Library of Congress's Blog, page 54

The March on Washington in Color

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Protesters at the March on Washington, Aug. 28, 1963, advocating for voting rights and an end to police brutality. Original black and white negative by Marion S. Trikosko. Prints and Photographs Division. Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd.

The following is a guest post from our friends at Unsplash, a platform for sharing millions of free-to-use photos. You can visit the Library of Congress page on Unsplash here.

Today marks the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington—when a quarter-million people came together to draw attention to the continued challenges and inequalities faced by Black Americans. The two dozen or so color photographs from that day and its leaders are locked down under expensive licenses, inaccessible to the general public, limiting the usage and awareness of one of the most defining moments in American history.

Today, we fix this.

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Marchers cooling off during the day. Original black and white negative by Warren K. Leffler. Prints and Photographs Division. Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd.

With the help of the team at the Library and visual historian Jordan Lloyd, we’ve assembled a set of images with no known restrictions from the March, its leaders and segregated America. The images are sourced from the Library, the US National Archives and the Seattle Municipal Archives. Lloyd has painstakingly restored and recolored the images in vivid detail to bring them back to life.

The resulting images bring the extraordinary scenes from the past into the present. 

Without the historical abstraction of black and white, the people, their hope for progress and their injustice take on a new perspective. They feel both historic and current—like they could equally belong in a history textbook and a news article from 2020. They remind us how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

By releasing the images in color, we hope that these images can be used by students, teachers, activists, creators and writers to retell these important moments, to celebrate these heroes of equality, and to put the events of the past into the context of present day.

You can find the original images on the Library’s Unsplash profile and the colorized versions on Lloyd’s Unsplash profile, Unseen Histories.

“People tend to think of history as an abstract concept: a time when their grandparents or great grandparents existed in black and white; and anything before photography is something you learn exclusively about through textbooks at school,” Lloyd said. “The truth is somewhat more vivid: records of where lives and events intersect were as real to the people who lived and saw it as we experience it today.”

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The crowd assembles in front of the Lincoln Memorial to hear speeches. Original black and white negative by Warren K. Leffler. Prints and Photographs Division. Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd.

“When I view the work,” he said, “looking at the finished photographs, they would not look out of place in coverage of protests in 2020. If that doesn’t make history feel real to me, then I don’t know what will.”

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The Suffrage Struggle After The 19th Amendment

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Carrie Chapman Catt receiving flowers in New York, August 27, 1920. Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, Manuscript Division.

This is a guest post by Elizabeth A. Novara, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

One hundred years ago today — August 26, 1920 — Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified that the 19th Amendment had become a part of the U.S. Constitution. As we commemorate that anniversary, it is important to acknowledge the multifaceted meanings that the amendment had for women in 1920. While the typical narrative ends in celebrations that “all” women’s voting rights were now assured, there is much more to this complex history.

The 19th Amendment actually falls somewhere in the middle of a long struggle for voting rights in the United States. Propertied women meeting certain age and other requirements voted in local and state elections in New Jersey until 1807, and women in the Wyoming territory had the vote as early as 1869.

By 1919, millions of American women could vote in some manner. Some women had full voting rights, while others could only vote in school board elections, and still millions of others had no voting rights at all. Even after the 19th Amendment’s ratification in 1920, women of color — Asian American, Black, Latina, Native American – faced obstacles to voting through the 1960s because of citizenship issues, discriminatory practices and outright intimidation, some of which continue even today. During the past year, we have written about some of these struggles in our magazine, in the Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote exhibition and in numerous blog posts.

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Milagros Benet de Mewton, ca. 1922. Photo: National Photo Company. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Manuscript Division holds the records of the two major women’s suffrage organizations, the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman’s Party. The NAWSA records are currently featured on the Library’s By The People crowdsourced transcription site. While acknowledging the problematic legacies of racism and imperialism inherent within these collections, there is also evidence of their contributions to suffrage movements for women of color.

Perhaps most overlooked are women’s voices in the territories newly acquired by the U.S. in the decades before 1920 because the 19th Amendment did not apply to the majority of these women. They continued the struggle for the franchise into the 1930s, fighting against not only gender discrimination but also racism and imperialism.

