20th Century Archives - Page 7 of 19

From There to Here: Lina de Castillo

Map of Columbia (via Wikipedia)

In September of 1980, my mother took a calculated risk. As a talented singer with perfect pitch frustrated by a broken marriage and limiting law career, my mom left Bogotá, Colombia to pursue her dream of opera singing. My father, already starting his second family, agreed that my brother and I needed to go with her. My maternal grandparents followed us to the United States soon thereafter. While my mother worked hard to win first prize at international lyric-opera competitions with the help of a renowned voice coach, my brother and I worked hard to learn English and excel in school with the help of caring teachers, our grandparents, and kind friends. We both were inspired by our mother’s tremendous efforts and her willingness to take risks. Although my daily life during the school year took place in Westchester County, New York, an important part of my childhood also took place in Bogotá, where I spent many summers and occasional winter breaks with my Colombian family. I yearned to learn more about the place of my birth. I also missed my family terribly when I wasn’t with them. At the same time, I appreciated the security, opportunities, and friendships I found in the United States.

Curiously, although Latin America was often included in the content of our social studies textbooks, we rarely got the chance to actually study the region. As an undergraduate student at Cornell University, I finally found courses that began to teach me about Latin America, including a course on US-Latino literature (the gendered sensitivity evoked by “Latinx” had yet to be imagined). For the spring semester of my junior year, I decided to ‘study abroad’ at home in Colombia. Doing so proved to be one of the most eye-opening and academically satisfying experiences of my life up to that point. The international relations seminar I took with Juan Gabriel Tokatlian at la Universidad de los Andes helped me see more clearly the problems that come with treating a public health crisis (drug addiction) through militarization and strategies of war. At the Javeriana University, I signed up for a graduate-level seminar on the Annales school, a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century that stresses long-term social history. A fellow student openly revealed his Marxist leanings and offered memorable critiques of our readings. These conversations for the first time allowed me to realize that there could be different schools of thought when it came time to develop historical analyses. Upon graduation, I decided to return to Colombia, where I taught a version of the US-Latino literature course at the university level, but only until my supervisor required that I teach the 19th-Century Colombian History survey. These experiences, together with the friendships I made with colleagues at la Javeriana and los Andes made one thing clear: if I wanted to be serious about teaching and researching at the university level, I needed to pursue graduate study in the United States. At the end of the day, the only career track that would allow me to bi-locate between my two beloved homes, the United States and Colombia, was the historical profession.

Also in this series:

Tatjana Lichtenstein
Julie Hardwick
Toyin Falola
Yoac Di-Capua
Susan Deans-Smith

Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China

By Alan Roberts

Former flag of the communist part of China (via Wikipedia)

Despite a growing tolerance for socialism, “communism” is still a dirty word for most Americans. Many point to Stalin’s Gulag, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, and the repressive Kim dynasty in Korea as they preface the question how could communism ever appeal to anyone? For each country, there are myriad answers to that question, but it is useful to consider the historical situation in each nation before they embraced communism.

In China, for instance, there were political, economic, and nationalistic reasons for the popularity of communism, but interestingly, Chairman Mao Zedong’s movement found broad popular support in part because of his explicit efforts to enforce gender equality. It was he, after all, who proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky.”^[1] Compared with China’s Confucian patriarchal system that had oppressed women for so long, many saw this as a welcome change. Nevertheless, part of what makes patriarchy so insidious is its ability to trick whole generations of people—including women—into propagating an oppressive system rather than overthrowing it.

Judith Bennett’s History Matters analyzes patriarchy in a medieval European context, but her theoretical claims could also be applied to pre-communist Chinese society in general, and Confucianism in particular. Bennett points out that it is problematic to broadly assume that men alone are the perpetrators of patriarchy and that women are their passive victims. While the institution of patriarchy certainly privileges the masculine over the feminine, Bennett also states that patriarchy has harmed individual men just as it has benefitted individual women. Indeed, certain women have not only benefited from it, but have also served as active “agents of patriarchy.”^[2]

Portrait of Confucius, painted by Wu Daozi, 685-7 58 (via Wikipedia)

Confucius lived circa 500 BCE, but it was not until the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) that Confucianism became the official state ideology. Since then, Confucianism was not simply a “main character” in Chinese society but also the stage, set, and scenery upon which the play of Chinese daily life unfolded. Central to Confucian philosophy is the doctrine of filial piety. This principle teaches that universal harmony is maintained when everyone shows proper respect to their elders because the organization of the family is a microcosm patterned after the organization of the state. A filial son honors his father, but filial piety also articulates the rules of conduct between friends, elder and younger brothers, husbands and wives, subjects and emperors. In this way, society is hierarchically structured with men ruling over women and the old ruling over the young, all the way from the lowliest peasant granddaughter to the imperial Son of Heaven.

