Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

The Rise and Fall of the Austin Dam

If you cross the Colorado River at Redbud Trail and look upstream toward Tom Miller Dam, there amid the tumbled rocks you can still see the wreck of Austin’s dream. In 1890, the citizens of Austin voted overwhelmingly to put themselves deeply in debt to build a dam, in hopes that the prospect of cheap waterpower would lure industrialists who would line the riverbanks with cotton mills. Austin would become “the Lowell of the South,” and the sleepy center of government and education would be transformed into a bustling industrial city.

Black and white image of the completed Austin dam from the 1890s — View of the completed Austin Dam, 1890s. (LCRA Archives, W00108)

It never happened quite that way, of course. After strenuous efforts to sell enough bonds, and after several setbacks during construction, the city managed to complete the great granite dam in 1893 at a site just northwest of town. Standing sixty feet high and stretching nearly 1200 feet across the river, it was then one of the largest dams in the world. A. P. Wooldridge and other boosters of the project had originally envisioned harnessing the river to drive mill machinery directly, but the engineers they called in soon steered them toward the new technology of the day, and the powerhouse erected on the east bank of the river was filled with electrical dynamos that supplied current to Austin’s new network of electric streetcars, as well as to the “moonlight towers” the city acquired in 1895. The shores of the lake that formed behind the dam—named “Lake McDonald” for John McDonald, the mayor who had whipped up support for the project—attracted new residents and developers, while the waters of the lake itself drew those seeking respite from the Texas heat. Austin boomed in the mid-1890s, driven largely by land speculation. Monroe Shipe established “Hyde Park,” a classic “streetcar suburb” north of downtown, and smaller developments sprang up around the city.

Black and white image of a group of men laying large granite blocks for the first Austin Dam in 1892 — Laying the last granite block in the first Austin Dam, 1892 (LCRA Archives W100198)

One of the biggest land deals was engineered by San Antonio banker and businessman George Brackenridge, who had acquired a large tract of land just downstream from the proposed site of the dam, evidently hoping to sell mill sites once the dam was completed. But the promised cotton mills never materialized. The flow of the Colorado proved to be far more variable than the project’s promoters had claimed, and the dam was never able to produce the kind of steady power needed to drive a bank of mills. At times it barely sufficed to power the lights and streetcars.

Having never lived up to expectations, the dam failed spectacularly on 7 April 1900. Enormous storms upriver sent a torrent of water cascading eleven feet over the crest of the dam. After the rains had stopped, Austinites came out that bright Saturday morning to see their local version of Niagara. Then at 11:20 am they heard a loud crack—“like a gunshot,” several said—and watched in horror as a central section of the dam gave way and slid sixty feet downstream. Water blasted into the powerhouse, wrecking it and killing eight people. Lake McDonald vanished, and though the western end of the dam still stood, the eastern half was destroyed. More than a century later, great chunks of it are still to be found scattered in the riverbed, forming part of the present Red Bud Isles.

Black and white image of the destroyed Austin Dam with large chunks of debris in the water after the flood of 1900 — The first Austin Dam in pieces after the April 1900 flood (LCRA Archives W100514).

The Austin Dam was probably doomed from the start. Over the objections of their engineers, McDonald and other city leaders had chosen a singularly poor site to build a dam: the exact spot where the Balcones Fault Zone passes under the river. The rock on the eastern end of the site was so loose and fractured it could be shoveled up and water percolated freely through it, undermining the foundation of the dam. Nor had the dam been properly built. Joseph Frizell, the original engineer on the project, quit in disgust, complaining that McDonald had meddled with the design and let the contractor use inferior materials. Faced with such knavery, Frizell said, a responsible engineer had no choice but “to abandon the work as he would abandon fire and pestilence.” A string of other engineers quit the project, too, and the eventual collapse of the dam was in some ways not a surprise.

After 1900, the people of Austin did what they could to recover from the disaster. Having gotten a taste of city-owned electric power, they refused to go back; they bought out the local private power company, which used steam-driven generators, and today’s Austin Energy municipal utility is in a sense a legacy of the old Austin Dam. The city also tried to rebuild the dam itself, but a dispute with the contractor left the repairs unfinished in 1912, and another flood in 1915 damaged it further. By then Brackenridge had given up his hopes for industrial development, and in 1910 he donated his five hundred acres of riverside land to the University of Texas, which now uses it for student housing and a biological field laboratory.

The wrecked dam sat derelict, “a tombstone on the river,” until the Lower Colorado River Authority stepped in and, with federal money, rebuilt it as Tom Miller Dam, completed in 1940. The remaining portions of the 1893 and 1912 dams were incorporated into the new structure, but are now hidden under new layers of concrete. By the time it was finished, however, Tom Miller Dam was already overshadowed by the much larger LCRA dams built upstream at Lake Travis (Mansfield Dam) and Lake Buchanan (Buchanan Dam), which for the last seventy years have provided water, hydroelectric power, and flood control for Central Texas.

