The Red Ball Express – The unknown link in winning World War Two?

The Red Ball Express was a supply line that was set up to ensure that the Allied troops who invaded France in 1944 were well supplied. It wasn’t just any supply line though; it was vital to the Allies’ advance against Nazi Germany in the latter months of 1944… Here, Greg Bailey tells this World War Two story.

A Red Ball Express convoy is waved on near Alenon, France. September 1944.

Like the Pony Express, whose legend has lasted far longer than its short history, the Red Ball Express, the vital supply line across France supporting the Allies’ war-effort against Germany, has earned a well-deserved heroic reputation. The around-the-clock stream of truck convoys was as important as any battle fought in World War II.

The Red Ball Express was created on the battlefield to solve an unforeseen but welcome development. The planners of D-Day anticipated there would be enough supplies, primarily gasoline, to support the advancing combat units while engineers completed a gas supply line from the Normandy landing area to the rear of the combat area. For a time, as the Allies slowly fought their way through difficult hedgerow country, the supplies piled up. But after Bradley’s division broke through the German lines, General George Patton saw an opening and aggressively took it. He charged across France and the army soon began to run out of supplies. By mid August Patton had to slow down his advance for lack of fuel. The gasoline and other supplies his men needed were piled up far from the front. "My men can eat their belts” Patton said, "but my tanks gotta have gas."  The solution was a special unit running on designated roads to move the supplies. Borrowing the name from the railroads, the Red Ball Express was born.

The Express at work

The Red Ball Express only ran from the end of August to the middle of November 1944. Men and trucks from scattered units were hurriedly brought together.  During those few months the convoys running on the designated roads marked by red ball signs, hauled more than 400,000 tons of materials from the Normandy beaches to the ever changing front lines of the Allied campaign. The loads included ammunition, medical supplies and food but above all gasoline in five gallon jerricans that were needed to keep the fuel hungry tanks and other vehicles advancing toward the enemy. Patton called the operations of the Red Ball Express “our most important weapon.”

Patton’s most important weapon was a combination of one of the best examples of American ingenuity and one of the most shameful episodes of American history.  Although the army used several models of truck during the operations, the mainstay was the two and a half tom Jimmie. The Jimmie had a five-ton cargo capacity.  The no frills version of the civilian truck, the Jimmie, was designed to be easily and quickly assembled. With simple, interchangeable parts, during the Red Ball Express’ operations, mechanics were able to swap out engines and transmissions by the side of the road often under enemy fire. Tires were a problem, often flattened on the road by discarded C-ration cans.  Under these tough conditions, each Jimmie had a life expectancy of less than a year.

Valiance in the face of Discrimination

What really pushed the operation was the men driving and repairing the trucks Three quarters of the Red Ball Express personnel were African Americans serving in all black units with white officers over them, barred from serving in combat under the segregation laws of the time. The white troops lived in separate quarters and were kept away from their comrades during and after duty.  British Major General H. Essame said: "few who saw them will ever forget the enthusiasm of the Negro drivers, hell-bent whatever the risk, to get General Patton his supplies."

Despite the sting of discrimination the men charged with the vital supply mission went above and beyond. On an average day 83 transportation units operated almost 900 trucks on the network of roads closed to all other military or civilian traffic.  On paper the speed limit for the five truck convoys was 25 mph with each truck spaced out in 60 feet intervals. In reality drivers disabled the governors on the truck engines to exceed the posted speed limits and the trucks were sometimes overloaded above their five-ton capacity.

During the first days of the Express, as the front lines nearly ran out of supplies, drivers set out with maps torn out of the pages of the Stars and Stripes newspaper.  And while the route was a solid line on a map, in reality the roads were narrow and twisting, pock marked with battle damage, running through fields of dead livestock and hidden snipers. The trucks ran at night with obscured headlights soon called cats’ eyes. Along the roads drivers passed the remains of trucks wrecked in accidents or destroyed by enemy fire.

Indeed, although the Red Ball Express was officially a non-combat unit, drivers were drawn into battles. Some of the trucks were fitted with 50 caliber machine guns and all of the personnel carried rifles with them. In these battles, black drivers left their trucks and fought alongside white soldiers and then returned to their second class status behind the wheels of their trucks marked with bullet holes. Against these hazards the Red Ball Express pushed on, with drivers completing the average 600-mile round-trip with little or no rest.

The murkier side

There was a dark side to the operation. In his 2000 book The Road to Victory author David Colley tells how bottles of premium French wine were traded for far more valuable cans of gasoline. Prostitutes along the way accepted jerricans as payment.  A few fully loaded trucks disappeared into the Paris black market under the unchallenged story that the trucks were destroyed by enemy fire.

By November other supply lines including pipelines and secured ports and rail lines had taken over the task of the Express. The Red Ball Express trucks were using a great amount of fuel to deliver gas to the increasingly distant destinations. The Red Ball Express had completed its mission. Other operations ran on other routes but the Red Ball Express image lived on it part because of the red circles on the transportation units insignia.

Tributes

After the war the Red Ball Express was celebrated in the Broadway musical Call Me Mister. “Steam was hissing from the hoods when they showed up with the goods. But they turned around and went back for more.”  A wildly inaccurate film on the Red Ball Express was released in 1952 staring actor Jeff Chandelier leading mixed white and black crews on trucks through burring villages to delivery gas to the stranded tank crews. An equally inaccurate sitcom on the Express ran for a short time on CBS in the 1970s.

But perhaps the most sincere tribute was expressed by the simple words of Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower. After calling the Red Ball Express the “lifeline between combat and supply”, Eisenhower said:

To it falls the tremendous task of getting vital supplies from ports and depots to the combat troops, when and where such supplies are needed, material without which the armies might fail. To you drivers and mechanics and your officers, who keep the ‘Red Ball’ vehicles constantly moving, I wish to express my deep appreciation. You are doing an excellent job.

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Greg Bailey is a history writer from St. Louis. His book The Voyage of the F.H. Moore and Other 19th Century Whaling Accounts was published last year.

Wisdom Higher Than a Fool Can Reach: The Amazing Life of Poetess Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was an amazing and intriguing woman who became a famous and noteworthy poetess in the latter eighteenth century. And what is most intriguing is that in an age of slavery and discrimination she was black. Here, Christopher Benedict tells her story…

The frontispiece to Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects.

On Being Brought from Africa to America

“Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too,

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

‘Their colour is a diabolical die.’

Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain,

May be refin’d and join th’ angelic train”

This eight line poem was written in 1768 by a young woman of fourteen named Phillis Wheatley. That it, and some 145 others she composed, would alternately subject her to the chaotic complexities of renown and acclaim, the attention of British nobility and America’s Founding Fathers, a tribunal before Boston’s most esteemed magistrates, ministers, and men of letters, not to mention the dismissive scorn of later, more enlightened and less subordinate generations can be best understood by taking the very nature of her blurred identity into consideration.

Her forename was gleaned from Timothy Finch’s schooner the Phillis, which deposited the seven year-old “slender, frail female child” on the Boston wharf at Beach Street on July 11, 1761 after plundering Guinea’s Isles de Los, Sierra Leone, and Senegal (where she is believed to have lived) of its inhabitants for use as human merchandise in America’s slave trade. The assignation of Phillis’ last name would result from her having been purchased, sickly and nearly naked but for a bit of soiled carpet, by Susanna Wheatley “for a trifle” (fewer than £10) to serve as housemaid.

The home, owned by affluent tailor and merchant John Wheatley, was located near Massachusetts’ original State House and within easy earshot, in years soon to come, of the Stamp Act riots and later the Boston Massacre, claiming the life of the Revolution’s first known black martyr Crispus Attucks, which Phillis would document in verse with On the Affray in King Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March, 1770.

Phillis achieved literacy through a combination of Susanna’s encouragement, the tutelage of the Wheatley’s teenaged children Nathaniel and Mary, and Phillis’ own natural desire for extracting sustenance from their English, Latin, Greek, and biblical lessons with an insatiable hunger for knowledge.