At the apex of the Confucian philosophical pantheon sits Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi. Writing almost four-hundred years after the fact, the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang (79-8 BCE) compiled a biography of 125 women who each exemplified Han feminine virtues. One of these women was the mother of Mencius, who, according to Liu, taught her son that a woman’s duties are to cook the five grains, heat the wine, look after her parents-in-law, make clothes, and that is all! This means that a woman’s duty is not to control or to take charge. Instead she must follow the ‘three submissions.’ When she is young, she must submit to her parents. After her marriage, she must submit to her husband. When she is widowed, she must submit to her son. These are the rules of propriety.^[3]

It is worth pointing out that although this quote is attributed to the mother of Mencius, it was actually written centuries later by a man whose intention was to reinforce the patriarchal order by projecting stereotypical female attitudes into the mouth of an authoritative woman whose own gravitas is enhanced by the respected tradition surrounding her son. However, Liu Xiang laid the foundation for others to buttress the Confucian patriarchy.

Photo of He Zhen (via Wikipedia)

Almost a hundred years after Liu Xiang, Ban Zhao, China’s first female historian, wrote a book titled Admonitions for Women. Her work condemns spousal abuse, but this text would certainly qualify Ban Zhao as one of Bennett’s “agents of patriarchy”:

On the third day after the birth of a girl…lay the baby below the bed [to] plainly indicate that she [is] lowly and humble and should regard it as a prime duty to submit to others…give her a spindle with which to play [signifying] that she should accustom herself to labor and consider it a prime duty to be industrious. Let a woman modestly yield to others; let her put others first, herself last. Should she do something good, let her not mention it; should she do something bad, let her not deny it. Let her bear contempt; let her even endure when others speak or do evil to her. Always let her seem to tremble and to fear.^[4]

A thousand years later, Confucian patriarchy would intersect gender and class by adding foot binding to its repertoire of female suppression. While women of the upper class suffered the debilitating pain and immobility of having bound feet, women of the lower classes without bound feet suffered socially from diminished marriage prospects and public humiliation. However, prior to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, bowing to society’s unrealistic beauty standards, all classes of Chinese women were binding their feet. Roughly half of all Chinese women had bound feet, although the percentage rose significantly among the upper classes. Although many Chinese emperors and administrators tried to outlaw the practice, only the communists were successful at doing so because of their superior organizational tactics and relentless campaigning.^[5]

In 1907, an expatriated Chinese woman named He Zhen published a series of articles on feminism and equal rights. Although she preceded the Chinese Communist Party by over a decade, and although she was not widely read by the Chinese public, her essays did influence a number of important social agitators whose movements helped bring the Communist Party to power. She begins her essay, “Women’s Revenge,” by outlining the patriarchal injustices that Chinese women have suffered. She then asks “how did this poison fill the entire world? It can be traced to the doctrines of Ban Zhao.” She continues by labelling Ban a traitor to her sex, a dupe of Confucian misogyny, and a willing agent of patriarchy.^[6] He’s intention, however, is not simply to lay the axe at the root of patriarchal Confucianism, but to actively promote communism as the treatment for China’s nineteenth and twentieth century social ills.

In another essay, He declares that starvation is the strongest tool of sexual oppression in Chinese society. By controlling the food (i.e. the products of labor), men control the labor of women. He argues that just so they can eat, women generally fall into one of three categories: either they are slaves to their husbands; they work in factories for slave wages; or else they become prostitutes and enslave themselves to their pimps. He proclaims that the problem for Confucian women is that they are dependent on others, and “as long as you depend on others, you cannot be free. I have a good idea that will exempt you from relying on others while still finding food naturally. How? By practicing communism.” Whether or not a twenty-first century Westerner agrees with He’s assessment, it should at least be understandable why so many oppressed Chinese women agreed with Mao and He that because women hold up half the sky, “if we only unite together, with [communism] we can naturally have a good future. As we say colloquially, ‘the good times are coming.’”^[7]

(Alan Roberts is an alumnus of the Defense Language Institute’s Chinese language program. He is currently a graduate student in history at Utah State University where he is writing his Master’s thesis on performative elements of gender in Chinese Communist propaganda.)

^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/world/asia/holding-up-half-the-sky.html?_r=0

^[2] Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 59.

