twentieth-century Archives - Page 2 of 2

Mexico-US Interactions

When Donald Trump launched his Presidential bid in June he trumpeted “I will build a great wall on our Southern border” to stop the influx of “drugs”, “crime”, and “rapists”. Portraying Mexicans, and Hispanics in general, as a dangerous invading Other has a long history in the USA and the question of increasing security along the Rio Grande will certainly dominate debate as the election draws closer.

Based in a border state, the historians at UT Austin are in a good position to offer historical perspectives on the Mexican-US borderlands. Below we have compiled a selection of articles on this topic previously published on NEP. These insights add much needed context to counter the clear-cut separation of the US and Mexico evident in Trumpian political rhetoric.

To start, Anne Martínez contextualizes the economic ties between the United States and Mexico during the twentieth century and discusses the ways Salman Rushdie and Sebastião Salgado conceptualize the US-Mexico borderlands.

The Mexico-US border is often talked about as a religious frontier dividing the Catholic South from the Protestant North. However, as Anne Martínez shows, Catholics on both sides of the border were very much part of the history of Mexico-US interactions. Read more about the Catholic borderlands between 1905 and 1935 and a list of recommended further reading.

The Mexican Revolution knew no borders. People quite freely moved between Texas and Mexico as Lizeth Elizondo highlights in her review of Raul Ramos’ War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and the Tejano Communities.

The “War on Drugs” often dominates discussions about Mexican-American relations. UT graduate student Edward Shore broadens the discussion to a global level arguing that the violence, disorder, and political, social, and economic instability associated with the drug trade has a long history with repercussions across the world.

While relations between Mexico and the United States are commonly discussed in negative terms, this has not always been the case. Emilio Zamora’s book Claiming Rights and Righting Wrong in Texas highlights the most cooperative set of relations in US-Mexican. Could this serve as a model for what is possible?

On 15 minute history, Miguel A. Levario from Texas Tech University (and a graduate of UT’s Department of History) discusses Mexican immigration to the US, and helps us ponder whether there are any new ideas to be had in the century long debate it has inspired—or any easy answers.

Over the past few years the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) has increasingly focused on the history of Mexican Americans living in the state. History Professors Emilio Zamora, University of Texas, and Andrés Tijerina, Austin Community College, are co-editing the forthcoming Tejano Handbook of Texas. And Dr Cynthia E. Orozco discusses the increased presence of Latinas and Latinos at the 2015 meeting of the TSHA.

Policing the Mexican-American border is not a new issue. Christina Salinas discusses the Texas Border Patrol and the social relations forged on the ground between agricultural growers, workers, and officials from the U.S. and Mexico during the 1940s.

Texas Border Patrol

The history of Mexican-American relations extends back into colonial history as Not Even Past’s series on the Entangled Histories of the Early Modern British and Iberian Empire and their Successor Republics demonstrates. Start with Bradley Dixon’s excellent introduction Facing North From Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History and then explore the following:

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) by Barbara Fuchs

Jorge Esguerra-Cañizares discusses his book Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-170 (Stanford University Press, 2006) on Not Even Past.

Renata Keller discusses Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007) by J.H. Elliott

Ernesto Mercado Montero discusses Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block (2012)

Mark Sheaves reviews Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution 1750-1816, by Karen Racine (2002)

Ben Breen recommends Explorations in Connected History: from the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford University Press, 2004), by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Maria José Afanador-Llach recommends Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires, by Kris Lane (2010)

And finally, Jorge Cañizares Esguerra recommends Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (2014).

Charleston Shooting Exposes America’s Pro-Apartheid Cold War Past

By R. Joseph Parrott

This article first appeared on Imperial and Global Forum, University of Exeter, UK (July 6, 2015)

In the wake of the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, the United States has undergone a deep soul searching. Images of the confessed shooter posing with the Confederate Battle Flag have launched a long-overdue national debate about the meaning of Confederate imagery. But they have quickly overshadowed the shooter’s use of two other symbols: the defunct standards of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and apartheid South Africa.

