Library of Congress's Blog, page 84
October 29, 2018
Thirty Years of the National Film Registry
The National Film Preservation Board meets at the Library this morning. Photo by Shawn Miller.
Something exciting is happening today. Of course, there are always exciting things happening at the Library of Congress, but today I want to take you behind the scenes of one of my favorite duties as Librarian – selecting films for the National Film Registry.
Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, each year the Librarian of Congress names 25 films to the National Film Registry that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant, and deemed worthy to be preserved for all time. This is the 30th year that the Library of Congress will add films to the National Film Registry!
Today, I will join members of the National Film Preservation Board for their annual meeting. The board was established by the National Film Preservation Act to serve as a public advisory group to the Librarian of Congress. This distinguished group of film scholars, artists, industry leaders and experts works on important issues related to the preservation of America’s film heritage. In the past year, I have visited the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library in Los Angeles and met with filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan. I admire their passion and dedication to film preservation, and I am grateful to the entire board for its service.
One of the board’s duties is to advise me on annual selections for the National Film Registry. At their meeting today, members will begin the process of developing a list of titles for my consideration. Given that the Registry selections exemplify the range and diversity of American film, it’s important for us to get lots of input. In addition to hearing from the board, we invited the public to submit nominations. For this year’s Registry, we received 30,000 votes for 6,300 different films! Thank you for your contributions.
Like many of you, I love the magic of movies. I enjoy all the watching, discussing and debating that goes into selecting the Registry films. The Registry creates a lot of excitement and conversation. One of the most important things it does is raise awareness about film preservation. I am proud of the role the Library plays in preserving and providing access to our film heritage. Visit the National Screening Room to see a set of films we recently made available online.
We will announce the 30th National Film Registry selections on Dec. 12. Over the next few weeks, we will celebrate past Registry titles. Stay tuned!
October 25, 2018
Free to Use and Reuse – and Animate! A Parade of Posters
A French poster from the early 1900s advertises noodles and pasta using images of celebrities, some holding packages of the product.
This month, we’re highlighting selections from the Library’s vast international poster collection on our Free to Use and Reuse page – and an animation contest.
The posters we’re showcasing – on themes from travel, sports and entertainment to consumer goods and more – reflect a special collaboration between the Library and Poster House, a new museum that will open in New York City next year. The museum’s staff worked closely with specialists from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division to select the 31 posters featured. Each connects in some way to a global cultural event or trend from the 1890s through the 1960s.
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A pair of skiers promotes the Jantzen skiwear brand in this 1947 poster.
Poster House now invites you to re-imagine the selected posters using digital animation: Can you tease new meaning out of a scene? Can you illuminate something interesting? Can you make viewers laugh?
The contest is open to students, professionals and amateurs alike. Download high-res images of the posters on the Library’s free-to-use page, and get to work!
Poster House will accept submissions starting in December, and a panel of judges from the design, advertising and poster communities will decide on 20 favorite animations in the spring. Winners will be displayed digitally in Poster House’s exhibition window on 23rd Street in New York leading up to the museum’s opening in spring 2019.
Address your questions about the contest to submissions@posterhouse.org.
To find out more about the Library’s poster collection and the highlighted posters, read this blog post from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division.
Scroll down to enjoy more examples of featured posters!
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A 1947 poster humorously recalls the well-known image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River – but in this case the river is filled with cherry pies.
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A 1941 poster promotes the health benefits of drinking milk.
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A theatrical poster from the 1890s features magician Harry Kellar.
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This 1903 poster advertises Swiss chocolate.
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A 1950s poster glamorizes air travel to Chicago.
October 23, 2018
New Online: Recordings from the Archive of Hispanic Literature
This is a guest post by Cataline Gómez, a reference librarian in the Hispanic Division. It was first published on “4 Corners of the World,” the blog of the Library’s area studies divisions.
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A listener enjoys a selection from the archive last month while sitting on the steps of the Library’s Jefferson Building. Photo by Catalina Gómez.
To celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month this year, the Library released new digital material on the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape. For the past three years, we have provided online access to a growing number of recordings through the archive’s portal. The launch of 50 new recordings adds to the existing digital archive of prose writers and poets from all over the Americas and Spain and Portugal reading from their works.
The archive is a historical collection of close to 800 audio recordings of Luso-Hispanic writers. Since its inception in 1943, curators in the Hispanic Division have continued expanding on this project by recording, in the Library’s recording lab and abroad, some of the most important writers and poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. Our efforts to digitize this collection are ongoing; with the 2018 launch, there are now 200 recordings available via online streaming.