^[3] Xiang Liu, “Women’s Virtues and Vices,” in Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, 2^nd Ed, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey (New York: The Free Press, 1981, 1993), 73.

^[4] Zhao Ban, “Admonitions for Women,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 1, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 821, 822.

^[5] Louisa Lim, “Painful Memories for China’s Footbinding Survivors,” National Public Radio, March 19, 2007, accessed May 2, 2018, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8966942.

^[6] Zhen He, “Women’s Revenge,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 2, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 394.

^[7] Zhen He, “What Women Should Know About Communism,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 2, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 390-2.

From There to Here: Susan Deans-Smith

Map of England (via Wikimedia)

I came to Texas from England over thirty years ago, now. My prior experience of living in the U.S. had been during my year abroad as part of my undergraduate degree at the University of Warwick, embedded in the department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although unbeknownst to me at the time my experience in Madison proved to be pivotal and part of the chain of events that would result in my coming to UT-Austin and Texas. Two things happened as a result of my time in Madison. The first was exposure to an absolutely brilliant political scientist of Latin American history– Peter H. Smith. The second was my first trip to Mexico. After completing my year at Madison and before returning to England to complete my senior year at Warwick, I embarked on my version of Jack Kerouac’s road trip – in my case a Greyhound bus and its Mexican counterpart (solo, no less) from Madison to Mexico City. Mesmerized by my experiences in Mexico, I knew that I wanted to specialize in its history. During the writing up of my dissertation at Cambridge University, I was lucky enough to be invited for one year as a visiting professor in the History department at UT-Austin. That year was particularly memorable and as I look back I’m still not quite sure how I did what I did: prep for four new courses in a university system very different from that of Cambridge where I was used to the tutorial system; complete my dissertation that involved some commuting between Austin and Cambridge; and, oh yes, fall in love with the Texan who I would marry. In fact, in March of that memorable year, I flew to Cambridge to defend my dissertation (successfully), and flew back to Austin the next week to get married. Not bad! But, things got even better. As it turned out, the professor for whom I substituted for a year, decided not to return. I applied for the tenure-track position that opened up and was fortunate to be selected for the position. And, here I am at home in Texas and privileged to be working with creative colleagues, stimulating students, and phenomenal research resources. Plus, I never did like the English climate……

Also in this series:

Tatjana Lichtenstein
Julie Hardwick
Toyin Falola
Yoac Di-Capua

IHS Panel: 1968: A Year of Upheaval in Global Perspective

Why has the 50th anniversary of a year generated so much interest just now? The year was 1968, and it witnessed an extraordinary outburst of protest and upheaval – one that transcended international borders. While the protests were triggered by diverse events and conditions, they seemed linked by more general aims of combatting institutionalized injustice and government abuse. This panel will examine the specific background and dynamics of 1968 movements in France, Mexico, and the United States (including Austin, Texas). At the same time, it will ask why these movements surfaced at this particular juncture, across much of the globe.

Matthew Butler
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Judith G. Coffin
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Laurie B. Green
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Leonard N. Moore
Vice President of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (Interim)
George Littlefield Professor of American History
University of Texas at Austin

Jeremi Suri, moderator
Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs
University of Texas at Austin

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.

Inching Towards War: Military Preparedness in the 1930s

The 1936 National Democratic Convention in Philadelphia was a coronation of sorts for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who faced little serious opposition in his pursuit of a second nomination. The convention program was full of articles and photographs that talked up the president’s programs and achievements during his first term. However a closer look at the working drafts found in the program printer’s archive, stored on campus at UT Austin’s Briscoe Center, shows that the administration grappled with presenting the political issues of the day to the public. Of particular note are essay drafts related to America’s role in the world, and specifically how Roosevelt sought to justify military investment to a skeptical public.

The printer’s archive includes original artwork, photographs, advertisements and party leader biographies from the 1936 convention program. In addition, it boasts a set of fully annotated typed essays written by Roosevelt’s Cabinet members and other officials. Those essays—including entries for the State and Treasury departments, the National Park Service, and the Works Progress Administration—comprise the bulk of the program’s content.

The program represented a chance for the Roosevelt administration to project its philosophy, policies, and achievements upon both the convention and the upcoming general election. The essays’ many edits point to the ways that Roosevelt’s ideas and activities were deeply contested at the time within the Roosevelt administration, the Democratic Party, and the wider American public during the 1930s.