Most Austinites barely notice Tom Miller Dam today, and few know the story of the old Austin Dam at all. Over the years I’ve have several students write research papers and senior theses about the dam and its effects on Austin in the 1890s; one of the best, by Ed Sevcik, was published by the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in 1992 as “Selling the Austin Dam.” Ed emphasized how the story of the dam reflected an ongoing tension in Austin between proponents of development, eager to spend public money to try to attract private business, and those who see such urban bustle and industry as something to be avoided rather than embraced. It is a story that has not ended even yet.

Notes:

The Lower Colorado River Authority website has more historical material, including a large digital photographic archive.

Ed Sevcik, “Selling the Austin Dam: A Disastrous Experiment in Encouraging Growth,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly (96:2, Oct 1992)

Lauren Belfer, City of Light (2003). A novel, set in Buffalo in 1901, about building dams for electricity and the conflicts that came with industrialization, with a wide-ranging view of gender and class conflicts in that period.

Click here for Bruce Hunt’s previous article on Austin’s moonlight towers.

Photographs courtesy of the Lower Colorado River Authority

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.

Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes by Lisa L. Moore (2011)

by Mary Katherine Matalon

The 1792 poem “Verses to Abigail Smith,” was preserved by Abigail’s brother, Elihu Hubbard Smith, who transcribed the poem into his diary and chronicled the strong friendship that existed between Sarah Pierce, the author and future founder of the Litchfield Female Academy, and his sisters Abigail and Mary. Like Smith, Lisa Moore is interested in recording and preserving the rich world of female friendship and same sex desire that she has discovered in a variety of creative media in the late eighteenth century. While diverse in form, these “sister arts,” including garden design, paper collage, collecting, and poetry, were united by the ways that their practitioners all used the landscape and the natural world both literally and metaphorically to create artworks that forged and memorialized the bonds among women.

In this lavishly illustrated book, Moore analyzes the lives and works of eighteenth-century women who practiced the sister arts: the artist Mary Delaney, the natural philosopher and collector Margaret Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland, poet Anna Seward, and the aforementioned Sarah Pierce. Moore is a skilled and vivid storyteller and her compelling prose enables the reader to inhabit the affective and intellectual landscapes these women traversed. For instance, the Duchess of Portland emerges as an insatiable collector and connoisseur of both female friendships and objects of natural history. In fact, Moore argues, the two practices—the forging of deep and sustained female friendships and the collecting of natural history specimens—were inextricably intertwined for the Duchess, who served as key link among a network of female friends who shared her passion for the natural world. For the Duchess, as for the other women Moore studies, flowers, shells, and other aspects of the natural world become a kind of language through which women can express their love and desire for one another.

Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes is simultaneously concise and evocative. Moore’s analysis not only suggests fresh, new ways of thinking about the history of sexuality and the history of material culture but also suggests ways in which these two, typically separate, fields might overlap. Moore’s stated goal is not to recuperate a straightforward lesbian identity for her subjects, but to establish the ways in which their creative practices can be read as lesbian, “because of their resonance with central features of lesbian history and culture that are still meaningful.”

Mary Delaney‘s botanical illustrations of flowers were considered to be “libertine” by some eighteenth-century critics.

In so doing, she demonstrates how we might map a history of sexuality onto the history of material culture—that is, she shows us how we might begin to read objects, rather than people, as lesbian or queer. For instance, Moore reads the shell grotto created by Mary Delaney and The Duchess of Portland as an important contribution to the lesbian sister arts tradition. Accordingly, Moore emphasizes the aspects of the grotto that accord with this tradition; she excavates the associations between the shells and female sexuality and she explains the way in which the creation of the grotto would have contributed to the two friends’ intimacy. Ultimately, Moore contends that the grotto serves as a monument to the two women’s passionate friendship. While we will never know the exact nature of that friendship, Moore demonstrates that inscribing its tangible manifestation—the shell grotto—into the lesbian sister arts tradition allows us to see the ways in which sexuality and intimacy were embedded both within the grotto and the women’s enduring relationship in ways that can be classified as lesbian or queer. Overall, Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes is a deeply rewarding book for it both complicates and enriches our view of these women (some of whom have been vastly understudied) and their creative legacies.

Further reading:

Lisa L. Moore’s blog, Sister Arts.

The book’s official page at the University of Minnesota Press.

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, Abridged Edition by Raymond Arsenault (2011)

by Matt Tribbe

Fifty years ago, in the spring and summer of 1961, a brave group of activists dared to commit one of the most dangerous acts imaginable at the time: they blatantly obeyed the laws of the United States. Knowing full well that a majority of white Southerners did not accept federal desegregation orders, and that the Kennedy administration was reluctant to enforce them, hundreds of civil rights activists nonetheless embarked on Southern-bound buses in order to test a recent Supreme Court decision forbidding segregation at interstate bus terminals. This was not necessarily civil disobedience, disobeying unjust laws for moral and political ends. Rather, as Raymond Arsenault notes of these “Freedom Rides,” it was a “disarmingly simple act.” The Freedom Riders would just behave as if Supreme Court rulings were, in fact, the law of the land, and then respond nonviolently to the inevitable bloodied heads, broken bones, firebombings, and intimidating prison stints that greeted their attempts to sit in interracial pairs on buses and integrate restaurants, waiting rooms, and even shoe-shine stands at terminals in the Southern states. Though few anticipated the full ferocity of the organized white resistance in the Deep South, the Riders hoped that such disturbing scenes of brutality against nonviolent activists who were simply expressing their constitutional rights would shock the nation out of its complacency on Southern segregation.

