People's History of the United States: Part 3

Chapter 2: Drawing the Color Line

     The long, sordid, and ongoing history of systemic racism in this country began in 1619 with the arrival of a single Dutch ship to the colony of Virginia. Its cargo was 20 African slaves, and so began one of the most controversial aspects of the United States history and its identity. In 1619 the Virginian colonists were desperate for labor to grow enough food to stay alive, and slaves were the fastest, most efficient way to make sure that there would never be another "starving time". As Zinn described it, in the winter of 1609-1610 known as the starving time, 500 colonists nearly died out for lack of food. In that winter they went crazed, scavenging bark berries and nuts in the woods, even digging up graves to cannibalize corpses, until there were only 60 survivors.

     Unlike Columbus, the colonists were unable to make the Indians work for them as slaves. According to Zinn, there were two primary reasons. First, the North American Indians (mostly Pequots at this time) were much better guerilla fighters and tactically, were far superior to their invaders. Although the colonists had superior technology, they were unable to find the Indians most of the time, let alone subjugate them. And this brings us to the second point; most of the settlers were craftsmen and men of leisure, not soldiers. These colonists had come to the New World seeking political or religious freedom, and didn't have the training, or even the inclination, or work fo themselves let alone exploit the natives. In one account, John Smith is actually forced to put his people in work gangs in order to get them to plant and harvest their fields.

     Zinn takes time to explore the notion of inferiority of blacks to whites at this time. Of course, it was the ideation (and justification) of the white Europeans that blacks as a people, as a culture, and as a living being, were inferior to the white races and so deserving of enslavement. Zinn points out that cultures that can make the subjugation of another culture practical and profitable, will always make it morally justifiable as well. The colonists of North America needed slaves, and though they were able to burn, kill, and torture the native Indians they had not been able to enslave them. However, African slaves, torn from their native lands (which provided Native Americans some protection) and their own culture (which provided European whites some control) were easily exploited and controlled.(25)

     Over the next 100 years, and as colonies in the New World grew to cities demanding greater and greater investments in agriculture and other economies, slavery grew from a small enterprise to a booming industry. Zinn describes the conditions of the capture and travel from Africa to the western colonies in vivid and tragic detail. Often African tribes were completely desimated by slavers, and were sometimes marched a thousand miles to the coast, of which the strain would kill 2 in 5. The conditions on the ship were even worse. Slaves were packed like fish into the holds of massive slaving ships, where they were chaiend to a space not larger than a coffin and were left to endure the several month-long journey across teh Atlantic. It's estimated that perhaps 1 in every 3 human beings transported this way died, but that the profits upon reaching market for each slave sold was double the amount. Howard Zinn remarks, "By 1800, 10 to 15 million blacks had been transported as slaves to the Americas, representing perhaps one-third of those originally seized in Africa. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings...in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization." (29)

Zinn goes to great lengths to point ou the hitorical roots of racism in the United States, fueled by a hunger for profit and productivity. At the height of the slave trade 3 million black slaves had been stripped of their cultural identity and socialized to understand their "place". It was bouyed by the temptation of poor whites, particularly in the South, to exercise power over another, and by a socio-psychological need for the subjugation of blacks in the Southern identity. However, as the U.S. prospered and grew, and a new elite land-owning aristocracy was developing, poor whites began to develop a class consciousness, and began to understand their role within the emerging hierarchy of power and powerlessness. This would ultimately lead to a revolution.

 

Photo from blog.encyclopediavirginia.org

H.H. Holmes was America's first serial killer

I’ve always been fascinated by the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. The temporality of it all. The opulent buildings that were only as solid as the winds that blew around them. The ability to mold oneself into who you wanted to be away from your home and you obligations. 

But that same exciting fleetingness was what gave H.H. Holmes, dubbed America’s first serial killer, his opportunity to kill women looking for that same kind of escape.  Holmes killed somewhere around 200 women—but only admitted to killing 27—in his “World’s Fair” hotel.

Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett in New Hampshire and moved to the Midwest to attend medical school at the University of Michigan.  There, he learned the crime ropes, stealing bodies and disfiguring them to make false insurance claims and in medical experiments. He was expelled from the school when his crimes against the deceased were discovered.