George Dern, United States Secretary of War from 1933-19336 (via Wikipedia)

George Dern’s essay is more annotated than most. The former governor of Utah was Roosevelt’s secretary of war from 1933 until his death shortly after the convention. Like the staunch anti-war campaigner, U.S. Senator Gerald Nye, Dern was a western progressive. His essay reflects this, emphasizing that American foreign policy “contemplates no aggressive action: it is entirely defensive. We are a peace-loving people.” And yet, unlike Nye, Dern advocated for upgrading the military’s capabilities to create a force – neither “dangerously small” nor “menacingly large” — that could respond rapidly in a crisis. Treading lightly, Dern remains pointed in his criticism of the Republican controlled Congresses of the 1920s, accusing them of underfunding the Army, which left it lacking in both equipment and personnel: “The President and the [now Democratic] Congress have taken steps to remedy at least in part this serious defect.” However, he is quick to add that America remains “considerably behind the armies of other countries.”

It’s a point that Dern reiterates again and again, but, intriguingly, Roosevelt’s communication strategists omitted many of these assessments. Whole paragraphs alluding to America’s unpreparedness for war are crossed out, including references to needing more soldiers and rifles and the Army being “very much smaller than that of any of the nations of comparable importance.” Roosevelt operatives—aware that the president’s internationalist leanings were stronger than those of the American public as a whole—were as keen as Dern to stress the practical rather than idealistic reasons for military investment. However, they appear to have thought Dern went too far and risked making America appear weak. In a world stalked by Hitler and Stalin, during a decade that had witnessed Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, that would be an understandable concern. In any case, Dern’s essay employs another motif to broker consensus for military investment: the Army as an agent of social and economic progress.

Essay by Dern with edits (via the Dolph Briscoe Center)

Dern states that the Army had been a “vital creative force that is closely identified with the growth and progress of our country.” Not only was it instrumental in pioneering preventative medicine and radio transmission, it was Army engineers who had “surveyed the routes of the early canals and the first railroads.” In addition to placing the Army within America’s glorious, trailblazing past, Dern emphasizes its nonmilitary achievements in the present. He highlights the Army’s work in disaster response and flood mitigation, as well as in training, equipping, and feeding members of the Civilian Conservation Corps. which employed nearly 3 million unemployed American youths in a variety of conservation programs such as trail maintenance and tree planting during its nine-year existence. Dern’s point was to show that the Army could “serve the people as well in the exigencies of peace as in the travails of war.” This was aimed at cultivating consent for an enhanced and enlarged military during a period when the public remained on the fence about internationalism and the prospect of upgrading America’s role in world affairs.

Dern was succeeded as secretary of war by Harry Hines Wooding, who continued his predecessor’s cautious modernization. Likewise, Roosevelt’s internationalism remained tempered, and domestic issues still dominated. However, events were to evolve rapidly. America’s perceived lack of response to Nazi aggression from 1938 on drew national and international criticism. After Paris fell to Hitler in 1940, the United States quietly pivoted toward Britain, as it had in World War I, supplying materials and later armaments in the war against Germany. Wooding was forced to resign and was replaced with Henry Stimson, who echoed Roosevelt’s now-increasingly hawkish tone and practice.

Sections concerning military nixed in this draft (via Dolph Briscoe Center)

Congress, however, remained divided even as late as the fall of 1941. Efforts to dilute the neutrality acts of the previous decade were successful, but the legislative opposition, led by Nye and others, was vociferous. Indeed, an extension to the military draft in August 1941 (from one to two and a half years) passed in the House by only one vote — that of Speaker Sam Rayburn from Texas. (Rayburn is pictured behind Roosevelt, right). But the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in December proved to be the tipping point, outraging American public opinion and leading to a swift congressional declaration of war. Even Nye voted aye. Germany, Japan’s ally, declared war on America in the days following. The United States was now at war both in the Pacific and the Atlantic. As in 1917, policy had edged forward but then seemed to turn on a dime. More than 16 million Americans went on to serve in World War II. Partially, gradually, emphatically, intervention had prevailed over isolation.

From There to Here: Yoav Di-Capua

by Yoav Di-Capua

Map of Israel (via Wikimedia)

(UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.)

I wish I could introduce clarity, coherence and a sense of purpose into the story of my arrival to this country from my native city of Jerusalem. I wish I could say that it was meticulously planned and well-executed. That it was a clean break with a past life that no longer resonated with me and that leaving behind parents, family, friends and memories was the natural and logical thing to do. I wish I could say that upon my arrival I actually knew English well enough and that it was all easy as it meant to be. That it was like in the movies. But, alas, I cannot. I never really pondered living here and America was never on my family’s radar. We were Europhiles of Italian stock. We did not travel to the US, we did not talk about the US or think about the US. Quite simply, it was not a part of our imagination. And though rock music was the soundtrack of my teenage years, the county as a whole stayed foreign to me.

