JF Ptak Science Books

A Cross Section of Poor Relief: Paris, 1892

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

[Source: Scientific American Supplement #842, February 22, 1892]

Browsing through the Columbian year of 1892 in the Scientific American Supplement I came across this interesting social-architectural cross section and story of poor relief (for men) in Paris.  It was seen as a great of comfort for men who had none, and model for how men of no means could be accommodated and assisted.  The poor refuge at Quai Valmy would be the nighttime home of 200 men for three consecutive nights every two months. They were provided with a bed, clean bedclothing while their own clothing was disinfected and washed, dinner, and a breakfast, and then sent again on their way.

The description of the experience follows (the bold numbers refer to the numbers in the cutaway view):

A Note on Franklin Roosevelt and the Holocaust, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2564

For all of the greatness of the man, Franklin Roosevelt for whatever reason came up decidedly short on the issue of accepting German Jewish immigrants seeking to escape Nazi Germany (in the 1930's) and then later, during the war, having a terrible record in the response to the concentration camps (1940-1942) and (somewhat later) on the identification of the extermination centers.(1943-1945).  It is certainly a large stain on this legacy, a despondency that is confused, confusing, and highly open to debate. 

This came to mind when I reviewed an older post on this blog on books/propaganda issued by the government printing office--in particular, the "Books are Weapons" series, which is a collection of strong images used in connection with Roosevelt's statement about books/weapons:

What struck me today for the first time is FDR's use of "concentration camp", which is surprising to me--at least the "me" at my level of understanding FDR and the Holocaust--because when this poster was issued by the Government Printing Office in 1942 Roosevelt had spent very little public time on the issue.  And in the course of the next 24 months or so, Roosevelt had more evidence of the gigantic crimes being perpetrated by Germany but still had very little publicly to say on the matter.  1942 though seems to be early for this sort of statement--and to find it in a mass-produced vehicle like this poster was a jolt. 

The text on the monolithic book that stand free and tall and immobile in spite of the Nazis in the foreground and their small pyre of burning books:

• "Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons." --Franklin D. Roosevelt. 1942 (the date referenced from the Library of Congress page on this poster http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/96502725/   Another post on this blog shows two other variations on this poster:  http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2014/09/books-are-weapons-in-the-war-of-ideas.html)

This is a very long story, but for right now it seems a relatively certainty that the situation of the Jews in Germany and the rest of Europe was fairly well known and established within the Roosevelt White House, and even so too to some extent in the popular press. By 1943 there was probably no doubt whatsoever with what was going on--in an example of Roosevelt's association with the contemporary knowledge of the Holocaust the FDR Presidential Library offers the following O.S.S. document on the destruction of the German Jews:

An Odd & Architecturally Symphonic Structure Dedicated to Bats, Malaria, & Guano (1916)

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 (20x20"?) 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]

The Found Poetry of Gustav Eiffel's Labor Relations (1888)

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.

Concentration Camps in Poland, 1921

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.

1897   Orleans (Indiana) Progress 20 May   American citizens must not be starved or otherwise executed in Spanish concentration camps in Cuba.

1901   Parl. Deb. 4th Ser. 90 180   The policy of placing the women and children confined in the concentration camps in South Africa, whose husbands and fathers are in the field, on reduced rations.

1927   C. Chapman Hist. Cuban Republic iv. 81   All Cubans (men, women, and children) were ordered to move into garrisoned Spanish towns or concentration camps.

1934   Ann. Reg. 1933 173   Germany..For dealing with the masses of prisoners special concentration camps were opened.

1940   H. G. Wells Babes in Darkling Wood iii. i. 234   The White Paper of Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps and elsewhere.

1941   Manch. Guardian Weekly 31 Jan. 82   They make raids on Jewish families and demand contributions, with the threat that refusal to comply will mean the concentration camp.

1945   M. K. Doherty Let. 16 July in J. Cornell & R. L. Russell Lett. from Belsen (2000) iii. 36   Within a stone's throw of the unutterable squalor and filth of theconcentration camp..were the magnificent quarters provided for units of the German Army.

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.”

On the Dreadful Nature of Unseen Point-Blank Racism

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.  