In Puerto Rico, one suffrage leader was Milagros Benet de Mewton (also spelled Newton), a member of the intellectual class who upheld voting rights for literate women as a path to suffrage for all women. In 1920, she was president of La Liga Femínea Puertorriqueña. She lobbied the U.S. Congress for women’s suffrage and formed connections with suffrage leaders such as Carrie Chapman Catt, president of NAWSA. Other suffragists in Puerto Rico, especially those with ties to the labor movement, such as Luisa Capetillo, advocated for universal suffrage. Puerto Rican women’s groups in New York City also joined in supporting women’s suffrage on the island. Suffrage for literate women was secured from the territorial legislature in 1929. Universal suffrage followed in 1932.

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Edith Williams, Anna Vessup, and Eulalie Stevens circa 1930s. NWP Records, Manuscript Division.

Edith Williams, the “mother of education” in the U.S. Virgin Islands, fought for suffrage along with Anna Vessup and Eulalie Stevens. All three women held memberships in the St. Thomas Teachers Association in the Virgin Islands, advocating not only for women’s issues, but for educational reform and more funding for local schools. They followed a route similar to African American suffragists who strived not only for women’s suffrage but also for the uplift of their communities. Williams served as a school principal and Vessup and Stevens were teachers. They attempted to register to vote in the 1930s, as women in the continental U.S. had done in the 1870s, and fought through the court system for women’s suffrage, with support from Elsie Hill, an American suffragist and NWP leader. They finally succeeded in 1935.

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Pilar Lim letter to Carrie Chapman Catt, November 14, 1936. NAWSA Records, Manuscript Division.

Women in the Philippines — a U.S. territory acquired from Spain in 1898 — continued to organize for women’s suffrage beyond 1920 as well. Pilar H. Lim, president of National Federation of Women’s Clubs of the Philippines, wrote Catt in 1936: “The knowledge that the women of America are with us in our struggle for the realization of our full citizenship is most inspiring….Our triumph will be a signal victory for the feminist movement throughout the world.” Filipinas, including Lim and Sofia Reyes de Veyra, the wife of the Resident Commissioner for the Philippines, organized their own groups, created networks with U.S. suffrage leaders and advocated for Philippine independence. They won the right to vote in 1937 and helped achieve their country’s independence in 1946.

 

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Johannes Kepler and COVID-19: 400 Years of Mathematical Modeling

This is a guest post by John Hessler, a specialist in computational geography and GIS in the Geography and Maps Division.

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Johann Kepler’s sketches of polyhedrals, detail. Rare Books & Special Collections Division.

Viruses are strange creatures. They are not really alive. They are only fragments of genetic code floating about, or marking time in the cells of an unsuspecting host until they begin replicating. Then they make their presence felt in the world. All of us have become more familiar with these facts as the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, has come into our lives.

The size of the COVID-19 virus is small by genomic standards. It is made up of 29,000 base pairs of the genetic material that is at the root of all life on earth. By comparison, you would need 3 billion of these base pairs to make a mouse from scratch.

When viruses like COVID-19 enter humans, they begin to mutate as their genetic material comes and goes through human cells. In this way the virus evolves, sometimes becoming better at infecting its hosts, sometimes not. The geometry and shape of the each of the individual virus particles — known as virions — is critical to the viruses’ success. It affects how, in the case of COVID-19, the virus jumped from its animal host to humans, and then how it spreads among humans.

Because viruses have such small genetic codes they have to be very efficient when it comes to building their shapes. Many, such as COVID-19, have polyhedral designs. A polyhedron is a three-dimensional shape with flat faces that are made of two-dimensional polygons. They have straight edges and sharp corners. As geometric figures, they have been studied since the time of the ancient Greeks.

In the early 17th century the astronomer Johannes Kepler, perhaps best known for his derivation of the laws of planetary motion, was fascinated by these shapes. In 1619, exactly 400 years before the outbreak of COVID-19, he produced a book called “Harmonices Mundi” (“Harmony of the Worlds”) that peered into and tried to understand these simple yet mysterious forms. The Library has copies of this work in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

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Title page of “Harmonices Mundi.” Rare Books & Special Collections.

Kepler, a genius polymath with an esoteric streak, thought that many of these shapes were universal and critically important to understanding the structure of the world. He wondered how they participated in the functioning and mechanics of the heavens. He thought they were at the foundation of the harmonies we hear in music. Determined to get a handle on this, he unfolded these complex shapes to see what simpler geometric forms, like triangles and squares, made them up, searching for some hidden geometric code.

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Tilings of polyhedra from Kepler’s “Harmonices Mundi.” Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

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A virus with the polyhedral forms studied by Kepler. Courtesy of Reidun Twarock, Nature Communications.