That remained the case until I discovered the American life of the mind. Until I realized the brilliance of its academy, the beauty of its books and the depths of its intellectual tradition. Until I realized that it is not only Bob Dylan who was out there singing all by himself. And so, in late 1999, when I packed my bags to leave for Princeton I did not really immigrate to a new country with big cities, mighty rivers, unbelievable storms, manicured gardens and bad food. Instead, I immigrated to a new language, a new intellectual landscape and a new sense of perception. Above all else, that became my new home. It still is.

Life in the new country proved to be a mess. My manners were off. I was too rude, too direct, too disrespectful, too aggressive, too casual and too whatever you can imagine as improper and inadequate. The art of “small talk” eluded me. I could not follow the rules. The police took my driver’s license. By the end of four years, I badly wanted to go home, back to the tribal society of Israel where I could once again make sense of myself. A place where you earn points for being rude, direct and truthful and when you don’t need to drink a beer in order to open up your heart. So I did. I married an American girl and moved back home; subconsciously making it as likely as I could that my life in Israel would come to a quick end. And it did. For a while, I celebrated my reunification with the beloved Hebrew language and with its brilliant humor. I indulged in friends, memories, good food and music. A lot of music. But I was also shocked by what I encountered.

The Second Intifada just ended. I mourned the death and destruction. I took the collapse of the Peace Process personally and I hated, and still do, the occupation of Palestinians with every cell of my body. I became an activist and spent more time in threatened Palestinian communities than writing my book. Troubled and upset, the life of the mind was slowly slipping away from me. The politics of getting a teaching position in Israeli academia were something like an episode of the “Game of Thrones.” It was not for me. Months after my return, the prospects of making a life in Israel and building my career there appeared to be slim to non-existent. The fact that my wife was living in Damascus did not help matters, either. I guess this is what Philosopher Svetlana Boym meant when she wrote of the impossible condition of “homesickness and the sickness of home.” It was not good. My parents were also worried, loved ones tried to intervene and friends protested my activism. They wanted me to stop trying to fix the unfixable and settle down. I could see their point, and thought they were right, but I decided to do this settling down somewhere else: in Texas, to be precise. I loved them all, I still do, but that was it. Defying my provincial expectations, UT presented a rich intellectual –and more important – human environment. Fifteen years or so after my crash landing on this campus, it appears that my second coming to America was something of a rebirth. I love it here. Teaching, writing and raising kids is enough for me. I still miss home. I miss it daily, but I have acquired another one as well. It is a home I grew to appreciate and love slowly and patiently, taking it, just as my three daughters do, one step at a time.

Also in this series:

Tatjana Lichtenstein
Julie Hardwick
Toyin Falola

“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library

By Gwendolyn Lockman

The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library opened “Get in the Game,” a timely exhibit on the intersection of social justice and sports, on April 21, 2018. In 2014, a new wave of athlete activism began in the United States. That year, NBA teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warm ups to protest the police brutality against Eric Garner. In the summer of 2016, the WNBA joined the conversation with the “Change Starts with Us—Justice & Accountability” and #BlackLivesMatter, #Dallas5, #__ demonstrations by the Minnesota Lynx and New York Liberty. The current moment is most defined, of course, by Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests that began in the 2016 NFL preseason. “Get in the Game” charts a legacy of barrier-breaking and justice-seeking athletes from the late 19^th century to the present with an emphasis on the current relationship between athlete activism and American politics.

Colin Kaepernick at the LBJ Library, (*all pictures unless otherwise noted are by the author*).

The exhibit is remarkably comprehensive, especially for a small-scale and brief installation (the exhibit closes January 13, 2019). Visitors will find a wide selection of sports represented—horse racing, football, baseball, basketball, track and field, boxing, tennis, golf, and fencing—and attention to gender, race, media, player salaries, and social justice. Guests should be keen to linger in the center room of the exhibition, where curatorial care and intentionality is reflected in an exceedingly well communicated examination of Jackie Robinson’s post-baseball activism and the 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights.

Letter from Jacki Robinson to President Johnson (photos by the author, materials held at the LBJ Library)

While most Americans are familiar with Jackie Robinson as a figure and the brief details of his early career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, few popular versions of his story reflect on the later years of his baseball career and after he retired. It is not popularly discussed that Robinson was among the crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, nor that he campaigned for Richard Nixon.