 

 

A Tiny Peep at the African American in the Great Depression & Dust Bowl Migration, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2571

The Negro Transient

[Source: http://newdeal.feri.org/opp/opp3513.htm]

I found this article, "The Negro Transient", by Herbert C. Jenkins, in Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life, January 1935, while looking for support material for an F.S.A. publication on immigration of "drought sufferers" and the indigent poor.  It is an interesting account of an African-American experience of part of the Dust Bowl, with a number of interesting collections of data and stats for "travelers" in the St. Louis area in 1935.  These "travelers" of course were folks who took it hard from the Depression and from the great  and dismal drought that killed many American farms throughout the Mid-West and West, and so they hit the road looking for the opportunities that dried up and blew away at home.  The new sense of "home" would be defined as anywhere there was work or benefit, which were difficult things to find in the sixth year of the Great Depression.  

One of the Roosevelt administration's aid to helping this large population on the move across the country was the 1933 creation of the National Association for Travelers and Transient Service, which was an outgrowth of regional Traveler Aid societies, many of which were formed in the 19th century and focusing their attention on immigrant issues and the poor. The federal program did its level best to provide shelter, food, medical aid, education, and other services to help and even improve the state of the homeless, the poor, and the Dust Bowler--in many cases the widespread assistance to people in need was unprecedented. 

The fascinating part of the story in Opportunity was the African American angle on population-in-motion.   The author, Herbert C. Jenkins, reports that "The November issue of the Transient, a bi-monthly publication issued by the National Association for Travelers Aid and Transient Service, states that there were 249,975 individuals under care in Federal Transient Bureaus October 15, 1934."  And "As in every movement of nation-wide scope Negroes contribute their quota to this transient army. There are no available figures at hand to show the percentage of the number under care in various bureaus, but because of the traditional "last to be hired and first to be fired" policy which exists in industry they doubtless constitute a substantial number of these wanderers." Jenkins proceeds to establish data that gave a peek into the African American part of the issue.

http://sites.davidson.edu/littlemagazines/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Cover1925.jpg

 

 

"Bohemian Workers in a Tradition of Misery"

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.  

"Has several marks of lashing, and has irons on her feet": Dickens' Check-List of an American Tragedy: Slavery, 1842

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.’

An Extraordinary Protest Document to the Chicago World's Fair of 1933

JF Ptak Science Books  [An earlier post from 2008, expanded and updated now to August 2017]

 This short pamphlet is a very strong tonic to those thinking about Chicago's "Century of Progress" celebration and World's Fair that was taking place in the middle of the Depression in 1933. Its intent is to reveal the "real" Chicago that took place surrounding the flourished confines of the Fair, protesting that there was a lot of real life beyond the fairgrounds that was far more important than whatever the fair represented in the best that's-not-real-but-this-is documentarian fashion.  (The Fair was intended to instill hope and foster a little forgetfulness during a time in which the Depression in full swing nationwide, plus relieve some negative impressions of  native-Chicago problems of gangsterisms, race riots, red scare, and economic distress.) As a matter of fact this pamphlet didn't seem to find much distribution, or at the very least it didn't get saved in spite of the fantastic documentary images that it contains.  This copy of Herman O. Duncan's Chicago on Parade (1933), was his own, sent to the Library of Congress as a gift in 1942 before it came to me in 1999. I can find only five other copies of this pamphlet located in libraries world-wide in WorldCat/OCLC (Oxford, Duke, Chicago History Museum, Wisconsin Historical Society, BYU) which makes it seem very strangely underrepresented.

Duncan addressed the work directly to the Rufas Dawes (President of the Century of Progress Celebration), and to the mayor of  Chicago and governor of Illinois as a very blunt request to not forget the actual world of real Chicagoans living in dire straits within site of the fairgrounds.  Duncan was obviously taking issue with the many statements of wonderment and flourishes of progress that accompanied the propaganda surrounding the fair, so that the attention of the public would not be "diverted by our political and civic leaders".  Duncan continued that these photographs, "none of which had been published previously in the United States" could "perhaps suggest a point of reference from which Chicago can measure its Second Century of Progress".

[Anxious men, women, and children welcoming the rubbish from a garbage truck.]

Duncan (who unfortunately did not identify the photographer(s)) was very strong in the use of images.  He was not afraid to show long bread lines, people (including children) scavanging at the city dumps, blacks and whites marching together in protest of police brutality, (many hundreds) of people sleeping out of doors in Grant Park (Chicago's "front yard"),because they had no where else to go, and much more.  The photographs had a real touch of journalistic acumen, and none of the images look forced or posed--they are the real stuff of social documentary, and how they have escaped wide notice is not known to me
. 

