearing as a series of articles in Rolling Stone Magazine, Thompson’s coverage of the 1972 presidential election shines light on the darker side of the democratic process. Thompson, author of Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has the right kind of eyes to see the corruption, the lunacy, and the sheer depravity of choosing a chief executive in modern America. In his landmark work of Gonzo journalism, Thompson chronicles the Democratic Party’s struggle to mount a viable challenge to Richard Nixon as the Vietnam War raged on with no end in sight.

book cover for Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

Thompson powerfully sets the stage for the 1972 Democratic primary contest – a party divided, old coalitions fragmenting, and the chaos of the 1968 election looming over the process. For the first time, the Democrats would choose their nominee exclusively through state primaries rather than a combination of elections and back-room deals. The list of candidates – including Sen. Ed Muskie of Maine, Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, and Gov. George Wallace of Alabama – proved familiar but uninspiring. In the midst of this drab battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, Thompson spots an honest man in a pack of party hacks: Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.

McGovern, who died last weekend at the age of 90, emerged in 1972 as the Democratic Party’s unlikely presidential nominee. As a rare liberal spokesman from a conservative state, McGovern championed the anti-war movement in the U.S.

Senate. McGovern, a former history professor and decorated World War II bomber pilot, passionately protested the Vietnam War on the Senate floor, lamenting: “I am sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.” McGovern’s fledgling campaign picked up steam through the primaries of 1972, and Hunter S. Thompson went along for the ride.

Hunter S. Thompson (left) and Sen. George McGovern on the campaign trail, 1972. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

As a sort of embedded journalist with the McGovern campaign, Thompson shunned the idea of impartial reporting. Objective journalism, he argued, is a “pompous contradiction in terms.” After all, selecting sources and choosing verbs are subjective activities. Besides, Thompson reasoned, artificial objectivity blinded most journalists to the dishonesty of politicians like Richard Nixon, his main antagonist. By this reasoning, Thompson publicly declared his support for McGovern early in the primaries.

At times, Thompson’s irreverent style (which he termed “Gonzo journalism”) also blurs the line between fiction and reality. On the campaign trail, he reported that a rumor was circulating that frontrunner Ed Muskie had been treated with a powerful psychoactive drug called Ibogaine. His report was true. There was indeed a rumor, but Thompson had started it himself. Similarly, Thompson sets his sights on derailing Hubert Humphrey’s nomination bid. Over the course of a brutal series of primary battles between Humphrey and McGovern, Thompson tells of suspected election fraud and attempts to circumvent the newly-instated primary system by the “old ward heeler” from Minnesota.

*Hunter S. Thompson, 1971. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

From the primaries to the convention, Thompson’s colorful prose proves both gripping and darkly humorous. The unprecedented access he gained to McGovern campaign staffers and Democratic Party chiefs enabled him to document every day of the historic contest in graphic detail. Thompson does not simply regurgitate press releases and the transcripts of pool interviews. He vividly relates the feel of life on the campaign trail – the blind euphoria, the hopeless despair, the money, the loneliness, the alcohol, and all. Thompson’s clarity and wit have firmly established Fear and Loathing as a celebrated work of political journalism and its author as an icon of American literature.

But what of the hero? What of George McGovern?

McGovern lost every state in the Union, save for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Nixon’s landslide victory represented the first time a Republican carried every Southern state and delivered the incumbent a then-record 520 electoral votes. Thompson rattles with contempt in his reflections on the Nixon landslide but maintains enough composure to analyze the reasons for McGovern’s devastating loss. First, the ugly primary fights with Humphrey left the liberal McGovern labeled as the candidate of “Amnesty, Acid, and Abortion.” Second, the fractured Democratic establishment never fully united behind its nominee.

*Senator McGovern, 1972. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Perhaps most significantly, McGovern’s running mate, Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri, was revealed to have undergone electroconvulsive therapy for depression. After waffling for days, McGovern asked Eagleton to step down to be replaced by former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver. Through these debacles, Thompson portrays McGovern as an honest man making foolish mistakes. These political errors undermined public confidence in McGovern’s judgment and reinforced his image as “too liberal” for the country.