This launch includes recordings from the 1950s onward, with many sessions recorded in the past five years. Reflecting the regions’ immensely rich cultural and linguistic diversity, the list includes the literatures of nations such as Haiti, Cuba, Spain, Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico, Chile, Argentina and more. It also includes, for the first time, recordings of works in indigenous languages, such as the recording of Mexican scholar Ángel María Garibay (1892–1967), who reads Aztec poetry in Nahuatl and Spanish; Mexican writer Andrés Henestrosa (1906–2008), who reads works in Zapotec, a pre-Columbian language from Oaxaca, Mexico; and poet Andrés Alencastre (1909–84), who reads verses in Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. Another linguistic gem included in this release is a reading by Spanish writer Unai Elorriaga (1973– ) in Basque or “Euskara,” a Pre-Indo-European language spoken in northern Spain.
We hope you enjoy these literary treasures! Below is the complete list of newly available recordings:
Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro
Bolivian poet Yolanda Bedregal
Brazilian author and poet Adriana Lisboa
Brazilian author and poet Tatiana Salem-Levy
Chilean author Manuel Eduardo Hübner
Chilean poet Angel Cruchaga Santa María
Colombian author Héctor Abad Faciolince
Colombian author Pablo Montoya
Colombian essayist and novelist Eduardo Caballero Calderón
Colombian poet Héctor Rojas Herazo
Colombian poet Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda
Costa Rican poet Mía Gallegos
Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas
Dominican poet Enriquillo Rojas Abreu
Dominican writer José Gabriel Alcántara Almánzar
Ecuadorian writer Alfredo Pareja y Díez Canseco
Ecuadorian writer Demetrio Aguilera Malta
Guatemalan-American author Francisco Goldman
Haitian poet René Bélance
Honduran poet and writer Rafael Heliodoro Valle
Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza
Mexican poet and short story writer Juan José Arreola
Mexican poet and writer Andrés Henestrosa
Mexican poet Homero Aridjis
Mexican writer and translator Angel María Garibay K.
Mexican writer María Luisa Mendoza
Mexican-American poet Juan Felipe Herrera
Nicaraguan poet, scholar, and folklorist Ernesto Mejía Sánchez
Panamanian poet Ana Isabel Illuca
Panamanian poet Ricardo J. Bermúdez
Panamanian writer Joaquín Baleño C.
Peruvian author Alonso Cueto
Peruvian poet and writer Alberto Hidalgo
Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo
Peruvian poet Andrés Alencastre
Peruvian poet Xavier Abril
Peruvian-American author Daniel Alarcón
Puerto Rican author José Agustín Balseiro
Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré
Puerto Rican author Esmeralda Santiago
Salvadorean poet Manlio Argueta
Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina
Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas
Spanish author Unai Elorriaga
Spanish poet César Antonio Molina
Spanish poet Clementina Arderíu
Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre
Spanish-Argentine author and poet Andrés Neuman
West Indian playwright David Edgecombe
October 22, 2018
New Online: Diarist Documents Eventful Times on the Confederate Home Front
This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division.
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The first page of Betty Herndon Maury’s diary.
“A diary, faithfully kept in such eventful times as these, must be interesting to our own children,” wrote Betty Herndon Maury on June 3, 1861, explaining her purpose in keeping a journal after Maury’s family chose to leave Washington, D.C., to cast its lot with the new Confederate States of America. By October 1861, Maury feared that she already had recorded so much that her diary would be “too voluminous” for her daughter, Nannie Belle, to read later. Fortunately for posterity, Maury continued to write, recognizing that “these are such eventful times and there are so many interesting incidents that I do not know which to omit.” Maury’s two-volume diary is now available online at the Library of Congress.
The impact of the war on Maury’s family occupied a central place in her diary. She lamented that her father, famed oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, did not receive assignments in the Confederacy worthy of his talents and reputation, but recorded his contributions to the war effort. Her husband (and cousin), William A. Maury, left his legal career in Washington, D.C., to join the Confederate government in Richmond, while his wife and daughter “refugeed” with relatives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Will’s extended absences and preoccupations caused Betty to question her role in their relationship and express disappointment when he left her behind, a common response of spouses during the Civil War.
Betty frequently wrote about her daughter, especially as the war brought out both Nannie’s feisty nature and her anxiety. To the offer of candy from a Union soldier in occupied Fredericksburg in May 1862, Nannie coolly replied, “No I thank you Yankee candy would choke me.” But fears of the unknown weighed heavily on Nannie’s mind by January 1863. “She is the most singularly nervous child I ever saw,” Betty recorded. “She shrinks from going out and is afraid to go to sleep for fear of dreaming bad dreams.” Betty’s father had advised her to shield Nannie from “things above her comprehension,” and she agreed that children absorbed more adult conversation than suspected.
Betty felt no such compassion for another family member, future president Chester A. Arthur. The husband of Betty’s first cousin Ellen Herndon Arthur, to whom she had been close before the war, came to Fredericksburg in May 1862 as quartermaster of the New York State troops. “I met him on the street but did not speak to him,” she boasted in her diary. “I could not shake hands with a man who came as an invader, to desolate our homes and kill our brothers and husbands.” Betty would later reconcile with the Arthurs, but Betty’s familial affection was a casualty of war in 1862.