Holmes moved to Chicago in 1886 where he found respectability in his chosen pharmaceutical profession and in his alias, Dr. Henry H. Holmes.

In Chicago, Holmes created his “Murder Castle” that included three-stories—the top for living and the bottom, a series of small rooms, for Holmes to torture his victims. The castle contained a maze of over one hundred rooms, with stairways to nowhere and doors only able to be opened from the outside.  He used several different contractors during the building’s construction so that no one but Holmes knew the entire layout of the house. Some of the rooms included gas jets for Holmes to use to asphyxiate his victims, as well as a giant bank vault in which he would suffocate victims.  The house also included chutes and trapdoors for Holmes to dispose of his victims in a kiln. He would strip other bodies of their skin and organs and sell the skeletons to medical schools.

During the Exposition, Holmes started calling his home a hotel and inviting visitors to stay. This is where he drew in many of his victims.  He killed women that were part of his staff, as well as his lovers.  Often, he forced his victims to take out life insurance policies with himself as the beneficiary. 

Holmes continued to commit insurance fraud during the time that he was killing women.  He tried to collect $10,000 from a life insurance in a plan with Benjamin Pitezel, and when in jail in Texas, he brought in another inmate into their life insurance plan.  Holmes couldn’t deliver on it, however, so the inmate told the authorities of Holmes’ whereabouts. 

Before the police caught onto him for insurance fraud, Holmes murdered Pitezel and kidnapped and killed three of Pitezel’s children. Holmes tried to set up Pitezel’s death as a suicide, but coroners could tell that chloroform had been administered after Pitezel was already dead. A Philadelphia detective found Holmes in Indianapolis where he had recently killed the third Pitezel boy with drugs and chopped up the boy’s body and put it in the chimney.

Holmes was first charged with insurance fraud and stood trial for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. Holmes told the police many stories and admitted that he had killed 27 people. He was hanged in 1896 in Philadelphia for Pitezel’s murder. 

Estimates say that Holmes killed anywhere from 20 to 200 victims.

 Sources and further reading:

http://www.biography.com/articles/H.-H.-Holmes-307622

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Holmes

Weathermen illustrated how to really stick it to the man

Today's young people get a lot of flack for not being politically active enough.  Our generation uses Facebook instead of marches, Twitter instead of sit-ins.  While it would be nice if this generation initiated more physical grassroots movements (i.e. left the house…), I doubt many would be as radical as the Weathermen during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  The politically heated atmosphere of the United States at this time converged with Weathermen ideology causing this extreme left group to attempt to overthrow the U.S. government with bombings and riots.

In the United States in the late 1960’s, radical civil rights groups like the Black Panthers as well as resistance to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War heated the political climate. The Weathermen were created as a union between a fragment of the Students for a Democratic Society, a group that tried to activate students to participate in government, and the Progressive Labor Party. Much of the Weathermen's ideology was based on radical civil rights reform and opposition to the war in Vietnam.

The name Weathermen comes from a Bob Dylan song with the lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In their founding document, the Weathermen said that the biggest thing they were fighting against was U.S. imperialism, which, following Lenin’s teachings, said that the poor and oppressed are the creators of an empire’s wealth. They declared their intention to destroy U.S. imperialism and create a world communism.

However, their methods for protest were completely different from the peaceful ideologies of their white compatriots.  One of their first actions was called the “Four Days of Rage,” held in 1969 in Chicago. The Chicago police had recently beaten demonstrators who were part of the Chicago Seven (the group that was slammed with riot and conspiracy charges during the 1968 Democratic National Convention). The Weathermen planned for thousands of rioters, but only hundreds showed up. 

After this first riot, the group met in 1969 in Flint, Michigan and held what they called the “War Council”. At it, the group declared that they would try and change the world with violent revolution and decided to go underground.  They started practicing karate, singing songs, exercising and condemning the pacificism of white middle-class people (like themselves).

