Media Archives - Not Even Past

Review of Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism (2021)

Over the last decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has grown into the most profitable media franchise in history. As of January 2022, the MCU accounted for four of the top ten-grossing films of all time. The expansive collection of films ranging from Iron Man (2008) to Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) has captured the imagination of new generations of viewers and taken the genre to new heights of commercial and critical success. In Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, Paul Hirsch explores the origins of these superheroes who have experienced such a profound renaissance in recent years. Hirsch examines comic books as instruments of American empire and unpacks the complicated relationship between government and publishers that have shaped these comic books’ imagery and messages over their eighty-year history.

book cover for Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism

Hirsh’s book marks an impressive effort to elucidate the political, cultural, and diplomatic legacies of an artifact that has been regarded by many as “trash.” Such attitudes have meant that cartoons’ history has “been obscured through shame, malice, and benign indifference.” Yet, Hirsch has turned up treasures through his tenacious research and the full-page, full-color reprints splendidly illustrate his analysis throughout.

Pulp Empire traces the dynamic relationship between the industry and state and federal governments, a connection that influenced comic books’ development throughout the twentieth century. Hirsch characterizes the emergence of comic books in the 1930s as products that exploited the creative energies of marginalized men and women. Writers and artists were stingily compensated for their work, while publishers began profiting handsomely as the pamphlet’s popularity rose. American entry into World War II led the industry in a new direction as the US government sought to use comic books as propaganda to generate support for the war effort and promote racial stereotypes about the nation’s adversaries. The government largely stopped regulating the medium following the war and, during subsequent decades, the industry began to depict darker stories as American society lived under the pall of nuclear warfare. Pages were soon filled with gruesome images of crime, violence, and the destructive effects of atomic explosions.

cover for "The Fighting Yank," on the cover of Startling Comics — *“The Fighting Yank,” on the cover of Startling Comics #10, Sept. 1941. Art by Elmer Wexler. Source: Digital Comic Museum*

Such seedy scenes and pervasive racist attitudes in comic books invited criticism on several fronts. Hirsch profiles anti-comic campaigners who decried these pamphlets as corrupting influences on American youth that contributed to rises in crime and juvenile delinquency. Others took a different tack and warned that stories effused with racial enmity eroded American credibility as a beacon of hope and democracy abroad during the intensifying ideological conflict of the Cold War. Hirsch shows how these efforts ultimately resulted in self-imposed censorship. New covert collaboration between the government and publishers crafted fresh characters and narratives to serve as propaganda designed to condemn communism and improve attitudes toward the United States. Several superheroes who have gained acclaim in recent films, such as Iron Man, Thor, and Spider-Man, were born from this public-private partnership and acted as implicit (or in some cases explicit) agents of US foreign policy.

Pulp Empire is filled with fascinating anecdotes and incisive analysis of the ephemera of the US empire. This book offers something for an array of audiences, from fervent comic book fans to historians of American foreign policy. Hirsch deftly deals with several dimensions of comics’ hidden history, from their perpetuation of racist and sexist tropes to their use as a unique tool of soft power popular abroad across class lines. Finally, Hirsch’s analysis of the debates over the atomic age played out in comic book pages proves both entertaining and enlightening. Pulp Empire effectively interrogates the intersection between politics and popular culture and profiles how superheroes have been deployed to serve American expansionist goals.

Jon Buchleiter is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies United States history with particular interest in US foreign policy of the Cold War. His current research examines the institutionalization of arms control and disarmament efforts and successive administrations approached and prioritized arms control initiatives. At UT, Jon is a Graduate Fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and Brumley Fellow with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Jon received his BA in Peace, War, and Defense and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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.