The war also impacted the households in which Betty lived by disrupting the institution of slavery, long before Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. The presence of the Union army near Fredericksburg prompted many slaves to exploit opportunities in the changed environment, if they remained in the vicinity at all. “The negroes are going off in great numbers,” Betty recorded on April 25, 1862. “We hear that our own three are going soon.” Still, slave escapes were not her primary concern. “I am afraid of the lawless Yankee soldiers, but that is nothing to my fear of the negroes if they should rise against us.”
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An architectural rendering of the Dixon-Maury House in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where Betty lived in 1861 and 1862.
“Matters are getting worse and worse here every day with regard to the negroes,” she noted in May. Hundreds of slaves escaped, and some of those who stayed demanded wages. Betty claimed to be relieved that most of their servants had gone, citing their perceived “insolent and idle” behavior.
Betty documented in her diary other changes on the home front. The disruption of domestic arrangements forced elite white women to perform more manual labor – cleaning, dying and spinning wool, making hats – and to make do with the clothing they had on hand when military activity stranded them from home for extended periods. When items were available to purchase, a currency shortage caused confusion as to the prices in coins, U.S. paper currency or “Virginia money,” and consumers might get their change in stamps. Lodging was a perpetual concern for Betty, who wondered where she would go after the death of the relative in whose house she lived in Fredericksburg in 1862, and then again in February 1863 after being evicted by her landlord in Richmond. When the diary ended on February 18, 1863, Betty was pregnant with her second child, homeless and uncertain where to go. That daughter, Alice Maury Parmalee, donated her mother’s diary to the Library of Congress in 1928.
October 17, 2018
New Online: Theodore Roosevelt Papers
Theodore Roosevelt, 1884.
This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division.
On Feb. 14, 1884, Theodore Roosevelt marked an X in his pocket diary, followed by the words, “The light has gone out of my life.” That morning his mother, Martha Roosevelt, died of typhoid fever. That same afternoon, in the same house, his wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, died of kidney disease, just two days after giving birth to their daughter. On another page, Roosevelt recalled his relationship with Alice, concluding, “For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out.” He was 25 years old.
Roosevelt’s life had really only begun, however, and his papers at the Library of Congress record his extraordinary public career through voluminous correspondence sent and received, speeches and executive orders, press releases and public statements, diaries and scrapbooks. The Theodore Roosevelt Papers, now available online, document the multifaceted and remarkable life led by America’s 26th president.
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Roosevelt’s diary entry for Feb. 14, 1884.
T.R. entrusted his infant daughter to his sister Anna, and set off for the Dakota Territory. “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” Roosevelt later wrote. He exercised his grief by leading the strenuous life of a cattle rancher, and learned the politically useful skill of working toward a common goal with people from different backgrounds. “I got along excellently with everyone,” he wrote his son Ted in 1908. “I worked hard with them on the roundup.” Roosevelt’s western period also gave him a cowboy image, which political cartoonists used in years to come.
Roosevelt found happiness with his second wife, Edith, his children and public service. He served on the United States Civil Service Commission (1889–95), and then applied his abundant energy to the New York City Board of Police Commissioners (1895–97). There he honed skills that he employed for the rest of his career. He sought reform in the operation of the police force and went on “midnight rambles” to determine how many beat cops slept at their posts or engaged in corrupt activities. He cultivated the press to publicize his actions and learned from reporters like Jacob Riis about problems in the community. As the scrapbooks in the Roosevelt papers attest, T.R. made news as a police commissioner, and his prominent teeth and eyeglasses became symbols that forever more identified Roosevelt cartoons.
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An 1895 cartoon depicts Roosevelt solely by way of his pince-nez glasses and his prominent teeth.
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A 1900 cartoon also portrays Roosevelt by his glasses and his teeth.
Roosevelt followed his police work by serving as assistant secretary of the Navy, where he advocated Alfred T. Mahan’s principles of naval supremacy. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Roosevelt refused to miss his “crowded hour” of glory and organized the First Regiment, U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the “Rough Riders.” He parlayed his fame as the hero of San Juan Hill into election as governor of New York, telling his friend Cecil Spring Rice in November 1898, “I have played it in bull luck this summer. First, to get into the war; then to get out of it; then to get elected.”
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Roosevelt flees the vice presidency in the cartoon “The Office Seeks the Man,” published in 1900.
Roosevelt, a Republican, continued his reformist and independent ways as governor, to the chagrin of his party’s establishment in New York. Political bosses hoped electing him vice president in 1900 would shelve him in a powerless position. Although he did not want the job, T.R. campaigned hard for President McKinley and reconciled himself to the end of his political ascent. In September 1901, however, an assassin’s bullet ended McKinley’s life, making Roosevelt president of the United States.