Today, these are the same shapes that mathematicians and theoretical biologists are using to understand the evolution of viruses. The outside case of a virus is known as a capsid. It is made up of the proteins that hold, in the case of COVID-19, the short strands of RNA that enter cells and infect their hosts. The shape of many viral capsids are built up from the simple forms Kepler studied. Capsids are also highly symmetrical, and because viruses have so little genetic code to work with, they need to conserve the information they have to take advantage of whatever shortcut nature and mathematics allows.

Scholars today are using these same shapes to ponder how viruses function and how these lifeless fragments of genetic material spring into being. In the mysteries of the polyhedral, we see modern epidemiology meeting 17th-century mathematics.

In this simple geometry, the past truly meets our present moment; rare books meet COVID-19. Kepler would have loved this mystery.

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National Book Festival: History, Photos from Past Years

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This guest post was written by 2020 Junior Fellows Sally Johnson and Saraya Flaig, who worked in the Signature Programs Office this summer with the project of archiving the National Book Festival. It was first published on the National Book Festival blog.

This year the National Book Festival hits an important milestone of 20 years. Those two decades encompass a rich history and evolution as the festival has grown and adapted to fit the ever-changing needs of the literary community and American people.

The NBF was founded in 2001 by then-first lady Laura Bush and then-Librarian of Congress James H. Billington as a joint effort between the White House and the Library. Over the years, the festival has evolved into the nation’s premier literary event. It began on the Library grounds and in its buildings on Capitol Hill, expanding soon thereafter to the lawn of the Capitol and then to the National Mall. The Washington Convention Center has hosted the event in recent years, and now, in 2020, the Library will host its first virtual festival.

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A rainbow shines over the Capitol building as festival goers move between pavilions at the 2008 National Book Festival. Photo: Nancy Alfaro.

The goal of our project was to archive the NBF in a way that would make its history accessible online. We decided a history web page was the best answer; we wanted to create an interactive page with which people could connect.  The page allowed us to curate content from hundreds of presentations over the years in an accessible and engaging way

The biggest task we faced was creating a photo gallery for each past year of the festival. We sorted through thousands of photos to find the best moments. The resulting gallery allows visitors to “walk through the festival and experience all of the activities and fun the festival offered that year.

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Colson Whitehead speaks in the Poetry & Prose tent at the 2012 NBF. Photo: Cecelia Rogers.

Another aspect of our project was repackaging older content as well as creating new material for this first-ever virtual festival. Thanks to the 2018 Signature Programs Junior Fellows, the Signature Programs Office already had an impressive collection of interviews and history archived and ready to go. We decided to repackage some of that content into a more engaging and user-friendly format, including a video-driven section on the festival’s website as well as shareable infographics. We also wanted to expand upon the already extensive collection of interviews in the digital archives by creating a space on the website for additional reflections by authors and Library employees. These reflections focus on the history, experience and impact of the festival.

You can learn more about our archiving project by watching the video below.

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You can get up-to-the-minute news, schedule updates and other important NBF information by subscribing to this blog. The festival is made possible by the generosity of sponsors. You can support the festival, too, by making a gift now.

World War II — The Double V Campaign

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Black members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps head to Fort Clark, Texas. Left to right: Auxiliaries (Privates) Florence Barbara Davis, Plaquemine, Louisiana; Dorothy Lee Harris, Washington, Texas; Mildred Lucile Turk Atlanta, Georgia., and Juanita Parisenne Ingraham, Gainesville, Florida. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Margaret McAleer, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It appears in the July/August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, one of several articles on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.

As members of America’s greatest generation, Jimmie Kanaya, William S.M. Banks Jr. and Charity Adams Earley had a lot in common. They served with the U.S. Army in the European Theater during World War II. They responded with exceptional valor and service to the nation’s call for patriotism, courage and ingenuity. They were among more than 30,000 Japanese Americans and one million African Americans who served in segregated units during the war, fighting fascism abroad and for an end to brutal discrimination at home. It was the “Double V” campaign, fighting for victories on two fronts.

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Yeiichi Kelly Kuwayama served in the 442nd Infantry Regiment in Italy. Veterans History Project. Prints and Photographs Division.

Kanaya was a medic with the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. He was awarded a Silver Star for tending to wounded men under heavy enemy fire near Castellina, Italy. Banks, an officer with the 92nd Infantry Division (known as the “Buffalo Soldiers”), also received a Silver Star in Italy when his company held out for a week against repeated enemy assaults. Adams commanded the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only African American Women’s Army Corps battalion deployed overseas. Her unit cleared a six-month backlog of mail and packages in only three months after arriving in England in early 1945.