Arsenault offers an engaging chronicle of the Freedom Rides in this new, abridged edition of his definitive 2006 account. He places the Freedom Rides in their larger historical trajectory, revealing their antecedent in an earlier attempt to desegregate interstate buses in 1947 and examining various civil rights strategies and initiatives over the 1950s that contributed to the decision to launch the campaign. But this book is about a specific moment in time—the summer of 1961—and Arsenault uses his gripping narrative to explore many broader issues confronting the civil rights movement and the nation as a whole in that particular year. We see in all their complexity, for example, the often-strained relationships and clashes over strategy between various civil rights organizations. Most established groups like the NAACP were critical of these provocative actions, yet it was that organization’s unenforced court victories that made the Freedom Rides both possible and necessary. Another major theme that Arsenault follows over the year is the Kennedy Administration’s consternation at the Rides. Wary of the embarrassment they might cause the United States at this pivotal moment in the Cold War, just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and shortly before Kennedy’s first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Attorney General Robert Kennedy constantly urged the Riders to accept a “cooling-off period” so that the administration could deal with Southern segregation in a more deliberate manner. But as the Riders well knew, “cooling off” meant returning to the unacceptable status quo. Indeed, to the Kennedys’ great chagrin, they were perfectly willing to cause a national crisis in order to force the administration to finally take meaningful action against segregation.

As the emphasis in the book’s title suggests, however, what comes across most vividly in Freedom Riders is the dogged determination of the four-hundred-plus activists who volunteered to continue the Rides over the summer, even after it was clear that violence and incarceration in Southern jails were unavoidable. Arsenault ably recreates all of the savage beatings and unenviable dilemmas faced by these men and women who risked their well-being, their freedom, and even their lives in order to force America to live up to its principles.

Readers wishing to learn more about this often-overlooked campaign of the civil rights movement and the very diverse group of people who pulled it off; about the movement’s decisive shift toward the strategy of non-violent direct action; about the massive headaches this endeavor caused the Kennedy Administration; about the horrors that faced anyone who challenged Deep South racial mores in the early 1960s; and, perhaps most important, want this story told with both nuance and flair, will enjoy Freedom Riders.

The fiftieth anniversary of the freedom rides this year has brought out a number of moving books, films, and other website materials:

PBS “American Experience,” film, Freedom Riders

The website for the PBS “American Experience” film, Freedom Riders, includes historical material, maps, biographies, teaching guides, and more.

James Farmer, one of the organizers of the Freedom Rides, interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

Raymond Arsenault interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air”

Group photograph: Freedom Riders at the home of Dr. Richard Harris after the church siege in Birmingham, AL. Included are Lucretia Collins (center), James Farmer (far right) and John Lewis (ground, right).
Credit: Johnson Publishing Company
From American Experience, Freedom Riders (fair use)

Photograph of James Peck seated on a hospital gurney in Birmingham, Alabama following attack on a Freedom riders bus. By Joseph M. Chapman Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Loseph Lelyveld (2010)

by Sundar Vadlamudi

Gandhi challenges biographers. The author must confront Gandhi’s prodigious writings, six decades of work as a political activist and social reformer, and importantly, his consecration as “Father of India” and international stature as Mahatma (Great Soul). Perhaps aware of this difficulty, Joseph Lelyveld sets himself a modest goal to “amplify rather than replace the standard narrative” of Gandhi’s life. The author, a former correspondent and Executive Editor of the New York Times, reported for nearly four decades on both India and South Africa. Thus, he brings a unique perspective to the project. In the book’s first part, Lelyveld revisits the oft-repeated tale of Gandhi’s transformation in South Africa between 1893 and 1914 from an unknown lawyer to a social reformer and a political organizer. The second part presents the well-known story of Gandhi’s trials and tribulations in his attempts to impose his ideas, developed during his South African experience, on a “recalcitrant India.” Throughout, Lelyveld focuses on Gandhi’s social reform efforts rather than his involvement in India’s nationalist movement for independence from British rule. His choice could have been influenced by the recent decline in public enthusiasm in India for Gandhi’s ideas of non-violence. Today, the term “Gandhian,” as Lelyveld notes, implies little more than “social conscience.”

