Author: JF Ptak

Examples of Colossally Bad Ideas–Sterilization, Eugenics and Soviet Racial/Genetic Domination Theory

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1301

Sometimes I need to make a post about a book simply to get it out of my system–once I’ve said something about a numbingly bad book, it usually just goes away, falling off the edge of the flat Earth rather than having its mast sink peacefully below the horizon. Such is the case with these pamphlets, one of which is so bad that its badness could not be contained in just one “volume” that it needed another. I almost wrote ” ‘little’ pamphlets” because they are, well, little–but little in size only, their badness easily transcending their size, and the idea of “size” in general.

[Note: all pamphlets pictured here are available at our blog bookstore.]

I never really liked the word “colossal” in the title of any book other than say a joke or magic book for children–outside that, I think the author is asking for trouble. And trouble is the seat of reason in this work, which was published in 1939. It is too painful to quote much from the text, but, right from the outset the reader gets a taste for what is ahead, being told that the New Russia (the Russians being “the most elemental of all white peoples”) is one way of saving the Nordic race, quoting The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception as a part-source, saying that “this race will collectively make up the sixth of the seven sub-races tat will constitute the present Aryan or Fifth Root Race” and it will “be expected to develop certain attributes that will contribute toward humanity’s ultimate perfection”.

The author is enamored of the free voting system in the Soviet Union. “No one visiting the Soviet’s pictorial Exhibit at the World’s Fair om New York could fail to be impressed by the dignity and attractiveness of the pictured polling places and the freshness and eagerness animating the faces of those figures who entered t perform their civic duty…” An incredible statement, validating the democratic freedom of the Soviet Union at a particular time in it history when millions of people had recently been starved to death, among other things. The photographs of the coming genetic masters was proof enough of freedom than anything else.

The pamphlets grow heavier and more dense with each paragraph, the edges of the pages bending under their own filthy weight of vast stupidity and understated racial hatreds. God and the superiority of whiteness and the gross disabilities of Catholics and Black people come along after a bit. Jewish people aren’t even mentioned. But the author states that it is a genetic “tick”, some sort of “genetic conscience” that comes into play that has prevented the “inferior races” (like Catholics or Blacks) to have come anywhere near attaining the presidency. It is a spiteful, hateful pamphlet that is completely myopic about the rich, savory goodness that is the highest attainment of spiritualism/intellectualism/modernism and civilization that was the Soviet Union. There would be little left to say about this work ten years hence, when the real stuff of the Soviet Union became more publicly common knowledge, and it became more difficult–I would think–for the author to reconcile his witches’ brew of Biblical nonsense, genetic debauchery and Cool-Whip history.

The next assortment–all written just after WWII–asks some questions that one probably has never heard before. “Should married lovers fight?” and “Is sexual castration easy?” are probably a pair of interrogatories that would never be heard in conversation in a hundred years of boring parties. The contents of the pamphlets are a genuine struggle to get through–I picked my way through each for about 20 minutes before declaring defeat, except that I know enough to not have to think about these works again.

The pamphlet Sterilization for Human Betterment, published by the Human Betterment Foundation (Pasadena, California), states that 13,000 people in this category had been “asexualized” between 1909 and 1939 in California. (I should point out that California was the sterilization capital of the United States, with a third of all the national eugenics procedure performed in this state for this period of time) It defends this practice, saying emphatically that “eugenic sterilization is not an experiment”, and that “sterilization in this form represents one of the greatest advances in modern civilization”.

It continues: “(sterilization) has been continuously used by American institutions since 1899, when the first sterilizations were performed in Indians”. What?

“Patients, relatives of patients, state officials, physicians,parole and probation officers, social workers, agree on the value of this practice” which was actually the “prevention of producing defective and handicapped children”. I’m relieved that the probation officers were consulted.

The Betterment people shed more light on the role of sterilization and sex offenses by women. (My bold.) “Of 304 feebleminded girls sterilized and paroled, 9 out of every 12 had been sex offenders before commitment. After sterilization, only one out of every 12 became a sex delinquent on parole”.

If this wasn’t such an awful story, “sex delinquent on parole”, a phrase I’ve never seen before, might make for a great 1950’s trashlit title. (It could’ve been a series, too: all you need to do is take the title “Sex Delinquents on Parole” and add something to it, like “…on Parole from Outer Space” or “…on Parole: Queenie the Slip Crown Breaks Her Knuckles” and so on.)