Such an impression did Phillis make on John Wheatley that he attested to her phenomenal scholarly advancement, noting that, “she, in sixteen months’ time from her arrival, attained the English language, to which she was an utter stranger before” and “as to her writing, her own curiosity led to it.”   

In 1765, she had already committed to paper her first poem, To the University of Cambridge in New England, and had another, On Messrs Hussey and Coffin, submitted by Susanna to the Newport Mercury, published only two years later, the first by a black woman in America.

Susanna, who by this time had excused Phillis from her previously appointed chores to perfect her chosen craft, would facilitate the collection of her early works into a proposed book containing 28 titles through advertisements that ran through the February to April 1772 editions of the Boston Censor, a Tory newspaper. Owing to the popular misapprehension that a simple slave girl could have been in no way responsible for these supposedly original creations, few offers for the requested 300 subscriptions to fund the project came forth.

On Virtue

“I cease to wonder, and no more attempt

Thine height t’ explore, or fathom thy profound

But, O my soul, sink not into despair,

Virtue is near thee, and with gentle hand

Would now embrace thee, hovers o’er thine head”

It is impossible to imagine the emotional state of Phillis, not yet twenty years old, only a little more than half of which had been spent as a kidnapped stranger in a strange land and even fewer familiar with its linguistic peculiarities, being asked to appear before a committee of eighteen of the colony’s most prestigious citizens to verify the authenticity of her writings and, in essence, become a spokesperson (quite literally) of her entire race.

In October 1772, at the urging of John Wheatley, Phillis was interrogated at length (most likely at Boston’s Town Hall) by an assemblage which included among its celebrated quilled pens and powdered wigs, those of Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Oliver, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Joseph Green, and the Reverends Charles Chauncy, Samuel Cooper, and Samuel Mather (son of Cotton Mather, who played a fringe role in the 1692 Salem Witch Trials).

Though there is no surviving transcript with which to flesh out the details of how they arrived at their conclusion, the matter was resolved to the satisfaction of all present, to the degree that when Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was finally published the following year, Phillis’ book was printed with the following testimonial, bearing the signatures of all eighteen of her questioners:

We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town. She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.

With skepticism rampant throughout the colonies, Susanna had gotten a copy of the manuscript in the hands of London publisher Archibald Bell by employing as a courier the captain of her husband John’s England-bound commercial trade ship. Phillis had already established a readership across the Atlantic thanks to the success of the widespread 1770 publication of On the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, her requiem for the recently deceased evangelical preacher, beloved both in the United Kingdom and its colonies. She would soon be accepted and treated as a celebrity, rubbing shoulders with royalty, having accolades and gifts heaped upon her by icons even in their own time and whose books today line our shelves and whose portraits adorn our currency. 

An Hymn to the Evening

“Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing,

Exhales the incense of the blooming spring.

Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes,

And through the air, their mingled music floats.”

So that she could personally supervise the publication of her book, Susanna sent Phillis, chaperoned by the Wheatley’s son Nathaniel, to London whereupon she was squired about town to see the sights, including a tour of the Tower of London with Granville Sharp, one of the first English abolitionists.

She was received by the Earl of Dartmouth, who gave her the five guineas necessary to purchase the collected works of Alexander Pope, and was presented with a folio edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost by one-day Lord Mayor Brook Watson.

Even Benjamin Franklin, who was in London grieving the case for peaceful independence on behalf of the American colonies before the classes of the British citizenry, from the highest to most humble, deviated from his schedule of oratory and article writing to spend time with Phillis. She thought highly enough of him that she intended to dedicate her next book to the bespectacled diplomat. 

A momentous meeting with King George III, for whom she had written To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty in 1766 following his repeal of the Stamp Act, unfortunately did not occur as Susanna Wheatley’s health suffered a sudden decline, necessitating the immediate return of Phillis and Nathaniel. Susanna improved physically (for the time being) and, though Phillis would continue to live with them, she and John emancipated her shortly after her abrupt homecoming. A shipment of her books arrived at the New Haven customs office from London which she solicited by subscription, even imploring local publishers not to use them as a template from which to print and distribute copies of their own and, thus, undercutting her independent endeavor.

As heady as 1773 was for Phillis, the following year would prove just as sobering, bringing as it did the British occupation of Boston, the death of Susanna, and the resulting grief-stricken flight of John to points unknown. Phillis left for a time as well, living with the Wheatley’s daughter Mary and her husband in Providence until just before the Redcoats had been driven out of Boston.

A handwritten letter was sent by Phillis in October 1775 to Continental Army headquarters in Cambridge, MA addressed to the subject of her poem His Excellency General Washington, a copy of which was enclosed, “though I am not insensible of its inaccuracies”.

Four months later arrived a personal reply wherein George Washington apologized for “the seeming but not real neglect” of his delayed response while self-deprecatingly worrying over “however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric”. His effusive praise is augmented by an invitation for Phillis to call upon him, adding that “I shall be so happy to see a person so favored by the Muses”.

She did, weeks later, journey to from Boston to Cambridge where the General and his officers lavished their attentions upon her and Washington pledged to reprint her poem, a promise he made good on when it appeared in the March 1776 Virginia Gazette. Thomas Paine followed suit, publishing her ode to General Washington in the April edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette. 

An Hymn to the Morning

“Ye shady groves, your verdant gloom display

To shield your poet from the burning day,

Calliope awake the sacred lyre,

While thy sisters fan the pleasing fire.”

Voltaire lent his endorsement to Phillis Wheatley’s work and she was sent a package from John Paul Jones, just prior to his embarking for Paris aboard the warship Ranger, containing praise of her writing along with hand selected copies of his own. 

Francois, the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, whose request for statistical information on the American colonies inspired Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, had read Phillis’ verses, “in which there is imagination, poetry, and zeal”.

Jefferson, a slaveholding Francophile who would later be lionized by no less than Frederick Douglass, bristled at this praise being accorded the talents of an indentured servant (a black one, anyway-and heaven forbid, a woman - as he pointedly excused from the conversation former European slaves and prisoners Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus) who could never qualify as the white man’s cerebral equal.

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry...Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Whatley (his spelling), but it could not produce a poet.

She is thereby reduced to a functional automaton capable of reading and, perhaps, comprehending Milton and Pope, the Athenians and Romans, but, creatively, of no better than their soulless mimicry.

Blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances,” supposed Jefferson’s vile but not unoriginal claim, “are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

It is noteworthy, illustrates Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard professor and author of The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, that “Wheatley’s freedom enslaved her to a life of hardship.” Fame brought no fortune to Phillis, who married John Peters, a free black man whom Gates describes as a “small-time grocer and sometime lawyer”, in 1778. Their years together were ones of financial and personal strife compounded by the deaths of two infants and the failures of Peters’ business ventures, landing him in debtor’s prison and stranding Phillis at home with another unwell child.

Although a handful of New England newspapers did publish some of her last poems, she was unable to gather subscriptions sufficient to cover the printing costs of her second book and, to add to her humiliation, was forced to take work as a scullery maid.

Phillis Wheatley, only thirty years old, died on December 5, 1784 and was followed a little over three hours later by her infant son. Her own widowed husband was the first to soil her literary legacy by selling the only copy of her manuscript, which to this day has never been found.

Her reputation was called severely into question by black radicals during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, when Wheatley was denigrated as “an early Boston Aunt Jemima”, “a colonial handkerchief head”, and reflective of “the nigger component of the Black Experience”.

The spark of this controversy ignited a contemporary reevaluation of her life, beliefs, and writings. Although her prestige is still open to debate and her physical remains are in an unmarked grave somewhere in Boston, Phillis Wheatley was selected in 1993 for inclusion in the Boston Women’s Memorial on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall along with Abigail Adams and Lucy Stone, whose bronze sculptures thoughtfully consider one another from a triangular formation.

“Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind,

At morn’ to wake more heav’nly refin’d,

So shall the labors of the day begin

More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin.”