Despite its conventional conclusions, Lelyveld’s biography acquired notoriety following a review in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the author depicts Gandhi as a bisexual and a racist during his stay in South Africa, a bald misrepresentation of the book. Lelyveld compares Gandhi’s pronouncements on black South Africans on different occasions and concludes that they remained “contradictory and unsettled.” The second instance of controversy relates to Gandhi’s relationship with an East Prussian Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach. The two lived together for about three years in Transvaal and, in one letter, Gandhi pledges “more love, and yet more love… such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.” But Lelyveld never implies that Gandhi and Kallenbach had a homosexual relationship. Rather, he indicates that Gandhi only expected love, devotion, and unquestioning support from Kallenbach. The unfortunate controversy overshadows some crucial points raised in the book.

Significantly, at several points, Lelyveld questions the historical construction of the myth about Gandhi. He points to the current South African government’s appropriation of Gandhi into its national history and he presents evidence that Gandhi actually supported South African whites’ suppression of the Zulus in the 1906 Bhambatha Rebellion. Similarly, he questions Gandhi’s saintly status as a champion of India’s lower-caste untouchables. Lelyveld illustrates Gandhi’s limited enthusiasm for a struggle by untouchables in Kerala (South India) to gain entry into temples since he believed that such conflicts could weaken the unity among Hindus in the larger struggle for Indian independence.

In his discussion of Gandhi’s successes and failures in India, Lelyveld treads on well- traveled ground and breaks no new turf. But, his discussion of Gandhi’s attitudes towards blacks and the absence of any sustained relationship between Gandhi and black South African leaders raises interesting questions about the role of race in the three-way contest between white settlers, black South Africans, and Indians. The book, therefore, promises to initiate further debate on Gandhi’s views on race as well as on racial relations among non-white populations in the British empire.

Further reading:

The Wall Street Journal’s controversial review of Great Soul.

“The Inner Voice: Gandhi’s Real Legacy,” an article that appeared in the May 2 issue of the New Yorker.

Day of Wrath (1943)

By Brian Levack

The film Day of Wrath, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, is in my opinion the finest film ever produced on the subject of witchcraft. Dreyer, who is best known for The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), adapted the film from a drama by the Norwegian playwright Hans Wiers-Jenssen. The film is based on the accusation and trial of Anne Pedersdotter, the wife of the Lutheran theologian Absalon Pedersen Beyer, for witchcraft. Anne, who was Norway’s most famous witch, was burned at the stake at Bergen in 1590.

Day of Wrath takes many liberties with the historical record of Anne’s trial. The film nonetheless illustrates many of the sources of witchcraft trials in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Europe, when approximately 45,000 individuals—most of them women—were executed for this crime. The film introduces a second witchcraft prosecution, that of an older woman, Herlof’s Marthe, who is identified as a friend of Anne’s deceased mother. Marthe conforms much more closely than Anne to the stereotype of the old, poor unmarried witch. The film also illustrates how tensions within families, especially between mothers and daughters-in-law, could result in witchcraft accusations. In the film Anne’s mother-in-law, Merete, had never approved of her son, Absalon’s second marriage to the young and beautiful Anne. When Anne falls in love with Martin, Absalon’s son by his first marriage, the relationship between Anne and Merete deteriorates. When Absalon dies suddenly upon discovering that his wife and son are having an affair, Merete charges Anne with having caused Absalon’s death by witchcraft. The film also shows how Anne gradually comes to believe that she is a witch. Having learned from Absalon that her mother had once been accused of witchcraft, Anne begins to believe that she had acquired her mother’s occult powers. Her success in winning Martin’s affection and in bringing about her husband’s death by wishing it to happen reinforces her belief that she is a witch, leading her to confess at the end of the film. Very few people accused of witchcraft confessed voluntarily in early modern Europe, and there is no evidence that the historical Anne Pedersdotter did so. But those few witches who did confess freely usually did so after they became convinced that they had the special powers attributed to them.

The film, which has become a classic, displays many of the features of Dreyer’s skill, most notably his willingness to hold close-ups much longer than most other directors. The film also gained political significance for what could be seen as its criticism of the Nazis, who occupied Denmark during the war, when the film was made. The Nazis banned the film, presumably for its depiction of unauthorized searches, the use of torture, and the efforts of authorities to create fear within society. The enduring historical value of the film, however, lies in its powerful depiction of the dynamics of witchcraft accusations in early modern Europe.

Norwegian actress Lisbeth Movin as the witch Anne Pedersdotter in Day of Wrath.

Further reading:

Background info on Day of Wrath.

A Youtube clip of Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Executed Today: Anne Pedersdotter, Norwegian witch.

Posted Monday, June 20, 2011.

A Dangerous Idea

by Miriam Bodian

In 1645, a young Jew who had been captured in Portuguese Brazil was brought to Lisbon and tried by the Inquisition for heresy. He had been reluctantly baptized by his parents in France, where the practice of Judaism was forbidden. His trial, in many ways so much like other inquisitorial trials, is different from any other trial I know of in one respect: The “heretic,” Isaac de Castro Tartas, defended his right to practice Judaism on the basis of a universal natural right to freedom of conscience. This was a bold defense but it ultimately failed; he was burned at the stake in 1647, at the age of nineteen. But his long exchanges with his inquisitors on religious authority and individual conscience are preserved in a lengthy dossier housed today in the Portuguese National Archives, and tell us much about the hopes and fears around this issue.