Presenting Prague Spring to the West: Czechoslovak Life and Socialism with a Human Face

by Cullan Bendig

In January 1968, Alexander Dubček became the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, replacing the unpopular communist hardliner Antonín Novotný. The following months of 1968, known as the Prague Spring, brought Czechoslovakia to the attention of the international community. Dubček’s goal was to create “socialism with a human face” through a series of liberalizing reforms, including loosening restrictions on freedom of expression. The Soviet Union attempted to use negotiations to reign in the program which had begun to expand beyond Dubček´s control as 1968 continued, but those efforts were unsuccessful. Under Soviet leadership, the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21, ending the period of reform and its increased freedom of speech. In the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion, the reform programs were gradually repealed and Dubček was removed as First Secretary in April 1969. The media faced a reimposed regime of Moscow-approved censorship, which would be extended to full censorship in March and April, 1969. The only reform that would survive the rollbacks was the federalization of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic.

Cover of the March, 1969 edition of Czechoslovak Life. Source: glossycommunism

The magazine Czechoslovak Life was published in Prague throughout this time, and it was distributed in English to an international audience. There is a sharp contrast between the Czechoslovak Life of pre-Prague Spring and the one that emerged in the wake of the crushed uprising. The magazine pre-Spring was much less polished, structured, and organized. Much of the content was dedicated to Czech identity and cultural achievements. In contrast, the magazine of the 1970s featured more highly polished images and articles that discussed the economic progress and welfare of the Czechoslovak state. The strict censorship imposed in 1969 is especially visible in a sudden shift in the language used to describe the Spring. Articles from the immediate wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion but before censorship stress that although the movement was crushed, the liberalizing goals of the Prague Spring were noble attempts to reform the organization of the state in line with the socialist project. After censorship was imposed, the official party narrative of the Prague Spring as a failed right-wing, bourgeoise coup replaced the previous narrative extended to Western audiences in Czechoslovak Life about what the reforms had meant.

The pre-Spring editions of Czechoslovak Life also included an editorial section alongside the table of contents that always starts with “Dear Readers….” The “Dear Readers” column was signed “Editorial Board,” and frequently commented on major international events or the state of the magazine itself. The editorial team on the magazine was largely comprised of the same group of people throughout the period when “Dear Readers” appeared. These people were replaced when “Dear Readers” stopped appearing in the magazine in 1970, therefore it can be assumed that the column was a project of this group of editors. Frantisek Lebenhart and Lenka Reinerová in particular, both Czech-born Holocaust survivors, appear in the list of editors in various positions from 1964 to 1969. The most common political statements made in the “Dear Reader” section were criticisms of then-ongoing imperialist projects by Western powers. In the November 1967 edition, for example, the editors condemned Israel as the aggressor in the Six-Day War and declared that “the editors of this magazine stand alongside the Arab states” in their resistance to colonialism. Throughout the 1960s, the editorial board was also highly critical of American military action in Vietnam.

During Prague Spring, the magazine continued to comment on global imperialism, but also shifted to address the international interest in developments within Czechoslovakia. One article alongside the “Dear Reader” column addresseed a question sent in from a Finnish reader who asks how liberal reforms can happen within a communist system. The editorial board replied that there is nothing inherently problematic with liberalizing reforms in order to advance a more democratic socialist project. The editors of Czechoslovak Life explicitly promoted Dubček´s reforms through the “Dear Reader” column and continued to do so even after the Spring began to be reversed in late 1968 and early 1969. The cover of the January 1969 edition features a photograph of a healthy, adorable child waving a Czechoslovak flag, and the first article on the next page is a telling “Dear Reader” section. This edition asks the reader to carefully verify everything they hear about Czechoslovakia in the coming months, and to remember what their elected leader Alexander Dubček had said. In retrospect, this can be seen as a forewarning of the oncoming censorship that lasted for the next two decades.