Perhaps the strongest statement (outside of the
photos of the children scrounging for food in dustbins and at the dump) is this series (below) showing views of the city of Chicago that were within site of the tower for the Century of Progress Sky Ride ("See the Fair / Come Up in the Air").  The series make an elegant and strong and incontrovertible point, and that there was definitely something very wrong going on outside the walls of the celebration which had been scooped out of the city's east side.  (The images remind me of series of photos of the US Capitol Building that appeared in the great classic of social and cultural recording of class division, Neglected Neighbors, which my friend Andy Moursund introduced me to many years ago in Georgetown.)

The logo design for the event is terrific and I'm sure that everyone had seen it at least once in their lives, but out of the many hundreds of other pamphlets and display materials that I have here for the expo I've got to say that the overwhelming majority of them are luridly colored with a palette found outside nature.

And anti-nature colors are somewhat schizoid-happy  colors, like MGM technicolor cartoons from 1949, which applies a massively ugly chromo-palette to the blight of the surrounding Depression problems.  Mr. Duncan was determined that this not happen, at least so far as he could help it, and published these arresting images to remind the rest of Chicago that the vividly colored happy face placed over the city like a stamp for the Century of Progress was not the case in fact. 

There are another few images in the "continued reading" section.

Note:  click on the photos for a larger, more detail view.

 

 

Map of Slave Sales, Washington, D.C., 1836

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2490

[Source: the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661294/]

This is one of those graphics that tells an impossibly large story, too much for a short post like this, too much for a single book--it is a Grand Canyon of a story, a story about something so big that its gargantuan nature is self-evident.

I meant to include this in yesterday's post on a 200-word summation of slavery in an 1863 broadside by George Stroud, but it is better posted apart from anything.

This is a shocking document.  It is big (64x48cm) and probably when it was pasted up on the side of a building or a fence or distributed with a newspaper that it must have stiffened its readers. The work is called Slave Market of America, and it is an indictment of the system of slavery, layering the institution of slavery on top of the great documents of U.S. history and portrays its practice on the background of the nation's capital. 

[Source: the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661294/]

The inset map is one of the few from this period to identify the locations of slave establishments.  Here they are identified as "prisons", which is what they were, but more accurately they were places to hold slaves during the slave sale process which would take place nearby. So the "prison" wasn't necessarily for law-breakers, but more so for holding the slaves as they were sold as property the ownership being transferred from seller to buyer. 

And it was not only the slave owners and auctioneers making profit from this--there was also the support industries, like taverns and hotels and restaurants that provided the necessary infrastructure for such business to be conducted.  The D.C. slave market was larger than the District--since it was situated between the two slave-holding states of Maryland and Virginia, it became a natural location for sales of slaves for the region. 

I'm not going to say very much here and just let the broadside do the talking.

And the inset from the bottom of the broadside illustrating the Neal Slave House:

[Source: the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661294/]

These are all details from:

[Source: the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661294/]

"Summary: A broadside condemning the sale and keeping of slaves in the District of Columbia. The work was issued during the 1835-36 petition campaign, waged by moderate abolitionists led by Theodore Dwight Weld and buttressed by Quaker organizations, to have Congress abolish slavery in the capital. The text contains arguments for abolition and an accounting of atrocities of the system. At the top are two contrasting scenes: a view of the reading of the Declaration of Independence, captioned "The Land of the Free," with a scene of slaves being led past the capitol by an overseer, entitled "The Home of the Oppressed." Between them is a plan of Washington with insets of a suppliant slave (see "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" no. 1837- ) and a fleeing slave with the legend "$200 Reward" and implements of slavery. On the next line are views of the jail in Alexandria, the jail in Washington with the "sale of a free citizen to pay his jail fees," and an interior of the Washington jail with imprisoned slave mother Fanny Jackson and her children. On the bottom level are an illustration of slaves in chains emerging from the slave house of J.W. Neal & Co. (left), a view of the Alexandria waterfront with a ship loading slaves (center), and a view of the slave establishment of Franklin & Armfield in Alexandria."--[Source: the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661294/]

Hounds for Hunting Escaped Slaves: "Negro Dogs"

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

[Source: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6736/]

 

In spite of many years of reading I have never before today come across the term "Negro Dogs". I found this mention on my twitter feed via Liam Hogan (University of Limerick, here), who posted the following ad for the sale of "Negro Dogs" for "the purpose of catching Runaway Negroes".  "All who have negroes [sic] in the woods, will please give me a call".  

[Source]  "This ad was originally published in the Dadeville Banner (Alabama), and was republished in Frederick Douglass' Paper, April 8, 1859."