Though not nearly as ubiquitous as the “stars and bars,” these totems symbolize an international segregationist philosophy of white superiority. While historians have rightly focused on the transnational dimensions of decolonization and the civil rights movement, there was also a smaller, if no less global, reaction against these trends. Both South Africa and Rhodesia actively cultivated alliances with reactionary white populations abroad, building support in the United States, particularly in the area of the old Confederacy. The Charleston shooting therefore serves as a violent reminder that American racism today is not only a regional issue – it has also been shaped by a decades-long global opposition to human and civil rights.

This particular transnational solidarity of whiteness emerged as a response to the interconnected struggles for civil rights and self-determination during the Cold War. The ideological conflict encouraged Western countries to realize their rhetorical commitments to democracy and freedom, creating an environment conducive to both decolonization and a reevaluation of racially defined inequalities such as American segregation.

Historians have shown that these international and domestic trends complemented each other, drawing inspiration across borders and informing a general movement toward a new rights-based international system.[1] The reevaluation of race relations inherent in these movements directly challenged imperial concepts of white superiority and Europe’s self-serving “civilizing mission,” famously described by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1960 as the “wind of change.”

Flag of apartheid South Africa

The normative shift away from colonialism and Euro-American dominance began the slow process of isolating segregationists in Africa and the Americas, but it also inspired them to seek transnational support through appeals to common racial and ethnic heritage. The most influential state actor on this new transnational frontier was South Africa. The nation had become the international exemplar of discriminatory official policy when it installed its apartheid system in 1948. Under attack at the United Nations and eventually ousted from the British Commonwealth, South Africa based its international propaganda campaign on two central arguments: anti-communism and negative stereotypes of black peoples. As Tim Borstelmann and Thomas Noer have argued, South Africa claimed to be a strategic bulwark in the Cold War, protecting key minerals and European economic interests from African nationalists the regime depicted as Soviet-controlled communists.[2]

South Africans also appealed to popular assumptions about the inability of colonized peoples to govern themselves. Recasting the outdated civilizational thesis in the rhetoric of the 1960s, the apartheid government argued that it strove to achieve “separate development,” helping to modernize its internal populations at different rates and in ways acceptable to Euro-American interests.[3] South Africans contended that it was white governance that allowed the country to build its modern economy and Westernized high-rise cities, minimizing the ways settler colonialism had depended on the conscious exploitation of black Africans. South Africa’s success in becoming what a 1966 Fortune article called “the only real industrial complex south of Milan” was enough to convince many business-minded Americans to overlook the country’s deep structural inequality.[4] This diplomatic propaganda effectively quieted much Western criticism of apartheid in its first two decades.

Apartheid South Africa also appealed to baser American motivations, manipulating racial fear to curry favor with more desperate elements of American society. Officials including apartheid’s architect, Prime Minister Daniel Malan, cited Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion and the chaotic period succeeding the 1960 decolonization of the Congo as proof of the importance of maintaining white control.[5] Violence, the argument went, would inherently follow the end of European rule, much of it targeting whites.[6] This propaganda appealed particularly to Americans in the desegregating south and urban areas, who were anxious over how the changing complexion of their communities and governments would affect future social relations.

Sen. Allen Ellender (D-LA) meeting with President Lyndon Johnson. When Ellender offered to arrange for a private screening of the film documenting his 1963 African tour, the president politely declined

American segregationists gravitated to the racially motivated warnings of individuals like Malan to justify their own policies. In one memorable example from 1963, Senator Allen Ellender (D-LA) contrasted his visits to South Africa and the British colony of Southern Rhodesia with those to newly independent Africa to argue that black peoples were “incapable of leadership except through the assistance of Europeans.”[7]

Rhodesia Flag

This reactionary internationalism bloomed especially after Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965. Fearing a metropolitan transfer of power that would strengthen the political power of the black majority, the white government of Southern Rhodesia broke with Britain and eventually declared itself a republic. Few nations recognized the sovereignty of the new state, which severely restricted the political and economic rights of black Africans it claimed were not yet fit to govern.