After the War Council, the group only became more militant.  In February 1970, Weathermen planted a nail bomb in the San Francisco Police Department.  It killed one officer and partially blinded another.  In the same month, the group aimed to punish the judge who was presiding over the trial of the “Panther 21,” a faction of the Black Panthers who planned bombings in New York City. The Weathermen threw Molotov cocktails into the New York State Supreme Court Justice Murtagh’s home. The group went on to bomb a Greenwich Village townhouse in March. 

In May of 1970, Weathermen issued a "Declaration of War" against the United States government in response to the death of Black Panther Fred Hampton during a police raid. They went on to bomb a Police Station in New York City with ten sticks of dynamite, broke an acid leader named Timothy Leary out of prison and sent him to live in Algeria, and bombed a women’s bathroom in the Pentagon in 1972 in protest of the U.S. bombing of Hanoi.

The Weathermen were prosecuted intermittently throughout their attacks, but it was often difficult for police to link the Weathermen to their crimes.  In 1970, Detroit indicted 13 Weathermen members on conspiracy to bomb and kill and in October of the same year, member Bernardine Dohrn was put on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. 

The group began disintegrating by 1976 when factions in different parts of the country disagreed on the kind of action their groups wanted to take.  In addition, black and Hispanic groups said that the Weathermen were taking some of their power.

Today, most Weathermen have re-acclimated into society and have enacted change through less violent means.  

Sources and further reading:

http://www.freewebs.com/ziggystardust26/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

Egyptian King Nasser propagandized for Arab Nationalism in the 1950's & 60's

Sometimes it’s difficult to track all of the changes in the Middle East in recent decades, as well as to chart the United States’ relationship to the Middle Eastern countries. Here’s a brief history of Egypt’s King Nasser who ruled 1956 until his death in 1970. Through manipulation of facts and propaganda, Nasser used the Suez War of 1956, the creation of the United Arab Republic in 1958, and the Israeli re-routing of the Jordanian River in 1963 to advance the cause of Arab nationalism.

The Suez War began because Western powers didn’t approve of Nasser. John Foster Dulles, the U.S. secretary of state, didn’t approve of Nasser because Nasser recognized the Communist People’s Republic of China. Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister of Britain, didn’t approve of Nasser because Nasser encouraged King Husayn of Jordan to fire John Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion. For these reasons, these nations would not give Nasser money to fund Egypt’s proposed Aswan Dam.

Nasser retaliated by nationalizing the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company. Eden responded to Nasser's move by calling French and Israeli forces to Egypt to try and run Nasser out of power. The United States was outraged by Eden’s response and forced the troops to withdraw.

Even though the Suez War of 1956 was halted due to U.S. intervention, Nasser, who was in control of the Egyptian media because all those who worked there feared him, propagandized this event in such a way Nasser was heralded by the Arab peoples as “the symbol of Arab steadfastness against the forces of imperialism.” This event bettered the cause of Arab nationalism by adding to Egypt’s, and therefore Nasser’s, reputation as the epitome of an Arab State and an Arab ruler. Not only did Egypt have the best culture, but it could protect itself from Western imperial forces or forces supported by Western imperialists.

Similarly, the United Arab Republic’s creation was surrounded by something Nasser later wanted to downplay—both Egypt and Syria were originally skeptical about a Union. Syria wanted to create the Union because there was so much political disunity within its borders that leaders worried for the country's preservation. When Syrian officials presented their plan to Nasser he was also initially hesitant. Eventually, however, he agreed with the plan because he needed to continue being involved with acts which would go along with his nationalistic agenda. So, Syrian officials flew to Cairo on February 1 and the Union was formed.

Again, the Nasser-controlled Egyptian media skewed the events leading up to the creation of the Union and the Union inspired a nationalistic frenzy because people knew such a union was possible. Nasser used this event to illustrate how his plan for one large Arab state was possible, and the UAR was the first step in his dream. The public showed their response to Nasser and for Arab nationalism through public displays of adoration. When the Egyptian King came to Damascus, for example, “public squares…transformed into something akin to areas of public worship” and an “adoring multitude camped outside” Nasser’s door.