Anonymous engraver, 17th century. The text reads “Method for burning those condemned by the Inquisition” and depicts the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon, Portugal.

Today, people who live in democratic societies take religious freedom for granted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most Europeans found the idea of “freedom of conscience” deeply threatening. How could the fabric of society withstand competing religious ideas? What would convince people to live moral lives in the absence of a single, state-supported church? The anxiety Europeans felt about religious freedom impeded the struggle to achieve that freedom. Isaac de Castro’s trial vividly reflects the great divide between the few who supported this idea and the powerful authorities who rejected it. The inquisitors’ views about religious authority is often disparaged; but even in 2011 it is just as important to understand the mentality of the inquisitors as it is to understand the arguments of Isaac de Castro.

Castro defended himself by arguing that even if the inquisitors chose to regard him as a baptized heretic, he was not guilty of heresy, “because an act that is done in accordance with one’s conscience cannot be judged culpable, and the act I have and will continue to do – the act of professing Judaism – is done according to the dictates of my conscience.” Castro supported his argument by describing his experience as a practicing Jew in Amsterdam and Dutch Brazil. These were exceptional environments in which freedom of conscience had been written into law. The inquisitors would have been well aware that Dutch society was thriving and had not been torn apart by the religious diversity of its inhabitants.

The Kahal Zur Israel synagogue in Recife, Brazil was the first Jewish congregation in the New World. It was founded in 1636 during the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco.

But the inquisitors were imbued with a medieval perspective on conscience, according to which individual conscience was “in error” if it differed from the teachings of the Catholic Church. Castro was accused of ignoring the Church’s authority and presumptuously adhering to his own personal beliefs. Confronted with this accusation, he strategically abandoned his argument as an individual and adopted an authoritarian counter-view. He argued that as a Jew by ancestry, and having been circumcised, he was bound to observe the Law of Moses – an argument invoking (Jewish) religious authority that met the inquisitors on their own ground. This concession by Castro,however, proved fatal. The inquisitors argued that baptism, regardless of ancestry, obligated Castro to observe the teachings of the Catholic Church. Having invoked religious authority, Castro had opened himself to attack. If “conscience” meant obedience to doctrines that did not come from within, as he had been pressured to admit, was he not bound to the first obligation he had incurred in his life, that is, baptism?

A great deal of pain, suffering, and experimentation have accompanied the process by which we have come to regard religious beliefs as a matter of individual conscience. But to understand events in our own time, it is important to understand that such an idea is not at all obvious – that for many centuries this was an idea that few could even imagine. An examination of the intense struggle in early modern Europe between those who defended religious authority and those who resisted it brings into focus the great difficulty involved in establishing a principle of religious freedom. It may help us to understand the frequent failure of well-intentioned efforts to impose an idea cherished in the western world, but alien to people conditioned to accept religious authority and to condone the persecution of religious nonconformists.

You may also like:

Historian Richard Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition: an Historical Revision (1999) offers a nuanced reassessment of the Spanish Inquisition’s role in history.

Yale Professor of Brazilian history Stuart Schwartz examines religious toleration in All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2009).

Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (1999).

Images via Wikimedia Commons

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1980)

by Gail Minault

We are in the delivery room in Bombay, at midnight on August 14/15, 1947, the moment India and Pakistan are created as independent nations. Two children enter the world simultaneously, one Muslim, one Hindu, and their destinies will be determined by the timing of their birth. Through their eyes, and especially through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, the reader travels around the subcontinent, meeting the other children of partition and viewing every major national event until Saleem Sinai quite literally disintegrates. Saleem is the reader’s guide through the world of independent India and Pakistan; its problems become his problems in fantastic and unpredictable ways. Through this journey, Saleem must face his past and his future, and it is not always clear how they will come together.

Midnight’s Children, winner of the 1981 Man Booker Prize, stands out as the most compelling account of the surreal aspects of partition experienced by families throughout the affected areas. While it may seem unusual to turn to a work of magic realism for guidance on a topic as complex as partition, Rushdie captures the tensions of these historical events better than most standard histories. There are no Viceroys or national fathers in Rushdie’s novel. But there are fathers and mothers, lovers, sons and daughters, friends and bitter enemies. As a young Muslim entering newly created Pakistan, Saleem loses his memory, loses his connection to his past, his connection to the history of Muslims in India; now relegated to a separate chapter, a separate country, a separate history.

The realities of partition, it seems, are best interpreted through Rushdie’s magical landscapes. Writing in English, he nonetheless expands a body of Urdu and Hindi literature that, in the months and years after the traumatic migrations of 1947, tried to capture the sense of unease that the divide introduced. These stories and poems looked into the dark heart of partition, long before the high politics had concluded or become fodder for official histories. As in Saadat Hasan Manto’s famous Urdu short story of partition, Toba Tek Singh, where the actions of the sane appear insane, and the insane sane, Rushdie builds upon a tradition of interpretation that goes beyond the histories of real actors and dives into partition’s fictions, its profound surreality.