Sanctioned by the United Nations and the Anglo-American entente, Rhodesia became a symbol for disaffected Americans to argue that decolonization – and by extension civil rights – unjustly favored non-white peoples. Solidarity organizations supporting Rhodesia sprang up across the United States, with historian Gerald Horne estimating that the Friends of Rhodesian Independence alone counted 25,000 members in 122 local chapters.[8] Though barred from establishing embassies in most countries, the rogue state operated information offices in Washington and elsewhere that promoted popular solidarity and actively recruited white immigrants to bolster the minority population.

This transnational solidarity grew from a common worldview among reactionary segregationists. Southerners in particular drew on a peculiar melding of democracy and white supremacy, which institutionalized an Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty that restricted suffrage and rights of governance to peoples of northern European descent.[9] It was this logic that they had used to justify segregation and the disenfranchisement of blacks and Hispanics. As their traditional system of white rule was undermined by civil rights, they looked abroad to South Africa and Rhodesia as the last bastion of what one conservative group called “the long-established doctrine of an informed electorate as prerequisite for self-government” that had at its center a hierarchy of race.[10]

The dichotomy of the seemingly modern minority nations and the selectively chosen examples of chaotic independence in countries like the Congo provided evidence of the rightness of the status quo. As Thomas Noer has astutely observed, the “segregationist critique of international issues began with an attempt to use the newly independent African nations as examples of black inferiority to buttress their defense of continued white political power in the American south.”[11] As civil rights advanced, the minority governments gained sympathy as examples of a new “lost cause”.

Strikingly, South Africa and Rhodesia did not only target whites but used interlinked claims to anti-communism, economic development, and traditional race relations to justify their existence on broader conservative grounds. The two countries employed a variety of lobbyists and public relations firms to sell their segregationist societies abroad, even to the African American community.[12] In one example, South Africa covertly provided tens of thousands of dollars to the American-African Affairs Association (AAAA) under the direction of the black anti-communist Max Yergen and influential conservative commentator William Rusher, who published a series of sympathetic pamphlets on the minority governments and colonial Portugal.[13] Activities undertaken by the AAAA and similar groups lent an air of multiculturalism and multiracialism to the defense of the segregationist regimes.

Yet these wider propaganda campaigns could not disguise how the most effective support for minority governance came from disaffected whites concentrated in the southern parts of the United States. Southern congressmen took the lead in defending the minority regimes from a growing popular chorus of criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, positions that played well with many of their constituents.

A 1971 U.S. law to allow the import of Rhodesian chrome, despite a UN boycott, passed with the sponsorship of Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr. (D-VA) alongside pressure from the Friends of Rhodesia and the segregationist Citizens’ Councils of America.[14] Other congressmen such as James Eastland (D-MS) and Jesse Helms (R-NC) had personal and professional ties to the minority regimes, and they worked actively to undermine any attempts to condemn South Africa or Rhodesia at the federal level.[15] It was only in 1986, when the American anti-apartheid movement had effectively built its own national network to counter South African propaganda, that Congress was able to pass a sanctions bill over the veto of President Ronald Reagan and place the United States firmly against minority rule.

The transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe in 1980 and the collapse of apartheid in 1994 ended mainstream white transnational solidarity, but it has done little to end its afterlives in the popular American subconscious and openly at the political fringes. The stereotypes reinforced and propagated by a transnational segregationist alliance remain embedded in the United States’ national heritage.

As evidenced by events in Charleston, white supremacists maintain this anachronistic and racist view of black peoples, while media coverage of the disturbances in Baltimore and many events in Africa hint that a subliminal acceptance of these stereotypes has not fully disappeared. In much the same way that the United States is engaging with the institutional memory of the Civil War, the country would do well to recognize the lasting transnational legacies of Cold War decolonization, modernization, and official segregation.