Israelis re-routing the Jordan River to flow mostly through only their borders was taken by Syria as an act of war. Israel wanted to divert seventy-five percent of the Jordan River away from other Arab states and into its own borders. Nasser originally did not want to get involved in a potential war with Israel because he had troops stationed in Yemen. Soon, however, Nasser had a change of heart and Egypt--no longer in a union with Syria, but still pledged in a military allegiance--joined forces, allegedly for Palestine’s sake. This allegiance brought about the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestine Liberation Army, both of which marked the beginnings of a reemergence in Arab-supported Palestinian nationalism.

Nasser again played down his initial hesitation to fight Israel at this point and used this event to change his goal from an “Arab unity” to an “Arab solidarity” because Arab nationalism was failing. Nasser knew his calling for Palestinian nationalism and a Palestinian state would not mesh with his Arab nationalistic view, so he made Israel out to be the enemy of all the Arab states, not only Syria and Jordan.

Nasser, and Arab nationalism’s, greatest ally throughout this period seemed to be Nasser’s superior propaganda skills and the influential Egyptian media, which he controlled. 

Sources and further reading:

Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Gelvin, James L. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasser

People's History of the United States: Part 2

Chapter 1: Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress

            Know this: Christopher Columbus is the first individual in recorded history to successfully commit genocide. In October of 1492, Columbus’ small fleet landed in Hispaniola and was greeted by Arawak Indians (the first to be famously miscategorized as “Indian”). These people were primitive and naïve, swimming out to greet their invaders and offering gifts. However, what intrigued Columbus and his men were the small bits of gold with which the natives adorned their ears. This small fact was the spark that would begin a wildfire of imperialism and slaughter that would continue for centuries. Columbus and his crew immediately took prisoners and demanded to be taken to the source of their gold. What he found were streams with bits of gold visible in their beds.

            Seized by a rush of greedy optimism, Columbus delivered a message to the Spanish royalty asking for further investment, describing the, “wide rivers full of gold and great mines of gold and other metals.” He promised, should they increase their sponsorship of the expedition, to send back, “as much gold as they need…and as many slaves as they ask.” (4) By 1495 they had located no fields of gold, but had to send back some kind of compensation to their European investors, and so loaded the ships with Arawak slaves; 500 of them. Although 200 died en route to Spain, the rest were sold by priests upon arrival. However, too many slaves had died for a large enough return on their investment, and Columbus was made aware of their displeasure.

            Anxious to pay back European investors and make his mark in the New World (which he still believed to be a series of islands off of China), he enslaved the entire population of Arawak Indians. Male Indians over the age of 14 were given quotas of gold to turn in each month, and for each quota met they were collared with copper bands. Those found without bands on their necks had their hands cut off. Unfortunately there was very little gold available; only what could be picked out of local streams. The Arawaks that attempted to rebel against their Spaniard captors were massacred by muskets, swords, and fire. There were mass suicides among the natives with cassava poison, infants smothered to save them from Spaniard persecution.             By 1495 fully half of the native Arawak population had perished.

            Bartolome de las Casas, a young priest that had participated in the early conquest, turned later in life and heavily criticized the Spanish occupation. He remains the definitive source on what happened in those early years and afterward in his multivolume, History of the Indies. He describes the native Arawaks in almost utopian terms; their culture, their social organization, their customs and habits. He also describes the cruelty of the Spanish in great detail, how they forced labor in the mines, how they tested their swords on innocent children and would actually “ride” the natives people if they were in a hurry. By 1508, Las Casas writes, “there were 60,000 people living on the island, including the Indians, so that from 1494 to 1508 over 3 million people had perished from slavery, war, and the mines.”(7) Though the exact numbers are in dispute, even the most conservative numbers place the native population at 1 million. By any standards, this is a successful policy of genocide.

            What Howard Zinn goes on to articulate in the later part of this chapter, is the precedent that this event set for the rest of history in the western hemisphere. “What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortex did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, the English of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and Pequots.” (11) In each case a systematic approach to the extermination of native populations was followed without credit or conscience. Not only was a precedent set in the way that our forebearers practiced single-minded imperialism, but in the way that history was revised as part of a narrative of progress and manifest destiny.