The sorry story that I’ve interrupted with this bit of frivolity is that the “sex offenses” that are being discussed here is actually “prostitution”. These young women weren’t committing violent acts of sexual savagery, they were just prostitutes, which meant that in most state they were “depraved”. The “feebleminded” girls I would guess were poor or working poor, without the best education, and didn’t do well on whatever test was being administered to them to determine their test-taking intelligence. It seems to me that if the goal was to liquidate prostitution that perhaps the men “seeing” these women should’ve been the ones faced with the operation. But that isn’t how the dominant culture viewed the situation, and that the best way to approach the problem was to remove the reproductive capacities from the weakest members of society.

(Click on this table for a larger, clearer version of the number of forced sterilizations by state.)

This pamphlet was the co-authored spawn of Paul Popenoe (1888-1979) and E.S. Gosney (1855-1942) while both were on the board of the Human Betterment group. In addition to a strict diet of superior morality and race, Gosney seems to have been the money behind the organization. Popenoe had a background in agricultural genetics with an overdrive taste for eugenics and race, somehow intersecting them with social hygiene and marriage relations. The “dr.” that Popenoe loved to insist attaching to his name was an honorary, unearned degree, which he must have felt he needed in order to secure the proper amount of intellectual identification necessary to write on intellectual identification. The Nazis wasted little time in translating and publishing this work, adding it to their official publications list in 1939. It was one of a significant number of intellectual imports that came into poor, besotted Germany; the imports came nowhere close to the amount of information banished, exported to the necessarily beautiful non-Aryan non-Nazi inferno. It was just the sort of thinly distributed stain that interested people like the Nazis.

I wonder what “Dr.” Popenoe thought of this Nazi honor?

The second pamphlet by the same people, Human Sterilization Today,. is in a swift eight pages in which the Betterment Foundation makes it case to use sterilization to check “the misery spread through the community by the unchecked reproduction of the human unit” (italics mine).. They are closing in on the Big Picture in this work, aiming at the 5,000,000 “who will be at some point committed to state hospital as insane” and the other 5,000,000 “who are so deficient intellectually (with less than 70% of average intelligence) as to be, in many cases, liabilities rather than assets to the race”.

This is exhausting reading, but it is a story that shouldn’t be forgotten, and could remind us that what we’re doing or practicing today might look like the Human Betterment stuff 25 years down the road.

What is also deeply unsettling about Popenoe is that from this vast miasmaic idea set of misguided and forced statistics, philosophical racial extremism, “social hygiene”, eugenic sterilization of the enfeebled and socially undesirable, he managed to create the very first marriage counseling service/practice in the United States. The American Institute of Family Relations opened its doors in 1930 (in L.A.!) with this dizzying philosophical semi-brew of sterilization and marriage talk-therapy, happily correlating the whole thing with exploding axis of divorce, love, social failure, racial impurity and castration. And somehow it all seemed to make sense to allot of people, back there in the past.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Social History
Discovering Something Not Discovered–or, How to Best Figure Out What You’ve Got Left After Being Nuked

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1300

The spoiler answer to this: make sure to account for the nukes dropped on you when figuring out what you’ve got left to work with.

This seems a tautologically tongue-twisting, not-quite-right title for this post, and indeed it might be. But that’s the way the pamphlet I’m reporting on read, a sometimes resilient-to- inspection rubbery beastie whose basis for being written was to report on an great oversight that doesn’t really want to be recognized, even if it is the title of the work.

The Bomb Damage Problem, AFAPA-4-4, published in 1954 by the Directorate of Management Analysis (DCS/Comptroller at the Headquarters of the U.S. Air Force) is a pamphlet of discovery–or rather, the discovery of the lack of discovery. (The pamphlet is available from our blog bookstore, here.)

The work is an introduction to some aspects of nuclear exchange post-attack predictive capacity–particularly with the ability of American industry “to support a war plan”.

The anonymous pamphlet gets straight away to the discovery part–that previous predictions of post-attack capacity were “probably completely unrealistic” because “[they] did not take account of the likely bomb damage to the U.S. production facilities”.

I would think that even at this relatively early point of planning for possible Soviet nuclear attack that war game scenarios would have taken bomb damage to industry a”and accompanying manpower losses” into account of how the war machine would react after the bombs began to explode. Though it seems not. I’ve looked to see how I could be misreading this thing because it seems like too monumental an oversight to make. But I can’t find where I’m making my interpretative mistake.