In the European Theater where Kanaya, Banks and Adams served, Japanese American combat units — the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Battalion — were among the most decorated of the war. African Americans in the theater flew 15,000 sorties as famed Tuskegee airmen, transported thousands of tons of supplies daily in truck convoys known as the “Red Ball Express” and advanced with the Third Army as members of the 761st Tank Battalion, among other achievements.

They accomplished the impossible against a strong headwind of racism.

Kanaya faced the painful task of helping his parents move from their home in Oregon to an internment camp in Idaho. “With our parents incarcerated,” Kanaya said, he and other Japanese American soldiers felt the need to prove themselves.

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Members of Tuskegee Airmen’s 332nd Fighter Group in Ramitelli, Italy. Left to right: Robert W. Williams, Ottumwa, Iowa,; William H. Holloman, III, St. Louis, Missouri.; Ronald W. Reeves, Washington, D.C.; Christopher W. Newman, St. Louis, Missouri; Walter M. Downs, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photo: Toni Frissell. Prints and Photographs Division.

When word came that his company would be deployed overseas, Banks’ white commanding officer predicted it would be sent to heavy fighting in the Pacific in order to increase the percentage of African American causalities. Banks found the statement “nauseating.”

Despite her rank, Adams recounted “salutes were slow in coming, and, frequently, returned with great reluctance.” Yet she never ceased to use her rank to fight against the discrimination experienced by women in her command. She was aided occasionally by white military personnel who stood up against racism. While traveling in uniform, she was barred from entering the dining car on her train until a white officer standing behind her thundered at the steward: “What in the world are we fighting this damned war for?”

His question was among the most important of the war. Indeed, service men and women of color fought on two fronts — against fascism and oppression overseas and against racism and discrimination at home. They achieved impossible feats despite demoralizing racism, violent encounters stateside, senseless inefficiencies created by segregation policies and training, housing and resources that were often substandard.

Their heroism in this dual war is told in oral histories and collections of personal papers and organizational records preserved in the Library’s Veterans History Project and Manuscript Division.

“In a thousand subtle ways, in a thousand brutal ways, we were taught we were no part of American culture and history,” observed Nelson Peery, who served with the African American 93rd Infantry Division. “Here we were making history.”

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My Job: Talia Guzmán-González

Reference librarian Talía Guzmán-González helps readers and researchers find what they’re looking for in the Hispanic Division.

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Talía Guzmán-González. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Describe your work at the Library.

I connect people with the resources they need to create, explore and satisfy their curiosity about the Caribbean, Latin America, Portugal, Spain and the Latinx community. I consider myself a connector in my personal life — I love bringing people together — so it’s only natural that I work in a field that would put me in contact with so many people from around the world who are eager to learn.

As a reference librarian in the Hispanic Division, I am responsible for recommending material (to add to our collections) from Brazil, Portugal, Spain, and Puerto Rico. I also offer reference services, organize public events, co-produce a podcast with my colleague Catalina Gómez and record authors for our unique literary archive in the Hispanic Division. I am also very active in the Hispanic Cultural Society, a staff organization that aims to promote, preserve and share all aspects of the Hispanic community in the Library at large.

How did you prepare for your position?

I have been preparing for this position my entire life. Since I was a teenager, I have worked in bookstores in Puerto Rico, New York and Baltimore, so I consider that my informal but essential “training” in being a reference librarian — I learned early on how to connect people with the material they were looking for.

As for “formal” training, you can say I am a lifelong learner. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Latin American studies from the University of Puerto Rico, a master’s in Portuguese from Indiana University-Bloomington, a Ph.D. in Luso-Brazilian studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s in library science from the University of Maryland in College Park. Everything I have done in one way or another has brought me to this position. This is my first job as a reference librarian, and I have to say, it’s pretty fantastic.

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“Discovery of Gold” by Candido Portinari, one of the murals in the Hispanic Reading Room. Photo: Carol Highsmith.

What are some of your favorite collection items?

My favorite item is probably not a collection item at all but a representation or metaphor of all collection items: the four murals in the Hispanic Reading Room by Brazilian painter Candido Portinari. As a trained Brazilianist, it speaks to my academic side in profound ways. As a caribeña (Caribbean woman), it’s a beautiful depiction of our complex history. As a reference librarian, it serves as an entry point to connect users with the collections at large. Each panel speaks to the work we do every day in the Hispanic Reading Room: discovery, connection and outreach.

How is it satisfying to connect researchers with the material they need?

