Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 38
May 25, 2020
Don’t Know Much About® Dorothea Lange
Daughter of Migrant Tennessee Coal Miner Living in American River Camp near Sacramento, California
(1936) by Dorothea Lange Credit: Gift of the Farm Security AdministrationMoMA Number:313.1938 Source: Museum of Modern Art
Dorothea Lange was born on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken,NJ. (2015 post; updated 5/26/2020)[image error]
Best known for her photographs of Depression-era America, she also recorded the the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Lange’s commitment to social justice and her faith in the power of photography remained constant throughout her life. In 1942, with the United States recently entered into World War II, the government’s War Relocation Authority assigned her to document the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, a policy she strongly opposed. She made critical images, which the government suppressed for the duration of the war.
–Dorothea Lange biographical entry from Museum of Modern Art
Photo by Dorothea Lange of Japanese-American grocery store on the day after Pearl Harbor Source: Library of Congress
Following the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan, there was a wave of fear and hysteria aimed at Japanese and people of Japanese descent living in America, including American citizens, mostly on the West Coast. In February 1942. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which declared certain areas to be “exclusion zones” from which the military could remove anyone for security reasons. It provided the legal groundwork for the eventual relocation of approximately 120,000 people to a variety of detention centers around the country, the largest forced relocation in American history. Nearly two-thirds of them were American citizens. (Smaller numbers of Americans of German and Italian descent were also detained.)
Photo Source: National Archives
The attitude of many Americans at the time was expressed in a Los Angeles Times editorial of the period:
“A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched… So, a Japanese American born of Japanese parents, nurtured upon Japanese traditions, living in a transplanted Japanese atmosphere… notwithstanding his nominal brand of accidental citizenship almost inevitably and with the rarest exceptions grows up to be a Japanese, and not an American…” (Source: Impounded, p. 53)
The exclusion order was rescinded in 1945 and internees were allowed to leave, although many had lost their homes, businesses and property during their confinement. However, the last camp did not close until 1946.
In 1980, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to investigate the internment and, in 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which provided for a reparation of $20,000 to surviving detainees.
One of those detainees was Albert Kurihara who told the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1981:
“I hope this country will never forget what happened, and do what it can to make sure that future generations will never forget.” (from Impounded, Norton)
Photographer Dorothea Lange also photographed the internment camps and her censored images were published in 2006 in the book Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (WW Norton, 2006).
The National Parks Service offers a Teaching With Historic Places lesson plan based on the camps some of which are now part of the National Parks System including Minidoka in Idaho and the Manzanar camp in California.
The Library of Congress offers an extensive collection of Lange photographs.
“Pea pickers in California. ‘Mam, I’ve picked peas from Calipatria to Ukiah. This life is simplicity boiled down.'” March, 1936. America from the Great Depression to World War II: Black-and-White Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945, Library of Congress.
May 21, 2020
Who Said It (5/22/2020)
I always suggest reading this for Memorial Day
Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863)
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln (November 1863) Photo by Alexander Gardner
Complete Text Source: Avalon Project/Yale Law School
Learn more about the Gettysburg Address in Don’t Know Much About the Civil War and more about American slavery and the presidency in IN THE SHADOW OF LIBERTY.
Don’t Know Much About® History: Anniversary Edition
Don’t Know Much About the Civil War (Harper paperback, Random House Audio)
May 19, 2020
The Divisive & Partisan History of “Memorial Day”
MEMORIAL DAY -MONDAY MAY 25, 2020
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Photo: Arlington National Cemetery) This memorial was created after the great losses of World War I.
(Revise of 2015 post)
It is a well-established fact that Americans like to argue. And we do. Mays or Mantle. A Caddy or a Lincoln. And, of course, abolition, abortion, and guns. And now lockdowns.
There is no debate that Memorial Day 2020 will be unlike any other. Many traditional public celebrations and family gatherings will be severely curtailed.
But a debate over Memorial Day –and more specifically where and how it began? America’s most solemn holiday should be free of rancor. But it never has been.
