Author: JF Ptak

World War II Propaganda–What We are Fighting For: Czechoslovakia, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1069

“In this war, we know, books are weapons”–Franklin Roosevelt, 1943.

This image composes the back cover of a very small (3 inches tall)
pamphlet, Unknown Country, published by the Inter-Allied
Publications in New York City in 1943. Its intention was to give a
background and some sort of name, a little understanding, to what was
Czechoslovakia, for the general reading public of the United States. By
1943 the pamphlet may have been a long time in coming, the Nazis
bullying the Western powers with threat of war if it didn’t get its way
in stealing most of the country back in 1938–an enormous debacle, the
only decent thing of it being the necessary disgrace of Neville
Chamberlain and the coming to the Prime Ministership of Winston
Churchill. The business of the division of Czechoslovakia and the
killing of the country through the later months of 1938 is a dark and
sorry tale, too long to tell here properly.

The Unknown Country was heavy with
democracy, the extremely limited successes of interwar
Czechoslovakia,and the resistance movement–plus of course lots of
pre-war history–all to provide some sort of recognition for this place
in the news, an attempt to create a sense of “ownership” about what was
happening there, a familiarity that would perhaps make Americans
responsive to war news from far away in places that they had never herd
of before.

One thing largely missing from this 94-page pocket pamphlet
deals with
another sort of crowd–the dead crowds of Lidice. This was the
town that was used as part of the 1942 reprisals against the Czech
people as their punishment for the murder of Reinhard Heydrich:
and what happened there is that the town and all of its people were
killed. Even dead people were killed, dug up, exploded, dynamited. The
town was set on fire, exploded and then bulldozed. The people there
were murdered on the spot or sent to concentration camps to be murdered
there. Lidice was world-famous by 1943, but for some reason it was
missing (save for a brief mention) from this pamphlet. I wonder why.

Here’s a sculpture dedicated to some of the murdered children of
Lidice:

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A Taxidermological Satirist Adventurer and PsychoBon-Vivant: a few Paragraphs in the History of Boredom

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1068

In the 19th century, when the rich were insane, they were simply eccentric; when the poor were insane, they were crazy. Luckily for Charles Waterton (1782-1865), he inherited a large estate and could insulate himself from legal scrutiny and indulge his whims and interests. Waterton would make a problematic biography, his life filled with front-line environmentalism, exploration, taxidermy, and natural history interests wrapped around a solid steel stake of bizarre personal behavior. Money was his greatest curative, an elixir of great depth and more understanding than Dr. Freud could ever muster. But ultimately I think that with all of this behavior masked a terminal boredom–Mr. Waterton was both bored and boring.

Waterton wrote three volumes of Essays on Natural History and the best-selling Wanderings in South America¹, turned his estate into what amounted to be the first nature preserve, talked to bugs, barked like a dog, tried to fly from his outhouse, left his gloves at the top of St. Peter’s, and on and on. His portrait by Charles Wilson Peale shows him with a sharp eye, weird hair, and a cat head as his buddy on a book.

Later in life he had a bitter dispute with JJ Audubon–this was mostly a one-sided affair, Waterton seeing mostly invisible complaints with the great ornithologist’s work. Audubon rarely responded to Waterton’s very public and in-print diatribes, ending only when Waterton left England for New Zealand in 1839².

The man did form a considerable collection of natural history specimens and medical oddities.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me to take away from Mr. Waterton are the subject headings of the biography written for him by his long-time fried, Dr. Charles Hobson, (Charles Waterton, his Home, Habits and Handiwork³), published in the first edition a year after Waterton’s death (and somehow reaching a second edition three decades later). The book is a very tough go from where I sit, and my main interest is just in the sub headings for the book’s chapters. For example, how could one resist the story of such an odd man when presented with chapters like these:

“Mr. Waterton recounts a conversation with a Man representing himself Skilled in Egg Gathering at Filey ….. “

“Remarkable Willow, from the Stump of which have sprung Twelve Stems, designated by Mr. Waterton “The Twelve Apostles,” and one detrimentally influenced by a Storm being named “Judas ”

“Securing of Pike by the Bow and Arrow a favourite Amusement of the Squire”

“Mr. Waterton “fairly floored” by Mr. Salvin’s .clever Imitation of a Pig”

“The Ape Searching the Squire’s head reminds him of a Cambridge anecdote”

“Special immunity in the female sex from death by lightning” (which is a loose, semi-statistical discovery of challenged means)

But once you open the book and make your way through Hobson’s unusual prose, the book becomes almost instantly resistible. And so my interest in Waterton wanes down to almost nothing–he seems like an interesting guy, but not so much so that it eclipses all of the egomaniacal stuff that went along with him. He seems to be made of the stuff that excludes friendship, and that leaves me out–and with which Waterton would have had no problem.