While the American public rejected McGovern in 1972, Thompson viewed him as the last best hope for America. As he writes: “The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes […] is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been.”

*Nixon at a campaign event. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

In light of the social upheaval of the 1960s and the persistent trauma of war in Vietnam, McGovern’s grassroots campaign provided a powerful contrast to the heavy-handed and often secretive Nixon Administration. Indeed, as Thompson tracked McGovern’s campaign for Rolling Stone, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein diligently investigated the June 17, 1972, Watergate burglary in the pages of the Washington Post. To avoid a probable impeachment, Nixon resigned the presidency just over two years later. As Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 brilliantly reveals, George McGovern inspired many with a vision of an honest and humane government intent on building peace at home and abroad. It is a vision that has been eroding ever since.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees by Peter Sahlins (1989)

by Chloe Ireton

To what extent is national identity directed from the political center of a nation? Do individuals living on the periphery of nations have agency in defining their own national identities? Peter Sahlins’ Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees departed from previous scholarship on national identity by arguing that national identity formed both on the localized level among individuals responding to local communal or personal issues and on the central, political level, where national rulers sought to incorporate peripheral communities into the national fold and impose a national identity through polity, education, law, lingua franca, and religion.

Sahlins’ study focuses on the Cerdanya valley, on the border between eastern France and Spain. His interdisciplinary study uses sociological, anthropological, ethnographic, and political and social historical approaches to identity formation. It is rooted in extensive research in archives across the Pyrenees on varied themes such as migrations, political disputes, marriage records, and criminal activity. Sahlins weaves together macroscopic and microscopic histories: the political history of the French and Spanish negotiations over the Pyrenean border alternates with studies of local responses to boundaries and nationhood from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The changing focus — from macro to micro, and political to local — allows the readers to contextualize the significance of national policies in these peripheral borderland regions and the importance of local definitions and uses of nationhood. This movement between the two historical lenses has led to many probing questions about the effects of national policies on local community politics in other regions of the world, and how localized events affect national identities.

The French Pyrenees town of Cauterets, between 1890 and 1900 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

The French Pyrenees town of Lourdes, between 1890 and 1900 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Throughout the study, Sahlins probes the relationship between local and national identities. He concludes that locals on the borderland often drew on national identities when defending local community interests against an invading enemy or significant “other.” They did this for example when confronting foreign property owning elites who did not pay taxes to the community, or when faced with an attack from a national army. In such cases, locals chose their nationality based on serving their own interests. Therefore a local from the French side of the border may claim to be both French and Spanish at different junctures in his lifetime, depending on local circumstances and interests. Sahlins also explored localized relationships across the national border in economic, familial, political, cultural, and linguistic terms. These investigations complicate the notion of a single national identity on either side, since locals travelled across the border regularly, often changing abode depending on economic or political circumstances. Sahlins also pointed to the importance of trilingual communities in questions of national identity. While locals from across the border may have spoken different languages for different purposes, and may have had different political affinities, they all shared the ability to allow their nationality to be permeable and changeable by code switching.

The Spanish Pyrenees, 2009 (Image courtesy of User Miguel303xm/Wikimedia Commons)

The French Pyrenees, 2010 (Image courtesy of Nicolas guionnet/Wikimedia Commons)

This book is without doubt a masterpiece. The study illustrated the fragility of national identities and borders in the Pyrenees from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It gave agency to local actors for defining their national identities, while showing how local definitions can have serious impacts on a national level.

Napoleon in Russia, 1812

by Joan Neuberger

On October 19, 1812, 200 years ago today, Napoleon Bonaparte was forced to admit that he had failed to defeat Russia and would have to abandon Moscow. The retreat that followed became the symbol of the suffering and folly of warfare for the rest of the century. It was immortalized by Tolstoy in War and Peace as a result of the vanity of tyrants. The invasion and retreat were responsible for one of the most famous visual documents in modern history, Charles Joseph Minard’s chart showing the depletion of the Grande Armee. Beginning with approximately half a million troops in June 1812, more than 4 out of every 5 soldiers had died by the time the French army recrossed the Neman River in December and left Russia behind.

