JF Ptak Science Books  (The First Entry in the Department of Two Eric/Eriks)

My polymathic friend Eric Sacharaow clued me into a wonderful image in the history of motion pictures: an encounter between The Three Stooges and Franklin Roosevelt. It occurs at the end of a movie short The Boys made in 1937 (which was evidently shot in four days) called Cash and Carry, in which (after hijinx [is this a Scrabble word?]) they pursue a hidden treasure to fund a crippled boy’s operation and wind up tunneling into a federal gold vault. They are caught, other stuff happens, and then they are in the Oval Office (for some reason located in the U.S. Capitol building), where they wind up being heroes of some sort. They appear with an actor playing the role of FDR with the president sitting with his back to the camera, the other actors facing towards the camera, speaking to the seated president. The Stooges are absolve because their pursuit was pure, with FDR announcing “executive clemency”, to which Curly responds, “Oh no, not that!”.

Anyway, the first interesting tidbit is that FDR appears seated but still holding a cane—this is highly unusual because even though he had been left with paralyzed legs from infantile paralysis (polio) in 1921 most US Americans did not know that he was living his daily life in a wheelchair. (FDR virtually never mentioned his legs in public, except at the very end, after Yalta—and then it was self-deprecating.)

The big deal here, though, was that this was the first depiction of FDR in a movie, and he does so with none other than the Three Stooges. Odd but true. (And for some reason, another very odd first appearance occurs for LBJ, who winds up depicted for the first time in a movie in the magnificently bad Batman, the Movie in 1966.)

I know this because I found a fascinating list compiled by the writer Erik Lundegaard https://eriklundegaard.com/item/why-is-fdr-hanging-with-the-three-stooges-everything-you-didn-t-want-to-know-about-screen-portrayals-of-us-presidents-and-didn-t-ask listing all of the depictions of U.S. Presidents in films, showing their first appearance (with year and film and the actor portraying the president), as well as a numerical census of the numbers of movies the presidents appeared in. My hat is off to Mr. Lundegaard, because this must’ve been a challenging research project.

I’ve reproduced the bare essentials from his list (below). Again, this is not my work, all credit to Erik Lundegaard:

The list (president/total number of appearances in films/year of first appearance):

Washington, 154, (1909); Adams , 5 (1911); Jefferson, 125, (1911); Madison, 27, (1937); Monroe  (1918); John Quincy Adams,  8, (1911); Jackson, 47, (1918); Van Buren,  4, (1936); Harrison, 7, (1942); Polk , 8, (1939); Taylor, 8, (1912); Fillmore, 4, (1939); Pierce, 2, (1944); Buchanan, 1, (2000); Lincoln, 327, (1911); Andrew Johnson, 6, (1922); Grant, 94, (1913); Hayes, 7, (1940); Garfield, 7, (1939); Arthur, 3, (1932) ; Cleveland, 4 (1939); B. Harrison, 2 (1952); McKinley, 11, (1936); T. Roosevelt,  86, (1917); Taft, 5, (1978); Wilson, 31, (1913); Harding, 5, (1975); Coolidge, 5, (1955); Hoover, 8, (1979); Franklin D. Roosevelt, 97, (1937); Truman, 34, (1947); Eisenhower, 37 (1955); Kennedy, 86, (1957); Lyndon B. Johnson, 32, [Batman: The Movie!] (1966); Nixon, 81, (1968); Ford, 15, (1975); Carter, 23, (1976); Reagan, 46, (1976); G.H.W. Bush, 27, (1986); Clinton, 74, (1992); George W. Bush, 112, (2000); Obama, 80, (2007).

Some presidents don’t break into film for a long time after their final year in office. This is understandable of course for the earliest period of the presidency, as the very first depiction of a president occurs in 1909—and that was GW, 112 years after his final year in office. So the function of appearance or not in films of the first flux or so presidents was a function of technology rather than anything else. Once you get into the meatier part of the presidency, the psych and popular factors come into play, which explains why it took 120 years after his final year for James Madison to be depicted in a film. He is followed by W.H. Harrison (101 years), van Buren (100), Pierce at 97 years, Fillmore (72), and B. Harrison (63). On the other end of the continuum, JFK is depicted in a film before he was president (1957); Wilson appears in the first year of his presidency (1913) and FDR in his fourth (1937). Once we reach Ike all of the presidents make appearances in film during their administration (many for the first time on Saturday Night Live).

In 2016 we did the opposite, electing a tv show of nothing but commercials to the presidency.