____

Notes.

1. The book has not been out of print since it first appeared 170 years ago. It is filled with adventures high and low, some of which are real, some not. Adventuring in Guiana in the first third of the 19th century was an exotic affair–much more so than could really be imagined in general today–and so the book was a best seller.

2. That’s okay–the arguments defaming Audubon came to nothing, and Waterton was generally wrong in the main points if not no-wrong in a few minor ones. I don’t know what his problem was with Audubon and his great work, but it really doesn’t matter. Audubon described one of Waterton’s missives to him as a “scrubby letter”, and I’m pretty sure it must’ve been so.

3. The book is available on Google to be read in its full majesty here. I’d say “pass” to the general reader, but if you’re in the exhibits/museum world, I’m sorry to say that it is probably a must-read.

There’s much more that I left out about this man, but I just can’t do any more:

“Charles
Waterton,” from the Catholic Encyclopedia

The
Charles Waterton Home Page

Wanderings
in South America, by Charles Waterton

A nice chapter appears on Waterton in Lynn Barber’s The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870 (1980).

And a very nice appreciation of the man (with a much more useful stuff about his history) from the Pyromaniac blog.

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Bad Ideas — Boredom, History of — Outsider Logic
Thinking about the History of Pockets and Pocketbooks

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1067

I’ve known about this photo for a long time—a picture of a
willed, powerful woman stepping up to an (early, interesting) microphone to perform: that would be Dame Nellie Melba, the prima donna from Australia, singing at the Chelmsford Marconi works on 15 June 1920 in the first-ever-advertised broadcast entertainment. Weirdly,
what has always struck me about this is the handbag. The pocketbook. Why didn’t she put it down to sing?

Its not a big question, really, especially if you look at
the pocketbook as just a pocket that you hold—an irony in itself, a displayed
thing holding concealed things.

The pocket, or handbag, or purse or pouch goes back a long
way, thousands of years. But for this
scant view of the history of the pocketbook the action begins in the 14^th
century or so, when pouches with drawstrings were used to haul this and that,
attached to the exterior girdle of the clothing of men and women alike. These exterior pockets were switched to the
interior in the 16^th and 17^th century (or so) given the
new and voluminous articles and layers of clothing that were in fashion—there
was so much material that the girdle or belt could be worn under the clothing
with the pouches attached to them there.
Of course if you didn’t have a lot of clothing to wear—like these guys
in Brueghel’s “Two Elders” , you’d be
wearing your pouches still on the outside, this in the manner of K Street bike
messengers.

And so by the end of the 18 th c fashion was flayed with the
curse and rumor of revolution—people wore less layered and puffy clothing, and the
pouches returned again, though aided in a short while by the invention of what we know and recognize today as the modern
pocket. The pocket would at first be a
simple slit in the clothing to get to the hanging, girdle/belted dangling
pocket, and then after Something Happened the pouch would be attached to the slit.
Voila.

The pocketbook that we think of today came into being in the
mid/late 19^th century—just a few decades really before this photo
was made—and that article of necessity hasn’t looked back since. It seems to me that the pocketbook of the 19^th
century might’ve been an advertising platform too for marketing marriagability—the
bags were often finely decorated/embroidered, which would show in effect a
particular domesticity skill. And then
of course the bags just held stuff, too.
It would be interesting to see a collection of the preserved contents of
handbooks by the decade for 150 years or so—just the contents spilled into a
bag and preserved, a version of “the Things They Carried With Them”.

I have no idea about the evolution of the interior pockets
of pockets in pocketbooks.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Women, History of
Power of Words: On Naming Women

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1066

In the river of names, of all things, babies and wives are given their’s by fathers and husbands–and the wives are solitary cases of having a name already given them taken away to take the husband’s.   In the early- and mid-twentieth century and before, women leaving their parent’s home with a husband followed the custom of leaving at least half of their social identity behind, and in many cases, all of their name disappeared as they became “Mrs. John F. Someone”, burying women further into unrecoverable social and legal anonymity.   In earlier times this burial was literal–if you take a walk in a mid-19th century cemetery (and earlier) you will see some amount of smaller headstone(s) next to a larger simply reading “His Wife, Elizabeth” and some simply, in high tragedy, “His Wife”. Like burying property, the woman in death remains an asset.