Russia defeated Napoleon with superior strategy and logistics. As early as 1810, Minister of Defense Barclay de Tolly and Emperor Alexander I decided that they would engage in strategic retreat, destroying local crops to prevent Napoleon from obtaining food for his soldiers and fodder for their horses, and engaging only in small skirmishes. Napoleon’s success in western and central Europe was based in his ability to crush the enemy’s army quickly and decisively. The Russian policy of retreat deep into the Russian territory and refusal to engage in battle was deeply unpopular but it won the war. Alexander wavered only twice in his determination to avoid major engagement. First at Smolensk, where the French victory was not decisive enough to gain the upper hand, and then a mere 75 miles outside Moscow at Borodino. The one-day battle at Borodino on September 7, 1812 is one of the bloodiest days in the history of warfare. Estimates vary, of course, but approximately 75-80,000 men died on that day. By comparison, the bloodiest day in the US Civil War, the battle at Antietam, fifty years later on September 17, 1862 resulted in 6,500 deaths. The Russian Commander in Chief, Mikhail Kutuzov, recognized that to continue fighting would not save Moscow, so he again ordered the Russian army to retreat. A week later Napoleon triumphantly entered the ancient capital of the Russian Empire.

That triumph quickly turned to disaster. Alexander had ordered the population to evacuate so Moscow was empty. Then mysterious fires broke out in the mostly wooden city, destroying three-quarters of its buildings. There was no food and people in the surrounding villages refused to give up what they had to the foraging enemy soldiers. The final blow came when Alexander refused to negotiate with Napoleon as long as he and his army were on Russian soil. The message Alexander sent to his soldiers was:

“I will make use of every last resource of my empire; it possesses even more than my enemies yet think. But even if Divine Providence decrees that my dynasty should cease to reign on the throne of my ancestors, then after having exhausted all the means in my power I will grow my beard down to here (pointing to his chest) and will go off and eat potatoes with the very last of my peasants rather than sign a peace which would shame my fatherland and that dear nation whose sacrifices for me I know how to appreciate…Napoleon or me, I or him, we cannot both rule at the same time: I have learned to understand him and he will not deceive me.”

It was not easy for Napoleon to acknowledge that he had been outwitted by the ruler and people of the country he referred to as “the Colossus of Northern Barbarism.”

But after 35 days in Moscow, he took his leave.

Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow, by Adolph Northern

The retreat was disorderly and deadly. More people died from disease and starvation than battle. But partisans and Cossacks harassed the retreating French army all along their devastated path. Romantic novelists and mythmakers like to blame the harsh Russian winter for the demise of the Grande Armee, but by the time temperatures dropped and it started snowing in early November, most of the damage was already done. The bitter cold of December 1812 caused great suffering but December marked only the final weeks of the six month war.

Although it took more than a year for Alexander I and his allies in central Europe to chase Napoleon back to Paris, the Russian resistance was the turning point of the Napoleonic wars. The defeat showed that Napoleon was not invincible and the retreat came to symbolize those wars’ terrible costs.

Want to read some more about Napoleon in Russia? try these:

Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon (2011)

Stephen Norris, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945 (2006)

Janet Hartley, Alexander I (1994)

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Cold War Smoke: Cigarettes Across Borders

by Mary C. Neuburger

In 1998, as the a result of a court case waged by a number of US states, cities, and counties, the tobacco industry paid 42 billion dollars in damages, had to cease most forms of advertising, and had to release some 36 million pages of documents. The excerpt of a document presented here is one of those millions of private tobacco industry documents, now available online. This document comes from a case concerning cigarette advertising. In 1986 Frank Resnik, the President and CEO of Phillip Morris, testified before a US House of Representative subcommittee on “Health and Environment,” where he constructed a case for the continued “right” to advertise tobacco products. His argument was based on a rationale that called upon the still ubiquitous logic of the Cold War.