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Sources

• The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Henry Louis Gates (Basic Civitas Books, 2003)
• Negro Poetry and Drama by Sterling Brown (Westphalia Press,1937)
• A Shining Thread of Hope by Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson (Random House, 2009).
• Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, Volume 1, edited by Yolanda Williams Page (Greenwood, 2007)
• Benjamin Franklin Holds Up a Looking Glass to the British Empire (Schiller Institute, September 2012)
• http://www.cityofboston.gov

Spanish Civil War - History of a Battle for Europe’s Soul – Spain’s Great War (Required History)

So, you think that World War 2 began in 1939?

Then you’re evidently not familiar with the Spanish Civil War.

The war was Spain’s Great War. The country suffered death, destruction, and repression on an unprecedented scale. There were large-scale military battles that left tens of thousands dead. The world witnessed some of the largest air battles that it had ever seen. People from all parts of society, from labor unionists to priests, were heartlessly murdered. Extremists and radical groups saw an exponential rise in their size and influence.

But, it was not just Spain that experienced its Civil War. The Spanish Civil War was also Europe’s and the world’s war. There was significant international involvement and interest in the war from the start, and it was a microcosm of the far greater war that was to follow it. It involved battles between democracy and dictatorship, Fascism and Communism, Germany and the USSR. The Great Powers of Europe tested out military strategies and new technologies, while tens of thousands of idealistic foreigners joined the war to battle against Fascism.  At the same time, the great democracies of Britain and France played a more muddled role.

Get the book on Amazon

This introduction to the Spanish Civil War is the second book from George Levrier-Jones. The book considers the brutal war that arose between the political left and right in Spain over the years 1936-1939.

The topics in the book include:

• 19th Century Spain and the path that led to the Spanish Second Republic
• The chronic instability and changes of the Spanish Second Republic
• The major differences between the two sides
• How the 1936 election led to the Spanish Civil War breaking out
• International involvement and the instability of 1930s Europe
• Why the Great Powers of Europe intervened in the war
• The early Nationalist advances in the war
• How General Francisco Franco consolidated the Nationalist side
• The civil war within the Spanish Civil War
• The great Republican counter-attacks and General Franco’s responses
• Events across Spain from Madrid to the Basque Country, and Barcelona to Valencia
• The closing stages of the war
• What the victors did in the years and decades after winning the war

The approximately 100-page book is the perfect complement to the Spanish Civil War History audio series that is available as part of the ‘History in 28-minutes’ podcasts.

So come and join the past – buy the book now!

Communism and Race in the 1930s Deep South

The Deep South has a history of racial animosity, but what happened when somebody tried to unite whites and blacks? Well, in Great Depression era Atlanta, Angelo Herndon tried to do just that. And he did so as a committed Communist. Bennett H. Parten returns to the site and explains what happened when the authorities tried to prosecute Herndon under an antiquated law…

General Research Division, The New York Public Library. (1926 - 1947). Let me live : the autobiography of Angelo Herndon. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-d7dc-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Atlanta, Georgia is an anomaly, if not an oxymoron. It’s a commercial and industrial oasis in the middle of an agricultural desert, a regional capitol with an international profile, and an emblem of the Old South with an insatiable appetite for modernity. In the early 1930s, the city’s exceptionality emerged again as it somehow juggled being both a hub for Communist activity and a bastion of conservatism. The city, sadly, could only juggle this thorny coexistence for so long.

Fueled by civic boosterism and an influx of Northern capital, Atlanta experienced a period of rapid growth during the first few decades of the 20th century; however, the dawning of the Great Depression brought the engines churning industrial development to a screeching halt. As a result, unemployment lines swelled, the number of homeless grew, and wages were cut, leaving many to survive off of the city’s limited relief budget.

Enter Angelo Herndon. Born in Ohio, Herndon arrived in Atlanta by way of Kentucky and Alabama. While working for the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company in Birmingham, he was exposed to Communism through various labor organizers drifting through the Deep South. Officially joining the party in 1930, Herndon became an organizer and gained a degree of notoriety in Alabama, prompting a string of arrests and his eventual migration to Atlanta.

A volatile city

By the time he arrived in 1932, Atlanta’s relief situation had reached boiling point. The city’s relief budget was exhausted and payments were suspended. A number of citizens pushed the county commissioners to alter the budget so that there was more relief funding, but a number of commissioners believed the level of suffering in the city had been exaggerated, demanding that evidence of such hunger and starvation be proven before altering the budget. In a show of force, Herndon organized and led a “hunger” march on the courthouse in Atlanta that, by the time it was finished, accrued close to 1,000 angry workers demanding a continuation of the relief payments.

Never before had the city seen such a concerted statement on behalf of its working men and women. The march frightened Atlanta’s conservative commercial elite, revealing to them just how volatile and unstable the city had become. What frightened them the most, however, was the social make-up of the marchers. Poor whites as well as poor blacks marched step by step with one another, breaking Jim Crow South’s rigid social hierarchy. Interracial class solidarity on the part of the working men and women would, in the eyes of the business elite, only breed more discontent and challenge the city’s traditional conservative political leadership.

Their response was to simply destroy the movement by attacking where they believed it began: the Communists. Atlanta police began targeting suspected organizers and kept a watchful eye on the post office since the only piece of evidence on the leaflets used to announce the protest was a return address marked P.O. Box 339. Eleven days after the march, on July 11, 1932, Angelo Herndon was arrested while retrieving mail from the box in question.

Herndon was formally charged by an all-white grand jury with “attempting to incite insurrection” under an old statute originally designed to prevent slave insurrections. He received legal counsel from the International Labor Defense, better known as the ILD, whom placed noted Atlanta attorneys Benjamin Davis Jr, the son of a prominent Atlanta newspaper editor and Republican politician, and John Geer at the head of the Herndon case. The two young black lawyers designed a defense that sought to attack the constitutionality of the antiquated insurrection law and Georgia’s judiciary system by calling into question Georgia’s informal practice of excluding African Americans from serving on juries; Herndon’s defense would thus be one that would attempt to strike a major blow to the justice system’s role in preserving Georgia’s Jim Crow laws in addition to exonerating Herndon.

The trial

But Georgia’s seasoned justice system would not go down without a fight. As the trial commenced, the defense team set its sights toward the legality of all-white grand juries like the one that indicted Herndon. All of the witnesses testified that there had not been a black participant on a grand jury in recent memory, but in the absence of proof that African Americans had been systematically excluded, Judge Wyatt, whom Davis had said “used the law with respect to Negroes like a butcher wielding a knife to kill a lamb,” would not be moved (Davis 62-63). The legal team left the courtroom after the first day in an air of defeat.

The second day started off much better for the defense. The duo of Greer and Davis, with the help of attorneys A.T. Walden and T.J. Henry, launched an attack on the prospective jurors, getting one to confess to Ku Klux Klan membership. The team eventually landed on twelve jurors deemed suitable. The charge of insurrection was then debated. Atlanta policemen Frank Watson was the first to testify, reading off a list of items found in Herndon’s room. The list included rather harmless materials such as membership and receipt books, but Herndon did possess two books, George Padmore’s The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers and William Montgomery Brown’s Communism and Christianism, that emphasized the Communist Party’s policy of self-determination for the South’s “Black Belt”, a stretch of land in the heart of the Deep South that housed large numbers of African Americans. The prosecutor, accompanied by a large map of Georgia, pointed out to the jury that under this policy a large majority of the state would fall under black political leadership, all but destroying the state’s white political stranglehold. But even with this evidence, Davis’s cross examination of Watson revealed that Watson never actually witnessed Herndon distribute radical literature or give a speech with revolutionary intent; Watson had merely seen Herndon checking his mail.

