Category: Social History

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

[My thanks to Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer for sending this photo my way!]

The idea of Dr. Charles A.R. Campbell (1865-1931) was that malaria was transmitted person to person by mosquito so a good way of combating the disease was to get rid of mosquitoes–perhaps the most dangerous animal in the world to humans–and a superior way of doing that was by introducing mosquito-ravenous bats.  And that is what he did as San Antonio’s health officer–through some amount of trial and error he introduced these “hygiestatic bat roosts” in Hill County, including this enormous 1916 structure. There were difficulties at the outset in attracting bats to the roost, so one of the ways of getting around this problem was to design the structure to look like the evidently all-time premium bat-attractor, the church steeple–I doubt that this had anything to do with the ultimate success of attracting bats, but the resulting profile surely was a winner.

I believe that that is Dr. Campbell leaning against one of the massive (20×20″?) legs of the roost.  Bats don’t weight that much, but that lumber-rich roost did, and so did the guano they produced. Evidently the guano was harvested as high end fertilizer, with more than two tons removed from this roost alone.

There’s much more to this story, of course–I really just liked the photograph:  see http://www.reformation.org/campbell.html and  http://www.batcon.org/resources/media-education/bats-magazine/bat_article/386

 I can’t mention bat guano without a brief sidetrack to Col. “Bat” Guano, from Dr. Strangelove, just because:

[Source: http://41.media.tumblr.com/VVa3lael6qyun4xkM8d9CxGuo1_1280.png]

JF Ptak Science Books                                   

[Source; http://www.ndl.go.jp/exposition/e/data/L/158-002l.html]

This is another in an uncertain series on Found Poetry (a cousin to the Found Book Art series), with this fragment found in the history of technology/labor relations category.  IT seems that in the early and problematic history of the remarkable Eiffel Tower, M. Gustave Eiffel had a few problems with his workers constructing the tower.  Soon after a three-day negotiating session ending the strike of September 19, 1888 (in which workers asked for a four-cent per hour pay increase and where Eiffel slowly met their demands but parsing the raise out one center per month for four months) there was another attempt at a strike, just before Christmas of the same year.  One of the demands floated by Eiffel et C^ie was that the workers engaged in the construction at greater heights should receive a higher pay, what with the rain and wind and the possibility of a fatal trip-and-fall.  Eiffel responded with the following efficient answer, set here to some sort of metre:

The professional risks remained

the same

whether a man fell from 40 meters

or from 300 meters,

the results were the same–

certain death.¹

This was a winning argument, and kept his workers working without compensation for working at a higher height,  and the tower’s completion on schedule. 

Notes:

1.  Eiffel’s Tower, by Jill Jones, Penguin, 2009, pg 49.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2572

I’ve written a number of times about tertiary,  massively incorporated examples of racist behavior in the pre-WWII United States. Impossibly bad stuff that we would never think of as having any place anywhere today was sort of every place everywhere 75+ years ago.  The racist imagery seems to spontaneously occur in places where there just wasn’t any “point” for it, but there it was, a sort of non-sequitur of half-conscious social quiet-loathing.

Tonight’s examples were inspired by a Twitter post by Ward Harkavy (https://twitter.com/WHarkavy) on an incredible piece of social propaganda: a patent for rifle shooting game in which the target is an African American. (It is interesting in and of itself that the inventor thought enough of his invention to patent it so that no one would steal his idea.)

There it is: the “Electric target machine with reversing target”, by William P. Falkenberg and James R. Hall, U.S. Patent # 2188292 A, 1939/1940. “Our invention relates to an improvement in electric target rifle ranges and has for one purpose the provision of an improved target”, the target being  Black man. Well, a Black man carrying a chicken, though it could be that “or any other suitable target”, whatever that was.  (The folks applying for the patent actually used the word “negro” with a small “N”, even though by about this time the fight to deprive African Americans of even the capitalization of the name of the race was over by about 10 years, though there were obvious pockets of resistance.)

“…simulate a negro [sic] carrying a chicken,

or any other suitable design.”

 From the patent report:

• “…#54 which may for example simulate a negro carrying a chicken, or any other suitable design.”
• “We illustrate, however, means for reversing the movement of the target structure in response to every hit so that the negro, if hit, may reverse his direction of movement.”