Ultimately the authors focuses on saving the corpus of the overall works, saying that this oversight does not damage the “important thinking” that had gone on it spite of this error.

The word “error: is not used in the text of course. This is how it is described: “In connection with this critical new obstacle to intelligent military planning, it is essential that speculation be minimized.” The error is actually redefined as a “critical new obstacle” the effect of which heightens “speculation”.   Which is all true.

I suppose what is really going on his the formation of some bedrock stuff formulating information gathering for creating a computer program for deeper analytical study of the effects of nuke warfare on post-attack industry. 1954 is about right for the time for this to happen, and the DMA–as the home for the creation of linear programming among countless other things–would’ve been the place for this work to happen.

But I keep coming back to what seem to be enormous understatements–even giving plenty of allowance for the time–that keep cropping up in the pamphlet. Perhaps it is just stating the obvious for the first time that makes all of these seem so potentially underwhelming, like this nugget:   “numerous measures of the importance of each target may eventually be needed….” (Page 7).

There’s plenty of more detail though that occurs in the pamphlet, as in figuring out damage to structures by the yield of the explosion and distance from the target and the composition of the target’s structure, and so on.

And then we get back to the obvious: “the principal effect of a fire storm following an attack would be to enlarge the area of destruction and to alter the shape of the various damage zones, changing them from concentric rings to irregular patterns. “. As I said, maybe it is just a case of a “Call me Ishmael”, or stating that lines and points in space exist for the purpose of geometry. Still, it rubs me the wrong way, all over.

And just to make this point perfectly clear: the “bomb damage” problem is to take into account bomb damage to U.S. war-making, bomb-producing capacity, in a sort of BIBO (bomb in, bomb out) version of a SISO (shit in, shit out).

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Militaria — Technology, History of
A Girl and Her Submarine, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1299

I could hardly resist this 1918 image: the young girl, the hands in her pockets, the ribbons on her chest, her submarine fashioned over a tricycle, the two flags (Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack).

The sun is low, rising or setting, and it is catching the girl in the face, the home-fashioned cardboard visor of her home-grown officer’s headgear doing nothing to shade her eyes. She’s in her dress whites, maybe proud of someone else’s handiwork on her ten foot long submarine. [The photo is available on our blog bookstore site, here.]

The image comes from a small archive of WWI news service photos, this one no doubt intended to stir some home fires to help raise money or spirits. I have no idea of the image was ever published.

And of course the details:

And this of the stern flag, the Union Jack:

And this, with the hand-sewn eagle on the hand-made jacket, with all of the trimmings a creation of mom, or someone else as kind:

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Militaria — Technology, History of — Women, History of — World War I
Less-than-Optimum Oblivion: Measuring the Bad Side of Advanced Nuclear Exchange, 1956

JF Ptak Science Books [Another in a long series of post on atomic and nuclear weapons.]

Perhaps nothing is obvious unless it is established or labeled so; perhaps the obviousness must be stated at least once before it can be officially, recognizably, the case. And perhaps the greater the obviousness is, the more the need to make it officially so. Perhaps nothing is so incredibly obvious that it can be studied and dissected and established.

This seems to be more the case in more recent history than in time more further removed: that millions of dollars can be spent “proving” that children do not like to be separated from their mothers, or that cars will go faster downhill than up, or that people will respond to proper medication better than not, and so on, so on into the night, just seem not to need a vastly-funded proof.

And so the case with nuclear warfare, people, and cities.

In this RAND report from 1956, the great issue seems to be laid to rest, once and for all: the problem with nuclear weapons being exploded in/over cities is that since cities are filled with people, people will be killed. And if those people in the cities are there because of professions that depend on city-settings, then more of those people will be killed than not. [This rare pamphlet is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

But what this report was really about was the unfortunate aspect of the impact if nuclear warfare on leadership and working positions in significant and strategic industrial/business/government professions. And what the report finds is this: since the vast majority of these positions are located in cities (defined as 100,000 population and above), and since cities will be the major targets in a nuclear “exchange”, the overwhelming majority of these people will be killed, thus leading to strategic human resource vacancies post-war.

It seems that 95% of aeronautical engineers in the U.S. would be killed in a nuclear war, which I guess would mean that it would be difficult to design new aircraft and such in the post apocalypse world. Of course these people would be killed because it was their industrial base that was being targeted and they were collateral damage, so there wouldn’t be any industrial base to produce the components necessary to build, say, a B-52. That part of the equation is not addressed here, though. Nor is there any sort of recommendation presented to fix the problem.