            The stories that our children hear about Christopher Columbus do not even resemble the reality of his “contribution” to our nation. In fact, his holiday is often accompanied by stories of heroic adventure and bloodless exploration. The natives, likewise, are often characterized as either friendly and benevolent allies or primitive savages. Neither one is entirely true, though the former is much closer to the reality. The Arawak, Powhatan, and Pequot were peaceful peoples that approached their European invaders with gifts and openness, or at least watchful tolerance. It was only after the Europeans began their procedural extermination of these peoples that they fought back. By the time that the U.S. was pushing the western tribes onto uninhabitable reservations they had lived down to Americans characterizations of their savagery, but only once they figured out that there would be no compromise, no negotiation, no cohabitation with their white invaders.

People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn 5th edition

Photo from www.thekidswindow.co.uk

Cairo, Illinois is a city disintegrated by racism

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Today, Cairo, Illinois (pronounce CAY-roh) is a virtual ghost town.  Predicted to grow bigger than St. Louis when it was first founded, Cairo perpetrated some of the worst racial injustices outside of the south.  Due to its alienation from the rest of Illinois geographically and ideologically, Cairo’s downfall seems to be that it was southern town in a northern state.      

After the Civil War, three thousand blacks decided to remain in Cairo. In the 1870s and 1880s, black men were excluded from skilled and semi-skilled professions that were available in a time of good economic growth in Cairo. Black women often worked as servants for white homes, but their work didn’t go without complaint.

It was of the utmost importance to the white citizenry that blacks were kept in their places without education or political power.  After the Civil War, African Americans realized they could use their large minority numbers to sway Republican party numbers, and help to shape public policy. Waging this power and helping the Republican party helped give black Cairorites a degree of power, and after 1870, white Republican party leaders let their black supporters attend county conventions as delegates. 

Despite their marginal strides in the 1800's political arena, education for black children was lacking, and whites balked at any change. In 1867, black community leaders wanted to build a public school to educate the city’s black children. Leaders knew that they would need money from the white community, and soon after the proposition, white and black leaders worked together to form the “Colored Union School of Cairo.” Things soon soured, and, unwilling to wait for the problems to be worked out, Shores, the leader of the school and intended lead teacher, told black parents to demand that the black children of Cairo be admitted to the white public schools. White residents were outraged. The black leaders failed to integrate the schools in the 1870s, and by the mid-1870s black students began attending school at the Greeley Grammar school. The school was understaffed—five teachers taught 220 black students.

Poor race relations and citizen vigilantism came to a head in 1909 when a mass mob of 10,000 citizens lynched a black man arrested for the murder of a white woman. On November 8, a 24-year-old white shop clerk name Mary Pelley was raped and murdered. A black man named William “Froggie” James was arrested for her murder. After his arrest, Sheriff Frank E. Davis told his deputy to take James in the woods to protect him from possible mob violence, into Karnac, Illinois. Joe Herrin, a Cairoite who was hunting near Karnac, recognized the sheriff, and returned to Cairo to tell of James’ whereabouts. The mob came to Karnac, and took James back to Cairo. The mob attempted to hang James, but the rope broke, so they shot him and burned his body. Before his body was burnt, the mob cut off his head and placed it on the end of the pole, took out the man’s heart and cut it up into pieces and handed them out as souveneirs, and soaked pieces of rope with his blood. 

After the lynching of James, the mob tried to find another man involved with the Pelley murder, but not finding him, killed a white man named Henry Stazner, accused of murdering his wife. The day after, the mob composed of 10,000 people, the governor called eleven militia companies to Cairo to restore order.

After this, race relations and employment woes, for both white and black, but for blacks in particular continued to deteriorate from the early-to-mid-1900s. Cairo reached its largest population in 1920 of around 15,000 people. By the 1930s, Cairo’s population was struggling financially and began dwindling. By 1935, 40.4 of Cairo’s population was on relief rolls from the government.