And that, as they say, is Show Biz.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2829

The Manzanar Free Press is a remarkable publication, issued by the “internees” of the Japanese Relocation Center/Concentration Camp, Manzanar, near Lone Pine, California. It was located in a beautiful and desolate-mountainous AnselAdams-scape made of the Inyo and Sierra Nevada mountains, and was one of 10 camps (plus another two dozen other facilities including isolation centers, temporary camps, and other smaller areas managed by the Department of Justice and U.S. Army) that held nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent (62% of them U.S. citizens) who were forcibly removed and imprisoned via the U.S. Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942. The area covered by the evacuation decree was quite large: half or so of Washington and Oregon states, all of California, and the bottom third or so of Arizona.

Manzanar was a semi-dead town 220 miles NE of Los Angeles, located in high desert with huge swings of temperature and unrelenting and challenging weather—semi-killed by the city of Los Angeles, which purchased the water rights to the region in 1929, forcing out the remaining inhabitants.  Manzanar had a peak population of about 11,000 before the Japanese were returned to what remained of their previous lives. And it was here that thousands of the unfortunate people of Japanese decent lived for several years.

What struck me on this go-round with the camp newspaper were the advertisements, which for reasons unknown didn’t register with me in the other times I went browsing. (There are many of them available online via the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84025948/1944-01-29/ed-1/?sp=3&st=text.) It has the feel of a small town daily, with all of the trimmings—except this was a concentration camp (U.S. Style), so it was hardly an “average” publication, though it was filled with basic/domestic/social/small-town “average” news from camp baseball to the newest shipment of non-rationed goods. And again, like any small town newspaper, there they were, the ads, usually a dozen or two in the newspaper’s twelve pages (the first half in English, the second in Japanese).

Who advertised what?  It just seemed extraordinary, and contrary, to see the ads in there, all of which combined gave the enterprise a feeling of everyday normalcy to a decidedly not-normal situation, with people gathered up,completely uprooted, losing businesses and property and of course freedom.  For the issue of January 29, 1944, we have the following advertisements:

• The Los Angeles Fish & Oyster Company was there (“supplying fresh fish to the canteen”);
• The Utah Nippo (which is one of only four Japanese newspapers published in the Continental U.S. through the course of WWII. http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Utah_Nippo_(newspaper)/ Does that mean that people received copies of the newspaper in the mail, or was it just posting its name because it made monetary contributions to the Manzanar paper?)
• LB Woolens and Trimming (from L.A.);
• Showa Shogu Brewing Co. (Glendale, Arizona);
• Dorfman Hat & Cap Co. (Oakland);
• Lone Pine Lumber and Supply (an ad for ready-pasted wallpaper), Lone Pine, CA.;
• Sears (for delivery of canned goods and such);
• Josephs Lone Pine (a general store “orders taken for non-rationed items”);
• Freeman, Los Angeles Barber & Beauty Co. offering “Southern California’s Leading Pomade”):
• Hotel Montezuma (Santa Fe, NM–I have no idea what this one was all about);
• Western Trunk Line, Lone Pine Depot;
• Hand-Knit Yarns (Peter Pan Yarns, NYC)’;
• and interestingly, Audiofilms Co., advertising their next film, Boy Slaves (starring. Anne Shirley, Alan Baxter Roger Daniel. According to IMDb “A runaway follows the leader of a gang of boys, and they all wind up working in a turpentine camp”. Oddly enough, the tagline for the “b” film was “SOLD – Human Beings, In This Modern Age, Actually Sold Into Slavery!”)

And there was Blossom Girl, of Hollywood (pictured at left).

There was one ad placed by one of the internees: Mastercraft Cleaning and Laundry, located at “Ironing Room 10”.

And then there was this small placement, simple, but powerful in it innocence:

The Japanese people at Manzanar and the other camps made extraordinary efforts to create a society and civility and reasonableness in the depths of an unreasonable situation in which much of their society had been ripped apart. Superb effort. As Charlie Goodnight inscirbed on Bose Ikard’s tombstone; “splendid behavior”.  

“Manzanar” means “apple orchard” in Spanish; there were no apples here in 1944. 

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2830

One of the most striking news items I found while browsing a volume of  the newspaper The Independent¹ was on the front page of the very first issue of this volume–a very strong, emotional, reaching-for-irony anti-slavery article reporting on the largest single slave sale in the history of the U.S

The publisher, Joseph H. Richards, was one of three people (including Pettengill and Tubbs) who in mid-1859 conceived and implemented the idea of bringing Abraham Lincoln to NYC to deliver a paid lecture. After much correspondence and delay Lincoln would lecture at what would be known as his famous and campaign-heightening Cooper Union speech in late February 1859. The newspaper was an eight-page weekly and was very strongly anti-slavery, its pages filled with Abolitionist writing. Henry Ward Beecher was given space for a sermon/lecture in nearly every issue for the volume that I have—Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Greenleaf Whittier were listed as special correspondents in the masthead.