The heated arguments over removing the Confederate flag and monuments to heroes and soldiers of the Confederacy in New Orleans and provide examples and reminders of the birth of Memorial Day.
In the Korean War, the U.S. military was integrated. (Source: Library of Congress)
Waterloo, New York claimed that the holiday originated there with a parade and decoration of the graves of fallen soldiers in 1866. But according to the Veterans Administration, at least 25 places stake a claim to the birth of Memorial Day. Among the pack are Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, which says it was first in 1864.( “Many Claim to Be Memorial Day Birthplace” )
And Charleston, South Carolina, according to historian David Blight, points to a parade of emancipated children in May 1865 who decorated the graves of fallen Union soldiers whose remains were moved from a racetrack to a proper cemetery.
Born out of the Civil War’s catastrophic death toll as “Decoration Day,” Memorial Day is a day for honoring our nation’s war dead. A veteran of the Mexican War and the Civil War, John A. Logan, a Congressman and leader of the Grand Army of the Republic, established the first somber commemoration on May 30, 1868, in Arlington Cemetery, the sacred space wrested from property once belonging to Robert E. Lee’s family.( When Memorial Day was No Picnic by James M. McPherson.) The Grand Army of the Republic was a powerful fraternal organization formed of Civil War Union veterans.
Abraham Lincoln (November 1863) Photo by Alexander Gardner
From its inception, Decoration Day (later Memorial Day) was linked to “Yankee” losses in the cause of emancipation. Calling for the first formal Decoration Day, Union General John Logan wrote, “Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains…”
In other words, Logan’s first Decoration Day was divisive— a partisan affair, organized by northerners.
In 1871, Frederick Douglass gave a Memorial Day speech in Arlington that focused on this division:
We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it, those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.
I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my “right hand forget her cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,” if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict.
But the question remains: what inspired Logan to call for this rite of decorating soldier’s graves with fresh flowers?
The simple answer is—his wife.
While visiting Petersburg, Virginia – which fell to General Grant in 1865 after a deadly, year-long siege – Mary Logan learned about the city’s women who had formed a Ladies’ Memorial Association. Their aim was to show admiration “…for those who died defending homes and loved ones.”
Choosing June 9th, the anniversary of “The Battle of the Old Men and the Young Boys” in 1864, a teacher had taken her students to the city’s cemetery to decorate the graves of the fallen. General Logan’s wife wrote to him about the practice. Soon after, he ordered a day of remembrance.
The teacher and her students, it is worth noting, had placed flowers and flags on both Union and Confederate graves.
As America wages its partisan wars at full pitch, this may be a lesson for us all.
More resources at the New York Times Topics archive of Memorial Day articles
The story of “The Battle of the Old Men and the Young Boys” is told in THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR (Now in paperback)
Now In paperback THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR: Untold Tales from Yorktown to Fallujah
May 13, 2020
Conversations- “Know More,” an online series with the National Council for History Education
Dear Educators,
In the next few weeks, while some of us are staying home during the Covid-10 pandemic, I’d like to share my love of history with you. Working with the National Council for History Education, I will do three virtual visits with students and teachers around the country.
These “Know More” sessions will take place on May 20, May 27 and June 3. Each will begin at 1:30 PM ET and last for 45 minutes to an hour.
You can learn more and register at the National Council for History Education website.
Here is what we will talk about:
•In our first get-together (May 20), we’ll talk about the worst pandemic in modern history— the Spanish flu — and what it had to do with the First World War. And we’ll also look at what lessons we can take from the Spanish flu pandemic today.
•In our second talk (May 27), we will discuss the history of slavery in the United States and the stories of five people who were enslaved by four U.S. presidents. 
•This is an election year. So our third session (June 3) will be about how we elect a president. Come to mention it, why do we even have one?
Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents (Hyperion paperback-April 15, 2014)
Each of these sessions will be a conversation— not a lecture. There won’t be any quick quizzes, tests, or papers to turn in. All you need to bring is your curiosity and your questions.