We had a user come to the Hispanic Division to read what looked like a young adult novel published in Spain during the 1940s. She came a couple of hours a day to read, and when she finished I asked her about the book. She told me she had been looking for this title for many years unsuccessfully. It was her favorite growing up in Cuba, but after 1959 she had to leave the country and all her childhood books behind. It was so gratifying seeing these two “friends” reconnect thanks to the library’s extensive international collection. Moments like this make my job truly gratifying.

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Old Copyright Submissions — Hawthorne, Twain, Douglass and Thousands More

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Gettins, a digital library specialist.
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Title page submission for “Tom Sawyer” with a sub-title that was dropped for publication.

In celebration of copyright’s 150th anniversary this month, the Rare Book and Special Collections Division launches a new digital collection, Early Copyright Materials of the United States 1790-1870, which puts online for the first time nearly 50,000 title pages that accompanied copyright registrations dating back to the foundation of the country.

The documents — just the first wave of tens of thousands of old copyright entries that we’re digitizing — form a uniquely American record of creativity, dreams and aspirations from a world gone by. The title pages sent in by authors and publishers to register their books for copyright feature serious literature, comedies, romance, true crime and plays for the theater. There are works on religious instruction, how-to books and educational texts. There are also applications for inventions, sheet music, prints, photographs and illustrated works of the sciences, most notably botany and zoology.

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Submitted title page of “My Bondage and My Freedom.”

Mark Twain’s 1875 application for “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” one of the landmark works of literature in the 19th century, bears a sub-title that didn’t make it to publication, “A Tale of a By-Gone Time.” Here is Frederick Douglass’s 1855 application for “My Bondage and My Freedom.”  Suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage are here with a title page of “History of Woman Suffrage.” Other titans of the era are represented, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, whose title pages are both ostensibly signed, like many applications, by the authors.

The documents stem from the first federal copyright laws in 1790 and 1831. They contain the earliest copyright records and materials that were held by the federal district courts and numerous government offices in D.C. The Copyright Act of 1870 — the birth of modern copyright law — consolidated previous records. The old entries were sent to the Library where they have since resided, nestled away in archival boxes, some scarcely seeing the light of day in 230 years. The Library, of course, has been home to the U.S. Copyright Office since 1897. It houses the modern records.

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“My bondage and My freedom” – Title pages – Frederick Douglass — Author” Possibly in Douglass’ handwriting.

As you go through the collections, it’s worth remembering that many items were never published or have been lost to history. And, because copyright registration preceded publication, many registrations do not correspond to a published work. These ghost books offer a fascinating glimpse of a “what if” in American cultural history.

The next phase of digitization will be the copyright ledgers, which comprise of the great bulk of the collection. Organized by state and date, these bound items were created and maintained by government clerks. Here they recorded in careful handwritten entries each copyright application noting the title, author and date of each work.

But, for now, these digital files will allow tens of thousands of titles to be discovered anew. They offer readers the chance to search them from their homes, laptops or smart phones. The items beg to be searched and discoveries made. We welcome you to use this new primary resource that contributes so much to the early canon of the nation’s historic works.

Al Neuharth: Newspaper Executive’s Papers Now at the Library

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The Gannett Building in Rochester, New York. Neuharth’s paper moved out years ago. Photo: Carol Highsmith.

This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. His most recent piece for the blog was about the legendary evangelist Billy Sunday.

Over the past 20 years, one would be hard pressed to identify an industry that has undergone as many wrenching changes as newspaper publishing. Allen Neuharth, chairman of the Gannett Co. from 1973 to 1989 and founder of USA Today, played a critical role in these developments.

The Allen Neuharth Papers, housed in the Manuscript Division, serve as a window into the media transformation that unfolded in the last quarter of the 20th century as well as a key vantage point from which to witness the rise of USA Today. They also reveal much about Neuharth, his relationship with more august publications, notably the Washington Post, and the kinds of practices he deployed in his rise to media mogul.

Neuharth grew up poor in Depression-era Eureka, South Dakota. His father died when he was 2 and Neuharth took work as a paperboy at age 10 to help support the family. After serving in World War II, Neuharth began his ascent in journalism at the Associated Press in 1950, working for $50 a week as a reporter. He eventually moved on to the Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press before arriving at Gannett as general manager in 1963.

By 1970, Neuharth was running the newspaper chain. He transformed it from a regional organization, consisting mostly of smaller newspapers in the Northeast, into a national multimedia empire that included the country’s largest newspaper chain along with 10 television and 16 radio stations. Though USA Today didn’t break even until the 1990s, it has persisted and remains one of the nation’s most circulated newspapers.

