Pamela D. Toler's Blog, page 5

From the Archives: Florence Nightingale Does the Math

 

 

Florence Nightingale is best known for her heroic efforts in the Crimean War(1), where she threw open windows, scrubbed filthy floors and equally filthy men(2),  bullied doctors and officers on the spot, fought with the British Army’s military director, and saved lives.

She returned home a heroine. Victorian Britain loved to celebrate a celebrity. Nightingale was the recipient of hundreds of poems extolling the Lady with a Lamp. Opportunists printed her picture on souvenirs of every kind: including pottery figurines, lace mats, prints, and paper bags. If Bobblehead dolls had existed at the time, she’d have been Bobbled for sure.

At first Nightingale tried to keep a low-profile. She even traveled home under the unimaginative pseudonym of Miss Smith. She soon came to realize that she could use her celebrity to effect change. With the help of Queen Victoria, who was one of her biggest fans, she convinced the government to set up a Royal Commission to study the health of the army.

One of the lesser known facts about Nightingale is that she was a STEM girl. As a child she loved organizing data. She catalogued her shell collection with precisely drawn tables and lists. When her parents took her and her sisters on a tour of Europe, she collected population statistics . Later she studied mathematics with a personal tutor–not a normal choice for a young woman at the time. She once claimed that she found the sight of a long column of numbers “perfectly reviving.”

Rather than leaving the question of the army’s health to the Royal Commission, Nightingale analyzed the army data herself, working with leading statistician William Farr and sanitation expert John Sutherland of the Sanitary Commission. She reached the conclusion that 16,000 of the 18,000 deaths in the Crimean War were the result of preventable diseases.

Nightingale knew that her love for the clarity of numerical tables is not shared by all. She decided to present her data in a revolutionary way: statistical graphics. (3) Her “rose diagram”, a variation on the modern pie chart, presented her figures in a dramatic and easily understood form.

She went on to spearhead other reform campaigns, using a combination of statistical analysis and expert advice. She prepared by reading the best information available, collecting her own information if good studies didn’t exist, interviewing experts, and testing her recommended changes before releasing her results. The “Lady with the Lamp” gained a new nickname, “the passionate statistician”.

Florence Nightingale: founder of modern nursing, social reformer, grandmother of the info-graphic.

(1) Publicized by the indefatigable William Howard Russell as part of his outraged news reports on the condition under which British soldiers fought and died in that war.

(2) Or more accurately, caused others to scrub.

(3)  Farr thought it was a bad idea: “You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading.”

Barbie and Ruth

 

Back in March, Stacy Cordery  made a comment that stuck with me:

“As a classroom professor and a woman’s biographer, it had been clear to me for years that female entrepreneurs are largely missing from history. Most of us can name at least a handful of Gilded Age or Progressive Era captains of industry (or robber barons; take your pick). But few of us teach our students about women of vision and grit who overcame the odds in the overwhelmingly masculine world of business.”

I’ve been thinking about women entrepreneurs and how their stories are told ever since.

I decided to start with Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her by Robin Gerber, which at 250 pages was a little less daunting than Cordery’s own biography of Elizabeth Arden.*

Barbie and Ruth is definitely the story of a woman who was a successful entrepreneur, but the title is too small for its subject. Ruth Handler (1916-2002) didn’t just create Barbie, she created Mattel, which became the largest toy company in the world under her leadership. She introduced revolutionary changes in how toys (and ultimately other consumer goods) are sold. (She was also indicted by a federal grand jury, along with several other Mattel executives , on charges of conspiracy, mail fraud, and giving the Securities and Exchange commission false financial statements. She pleaded no contest. And left the company. )Several years after leaving Mattel, inspired by her experience of breast cancer, Handler founded a second successful company that created lifelike protheses for breast cancer survivors marketed as Nearly Me. She was fond of saying “I’ve lived my life from breast to breast.”