Roosevelt’s presidency is the best-known period of his political life, and it is documented extensively in his papers. Incoming correspondence captures the issues brought to Roosevelt’s attention, while letterpress copybooks record his voluminous output on subjects from coal strikes to conservation, from statues to socialism. Scrapbooks contain newspaper clippings on various aspects of the Roosevelt administration, and desk diaries reveal who met with the president on a daily basis.
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An April 11, 1908, letter from Roosevelt to his son Archie in which Roosevelt describes punishing Archie’s brother Quentin for putting spitballs on portraits at the White House.
Throughout his political career, Roosevelt enjoyed another life as an author. He published historical works; wrote about his experiences as a rancher, hunter and explorer; and regularly contributed articles to periodicals such as “The Outlook.” T.R. even briefly tried to change the English language itself by promoting economical spelling, such as substituting “thoroly” for “thoroughly.” The experiment failed, but Roosevelt accepted good-natured ribbing from associates and continued using alternative spelling in his personal correspondence.
After leaving the presidency, T.R. went on safari in Africa, sending specimens to the Smithsonian Institution. He then toured Europe in 1910. After breaking with the Republican Party in 1912, he formed the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party and ran unsuccessfully for president. He went to South America in 1913 on an expedition to explore an Amazon River tributary later named in his honor.
The outbreak of World War I brought Roosevelt back into the public arena as an ardent voice for American war preparedness. T.R. even offered to raise troops, but the Wilson administration rebuffed his offer. “I am a man of action,” Roosevelt wrote in June 1917, “and the President has refused to let me take part in this great contest as a man of action.”
Theodore Roosevelt, the man of war who also received a Nobel Peace Prize, died in his sleep on January 6, 1919.
October 15, 2018
My Job at the Library: Engaging Spanish Speakers with the Collections
Benny Seda-Galarza joined the Library’s Communications Office a little more than a year ago as a public affairs specialist. Fluent in English and Spanish, he is helping to reach out to the Spanish-speaking community to raise awareness about the Library’s programs and services. In observance of Hispanic Heritage Month, Seda-Galarza answers a few questions about his background and career.
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Benny Seda-Galarza. Photo by Shawn Miller.
Where did you grow up and go to school?
I was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, an island in the Caribbean also known as “La Isla del encanto” – the island of enchantment. Imagine summer all year long, a salty breeze and trips to the beach in December – it is paradise! When I went to college, however, “home” became more of a state of mind. My alma mater is the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in communications. I also did an exchange program at New York University on scholarship and studied abroad at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain.
What drew you to New York?
I always wanted to become fluent in English and overcome the language barrier I thought I had. At one point, I became obsessed with “Mad Men” – the TV show based on the booming advertising industry of the 1950s in New York City – which fueled my desire to live in the city that never sleeps. Since New York University offered a scholarship to students from my university, it felt like a no-brainer – perfect my English and live in the city of my dreams. It was challenging at times, but it forced me to get out of my comfort zone. It is one of the best decisions I made in college. Being fully bilingual has opened many doors for me professionally, and it has also enabled me to support others in my community.
How did you make your way to Washington, D.C., and the Library?
After living in New York, I interned in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in D.C. and was later hired as a marketing specialist to lead efforts related to agricultural commodities. Beyond my daily duties, I supported outreach to the Hispanic and LGBTQ+ communities. When the Library announced a position involving reaching out to Spanish speakers, I was delighted to apply.
Describe your job at the Library.
I like to tell friends that I share the treasures of the world’s largest library with the nation and beyond. That means leading internal and external communications and marketing for new acquisitions, digital initiatives and public programs – from 16th-century manuscripts to audio books and online educational apps – on behalf of multiple Library divisions. I also write for Library publications.
In addition, my role involves planning and executing outreach to diverse audiences, including the Spanish-speaking community – I develop communications materials in Spanish and will soon establish a formal plan to support the Library’s engagement of Spanish speakers.
What events have you most enjoyed working on so far?
In my experience, every program or event in the Library is unique, and I truly enjoy the dynamism of working on totally different projects. However, if I were forced to choose, I would say it was pretty neat to meet André Aciman, author of one of my favorite novels, “Call Me by Your Name,” as part of the National Pride Month events in the Library.
What is something not many people know about you?
I secretly read my horoscope with my morning coffee, so I guess you can say I am a fan of astrology. I am a Scorpio with a rising in Scorpio as well, which explains a lot about me, and a Gemini moon. If you know, you know.
October 11, 2018
Hispanic Heritage Month: Early Titles by the Americas’ First Printing Press
This is a guest post by John Hessler, curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the History and Archaeology of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress.