If you are a student from the middle or high school grades, I hope to see you there. Teachers and parents are welcome to join in as well as we talk about what we should learn from the past.
Space is limited. But we want you to be there. History matters. Now more than ever. When you have questions, ask!
“Return to Normalcy”
The Covid-19 pandemic is far from over but people are already asking what a post-pandemic world will look like. Will there be more telemedicine? Less time in the office? More remote learning?
The short answer is nobody really knows. But history can help. The sweeping changes that followed the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 offer some lessons.
Following the pandemic of 1918-1919, which took 675,000 American lives, most people just wanted to feel “normal.” Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding made “Return to Normalcy” the centerpiece of his 1920 campaign and won the White House in a popular landslide.
Warren G. Harding (1920)
People also adopted a collective amnesia. The Spanish flu pandemic overlapped with the First World War and there was widespread sickness, death, and destruction. But while the First World War profoundly influenced art and literature, the Spanish flu pandemic left few marks in culture or popular memory.
There was no “pandemic literature.” Few novels, plays, movies, or paintings depicted the flu. A notable exception is Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a story written by Katherine Anne Porter, a survivor of the flu. No full-scale history of the flu was written until years later.
No surprise, the pandemic was followed by a desire to relax, have fun — even go a little wild– especially after after Prohibition was ushered in starting on January 17, 1920.
Detroit police inspecting equipment found in a clandestine underground brewery. (National Archives ID 541928)
Actress Louise Brooks an icon of “Flapper” style (Library of Congress http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggba...)
Famed entertainer Josephine Baker does the Charleston in Paris (1926 Wikimedia)
The 1920s brought loosening styles of clothing (Flappers!), music (Jazz!), dancing (the Charleston!), and the boom of Hollywood into one of the nation’s biggest businesses. It was the “Roaring Twenties.” After years of war and disease, people wanted to forget their troubles.
The status of women changed— they largely benefited. They had stepped in as nurses, factory workers, and teachers, helping the sick on the home front as others went to war. Women won the right to vote in federal elections in 1920 and voted in all 48 states that year.
And there was a dark side. During the pandemic, Germans were blamed for poisoning the water and causing the pandemic. Crowded tenements were hotspots and immigrants often got blamed for the outbreak. America retreated into isolationism and the anti-immigration laws passed after the pandemic were draconian. The fear of foreigners also emerged in the nation’s firest “Red Scare,” in which a young J. Edgar Hoover began his quest to find socialists, Bolsheviks and communists. And the hatred of immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and African Americans led to a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and with it a wave of lynchings.
Of course, the excitement of the “Roaring Twenties” would be short lived and come crashing down –literally– with Wall Street’s “Great Crash” in October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.
I discuss some of these changes in my book More Deadly Than War and the era of the “Roaring Twenties” in Don’t Know Much About® History.
Who Said It? (5/13/20)
Warren G. Harding (May 14, 1920)
Senator Warren G. Harding (1920) Image Wikipedia
America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
My best judgment of America’s needs is to steady down, to get squarely on our feet, to make sure of the right path. Let’s get out of the fevered delirium of war, with the hallucination that all the money in the world is to be made in the madness of war and the wildness of its aftermath. Let us stop to consider that tranquillity at home is more precious than peace abroad, and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people. . . .
Source: Teaching American History
Following World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic, Senator Warren G. Harding (Ohio-Rep.) ran for president on a platform of a “return to normalcy.” He won the 1920 presidential election in a popular and electoral landslide, the first incumbent Senator to be elected president. His presidency was marred by the Teapot Dome scandal and other corruption in his cabinet which emerged fully after his death in office. Harding died while on a national tour in San Francisco on August 2, 1923. He was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge.
Resources on Harding from the Library of Congress
May 11, 2020
The 1918 Pandemic That Killed Millions (Matter of Fact video)
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 was the most deadly outbreak of disease in modern times. It was completely connected to the last year of World War I. And it has some important lessons today as the world confronts another deadly pandemic. This short video looks at the history of one pandemic while we live through another.