I have mixed feelings about both the book and Handler. In Gerber’s hands, Handler is a charming steamroller—which I suspect is an accurate depiction. I was bothered by the time Gerber spent on Handler’s failings as a mother—which I have no doubt is accurate. But I wonder whether a biographer of say, Walt Disney (1916-1966), would spend the same amount of time assessing Disney’s success or failure as a parent.**

At some level, the book felt more like a leadership case study than a biography. Perhaps it’s time for someone to write a Big Fat Biography of Ruth Handler. (Not me, though.)

*Normally I wouldn’t hesitate to dive into a Big Fat Biography on an interesting subject, but my reading commitments have gotten a little overwhelming in recent months. I did it to myself by taking on the challenge of reading my way through the various history and heritage months on top of reading wildly and widely in pursuit of my possible book topics. I have no regrets, but occasionally I have to acknowledge limitations of time and energy. (Some of you who know me in real life are gasping to hear me admit this.)

**It would be easy enough to answer the question. But I’m not prepared to drop everything and read a biography of Disney—the best of which qualify as Big Fat Biographies. At least not right now.

The Exodusters

In 1870s, after the failed promise of equality and opportunity under Reconstruction had ended, thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans headed to Kansas and other Western states, hoping to take advantage of the opportunity to own land offered by the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave 160 acres of federal land to anyone who agreed to farm it.. The large-scale migration, which came to be known as “the Great Exodus,” predated the better-known Great Migration from Mississippi to Chicago by a quarter century. The people who participated in it were called “Exodusters.” Between 40,000 and 60,000 Black Americans left the South and migrated westward. Some were part of organized efforts to establish black settlements. Most settled in Kansas.

Why Kansas?

In part, the choice was practical. Getting to Kansas was simpler and less expensive than traveling further west or north, though still daunting .

There was also an emotional element to the choice of Kansas as the New Promised Land. Between 1855 and 1859, “Bleeding Kansas” was the site of violent conflicts in which abolitionists, supporters of slavery and free staters literally fought over whether the state would allow slavery or not. The most well known of these incidents was John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. In many ways it was a dress rehearsal for the civil war that would follow. The events gave Kansas the aura of holy ground for many Black Americans. As one made from Louisiana wrote in a letter to the governor of Kansas, “I am very anxious to reach your state, not just because of the great race now made for it but because of the sacredness of her soil washed by the blood of humanitarians for the cause of black freedom.”

The migration began in 1873, when Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, calling himself the “Moses of the Colored Exodus,” led the people he called “Exodusters” from Tennessee to found a small African-American town in Cherokee County called “Singleton’s Colony.” The gradual exodus turned into “Kansas Exodus Fever” in 1879, following political changes in Louisiana that threatened to escalate violence against former slaves. By early March, about 1500 “exodusters” had passed through St. Louis to Kansas. Thousands more crowded the wharves on the banks of the Mississippi waiting to get passage on a northbound steamboat. Many arrived in St. Louis with no resources and no idea how they would get across Missouri into Kansas. St Louis clergy and businessmen organized committees to collect food and funds to help them on their way.

Roughly 6,000 Black Americans arrived in Kansas in the spring of 1879, most of them from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Other Exodusters made their way to Oklahoma, Colorado, Ohio, Nebraska, the Dakotas, New Mexico, Arizona and Montana . The exodus began to slow down by early summer, but continued through the 1880s. By 1880, the Black population of Kansas had grown to some 43,000..

***

An interesting side note: Although much of what we know about the Great Exodus comes from newspaper accounts of the Exodusters on the move—accounts that are laden with the racist language of the period even when sympathetic to the cause of the migrants, we also have first hand testimony from some of the Exodusters themselves in interviews taken as part of a n 1880 Senate investigation into the cause of the migration. These interviews are an earlier counterpart to the better-known Works Progress Administration interviews with formerly enslaved peoples recorded during the Great Depression. In addition to their personal testimony, many of the witnesses brought additional evidence to the stand in the form of letters and affidavits from other community members. Who knew? Not me.