The RAND document just painfully points out the obvious, once and for all; no one really knew what to do with the information now that it was there, in black and white. Certain people could be evacuated, saved from the maelstrom; but saved for what? There were other evacuation plans that were completely doomed from the beginning, sheltering plans, Dr. Strangelove arrangements, but all of that would come into their pitiful being later on.

First, though, the bitter reality of what everyone already knew–one of the greatest of all obviousnesses–had to be make its appearance in print. And so it did.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Militaria
When a Portrait is Portraits: Found Portraits in a Group Photo, WWI, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books

In my collection of WWI News Photo Service Agency photographs I would say that half or so of them show scenes like this–semi-informal group portraits of military support groups. 500 portraits like this seem to be a lot, and I’m not sure why these images are so well represented. Except of course that there weren’t that many images (overall) of active-battle scenes. [This image is available for purchase at our blog bookstore, here.]

These bakers, working at a front-line support station, from my read were probably taking a break, and the photographer took the opportunity to draw them together for the portrait. I don’t know why they’re separated so, but they do look as though they have a real camaraderie–it is just a wonderful picture, full of friendship and loyalty, and I’m sure it has never been published before.

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The Big Lie–Poland as an Aggressor Against the Reich, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1298    (This is the second post written on this pamphlet–it is a stunner to me every time I see it. The earlier post was written in September 2008 and can be found here.)

Here’s an interesting entry from the instrumental librarians’ tool WorldCat, a massive 75 million item book database that I use with some frequency, trying to determine whether some obscure-sounding/looking pamphlet or book is actually Not Around, like not in library collections. (When something just isn’t there, not located, it makes the work even more interesting to me.)

Poland’s Designs on Germany has the sound and feel of a piece of propaganda, right from the start, just from the supra-obvious title page and the very feel of the production. Looking for my proof-in-the-pudding–the printing information and source for the information–I found none. Another strike for the propagandist. (And another interesting point: the phrase “Poland’s designs on Germany” is a non-starter on Google, not located on the web, or in JSTOR, or in other pay-for web commercial communities.)

(This item is available for purchase at our blog bookstore.)

Then of course there was the content, which is a simple, serial distribution of The Big Lie, painting Poland as an aggressor, hungry for German land and people. So far as I can tell there is nothing truthful in this work whatsoever, or at least I should say nothing that is assertive to the point of Poland being an “aggressor”. There are seven maps illustrating the points. These are the great hallmarks of The Big Lie–a lie so vast that no one is supposed to think it possible that someone would tell a lie so fantastic, that no broadcast lie could be so incredibly big as to have been invented and told, and so the lie must be true. Hitler wrote about this admiringly in Mein Kampf, expressing an idolotry for the idea in print, recognizing it as a powerfull tool of subversion and propaganda, and then went ahead and followed the instructions.

Then comes the entry in the WorldCat–I found that the year was 1939. It would be in September of the year that Hitler would attack Poland and the war would begin. Who would have thought that the Nazis were acting in self defense?

The WorldCat entry:

Poland’s Designs on Germany as expressed since the British guarantee. [Berlin W 62, Rauchstr. 27] [Dt. Informationsstelle],
1939
23 S. : 7 gez. Kt. ; 8.
Other Titles:     Polnische Ansprüche auf deutsches Reichsgebiet. engl.
Locations    Library
Germany    BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK
Germany    BIBLIOTHEK DES HERDER-INSTITUTS
Germany    DIE DEUTSCHE NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK
Germany    STAATSBIBLIOTHEK ZU BERLIN

And there it is: “Dt. Infomrationnsstelle” is the Deutsche Informationnsstelle, the German Information Centre. The GIC exists today in name only, but during the National Socialist period leading up to the war and during WWII it was an outlet for German propoagandistic works. There are no copies of this particular work, evidently, in libraries in the United States. This is too bad, because this is a tremendously insulting document, an insistent, insinuating, unforgiving document to the ridiculous, perverted manner of thought and logic of the Nazis.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Anticipation, History of — Bad Ideas — Militaria — Outsider Logic — Perspective — Social History
The Not-Yet Iconic Hamburger, 1956

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I was looking for something completely different when I stumbled over this simple ad for Worcestershire Sauce. What was instant recognizable to me was that the hamburger was just exactly that–a hamburger. There was the burger and the buns, and that was it. except of for the fancy Worcestershire sauce, brought to America from the old country. In the ultra-centrifuge micro-cautionary ads of today, it would seem impossible to show a food product in such simplicity and so remarkably unposed–the buns are uneven, and imperfect, and there’s nothing about the burger to suggest itself as good except for the smiling, suited man.