When Angelo Herndon took the stand, the momentum won with the Watson cross-examination again shifted away from the defense. In the witness stand, Herndon unleashed quite an oration, one more idealistic than inflammatory. He unabashedly emphasized the interracial aims of the party, pointing out the immense levels of suffering of both poor whites and poor blacks. He described the horrid conditions of the Fulton County jail, claiming that he had to share a jail cell with a dead man whom was denied proper medical treatment. His most radical claims, though, were made when he blamed the capitalist regime for race baiting, constantly pitting white versus black as a substitute for the natural animosities between the rich and the poor. Needless to say, Herndon’s own testimony did not do him any favors with the jury.

Closing the trial

As for the closing remarks, each of the four attorneys—two defense counselors and two prosecutors—took turns. When it came time, Benjamin Davis, vaunted for his oratory skills, released an emotional critique of the justice Herndon had been served. He charged that Herndon had simply been attempting to better the conditions of Atlanta’s working people in a peaceful way as the march on the courthouse was not violent nor did it cause any harm. According to Davis, Herndon was charged not for inciting insurrection but for being black, and his attempts to unite both races for the common welfare should be lauded. Davis’s remarks drew ire from the whites in the courtroom as well as those in the jury. Whenever he approached the jury box during his summation some of the jurors refused to listen and turned their backs on him. Davis, unfazed, went on. He read from one of the radical pamphlets found in Herndon’s possession that described the lynching and burning of a pregnant black woman. The description was so graphic and Davis’s dramatization so intense, one spectator fainted.

His summation hinged on the inherent irony of supposed “justice” in Georgia: a peaceful interracial Communist protest was condemned as insurrectionary while the justice system turned a blind eye to lynchings and other forms of racial oppression. He concluded his remarks by stating that if a guilty verdict was served, it would be derived only from the “basest passion of race prejudice”, and such a verdict would be “making scraps of paper out of the Bill of Rights” and the Constitutions of both the United States and Georgia (Herndon 351-354). Sadly, such an impassioned plea for justice was rendered fruitless as the white jury found Herndon guilty as charged.

But the battle was not over. Almost immediately, Davis and company submitted their appeal. Over the course of five years, their appeals garnered almost no headway at the national or local level. Finally, in 1937, with his case in the national spotlight—and Let Me Live, Herndon’s newly published autobiography on the bookshelves of civil libertarians and liberal thinkers nationwide—the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s insurrection stature, arguing that it violated the First Amendment. Herndon was exonerated, and Georgia, a bastion of white conservatism, was forced to release an avowed Communist and radical interracial labor organizer. Jim Crow obviously did not die with Angelo Herndon, but his victory stood as a major blow to conservative Georgia’s ability to deal out so called “justice” in the courtroom.

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Bibliography

Davis, Benjamin J. Communist Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written In A Federal Penitentiary. New York: International Publishers, 1991.

Hatfield, Edward A. "Angelo Herndon Case." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 03 December 2013. Web. 30 June 2015.

Herndon, Angelo. Let Me Live. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Martin, Charles H. The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. 

The Intriguing Lost Conversation of the Civil Rights Movement: The Writer and the Monk - James Baldwin and Thomas Merton

Racial tensions have sadly been all too common in the United States over the years. Recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere are but the latest in a long line of racial issues. Here, Edward J. Vinski presents a fascinating view on race in America, with the help of two very different people who wrote at the height of the American Civil Rights movement.

Photograph of a Young Woman at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. with a Banner, 1963. From the U.S. Information Agency.

When one reads, one enters into a conversation with the writer. Such conversation, although naturally different from the more traditional face-to-face method, allows us to travel across time and distance and even to resurrect the dead. This, of course, is only in a manner of speaking, but in the world of letters the conversation is real. We may hear the words of persons long since dead and descriptions of places we might never visit.

For a brief moment during the height of America’s Civil Rights movement, an unconventional conversation occurred between two men: one, James Baldwin, an African American writer living in Europe, the other, Thomas Merton, a white Trappist monk living in a Kentucky monastery.  While their different backgrounds alone might make their interaction appear somewhat unusual, they shared a social consciousness that transcended their worlds. In this, they were, perhaps, more similar than they might initially seem.  What makes their conversation truly unique, however, is the way they communicated to each other and ultimately to their readers: they conversed primarily through a series of letters not addressed to each other.

The “Correspondence”

In his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin demonstrates what it means to be black in America and how whites are, in fact, viewed by their black counterparts. The two essays take the form of letters[1]. The first and shorter of the two, “My Dungeon Shook”, is written as a “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation.” In it, Baldwin describes his own father, recalling that “he was defeated long before he died because at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 3), and he admonishes his nephew that “you can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger” (p. 4). Through this initial statement, Baldwin shows the connection between the movement toward black freedom and that of white freedom as well. By using the offensive word “nigger” he underscores this fact that American Blacks are an invention of White Americans. It is this creation that causes “defeat “ in those created, as in the case of the senior Baldwin, and it is the crime of which Baldwin accuses his countrymen. He writes that they are destroying:

Hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it […] but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime (p. 5).

Their so-called innocence lies in the fact that White America fails to see the crime. “They are, in effect,” Baldwin writes, “still trapped in a history they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (p. 8). As such, the truth about integration is not that it means the acceptance of blacks by whites. Rather, Baldwin tells his nephew, “the terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them” (p. 8).

In his long-form essay “Letters to a White Liberal”, written in response to The Fire Next Time, Merton recognizes this very assumption among whites that white society is somehow superior to that of blacks. Perhaps more accurately, White America exists under the assumption that it has somehow achieved perfect human completeness.  From this perspective, as Baldwin suggests, blacks are “to be accepted into white society” (Merton, 1964, p. 58). Baldwin and Merton both call attention to the fact that equality does not mean the elevation of one group to the standards of the other. Rather, true integration and equality requires movement on both sides. “Your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to,” writes Baldwin, “[…] if she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 96). Merton concurs. In the only direct correspondence between the two men, Merton wrote a letter to Baldwin shortly after he read The Fire Next Time. In it, he states that human completeness comes only from the realization that “I am therefore not completely human until I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of humanity which I lack” (Merton, 1964/2008, p. 226).[2]

Even if true equality means that blacks must unilaterally become more like whites, Baldwin questions whether blacks would accept these conditions. He writes that:

I do not know many Negros who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t want to be beaten over the head by the whites […] white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this […] the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 21).

Years earlier, Merton had come to a similar conclusion. Working for a time among Harlem, New York’s poor, sick and dispossessed at Baroness Catherine de Hueck’s Friendship House led him to conclude that “there is not an Negro in the whole place who does not realize, somewhere in the depths of his nature, that the culture of the white man is not worth the dirt in Harlem’s gutters” (Merton, 1948/1976, p. 386). Not only do they not wish to be integrated in to such a world, the sickness, drugs and death of Harlem stood not only as a contrast to the corruption and greed of white society, but as an indictment against that very society. Reflecting on what he saw, Merton concluded that such pockets of resistance against White American society may be all that prevents God’s wrath from wiping that very society from the planet.

While both men recognize that the races need each other to achieve perfection, they also acknowledge that awareness of this fact is difficult for people to grasp. Baldwin indicates that such a realization is more difficult for those in power writing that “people are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal […] but they love the idea of being superior” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 87). For whatever reason, Americans have long mistrusted standards of civilization that are not cut from the European model. As a result, white Americans have come to believe that they possess something “[…] that black people need or want.  And this assumption […] makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards” (p. 93).

Merton concurs. Whites, according to him, all too frequently assume that they have nothing to gain from blacks and that black society is therefore “more or less worthless” (Merton, 1964, p. 59), thus echoing the sentiment expressed in his letter to Baldwin. The truth that both writers present is that “different races and cultures are correlative. They mutually complete each other” (Merton, 1964, p. 61).

The problem is that the self-knowledge necessary to change this perception would require an abandoning of the most cherished American myths: that of “freedom-loving heroes” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 100). These are the myths that whites believe and about which blacks know better[3]. As such, most blacks “dismiss white people as slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing” (p. 101). Blacks can’t hate whites, according to Baldwin, because they know how much whites have to lose if integration was to become complete, and that the fear of this loss is such that it is impossible for whites to act with love toward them.