You may also like these articles on slavery and its legacy in the US and flags, monuments, and myths about the confederate history.

[1] See in no particular order Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956-1974 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions: African Americans Against Apartheid, 1946-1994 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) among others.

[2] Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Thomas J. Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948-1968 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), chapters 1-2.

[3] For a discussion of how whiteness and modernization worked together to shape American attitudes toward Africa, see the work of Larry Grubbs, notably Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

[4] John Davenport, “South Africa: The Only Real Industrial Complex South of Milan,” Fortune, December 1966.

[5] See for example the interview with Daniel Malan in U.S. News and World Report, 16 April 1954, 60-66.

[6] This argument was reinforced by the Angolan rebellion of 1961, which began with a number of violent attacks on white owned farms (and even more violent responses by the Portuguese). With the aid of a public relations firm and a Lisbon-backed American organization, the government issued a number of grisly publications in English showing the mutilated bodies that not so subtly portrayed the barbarity in racial terms. See “On the Morning of March 15^th,” (Boston: Portuguese-American Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1961?). Thomas Noer also touches on this theme in his article on segregationist internationalism, “Segregationists and the World: The Foreign Policy of the White Resistance,” in Brenda Gayle Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 141-162.

[7] Jack Anderson, “State Cables Tell Tale of Ellender,” Washington Post, 6 August 1963.

[8] Gerald Horne, From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 45.

[9] Daniel Geary and Jennifer Sutton, “Resisting the Wind of Change: The Citizens’ Councils and European Decolonization,” in New Directions in Southern History: U.S. and Europe Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 265-282. For a greater discussion of the 19^th century tradition of exclusionary governance, see Reginald Horseman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

[10] American-African Affairs Association, Some American Comments on Southern Africa (New York: American-African Affairs Association, 196-?), III.

[11] Noer, “Segregationists and the World,” 142.

[12] Claims of communist infiltration, all-expenses paid and highly choreographed trips to the minority-ruled countries, as well as cash payments won over allies of all hues, including the conservative black columnist George Schuyler. New York Times correspondent has recently completed a book on South Africa’s international propaganda machine during the apartheid era, excerpted recently as “How apartheid sold its racism,” The Star, 25 June 2015.

[13] The AAAA used South African funds to produce the pamphlet Red China in Africa (New York: American-African Affairs Association, 1965?). Memo, J.S.F. Botha to Secretary of Foreign Affairs, 7 April 1966, Folder 1/33/3/1, South African Department of Foreign Affairs Archives (Pretoria, South Africa).

[14] In the late 1960s and 1970s, anti-apartheid activists and churches were impressed by the size and influence of the pro-Rhodesia lobby. Ken Carstens to Blake et al., “Report on visit to Congressmen in April,” 29 April 1967, Box 23, RG6, National Council of Churches Papers, Presbyterian Historical Society (Philadelphia, PA). See also Horne, chapter 4.

[15] Noer, “Segregationists and the World,” 145-146; Geary and Sutton, 272. South Africa also directly attacked congressmen who worked against their interests in the United States, likely targeting liberal internationalist and Africa subcommittee chair Senator Dick Clark (D-IA) by funneling money to his electoral opponent in 1978. For a very readable examination of this incident, see David Rogers, “A Nelson Mandela Backstory: Iowa’s Dick Clark,” Politico, 26 December 2013.

Reading Every Issue of The New Yorker

By David Ochsner

In Jack Finney’s novel Time and Again, the protagonist Simon Morley is taken to a top-secret government facility where time travel is made possible through self-hypnosis. Simon views what seem to be a series of historically accurate movie sets—complete with live actors performing everyday activities—and through extreme concentration he “travels” to the era depicted in those sets.

I read the novel when I was about ten years old, and subsequently attempted the trick myself, building shoebox dioramas and concentrating on the contents in hopes that it would be a portal to some great adventure.