McDonalds was selling burgers at this time, and for 15 cents a pop. I’ve seen television commercials advertising burgers for a buck here in the present, cheaper than what the thing was in 1956, that dollar covering only 12 cents of expense then. The current burger is cheaper still if you consider it as part of an hourly minimum wage; the 1956 minimum was 75 cents/hour, while 2010 is about ten times that; that means that the 1956 hamburger was 1/5 of the hourly wage, while the product in 2010 was 1/7 of the minimum wage. The extreme cheapness of the current hamburger must make it seem a good deal for people working at or below the minimum wage, providing a food-like product to fill the belly for very little money in exchange, and with very little nutritional value. Perhaps that explains why 50 million Americans eat a a hamburger place of some sort every day–it is a vastly successful business model predicated on delivering an almost entirely valueless version of an essential component of daily life, with constant advertisement duping people with greasy heart clogging goodness delivered by a bouncing clown or a little girl with freckles. But of course there were worse things–this one just happened to catch my attention this morning.

The hamburger has maintained its cheapness over the years, and certainly is one of those things from the ’50’s whose back-then price has translated into a more-expensive price with CPI-adjustments over time. There are other staple-like thingas that were more expensive in 1956 than now: milk/gallon: 92 cents 1956 and $7.44 in 2010 dollars) and coffee, 93 cents (1956) or $7.52 (2010). Gasoline was 23 cents/gallon or $1.86 in 2010 dollars. (Gasoline pricing is another, more complicated story, for another time.)

Don’t forget to order your copy of Dishes Men Like! It has seven pages of carving diagrams.

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Executing Numbers instead of People: Lincoln and the Sioux, 26 December, 1862

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1298

(Continuing Post 669)

The great mystery was how those Indians were smuggled out of the grave, in spite of the watchfulness of those guards. From the Autobiography of Theodore Edgar Parker

One of the darkest moments of the spectacular Lincoln presidency came on 26 December 1862 when the president chose to not interfere with the vengeful hanging of 38 Santee Sioux (just south of St. Paul, Minnesota). This was the legal outcome of a short-fought “war”(known variously as “The Great Sioux Uprising”, “the Dakota War of 1862” and “Little Crow’s War”) between U.S. soldiers and several Siouan tribes. It was a war brought on by the desperate tribes after suffering failed crops and the reneged treaty obligations (including a long-overdue payment of $1.4 million for the purchase of 24 million acres, or about a nickel an acre) of their Great Father in D.C. It was really more like a hunting expedition—the Indians, who had rampaged and taken hostages and killed over 200 white settlers and farmers, were at the end of their endurance. The warriors were ill-equipped for almost anything, with little food and failing horses, and were positively no match for the federal troops who would hunt them down and destroy them. The end result was a six-week course of “trials”, conducted by a commission of unsure legality, hearing the cases of 393 people over a span of 42 days, convicting 323, and sentencing 303 to death by hanging. Lincoln commuted most of the 303, but left 38 to be killed.

[This image is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]

“Destroy” isn’t my choice for words—it is used over and over again in the communications between the field commander General Henry Sibley and the general in charge of the entire region, General John Pope. It turns out that Pope was of the Tecumseh Sherman school of Indian relations, writing for the record:

“It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromise can be made.”

Sibley was a hardened veteran but comparatively understanding towards the Indian, though his communications read much harsher than that. At least he used the word “destroy” rather than “exterminate”, though that was small comfort to those on the receiving end of that vocabulary. (In a letter written in October 1862 to four Sioux chiefs whose tribes might be seen as harboring the breakaway, “warring” tribal elements led by chief Little Crow, Sibley said that he was out to “destroy” Little Crow and that the chiefs should be as invisible as possible, as the Union soldiers “might not be able to distinguish you from the guilty bands” and could kill them also/instead.)

The war, which began in August ended almost immediately, found the troopers breaking the backs and the wills of the Indians at the Battle of Wood Lake in September 1862. From that point on, it was Sibley’s job to round up as many of the warring bands as possible and bring them to justice in a military court of law which would not disappoint those with vengeance in their hearts. The major difficulty seems not to have been the resistance of the Indians but of the problems of supply for the troops. The prairie grasses then were brittle and dry and brown, forage was extremely limited, and moving 2000 men was a difficulty. Little Crow and his followers of course had much less, plus they had already been semi-starved up to that point—now that they were on the run, their situation was beyond desperate.