1969 was the last gasp of the “Dear Reader” section of Czechoslovak Life. In 1970, the entire editorial board was replaced by names not found anywhere in the editions from the 1960s. Frantisek Lebenhart was the first to go during 1969, and Lenka Reinerová became Editor in Chief before being removed herself between 1969 and 1970. Reinerová would not be allowed to publish at all in Czechoslovakia until the fall of communism. The content of Czechoslovak Life in the 1970s reflects the increased censorship imposed in 1969, with articles about Czech industry, the health of good socialist citizens, and denunciations of the Spring as a failed right-wing coup that Czechs and Slovaks had recognized and rejected. No mention is made of the Warsaw Pact tanks. The censorship regime imposed after the Prague Spring marks the end not only of Dubček’s reforms, but also of Czechoslovak Life presenting “socialism with a human face” to a Western audience.

Further Reading:
Glossy Communism

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The Refugees of ’68: The U.S. Response to Czechoslovak Refugees during Prague Spring
The Public Archive: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions
50 Years Since Prague Spring: Czechoslovak Dreams and Cold War Realities

The Public Archive: Indian Revolt of 1857

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Also known as “Sepoy Mutiny,” the Indian Rebellion of 1857 represented a major, although unsuccessful, challenge to British colonialism. Anuj Kaushal’s digital project, titled “Indian Revolt of 1857”, considers the question of Indian nationalism during the rebellion and British response through blogs, lesson plans, and digitized issues of Illustrated London Times and New York Daily Tribune.

More on Kaushal’s project and The Public Archive here

The Public Archive: The Road to Sesame Street

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media through digitized documents, blog posts, and lesson plans.

More on Kunze’s project and The Public Archive here.

How do we talk about Enoch? Enoch Powell, Race Relations, and Public History in Britain

Embed from Getty Images

by Edward Watson

Few British politicians in the 20th century have been as inflammatory as Enoch Powell. On April 20, 1968, the Conservative MP and Shadow Defence Secretary criticized mass immigration from the Commonwealth into the UK during an address to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. Dubbed the “Rivers of Blood” speech, Powell claimed that the anti-discrimination Race Relations Bill of 1968 would provide immigrant communities with the means to “overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

Powell’s speech caused uproar. The Times condemned it as “an evil speech” and Powell was promptly dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet by Conservative leader Ted Heath. However, Powell had his supporters. In fact, a Gallup poll in 1968 found that 74% of respondents supported his suggestion of repatriation. Powell subsequently became a mythologized and divisive figure. For the far-right, “Enoch was right” became a key rallying cry of anti-immigrant sentiment. For many on the center and the left, Powell embodies an openly vitriolic, racist strand of British politics.

BBC Radio 4, a highbrow wing of Britain’s public service broadcaster, decided to air a dramatic reading of Powell’s speech interspersed with commentary from journalists and academics in commemoration of the speech’s 50th anniversary. The presenter, BBC media editor Amol Rajan, promoted the program on Twitter, claiming that “on Saturday, for 1st time EVER, Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech will be read in full on UK radio.” The BBC has widely come under fire, most forcibly from Labour peer Andrew Adonis and academics. Dr Shirin Hirsch, who had been interviewed for the broadcast, tweeted that she was “disgusted by the way the BBC are promoting this show. I made a mistake and was interviewed for this but I have been sick with worry since seeing the way this is being presented.” Considering the divisive nature of Powell’s speech, many questioned the decision to give an uncritical platform to the far-right while others focused more on the decision to commemorate the speech at all. Rajan later defended the decision by arguing that “the speech is broken up, and critiqued by voices from across the spectrum. Not just read out in a single go.”

On Saturday, for 1st time EVER, Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech will be read in full on UK radio (by actor Ian McDiarmid). Please join us @BBCRadio4 8pm. Super-brains Nathan Gower + David Prest have done an amazing production job. Great guests too: https://t.co/3XvDMSH16d
— Amol Rajan (@amolrajan) April 12, 2018