Merton draws the same conclusion, writing:

If the Negro […] enters wholly into white society, then that society is going to be radically changed. This, of course is what the white South very well knows and it is what the white Liberal has failed to understand (Merton, 1964, p. 8).

Equality, thus, can only be obtained through sacrifice particularly on the part of whites. The world they knew will be radically altered on economic, social, and psychological levels. But this is the price to be paid for a new society. “The only way out of this fantastic impasse is for everyone to face and accept the difficulties and sacrifices involved, in all their seriousness, in all their inexorable demands” (Merton, 1964, p. 9).       

The writer and the monk bring their respective books to a close with calls to action. Baldwin attempts to rally “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks” of America. “If we […] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able […] to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 104-105). But if we fail, he writes, the prophecy of the old spiritual will come to pass: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!” (p. 105).

Merton’s ending is, perhaps, less dramatic, but just as powerful. Recognizing the difficulty that whites have in understanding the message of the Black Americans, he writes:

This is the message which the Negro is trying to give white America. I have spelled it out for myself, subject to correction, in order to see whether a white man is even capable of grasping the words, let alone believing them (Merton, 1964, p. 70).

Then, acknowledging that the truly prophetic vision of a racially equal America’s potential can only come from the perspective of Blacks, he brings this message home: “For the rest, you have Moses and the prophets. Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and the others. Read them, and see for yourself what they are saying” (p. 70).

Conclusion

The passage of the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery in the United States, but it did not end racial injustice. The Brown vs. The Board of Education court decision helped integrate American schools, but did not end racial inequality. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s did not end racial tensions. The last half-century has been one in which periods of relative calm are punctuated by flare-ups of old resentments and suspicions. The events of Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; and Baltimore, Maryland have been nothing but the most recent examples of long-simmering racial tensions boiling over. With each event, there are calls for a national conversation on race. Sadly, people on both sides of the divide often bristle at and deflect any real attempts at open discussion. In the meantime, opportunists seek to achieve their own ends. In so doing, they add a further level of distraction to matters, often doing little more than confirming the worst fears of those on whichever side they seem to oppose.

The truth is that the story of America is intertwined with the messy story of racism, and until the entire nation comes to grips with this disturbing fact, it is likely that a resolution to the problem will continue to elude us. Fifty years ago, Thomas Merton and James Baldwin exchanged “letters” devoted to this topic. If there is any significant lesson to be learned from their “correspondence” it is this: racism in America will not be solved by the nation’s liberals or conservatives, politicians or activists.

Rather, change will be brought about by its prophets who can see the problem from a self-critical, but not self-condemning perspective.

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Author’s note

I ask to be excused a slight stylistic indulgence.  In light of my thesis that the written word allows a measure of immortality, I have written most of this piece in the present tense. I believe that the conversation is too important to have simply happened once and for all in the past. Rather I believe that Merton and Baldwin continue to speak to each of us to this very day.  

References

Baldwin, J. (1963/1985). The fire next time. New York: The Modern Library.

Campbell, J. (1991) Talking at the gates: A life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking.

Leeming, D. (1994). James Baldwin: A biography. New York: Arcade

Merton, T. (1948/1976). The seven storey mountain. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Merton, T. (1963/2008). Letter to James Baldwin. In W.H. Shannon and C.M. Bochen (Eds.). Thomas Merton: A life in letters. New York: Harper One.

Merton, T. (1964). Seeds of destruction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Footnotes

1. The New Yorker, in which the essays were published before being collected in The Fire Next Time, required that all submissions be in the form of a “Letter from….” (Campbell, 1991)

2. As not all of Baldwin’s personal papers have been released to the public, I am not aware of whether he replied to Merton. 

3. This is not an exclusively American problem. While visiting an elementary school in Senegal, Baldwin was outraged to find the children’s textbook referring to their ancestors from Gaul (Leeming, 1994)

Robert Kennedy’s amazing climb up Mount Kennedy: Always Do What You Are Afraid to Do

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a wave of tributes and memorials commemorated him around the world. One such memorial was the naming of a mountain in Canada – Mount Kennedy. Here, Christopher Benedict explains the story of how JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy, attempted to make the first ever ascent of the mountain.

The Kennedy brothers in 1960. Robert is in the middle, with John on the left, and Ted on the right.

Difficult and Perplexing Times

There is no setting the clock on grief. Tragedy does not come with a catch-all instruction manual to help survivors cope in some uniform fashion with the incomprehensible. Retreating into a cocoon of counter-productive and self-destructive tendencies-denial, despondency, and inactivity-may suffice for most people. But, Robert F. Kennedy was not most people.

Which is not to suggest that he was impervious to such things. In the time spanning Jack’s murder and his own, he took to wearing his brother’s naval jacket, literally cloaking himself in sorrow. However, he also accepted this most wretched of calamities as a provocative personal challenge. To struggle against the stagnation of pre-conceived notions and overcome confidential fears and ideological obstacles to achieve forward progress in his own thought process and, therefore, of the society of which he was an active participant and public servant.

“He had always been a taker of risks from that day, so many years before, when he had thrown himself off the yawl into Nantucket Sound in his determination to learn to swim,” historian, Special Assistant to the President, and family friend Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Bobby, “and John Kennedy had said he had shown either a lot of guts or no sense at all, depending on how you looked at it.”

When the National Geographic Society proposed that the surviving Kennedy brothers Robert and Edward join the assemblage of experienced climbers seeking to be the first to ascend the Canadian mountain peak named for their fallen brother, a horrible plane crash less than seven months after Jack’s assassination, in which Ted suffered three broken vertebrae, two cracked ribs, and a collapsed lung, removed him from the equation.

It would have been more than understandable had Robert, terrified of heights and otherwise “rash but not reckless” in Schlesinger’s estimation, begged off the expedition, especially given the perilous nature of recent circumstances. For most people, this would have been perfectly acceptable. But, again, Bobby was not most people.

Lofty and Magnificent

Tributes to the martyred President John F. Kennedy emanated from all points on the globe common and obscure, his name and/or likeness affixed to coins, plaques, statues, stamps, streets, high schools and law schools, office buildings, an international airport in Queens, New York, the former Plum Pudding Island in the South Pacific from which Lt. Kennedy and his surviving PT-109 crew were rescued during World War Two after their craft had been demolished following an encounter with a Japanese destroyer.

The Canadian government had something in mind on a much grander scale. Though initially, in the opinion of Bradford Washburn, not grand enough. Washburn, founder and director of Boston’s Museum of Science, was a cartographer and mountaineer with an impressive list of first ascents to his credit, most notably the West Buttress of Mount McKinley, North America’s highest mountain.

He urged the Canadian Parliament to reconsider their original choice for Mount Kennedy, a 12,200-foot peak which he referred dismissively to as “a burble”. The uncharted 14,000-foot Yukon mountain near the Alaskan border that he had in mind was one Washburn had discovered himself from a Fairchild ski-plane during a 1935 mapping mission for National Geographic. Thirty years later, he was now gathering a survey and summit party on behalf of National Geographic and the Boston Museum of Science to set out for Mt. Kennedy and its two adjoining peaks. The expedition would include in its ranks Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Mt. Everest in 1963, Barry Prather, who was a support member of the 1963 team but fell ill with pulmonary edema and was unable to continue, Mount Rainier park ranger Dee Molenaar and fellow Washington state native George Senner, British Columbia Mountaineering Club member James Craig, National Geographic photographer William Allard, and last  - but not least - New York Senator Robert Kennedy.

Asked by Whittaker about his training regimen for the upcoming journey, Bobby joked, “Running up and down the stairs and hollering, help!”

Lightheartedness was a fine defense mechanism to ward off the fear which must have been substantial to a novice climber. Even Whittaker worried over the potential for avalanches caused by melting spring snows, not to mention the concerns inherent to exploring uncharted territory where “one doesn’t know what those problems will be.” 

Mount Kennedy as shown from an airplane in 1984. Mount Kennedy is the high peak towards the left. Source: Gary Clark, available here.