I did a quick search on Google Patents and found a few more examples of this extreme passive-aggressive form of racism.  The second is from 1923,  a “Pursuit toy”, U.S. Patent # 1588143 A, by Joseph A. Ross, 1923.  The toy consisted of a cop who would spin ’round and ’round trying to catch/club a Black man whose head would pop up from a sewer cover.  The figure that the cop was chasing according to the report was “in the Form of a negro [sic] or any fugitive”.  The profile of the toy shows a cutaway of the patrolman (with raised baton) and the African American head (in the drawing beneath) coming up and through the manhole cover.  

JF Ptak Science Books  

The name of the concentration camp comes to us from the Cuban war of independence (1895-1897) with its first appearance in print (according to the OED) in 1897¹, when the Spanish imprisoned and impressed Cuban families in large compounds. The idea and the terminology was again used shortly thereafter in the Boer War (1899-1902), this time seemingly with more cruelty and savagery. These were the people who had escaped the systematic and revolting scorched earth policy initiated by Field Marshall Kitchener² (who was in command of events after 29 November 1900), where the Boers were simply hunted and killed, or if not killed, then imprisoned; farms were destroyed, towns torched, livestock killed.  In general, the country of the Boers (all of whom were seen as guerrillas) was being taken and killed.  The survivors of this onslaught were sent to the concentrations camps.  

This more modern 1921 reference to a concentration camp comes to us from British Committee of the Russian Red Cross Fund in Great Britain, First report, 1919-1921.  This was a tough time for the people of Russia–the Soviet Union–who were on the beginning of a mostly long-arc downward.  Just seven years beyond the beginning of World War I they were experiencing enormous “hardships” brought about by fighting the war, complicated by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the resulting civil wars.  Then of course there was the end of the war, and the beginning fo the war with Poland in 1919/1920.  And then another in a series of natural/mostly-unnatural famines in 1921.  This particular famine–killing about 5 million people in this year–was brought about mostly by the Revolution and prodrazvyorstka–the practice of forcing peasant farmers into selling whatever “surplus” food they produced to the state at the state’s prices, and also by being forced to supply food to the Red Army and to urban areas.  Add a drought to this mix, and it lead to absolute disaster for the peasantry

Russian Red Cross Fund wasn’t yet concerned with the Povolzhye Famine, not yet, addressing the plight of the country’s response to six long hard years of war, civil war and war again–a poor country made poorer and more miserable, this fund made some attempt at relieving at least a small burden of this impossible situation within the country.  

What caught my eye was in the discussion of providing relief to the camps of Russian refugee expatriates, the report detailing some of those in Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia and Finland.  And Poland.  The Polish camp, however, was different, and described the attempt to send relief to the 140,000 in “the Concentration Camps”, and then describing another of 110,000 “Russians who have been interned according to the Riga Peace Terms, and that the Poles are quite unable to do anything for them”.    (This pamphlet is available for purchase through our lbog bookstore.)                      

The reference took me by surprise–I knew a tiny bit about the Russia/Poland War at this time but hadn’t realized the extent of it, nor the extent of the Russian refugees in the country nor the amount of soldiers (and their families) within the concentration camps.  These are not the extermination camps that would appear in Poland two decades later, but the conditions of the people in the camps led to the deaths of thousands.  

Notes:

“Concentration Camp”, from the Oxford English Dictionary:

A camp in which large numbers of people, esp. political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labour or to await mass execution.The term was first used during the Cuban war of independence (1895–8) to denote camps in which rural Cubans were interned by the Spanish military authorities, and was subsequently used of the camps instituted by Lord Kitchener during the Boer War (1899–1902). Concentration camp is now most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe from 1933 to 1945, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz.

2. Kitchener (who full title without his bloody shoes on was Field Marshal The Rt. Hon. Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, KG, KP, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, ADC, PC) described his vision for ending the Second Boer War in the Parkenham’s history: his aim was to  “flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organized like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly ‘bag’ of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children…. It was the clearance of civilians—uprooting a whole nation—that would come to dominate the last phase of the war.”