The BBC’s broadcast touches on numerous ethical and methodological issues for public historians. How do we deal with difficult subject matter? What is the best medium for a critical analysis of such an incendiary speech? How should such a broadcast be marketed? What are the risks of presenting the speech as a commemoration? Its hype as “the first time” the speech had been broadcast was fundamental to the controversy. Historians often use anniversaries as an opportunity to disseminate their own work and engage with a public audience. In this instance, the seemingly celebratory nature of the significance of Powell’s speech was widely criticized. Historicizing Powell’s speech is important and we have to establish critical and reflective ways of covering Powell in the wider context of race relations in Britain. There is no singular correct way to do this, but a dramatic reenactment of the speech seems inappropriate, especially as there is no recording of Powell’s most famous and divisive line, “I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

This is not to say that Enoch Powell should be ignored. Powell’s speech represents an important juncture in British political and cultural history. Prior to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, Commonwealth citizens had extensive rights to settle in the UK. Race riots, most notably in Notting Hill and Nottingham in 1958, inflammatory speeches (such as Powell’s), and restrictive immigration laws were indicative of intense debates surrounding race relations in the UK. In 1964, the hugely controversial election in Smethwick in the West Midlands highlighted the prevalence of racism in British politics, as the Conservatives were widely reported as adopting the slogan “if you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour.” By the time British citizens of South Asian origin faced a campaign of discrimination from the Kenya African National Union (KANU) government in 1967, racial tensions and white British concerns over the influx of immigrants from the Commonwealth were immensely influential over government policy. The Kenyan Asian crisis, as it came to be known, prompted the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill in 1968, which reduced immigration from the Commonwealth to 8500 per year and a mere 1500 from Kenya specifically. 80,000 people in Kenya, who had previously been entitled to British passports as Citizens of the UK and Colonies, were effectively rendered stateless. In an effort to appease their critics, the Labour government passed the Race Relations Act in 1968. The act made it illegal to refuse housing, employment or public services to a person on the grounds of race or national origins. Powell rallied against the Labour government’s bill and the levels of immigration, arguing that it was “like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He believed that racial tensions “of American proportions” which were “interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.”

Embed from Getty Images

The specific context to Powell’s speech is often forgotten and there are historical and political ramifications in understanding its background and subsequent influence. For the left, so eager to portray the Labour party as the bastions of racial equality, it represents a colossal failure in terms of immigration and race relations for Harold Wilson’s government. On the far-right, Powell’s mythology is increasingly synonymous with all anti-immigrant sentiment. Understanding Powell’s background illuminates why his speech was so dangerous. Powell has been caricatured as a demagogue and a rambling racist, but he was a highly respected, classical scholar with an astute awareness of how he could manipulate history for political means. Powell believed history “was always a series of myths and the point was to choose the most appropriate ones for the hour of national need.” He was an articulate and charismatic orator. This was no incoherent, raving outsider, but a calculated and educated member of the political elite.

This is what made his speech so divisive and why it continues to have relevance in British political life to this day. In 2014, comedian Russell Brand called UKIP leader Nigel Farage a “pound shop Enoch Powell” on the BBC’s political TV show Question Time. Welsh UKIP leader, Neil Hamilton, defended Enoch Powell, arguing the idea that Powell was a “racist villain” is “absolute nonsense.” Even more recently, Commonwealth immigration has hit the headlines with the Home Office coming under fire for destroying landing cards from the “Windrush generation,” with thousands of children who were brought to Britain from the West Indies in 1948 now at risk of deportation. Days ago, Labour MP David Lammy, lambasted the Prime Minister and Home Secretary for appeasing the anti-immigrant sentiment of the far-right, arguing that “if you lay down with dogs, you get fleas.” The ghost of Enoch Powell looms large over UK politics. We would do well to figure out an appropriate way to discuss Powell’s speech in its historical context as well as how it fits into contemporary political discourse. Understanding Powell’s strand of racist rhetoric derives from a closer reading of his speech and the context in which he delivered it. In this sense, the BBC’s decision to critique the speech amidst the dramatic reading is important. However, if Britons are to have a more meaningful discussion about the history of race relations, then the discussion must go beyond a dramatization of Powell’s speech. Moreover, public scholars need to do more thinking in terms of how to appropriately frame such a difficult discussion.