The article, “The Great Slave Sale at Savannah²”(the sale itself also referred to as “the Weeping Time”) appeared on 10 March 1859, about a week after the two-day event was held in a driving rain at the Ten Broeck Race Course, about two miles west of downtown Savannah. The slaves were the “property” of Pierce Mease³ (1810-1867), a profligate Georgia aristocrat who led himself to ruin, the slave sale intended to restore his economic condition. The sale was held at a race track 

I imagine that The Independent sent an undercover correspondent (much like for Horace Greeley did for the New York Tribune) to cover the event—or perhaps not; I can’t tell for sure….there is enough detail to make you think that this was information not taken from some other newspaper source; I just can’t tell. In any event these reporters would not have been welcomed at the auction, and could have been dealt with as spies or infiltrators, or worse.

The pseudonymous reporter (the article signed “T.T”) notices the details of those in charge of the proceedings, some of the aspects of the crowd, though mostly the descriptions are focused on the poor people waiting to be sold…and then, mostly that on the children, and the infirmed.

I’ve reproduced the article below–so far as I can tell this has not been reproduced anywhere else.

“The event was reported extensively in the Northern Press and reaction to the sale deepened the nation’s growing sectional divide”, states a respectful if not understated and mundane historical marker (placed 149 years later) at the sale’s location, the text attributed to the Georgia Historical Society. At least the state of Georgia chose to officially recognize the place and donated a small remembrance park to it, which is still steps ahead of, say, Washington D.C. where at least two of the “slave pens” that were very nearly on the National Mall are still not officially recognized by a marker.  

Notes:

1. The Independent¹, March 10, 1859. “The Independent was founded by the Broadway Tabernacle Church as an anti-slavery newspaper. The original Broadway Tabernacle, now known as Broadway United Church of Christ, was founded as the Second Free Presbyterian Church, organized in 1832 by Lewis Tappan for Charles Grandison Finney, a famous evangelist / revivalist from western New York.”–Wikipedia
2. “The Great Slave Auction (also called The Weeping Time) was a March 2 and 3, 1859 sale of enslaved Africans held at Ten Broeck Race Course, near Savannah, Georgia. Slaveholder and absentee plantation owner Pierce Mease Butler authorized the sale of approximately 436 men, women, children, and infants to be sold over the course of two days. The sale’s proceeds went to satisfy Butler’s significant debts, much of it from gambling. The auction is regarded as the largest single sale of enslaved people in U.S. history.”-Wikipedia
3. . “… inherited two plantations in the Sea Islands of Georgia from his wealthy Southern family; one on Butler Island, and another on St. Simon Island. Both lands were worked by slaves.” https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/slaveowners_civil_war/1/

There’s a fine article by Kristopher Monroe in The Atlantic about the event: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-weeping-time/374159/

Full article, follows:

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I used fifteen minutes of my life to collect some of the most outrageous/anti-subtle subtle, non sequitur , and just plain odd pseudonyms used by the great Ambrose Bierce in his long and wide writing career, ending with him disappearing into a Mexican sunset in 1914 (or so). Many of them are taken from various iterations of The Devil’s Dictionary.  There are many others. 

The partial list: Agb, Anita M. Bobe, Conmore Aple Brun, Bnashi Basouk, Oogum Bem, Hamin Benjarrison, Joel Ffrad Bink, A. Brute, Salder Bupp, Choggins, Clementina, Clericus, Purzil Crofe, Ambat Delaso, Arion Spurl Doke, Etcetera, Almira Faircheek, Booley Fito, Aramis Loto Frope, Bissel Gip, Boot Gish, Dod Grile, Hestiba, Jamrach Holobom, Gat Huckle, Ignotus, Infallible, An Insulted Giant, Jebel Jocordy, Little Johnny, Opoline Jones, A Mandarin of the Order of the Golden Teapot, Atla Mipo, Jupiter Muke, N.P. Nopput, Naramy Oof, Orm, Pludge, Phela Orm, Pylades Nupkins, Phrytz, Bogul S. Purvy, Jobo Rem, Doddington Pry, Samboles, Dr. John Satan, Dudley Spink, Statanella, J. Milton Sloluck, Theophilus Smallbeer, Venable Strigg, Sukker Uffro, Barlow Vode, and many others. Oh: and John Smith.