Commitment of Body and Mind

His first actual sighting of the mountain came, “lonely, stark, forbidding” Kennedy recalled, on March 23, 1965 from a relatively safe sixty-mile distance in the confines of a Royal Canadian Air Force helicopter. The team members were deposited at 8,700 feet where Base Camp One had been established on the newly christened Hyannis Glacier for their first night’s stay. The following morning, the expedition gained an additional 4,000 feet of elevation over the unwelcoming terrain of Cathedral Glacier to reach the High Camp through a snowstorm that, by early evening, had developed into white-out blizzard conditions. This turn of events threatened the next day’s planned summit attempt.

Fortunately, wrote Robert Kennedy for his Life cover story, “during the night the snow stopped, the stars became bright, and the northern lights appeared over the ridge of the mountains.” As picturesque as it was propitious for the task at hand, their tents were nonetheless buffeted by 50 mph winds which “made sleep impossible” but also “either cleared or packed the fresh snow which had fallen and made our climb to the summit that much easier.” Not that it would be free of near disaster.

After waking at 6am to amenable temperatures of 5 above 0 for a breakfast of “soup, mush, and chocolate bars”, the climbers geared up and set off on their final assault at 8.30am. Bobby had learned well from his mountaineering mentors who were all duly impressed with the Senator’s efforts. He was, after all, a veteran of the legendary Kennedy football games on the front lawn at Hyannis Port which would not uncommonly end in bloody noses and bruised egos for brothers and sisters alike. He kept his attention on the progress of “how far we would be in 100 steps” but would also create a diversion in his mind by way of mentally reciting poems as well as passages from Churchill and Emerson. It was not for lack of focus, but simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that Bobby, negotiating a 65-degree incline, suddenly plunged into an icy crevasse up to his shoulders. Quickly pulled free, he looked down from whence he emerged unable to see the bottom, pondering in retrospect the advice given by his mother Rose: “Don’t slip, dear.”

What Am I Doing Here?

“I had three choices: to go down, to fall off, or to go ahead”, reflected Bobby, who was told by a newspaper reporter prior to his departure that he had already written Kennedy’s obituary. With the grim determination for which he was famous (and feared), he reassessed that “I really had only one choice.” 100 feet from the summit, the ridge flattened and widened considerably and it was about here that he was untethered from his rope team of Jim Whittaker and Barry Prather.   

Whittaker, who had been awarded the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal by President Kennedy during a Rose Garden ceremony a mere four months before JFK was killed in Dallas, was the first to selflessly urge Bobby ahead of the pack of proud and accomplished climbers so that he could be the first man to set foot on the summit of Mount Kennedy.

Ironically, at approximately 1pm Robert Kennedy unfurled and planted at the pinnacle of the mountain a three-foot tall flag bearing his family’s crest - the official moment of death ascribed to his brother. He also set in the snow, “with mixed emotion”, two PT-109 tie clasps as well as a golden inaugural medallion which complemented the bound copy of the President’s historic “Ask Not” address encased in plastic. “It was with a feeling of pain that the events of 16 months and two days before had made it necessary,” Robert later wrote. “It was a feeling of relief and exhilaration that we had accomplished what we set out to do.”

Happy to be home, Kennedy would neither scale another mountain nor entertain the desire to do so. Removed from the immediacy of quick thinking and physical exertion necessary in the present moment, however, Bobby was finally able to treasure the views and elements which “I’m sure would have greatly pleased the man for whom the mountain was named.”

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Sources

• Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1978, Houghton Mifflin)
• Our Climb Up Mt. Kennedy by Robert Kennedy (Life Magazine, April 9, 1965)
• Mountain Tribute to JFK Evoked by Kennedy Trip to Yukon by Michael Jourdan (National Geographic, August 5, 2013) 
• The Strange History of Mount Kennedy, http://www.theclymb.com/stories/out-there/the-strange-history-of-mount-kennedy/

You thought you were having a bad day? Bad days from May in history…

We’ve just found out about an intriguing book that tells tales of bad days in history. In fact it has one bad tale for every day of the year - from the weird to the terrible. And as we enter May, we thought we’d share a few of these with you… From trouble in the American South to Mary Lincoln, and a clash between a communist and somebody who was very rich! So, following is an excerpt from BAD DAYS IN HISTORY: A Gleefully Grim Chronicle of Misfortune, Mayhem, and Misery for Every Day of the Year by Michael Farquhar!

May 1, 1948 and May 14, 1961 and 1963

Raging Bull Connor

There must have been something about the merry, merry month of May that got Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor’s blood boiling. With spring in the air, and racial inequality to be maintained at all costs, the super-segregationist public safety commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, seemed extra-energized by the season.

Bull Connor in 1960. Source: City of Birmingham, Alabama. Available here. 

Start with May 1, 1948, when Glen H. Taylor, U.S. senator from Idaho, came to Birmingham—“the most segregated city in America,” as Dr. Martin Luther King later called it—and tried to enter a meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress through a door reserved for blacks, rather than the “Whites Only” entrance. The senator, then running for vice president on the Progressive Party ticket, was promptly seized by the police under Connor’s control. “Keep your mouth shut, buddy,” they ordered, before hauling Taylor away to jail.*

Then came more invigorating May days in the early 1960s, when Connor’s bigotry blossomed furiously in the face of new challenges to white supremacy. The Freedom Riders were coming to town, and Connor was good and ready for them. He had arranged with the Ku Klux Klan a memorable greeting party for May 14, 1961— Mother’s Day. According to one Klan informant, the terrorists had been assured by Connor’s Birmingham Police Department that they would be given 15 minutes “to burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don’t give a goddamn . . . I will guarantee your people that not one soul will ever be arrested in that fifteen minutes.” The Klansmen used the allotted time well, unleashing a savage assault on the riders with iron pipes, baseball bats, and chains.

Two years later, during the first week of May, Birmingham’s children inflamed Bull Connor further when thousands took to the streets in peaceful protest. Mass arrests were followed by a full-on assault on demonstrators with fire hoses and attack dogs—images that were captured on film and sent throughout the world. The media glare and national outrage that accompanied it made Birmingham too blistering hot for Connor that May. Unwelcome change was in the air, change he had inadvertently unleashed. By the end of the month, he was out of a job. Worse, his viciousness had pushed the previously inattentive Kennedy Administration to finally address the gross injustices in the South that Connor so viciously represented in Birmingham.

“The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor,” President Kennedy said. “He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”

* Connor had already given vent to his feelings about racial mixing a decade before, when he halted the integrated meeting of the newly formed Southern Conference for Human Welfare with this delightfully oxymoronic declaration: “I ain’t gonna let no darkies and white folk segregate together in this town.”

May 4, 1933

Immural Acts? Rockefeller vs. Rivera

Had it not been for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the lobby of New York’s RCA building at Rockefeller Center might still be graced by the work of the world-renowned muralist Diego Rivera. The Rockefellers, capitalists to their core, commissioned Rivera, an avowed Communist, to paint a dramatic centerpiece for the new building. The lofty theme: “Man at the Crossroads Looking With Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future,” which, in the midst of the Great Depression, would feature two opposing views of society, with capitalism on one side and socialism on the other. Perhaps some might have thought twice about such a potentially explosive topic, but family matriarch Abby Rockefeller was a big fan of the artist, despite, perhaps, his political views, and the fact that he had already ridiculed John D. Rockefeller in another work. Thus, Rivera set about his creative task—with a great big surprise up his sleeve.

A recreated version of Man at the Crossroads. It is by Diego Rivera and called Man, Controller of the Universe. Source: Gumr51, available here.

With work on the mural well under way, future New York governor and U.S. vice president Nelson Rockefeller went on one of his frequent visits to check on Rivera’s progress. This time, however, he saw something entirely unexpected incorporated into the work: a portrait of Lenin himself. Rockefeller was appalled, and on May 4, 1933, he shared his feelings with the artist in a letter asking him to change Lenin’s face to that of an unknown person.