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Title page to the “Doctrina breve muy provechosa,” by Juan de Zumárraga.
On June 12, 1539, a boat set sail from the Spanish city of Seville containing a cargo that would change the face of the Americas forever. On board was Giovanni Paoli (1500–61), perhaps better known by his Spanish name, Juan Pablos. He had been sent to the New World by Juan Cromberger (d. 1540), one of the most successful printers in Spain, to establish the first printing press on the new continent; with Pablos came all the materials and knowledge necessary to start publishing books in the Americas.
Juan Pablos arrived in Mexico City in October 1539 and quickly set up a press that would become known as the Casa de Juan Cromberger. Between Pablos’ arrival and his death in 1561, he published 37 titles, taking over full ownership of the press after Cromberger’s death in 1540. Only some the titles printed survive to the present day.
His first book, the earliest known to have been published in the Americas, came off the presses in 1539. It was titled the “Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Christiana en lengua Mexicana y Castellana,” which translates to “Short Compendium of Catholic Doctrine in Both Nahuatl and Spanish.” The first archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga (1468–1548), wrote the book, apparently in both the indigenous language of Nahuatl and in Spanish. Unfortunately, no copies of the book have survived. Through the centuries, it has taken on legendary status, as scholars, collectors and antiquarians have continued to seek it out.
The distinction of being the first book printed in the Americas that can still actually be read goes to another Zumárraga title, “Doctrina breve muy provechosa,” or “Brief and useful Catholic Doctrine,” dating from 1543–44. The Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds a copy of this extremely rare book.
In it, one finds explanations and philosophical arguments related to the moral and theological principles necessary for a Christian life – the book was part of Zumárraga’s project to convert the peoples of Mexico to the Catholic faith.
Specialists who sit down to read book – which because of the typeface is not for the faint of heart – are immediately struck by the fact that it copies, in Spanish translation, much of the content of a far more famous book, the “Enchiridion,” translated as the “Handbook of a Christian Knight,” by the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536).
The “Doctrina breve” contains much more, however, than a simple copy of Erasmus’ text. It narrates the Catholic articles of faith, explains the sacraments, talks about the various kinds of sin and works of mercy, and it delves deeply, in its 168 pages, into the importance of living a moral life.
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Title page to the Nahuatl-Spanish section of Molina’s “Vocabulario en lengua castellana y Mexicana.”
The early printing press, wherever it was found, was often controversial. The one set up in Mexico City by Cromberger and Paoli in 1539 was no different, as it opened up the Americas to the revolution of print that was sweeping through Europe. In 1559, nine years after Zumárraga died, the Mexican church temporarily banned the “Doctrina breve,” somewhat mysteriously. The “Enchiridion” was also considered by many in the church to contain heretical doctrine; it, too, was prohibited reading in 1559.
As publishing increased in the New World, however, it was not only church doctrine that became the subject of the new print culture. Indigenous languages, histories and customs also began to be more widely studied and read, quickly producing such printed masterworks as Alonso de Molina’s (1514–79) “Vocabulario en lengua castellana y Mexicana,” a bilingual dictionary of Spanish and Nahuatl. Originally called the “Aquí comiença un vocabulario en la lengua castellana y mexicana,” it was edited by Juan Pablos in 1555 and was the first dictionary of any kind to be published in the New World.
In the Americas, the printing press gave voice to both indigenous and European thought, as the two cultures began the long and difficult process of accommodating each other in the 16th century. What started as a trickle of books in 1539 increased rapidly and became, to quote Johannes Guttenberg, “a spring of truth” that would “scatter the darkness of ignorance and cause a light heretofore unknown to shine amongst men.”
October 9, 2018
Hispanic Heritage Month: Mexican-Americans and Baseball
This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. The post celebrates both National Hispanic Heritage Month and the Library’s ongoing exhibition Baseball Americana .
“I remember traveling to Lake Elsinore, which was a long way in those days. … [T]he only ride we could get was from a friend who hauled fertilizer in his truck, so all the guys crawled inside … and tried not to breath during the ride. By the time we arrived to play well we all smelled like fertilized fields. We did it because we loved the game.”
—Zeke Mejia, June 29, 1996, Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.)
For Mejia and thousands of other Mexican-Americans in Southern California during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, baseball served as a means both to demonstrate their belonging in the United States and to assert their unique identity. In Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, Mexican-American teams dotted the landscape, creating a human geography of social, economic and political connections that helped buoy working-class communities, and even contributed to unionization efforts amid widespread discrimination, writes historian Jose M. Alamillo. For these players, referred to as “peloteros,” baseball clubs provided the critical foundation for larger collective action.
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Members of the Los Hermanos Peloteros Team in Los Angeles, 1932. Courtesy Shades of L.A. Photo Collection / Los Angeles Public Library.