Further reading:

Hosain, Attia. Sunlight on a Broken Column. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992.

Ravikant, and Tarun K. Saint, eds. Translating Partition: Stories by Attia Hosain, Bhisham Sahni, Joginder Paul, Kamleshwar, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Surendra Prakas. New Delhi: Katha, 2001.

Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New Delhi: Roli Books, 2006.

Zaman, Niaz, ed. The Escape and Other Stories of 1947. Dhaka: University Press, 2000.

AIDS & Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame by Paul Farmer (1992)

by Blake Scott

In 1983, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia announced that there were four major risk groups for AIDS in the United States – homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin-users, and Haitians. The report acknowledged that each of the four groups – widely known as the “Four-H Club” – contained many individuals who were not at risk for AIDS. In the early years of the epidemic, however, those exceptions meant little to the public. AIDS was a new, mysterious disease and these people were its supposed carriers. The warning, in the end, may have caused more harm than good, intensifying paranoia and discrimination.

While all four groups experienced the stigma of accusation, there was something particularly arbitrary about the ‘Haitian’ risk pool. It was the only risk group based on nationality rather than specific behavioral factors. Why were all the citizens of Haiti included in the CDC warning? In his well-crafted book, Paul Farmer takes “a geographically broad and historically deep” approach to explain the roots of the AIDS accusation afflicting the Haitian community.

Leading up to the official warning, the media and a handful of prominent scientists in the U.S. had erroneously concluded that Haiti was the original source of AIDS in the Americas. As Farmer convincingly argues, though, the Haitian origin theory represented a “systematic misreading” of both epidemiology and history. The false accusations that swirled around the Haitian community, he explains, drew on a long history of racism and ethnocentrism.

Over the course of the 1980s, Farmer, a medical doctor and anthropologist at Harvard University, carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Haiti, while at the same time, offering medical services to rural communities. In his writings, Farmer combines medical and anthropological knowledge to explain how both international and local forces shaped disparate responses to the epidemic.

U.S. troops marching during the occupation of Haiti, 1915, via Wikimedia Commons.

The book is made up of highly readable essays that allow the reader to approach the story from several angles – from Haitian community dynamics to larger medical debates to transnational economic and political issues. In one essay, for example, Farmer narrates the local history of the village of Do Kay to illuminate how poverty and cultural beliefs, such as sorcery, helped to direct responses to the disease. In another section, he explores the intersections between epidemiology and history to explain how HIV most likely arrived to Haiti via North American tourists. The arrival of AIDS, he concludes, was linked to Haiti’s historical and continually evolving role in a regional economy dominated by the United States.

Haiti after the earthquake. Photograph by Eva Hershaw.

Farmer offers a compelling argument for why medical professionals need to better understand the histories and cultural practices of the people they hope to help, at home and abroad. Haitian counter-theories, which vehemently blamed North American imperialism for the arrival of AIDS, originally baffled U.S. medical doctors and scientists. A greater awareness of the history of U.S.-Haitian relations would have led to a more sympathetic and likely, a more effective medical response. In short, anyone interested in learning how history and culture affect societal responses to disease will find Dr. Farmer’s book well worth their time.

For those interested in learning more:

The Agronomist. In this documentary, award-winning director Jonathan Demme profiles the life of Haitian journalist and radio pioneer Jean Dominique. Through the life of Dominique and his family, The Agronomist offers a compelling portrait of Haiti in the second half century of the twentieth-century.

Paul Farmer’s Haiti After the Earthquake. Dr. Farmer offers an on-the-ground account of the most recent earthquake in Haiti, discussing its aftermath and recovery projects, past, present, and future.

Mary A. Renda’s Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940. Professor Renda explores the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the 1915 intervention and its aftermath. She shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism.

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Professor Dubois weaves the stories of slaves, free people of African descent, wealthy whites, and French administrators to explain how the Haitian Revolution became a foundational moment in the history of democracy and human rights.

George on the Lege, Part 9 – Abortion Law in Texas

Interior view of the Texas State Capital Building looking up into the building's dome depicting the dome's many layers

By George Christian

On May 19, Governor Rick Perry signed into law legislation further restricting abortion rights in Texas. H.B. 15, which passed by 2-1 majorities in both the Texas House and Senate, requires a physician to perform a sonogram on a woman seeking an abortion at least 24 hours prior to the abortion procedure. The bill further requires the physician to show the sonogram to the woman, explain the images on the sonogram, and make the fetus’s heartbeat audible. A woman seeking an abortion may waive the requirement that she view the sonogram image and hear the heartbeat, but must hear the explanation of the sonogram images unless she can certify that: (1) she is pregnant by reason of sexual assault, incest, or other criminal violation; (2) she is a minor receiving an abortion under the judicial bypass procedure; or (3) the fetus has an irreversible medical condition or abnormality. If the woman certifies that she resides more than 100 miles from the nearest abortion provider, she may waive the 24-hour waiting period. The bill requires the provision of printed materials to women seeking abortions and penalties for physicians who fail to comply with the law.