Resnik’s central argument was simply and clearly that advertising does not increase the total number of smokers in any given society; that advertising influenced smokers’ choice in terms of brand and variety, but did not increase the number of smokers overall. His primary evidence for such an argument was that behind the Iron Curtain, where there was no cigarette advertising whatsoever, cigarette consumption had increased by 30% between 1970-1984. With Cold Warriors in his audience in mind, Reznik characterizes the lack of cigarette ads in the Bloc as symptomatic of an “endemic repression of the very freedoms which we Americans cherish.”

Collinsville, Illinois (photo by Lyle Kruger)

Such apparent distaste for the communist enemy, however, did not preclude American tobacco companies from engaging in lively trade in tobacco and tobacco technologies with the Eastern Bloc beginning slowly in the early 1960s with an East-West détente. By the 1970s company documents reveal an intensified interest in penetrating Bloc markets in a period when smoking rates in the United States were -2%, and communist Europe had some of the highest rates of increase, along with the “developing world.” While Russia was by far the biggest market in the Bloc, little peripheral and Soviet-loyal Bulgaria was by far the biggest producer of tobacco and cigarettes. In fact, between1966 and 1989, Bulgaria was either the largest exporter of cigarettes in the world, or second only to the US.

Cigarette Factory Workers, Pleven, Bulgaria (photo by www.lostbulgaria.com)

Bulgaria became one of the most important points of entry for Phillip Morris, RJ Reynolds, and other US tobacco companies to penetrate the Iron Curtain into a growing and untapped market. While the direct imports of cigarettes into the Bloc remained limited, Bloc states signed licensing agreements with US companies in the mid-1970s that resulted in the production of Marlboro (Phillip Morris) and Winston (RJ Reynolds) in local factories. These “American cigarettes” were highly seductive to local consumers, as other Western products that were largely available in hard currency stores or carried across the border in suitcases by the lucky few who could travel to the West. If Bulgarians and other Bloc citizens could not go to America, they could at least hold its glossy packaging in their hands, and inhale its particular blend of taste and nicotine that was quite distinct from the Bulgarian “Oriental” variety. In the late communist period, American cigarette brands perforated the Iron Curtain in a sustained and successful way, paving the way for a post-communist flooding of local markets.

But Resnik, of course did not mention such facts at the 1986 session of the House Health and Environment committee. He did not mention that with the leveling off of US markets the communist world had become an explicit target of tobacco trade and that the industry had been among the first to push US entry into these markets. Instead he called upon the House committee members as freedom-loving Americans to reject all legislative proposals to ban or restrict tobacco advertising. By 1986, however, the industry was rapidly losing ground to an organized and effective grass-roots anti-smoking movement. As of August 1986, tobacco ads were no longer allowed to appear on TV. Yet in the Eastern Bloc, where ads had never been on TV, smoking rates continued to rise among men, women, and youth. Perhaps Reznik was right in saying that advertising had no role in increased smoking rates, rather smoking was a by-product of communist modernization projects, with their accompanying new modes of leisure and consumption.

The rapid rise in smoking in the Bloc eventually raised concerns about tobacco and health, and Bloc states have waged fairly serious anti-smoking campaigns since the 1970s. Such campaigns, however, were largely ignored by local populations. Anti-smoking came from the wrong messenger, and what little “freedoms” people had – like an afternoon smoke break—were held onto tightly. Hence unlike the United States, communist citizens were largely resistant to the anti-smoking campaigns that stopped smoking as a mass consumer phenomenon in the West in its tracks. To this day, the former communist states (and still-communist China) have among the highest smoking rates in the world. While the Western cigarette easily seduced (and still seduces) these populations, the Western propensity to kick the habit is more contested. As Frank Reznik might have once interpreted it, the “right” to smoke is still valued by people from large swaths of the globe, particularly the lands once (or still) ruled by communists.

Watch for our November feature on Mary Neuburger’s new book, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (1944)

by Alexander Lang

Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt is a morbid and often surreal examination of the descent of European civilization during World War II. Malaparte’s description of Axis Europe during World War II is not the most accurate, but it may be the most telling. His extravagant writing style and excellent use of symbolism provide several haunting and powerful images that sum up the horrors of the war like few accounts have. As one of the more famous Italian cultural figures, Malaparte was connected to the elites of Axis Europe, including aristocrats, diplomats, and Nazi leaders. This is an insider’s account that comes from a man who had a long, troublesome history with fascism. Malaparte’s description of total moral collapse is so powerful because he participated in it personally.

