David Michael Newstead's Blog, page 103
March 9, 2017
March 8, 2017
Patrick Stewart as Vladimir Lenin
By David Michael Newstead.
Today marks the centennial of the February Revolution of 1917, which ended the rule of Czar Nicholas II. Here’s a clip of Vladimir Lenin learning of the downfall of the Czar as portrayed by actor Patrick Stewart.
March 4, 2017
Rosie the Riveter: A History
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By David Michael Newstead.
During the Second World War, the War Advertising Council wanted to mobilize American women and get them into the workplace. And while this ultimately contributed to social progress in the United States, the ad campaign was really motivated by necessity more than feelings of equality. At the time, millions of men were leaving to join the military and the jobs they once occupied had to be filled for the country to function and for America to meet the industrial demands of a major war. This meant groups that were normally excluded from and discriminated against in the workforce were now of vital importance. In 1941, for example, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination throughout the nation’s defense industries at a time when segregation was the norm in many parts of the U.S. And if racial bias was understood to be secondary to the war effort, it quickly became clear that entrenched sexism was an obstacle to victory as well. Because of that, the War Advertising Council launched the Women in War Jobs campaign in 1942 and the persona of Rosie the Riveter was born.
When I first sat down to do research this, I discovered that there was no specific woman who was Rosie the Riveter. Instead, there were actually several women who were either the inspiration for or directly associated with the Rosie the Riveter campaign. Many of them have passed away, but below I attempt to provide an overview of their contributions to this unique chapter in history.
The earliest inspiration for Rosie the Riveter was Veronica Foster who was part of a 1941 Canadian campaign for Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl. Veronica worked at the John Inglis Plant where she helped manufacture machine guns and this idea would serve as a precursor to the more famous Rosie.
The American campaign was first popularized by a hit song in 1942 about a New York resident named Rosalind Walter, a riveter at the Corsair Plant where they built the classic Vought F4U Corsair fighter aircraft. Rosalind worked the night shift and went on to inspire Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb to write the song Rosie the Riveter that year. Later, this song would be performed by various popular musicians of the time such as James Kern Kay Kyser as well as the Vagabond Boys. I include the lyrics below and personally I thought the version of it on YouTube was pretty catchy. Just to clarify, the Brrr throughout the song is a sound effect, mimicking what riveting sounds like.
All the day long whether rain or shine
She’s a part of the assembly line
She’s making history working for victory,
Rosie Brrr the riveter.
Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage
Sitting up there on the fuselage
That little frail can do
More than a male can do,
Rosie Brrr the riveter
Rosie’s got a boyfriend Charlie,
Charlie, he’s a marine
Rosie, is protecting Charlie
Working overtime on the riveting machine.
When they gave her a production “E”
She was a proud as a girl could be,
There’s something true about
Red, white and blue about
Rosie, Brrr the riveter.
Then in 1942 and 1943, two American artists would produce the images that are the most familiar depictions of Rosie the Riveter to modern audiences. The key difference being that one of these pieces was immediately famous, while the other was not widely circulated at the time and only became well-known decades later.
The first was a drawing of Mary Doyle Keefe who lived in Vermont and was the original model for Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover of Rosie, itself based on Michelangelo’s Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel. Rockwell, who also lived in Vermont, was known for using random people as models for his iconic illustrations and like many other drawings, this is how his Rosie the Riveter came about. Mary posed for Rockwell on two occasions and was paid $10.
The second drawing was of Geraldine Hoff Doyle. This is the now famous We Can Do It poster created by J. Howard Miller, an artist contracted by the Westinghouse Electric Company in Michigan. Geraldine worked as a metal presser there and a photograph of her was used by the company to create an in-house poster to show its employees. At the time, very few copies of this were printed and it was only displayed for about two weeks. Almost no one saw this poster during the Second World War and it was forgotten about for years. But when it was rediscovered in the 1980s, We Can Do It became widely displayed in popular culture and in feminist marches originally due to copyright reasons. Those being, Norman Rockwell’s version is copyrighted and the We Can Do It version is not. Incidentally, this is the same reason that the ubiquitous Che Guevara image is mass produced on t-shirts and posters (It isn’t copyrighted). Because of that, the We Can Do It poster entered into our cultural consciousness almost on accident. Even Geraldine Hoff Doyle herself was completely unaware of her role in the poster’s creation until the early 1980s.
Other incarnations for Rosie the Riveter include Rosie Bonavitas of New York who was recognized in a commendation letter from President Roosevelt in 1943. She had set a productivity record as a riveter for a single six-hour shift, while helping to manufacture a Grumman TBF Avenger Torpedo Bomber. Then in 1944, Rose Will Monroe was working at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Michigan when she was recruited to play the part of Rosie the Riveter in several short films that encouraged people to buy war bonds.
These were the women who can most readily be called Rosie the Riveter. But in a sense, Rosie isn’t and never was just one person. In addition to those I’ve mentioned, there were twenty million other women, toiling away in factories and planting the seeds for social change. My grandmother was one of them. Your grandmother might have been one too. Their names and stories may have varied. And they might not have always fit into the narrative of a national advertising campaign, but their place in history is assured.
March 1, 2017
Top Five Politicians with Facial Hair 2017
By David Michael Newstead.
Politicians with facial hair are few and far between, especially in Western democracies. While it’s normally associated with left-wing revolutionaries, here’s a look at the top five politicians with facial hair in 2017 from around the world and across the political spectrum.
5. Jeremy Corbyn – Head of the British Labor Party, Corbyn is a committed leftist and longtime member of Parliament who’s party leadership has often been challenged as Labor struggles to appeal to voters.