And they weren’t hard to find. Sibley’s main concern was to get as many in for trial and judgment and (probable) execution as possible before word leaked out that the guilty were going to be killed and their women and children impounded. Sibley wrote to Pope on 3 October:

“It is probable I shall not order any execution of the guilty until I can get those understood to be coming down to surrender themselves in my power, as otherwise they might be deterred from returning.”

Deterred, indeed. He continues:

“I shall send the Indians composing the friendly camp to the lower agency, in charge of a detachment of troops, to collect the corn and potatoes in the fields, which have remained hitherto undisturbed. This camp is composed of about 1,200 men, women, and children; mostly the latter, there being but about 250 men among them. How they are ultimately to be disposed of is a question for the determination of the proper authorities. They comprise perhaps nine-tenths of those who have not been actively engaged in the war.”

So Sibley was successful early on his round-up campaign, catching all of those women and children–sounds like of the 1,200 that he overtook, there were about 500-600 kids. The next day Sibley reported to Pope that the Indians were coming to surrender of their won free will, though they were doing it “slowly”.

Little Crow’s people were “coming in but slowly” and “I may still be necessary to attack them”.

Attacking for slowness. In a later letter of 8 October Sibley notes that there is an actual reason for the slow movement:

The messengers dispatched by me to the upper camps returned last evening. They communicated my demand to their small camps, one of which, of 20 lodges, will be here this morning. They say that they dispatched young men to the larger camp, and they state that they were informed that all of the lower Indians were moving down, but slowly, as their horses and oxen are so poor and weak that rapid marches are impossible.

On 6 October Sibley reports to Pope on some other bands of the guilty Indians starting to slip away, writing of “destroying” them as well:

“The bands of Lower Sissetou Sioux, headed by Sleepy Eyes and White Lodge, consist of perhaps 100 or more fighting men, and these have gone with their families toward the Cotean des Prairies; they will probably be found on or near the Big Sioux or James River, where they usually make their fall hunts, and they can only be overtaken and destroyed by a sufficient force of mounted men…”

The next day, 7 October, Sibley seems to continue to play a diminishing role of understanding-the-Indian, telling Pope that the lawbreakers “small mercy”, preferring to wait until all of the Inians were brought in before he started to hang anyone. Of course thius was all pre-trial conversation.

If I succeed in securing them, as I hope to do, I shall have in my hands three- fourths of those principally concerned in the outbreak, and I promise you they will receive but small mercy at my hands. I have 20 prisoners under sentence of death by hanging. 1 have not yet examined the proceedings of the military commission, but although they may not be exactly in form in all the details I shall probably approve them, and hang the villains as soon as I get hold of the others. It would not do to precipitate matters now, for fear of alarming those who are coming forward to take their chances.

As awful as this sounds, Sibley was a little too liberal and deliberate for General Pope, who wanted to get things settled immediately if not sooner—Pope actually wanted the Indians shipped to him so that he could dispatch the offenders upon arrival. Sibley to his credit fought this.

Once the deed of rounding up the Sioux was completed, there was a quick trial, and 303 of the braves were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.

The text of the orders from the Executive Mansion–and signed by Abraham Lincoln–to General Sibley read as follows:

“Ordered that of the Indians and Half-breeds sentenced to be hanged by the military commission, composed of Colonel Crooks, Lt. Colonel Marshall, Captain Grant, Captain Bailey, and Lieutenant Olin, and lately sitting in Minnesota, you cause to be executed on Friday the nineteenth day of December, instant, the following names, to wit”… [39 names listed by case number of record: cases 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 22, 24, 35, 67, 68, 69, 70, 96, 115, 121, 138, 155, 170, 175, 178, 210, 225, 254, 264, 279, 318, 327, 333, 342, 359, 373, 377, 382, 383]. The other condemned prisoners you will hold subject to further orders, taking care that they neither escape, nor are subjected to any unlawful violence.

The condemned did of course have names but I haven’t been able to find them as yet.

The detail of the wood engraving that I’ve shown above may have these men shirtless in the bitter cold. They were being watched by men in columns, at attention. Then there were others who were standing on a barrel to get a better view. Others were on horseback. Outside the obvious monstrosity of the situation, not having your feet on the ground, not standing, not bothering to keep yourself erect as witness to the enormity, was inexcusably bad behavior.