It didn’t work.

I’ve since found another way to access the past through the The New Yorker magazine’s digital archive. By reading every issue—every article, every advertisement starting with Issue No. 1, Feb. 21, 1925— and blogging about it, I am hoping to gain a better sense of how one slice of America was living and thinking in the interwar years and beyond.

The New Yorker, Issue No. 1, Feb. 21, 1925. Many of magazine’s elements familiar to today’s readers were in place from the beginning, including the magazine’s distinctive typography and its famous cartoons. (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

This approach is similar to one taken by writer Laura Hillenbrand when she wrote a bestseller about the racehorse Seabiscuit. In an excellent essay in the July, 7, 2003 New Yorker, she described how a chronic illness forced her to conduct much of the book’s research from home, and in a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine (Dec. 18, 2014), she further related how the research included buying old newspapers on eBay and reading them in her living room as though she were browsing the daily paper. “I wanted to start to feel like I was living in the ’30s,” she told the magazine. “That elemental sense of daily life seeps into the book in ways too subtle and myriad to count.”

The New Yorker’s digital archive doesn’t provide the same tactile experience as newsprint, but each issue is nevertheless an exact scan of the original, some even bearing a past reader’s penciled notes, dog-eared corners, or the shadow of cellophane tape hastily applied over a tear.

My blog, A New Yorker State of Mind, is by no means a comprehensive survey of The New Yorker, but I hope my selections and observations give readers a sense of what was important to the magazine’s editors and writers. In addition to citing actual articles and illustrations from each magazine, I provide some context through research and images gleaned from various sources.

Famously droll cartoons were a New Yorker staple from the very beginning, including this illustration of President and Mrs. Coolidge by Miguel Covarrubias. The president was a frequent target of the magazine for his frugality and bland demeanor. March 14, 1925 (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

The magazine archive not only offers a glimpse into the lives of upper-middle class Gotham strivers, but it is also offers a point of reference to a particular time, and to all of the historic digressions to which it is connected.

For example, the May 2, 1925 issue’s “The Talk of the Town” notes the rapidly changing face of the city—Fifth Avenue mansions are giving way to commercial interests and architectural landmarks, such as architect Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden, are falling to the wrecking ball. In “The Sky-Line” section of the magazine, architecture critic R.W. Sexton noted, in reference to the Garden’s demise, how critics, including foreign visitors, often taunted New Yorkers about their “rabid commercialism.” The following week’s issue (May 9) told of the removal of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ nude “Diana” sculpture from atop the Garden’s tower (which White fashioned after the Giralda of Seville), and an oblique reference was made to Stanford’s White’s scandalous demise, noting that although the manner of the architect’s death put him “in a poor light among his puritanical countrymen,” he was nevertheless courageously defended by the likes of Saint-Gaudens. That sent me back to 1906 (though various scans of tabloids from that time) to briefly revisit how the architect of Madison Square Garden was murdered by the husband of his lover, the actress Evelyn Nesbit, in the rooftop theatre he built in the shadow of his Giralda tower. I returned to 1925 with the understanding that the wrecking ball would be taking away far more than brick and stone.

Image of the destroyed Madison Square Gardens. Via Museum of the City of New York

Photo of the destroyed Madison Square Gardens. Via Museum of the City of New York

Photo of Evelyn Nesbit, whose affair with the architect Stanford White led to his death on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Via Wikipedia.

That is what makes this exercise so engaging: one can read the magazine as a contemporary while moving back and forth across the timeline. The blog is also informed by other contemporary readings—newspapers, other magazines, and books such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s unfinished trilogy recounting his 1933 journey on foot across Europe. Following the Rhine and the Danube on his way to Constantinople, the 19-year-old Fermor occasionally noted in his journal the rumblings of fascism in Germany and Austria, but mostly describing the faded glories of collapsed empires and the many places that retained old ways of life.