Having a woman follow a custom of taking her husband’s name in marriage is an old practice in the United States, and a successful one (for centuries) of helping to keep woman as a subjugated class, and for at least maintaining a control of sorts on women’s individuality.

And so far as I know this practice was a custom–I’m not aware of any state laws requiring a wife to take her husband’s name. (Just in a way as “the Pirate’s Code”, as Capt Jack Sparrow pointed out, “was more a guideline than a set of rules”.) This was one of the great unspoken non-issues of the suffragist movement in the 19th century. I think that the idea was too dicey and radical even for the far-liberals. But not all: Lucy Stone kept her name in marriage, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton so elegantly wrote about in the radical feminist magazine The Revolution in 1869 (see below).   But there were few others–the convention was perhaps too difficult and deep to deal with at the same time as addressing the less-problematic issue of women voting. The issue was left to the late 20th century top begin to deal with in any real way.

So the control of an entire class of people is aided by the power of words–or a word, the husband’s name. This sort of control happens all of the time, at every level, every day.   Take “spill” for example. There’s nothing that I can think of in English that is suitable to describe exactly what continues to happen with every passing second with the BP Gulf Coast event horizon debacle. I am certain that BP is relieved that we don’t have twelves different classifications for the idea of “spill” as, say, a language for a culture which lives in perpetual snow conditions would have twenty words for different types of snow. No matter how much someone tries to explain what 100,000,000 gallons of oil looks like, calling it a “spill” in every breath lessens the impact of the event and the data.

If you call something by a name right or wrong enough times, that is what it becomes. This is a standard advertising ploy, as the great American psychologist and inventor of behaviorism John B. Watson more or less discovered when he began work with the J. Walter Thompson agency–it didn’t matter what the cigarette tasted like (hot toxic smoke and fumes from a burning plant inhaled into the lungs), so long as people remembered that they were told it was”good”.

This is also the way stereotyping functions, as well as the Big Lie. With women, the naming process helped to subvert an individuality that suffered terribly in the courts for some time–in addition to giving up her name, a married woman (in many states) gave up much else, including the right to own her own income, the right to contest a divorce, and the right to have any say in the disposition of her children in the case of a suit for divorce brought by the husband. Naming things does have great power.

Notes:

From Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae, The Radical Women’s Press of the 1850’s (sometimes the desired quote doesn’t come up in this window; if you see just the cover of the book, advance to page 168 for the articles “Lucy Stone” and “Can a Married Woman Have a Name?“):

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The Medical History of Curing Cancer with Limburger Cheese, Glycerin and Alcohol.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1064

“The bees were made of sugar and honey, and so made them sting so sweet…” Billy “Craggy” Muffle singing on the French Broad River , 1935.

Punched into the New York Times for 24 October 1909 was this weird Sunday filler on page 11: “LIMBURGER AS CANCER CURE.; Denver Chemist Says That Cheese May Conquer Leprosy, Too.” It was a true story, the quackery produced by the Radio-Sulpho Company by Philip Schush, Jr., a man who preyed on sick people and who is now dead and probably in some Hell. Schush couldn’t leave well enough alone, claiming that his valueless concoction could smite leprosy as well–evidently his range wasn’t wide enough and needed something more, something extra, to fatten his pillow for his fetid night’s sleep. Somehow Schush chose leprosy.

The article comes from a time when the American Medical Association was working in a new alliance with the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Post Office to identify worthless and fraudulent products like this and to protect consumers from vulture companies like Schush’s. This was a new practice with Federal teeth for enforcement, and the amount of quackery it exposed in the medical field was staggering—which I guess is the case when you shine a bright light on anything for the first time, like discovering teeming cold life at the bottom of the sea.

The temerity of so many of these products was astonishing—it seems that absolutely anything could be said, and fortunes would be made, the little-regulated market of medical cures had an enormous population of the sick and frightened to pull form, people who would supply their own truths and beliefs where there was none.

The Radio-Sulpho Company is a prime example: Schush claimed that cancer was caused by germs in vaccines, and that by applying a Limburger cheese poultice to the affected area and drinking his concoctions (“the greatest internal remedy in the world”, which were mainly sulphuretted hydrogen and water) every twelve hours, the cancer would be cured. For a steep $25 a month (“and upwards”) the Radio-Sulpho Company would take care of business, “cancer of the womb and breast (were) the is simplest, easiest and quickest cures made”. Schush Jr. would also come out to treat you personally with his nostrums for $100 a day—but would visit “the white race only”. He died under mysterious circumstances in 1911—some say murder and some say a heart attack (though a heart attack caused by a bullet would’ve been more in line with what the man deserved).