One can guess at Malaparte’s (born Kurt Eric Suckert) moral ambiguity from his pseudonym, which was a sinister play on Napoleon Bonaparte’s surname. Though he was an early supporter of the Italian Fascist movement, he spent time in jail in the early 1930s for a controversial coup d’etat how-to guide. Later in the decade, Malaparte sought to once more ingratiate himself into the regime. At the beginning of the war, he managed to obtain permission to visit various fronts in an Italian officer’s uniform as a war correspondent for the Milanese newspaper, Corriere della Sera. It is likely that he initially believed in an Axis victory, though his articles still warranted censorship. As a German victory appeared less likely, Malaparte began changing his early (and secret) manuscript for Kaputt into a devastating indictment of Axis Europe. In this dangerous context, Malaparte described Kaputt as a novel, altered parts of it for political reasons, and included elements of fiction throughout. Despite these alterations, the themes and indelible images of the book make it an extremely interesting and thought-provoking read.

A German officer eats “C-rations” in Saarbrücken, Germany, 1945 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Symbolism plays an important role throughout Kaputt. Malaparte splits the book into six parts named after animals — Horses, Mice, Dogs, Birds, Reindeer, and Flies – and relates his experiences with these animals during the war to broader problems in European society. In the section on horses, for example, he compares the smell of dead horses on the Eastern Front with the new, industrial smell of burned-out armored vehicles. Then he describes a horrifying scene on the northern shore of Lake Ladoga, outside of Leningrad, in which hundreds of Russian horses froze to death in the lake, with their heads sticking out of the ice. For Malaparte, the indifferent attitude of Europe to the slaughter of so many horses represents the final death of any sense of nobility in European culture.

Paris after bombardment, April 21, 1944 (Image courtesy of German Federal Archives/Wikimedia Commons)

In another powerful scene, Malaparte describes a German general in Finland who is obsessed with catching a large salmon. In the final struggle, the general, decked out in his uniform and watched by many spectators, tussles for hours with the salmon. Frustrated and facing a blow to his dignity, the general orders his aide to shoot the salmon in the head with a pistol. Malaparte argues time and again in Kaputt that Nazi violence is a product of fear and weakness. The very thought that the “lesser beings” of the world could even challenge the always triumphant German demands the destruction of the “pitiful” challenger. Thus the valorization of strength leads to an intensive fear of the weak, which alone has the power to unmask the hollow, naked truth of the real German. While one cannot say whether the salmon story is true or not, it effectively encapsulates Malaparte’s explanation of Nazi violence.

Ruins along the Pegnitz River, Germany, April 20, 1940 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Malaparte’s symbolic descriptions of the front would make for a powerful account in their own right. Yet the true weight of the book comes from the immorality of those behind the front. In a clever literary technique, Malaparte describes elite social gatherings in which he tells his stories from the front. The reactions tell us much about the moral depravity of the decadent Axis elite: laughter, jokes, evasion, justification, and sullen acceptance are the norm, while true outrage and empathy are nowhere in sight. Malaparte is so disgusted by this cold and hardened response to the destruction of Europe and its people that he is shocked to hear the word sangue (blood) uttered with reverence by poor Italians in Naples. Malaparte can scarcely believe that blood could be a sacred and dignified object after he has seen so many Nazis speak of mass death in such scientific terms and expressionless tones. This blasé attitude to the horrors of war is best seen in Malaparte’s intimate conversation with the Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano. While Ciano believes there is a chance he can survive by siding with the Allies, Malaparte frankly tells him that the Italians will want him dead for his actions during the war and that his only option is to wait for Mussolini or the Italians to kill him. Malaparte implies that Ciano did not risk his life for fascism, or against fascism, but on a failed bid for personal power, and now he will die for nothing. Ciano glumly returns to eyeing the beautiful women who frequent his court.