May 8, 2020
The first “Mother’s Day”-Some Hidden History
[Updated older post]
Let me be among the first to say Happy Mother’s Day. Spouses, partners, and children everywhere: Don’t forget.
But amidst the brunches, flower-giving, and chocolate samplers, there is a story of another “Mother’s Day” that is worth remembering this weekend.
Julia Ward Howe, a prominent abolitionist best known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” published what became known as the “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” originally called “An Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.”
Julia Ward Howe (1907) Source: Library of Congress
In 1870, Howe wrote:
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. . . . From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
Source and Complete Text: Library of Congress
Howe’s international call for mothers to become the voice of pacifism found few takers. Even among like-minded women, there was greater urgency over the suffrage question. Her passionate campaign for a “Mother’s Day for Peace” begun in 1872 fell by the wayside.
Mother’s Day, as we know it, is not the invention of Hallmark; it started in 1912 through the efforts of West Virginia’s Anna Jarvis to create a holiday honoring all mothers for their sacrifice and to assist mothers who needed help.
Today, Mother’s Day is largely a commercial bonanza — flowers, chocolates and greeting cards. Is it possible to truly honor Howe’s version of Mother’s Day and work towards her original vision of Mother’s Day?
If only we remember the history behind the holiday and what she thought it should be.
Now In paperback THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR: Untold Tales from Yorktown to Fallujah
Who Said It? (5/8/2020)
President Harry S. Truman May 8, 1945 V-E Day. It was a good day to celebrate his birthday.
President Harry S. Truman
(Photo: Truman Library)
THE PRESIDENT. Well, I want to start off by reading you a little statement here. I want you to understand, at the very beginning, that this press conference is held with the understanding that any and all information given you here is for release at 9 a.m. this morning, eastern war time. There should be no indication of the news given here, or speculation about it, either in the press or on the radio before 9 o’clock this morning.
The radio-my radio remarks, and telegrams of congratulation to the Allied military leaders, are for release at the same time. Mr. Daniels has copies of my remarks, available for you in the lobby as you go out, and also one or two releases here.
[1.] Now, for your benefit, because you won’t get a chance to listen over the radio, I am going to read you the proclamation, and the principal remarks. It won’t take but 7 minutes, so you needn’t be uneasy. You have plenty of time. [Laughter]
“This is a solemn but glorious hour. General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.”
Source: Harry S. Truman: “The President’s News Conference on V-E Day,” May 8, 1945. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.
Harry S. Truman was born on May 8, 1884. Read more about him in this post, Don’t Know Much About® Harry Truman
Learn more about Truman at the Truman Presidential Library
Who Said It? (5/8/2018)
President Harry S. Truman May 8, 1945 V-E Day. It was a good day to celebrate his birthday.
President Harry S. Truman
(Photo: Truman Library)
THE PRESIDENT. Well, I want to start off by reading you a little statement here. I want you to understand, at the very beginning, that this press conference is held with the understanding that any and all information given you here is for release at 9 a.m. this morning, eastern war time. There should be no indication of the news given here, or speculation about it, either in the press or on the radio before 9 o’clock this morning.
The radio-my radio remarks, and telegrams of congratulation to the Allied military leaders, are for release at the same time. Mr. Daniels has copies of my remarks, available for you in the lobby as you go out, and also one or two releases here.
[1.] Now, for your benefit, because you won’t get a chance to listen over the radio, I am going to read you the proclamation, and the principal remarks. It won’t take but 7 minutes, so you needn’t be uneasy. You have plenty of time. [Laughter]
“This is a solemn but glorious hour. General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.”
Source: Harry S. Truman: “The President’s News Conference on V-E Day,” May 8, 1945. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.
Harry S. Truman was born on May 8, 1884. Read more about him in this post, Don’t Know Much About® Harry Truman
Learn more about Truman at the Truman Presidential Library