By 1960, Cairo population is 9348 with 39 percent black. Racial tension and corrupt police officers again came to a boil with the death of a young black soldier, under shady conditions, in custody of the Cairo police department. The department said the decidedly happy soldier had hanged himself in his jail cell. Hunt’s death divided and militarized the black and white citizens of Cairo, and, with the limited power of black police officers and the negligence and corruption of white officers, vigilante citizens again took their ideas of justice into their own hands.

Aside from violence, blacks recognized the long-standing economic woes of the city, and began biting back with a boycott of white businesses who wouldn’t hire or properly serve blacks, thereby pounding another nail into Cairo’s economy and further depleting its population, something that still hasn’t recovered.

Cairo is now a ghost town, despite attempts beginning in the 1980’s that continue through the present day attempting urban renewal. With enough structures to house a population of 20,000, the town truly looks deserted at a mere 3000 citizens.

Intelligence Testing after WWI kept undesirables out of the U.S.

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After World War I, the United States only wanted to let the brightest, best (and wealthiest) immigrants into its borders.  At Ellis Island, intelligence testing was used to keep undesirables—depressed people, alcoholics, the senile elderly—out, but also were skewed to keep those who weren’t wealthy enough to travel in a cabin out of the country.  Rich immigrants were given a pass, but poor immigrants were pressed with rigorous screenings to ensure that they were mentually fit to enter the country.  If not, these immigrants were interred in Ellis Island’s mental hospital or deported.

As immigrants passed through Ellis Island, each one was screened for health defects and mental defects.  Mental defects were identified by an alien appearing to be “inattentive" or were stupid-looking” as defined by a 1917 Public Health Report detailing the screening process at the immigration center.  Mentally suspect immigrants were marked with a chalk X on their coats and taken to be examined for mental disorder.

These immigrants were examined for pecularity in dress, excessive talkativeness, nervousness, as well as many other factors.  The test began with simple quesiotns such as  “Where are you going? How old are you? What is your name?" Most immigrants were then asked additional simple arithmetic questions.  The difficulty of the questions was determined by age, sex, race and general appearance. For example, a northern Italian girl with apparent schooling would be asked more difficult addition problems than an illiterate Italian man or Greek woman.

If immigrants were then determined to be suspect, the examiner would issue them a yellow “hold card” and the patient was held overnight for a complete mental inspection. About 9 out of every 100 patients during 1917 were held for more mental inspection. Potential mental patients were deemed retarded, apathetic, catatonic, depressive, alcoholic or talkative.  One detained woman reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary and another detained man appeared to be senile, but claimed to be a resident of California with $3,700 in the bank. 

The scariest part of these mental health tests were that the immigrants’ inability to speak or read English was also often noted as part of his mental instability.  Also, many of the conditions deemed insane by the examiner were products of the immigrant’s long journey, as well as his or her unease in being in a foreign country, a place where she didn’t speak the language.

In addition, in the same swoop, Americans decided that mental illness could only be found in the poor, or that the richer classes of people could enter the country and care for their mental disease themselves. If a passenger travelled in a cabin, he or she was exempt from the testing.

In theory, mental testing was set in place so that immigrants wouldn’t strain American health and mental care facilities.  In practice, poor immigrants were often misunderstood as mentally unstable and sometimes spent portions of their sad lives in America as mental institution inmates.  

During this time, the United States was not interested in becoming a dumping ground for the world’s mentally diseased. Still, at the same time, we effectively put limits on what we viewed as sanity or insanity, mental health or disease, standards that we still use today.

Sources and further reading:  

http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologicaltesting/a/int-history.htm

http://www.gjenvick.com/Immigration/Medical-Mental-InspectionOfImmigrant...

Yiddish theater in America was a halfway point between old country and new

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, new immigrants often kept to themselves in separate ethnic enclaves.  Naturally with this separatism came ethnically-specific culture in different parts of the same cities.  From grocery stores and radio stations to places of worship, immigrant groups could find amenities similar to those they would find in their home countries.  One such type of ethnic transplantation was the Yiddish theater, which originated in Romania and was transplanted to popularity in American, especially in New York City, from 1888 to the 1920’s.