Soviet infantrymen marching through Kiev, 1943 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Though segments of Kaputt are either fictitious, exaggerated, or self-serving, Malaparte’s ambiguous involvement with fascism allows us to hear from someone who knew the movement from the inside, and who could offer profound insights into the moral decline of Europeans during the war. For anyone who is interested in a powerful literary account of the Eastern Front and an unparalleled description of the social life of the Axis elite, Kaputt is a must-read.

H.W. Brands on Thomas Carlyle on the French Revolution

What makes the French revolution come alive for students today? H. W. Brands tells us about teaching Carlyle’s 1837 account on the NPR book blog, here.

An Architectural History of Garrison Hall

By Henry Wiencek

As students and faculty members resume their classwork at Garrison Hall this semester, it is worth examining the iconic building’s colorful history and architectural conception. The first stages of Garrison’s development began in 1922 as the Board of Regents sought a new campus plan for the university. Although the Board had been employing the eminent New York City architect Cass Gilbert—whose achievements include the U.S. Supreme Court building, the Woolworth Building and various state capitols—pressure from local architects to patronize a Texas firm resulted in Gilbert’s termination. Subsequently, the University hired Herbert M. Greene of Dallas, James White of Illinois and Robert Leon White of Austin, who collaborated on a 1924 campus plan that included the future Garrison Hall.

Architects Tag for Garrison Hall at the University of Texas at Austin

Construction began in 1925 and finished the following year, producing the 54,069 square foot edifice at a cost of $370,000. Initially known as the “Recitation” building the new structure eventually borrowed its name from George Pierce Garrison (1853–1910), the history department’s first chair and a founding member of the Texas State Historical Association. Hired by the university in 1884, Garrison assumed responsibility for teaching the entire history curriculum and earned a reputation for domineering style. Even after the department hired additional faculty in 1891, Garrison refused to allow his colleagues to teach any U.S. subjects.

Blueprint of the architectural drawing of Garrison Hall at the University of Texas at Austin

The building’s design blended classical aesthetics with Texas iconography—pairing wide archways and Ionic flourishes with renderings of cacti, steer skulls and 32 Texas cattle brands. Texas pride is also evident on the second floor’s exterior, which is adorned with the names of prominent state figures: [Stephen F.] Austin, [William Barret] Travis, [David G.] Burnet, [Sam] Houston, [Mirabeau B.] Lamar, and [Anson] Jones.

Detail on the blueprints of the architectural drawings of Garrison Hall at the University of Texas at Austin

Throughout its existence, Garrison has accommodated numerous departments, including English, government, psychology, sociology, philosophy, economics and history—its only continuous occupant. However, Garrison has also housed other, less desirable, elements of the university as well. William Battle, Chairman of the Faculty Building Committee, described these “residents” in an October 1931 letter to Goldwin Goldsmith, the Architecture Department’s Chair: “I noticed that the north entrance to Garrison Hall is a harboring place for bats. It is evident to the senses of both sight and smell.” Responding one week later, Goldsmith lamented that “I do not see how to protect the entrances from these loathsome creatures, but Miss Gearing tells me that the Comptroller’s office has an excellent way of dealing with them. It is apparently by using fire-extinguishing apparatus.” Fortunately for Garrison’s present occupants, the University resolved this unintended infestation.

Details of the Skull Freize on the blueprints of the architectural drawings of Garrison Hall at the University of Texas at Austin

In 2008, Garrison underwent an extensive renovation that modernized its facilities while restoring its historic features. In addition to its remodeled interior, the building also resides amidst a very different University of Texas. The UT tower, completed in 1937, now dominates the campus; and no longer do students use the halls for “loitering and smoking” as history professor Walter Prescott Webb (1888–1963) once observed. Nonetheless, Garrison maintains a strong continuity with its history and functions as both a figurative and literal time capsule: the building’s hollow cornerstone contains university newspapers, correspondence and ephemera dating back to the early 20^th century.

All photos courtesy of:

The University of Texas Buildings Collection
The Alexander Architectural Archive
The University of Texas Libraries
The University of Texas at Austin

Works Cited:

Nicar, Jim, Texas Exes, UT Heritage Society, and UT History Central, “An Ode to Garrison Hall”
Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah, “Some Notable Personalities in the History Department”

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