 

Looking Forward to Juneteenth

Photo credit: Carol M Highsmith. Library of Congress

On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3, which announced the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas, from a balcony in Galveston Texas, or so the story goes. It was two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect and 2 months after the Civil War had ended. Even if the enslaved people of Galveston had already heard the news, without the presence of Union troops to enforce it, the proclamation was largely theoretical at that moment.*  I assume I don’t have to tell you that the anniversary of that event is now a federal holiday.

I’ve been thinking about Juneteenth a lot lately. Over the last few years, I’ve come to think of Juneteenth and the Fourth of July as bookends, marking out a space of time to think about the unfinished promise of the American Revolution, a promise we are still struggling to fulfill. More so today than ever.

One of the questions Clint Smith grapples with in the section on Juneteenth in his amazing book, How the Word is Passed, is the perception that Juneteenth is only a “Black thing.” One of the participants in the celebration in Galveston, a white Civil War re-enactor who has played the role of General Granger since 2015, summed up what I believe: “…it’s not ‘a Black thing,’ it’s an American thing. This is the final bit of freedom for all of us. And that’s just so important.”

Back in February, when I was reading my way through Black History month and visiting the George Washington Carver Museum in Austin, Texas , I told myself that we needed to find a Juneteenth celebration to attend—the same way we seek out Memorial Day services.** That didn’t work out. On Juneteenth I’m going to be headed to Minnesota to attend my college reunion. Unless there is a Juneteenth celebration in the Minneapolis airport, I’m going to miss out.

I think it is particularly important to mark that moment today. Since I won’t be attending a Juneteenth celebration in real life,*** I plan to re-read Annetter Gordon-Reed’s equally amazing On Juneteenth  on the plane.

If you attend a Juneteenth celebration, I’d love to hear about it.

*It is worth remembering that the Emancipation  Proclamation only emancipated enslaved people in the rebelling states. Slavery was not abolished in the United States as a whole until the 13th Amendment was passed in December, 1865. Even then, there was a cross-your-fingers-behind-your back clause that allowed involuntary servitude as a a criminal punishment.

**We attended an excellent one this year in the Chicago suburb of Blue Island. It had a small town feel in all the best ways. Highlights included:

• Two elderly members of the local American Legion post served as the color guard—an interesting change from the more familiar use of Boy Scouts. It may have been an expedient decision, but it added depth from the first moment of the service.
• A roll call of all Blue Island residents who had died in foreign wars since the Spanish American war, read by the American Legion chaplain. Each name was followed by the silvery peal of a small bell. I choked up even though I knew none of them.
• An open invitation at the end of the service to anyone who had lost a soldier in the wars to lay a rose at the foot of the flag pole.
• Taps. Always a part of these services. Always heartbreaking.

But I digress.

***Probably. Though the Minneapolis airport could surprise me.

Laundry Day (Not the Band)

In my last post, I made a casual reference to just how hard it was to do laundry in the mid-nineteenth century, but I didn’t bother to elaborate.* Time to correct that oversight.

Laundry in the mid-nineteenth century was a difficult job, one that most households undertook no more than once a week.**

Washing machines were a relatively new invention, first demonstrated at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London. They consisted of a ten- or twenty-gallon cylinder on top of a boiler that produced both hot water for the clothes and the steam that drove the engine. The operator would put clothes and soap in the cylinder, which then revolved for five or ten minutes. High-end versions had a second boiler for hot rinse water. The machines were expensive and found only in the wealthiest homes. In 1861 a basic machine cost $50—more than $9,000 today. (Realistically, anyone who could afford to buy a washing machine in 1861 also could afford to hire someone to wash the household linens. Maybe even more than once a week.)

Most people made do with wooden washtubs, large kettles for heating water, and plenty of elbow grease.