The sentences of all but 38 were commuted. On the morning of execution the men were marched in 35 degrees below zero cold twelve miles to the place of execution at Mankato (outside of St. Paul). The scene is reported by eyewitness Theodore Potter (recorded in The Autobiography of Theodore Edgar Potter):

“On the morning of December twenty-sixth our company was ordered to march to Mankato and act as guard at the execution. We were in our saddles and on the way before daylight. The distance was only twelve miles, but the thermometer registered thirty- five degrees below zero, and before we reached Mankato many of the men had frozen ears and feet, and all suffered severely from the intense cold.”

Potter describes the execution thus:

“At Mankato we met several other companies of our regiment who had been ordered here for the same purpose as we. Hundreds of angry men who had suffered at the hands of these savages were camped within sight of town. They were well armed and officered and were determined that the two hundred and eighty-two Indians who were not to be executed that day by the law, should suffer execution at their hands. Colonel Miller, who was in command of the troops had a force of fully two thousand men, including one battery of artillery, with which to protect his prisoners. The execution took place in the early afternoon. The thirty-nine Indians were ranged on one long platform and executed at the same moment, in sight of a vast multitude of people besides the two thousand troops. At the appointed moment W. W. Dooley, a former member of my militia company and a chief of scouts, whose family had been killed by the Indians at Lake Shetook, stepped forward and cut with an axe the two-inch rope that held the scaffold suspended and the entire number were plunged to death. The prisoners met their end like true soldiers of the plains. Missionaries who had been with them for years were permitted with them during their last days. When the time came for them to go to the gallows the braves asked to have the chains taken from their legs so that they could go in Indian style, single file. This was allowed, and they marched to the scaffold singing their Indian war- song, which was joined in by all the other prisoners. Each Indian placed the rope around his own neck and sang while the death cap was drawn down over his eyes. For five minutes after the scaffold fell everything was as hushed and silent as death itself. Then the crowd began to quietly disperse. The settlers who had formed in companies prepared to make an attack on the barracks, but Colonel Miller had his force well disposed to repel any attack, and the people saw that it would be foolhardy to make an attempt to storm the jail protected as it was by the force of disciplined soldiers. Nearly all the soldiers present were Minnesota men and many of them had had friends killed by the Indians, so that their sympathies were with the settlers and it was well understood among them that if an attack was made on the barracks, and they were ordered to fire on their own friends, they would do so indeed, but would see that none of the attacking party should get hurt. Fortunately the attack was not made and the settlers dispersed.”

The hanged men were buried in a mass grave, though they didn’t stay buried for very long at all. Potter concludes:

The executed Indians were ordered buried on an island in the river near the spot of their execution. All were to lie in one grave and a strong guard was stationed to protect their remains. That night our company returned to St. Peter. On the way several sleighs passed us at different times with only two men in each sleigh. The surgeon of our regiment, a Dr. Weiser, who was riding at my side, remarked that it looked as if those sleighs might have dead Indians in them in spite of the guard at the grave. I jokingly assured him that even if there were dead Indians in those sleighs, there was no danger of his losing his scalp to them. That night after reaching St. Peter and supper at the Nicolet Hotel, the doctor invited me upstairs to the third floor, saying that he had some valuable Indian relics he would like to show me. There on the floor lay three of the Indians that had been buried that afternoon and placed under a guard consisting of a full company of live Minnesota soldiers. The great mystery was how those Indians were smuggled out of the grave, in spite of the watchfulness of those guards. It was soon known to all that their bodies had escaped the grave and were distributed among museums and hospitals in this country and abroad.

Unfortunately, as we all know, these actions were all “normal”. The aftermath of all of this in Minnesota was that all of the remaining tribes were expelled and all Indian reservations were abolished. That pretty much ended the “Indian problem” in Minnesota.

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JF Ptak

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American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Social History
Selling and Costing-Out Digital Computers, 1959–When “Computers Didn’t Sell Themselves”

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1296

“Computers do not as yet sell themselves.”–Lehman, 1959

Question: what had 1000 transistors, 5000 diodes, 2000 resistors and 1000 capacitors, a team of ten and took 18 months to build?

Answer: an inexpensive, $12,000 digital computer in 1959.

Mind you this is legions better than what was happening in the mid-1940’s, with teams of hundreds and costs in the many millions, and much better than in the early 1950’s, when these numbers were of an order of magnitude greater.