Although the game first reached Mexico in the 1860s, it didn’t gain traction there until the dictatorship of Porfiorio Díaz, beginning in the 1870s. Under Diaz, the government encouraged industrialization and foreign investment. Predictably, American capital poured into northern Mexico; soon after, following U.S. railroad and mining expansion, baseball reached the nation’s more remote central and western regions.
U.S. investors and “Porfirian liberals” saw baseball as a useful means by which to introduce modern industrial values, such as teamwork and self-discipline, to the Mexican lower classes. Similarly, American companies operating in northern Mexico and Southern California viewed baseball as a vehicle for spreading industrialization and capitalism, particularly regarding the work habits of laborers.
By the 1920s, Mexican and Mexican-American labor occupied a critical, if underappreciated, place in the economies of California and the U.S. southwest. The rhetoric of the day described Mexicans in derogatory terms – even immigration advocates justified the migration of Mexican labor in racist terms.
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A Mexican laborer works in a field planted with cantaloupes in California’s Imperial Valley, 1937. Photo by Dorothea Lange.
While agricultural growers like Sunkist encouraged baseball clubs among their Mexican and Mexican-American workers to ensure workplace discipline and efficiency, peloteros competed for very different reasons. Teams like the Corona Athletics, the Oxnard Aces and the La Habra Juveniles, to name a few, helped to build community amid the segregated landscape of 1930s Southern California.
Teams sprouted from sports clubs, mutual-aid organizations, churches and even businesses. Organizations like the Asociacion Deportiva Hispano Americana and La Asociacion Atletica Mexican del Sure de California, formed in 1932 with help from the Los Angeles Department of Recreation, promoted the sport among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. La Asociacion Atletica even formed a new baseball league, Liga Mexicana de Sur de California (Southern California Mexican Baseball League), which included over 15 amateur and semipro squads, including the El Paso Shoe Store Zapateros, the Oxnard Aces, La Habra Juveniles, Carta Blanca Cerveceros, Hermosa Mexican Club Pescadores, Santa Paula Limoneros, Placentia Merchants and the Corona Athletics.
Mexican-American businesses also staked a claim to the burgeoning sport. Hoping to capitalize on the growing Mexican and Mexican-American community in 1948, Mario Lopez and his partner Francisco “Pancho” Sornoso opened the Carmelita Provision Company in Los Angeles, a factory that marketed popular Mexican pork to Mexican-Americans.
Carmelita boomed. Soon Lopez founded the Los Chorizeros (“The Sausage Makers”), a team that would become the “New York Yankees of East Los Angeles.” One of the team’s many highlights was its victory in the 1961 Los Angeles City Final.
For some players, baseball provided a break from the numbing labor of agricultural fields and citrus groves; for others, it functioned an expression of identity and community; for still others, it served as a means for organizing workers.
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Mexican field laborers on strike in Bakersfield, Calif., in 1938. Photo by Dorothea Lange.
Labor militancy worried growers. World War I had threatened agricultural interests, as unionization began to gain adherents nationwide. Recreation programs were seen as antidote to such “radicalism.” The Los Angeles Department of Recreation often pointed out that baseball’s ideals of “good sportsmanship, fair play, team work, clean living, and plant loyalty” promised to create a “spirit of cooperation between employer and employee.”
Yet the experience of Mexican-American peloteros encouraged labor solidarity and ultimately promoted unionization among agricultural workers in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. Numerous ballplayers emerged as labor leaders and organizers, including several members of the Corona Athletics, who served as organizers for the United Cannery Agricultural Packing and Allied Workers of America. And many former Chorizeros, in addition to becoming educators, professors and community leaders, worked on political campaigns.
Likewise, political leaders and activists attended games, as did leaders of Mexican-American organizations and veterans groups. As Francisco E. Balderrama and Richard A. Santillan assert in “Mexican American Baseball in Los Angeles,” baseball, much like family and religion, served as the “institutional thread that united community.”
Following Jackie Robinson’s integration of Major League Baseball in 1947, several Mexican and native-born players of Mexican descent, all plying their trade in the Southern California league, received opportunities to compete in the minor leagues. Even California-born Mexican-Americans got into the act – San Gabriel Valley native Hank Aguirre signed with the Detroit Tigers in 1951.
Today, baseball’s place among Mexican-Americans might not be as dominant as it once was. Without doubt, however, baseball played a central role as the Mexican-American community expanded, fostering cultural identity among one of the nation’s fastest-growing populations.
October 3, 2018
The Mystery of James Madison’s Crystal Flute
It is well known that Dolley Madison rescued a now-iconic portrait of George Washington as she fled the White House on August 24, 1814, just before British troops set fire to Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812. Less well known is exactly what else she managed to take with her amid the chaos of the attack.