However, Fermor did not start writing his trilogy until the 1960s, and didn’t publish the first book in the series, A Time of Gifts, until 1977. It is an account of what a young man hears and sees in 1933, but the omniscient hand of his future self guides his pen. Young Fermor gives us fresh-eyed descriptions of villages and the homely charms of the people, while the older Fermor knows (and occasional notes) that much will be obliterated by the war to come.

So before one gets too carried away, one must be mindful of this “older self” that can haunt a serial reading of The New Yorker. Although I attempt to read the articles and advertisements as though I am living in that time, this is not possible since I possess the foreknowledge of an omniscient reader. When I come across a cheeky account about two buffoons named Hitler and Mussolini, I know a horrible truth awaits my fellow readers.

Foresight and hindsight: A reader of this ad in the May 8, 1937 issue of The New Yorker would be well advised not to book passage on the Hindenburg, because it will not be making the return trip to Germany. (The New Yorker Digital Archive; Wikipedia)

Then there are the advertisements, such as the series that urges indiscriminate spraying of FLIT insecticide (with whimsical drawings by Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel), or the quarter-page ad in the May 8, 1937 issue that invites readers to book a flight on the Hindenburg, which was destroyed on May 6, 1937, claiming 36 lives. The following year Germany would annex Austria, and soon after Czechoslovakia, and the rest is, um, history.

The indiscriminate spraying of FLIT insecticide was encouraged in a series of ads merrily rendered by Dr. Seuss. (The New Yorker Digital Archive)

Which begs the question I often ask myself during my readings: In the midst of the Roaring Twenties, did the New Yorker writers or readers have any idea of what was to come?

The answer so far: No more than we do today.

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, by William Burrows (1998)

The Soviet Union appeared handily ahead in space. They launched the first successful satellite, put the first man and woman in space, performed the first space walk, and sent the first satellites out of earth’s gravitation and to the moon. And yet the United States still “won” the Space Race. How could that be? In This New Ocean, William E. Burrows grapples with this and other questions, illuminating widespread political manipulation in the process, and chronicling the first space age.

Cold War tension, exacerbated by the Soviet Union’s new nuclear capabilities, and the upcoming 1957-58 International Geophysical Year initiated the Space Race – the Cold War competition between the US and Soviet Union to achieve superiority in spaceflight. The US and Soviet governments were eager to fund military ventures for national security; both countries poured billions of dollars into space and rocket agencies. National security was the foundation of the world’s public space frontier, which Burrows dutifully records from the US acquisition of German personnel (notably former Nazi, Wernher von Braun) and V-2 rocket onwards.

Burrows contends it is a misconception to perceive Soviet dominance at the outset of the Space Race. The US never truly lagged behind the Soviet Union in space capabilities. Upon learning about the successful launch of Sputnik 1, President Eisenhower actually felt mild relief, contrary to the American public’s fear of inferiority at the time. As Sputnik 1 orbited over American soil, Eisenhower’s personal fear of infringing on restricted airspace by orbiting above another country dissipated. Despite employing Sergei Korolyov, lead rocket engineer and Wernher von Braun’s Soviet counterpart, funding and morale for the Soviet space program dwindled following notable accidents and poor planning. The leadership regularly used outdated technologies in an effort to save money. They also put Korolyov and his team in competition with another Soviet program planning a manned Moon landing. Many in the leadership questioned the goal itself – why spend increased capital putting humans in space who require life support systems when robots were cheaper and might obtain similar results?

The Chief Designer Sergei Korolev (left) and the Chief Theoretician Mstislav Keldysh (right). In the centre- Igor Kurchatov, 1956

Following the initial Soviet rocket achievements, notably Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 spaceflight, President Kennedy looked to quell the American public’s fear of inferiority by investing heavily in space. Noticing the monetary influx, politicking scientists secured government funding. Burrows scrutinizes projections justifying project funding given to the government, exposing their unrealistic claims. For example, although the space shuttle project was an enormous financial undertaking, scientists justified the seemingly high cost by emphasizing the shuttle’s reusability, overstating the number of executable missions, and downplaying turnaround time. The cost per mission looked good on paper, but the figures rested on misleading data. The shuttle program could never live up to such deceptive expectations.