The first step, one most of us don’t think of as part of the laundry process today, was mending and patching. Once she finished mending torn clothing and bed linens, the laundress or housewife moved on to stain removal, which was a time-consuming process that could involve applying lemon juice to stains (a relatively expensive choice), exposing stained items to direct sunlight, or soaking them overnight in “blood warm water” (basically the same temperature as a baby’s bottle). Washable clothing (made from fabrics such a cotton and linen as opposed to silk, leather, velvet and some woolens), bed linens and rags were then washed in hot water using soft soap and a washboard,*** boiled to kill lice and insects, rinsed several times in hot water, allowed to cool, and then rinsed again in cool water.**** Wet laundry was hung out to dry on anything that would hold it off the ground: a clothesline if you were lucky enough to have one, bushes, a porch railing. A home laundry guide from 1902 pointed out that even drying clothing had its challenges. You needed a “grassy corner well open to the sun,…sheltered from high winds…the attentions of wandering poultry… and the incursions of pigs, puppies and calves…they not only soil the clothes, but will tear and even eat them.” Once dry, clothing would be ironed using a cast-iron metal iron heated on a stove or run through a mangle, a device made up of two rollers and a crank that used pressure to smooth wrinkles from the fabric.

All this sounds hard enough, but this description masks the layers of physical work involved in the process. Water had to be brought from sources with varying degrees of inconvenience: a stream or pond at some distance from a home, a shared pump in an urban neighborhood,  a farmyard well. Once acquired, water was heated in large kettles on wood-or coal-burning stoves—the fuel for which had to be lugged as well— and carried from kitchen to washtub. Commercial soap was not yet widely available outside of major cities. Many families made their own.

From mending to folding, laundry was backbreaking work. There’s a reason why washerwomen are portrayed as physically powerful in popular literature and images of the time.

Makes you appreciate modern laundry equipment doesn’t it?

*In part because I assumed I wrote a blog post about this back in 2015 when I was writing Heroines of Mercy Street, a book about Civil War nurses in which laundry played a surprisingly large part.

**My description draws on research in the United States. The details may have differed in Europe but the big picture would have remained the same.

***I paused here to do a little dive into the question of washboards, which seem to have appeared in the early nineteenth century and were greeted as a serious technological improvement

****Though I’m willing to bet that some harried women skipped a few rinses on occasion.

“Stagecoach Mary” Fields Carries the Mail

Fifty years before the Six Triple Eight Central Postal Directory Battalion  made postal history, a six-foot tall, powerfully built formerly enslaved woman named “Stagecoach Mary” Fields delivered the mail in rural Montana as a Star Route Carrier for the United States Post Office.*

When Mary was emancipated, she left West Virginia, where she had been enslaved, and worked her way up the Mississippi on the steam boats.  She eventually ended up ending up in Toledo, Ohio.**  She worked for a time at the Ursuline Convent of the Sacred Heart in Toledo, where she did the laundry,*** ran the kitchen, maintained the garden and grounds—and made friends with the convent’s Mother Superior, Mother Amadeus Dunne.*** *That friendship may have helped her keep her job: her gun-toting, hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, bad-tempered ways were not a good fit for the quiet of the convent

Mother Amadeus moved west to Montana, where she founded another convent. When she fell ill, Mary followed. She worked for a time at Mother Amadeus’s new convent,  St. Peter’s Mission, near Cascade Montana.. Mary’s rough manners and bad-temper ways got her in trouble with the bishop. The final straw came when she and a male employee of the mission got into a fight, in which they both pulled their guns. Neither fired, but the Bishop demanded that the nuns fire Mary. (Was the man she fought with also fired? My sources don’t say.)

Mary moved to Cascade, where she tried a number of ways to make a living. She took in laundry and opened several restaurants that failed—perhaps due to her habit of feeding people for free if they didn’t have the money to pay. Mostly she did odd jobs, including work for the Ursuline mission. (Evidently the nuns found ways to get around the Bishop’s orders.)