“At this late hour a wagon has been procured, I have had it filled with the plate and most valuable portable articles belonging to the house,” the first lady and wife to President James Madison wrote to her sister, Lucy Payne Washington Todd, in a letter she had started the day before. The articles packed reportedly included red-silk velvet draperies, a silver service and blue-and-gold Lowestoft china purchased for the state dining room.
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James Madison’s crystal flute, made by Claude Laurent. Photo by Shawn Miller.
Might an exquisite crystal flute made for James Madison by Claude Laurent of Paris – one of 20 Laurent glass flutes in the Library’s Dayton C. Miller Collection – also have been packed?
Laurent patented his “flute en cristal” in 1806 in France, winning a silver medal at the Paris Industrial Exposition the same year for his invention. Known for their intricate cut patterns and ornate jeweled keys, the instruments – which are functional – soon became very popular. They were owned by emperors, kings and other heads of state, including Madison.
Madison’s flute is distinctive in that Laurent made it specifically for him in honor of Madison’s second inauguration. Its glass is styled in a way that Laurent seems to have reserved for especially illustrious figures, and its silver joint is engraved with James Madison’s name and title and the year the flute was made: 1813.
The flute stands out among the Library’s Laurent holdings: it is one of only two made of crystal. Initially, all 20 Laurent flutes were thought to be crystal. But about five years ago, expert staff at the Library began to study the flutes to determine how to address worrying signs of deterioration on some of them.
Noninvasive analysis of the flutes’ composition using X-ray fluorescence showed that 18 of the flutes are actually made of potash glass as opposed to high-leaded glass, or crystal. Those 18 glass flutes remain precious – only 185 Laurent glass flutes survive worldwide today – but the crystal flutes are exceptionally rare.
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Laurent engraved Madison’s name and other identifying details on the crystal flute he made for Madison. Photo by Shawn Miller.
It isn’t totally clear how Madison’s flute made its way from Laurent to Madison, as no system for tracking package delivery existed in the early 1800s, and no record of the original arrival of the flute remains. We do know, however, that Madison received a letter in French dated March 25, 1815, inquiring about the arrival of “une flute en Cristal de mon invention” and asking whether Madison found the flute agreeable. The letter is cataloged under “Laurens” in Madison’s papers – the final letter in the signature is styled with a flourish, making it difficult to decipher.
One thing we know for certain about the flute is that Dolley Madison’s son from her first marriage, John Payne Todd, bequeathed the flute to Dr. Cornelius Boyle of Washington, D.C., in his will.
Cited as “the bad boy” in a White House Historical Association profile, Todd was known for gambling, womanizing and drinking – he was jailed several times for disturbing the peace. Yet he was also a lover of fine art, and both James and Dolley Madison helped to support him and get him out of scrapes. Apparently, at some point, one or the other bestowed the flute on Todd.
Dr. Boyle treated Todd before Todd died in 1852 at age 60, at which time he was in considerable debt. It is possible, but not certain, that Todd willed the flute to Boyle in payment for medical services.
In any case, Boyle’s heirs arranged for the flute to be exhibited in 1903 in the United States National Museum – part of the Smithsonian Institution – after which they sold the flute to Dayton C. Miller with the understanding that he would ensure its display in an important national museum.
Miller was an Ohio physicist with a passion for flutes and wind instruments. He donated his collection of more than 1,700 instruments, including the Madison flute, to Library of Congress in 1941.
So, was the crystal flute saved by Dolley Madison as she fled a White House under siege? The flute’s value, portability and origin – Madison was known to appreciate fine European goods – would seem to make it a likely candidate for rescue if it was indeed at the White House, as research into the Madisons’ whereabouts during the period suggests that it was. Many years later, in a letter to Dolley Madison, Thomas Ludwell Lee Brent, also seems to recall the flute having been in Washington: “How I should like to be in Washington this winter,” he wrote wistfully in 1842, “and play for you upon that sweet cristal flute.”
But, alas, unless or until more documentation about the precious flute’s history is unearthed, we will have no way to know for certain whether the flute escaped the White House with Dolley Madison in 1814.
Read more about the Dayton C. Miller Collection on the Library’s website.
This blog post incorporates research into the Library’s Claude Laurent flutes by Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, senior curator of musical instruments; Lynn Brostoff, a chemist and conservation scientist in the Preservation Research and Testing Division; and Dorie Klein, an intern from Smith College who has worked with Ward-Bamford and Brostoff.
October 1, 2018
Inquiring Minds: Finding Jonathan Larson’s Lost Works in Tapes and Boxes
The following is a guest post by theater historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper, the creative and programming director at Feinstein’s/54 Below, a Broadway supper club in New York City. From October 9 to 14, the club will present “The Jonathan Larson Project,” a concert of previously unheard work by the late composer and playwright. Tepper, who conceived of the concert and directs it, writes here about how she found inspiration in the Library’s Jonathan Larson Collection . Tepper is also author of “The Untold Stories of Broadway” book series, producer of the musical “Be More Chill” and historian-consultant for the upcoming movie “Tick, Tick … BOOM,” based on Larson’s autobiographical musical. An expanded version of this post first appeared on “In the Muse,” the Library’s performing arts blog.