Notes:

See:  From Dog Law Reporter, the fascinating article  "Dogs in the Economy and Operation of the Peculiar Institution: Evidence from Slave State Case Law", here: http://doglawreporter.blogspot.com/2012/02/dogs-in-economy-and-operation-of.html

A worthwhile appraisal of the "Negro Dog" can be seen a BlackVoices, here. 

The Drunken Sale of a Sober Wife, with Pig Jobbers and a Bloody Battle

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

The title of the broadside is constrained though it does give a little bit of a pull and hint about the juicy tenders to follow, all brought to you from the National Library of Scotland:

'A full and particular Account of the Sale of a Woman, named Mary Mackintosh, which took place on Wednesday Evening, the 16th of July, 1828, in the Grass Market of Edinburgh, accused by her Husband of being a notorious Drunkard; with the Particulars of the bloody Battle which took place afterwards.'

Unfortunately it was legal to sell your possessions and your wife, though it seems as though this was an activity of the "lower classes" and a much frowned-upon activity by most.  

And here are one set of the details that you could purchase for a penny, with much colorful language and alliteration to come:

"When, the crowd got a little quiet the people began to examine the
countenance of the woman ; a Highland Drover stepped through the crowd,
and pulled out his purse, and Said, " She be a good like lassie,'l will gi'e ten
and twenty shillings for her." This caused great cheering among the
crowd?then a stout Tinker made a bolt into the crowd, and said she should
never go to the Highlands?he then bid sixpence more for her. At this time,
one of the KlLLARNEY PIG JOBBERS, with his mouth open as wide
as a turnpike gate, and half drunk, eried loudly, FAUGHAHOLLICE , I will
give two shillings more, for she is a pratty woman. A Brogue maker,
from Newry, coining out of a public house; as drunk as 5O cats in a wallet,
came up to the Killarney man, and hits him in the bread bag,"

Full transcription http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15971/transcript/1

Source:  National Library of Scotland  http://deriv.nls.uk/dcn3/7441/74414096.3.jpg

List of African-American Newspapers, 1895

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I found this list (below) of 19th-century African-American newspapers in James T. Haley's Afro-American Encyclopaedia (Or, the Thoughts, Doings, and Sayings of the Race, Embracing Lectures, Biographical Sketches, Sermons, Poems, Names of Universities, Colleges, Seminaries, Newspapers, Books, and a History of the Denominations, Giving the Numerical Strength of Each. In Fact, it Teaches Every Subject of Interest to the Colored People, as Discussed by More Than One Hundred of Their Wisest and Best Men and Women), which was published in 1895 in Nashville (639pp,by Haley & Florida). The book  was digitized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of their digitization project,   Documenting the American South. It is a fantastic thing absolutely filled with information and insight.  

• Full text found here: http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/haley/haley.html

The newspaper section starts with this introduction about the need for newspapers followed by a statement on the involvement, intelligence, and capacity to publish a newspaper:

Shall I Take a Paper?

"AT this season of the year, when publishers are making special offers to the reading public, we are all debating the mental fare with which we shall spread our table in 1895. We ought to have first a good church paper thoroughly representative of our denomination."

"The Methodist ought to have the South- Western Advocate, published at New Orleans; the African Methodist ought to have the Christian Recorder, published at Philadelphia; the Congregationalist ought to have The Congregationalist, published at Boston, or the The Advance, published at Chicago, and so on for the Baptists, Episcopalians,"

"Evangelists and other denominations among us. Each home ought to have its church paper. Next to that stands some good clean helpful race journal. Get one, in the columns of which the editors are seeking to help the race up, and not working to pull it down. When you subscribe for a race journal get one in which the editors display not pessimistic, but optimistic views of the race."

"It will be well to remember that it takes brains to edit a newspaper, and men who have not been trained to think are hardly men to be entrusted with the perilous task of giving direction to public opinion. The editorial chair requires more than that culture gotten from the reading of newspapers. The editor who is sending out week by week his paper into the world ought to be able to grapple with the problems of the day and think them through. There is too much guessing on the grave social problems of the day by editors. Riots and mobs are the result of false teaching, both on the part of the hotheaded anarchists and incompetent editors who are not anachists. In selecting your race journal for the next year find one whose editorial columns show moderation, and one which is not always squared off with a chip on its shoulder daring someone to knock it off. The paper which busies itself with fighting its contemporaries cannot be of very much help to you. When you raise the question about taking a race journal remember there are two reasons especially to be remembered why you should. The first is a duty you owe to yourself to keep up with the movements among your own people. Second, you owe it to the race to support laudable enterprises which look to the betterment of the race. Let us remember, too, that the press, the pulpit and the platform have been the great liberators of the nations In this land of ours we need the influence of all of these to plead our cause up and down the length of our land. Put some good race weekly on your list for 1895."--Cleveland (Ohio) Gazette.