With Governor Perry’s signature, Texas joined eighteen other states that regulate sonograms for pregnant women seeking abortions, but is only the fifth state to require a woman to obtain a sonogram prior to an abortion (the others are Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, and Mississippi; Oklahoma’s similar sonogram law is in abeyance pending a court challenge.) H.B. 15, however, can be seen as part of a larger historical trend to reassert state regulation of abortions in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that struck down a Texas criminal statute barring a woman from procuring and a physician from performing an abortion unless a physician deemed it necessary to save the woman’s life. As Justice Blackmun recites in his opinion in Roe, Texas’ criminalized abortion in 1854, joining a growing number of states and territories (Connecticut was the first in 1821). The statute survived in substantially unchanged form through several subsequent revisions of the Penal Code, most recently in 1961, but physicians prosecuted and convicted under the statute had repeatedly challenged its constitutionality in state courts. As early as 1908, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the state had a fundamental interest in preserving fetal life and that the state’s proscription of abortion was not unconstitutionally vague (Jackson v. State, 55 Tex.Cr.R. 79, 115 S.W. 262 [1908]). The Court affirmed this decision in 1971, just two years prior to Roe. For well over a century, Texas law, as well as the laws in a majority of states, made voluntary abortion illegal.

This all changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when several state courts (Texas excepted) struck down criminal abortion statutes. In Roe, seven justices of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, albeit not all for the same reasons. Speaking for the majority, Justice Blackmun concluded that criminalizing abortion violates the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. States or the federal government may not regulate abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy, but may regulate abortion in the second trimester in a manner reasonably related to maternal health. In the third trimester, a state may proscribe abortion except where it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother. Justice Blackmun’s characterization of the legal history of abortion at English common law and in its nineteenth-century statutory adaptations in the United States has proven almost as controversial as the decision itself. A growing scholarship on the subject asserts that American jurisprudential and medical history belie Roe’s emphasis on the relative leniency of the common law toward abortion and the existence of a constitutional right to an abortion. This debate will doubtless rage on and deeply influence the next round of litigation seeking to reverse Roe.

In the meantime, states such as Texas have steadily eaten into the conceptual framework of Justice Blackmun’s constitutional argument by erecting increasingly more restrictive hedges around a woman seeking to exercise that right. In response to a 1974 request for opinion, Texas Attorney General John Hill issued guidelines pertaining to abortion in the post-Roe world, including: (1) a requirement that only licensed physicians perform abortion; (2) physicians and private hospitals (but not public hospitals) may decline to provide abortion services; (3) abortion facilities should not be subject to any reporting or regulatory requirements different than other facilities; and (4) legislation allowing the putative father to consent to the abortion would likely be unconstitutional. The initial legislative response to Roe and the Attorney General’s interpretation occurred in 1977, when the Legislature immunized from liability physicians who refused to perform abortions and allowed private hospitals and clinics to refuse to perform abortions unless the pregnant woman’s life was in imminent danger. In 1985, the Democratic Legislature passed and Republican Governor William P. Clements signed the Texas Abortion Facility Reporting and Licensing Act, which required all facility or physician’s offices performing abortions to obtain licenses and report detailed information regarding each abortion provided.

Tighter abortion restrictions interacted with U.S. Supreme Court decisions handed down after Roe. In a series of decisions beginning with Danforth v. Planned Parenthood, 482 U.S. 52 (1976) and ending Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490 (1989), the Court began relaxing Roe’s strict scrutiny standard and allowing regulation of abortions and abortion facilities. The new test was whether state regulation imposed an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion. The effect of this shift was to open the door to informed consent, waiting period, and parental consent laws. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), the Court specifically upheld Pennsylvania’s 24-hour waiting period, informed consent, parental consent for a minor (with a judicial bypass), and detailed reporting requirements, though it struck down a spousal consent requirement. The Court passed up several opportunities to revisit the issue for nearly a decade, when in Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914, 120 S.Ct. 2597 (2000) it struck down a Nebraska statute prohibiting partial-birth abortions as overly broad. A split Stenberg court, however, left open the possibility that a more narrowly tailored ban on partial birth abortions, one that excepted procedures to save the life of the mother, would pass constitutional muster. Since Stenberg, 16 states have banned partial birth abortions, but not yet Texas.

After a relatively quiescent period in the 1990s, an increasingly conservative Texas Legislature took up the abortion issue with renewed vigor. In 1999 Texas joined the 39 states that prohibit third trimester abortions and impose penalties on physicians who performed them. The Texas legislation exempts abortions in which a physician concludes that the fetus is not viable and the pregnancy is not in the third trimester, the abortion is necessary to prevent death or serious harm to the woman’s physical or mental health, or the fetus has a severe, irreversible abnormality. More significantly, the Legislature passed legislation barring a physician from performing an abortion on a pregnant unemancipated minor without at least 48 hours prior notice to the minor’s parent or court-appointed managing conservator or guardian, unless the physician determined an immediate abortion was necessary to prevent the minor’s death or avoid a serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function. The legislation also allowed a minor to seek a court order authorizing the minor to consent to the procedure without parental notification. Texas’ parent notification law became a centerpiece in then-Governor George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign for the White House.