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Tepper’s April 1999 Bat Mitzvah sign-in board featured her popping out of a pile of playbills for the Jonathan Larson musical “Rent.”
I grew up inspired by Jonathan Larson’s musicals. Even as a teenager living in Boca Raton, Florida, I identified deeply with his ideals: with his unwavering dedication to art made from the heart, with his passion for bringing musical theater to a new generation, with the devotion to friendship and community layered into all of his work – and of course, with his undeniable genius in channeling all of this into characters, stories and songs that have changed the world.
When my close friend Jason SweetTooth Williams was appearing in “Freaky Friday” in Washington, D.C., in fall 2016, I went to visit him and spent a day at the Library of Congress, immersed in the Jonathan Larson Collection.
I have worked as a theater historian for almost a decade now, and nothing has knocked me out quite like this collection did that day.
There were hundreds of hours of audio recordings and hundreds of files of written material: each one incredible. I sat at the Library that day feeling like the little mermaid in her grotto, marveling at treasures galore from a time and place I longed to transport myself to: Jonathan Larson’s world.
The recordings included a momentous reading of Jonathan’s unproduced musical “Superbia,” followed by discussion of the piece with a panel of writers including Stephen Sondheim; a hilarious tune written on spec for “Saturday Night Live” with Ben Stiller and Jeff Kahn; mix tapes filled with pop and rock songs taped off the radio that inspired the characters of Larson’s smash musical “Rent”; songs from promising-but-never-produced musicals about presidential elections (“National Lampoon’s Tricentennial Revue”) and the end of the world (“1984”); and much more.
The written material was equally exhilarating to explore. A letter from theater producer Jeffrey Seller to Jonathan in 1990, telling him how much he’d loved his concert of “Boho Days” (an early version of “Tick, Tick … Boom!”); an outline for a musical version of “Polar Express”; original audition notes for “Rent” at New York Theatre Workshop; scripts and lyric drafts and budgets and programs and sheet music and photos and letters. Free-style essays. Lists of words. Journal entries.
I returned to the Library of Congress half a dozen times over the next year. I spent days going through the recordings and folders. After that first visit, I connected with Julie Larson, Jonathan’s sister, who generously gave me permission to go full steam ahead with my show “The Jonathan Larson Project.”
A piece featuring Jonathan’s unheard works deserved a creator who was going to listen to every tape and read every page. It was a privilege to do so. “Privilege” doesn’t cover it – it was the adventure of a theater historian’s wildest dreams. It was also at times devastating. With Jonathan’s voice in my ears and his papers in my hands, I could see with a new level of intimacy how hard he persevered and how ahead of his time he was.
Jonathan saved dozens of rejection letters. He rewrote shows endlessly. He did everything he could to try to convince the powers-that-be of the 1980s and 1990s that he was the future of musical theatre, that he was going to change its sound. He worked hard to create musicals and songs about what was really happening in the world, that sounded like the time he was living in. He pinched every penny and banged on every door. And he didn’t get to live to see that every dream he ever had came true.
Jonathan’s papers allowed me to see the man behind the work better than ever before. So much of theater history is about what’s scrawled in the margins. Jonathan’s margins are rich with details of his inspirations, frustrations, ideas and loves. I delighted in finding Jonathan’s “They’re Playing Our Song” playbill from when he saw the show on Broadway at age 18. On the cover he wrote down one Carole Bayer Sager lyric from the show in red pen: “Does the man make the music or does the music make the man?” On a notebook page related to “Rent,” Jonathan also scribbled the lyric from “Merrily We Roll Along” – “We’re opening doors” – and underlined it three times. Underneath it, he wrote “why they won’t ever sell out.” Finding Jonathan’s personal connections to other musical theater felt revealing and significant.
Even though 95 percent of what I discovered at the Library of Congress will not literally be part of “The Jonathan Larson Project,” it will all be part of the concert in a way. The opportunity to learn so much about a man and artist I have admired endlessly has impacted the piece immeasurably. I will be staging a cut song from “Superbia,” having read six drafts of the show. I will be collaborating with actors on songs about loss, knowing in detail about those friends Jonathan lost and loved dearly. I will be bringing to life songs that have never before been performed publicly, which reveal pieces of Jonathan’s life and era I understand profoundly because of all I was able to access.
Jonathan was indeed the future of musical theater, and his work changed the world. Now, because of this collection, new audiences will experience songs and ideas of Jonathan’s that were previously only experienced by one woman, wiping away tears at a library desk.
To days of inspiration.
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