Along with chronicling Soviet and American achievements ranging from Sputnik 1 to the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Burrows also covers both US and Soviet program failures. These include Project Vanguard (America’s little known unsuccessful first attempt to place a satellite in orbit), a fatal American ground test fire, fatal Russian spacecraft electrical malfunctions, and space shuttle Challenger’s O-ring catastrophe. Each failure dealt a blow to the two superpowers’ morale, inviting the public to question its nation’s technological prowess.

Saturn V carrying Apollo 11 rises past the launch tower camera

A new space age has now begun. Private companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are slowly taking the helm in the universe’s largest frontier. New questions arise: should space exploration be financed by centralized governments? How does one justify financing space exploration? If we choose to return to the Moon, land on Mars, or explore any facet of space, our technology will be rooted in the work of von Braun, Korolyov, Robert Goddard, and the other early rocket pioneers. The story of humanity’s very first space age, exploring This New Ocean, is inspiring, gripping, and encouraging.

William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (Random House: 1998)

History Museums: Race, Eugenics, and Immigration in New York History Museums

By Madeline Y. Hsu

New York Historical Society (Wikipedia)

Ideas about race and eugenics have had a long influence on U.S. immigration and citizenship laws. A pair of historical exhibits ongoing in New York City vividly convey this troubling history. The regulations governing U.S. borders reveal the beliefs of legislators, but also many Americans, regarding what kinds of people are “fit to be citizens.” These two exhibits, “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” at the New York Historical Society and “Haunted Files: The Eugenics Records Office” at New York University, demonstrate how deeply entrenched such beliefs have been and the many forms of inequality that they produce and signify.

A political cartoon from 1882, showing a Chinese man being barred entry to the “Golden Gate of Liberty”. The caption reads, “We must draw the line somewhere, you know.” (Wikipedia)

For example, in 1882 the United States set a precedent in making Chinese the first and only group identified by race for severely restricted entry rights into the United States and bars against their naturalization. The so-called Chinese Exclusion Law lay the foundations for future U.S. immigration laws that targeted an expanding array of undesirable people by race, national origin, illiteracy, imbecility, and likelihood to become a public charge. By 1924, a majority of the world’s people, originating everywhere from Palestine to Southeast Asia, could not legally enter the United States and eastern and southern Europeans faced much higher bars against entry than their counterparts from western and northern Europe.

‘Chinese Must Go’ pistol from the 19th century. (Wikipedia)

The “science” of eugenics made such immigration controls seem to be a necessity for national preservation. As one slogan claimed: “Every 15 seconds $100 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity,” thereby mandating the use of laws to protect U.S. population, civilization, and resources. Bolstered by protracted schemes to measure quantitatively, systematically categorize, and document racial and other inherited attributes, eugenics bore the force of natural selective processes, thereby tempting its practitioners to intervene in its principles in order to improve the caliber of American human beings. Such quests for a higher order of civilization and society irreparably marginalized and damaged humans identified as inferior by their ancestral traits.

In conjunction, “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” and “The Haunted Files” provoke insights regarding the very close relationships between U.S. immigration laws, our restrictions upon citizenship, and naturalized assumptions about what kinds of persons deserve to join America’s democracy.

Madeline Hsu’s book The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority is now available for pre-order from Princeton University Press.

More from our series of history museums:

NEP editor Joan Neuberger visits the Museum of Liverpool

Carrie Marcus Neiman: A Pioneer in Ready to Wear

By Lynn Mally

Neiman Marcus building from a postcard circa 1920

The Neiman Marcus store, which opened in Dallas Texas in 1907, was founded on a revolutionary idea—that ready-to-wear clothing for women could be as well made as couture garments. At the start of the twentieth century, women who had the means to do so bought custom made clothing. The three founders—Herbert Marcus, Albert Neiman, and Carrie Marcus Neiman (wife of Albert, sister of Herbert) sought to change those patterns of consumption.