4. Beppe Grillo – Grillo is an Italian comedian and activist who founded the anti-establishment Five Star Movement in 2009. Since then, the Five Star Movement has had notable success, winning mayoral elections in Rome and Turin as well as helping to defeat Italy’s 2016 constitutional referendum.
3. Steve Bannon – A top advisor in the Trump administration, Bannon is formerly the head of Breitbart News. Synonymous with the Alt-Right movement, Bannon expounds a far-right and economic nationalist vision for the United States.
2. Jagmeet Singh – An up-and-coming politician in Canada’s New Democratic Party, Singh is popular on social media and a prominent member of the Sikh faith who was recently featured in GQ magazine for being so well-dressed. Read Here.
1. Tom Perez – Until recently Perez was Secretary of Labor in the Obama administration. Now the newly elected Chair of the Democratic National Committee, Perez is tasked with rebuilding the Democratic Party after their losses in 2016. It’s worth noting that his main opponent for DNC Chair was Representative Keith Ellison who also has facial hair, a rarity in American politics.
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February 28, 2017
February 25, 2017
February 24, 2017
From the NYT: The Jobs Americans Do
By Binyamin Appelbaum.
Popular ideas about the working class are woefully out of date. Here are nine people who tell a truer story of what the American work force does today — and will do tomorrow.
Forget the images of men in hard hats standing before factory gates, of men with coal-blackened faces, of men perched high above New York City on steel beams. The emerging face of the American working class is a Hispanic woman who has never set foot on a factory floor. That’s not the kind of work much of the working class does anymore. Instead of making things, they are more often paid to serve people: to care for someone else’s children or someone else’s parents; to clean another family’s home.
The decline of the old working class has meant both an economic triumph for the nation and a personal tribulation for many of the workers. Technological progress has made American farms and factories more productive than ever, creating great wealth and cutting the cost of food and most other products. But the work no longer requires large numbers of workers. In 1900, factories and farms employed 60 percent of the work force. By 1950, a half-century later, those two sectors employed 36 percent. In 2014, they employed less than 10 percent.
For more than a century, since the trend was first documented, people have been prophesying a dire future in which the working class would no longer work. In 1964, a group of prominent liberals wrote President Johnson to warn of a “cybernation revolution” inexorably creating “a permanent impoverished and jobless class established in the midst of potential abundance.”
Machines have taken the jobs of millions of Americans, and there is every indication that the trend will continue. In October, Budweiser successfully tested a self-driving truck by delivering beer more than 120 miles to a warehouse in Colorado. In December, Amazon opened a small convenience store near its Seattle headquarters that has no cashiers. Customers — for now, Amazon employees only — are billed automatically as they leave the store. In January, Bank of America opened branches in Denver and Minneapolis that are staffed by a lone employee, A.T.M.s and video terminals. And Americans are making a growing share of purchases online: about 8.4 percent of retail sales in 2016. These changes are driven by consumer preferences, not just by corporate cost-cutting imperatives. People like shopping in bed in the middle of the night. People like that computers make fewer mistakes. And people grow accustomed to computers. A few years ago, I watched a woman walk up to a bank teller and ask where she could find an A.T.M. The teller asked if she could help. No, the woman said, she just needed to withdraw some money.
But the forecasters were wrong in the most important respect. Workers continue to find work, but now the jobs are in service. Taking care of aging baby boomers, in particular, has become by far the largest driver of job growth in the American economy. Among the occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects to grow most rapidly over the next decade: physical-therapy assistants, home health aides, occupational-therapy assistants, nurse practitioners, physical therapists, occupational-therapy aides, physician assistants. … You get the idea. Nine of the 12 fastest-growing fields are different ways of saying “nurse.”
February 20, 2017
American History X Revisited
By David Michael Newstead.
American history tends to get whitewashed and Disneyfied overtime until the past seems like something it never really was. Of course, there are lots of good moments in American history and I don’t mean to diminish that. Then again, anything tends to look good when you leave out all the bad parts.
I say all that to say that race and racism are central to American history and any attempt to paper over that fact is at best a well-intentioned fantasy. In bookstores, for instance, I used to have this habit of opening up American history books and seeing if they made any real mention of Native Americans. More than a few do not. Similarly, African Americans and others tend to fall by the wayside in this grandiose national narrative we’ve constructed overtime. It’s not incorrect per se, it’s just an incomplete picture of what happened. And to quote founding father Benjamin Franklin, half a truth is often a great lie.
Lately, I keep thinking about the movie American History X. I like movies a lot, I’ll just say that now. But this isn’t one you enjoy exactly. It’s thought provoking more than anything else and sad as you watch one tragic event or bad decision leading to more of the same and you’re left to wonder if that cycle ever really ends. The film is almost twenty years old now and it follows a misguided young man as he moves into and later out of the white supremacist movement.
It had been awhile since I’d actually sat down to watch it. American History X is from the late 1990s after all. The film stars the normally affable Edward Norton who is transformed into a muscle bound Neo-Nazi skinhead covered in tattoos and swastikas. But we also get to see Norton’s character before he shaved his head and became a Nazi and the unfortunate path that took him there. Given the subject matter, it can be difficult to watch. There’s graphic violence and racism. But everything people are grappling with in 2017 is right there: xenophobia and immigration, anti-semitism and arguments about police violence, angry white people and hate proliferating the internet.
As an audience though, we’re not just bombarded with hate for the sake of it. You watch how the main character and his brother are pulled in. And you get to see them realize everything that’s wrong with it, how their anger and grief were manipulated. How that hate solved nothing. Is that some kind of redemption? I don’t know. The movie ends with a quote from Abraham Lincoln and so that’s what I’ll leave you with: We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
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February 19, 2017
Presidents’ Day
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