Yiddish theater was created in Romania and came to New York six years later. Yiddish theater most often included over-the-top representations of Jewish characters—the pining lover, the devout cantor, the husband with the wandering eyes—in exaggerated situations. Following the model of vaudeville, Yiddish theatrical productions included melodrama, operettas and pieces inspired by the European stage. Nearly every act in the Yiddish theater included singing.  Performers were usually immigrant Jews and traveled throughout the country performing their acts.

Some historians of the Yiddish theater claim that it was more of a meeting place, and a place to see and be seen, in the American Jewish community than synagogues.  In New York City, this is not surprising in that nearly 3.5 million Yiddish-speaking Jews settled here during the same time as the popularity of the Yiddish theater.

The Yiddish theater was not isolated in New York City, however, and included houses throughout the country.  In 1927, after immigration to the United States had slowed, New York had eleven theaters, Chicago had 4, Philadelphia had 3 and Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark and St. Louis had one each.  In 1937-38, perhaps influenced by nostalgia, Yiddish theater sold 1.75 million seats in New York, nearly ten years after its prime.

Yiddish theater was particularly significant because it began blending American popular song with Yiddish, particularly Eastern European, historical and language-based specificity.  Popular performers quoted songs and phrases from more mainstream American music, as well as used popular English phrases in songs sung mostly in Yiddish.  So, immigrants who went to see Yiddish theater were following their homeland culture while, at the same time, beginning to amalgamate into the homogenizing American whole.

Two of the most famous American immigrant Yiddish theater performers were Ludwig Satz and Aaraon Lebedeff.  Satz, born in Austro-Hungary (currently Ukraine) was called the greatest comedic Yiddish actor by the New York Times in 1925.  This nod alone showed that by this time, Yiddish theater was becoming more well-known to non-Jewish audiences in New York City.   Lebedeff was born in Russia and made a name for himself there, as well as in China. He came to America in the 1920’s, performing, directing and composing many of his own comedy routines.  He toured the entire country—he was particularly popular in the Midwest—and combined Jewish religious song with vaudevillian style. These men are largely forgotten, but provided a template for comedic characters and for the combination of old-and-new that is still used in entertainment today. 

Cultural amenities like the Yiddish theater that blended old country language and tropes with mainstream American culture served as a crossroads for new immigrants to retain their old-country identities while simultaneously becoming Americanized.  Yiddish theater, and its eventual demise, represented a halfway point for Jewish immigrants and their descendants to retain their heritage, but also learn how to be Americans. The next phase in Jewish-American entertainment was Yiddish film, starring many of the same actors that became famous on the stage.

Sources and further reading:

http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=1411

http://aaronlebedeff.free.fr/anglais/codage/biographie.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Satz

Ellis Island's Oral History program records immigrant interviews for posterity

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I interned at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum as an archival intern last summer. First off, there is no huge book where your ancestors signed their names when they first entered the country.  I guess this was in some Will Smith movie that I never saw, so people would always ask where they could find “the book.” It doesn’t exist.

Instead, American immigrants signed a ship manifest in their country of origins before they ever left their port—and Ellis Island doesn’t have a physical record of these. But if Ellis Island visitors really want to hear the immigration stories of tottering Aunt Helen or about the difficult ocean passage of long-dead Uncle Vladimir from Russia, they can listen or read an interview from their relatives as part of Ellis Island’s Oral History program. 

Ellis Island was open as an immigration station from 1892 to 1954. After that, despite short stints housing other things, it was left stagnant in the New York Harbor for many years, until it became part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965.  Housed in many of the original immigration station buildings and with plans for expansion, the Immigration Museum opened its doors in 1990. 

Over twelve million immigrants passed through the immigration station during the years it was open. Nearly eleven million of those immigrants journeyed away from New York and New Jersey to populate the rest of the country.

Today, over one-third of Americans can trace their ancestry to this single immigration station. However, as immigration patterns changed and shifted—many new immigrants wanted their children to be as “Americanized” as possible—so did their American-born children’s and grandchildren’s knowledge of their immigrant relatives’ homeland culture or immigration stories.