It was Carrie and her colleague Moira Cullen who did the most to make the Neiman Marcus experiment a success. They were the buyers for the store; when they didn’t find merchandise that met their high standards, they had it made. As Stanley Marcus wrote in his memoir, Minding the Store, “They were creators of a style, a Neiman-Marcus style, which they accomplished by fabric substitution, ‘always for the better’; by the replacement of garish buttons, pins, and belt buckles with simpler ornamentation; by insisting on handsewn linings, deeper hems, and subtle colors.”(62)

Carrie Marcus Neiman, from Stanley Marcus Minding the Store

At work Carrie Neiman wore a kind of uniform, a black outfit with pearls and two gold bracelets on one wrist. You can see the basics here in this 1948 photo, taken when she was around sixty-five. Her clothes outside of work must have sometimes been more colorful. After she died her family donated 200 items from her closet, which became the basis of the some 200 became the basis for the Texas Fashion Collection at the University of North Texas. You can browse the collection on line. It has many a dark dress, but also a burnt orange Chanel suit and a metallic green dress and coat combination by Bonnie Cashin. How fitting that she bought not only from Parisian designers, but also from Americans known for their outstanding ready to wear clothes. She had paved the way for them.

Original post on American Age Fashion.

Reforming Prisons in Early Twentieth-century Texas

By Nakia Parker

Elizabeth L. Ring was a prominent public servant and social reformer in early twentieth-century Texas. During her marriage to Henry Franklin Ring, an attorney, Elizabeth became involved in campaigning for state funding for libraries, advocating for more educational and political opportunities for women, and spearheading efforts to enact laws that protected the rights of working women and children (such as minimum wage legislation). Yet, Ring left her most indelible mark on the prison reform movement in her home state. She tirelessly worked to better conditions in Texas prisons during the Progressive Era, and the Texas Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor formed under her watch. A document found among her papers at the Briscoe Center for American History shows us something about how a progressive activists thought about prison reform at that time. This is a questionnaire from the Psychology Department of Western State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania for the wives of incoming prisoners that was related to her research on prison conditions.

Western State Pen Questionnaire

The questionnaire probes every crevice of a prisoner’s marital and familial relationships, posing questions on the state of the marriage before the husband’s incarceration, his work, personal and religious habits, his family history (including reputation in the community and the past criminal acts of siblings), as well as determining the extent of the wife’s personal knowledge of her husband’s crime. Even the wife’s activities are put under a microscopic lens, as evidenced by the questions “How are the children supported now? If you support them, how do you do it?” Indeed, to call the application intrusive seems a gross understatement. Yet, by examining the document in the context of American prison reform in the Progressive Era, the purpose of the questioning can be understood. In particular, prisons in the northern part of the United States, such as Western Penitentiary, experimented with programs that focused on the “reforming” of criminals through the use of individualized educational, medical, and psychiatric treatment. Thus, it appears that the prison psychology department utilized this invasive line of questioning in an attempt to explain motivations or reasons behind criminal behavior by conducting a thorough investigation of the prisoner’s background.

Prisoners assemble for the visit of Governor Colquitt, July 4, 1911. — Prisoners assemble for the visit of Governor Colquitt at Huntsville Prison, July 4, 1911.

It is harder to ascertain how Elizabeth Ring used this particular questionnaire for her research. Was there something unique about the treatment programs of this prison that led Ring to believe this form could prove useful in pushing for penal reform in Texas? In addition, the reader has no way of knowing whether this paper served as the standard application for the wives of the incarcerated. Were there separate questionnaires for whites and non-whites? Or for native-born individuals and immigrants? More research would be necessary to answer these questions, but anyone interested in the Progressive Era, reform movements, prison history, or women’s history would doubtless find this an intriguing source.

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