Also by Edward Watson on Not Even Past:

Review of Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

Did Race and Racism Exist in the Middle Ages?
History Museums: Race, Eugenics, and Immigration in New York History Museums
History in a “Post-Truth” Era

Dorothy Parker Loved the Funnies

by David Ochsner

Interminable…The last thing Dorothy Parker wanted in her funnies was some fine print. In Frank King’s Gasoline Alley strip from 1927, Walt gets full custody of the orphan Skeezix (via hoodedutilitarian.com)

“It is amazing, it is even a little terrifying to see how the spirit of the comic strip has changed,” wrote Dorothy Parker in her Dec. 3, 1927 “Reading and Writing” column for The New Yorker. Time was, she lamented, when the daily strips concerned themselves “with chubby children blowing their elders to hell with generous charges of dynamite,” and “each set of pictures ended gloriously, with a Bam and Pow, in the portrayal of the starlit delirium induced by a cracked skull.”

Dorothy Parker in the 1920s (via Wikipedia)

Most of us know Parker as one of America’s great satirists and a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. She could also be a tough critic. No author was sacred in her book review column, which ran in The New Yorker from 1927 to 1931. She summed up the beloved “Pooh” poems in A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six as “affected, commonplace, bad,” and when Sinclair Lewis published The Man Who Knew Coolidge, she dismissed it as “an outrageously irritating book.”

So it was a bit of a surprise to discover that Parker was also a dedicated reader of the funny pages, which doubtless offered her respite from the bouts of depression she suffered throughout her life. When favorite strips such as The Gumps abandoned broad humor in favor of long-form melodrama, Parker was crestfallen, lamenting that she hadn’t “seen a Pow or a Bam in an egg’s age.”

Andy Gump, in simpler times, from a 1920 strip featuring The Gumps, by Sidney Smith (via newspapers.com)

Sidney Smith, creator of The Gumps, is often credited as the originator of the comic strip melodrama. Unlike a daily, stand-alone gag, this serial approach kept readers waiting for the next installment. Smith was also the first cartoonist to kill off a regular character. His “Saga of Mary Gold,” which ran during 1928-29, ended with sweet Mary’s tragic death and prompted a flood of letters from readers demanding her resurrection.

Busying himself with charity work while being mixed up with spies, Andy Gump had “lost his touching and epic sympathy,” Parker wrote. On top of that, Little Orphan Annie had also gone soft, Annie helping a widowed neighbor with her housework rather than “fighting various gangs of desperadoes.”

Not Your Broadway Annie…Before she went domestic, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie could kick some butt, as she did in this 1927 strip

Over in Gasoline Alley, a gag strip that featured the simple life of guys and their cars, the strip’s creator, Frank King, was allowing his characters to age naturally. “That hurts, Parker wrote. “We ask our comic artists for bread, and they give us realism.” She lamented the strip’s “interminable” storyline, which at the time was mired in a custody battle in which “Unca Walt” (the strip’s patriarch) was desperately trying to adopt little Skeesix, who had been left on Walt’s doorstep in a 1921 strip. Parker feared that by the time the custody battle was settled, “Skeesix is going to be a kindly old gentleman with a flowing beard” (Skeesix, now 96, is still occasionally featured in the strip).

Parker concluded that the melodramatic comics “are unquestionably what the readers want,” and was “surely indicative of something…I cannot bear to analyze it. My great heart is broken for my people. What this country needs is more Bams and more Pows.” If Dorothy were still around today, she would find plenty of Bams and Pows at the Multiplex.

David Ochsner writes the blog, A New Yorker State of Mind, in which he chronicles his experiences reading every issue of the New Yorker magazine. He is currently mired in the fall of 1928.