Ellis Island’s Oral History program started in 1973, as museum staff began to recognize that many of the earliest immigrants who passed through the iconic immigration station were dying off. The collection now exceeds 1,900 interviews, with staff members completing more and more interviews each year.  Since the 1980’s, interviews have included questions about immigrants’ lives in their birth countries, ship passages to the United States, transitions to life in the States and the processing at the Immigration station.

I transcribed a number of these interviews and searched through a lot of the interview records.  Many of the immigrants interviewed lived in the New York City/ New Jersey area, or in one of the cities to which the Immigration Museum staff journeyed to interview significant passengers.  Most immigrants interviewed were well into their 70’s and 80’s and most of their countries of origin were Ireland, Great Britain and Germany, as well as other Western and Central European countries and Russia. 

Although the names and countries of origin changed significantly, many of the themes in these interviews stayed the same.  Immigrant journeys on seafaring ships were often difficult and long, the Statue of Liberty was greeted with awe, and immigrants were checked and interviewed in fear that they may be detained or deported at the Immigration Station.  New York City (where many interviewees stayed) was filled with ethnic enclaves in the early 20th centuries that were often very poor and parents of the immigrants interviewed sometimes barely learned English and retained many of their homelands’ customs for the rest of their lives.

Living history collections like these about the immigrant experience and details about immigration patterns—such as ethnic enclaves that were eventually homogenized—make American history that much more real to new generations of Americans.

Sources and further reading:

http://www.nps.gov/elis/historyculture/oral-history-program.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island

 

 

The People's History of the United States: Part 1

Howard Zinn's Life and Work

 

           Many of you are probably familiar with Howard Zinn’s, People’s History of the United States. If you’re not, it is the definitive “other version” of the history of our country from its genesis in the arrival of Christopher Columbus, through colonization, formation of the union, all the way to the 2000 election of George W. Bush to the White House.

            Originally published in 1980, this book is not revisionist history so much as un-revisionist. If history is truly written by the winners, Howard Zinn seeks to reveal the truth of our history from the people that paid the steepest price; the native, the minority, the poor, the “losers”. Pain-stakingly researched and impeccably reported, this book provides an incredible outside perspective totally different from the history many of us learned in our formal education.

            So astounding and irrefutable is Zinn’s contribution in this heavy volume that his book has been adopted as text for collegiate level students in many private colleges (state universities and secondary schools are much less likely to follow suit, understandably). Apparently we want to fully indoctrinate our children before we educate them.

            The volume is incredibly rich with quotations, documented materials, footnoted and referenced to the point where argument would be difficult, even impossible. However, it also makes it less accessible (it is, after all, a textbook). For all of those readers out there that lack the time, patience, or inclination to mine the book’s pages, I’ve decided that each week I will summarize a chapter of the book (there are 25 chapters moving from “discovery” though the 2000 election). I feel this is a great way to shore up some job security, further educate our readership about the reality in this country, and continue the tradition of “bloggery” (re-casting information in an easily consumable, bite-size form).

            I begin the very first post in the series not with Chapter 1 then, but with my intent and some information about the author; Howard Zinn (1922-2010).

           He was born into the working class to immigrant parents, grew up in the shipyards, and flew bombing missions during World War II. These experiences no doubt shaped his perception of the world, and his fervent anti-war positions. On the G.I. Bill, he received his doctorate in history. He was fired from his first professorship for supporting student protesters during the civil rights movement. He then went to teach at Boston University, where he spent the rest of his formal career. His life’s work, however, was writing, lecturing, and promoting civil rights and political justice around the world. His autobiography, It’s Hard to Be Neutral on a Moving Train, is a testament to his commitment that all people, of all shades, creeds, and levels of wealth, be free of the exploitation of nations and the powerful. There is no greater calling than that.

            What impresses me most about the man, like other humanitarian intellectuals like Daniel Quinn, Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, and many others, is that despite this country’s sometimes aggressive disregard for logic and ethics, he nonetheless spent his life attempting to make that those in the dark see the light. For more information about Howard Zinn, his work, and his writings, visit the website of his nonprofit, www.howardzinn.org.

Photo from dailycensored.com

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