NEWSPAPERS

        The following is a list of newspapers and magazines edited and published by and for Afro-Americans. Alphabetically arranged by States:

        

ALABAMA.
1	Birmingham	Harrison's Pet	Weekly.
2	Birmingham	Wide Awake	Weekly.
3	Birmingham	Southern Broadaxe	Weekly.
4	Eutaw	Weekly Blade	Weekly.
5	Huntsville	Huntsville Gazette	Weekly.
6	Huntsville	Huntsville Journal	Weekly.
7	Huntsville	Southern Freeman	Weekly.
8	Huntsville	The Independent	Weekly.
9	Lovan	The Eagle	Weekly.
10	Mobile	Southern Watchman	Weekly.
11	Mobile	Ferret Journal	Weekly.
12	Mobile	Weekly Sentinel	Weekly.
13	Mobile	West Alabama Advocate	Weekly.
14	Montgomery	The Argus	Weekly.
15	Montgomery	Baptist Leader	Weekly.
16	Montgomery	Odd Fellow's Journal	Monthly.
17	Opelika	The People's Choice	Weekly.
18	Selma	Student's Voice	Weekly.
19	Tuskegee	The Tuskegee Student	Monthly.
ARKANSAS.
20	Fort Smith	The Post	Weekly.
21	Helena	Helena Progress	Weekly.
22	Little Rock	Arkansas Dispatch	Weekly.
23	Little Rock	Baptist Vanguard	Weekly.
24	Osceola	Afro-American Leader	Weekly.
25	Pine Bluff	The Echo	Weekly.
CALIFORNIA.
26	Los Angeles	The Vindicator	Weekly.
27	Los Angeles	The Eagle	Weekly.

On Saving the Jews, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2406

 There was a time in 1943, in London, that there was a great call for the "immediate rescue" of the Jews and other victims of Nazi massacre--given everything, those were pretty strong words, a call to instant action in helping populations in the immediate threat of "extermination". Nazi massacres of the Jews & others : some practical proposals for immediate rescue (1943) was written with the addresses made by the Archbishop of Canterbury (William Temple) and Lord Rochester (Ernest Henry Lamb, Baron of Rochester) in speeches made on March 23rd 1943 in the House of Lords, an addressed an issue that few cared to discus.

 

There are volumes of reports and newspaper articles by 1943 on the extermination and deportation of the Jews and other people, but, really, there was very little discussion about what to do about it.  There were no plans for rescue.   Even when it came down to much more simple issue of raising the levels for accepting refugees (and this by the tens of thousands) there was usually struggle and defeat. On the practicable end of the argument, ships full of refugees were often turned away.  

It is a very contentious issue as to whether the Allies could have taken pro-active measures against the concentration camps, and the issue of the discussion of whether help could have been given is contentious in itself. What makes this pamphlet noteworthy is that it showed there was a public display of concern during a time when there wasn't much public thinking being done on that.  This is a complex issue, though I think the capacity to effect some sort of rescue of thousands, or hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people could have taken place², though it did not, for reasons of indifference more so than for ability or capacity. 

This pamphlet certainly laid the issue wide open:

"My chief protest is against procrastination of any kind. ... The Jews are being slaughtered at the rate of tens of thousands a day on many days. ... It is always true that the obligations of decent men are decided for them by contingencies which they did not themselves create and very largely by the action of wicked men. The priest and the Levite in the parable were not in the least responsible for the traveller's wounds as he lay there by the roadside and no doubt they had many other pressing things to attend to, but they stand as the picture of those who are condemned for neglecting the opportunity of showing mercy. We at this moment have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God."

I couldn't find the full text online, so I scanned my copy and include it below:

Notes:

1. Nazi massacres of the Jews & others : some practical proposals for immediate rescue  made by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Rochester in speeches on March 23rd 1943 in the House of Lords / [William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury ; Ernest Henry Lamb, Baron of Rochester.

2.  This has been shown work by David Wyman The Abandonment of the Jews, America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 (1998) and Richard Breitman  FDR and the Jews (2014), among others.