Another example of extruded quackery is the continuing downward spiral of Muscatine, Iowa’s Norman Baker, whose long line of fraudulent products attracted the attention of The AMA early on, and whose exploits lead to longer and harsher judgment under the law. He treated cancer sufferers in his own hospital at a cost of $1000 (in the 19-teens), treating “external” cancers with a cure of arsenic powders (which had been stolen from another quack, Harry M. Hossey) and internal cancers with glycerine.. He abetted his “cancer is conquered” claims with his magazine TNT (The Naked Truth) and his radio station, KTNT.

There were hundreds of others: S.R. Chamlee (Chamley) promised a unique and infallible cure of cancer that amounted to 90% water, “benefited” with strychnine and saccharine. G.M. Curry (Lebanon, Ohio) claims to have discovered the germ of cancer (ca. 1910) which was cured with his elixir of water, sugar and opium.
Other cancer cures used plaster applications (at the Gast Sanatorium, Columbus, Ohio); sugar water (“B.H. Green’s Wild Woods Cancer Preparation and Female Tonic”, Bessemer, Alabama); “radium oil” (James Harris, Tulsa, Oklahoma);chiropractic (David Hestand, Sherman, Texas; “liquid laboratory products” (a mixture of water an d zinc chloride (Indianapolis Cancer Hospital); “cancerine tablets” (95% sugar and 4%’inorganic material’, Johnson Remedy Company); “blood Purifier (20% alcohol, 25% sugar, plus glycerine and licorice, the Johnson Remedy Company). Koch’s Synthetic Anti-toxin (Detroit), William F. Koch) involved “secret remedies” for a starting point of $200 which according to the AMA “was a gruesome spectacle causing a large number of deaths”, the Journal of the A.M.A.); the Lamotte Caner Institute in the U.P. didn’t actually cause people’s deaths but led them to their ultimate cancer-y demise by treaty their illness with bark; L.T. Leach’s “Healing Oils” were widely used at one point by tens of thousands of cancer victims, the remedy containing nothing but cottonwood oil; the “Drs. Mixer”, a cancer cure business run in Hastings, Michigan by C.W. Mixer and other assorted non-medical relatives, sold various products containing mostly alcohol and glycerine, plus “Cancer Paste”, which was nothing but petroleum jelly, “Cancer Salve”, which was made of Vaseline and lanolin, plus powdered opium, and an anti-cancer soap, “Cleanoine Soap Powder”, which was made of borax and animal thyroid.

These cures range wide and deep, a huge trough of wasted hope—its just tough to see the end of the list.
But one last one: the Toxo-Absorbant Company of Rochester, N.Y., run by Frederick Welles Warner, who claimed an assortment of cancer cures whose “chemical affinities…draws (cancer) out through the pores” of the skin. For $10 (in 1910 money, which was considerable) he would send one treatment which consisted of (1) a “Toxo-Absorbant Pack”, being a cloth that was to be placed on the affected area (containing a powdery mixture of nothing but clay, pulverized earth and charcoal), “Cancer and Tumor Tablets” (made of milk sugar) and “Cancer Ointment” , which was a topical made of Vaseline and oil of tar.

When finally restrained by the A.M.A. and prohibited from selling his stuff through the mail by the U.S. Post Office, Warner’s defense for his worthless products was not that they were actually curing cancer and that he was being defamed, but that the laws restricting their sale did not pertain to him because he was selling his products before the laws existed. This was a surprisingly common approach to legal defense in many cases that I have read, and of course did not hold—otherwise, for example, cigarette manufacturers would have been immune from any sort of regulation. The history of medicine is plagued with this sort of deception, but perhaps the period 1880-1930 was the highest stage of this kind of fraudulent-medicine capitalism, if for no other reason than the newly-established and semi-monied working classes could actually afford to buy the stuff.

I’m not sure what sort of weight will be brought to bear on our own medical practices a hundred years from now–copper bracelets, shoe magnets (for example) and other obvious modern quack stuff will certainly make it to the condemned list, but I also wonder about stuff like cosmetic plastic surgery. And then of course there’s Dr. Freud….