Also by David Ochsner on Not Even Past:

Reading Every Issue of the New Yorker

The Media Matters: Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Discovery of Hunger in the U.S.

by Laurie Green

April 11, 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of a historical moment that is far more relevant today than we might wish: the discovery of hunger in the U.S. or, perhaps better put, the point in the late 1960s when severe poverty and life-threatening malnutrition in the world’s wealthiest nation suddenly soared into public view on the national political stage. This anniversary matters today not only because proposals to restructure federal food programs threaten their very viability, but also because of the role played by the media, then and now.

The very meaning of “discovery,” when it came to the politics of hunger in the late 1960s, rested in part on the production and reception of news, documentaries, visual images, and editorials that, at times, provoked explicit confrontations over who had the right and expertise to say whether starvation existed in America. The one media production that scholars have written about, CBS’s renowned Hunger in America, first broadcast in May 1968 and vividly recalled by many who watched it, is notable as much for the reactions it provoked as its content. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman denounced the program’s critique of federal food programs as “biased, one-sided, [and] dishonest.” San Antonio’s county commissioner, A. J. Ploch, reported threats on his life for his statement that Mexican American kids didn’t need to do well in school, for which they needed better nutrition, because they would always be “Indians,” not “chiefs.” Later it came out that the Mississippi congressman who headed the House agricultural appropriations subcommittee borrowed agents from the FBI to track down and survey the cupboards of every interviewee in order to prove the show had been a pack of lies. Drama over who controls truth in the media is not a new phenomenon.

Fannie Lou Hamer speaking at a hearing of Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 10, 1967. Rev. J. C. Killingsworth is seated beside her. (Photograph: Jim Peppler)

On April 11, 1967, Senators Joseph Clark (D-Pennsylvania) and—famously—Robert Kennedy (D-New York) conducted a daylong tour of the Mississippi Delta that brought them face to face with residents, especially young children, who bore signs of malnutrition so severe that they could only compare them with what they had observed in Latin America and Africa. Their shock at what they witnessed triggered an ultimately victorious decade-long campaign to expand, alter, and establish the federal food programs that are in jeopardy today. Within months, investigations in locales as disparate as Kentucky, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C. precipitated a cascade of further discoveries confirming that hunger was not solely a Mississippi problem.

Senators George Murphy, Jacob Javits, Joseph Clark, and Robert F. Kennedy of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, listening to testimony during a hearing in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 10, 1967 (Photograph: Jim Peppler)

Kennedy and Clark had flown to the Delta from Jackson, where the day before they had heard Mississippi activists testify at a senate hearing on the War on Poverty that starvation had become a genuine threat in their counties. Fannie Lou Hamer, Marian Wright (Edelman)—then an NAACP attorney in Jackson—and others ascribed this devastating situation not only to joblessness caused by cotton mechanization but voting rights repression. County officials, they argued, used government regulations to prevent them from receiving food stamps. Back in Washington two weeks later, Clark, Kennedy, and other members of their committee released a letter they had sent to Lyndon Johnson describing their shock at witnessing malnutrition and hunger among the families they had met and urging him to send emergency food to the area. Johnson denied the request, the press reported, blaming the problem on congressional cuts to the poverty program. Hunger was not new in the U.S., nor had activists previously held their tongues, but now it arrived on the national political stage wrapped in drama and political conflict.

Daniel Schorr’s typescript for CBS News, April 11, 1967. (The Daniel Schorr Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division)

By evening on April 11, 1967, reporters and photographers had filed stories and images of the senators’ Delta tour. Daniel Schorr’s CBS Evening News report and Joseph Loftus’s New York Times article helped frame what would be cast as ground zero for the politics of hunger. Both portrayed Kennedy surrounded by enthusiastic crowds, but whereas their coverage of the previous day’s hearing had centered on the Mississippi politicians’ assault on Johnson’s War on Poverty, these stories concerned Kennedy and Clark’s critiques of Johnson from the left. Loftus reported that Clark had declined to label what he witnessed as starvation, but asserted that the deplorable conditions indicated the poverty program’s weakness. Schorr mused that RFK might have found a platform other than Vietnam, from which to challenge Johnson.