Robinson committed much of his time in retirement to activism, working with the NAACP, encouraging other black athletes, and communicating with several politicians. “Get in the Game” features letters and telegrams from Robinson to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The letters show Robinson’s concern that Civil Rights remain a presidential priority throughout changes in regimes, as well as his concerns about the morality and risks regarding the Vietnam War.

Robinson implored Eisenhower to do more for African Americans, writing, “I was sitting in the audience at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders yesterday when you said we must have patience. On hearing you say this, I felt like standing up and saying, “Oh no! Not again!” I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most patient of all people. When you said we must have self-respect, I wondered how we could have self-respect and remain patient considering the treatment accorded us through the years.”

Robinson also engaged Presidents regarding black liberation in Africa and Dr. King’s anti-war stance. He wrote to President Kennedy, “With the new emerging African nations, Negro Americans must assert themselves more, not for what we can get as individuals, but for the good of the Negro masses. I thank you for what you have done so far, but it is not how much has been done but how much more there is to do. I would like to be patient Mr. President, but patience has caused us years in our struggle for human dignity.”

When Dr. King protested the Vietnam war in 1967, Robinson wrote to President Johnson, “I do feel you must make it infinitely clear, that regardless of who demonstrates, that your position will not change toward the rights of all people; that you will continue to press for justice for all Americans and that a strong stand now will have great effect upon young Negro Americans who could resort to violence unless they are reassured.”

Another strength of the exhibition is the number of items on loan or gifted from the Dr. Harry Edwards Archives at the San Jose State University Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change. Dr. Edwards led the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), the group that organized the boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, and continues to work with athletes, including Colin Kaepernick. The exhibition focuses not only on Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s iconic anthem protest and its 50^th anniversary, but also the support, solidarity, and demands of the OPHR.

Mere days before his assassination, Dr. King met with Dr. Edwards and endorsed the athletes’ “courage and determination to make it clear that they will not participate in the 1968 Olympics until something is done about these terrible evils and injustices.” Five members of the Harvard Rowing team, due to compete in the Games, appeared with Dr. Edwards to officially state, “It is their criticisms of society which we here support.” Black students at Harvard Law also stated that they supported the athletes’ “willingness to sacrifice the fruits of your labor for the achievement of the goals of Black Americans.”

Though the International Olympic Committee (IOC) met one of the demands of the OPHR, that South Africa and Rhodesia be uninvited to the games, and the boycott was called off, Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and other basketball players maintained their stance and did not compete at the games.

Even for those athletes who did compete, the spirit of the OPHR continued, breeding both solidarity and backlash. An OPHR button is included in the exhibition, like the ones worn by Smith, Carlos, and the Australian runner Peter Norman who won the silver medal alongside Smith’s gold and Carlos’s bronze. Displayed adjacent to the button is a State Department memo concerned with what to do about the demands from the IOC to remove Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village, though the athletes ended up leaving on their own, returning to backlash from the press and the public.

The exhibition closes with Kaepernick and notes his connection to the 1968 Olympics. A unique strength of the materials is the inclusion of University of Texas at Austin alumnus Nate Boyer, who worked with Kaepernick to attempt to bridge the divide between his protest and American servicemen and women and their families.

A notable curatorial decision that mutes the political nature of the exhibit and fails to connect Jackie Robinson, the 1968 games, and Colin Kaepernick, is the omission of Jackie Robinson’s autobiography I Never Had it Made (1972). This is a common missed connection in the anthem protest legacy. Calling upon Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”, the introduction to Robinson’s book recalls game one of the 1947 World Series, Robinson’s rookie year. He writes, “The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. it [sic] should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment . . . As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Though the decision to omit the autobiography is an easily defendable one—the focus on Robinson is his breaking the color barrier and his correspondence with Presidents—it stands out because of the inclusion of other athletes’ autobiographies and provocative statements. Perhaps more accessible due to the museum’s possession of an inscribed copy owned by LBJ, Bill Russell’s book Go Up For Glory (1966) is included, along with details of his delivery of Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve in the military.