Rarely do shrinking violets ascend to the heights of the American media landscape and, in this regard, Neuharth was not an exception. In its 2013 obituary for Neuharth, the New York Times described him as a “flamboyant, egotistic and proudly Machiavellian” character, dressed in “designer finery,” more “Rat Pack that rumpled newspaperman.” One finds evidence of Neuharth’s charisma, brashness and confidence in his correspondence.

Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham frequently competed with Neuharth for new acquisitions and talent; she once stormed out of a meeting in Honolulu when she discovered Neuharth and Gannett had outmaneuvered the Post in a particular deal. Yet, her correspondence to him reveals a broader, more nuanced relationship. “I loved my night on the town with Neuharth — or my course on ‘breaking and entering 105’ — whichever you prefer,” she noted in a 1981 letter to him. “No one looked at us, or singled us out in any adverse way. A startling contrast I fear, to a similar house here in D.C.,” she cryptically confided.

Even as USA Today prepared to launch in September 1982, Graham managed to acknowledge the competition while expressing her admiration. “Now that we have both let down our guard for five minutes, we can safely go back to the tough shiv, and I have got my eye on you about your intentions with USA Today in our fair city, to say nothing about hires you are making from our midst.”

Then again, for all his Rat Pack bravado, Neuharth was, for the time and for an executive, surprisingly “woke.” Under his leadership, Gannett led the way in terms of women and minority hires. By 1988, minority employment in Gannett newsrooms exceeded the national average by 47 percent. Women made up almost 40 percent of the company’s management, professionals, technicians and sales agents and a quarter of its newspapers’ publishers.

Neuharth made his beliefs clear on the matter in a note to his daughter, Jan: “Here are two of the T-shirts I mentioned to you — a large one for a very big chauvinist and a small one for a little bitty chauvinist (actually, all chauvinists are small).”

Of course, newspaper publishing is a tough business and Neuharth could throw elbows with the best of them, case in point the Post’s legendary editor Ben Bradlee. The two men frequently traded barbs. “If USA Today is a good newspaper,” Bradlee once said, “then I’m in the wrong business.” Neuharth shot back, “Bradlee and I finally agree on something: He is in the wrong business.”

Bradlee was hardly Neuharth’s only critic. Though Wall Street loved Gannett for its amazing profitability — annual revenue increases of 15 to 20 percent were not uncommon — others took Neuharth’s management to task for favoring profits over public service, for championing steep cost-cutting endeavors and dumbing down news.

His defenders pointed out that Neuharth recognized a changing media landscape and streamlined the industry such that print media could compete in the internet age. Newspapers across the  country adopted USA Today’s practice of using bright colors and short articles, what Bradlee might describe as “mediocrity,” but the public and competitors clearly embraced the model. Well before it won its first Pulitzer Prizes in 2018, the paper had helped to broaden what was and is considered news to include cultural trends as well as health and consumer matters. “[USA TODAY] has had a tremendous impact on newspapers for better or for worse, and in some cases it has been for the worse,” Neuharth acknowledged. “There are some things some papers have been foolish to adopt.”

In the end, the Allen Neuharth Papers provide historians with an inside look at a changing industry, the rise of the only national newspaper established after World War II and the thoughts, practices and endeavors of a media mogul who defined the age.

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Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Another “Mystery Photo” Solved

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The identity of this flapper-era actress was a mystery.

Cary O’dell at the Library’s National Recording Registry runs our ever-popular Mystery Photo contest. He most recently wrote about the photo identification of actress Wendy Phillips, the “most mysterious woman in the world.“

If this were an old Sam Spade mystery, it would open with, “She haunted me.”

Photo #20 was one of those left in my pile of “unknowns.” Tough-guy gumshoes and Library photo detectives have at least one thing in common — we can’t let cold cases lie. This is one of those noir classics. Before I go on, can I get some black-and-white cinematography, misting rain, a trench coat and a streetlamp on a dark street? Highlighting a woman’s silhouette by a sleek Packard? Thank you.

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The mystery photo of actress Wendy Phillips.

Now. As you know, we’ve been solving the unidentified pictures in a large donation of entertainment-industry stills that came to the Library a few years ago. Readers (that’s you guys) have helped us solve a lot of these, including our most recent identification of someone I had dubbed “the most mysterious woman in the world.” That actress, who alert reader James Owen identified as Wendy Phillips, was one of those that I couldn’t get out of my head.