Four years later Governor Rick Perry championed and the 2003 Legislature enacted the “Woman’s Right to Know Act,” which required informed written consent before an abortion may be performed; detailed information in the consent form about the risks of abortion, the availability and benefits of prenatal and neonatal care, pregnancy counseling services, and adoption services; a 24-hour waiting period between dissemination of the materials and the abortion procedure; and detailed explanation and images of the fetus at certain gestational periods. Texas is now one of 22 states with a mandatory waiting period. It is this 2003 statute that has now been expanded to add the sonogram requirement. As in 1999, when a Texas governor advocated a parental notification law as part of his presidential election bid the following year, a current Texas governor, after declaring a mandatory sonogram law a legislative emergency earlier this year, has an abortion regulatory bill under his belt as he mulls a presidential bid of his own. This historical coincidence does not at all mean that abortion regulation is merely a political issue, though strong anti-abortion or pro-life credentials appear necessary for candidates hoping for success in the GOP primary elections. But it does suggest a fundamental philosophical position that is likely to hold sway in Texas for the foreseeable future. What remains to be seen is how far the courts will allow state legislatures to go. If current trends hold, abortion rights will continue to shrink, and Texas stands at the forefront of this movement.

Sources:
Guttmacher Institute, State Policies in Brief: An Overview of Abortion Laws, (accessed May 1, 2011)

John Keown, “Back to the Future of Abortion Law: Roe’s Rejection of America’s History and Traditions,” National Center for Medically Dependent & Disabled, Inc., 22 Issues L. & Med. 3 (Summer, 2006)

J. Lewis and Jon O. Shimabukuro, “Abortion Law Development: A Brief Overview,” Congressional Research Service, January 28, 2001 (accessed May 10, 2011)

National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine (Bethesda, Maryland), http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3353873 (accessed May 30, 2011)
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)

Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History by Karl Jacoby (2008)

by Nathan E. McCormack

In Shadows at Dawn, Karl Jacoby examines the way that perspective influences historical memory and the role that political power plays in selecting which memories become codified in the historical narrative. Jacoby does this through a study of the Camp Grant Massacre—the death of approximately 140 Apache at the hands of a group of white and Hispanic settlers and Tohono O’odham natives in April 1871 in the Aravaipa Valley in Arizona.

Jacoby examines the settlement of the Arizona-Mexico border region from four perspectives, those of the Apache and O’odham natives, the settlers from Mexico, and settlers from the United States. He relates each group’s story individually, highlighting events forgotten, dismissed, or emphasized, and demonstrating the way each group created a unique narrative about a shared event. In doing so, he calls attention to the influence of numerous factors, that influence the creation of history and group memory, including a culture’s worldview and its political position within the larger social context.

Divided into two overall sections—before and after the Aravaipa massacre—Jacoby begins each group’s narrative with its arrival in the area northeast of the Gulf of California, in present-day southern Arizona (in the case of the O’odham, whose arrival in the area is uncertain, a discussion of its lifestyle before the other groups’ arrivals). Jacoby discusses each group’s interaction with the others from its own perspective, which he gleans by studying historical and biographical narratives, or artifacts with analogous function among the indigenous groups. By addressing the way each group interpreted common events common, for example the cause each group attributed to the Aravaipa attack, Jacoby theorizes about the way that each group envisioned its role in the conflict, and more broadly, the way that it interpreted life in the rugged Arizona territory.

Jacoby’s study presents a fairly straightforward analysis of the events leading up to the Araviapa Canyon attack and does not attempt to present a theoretical explanation for the violence of the frontier or colonialism. The major contribution of Shadows at Dawn, however, is Jacoby’s portrait of each group’s distinctive perspective on the same time period—and, in some cases, the same events. This is particularly useful in postcolonial or subaltern studies, for recovering the voices that are lost when, as is frequently the case, only the history of the dominant or victorious community has been preserved. Jacoby’s approach, however, also highlights the difficulty of subaltern histories—preserving the perspective of conquered peoples, which tends to be lost or destroyed. What fragments remain—in his account the calendar sticks of the Apache serve as an example of these historical remnants—generally paint an unclear or incomplete picture, at best, and the historian must engage in some degree of speculation to construct a narrative based upon them. This is particularly true when dealing with semi-literate groups like indigenous North Americans.

Despite this difficulty, Jacoby utilizes the extant material effectively and acknowledges the challenges that it presents. The result is unique both in its approach and analysis and makes for a readable and accessible study, which avoids the all-too-common trap of theoretical overreaching.

Further reading:

Official website for Shadows at Dawn.

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