As visitors exit “Get in the Game,” the last item they see is the block quote, “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” from Frederick Douglass. Knowing what we do about Robinson, Smith and Carlos, and Kaepernick, it is also worth considering a quote from Douglass’s “Fourth of July” speech:

“The Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, by Frank Dikötter, Lars Peter Laamann, and Zhou Xun (2004)

By Horus T’an

The opium myth is one of the most important pillars of the conventional narrative of modern Chinese history. According to the myth, opium is presumed to be a highly addictive narcotic and highly harmful to its users’ health, and Great Britain used its military superiority to impost the shameful opium trade on China and turn it into a nation of opium addicts who were “smoking themselves to death while their civilization descended into chaos.” In the opium myth, opium symbolizes the imperialists’ pernicious intention to dominate China and the tragedies suffered by all the nations facing imperialist aggression. In Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun debunk the opium myth through exploration of the history of opium in China from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. They point out that the opium myth was invented by nationalist reformers and never reflected the reality of opium in Chinese society during the late imperial period. The authors also argue that the miseries experienced by Chinese opium smokers from the end of the nineteenth century were brought on by the anti-opium campaigns launched by the Chinese authorities rather than the chemical property of opium. These campaigns degraded the opium smokers into a morally depraved status and forced them to use more harmful semi-synthetic opiates like morphine and heroin.

The opium myth analyzed opium smoking practices in China and India in isolation from the cultural and social factors sustaining these practices. In contrast, this book shows that opium in China served as an essential lubricant in male social activities. Opium was prepared and appreciated in highly sophisticated ceremonies by male social elites. Opium also served as a panacea for many ailments. Quite contrary to the incurable addicts in the opium myth, the authors argue that the opium consumed in both China and India was relatively moderate and had few harmful effects on either health or longevity. Most opium smokers were able to control the quantity of the opium they consumed, and the irresistible compulsion toward ever-increasing doses was not a common phenomenon among them.

The highlight of this discussion about the history of opium before the end of the nineteenth century is the comparison between tobacco and opium. The authors demonstrate that tobacco and opium played a relatively similar role in social activities and people showed similar attitudes toward them. There were alarms in the 1830s and 1840s from a few Han officials over moral decay and the breakdown in social order caused by the prevalence of opium. The opium myth interpreted these critiques as Chinese people’s unyielding resistance to imperialists’ attempt to turn China into a nation of opium addicts. Nevertheless, the authors prove that these alarms were based on Confucian asceticism rather than Han officials’ understanding of the addictive chemical property of opium since some officials expressed similar concern about the popularity of tobacco. In addition, the authors emphasize that the critique of opium by Han officials was related to their desire to restore the scholar-official class to the position of moral authority that it possessed during the Ming dynasty.

The authors suggest that the opium myth, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, was a confluence of two trends. The first is the prevalence of opium prohibition in Europe from the 1870s. Opium prohibition was “part of the medical profession’s search for moral authority, legal control and statutory power over pharmaceutical substances in their fight against a popular culture of self-medication.” The second is Chinese nationalists’ effort to defend their own country from the encroachment of imperialism. The nationalists were eager to figure out why China was repeatedly defeated by imperial powers. The authors suggest that the Chinese nationalists viewed opium smoking as the origin of national weakness rather than a personal behavior and that they saw anti-opium campaign as a useful tool to save China from a world dominated by imperial powers.

The authors’ second conclusion is that the anti-opium campaigns, rather than the opium itself, brought miseries to opium smokers. The anti-opium campaigns transformed the public image of opium smokers from gentlemen to thieves, swindlers, and beggars who were enslaved by powerful chemicals. These campaigns also transformed opium houses from a culturally sanctioned venue for male sociability into a site of perdition, a marker of uncivilized behavior and barbarism where vulgar and despicable addicts were leading the country to complete extinction. The prohibition laws passed in these campaigns gave authorities the right to arrest, punish, and kill opium smokers. Besides creating a criminal underclass, these campaigns also pushed smokers from moderate opium to more addictive and more harmful semi-synthetic opiates like morphine and heroin. Even worse, these semi-synthetic opiates are consumed in a much more harmful pattern: heroin and morphine were usually mixed with other unknown compounds and snorted, chewed, or injected with dirty needles shared by many addicts without any protection.