Another was an unknown from the silent movie era. All I knew was that the photo was taken at New York’s legendary White Studios, an early creator of the showbiz “head shot.” The subject sported a look popular at the time. With her bee-stung lips and dark eyeliner, she looked like every flapper who ever flapped. (Why isn’t this script in development? It’s writing itself!)

A couple years into the case, I got a tip. Someone mentioned it might be a Ziegfeld chorus girl, name of Florence McFadden. So I kicked over a barstool and ran it down. Turned out to be a solid lead.

McFadden was indeed a Ziegfeld dancer and an actress. A Pennsylvania native, she went into show biz as a teen. She was half of a vaudeville act, “McFadden and Haley,” and got married at 19 to her stage partner. His name was Jack Haley.

Lucky for me, Haley is a legend. He played the Tin Man in the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz.” There’s lot of info out there on him, so I dug in. Internet searches. Cold-called his biographer. Another tipster — look, this is my line — directed me to a Facebook fan page. Trivia: It’s shared between Haley, the Tin Man, and Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow. (Bert Lahr, the Lion? Goes his own way. Judy Garland, Dorothy? Get outta here.)

Once on the fan page, I appealed to all: Anyone have photos of Florence, aka Mrs. Haley? In her youth? They did. Not only that, some of the fan page members were Haley’s grandchildren. They caught my drift. They talked.

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Florence McFadden and Jack Haley, lifetime partners. Family photo.

Flo and Jack, who got hitched so young, stayed married all their lives. While he did films, radio and television, she ran a beauty parlor that catered to celebrities. One of their kids, Jack Haley Jr., grew up to be a big-shot producer of TV specials. He was married for a while to Liza Minelli, daughter of Judy Garland. So, in your Hollywood scoring, that’s “The Tin Man’s kid marries Dorothy’s kid.” Funny world, Tinseltown. Jack died in 1979; Flo, in 1996. They’re buried next to one another in Culver City.

Among the many things the Haley kids told me, after looking at my mystery picture? “That blue-eyed lady is our grandmother!”

So. Mystery solved. Case closed.

Fade to black. (I told you this thing was writing itself!)

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Hiroshima, 75 Years Later: A Survivor’s Account, Now at the Library

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The mushroom cloud begins to rise from the bombing of Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945. Photo: U.S. Army, A.A.F.

This guest blog was written by Cameron Penwell, a Japanese reference librarian in the Asian Division; and Margaret McAleer, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

Several weeks ago, the Library was given a small collection that includes a survivor’s remarkable account of the atomic blast that leveled Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. More remarkably, the account, written by a Japanese school-teacher and interpreter, was presented as a “gift of friendship” to an American paratrooper. More remarkably still, the Japanese author was a scholar of Walt Whitman, that most American of poets.

On the 75th anniversary of that bombing, we note that the Library’s collections are filled with stories such as this – documents born of a particular place and time that say lasting things about the ties of humanity, friendship and the power of a personal narrative to convey emotions over the chasms of generations.

This harrowing narrative was penned by Haruo Shimizu, a middle-school teacher who’d gone back to college to study Whitman’s poetry. He wrote it in 1946, as the first anniversary of the bombing approached. By then 43 years old and working as the interpreter for a hotel in Otaru, he presented it to a 19-year-old paratrooper named Willard “Bill” Claude Floyd of Bliss, Idaho. The hotel was used by the U.S. military as a formal or informal base of operations during the occupation of Japan and the pair apparently struck up a friendship. Floyd’s family recently gave the Willard C. Floyd Papers to the Library; they include the manuscript. (The collections has not yet been digitized.)

Shimizu titled his paper, “The Atomic Bomb – The Impression of the Doomed Day – Aug. 6th, at Hiroshima.” It covers 24 pages, written in flawless English on lined rice paper, as neatly done as a term paper.

It’s also horrifying.

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The beginning of Shimizu’s manuscript.

Shimizu was a gifted writer. He was born in 1903 in Nemuro, a small town on Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. According to research done by Hajime Saito, a professor at University of Tsukuba, Shimizu moved to Otaru, a city on the western side of the island, and settled into a job as a middle-school English teacher. But in his early 40s, with World War II raging, he left his job to study American poetry at the Hiroshima Higher Normal School, a premier teacher-training university. His area of emphasis was Whitman’s poetry.

On Aug. 6, 1945, Shimizu and his much younger university classmates were to report for work at a munitions factory. Shortly after 8 a.m. – with the U.S. bomber Enola Gay already airborne — Shimizu boarded a trolley, intending to visit a friend before reporting to the factory. It was his great fortune that he was headed west, away from the city center.