Predictably, Rivera balked at the idea of altering his artistic vision. The same day he received Rockefeller’s letter, the artist responded: “Rather than mutilate the conception, I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety.” With that, what Rivera called the “Battle of Rockefeller Center” was on. The artist was ordered to stop work on the project, and his fee was paid in full.

Amid the ensuing uproar from the art world, Nelson Rockefeller suggested the plywood-covered mural be removed and donated to the Museum of Modern Art. But the museum’s timid trustees wouldn’t touch it. Then, the following February, Rivera’s work was suddenly and unexpectedly smashed to bits and tossed into barrels—an act one critic described as “art murder.” The family claimed the destruction was inadvertent, the result of an unsuccessful attempt to remove the artwork intact. But Rivera didn’t buy that, nor did many art connoisseurs. In a wire sent from Mexico City—where he eventually reproduced the destroyed mural—the artist seethed: “In destroying my paintings the Rockefellers have committed an act of cultural vandalism. There ought to be, there will yet be, a justice that prevents the assassination of human creation as of human character.”

May 20, 1875

The Son Sets on Mary Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln tolerated his wife’s wild extravagances and occasional fits of fury with benign chagrin; his son Robert, much less so. On May 20, 1875, just over a decade after the president’s assassination, the younger Lincoln had his mother committed to an insane asylum. It was an ambush, really, one for which Mary Todd Lincoln was entirely unprepared.

The day before her forced confinement, Leonard Swett, a lawyer and adviser to the late president, arrived unexpectedly at the Chicago hotel where Mrs. Lincoln had taken a room. Accompanied by two guards, Swett escorted her to a packed courtroom where a judge, a previously empaneled jury, and an array of witnesses awaited her. Robert Lincoln was also there, having orchestrated the entire proceeding. The son had been long mortified by the eccentricities of his mother, who had endured the tragic loss of two young sons and witnessed the assassination of her husband. But mostly he was concerned about money—and how much of it she was spending.

The former first lady sat in the courtroom that day, by turns bewildered and infuriated, as a parade of experts—many of whom had never met her—testified as to her unbalanced mind, based solely on reports they had received from Robert. Hotel maids and others were called as well, offering such damning evidence as “Mrs. Lincoln’s manner was nervous and excitable.”

Then Robert took the stand. “I have no doubt my mother is insane,” he declared before the court. “She has long been a source of great anxiety to me. She has no home and no reason to make these purchases.”

The defense rested without ever raising an objection or offering a witness of its own. Robert had his mother’s appointed lawyer in his pocket, and he wouldn’t have stood for any rebuttal. While the all-male jury retired to determine Mrs. Lincoln’s fate, her treacherous son approached and tried to take her hand. Rejecting the transparent gesture, Mary Lincoln made her only statement of the day: “Oh, Robert, to think that my son would do this to me.”

Ten minutes later, the verdict of insane was rendered, and the next day Mary Todd Lincoln was locked away. 

We hope you enjoyed the article! There is a bit more on the book below:

BAD DAYS IN HISTORY: A Gleefully Grim Chronicle of Misfortune, Mayhem, and Misery for Every Day of the Year by bestselling author Michael Farquhar is available for purchase on Amazon. It offers a compendium of the 365 most dreadful, outrageous, and downright disastrous days in human history, all shared with Farquhar's trademark wit. 

The World War One German invasion of Belgium… What happened next?

In the early days of World War One, the Germans planned to march through Belgium as part of their plan to win the war. The Germans did not expect the Belgians to put up much resistance; however, events did not quite turn out that way. In the second of a two-part article, Frank Jastrzembski continues from part 1 and tells the tale of the heroic Belgian defense of its homeland in 1914…

General Gerard Leman., the Belgian in charge of the defense of Liege.

General Leman set up his headquarters in Liege on July 31, 1914. On August 3, he ordered the destruction of the bridges, tunnels, and railways connected to Liege as the German forces began to flood across the small Belgian border. The next day the German Army of the Meuse arrayed for battle outside the ring of forts. An ultimatum was sent out to allow the Germans to enter Liege. Leman boldly refused the demand to surrender.

The Third Division occupying the trenches between the easternmost forts was attacked by the units of the Army of the Meuse. The German officers arrogantly launched their assault shoulder to shoulder as if organized on a parade ground against the sheltered Belgian defenders. The German assault was cut to pieces with the help of Belgian machine guns placed in the adjacent forts. At Fort Barchon, the Belgians mounted a counter strike and threw the wavering Germans back with their bayonets. The German attackers withdrew bloodied and completely stunned by the dogged Belgian resistance.

The Germans mounted a daring attempt to capture or assassinate Leman on August 6. A detachment of thirty German soldiers and nine officers dressed as British soldiers drove up to Leman’s headquarters. One of Leman’s aides, Major Marchand, soon caught on to the trap and alerted the headquarters, but was subsequently shot down. The surprise German attack carried Leman’s headquarters, but in the confusion Leman escaped to Fort Loncin, west of the city.

Closer to Liege

The German high command decided on the realignment of their strategy by focusing on capturing the city of Liege itself. Thousands of German reinforcements were soon flooding to the outskirts in an attempt to make a concentrated breakthrough past the forts into the city. After refusing to surrender once again, Liege was shelled on August 6 by a Zeppelin LZ-1, killing nine civilians. The Germans would become vilified for the atrocities committed against the Belgian population. With enough pressure, there was a breakthrough between Fort Fleron and Fort Evegnee on August 10, putting the Germans in range of Liege itself.

The Third Division was controversially sent to join the main Belgian Army in Louvain. The reasoning behind this move was that it would be better suited if it joined King Albert and the main army rather than being bottled up within the forts and surrounded. The movement of the Third Division to join Albert left Liege with weakened defenses as German reinforcements continued to strengthen their chokehold around the city.

The few Belgians in Liege were eventually forced to surrender the city. Even though the city was in German hands, the forts were still intact, and the guns of the forts controlled the roads coming in and out of Liege. The German’s held Liege with approximately 120,000 men, but could not move in and out of the city without being under persistent artillery from the forts. The Germans could only move undetected at night and in small parties.

In the meantime, the Allies sluggishly reacted to honor their guarantee to protect Belgian neutrality. The French, under General Joseph Joffre, were too infatuated with attacking through Alsace-Lorraine, and were indifferent to the genuine threat on their left in Belgium. The British, who decided on sending an expeditionary force of four divisions of infantry and cavalry, were slow in transporting these men across the channel to help the besieged Belgians.

A new weapon

General Erich Ludendorff, the new commander of the Fourteenth Brigade, realized the Belgian forts were not going to surrender even with Liege occupied. He decided on a method other than sacrificing his men in useless frontal assaults. He ordered up some 305 mm Skoda siege mortars borrowed from Austria, and a 402 mm howitzer produced by Krupp steelworks. None of these steel behemoths had been used in combat before. The 402mm Krupp weighed 75 tons and had to be transported by rail in five sections then set in concrete before going into action. It would fire up to ten 2,200 lb. projectiles per hour. It had a range of up to nine miles and was fired by an electric charge with a 200-man crew.

On August 12, the German government relayed another message to King Albert demanding the Belgians surrender. “Now that the Belgian Army has upheld its honor by heroic defense to a very superior force,” the Germans arrogantly indicated, they asked that the Belgians spare themselves from “further horrors of war.” King Albert refused to reply. The massive siege guns were soon unleashed on each fort in succession.

The forts had a major weakness in their design. They were vulnerable to artillery attacks from the rear. The siege guns took two days to assemble, and on August 12, they began to pound the remaining forts in detail.

The massive shells decimated the defending concrete and steel forts and buried the defenders. The forts could not return fire as the German guns were out of range. The defenders of each fort were forced to hunker down and withstand the bombardment. On August 13, three of the forts fell. Fort Pontisse withstood forty-five shells in 24 hours of bombardment before it was taken by an infantry assault. Fort Chaudfontaine surrendered with only 75 out of 408 still alive from the hellish shelling. By August 14, all forts east and north of the city had fallen.