There are some omissions in this book. The first is the process by which the opium myth gained its concrete shape. The authors do a great job in deconstructing the opium myth but fail to dedicate enough attention to this process. This omission weakens the credibility of their argument. The second is the role of racism in the anti-opium campaigns. Opium smoking was mainly a habit practiced by Chinese and Indian. Racism against Chinese immigrants in the United States is responsible for linking opium smoking as a Chinese behavior with opium smoking as a barbarian behavior. Some Chinese intellectuals might accept the anti-opium ideas without any awareness of the racism behind it. The absence of the discussion of racism makes this book less useful than it is supposed to be in understanding how Chinese intellectuals changed their way of thinking through their interaction with the Western world. Furthermore, the authors’ conclusion that the anti-opium campaigns facilitated the spread of the semi-synthetic narcotics is also questionable. After the collapse of the Ch’ing Dynasty, some places of China witnessed the prosperity of both opium and semi-synthetic narcotics. This prosperity could not be explained just with the pressure of the anti-opium campaigns. Despite these omissions, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China serves as essential scholarship for the researchers of modern Chinese history. It re-interprets opium use in Chinese society from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and shatters one of the most important pillars of the conventional narrative of modern Chinese history. It reveals the complexity of modern Chinese history and implies the failure of the conventional narrative in addressing this complexity. The book throws lights on opium smokers’ miseries caused by the anti-opium campaigns and reminds readers that some important stories are crushed and abandoned in the writing of modern Chinese history. Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China also indicates the significance of culture in shaping public opinion about narcotics and encourages readers to reconsider the effectiveness of the restrictive prohibition law in dealing with the spread of narcotics.

Austin Historical Atlas: Development During World War I

(This is the first of a series that will explore creative ways to think about historic markers in Austin.)

By Jesse Ritner

1917 marked a turning point in the history of Austin’s development. A large donation and the dismembering of a family estate spread the city west and north, resulting in dramatic increases in public spaces, urban housing, and wealth for the Austin public schools. Yet, Austin’s growth came at the expense of one specific neighborhood. The story is already written onto the city, if we know where to look.

The Andrew Jackson Zilker marker (placed in 2002), the Clarksville Historic District marker (placed in 1973), and the Crusemann-Marsh-Bell House (placed in 2009) seem to be about distinctly different historical events. Zilker’s, located in front of the Barton Springs Pool House, informs us about the life of Austin’s “most worthy citizen” in basic outline, emphasizing his rags to riches story, and his generous philanthropy. The Clarksville marker, on the other hand, recounts a story of survival. It details the resilience of the black community of Clarkville, founded by freed slaves in 1871, who refused to move for over a century, despite repeated pressure from the city of Austin. Last, the Crusemann-Marsh-Bell House marker comments on the architecture of this 1917 home, built by the “granddaughter of Texas Governor E.M. Pease.” By themselves, the three markers recount one story of wealth, one of poverty, and one involving the American Dream. Collectively, they tell a dramatic geographic history of urban expansion into west Austin in 1917.

Although the date is missing in the Zilker marker, it notes that Zilker “indirectly funded school industrial programs when he sold 366 acres of parkland, including Barton Springs, to the city.” The sale occurred in 1917. The same year the heirs to the Pease estate, which spread from 12^th street to 24^th street and from Shoal Creek to the Colorado River, decided to split the estate and develop it, dramatically spreading the city of Austin north and west (marked in black on the map). This house was one of the first homes built in what would become the Enfield development. Comparing the map above to the historic map below (although it is a few years newer), it is easy to see that the black neighborhood of Clarksville (marked in red and bordering the new development), sits precariously between the new park and the burgeoning neighborhood that spread Austin west of Lamar Boulevard.

Map of Austin, Texas depicting the city's various neighborhoods

In 1918, as the Clarksville marker notes, the Austin School Board closed down the Clarksville public school in one of the first attempts to move Clarksville residents east. The decision by Austin’s school board, only a year after the single largest donation in their history, was not accidental. The absorption of what is now Zilker Park and the Pease Estate into Austin pushed city borders westward, pulling Clarksville undoubtedly into the urban sphere. The presence of a black neighborhood on the border of the soon to be wealthy and white neighborhood north of 12th street with the easy access to Zilker Park made their movement politically imperative in Jim Crow era Austin.

While the two years of 1917 and 1918 seem almost happenstantial in each individual marker, when read together they mark a significant turning point in Austin’s growth, as well as a distinct moment in Austin’s history of segregation.

Also in this series:

Mapping Austin’s Historical Markers

Similar series:

From There to Here

From There to Here: Julie Hardwick

by Julie Hardwick

Map of the United Kingdoms (via Wikipedia)

(UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.)

I came here, aged 21, on 15 August 1984 to join a study abroad program in Wisconsin with every intention of returning to the UK to become an accountant in London – and in fact I had a nice job waiting. Instead I met my now husband of 31 years two days later, and I have been here ever since: first on a student visa as I shifted into a PhD program at Johns Hopkins, then on a green card as the spouse of a citizen, and latterly as a United States citizen. We have two native Texan daughters who have dual citizenship and they are very proud of their American and British roots.

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