At about 8:15 a.m., the Enola Gay dropped its bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy.” Falling by parachute, it detonated about 2,000 feet above the central city. Shimizu saw it: “…I saw a silver-white flash, like that of magnesium powder used in taking a photograph, high up in the sky and immediately after it I heard a tremendous sound similar to the explosion of some big fireworks.”

The trolley careened, people bolted for the exit. His right arm was covered in someone else’s blood. People fell into ditches, rocked by explosions from burning buildings. Torrential rain began to fall. Shimizu grew disoriented:  “A tremendous clap of thunder went on and huge columns of brown clouds with dust and flame were making sheer screens all around.”

The dying begged for water. Skin began to peel off people. Shimizu and others rose from the ditches and staggered west. He described the people in the procession:

“All of them were injured or burned more or less. They had just a shirt and pants or a chemise on, smeared with blood and dust.  Some of them were carrying their wounded wives on their shoulders and some their dead children in their arms. They were all desperately shouting for help and calling aloud the names of their families….above all the sound of rumbling of the thunder in the sky was absolutely threatening, as it was not quite certain whether the source of the sound was enemy planes or not.”

Some three hours after the bombing, he made it to his friend’s house, on a hill far from the city center. The windows were blown out and part of the roof was gone, but the building was otherwise intact and its inhabitants alive.

He soon ventured back out to see what had become his boarding house, and went back into the city the next day to try to reach the munitions factory. His journeys read as if they were lifted from Dante’s “Inferno.” A young husband and wife share his umbrella briefly, the wife so sick with radiation poisoning that she was vomiting repeatedly, “shuddering without a stop.” Hundreds of dead bodies were burned black “except for their grinning white teeth.” He got within 300 yards of his old lodging house, but no closer: “Everything in that quarter was in flame.”

“I don’t believe that anybody could have escaped out of the city with a whole skin.”

Three days later, the U.S. bombed Nagasaki. On Aug. 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender.

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The final passage of Shimizu’s account: “It was about five days later that I learned of the right name of that powerful and terrible bomb, which was supposed to have killed more than one hundred thousand people in an instant. The name was the “Atomic Bomb.” 

Suffering from radiation sickness, Shimizu made his way back to his hometown to convalesce. He soon returned to Otaru and found work as “official interpreter and assistant manager of the Etchuya Hotel.” By that time, the 11th Airborne Division was occupying the area, among them the young Bill Floyd.

Floyd had been called up for duty in December 1945, three months after Japan surrendered. Untested by combat, his family remembers him saying that he was assigned to guard a munitions depot near Otaru and then given broader duties in a nearby town.

At some point, Shimizu and Floyd became friends, perhaps because of Shimizu’s duties at the hotel. It is remarkable that Shimizu was able to grow past the natural feelings of bitterness toward the military force that had devastated his nation. Instead, he wrote out his memories of the bombing and inscribed the manuscript to his young American friend: “PFC Willard C. Floyd, with best wishes as a token of friendship.”

Like many war friendships, it was brief. Floyd was reassigned in November 1946 and lost contact with Shimizu, whom he presumed had soon died of radiation sickness. Floyd lived for a while in Alaska, then settled his family in Arizona, where he ran a barber shop. He died in 1985. Floyd’s family remembers that Shimizu was very much a presence in their household, both through Floyd’s stories of Japan and through Shimizu’s treasured manuscript.

Shimizu, though, did not die, but went on to become a professor of English language and literature, eventually teaching at Gifu Women’s University, from which he retired in 1986. He died in 1997.

During his post-war career, one of the key books he wrote was an academic treatise, “A Study of Whitman’s Imagery,” published in 1957. He summarized his key arguments in a short piece in the Walt Whitman Review.

He writes that if the poems in “Leaves of Grass” are arranged chronologically, they reveal the journey of the soul. Individually and collectively, the soul progresses from the youth, when “imagination soars on light wings,” to an adult soul rocked by hardship, eventually maturing into a soul that recovers its ability to dream and reattaches itself warmly to the world.

Shimizu perhaps saw himself in Whitman, whose poetry offered a path forward to healing and recovery. It is not difficult to see Shimizu’s manuscript and his friendship with a young American G.I. as part of his own journey to recovering the power to dream.

For further information about the Shimizu narrative, contact the Manuscript Reading Room. For inquiries pertaining to Japan or Japanese-language materials, contact the Asian Division.”

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