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Jigsaw Puzzle Girl/Women of Popularity and Unpopularity

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1062

A little while ago I wrote a post called What
Goes Into Making Human Robot Girls, 1941, which was a look at one of a series
of
intolerably heavy eight-page pamphlets cementing the structure of female
social
intercourse at the hands of the magazine The
Ladies’ Home Journal.

Continuing on this thread of “constructing” females come this publication—hardly a pamphlet per se, just a folded 11×8 inch
sheet of heavy
stock—from that same series. It was offered without a title, presenting itself as a do-it-yourself cut-out puzzle. The puzzle
pieces
are parts of two women, “Miss Popular” and “Miss Unpopular”: the reader
was to
take the publication, cut out the pieces, and reassemble them into
hidden role
models, with phrases describing each on the back of each puzzle piece,
all done with the with lost irony and questionable metaphor.

The twisted printing makes the description conform to the puzzle piece on the other side of the paper. The descriptions for the Popular Girl are as follows:

live wire, plenty of push, wide
awake, snappy
looker, dependable, genuine, secret keeper, on-her-toes, spick and span,
light
hearted, all-around-student, straight-shooter, gossip scorner,
sympathetic,
cheerer-upper, sparkler.

Miss
Unpopular’s phrases/descriptors:

glory grabber, sour puss,
cheater, sob-sister,
snooty-snob, wet-blanket, borrower, prissy prig, sharp tongue, gory
gossiper,
clothes dummy, iceberg, sly and slippery, jellyfish, sticky-sweet, soft
soaper
(?) and, of course, fast and loose.

And
so girls—or young women—picking up this publication in 1941 were
expected to
cut this thing up and piece together the proper (paper) role model using
the
reinforcing traits of meager acceptance printed on the back of the
puzzle
piece. Once together Miss Popular and Unpopular look pretty much the same, though in general Miss Unpopular seems a little darker than necessary, scorched I guess with her selfish sins.

And so double-click for a big image, save it to your desktop, print out and cut up your own Popularity Girl. Or not.

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Found Comix: Female Trouble, 1947 (“When Tears of Shame Smell!”)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1062

I’ve posted a few found comix elsewhere on this blog (for example, this magnificent Italian contribution on surviving fire bombs, here), and I guess that I should have been paying more attention to these other bits of comix-driven advertisement marginalia that flits in and out of the pages of mass market weekly journals–they turn out to be pretty interesting and revealing entities. In today’s case it is LIFE magazine for 9 June 1947, and if subtle, rueful self-awareness images like this were an automobile, this submission would be a jaguar. It is the blatant story of a private and personal life ruined by whispers of BO, where a woman named Jane is paralyzed by the sly look and not-so-silent pronouncement of sniffy displeasure by a man named Dick. The woman would scrub up and then somehow land that self-same Dick in the end with her newly perfumed Lifebuoy body, but only after filling bathtubs with her BO-laden tears. But what a terrible story to tell about such a fragile existence extinguished, all to sell a bar of soap through a comic book tale on the edges of the back pages of a picture magazine.

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Special Welcome to Bloomberg.com Business Week Readers!

Thanks for dropping by! There are more than 600,000 other words on this site (along with another 3,000 images) so have a go. There’s an index of categories to the right–enjoy! Some other recent posts from this blog have appeared in The Economist, The New York Times, Boing Boing, Jezebel, The Wall Street Journal, and others.

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Uncategorized
The Honor of the British Marine, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books

I came across this image in the Illustrated London News for 8 Mar 1943–it is an extraordinary thing, both wrenching in the fantastic simplicity of the material used for training, and magnificent for these men behaving like the soldiers they were for training in a flimsy imitation landing craft for the invasion of Europe. I think it an amazing thing that so much could have been produced with so little material assistance.

The caption reads: “the Royal Marines are ready for anything; an invasion craft has been built on land so as to give them invasion practice”. I think of these men with nothing but the highest respect and admiration–they certainly know that these bits of wood on dry land won’t approximate anything, and yet they train. There was no alternative.

Patti Digh just said–while looking at this picture–“history makes me weep”.

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Little Horizon/Big Sky

JF Ptak Science Books LLC (Image Post)

I’ve always been attracted to antique prints showing distant horizons engulfed by a big (and preferably blank) sky, though in a pinch of a human landscape made miniscule by an enormous starry sky will do just fine. In any event the images below are unusual for their depictions of Big Sky–a hard thing to translate on a little piece of paper.

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Absurdist, Unintentional