In 1895, now in her mid-sixties, Mary got a contract with the Post Office to be a Star Route Carrier, apparently with the help of the Ursuline nuns. She was the second woman to get such a contract since the Star Route service was established in 1845. Rural Montana was a wild place. Driving a stagecoach provided by the Ursulines, Mary delivered the mail in spite of bandits, wolves, and the weather. (A broader, more dangerous variant of “neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night.”****) In bad weather, when the coach couldn’t get through, she picked up the mail bags and walked. She carried both a rifle and a revolver and built a reputation of being fearless and ferocious.

She retired after delivering the mail for eight years and settled down in Cascade, where she became a beloved town character, who drank in the town saloons and ate in the towns restaurants for free. She celebrated two birthdays a year because she didn’t know when she was born, wore men’s trousers under her skirts, and supported the local baseball team with flowers from her garden and a punch in the face for anyone who bad-mouthed the team.

She died on December 5, 1914. The town raised money to have her buried in a cemetery on the road that linked Cascade to the Ursuline mission, a route she had driven frequently with the mail. Her funeral was one of the largest the town had seen.

Montana-born actor Gary Cooper, who met Fields on a visit to Cascade when he was nine, summed up her life in an interview about Mary with Ebony magazine “Mary lived to become one of the freest souls ever to draw breath or a .38.”

*The purpose of the Star Route service was to reduce the cost of getting the mail from one remote rural post office to another. Previously, local stage coach companaies had carried the mail, often charging the government for the use of the horses, the wagon and a driver. Independent contractors, who provided their own transportation, which sometimes was no more than a horse or a canoe, bid for the four-year contracts to deliver the mail with “celerity, certainty, and security.”

**Which is not on the Mississippi.  Some details are missing in Mary’s story.

***Not a small job in the mid-nineteenth century.

****Some sources claim the friendship dated back to the days when Mary was enslaved in West Virginia, but this has not been substantiated.

****The first version of this was written by the Greek historian Herodotus, referring to the couriers of the ancient Persian empire: “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these courageous carriers from the swift completion of their appointed course.”

 

https://www.sendoso.com/resources/blo...

Hazel Ah Ying Lee: Chinese-American WASP

Hazel Ah  Ying Lee was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1912. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants—the second of eight children.

Lee was nineteen when she experienced her first flight, at the end of a friend’s flying lesson.  She was hooked. She immediately began to save up the money for flying lessons from her job as an elevator operator in a Portland department store.

A few years earlier, it might have been hard for her to find a flight school that would take a Chinese-American teenage girl as a student. But the Portland Chinese Benevolent Society had recently opened the Chinese Flying Club of Portland in response to the Japanese invasion of China. Benevolent associations across the country had opened similar schools in cities with large Chinese populations with the goal of training pilots for the Chinese military.

Lee earned her pilot’s license in 1932, one of the first Chinese-American women to do so. In October of that year, she left for China with a squadron of her fellow classmates. When she arrived, she found that she was not allowed to fly with the Chinese Air Force. (Why this would have surprised her is not clear.) The air force offered her an administrative job, but she chose instead to relocate to Guanzhou,* where she worked as a commercial pilot. (Could she have done this in the United States in the 1930s? I’m not sure, but my impression is no.) She lived through the devastating bombing of that city by the Japanese in 1937—part of the Canton Operation, which was designed to blockade China and isolate the British port of Hong Kong. She spent a year in Hong Kong as a refugee, then returned to the United States where she worked for an organization in New York that sent armaments to China.