Schorr began his next report by stating: “Congress talks of poverty and how it should be dealt with, but rarely does it go to look at it.” Clark and Kennedy, however, had gone themselves “to see if the reports of starvation were true.” He described their shock at seeing “children with distended bellies” and speaking with “poor Negroes earning $6 a day for cotton chopping, and many earning nothing.” Many, Clark learned, “could not even scrape together the $2 a month to buy $12 worth of food stamps.” The senators had not spoken of “starvation,” but Schorr had. That term spurred irate Mississippi politicians to launch their own investigations to disprove its existence. Journalist didn’t invent this language—African American activists in Mississippi did that; however, they helped create the context for national controversy.

Simeon Booker

Simeon Booker covered similar ground in his article for Jet, aimed at black readers, but he made Kennedy and Clark’s Delta tour inseparable from what occurred at the hearing the previous day. This strategy allowed him to present a trenchant critique of racism in the antipoverty program from the vantage point of activists at the hearing. At a time when some journalists had begun to separate hunger from other problems the hearings had addressed, Booker took a different tack, beginning and ending with Kennedy’s responses to witnessing hunger and malnutrition but diving into economic, medical, and political challenges in between.

Others pursued feature stories that combined “behind-the-scenes” investigation, vivid language, and political insight. Robert Sherrill’s June 4 New York Times essay, “It Isn’t True That Nobody Starves In America,” took readers to Alabama and Mississippi, while slamming the beltway politicians who had structured federal food programs such that they could produce starvation as easily as nutrition. Mississippi could pride itself on having food stamp programs in more counties than elsewhere in the South, he declared, but purchase requirements meant that the poorer one was, the more unlikely one was to access benefits. Sherrill minced no words, criticizing even Kennedy for using euphemisms like “extreme hunger.”

Sherrill’s article preceded national hearings on hunger and malnutrition that Clark’s Senate poverty committee held in Washington in July 1967. People watched the hearings on television or read reports of such moments as when Senator John Stennis lit into North Carolina pediatrician and civil rights activist Raymond Wheeler. Wheeler was one of six doctors sent by the Field Foundation to investigate starvation in Mississippi and had accused white elites of trying to starve blacks out of the state. Stennis, who had his own radio program and was well aware that cameras were rolling and reporters were scribbling, accused him of “gross libel and slander.”

William Hedgepeth and Al Clayton, “The Hungry World of Teresa Pilgrim,” LOOK, December 26, 1967.

Questions of proof inspired one of the most intimate and widely-read features to appear in a mass-circulation glossy magazine, Al Clayton and William Hedgepeth’s “The Hungry World of Teresa Pilgrim,” which ran in LOOK’s Christmas 1967 issue. Struck by Clayton’s photographs, which Kennedy displayed at the hearings as proof of starvation, Hedgepeth teamed up with the photographer for a story about a family surviving conditions the senators described. Both white southerners — Clayton from southeast Tennessee, Hedgepeth from Atlanta — they spent days with the Pilgrims, especially with six-year-old, bright-eyed Teresa, whose photograph opens the story. Public response was off the charts for LOOK, as readers asked where to send Christmas gifts and money.

CBS’s phones began ringing off the hook five months later, even before the broadcast of Hunger in America had concluded. Viewers not only sent food and financial support to those who appeared in it, but sent letters to their representatives demanding the overhaul of food programs that the documentary prescribed. While the Federal Communications Commission weighed charges that CBS had overstepped the ethical bounds of journalism, social commentators referred to the documentary as the turning point in bringing public awareness to the crisis of hunger.

The matter of truth, including who had the right to define it, was an incendiary one in April 1967 and for months thereafter. “Starvation,” unlike either hunger or malnutrition, implied that someone or something was responsible, raising the stakes in a conflict that drew in large swaths of the public via the media. Two years later, antipoverty activists in every region were fed up with hearings and investigations; they wanted change.

Also by Laurie Green on Not Even Past:

Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity.
1863 in 1963.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000.

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