It seems to me that this short 1959 paper is at the upper end of a beginning concern–costing -out the price of a digital computer for second-tier interests. “The Specification Development of a Cost-Limited Digital Computer” (by M. Lehman of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and available here for purchase) was written for those businesses and schools with a definite low-end budget, the upper range of which was set by Lehman at $12,000 for “peripherals, hardware and programming (or about $125,000 in 2010 dollars, sort of¹). This figure was also exclusive of maintenance outside of the cost (at 15-20% of the construction costs overall) of designing and building the machine.

This was some new thinking on providing lower-cost digital computers to a new market: “in just ten years there has emerged a multimillion dollar industry largely dominated….by the giants of the electronics and data-processing industries…”. Lehman was saying that there was a new opportunity for business to supply computers to “smaller research groups” who were “finding it increasingly difficult to obtain the backing which would enable them…to build an actual machine”. There were other ways of doing it, and Lehman laid out the basic understanding of that procedure.

Lehman’s leading quote for this post was accurate–computers needed to be “sold”, as in salesmen and businesses actively engaged in contacting clients who would (“might”) benefit from having computeriaed part of their business. The computer manufacturer’s “staff will often spend many months investigating customer’s problems, possibly reorganizing his techniques and generally preparing teh ground for the installation of a Digital System…”

(The figures in the right column are indeed dollars.)

Lehman was doing some groundbreaking work here at the end of the ’50’s, still far ahead of the time–and probably a full generation–where computers didn’t necessarily have to be shown as being ‘needed” let alone
“necessary”. The computer would be “selling itself” on the low-end of the market soon enough, but really not until the Reagan years when it was beyond question that the computer could be used by virtually any person or business–at affordable rates.

Notes

1. Sort of, indeed. Straight CPI translation would put this figure at about $125,000, but the other cost of things in 1959 compared to 2010 is a different structure. Sure, it might cost out to 125k, but that $12k in 1959 could’ve been traded for a decent working-class house in a big city; you couldn’t trade that $125k for the same thing today, no way, no how.

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JF Ptak

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Calculating — Computer Tech/History — History of Dots — History of the Future
The Rare Antique Vision of Looking Straight Down

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1295

The idea of representing a view straight down, of looking straight down from some height, is a relatively recent occurrence, this view being somewhat rare in the antiquarian world pre-balloon or pre-heavier-than-air flight. The pre-human-flight reason for its scarcity is understandable, but even after the first Montgolfier ascension in 1787, there’s another 120+ years of scarcity yet to come before these views would start to pop up in common (and uncommon) literature.. Now I’m not talking about cartography, which is basically a straight-down view of the world—what I’m referring to is that same view but not as a map per se, but what you would see if you were dangling out of a plane or balloon. The extraordinary map of Imola by Leonardo would certainly classify because of its you-are-there qualities: essentially it would be like a bird’-eye or oblique view, but straight down.

All of the images are available to purchase from our blog bookstore, here.

The first image is that made from a balloon, a lighter than air affair, and engraved and printed around 1810 or so. It has a very uncommon vertigo-ey affect, like a map of Dante’s leveled creations, though what we’re seeing is a very

…which is a detail from this engraving, made in London around 1810.

There are of course a number of other lovely design elements, not the least of which is the man in the parachute, bottom left. (My guess is that the flag held by the man was not for patriotic reasons but rather for more practical concerns, light judging wind strength and duration.

Another interesting image is this instructional from a source printed around 1620 (I don’t know the source here, either–I purchased the print loose many years ago like many of the others here at Pageant Bookshop in NYC). It shows a slightly oblique angle (below) and then the flat-perspective view at top:

And then the lovely detail:

Then there’s this beauty, showing an idealized town square, presented in mosaic as though seen from above, continuing this thread of flat-perspective–basically looking at some central part straight down, and then taking the objects surrounding the central figure and simply laying them on their backs, as so):

Lastly for now is this quite flat persepective of the remains of the Hastings Castle (East Sussex), which was built right after 1066 but before the battle. The (limestone) cliffs that did so much damage to the castle are clearly visible, though what was left of the castle is not. The view of the area of the castle shows the grounds both in perspective and plan and also from directly above. Its a more-naive approach to imaging that was done so well (on occasion) by the U.S. Coast Survey when it rendered a coastline with an inset of what the coastline looked like from the water–both were superior efforts, but a little odd if you took the map at face value. This map makes no pretense on perspective correctness, though it is overall a fine map, nicely displaying the necessary details accureately though not correctly (?)

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JF Ptak

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Aviation & flight — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Perspective