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is a rather poetic approach to describing and naming street vendors during the reign of Louis XVI–of course these sorts of descriptions tend to be so in another language.  “La boheme  du travail une sorte de tradition de la misere, la defroque prend sur le dos de ces irreguliers du travailuine mem forme  et une meme coleur…” is how these images are described by L(eon) Roger-Miles’ in Comment Discerner les Styles du VIIIe au XIXe Siecle…etudes sur les formers et les Variations dans le Costume et la Mode, by L(eon) Roger-Miles, volume III, and published in Lyon around 1900.  Bohemian workers in a tradition of misery (or thereabouts) is how this is described–common people of a remedial ability, trying to make a penny.  Street vendors.  

• Earlier in this blog I wrote on a more-fanciful description of professions in “The Dance of Work: Satires and Grotesques of the Professions, 1700”, here. 
• Also, another interesting bit, “The Alphabet of Professions, 1850”, here

And what these people are selling:  (1) oyster seller (with a stubby knife hanging from a string); (2) a kernel seller (which I think refers to corn); (3) a cream and milk seller; (4) water carrier; (5) petseller, with pockets filled with puppies and kittens; (6) ribbon seller, when ribbons were much more popular and played roles in courtship; (7) rabbit skin seller; (8) lottery seller; (9) I believe is a clothing cleaner, fabric cleaner, who would boil materials and such; (10) bird seller; and  (11) a magic lantern performer.  Perhaps the most interesting to me in this group is the last, a guy hauling around a magic lantern and slides, offering up optical performances to whatever audience he could muster.  

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2531

Charles Dickens made a tour of the United States in the first half of 1841–the results of his visit were a critical appraisal of U.S. society and culture, and in general he didn’t like much of what he saw. He published his impressions and observations in 1842 in his American Notes, and it was in chapter 17 (the final chapter) that Dickens undertakes a  thunderingly blistering condemnation of the U.S. institution of slavery–he found it repugnant and inhuman, and a demonstration of a hypocritical American way of life.  There was plenty that he didn’t like about the U.S., but it was the slavery issue that really set him on fire.

Here’s the beginning of the chapter:

CHAPTER XVII
SLAVERY

“The upholders of slavery in America—of the atrocities of which system, I shall not write one word for which I have not had ample proof and warrant—may be divided into three great classes.”

“The first, are those more moderate and rational owners of human cattle, who have come into the possession of them as so many coins in their trading capital, but who admit the frightful nature of the Institution in the abstract, and perceive the dangers to society with which it is fraught: dangers which however distant they may be, or howsoever tardy in their coming on, are as certain to fall upon its guilty head, as is the Day of Judgment.”

“The second, consists of all those owners, breeders, users, buyers and sellers of slaves, who will, until the bloody chapter has a bloody end, own, breed, use, buy, and sell them at all hazards: who doggedly deny the horrors of the system in the teeth of such a mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject, and to which the experience of every day contributes its immense amount; who would at this or any other moment, gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery, and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by any human authority, and unassailed by any human power; who, when they speak of Freedom, mean the Freedom to oppress their kind, and to be savage, merciless, and cruel; and of whom every man on his own ground, in republican America, is a more exacting, and a sterner, and a less responsible despot than the Caliph Haroun Alraschid in his angry robe of scarlet.”

“The third, and not the least numerous or influential, is composed of all that delicate gentility which cannot bear a superior, and cannot brook an equal; of that class whose Republicanism means, ‘I will not tolerate a man above me: and of those below, none must approach too near;’ whose pride, in a land where voluntary servitude is shunned as a disgrace, must be ministered to by slaves; and whose inalienable rights can only have their growth in negro wrongs.”

Then comes this incredible listing of runaway/escaped slaves—in attempting to identify their “property” properly, the slave owners described the various injuries made to the slaves’ bodies and how they happen to have been bound before their flight to freedom. It is an unknowing self-indictment, each ad a testimony to cruelty and viciousness.

“The following are a few specimens of the advertisements in the public papers.  It is only four years since the oldest among them appeared; and others of the same nature continue to be published every day, in shoals.

‘Ran away, Negress Caroline.  Had on a collar with one prong turned down.’

‘Ran away, a black woman, Betsy.  Had an iron bar on her right leg.’

‘Ran away, the negro Manuel.  Much marked with irons.’

‘Ran away, the negress Fanny.  Had on an iron band about her neck.’