The creation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program by the Army Air Force in 1942 gave Lee a chance to get back in the air. ** The purpose of the program was to train women to fly military airplanes.  Trained WASP (not WASPs) flew non-combat missions and acted as test pilots in the United States, thereby freeing up male pilots for deployment overseas. Lee immediately applied. Lee was the first of only two Chinese-American women accepted into the program.*** At 30, she was older than most of her fellow pilots and soon became a leader in her training class. She was playful as well as a good pilot. For instance, she would write her classmates names in Chinese characters in lipstick on the tails of planes their planes.

Women pilots put up with grief because of their gender, but Lee faced special challenges because she was obviously Asian. On one flight, she was forced to land in a field. The farmer ran out to the field to investigate, armed with a pitchfork. He assumed she was part of a Japanese invasion force. Hazel had to talk fast to convince him that she was Chinese, and more importantly, American, before he would allow her to call for assistance. Back that base, she reduced the entire chow line to tears of laughter with the story, but they all knew it could have ended badly.

After Hazel graduated from the training course in Sweetwater Texas, she was stationed at Romulus Army Air Base in Michigan, where she flew large transport aircraft as part of the 3rd Ferrying Group. In September, 1944, she was sent to Pursuit School, in Brownsville Texas, where she was trained to fly fighters like the P-51 Mustang and the P-63 Kingcobra.

In November, 1944, Lee picked up a P-63 Kingcobra from the Bell aircraft factory in Niagara Falls and flew it to Great Falls, Montana, which was a major staging area for planes being sent to the Soviet Union. (Male pilots flew the planes from Montana to Alaska, where Soviet pilots waited to fly them on the final leg to Russia.)

On November 23, Lee was making an approach to land. Another group of P-63s was arriving in at the same time.  The radio on one of the planes in that group had failed several days before.  The pilot, Jeff Russell, had relied on the other fliers in his group to inform the control tower  at each stop that he did not have a radio.

As Lee began her approach to the runway, Russell was above her. Unfortunately, the personnel in the control tower lost track of who didn’t have a radio. When someone in the tower realized they were too close and yelled “pull up,” Lee heard the order instead of Russell. Responding to the order, she ran into Russell’s plane. Both planes crashed at the end of the runway and burst into flames. Both pilots were rescued from the planes, but Lee was too badly burned to survive. She died on November 25, 1944—the last WASP to die in the line of duty.

Because the WASP were officially civilian pilots, even though they flew under military command, the military did not pay for her funeral expenses, as they did for her mail counterparts.**** Lee’s family had to pay for the costs of transporting her home and burying her. When they tried to buy plots for Hazel and her brother, a soldier who had died in France three days after Hazel, the family was told that they could not be buried in the cemetery because they were Asia. The Lees fought back, and won.

The WASP program was disbanded on December 22. In 1977, Congress retroactively granted military status to the women who served in it.

 

*You may know it as Canton.

**The fact that the P is WASP is plural means that describing the women who served as WASPs is incorrect. But working around it is a pain.

***The other Chinese-American WASP was Margaret Gee, who went on to work as a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

****Women in the WASP program also received less pay than their male counterparts, had to pay for their own room and board, and bought their own uniforms.

 

Wanda Gág, Printmaker with a”Grimm” Aesthetic

Until a few weeks ago, the name Wanda Gág meant nothing to me, but it turns  I was very familiar with her most famous work.

I discovered Gág while I was happily reading a book about professional women artists in the first half of the twentieth century who had all been students of a single male teacher. (Just because.) One of his students was a printmaker named Wanda Gág. I found her work, as portrayed in the book, very appealing and slightly familiar.

Grandma’s Kitchen. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

And then I hit a surprise.  The author mentioned in passing that Gág was the author and illustrator of an iconic children’s book, Millions of Cats. Published in 1928, it is considered the first modern picture book and is the oldest picture book still in print. And I had read it many times as a child.

Rabbit hole time!

Wanda Hazel Gag* was born in 1893 in New Ulm, Minnesota. Her parents and grandparents had emigrated from the Bohemia region of Czechoslovakia. She grew up in a German-speaking, art-centric household, the eldest of eleven children.

Wanda later wrote that her childhood was steeped “in the serene belief that drawing and painting, like eating and sleeping, belonged to the universal order of things.” Her father was a painter who supported his large familydecorating houses and churches. On Sundays he painted for himself, and he encouraged Wanda to draw, too. Her father, who was self-taught, dreamed that she would get formal art training.  By the time she was twelve, she knew she wanted to become an artist.

Her father died of tuberculosis in 1908, when Wanda was fifteen. The family was impoverished. Their savings had been eaten up by her father’s illness. Her mother took in washing to earn money, but soon collapsed from exhaustion. Neighbors urged Wanda to quit school and get a job to support her family. Instead she found ways to use her art to support her family and to ensure that she and all of her siblings finished school. For three years, she took care of her family. She was finally able to give up her role as the family’s sole provider, when two of her sisters became school teachers and were able to help.

In 1913, at the age of twenty, she won a scholarship to attend the Minneapolis School of Art. Four years later, she won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York–which was a really big deal.** In New York, she cut her hair in a stylish bob, added the accent to her name, and flung herself into the art world. In addition to attending classes, she spent a lot of time visiting New York’s art museums, where she marveled at Old Masters that she had previously seen only in books, and small galleries, where she was inspired by modern artists from Europe. (Van Gogh and Cezanne were particular favorites.)

Wanda Gág preparing a lithography stone, ca 1930

The scholarship was a really big deal, but it wasn’t enough to live on. She was forced to spend much of her time on commercial work, including fashion illustrations*** and painting lampshades, plus occasional stints as a model. At the same time, she was developing a distinctive style of drawing and lithographic print making. She focused on interior spaces, rural landscapes, and architectural structures, using strong tonal contrasts and twisting contours. The result was modernist in style, with fairy tale overtones. In 1925, she began to enjoy success in the art world with the first of several solo exhibitions. (Her work sold out.)

Wanda finally found financial security in the world of children’s illustrated books. In addition to writing and illustrating her own books—of which Millions of Cats remains the best known—she also illustrated books written by others. In the 1930s, she returned to the stories she had read in her childhood, translating and illustrating the German fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers. She never strayed from the “grim” in those tales, or her own. Alice Gregory describes her children’s books as “fairy-tale familiar.” Certainly that is true of Millions of Cats, which I re-read a few days ago. I had remembered the premise, but not the plot. The word “macabre” came to mind. Also weird. And yet visually enchanting. No wonder I loved it as a child.

 

*She added the accent mark later. I am sure she had her reasons.  I just have no idea what they were.

**The Art Students League was founded by a group of students who wanted more varied and flexible art instruction than that offered at the venerable (i.e. stuffy) National Academy of Design. One of the ways in which the Art Students League was more flexible was the number of women it accepted as students. The school became a center of American modernism.  Thomas Eakins, of the Ash Can School, was one of the first board members. Some of the school’s most well known students included Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and Louise Nevelson.

***She preferred working on “stylish stouts” rather than the idealized waif-like flappers, whom she described as “fashionable ghostlings.”

 

 

 

Strangers in the Land

I ended Asian-American Heritage Month with a Big Fat History Book: Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.

Michael Luo started thinking about writing such a history in the fall of 2016. He and his family were standing in front of a restaurant in Manhattan when a woman screamed “Go back to China” at them— twice. The only response Luo had was “I was born in this country!” It was a few weeks before Donald Trump was elected on a platform that rested in part on the nativist ideology that has been a consistent and ugly undercurrent in American politics.   Strangers in the Land tells the story of the long history of anti-Asian racism which is the background for that encounter and the anti-Asian violence that swept the country during the COVID pandemic. Luo begins with the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the California gold rush of 1848 end ends with his own family’s immigration to the United States thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Luo’s prose is clear, even elegant. His accounts of historical events are vivid, and rooted in the broader context of the time. He makes historical links between the Chinese experience in American and the Civil War, the end of slavery, the larger question of nativism, the labor movement, China’s changing role in international politics, and the Cold War. At the same time, he has a good eye for the telling detail.

But despite Luo’s mastery of his craft, Strangers in the Land was a difficult book to read. His accounts of attacks on Chinese miners and railroad workers by their white counterparts, of violence against Chinese residents in small towns throughout the Western and Pacific regions of the United States, and the destruction of urban Chinatowns by enraged mobs were both new to me and all too familiar. I was reminded over and over of attacks on Black Americans:   the Reconstruction, the Red Summer of 1919,  the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. The repeated destruction of Chinese owned businesses made me think of the destruction of the Black Wall Street in the Tulsa race riots in 1921. Anti-immigrant rhetoric by politicians and rabble-rousers in the past could have come from a present day political rally.

It left me ashamed. And determined to learn more. It’s the reason I am trying to read my way through the heritage months this year. It is important to grapple with the tension between acknowledging our country’s mistakes and appreciating the things we have done well—a condition that social psychologist Dolly Chugh describes as being a “gritty patriot.”  I’ve said it before.  I’ll doubtless say it again.  History can be hard.

They Called Us Enemy

And now, I return to the Japanese internment camps in World War II,* this time in the form of George Takei’s graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, written in collaboration with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker.**

Jumping back and forth in time,*** They Called Us Enemy tells the story of the camps from the inside, both through Takei’s eyes as a young boy and then through his growing understanding of what he experienced as a result of conversations he had as a teenager with his father about their times in the camps. As the book’s narrator, Takei explores the disconnect between his childhood memories of happy moments and humor as well as confusion and trauma and his later understanding of the events he lived through. He contrasts his experience as a child with that of his father—both as he saw it at the time and later. (In one particularly powerful scene, the teenaged Takei accuses his father, and Japanese Americans as a whole, for cowardice in not protesting their treatment. That scene is immediately followed by his later shame for his outburst.) Takei’s personal experiences are clearly set against the historical context of the internments—some of which I was not familiar with.****

The art is a powerful element of the story. Grey-scale drawings evoke the details of the camp.  Children are drawn with less detail than the adults and setting around them, in a style reminiscent of Peanuts characters or the earlier Campbell Soup kids of Grace Drayton, evoking the childhood innocence that is a critical part of the book. Small details add to the whole, such as the subtle and brilliant use of guard towers and barbed wire in the title.  (Click on the image in your browser to see this detail clearly.)

They Called Us Enemy ends with a montage of “clips” of Takei’s later activism. This section looks at the racism and fear that led to the camps in comparison to modern issues, specifically action against Muslim Americans taken during the first Trump administration and the detention of Mexican Americans in camps along the U.S. border. (The book was published in 2019.)

*Despite my claims that the beginning of the month that I wasn’t going to read more about the internment camps.

**And yes, I know I also rejected the idea of reading celebrity memoirs by Asian-Americans, but Takei spends only a few pages on his role as Lieutenant Sulu of the Starship Enterprise. This is not a book about Takei’s rise to fame in the face of adversity.

***FYI, some reviewers complained about this when the book came out. Personally, I did not find it distracting.

****Or perhaps I had seen those elements before, but needed to read another book about the subject to make me remember them.

****

They Called Us Enemy has been compared to two other powerful graphic historical works: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize- winning Maus, which draws on his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, and Rep. John Lewis’s three volume graphic memoir, March, which tells the story of Lewis’s life in the civil rights movement.  Both are worth your time.

If you are interested in a slightly more hopeful graphic work about the internment camps, I strongly recommend the graphic novel Love in the Library by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, which is based on the story of her grandparents who met in an internment camp in Idaho. It is a story of joy, love, and resilience, though Tokuda-Hall in no way minimizes the racism that placed her grandparents in the camps, or the trauma related to it.