After the eastern forts were reduced, the siege guns were brought up against the forts positioned to the west of the city. Fort Boncelles survived a 24-hour bombardment but soon fell on August 15 leaving little more than particles of concrete and scraps of metal. The bombardment left clouds of poisonous gas. By August 16, eleven of the twelve forts had fallen. Only Fort Loncin remained.

The last battle

General Leman had positioned himself in the last standing fort. The bombardment lasted for three days, from August 12-15. In an interval between the bombardments, the Germans sent emissaries under the white flag to try and convince Leman to surrender the garrison. Leman refused all demands. On August 16, Loncin was hit by a 420 mm shell that penetrated the magazine and exploded, demolishing the fortress.

German soldiers then entered on foot after the explosion. The majority of the garrison was buried in the debris, including their commander. Leman later vividly remembered the effects of the explosion as, “Poisonous gases seemed to grip my throat as in a vise.”

Hopeless as the situation was for the Belgians, they attempted to hold on to the fort. The last twenty-five or so Belgian defenders still able to stand were found in a corridor preparing for a last ditch effort to ward off the Germans. In another instance of tenacity, a corporal valiantly tried to drive the Germans back single-handily by firing his rifle in vain with one good arm, as his other arm was dangling wounded at his side. In a show of compassion, the Germans threw down their weapons and ran to the aid of the Belgian soldiers. Of the 500 defenders in Fort Loncin, 350 were dead and 150 wounded.

Fort Loncin in the aftermath of the battle.

The General

The Germans came upon the lifeless body of General Leman pinned beneath a block of stone. “Respect the General, he is dead,” uttered a nearby weeping Belgian adjutant. When it was realized that Leman was actually not dead, his lifeless body was carried out of the fort unconscious by German soldiers to General von Emmich. When he regained consciousness, Leman was said to have proudly pronounced, “It is as it is. The men fought valiantly. Put in your dispatches that I was unconscious.” Moved by his heroic proclamation, General von Emmich replied, “Military honor has not been violated by your sword. Keep it.”

Leman was transported to a prison in Germany. From his prison in Germany, Leman wrote to Albert pledging, “I am convinced that the honor of our arms has been sustained. I have not surrendered either the fortress or the forts…I would willingly have given my life the better to serve them, but death was denied me.”

The day after the fall of Fort Loncin, the German Army resumed its march through Belgium toward France. Though unsuccessful at Liege, the Belgian forces had delayed the German advance for two priceless days in its sweep toward France. The German invasion was stopped dead in its tracks on the Marne River on the outskirts of Paris in September of 1914. The chance of a quick German victory faded away and trench warfare began in earnest.

Leman was kept as a prisoner of war until December 1917, when due to his failing health, he was released to travel to France. After the war, he returned to Belgium with a hero’s welcome for his heroic defense of Liege. He retired to the city he was born and fought to defend. He died on October 17, 1920.

Some may argue that the importance of the two-day defense of Liege is inconsequential. However, the Belgians helped to dramatically alter the outcome of the 1914 campaign. The Times of London declared that Belgium earned “immortal renown” by helping to shatter the superstition that the German armies were invincible. Today Fort Loncin is a grave to roughly 300 of those who died and remain buried in the wreckage.

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Further Reading

Davis, Paul K. Besieged: An Encyclopedia of Great Sieges from Ancient Times to the Present. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2001.

Donnell, Clayton. The Forts of the Meuse in World War I. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2007.

Horne, Charles F. The Great Events of the Great War Part Two. Volume II ed. The National Alumni, 1920.

Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Lipkes, Jeff. Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2007.

Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918. New York City: Delacorte Press, 2007.

Pawly, Ronald, Pierre Lierneux, and Patrice Courcelle. The Belgian Army in World War I. Oxford: Osprey, 2009.

Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. The Guns of August. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.

Tucker, Spencer C., and Priscilla Mary Roberts. World War I: A Student Encyclopedia. 5 vols. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006. 

The true story of the World War One German invasion of Belgium…

In the early days of World War One, the Germans planned to march through Belgium as part of their plan to win the war. The Germans did not expect the Belgians to put up much resistance; however, events did not quite turn out that way. In the first in a two-part series, Frank Jastrzembski explains the heroic Belgian defense of its homeland in 1914…

The Defense of Liege by W.B. Wollen. Source: available here.

All that stood amid the concrete wreckage of Fort Loncin were roughly twenty-five battered Belgian defenders out of the original 500-man garrison. The small portion of surviving Belgian defenders were gathered together in a shattered corridor. Soiled with dust, they stood anxiously clutching their rifles and awaiting the onslaught of German soldiers swarming over the rubble of the once formidable fort. Today a monument stands at the fort celebrating their heroic defense with the inscription, “Passer by... go say to Belgium and France that here 550 Belgians sacrificed themselves for the defense of freedom and the salvation of the world” based on the epitaph by Simonides for the Spartan dead at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC:

Go tell the Spartans passerby,

That here obedient to their laws we lie.

Brave Little Belgium

The German invasion through Belgium in August of 1914 was presumed to have been an effortless undertaking. The German soldiers and their officers were stunned by the tenacious defense the Belgians exhibited. The soldiers of the Belgian Army were jokingly referred to as “chocolate soldiers” for the way in which they would melt away in combat from any determined opposition. The Kaiser once said to a British officer, “I will go through Belgium like that!” slicing his hand through the air. However, this gallant little nation shocked and inspired the world with their dogged stand against an enemy invasion force that outnumbered them roughly fourteen to one. “Brave Little Belgium” became a rallying cry around the world signifying a free nation defending their sovereignty against an aggressive German invader.

The Belgian Army was ill prepared to face the juggernaut of the German Army. It numbered seven divisions amounting to 117,000 men, with only 93,000 considered combatants. The Belgian forces in the forts surrounding Liege numbered around 4,500 men, with the mobile Third Division stationed in the city composed of 25,000 soldiers.

The Belgian Army was considered one of the most decrepit armies in Europe. The cavalry still wore early nineteenth century uniforms, with the infantry sporting shakos, bonnets, or bearskins as headgear. In some instances, machine gun crews were drawn behind teams of dogs. What the Belgian forces lacked in size and modern equipment though, they more than made up for in their tenacious willpower to defend their borders.

Schlieffen Plan

The neutral nation of Belgium found itself positioned in the center stage of a colossal conflict when the Great War broke out in August of 1914. The German General Staff dusted off the Schlieffen Plan geared to strike a devastating blow to their French enemies. They sensibly anticipated that France would naively concentrate an offensive toward Alsace-Lorraine along the Franco-German border. The German General Staff was delighted when the French proceeded to overextend themselves in this aggressive movement.

While France was preoccupied with this maneuver, the Germans concentrated their soldiers on the opposite side on the Ardennes in an aggressive flanking movement. The heavily wooded Ardennes would shield this movement, allowing German infantrymen to boldly sweep around the French left flank and crash into Paris. The movement would allow them to outflank and strike the French Army from an exposed position. This was a brilliant strategy aimed to end the war with one swift and devastating strike.

One of the many major flaws in the Schlieffen Plan was underestimating the opposition of the neutral nation of Belgium. In order to successfully implement the Schlieffen Plan, German soldiers would have to move through Belgium. This movement would allow for the easiest route to travel through northern Germany into France. An ultimatum was sent out on August 2 with a twelve-hour window to reply. The Germans demanded that the Belgian King, Albert I, grant them military access and allow their infantrymen to march through Belgium uncontested. Albert was skeptical of German intentions, and flatly refused, asserting that if they entered Belgian territory their neutrality rights would be violated.

The Germans moved into Belgium nevertheless, deliberately violating Belgian neutrality. The Belgian’s only hope was to contain the German Army long enough for French or British support to arrive. If a stand was to be made, it would be done at the formidable fortresses surrounding the city of Liege.

Liege

The city of Liege was strategically located on a high bluff overlooking the Meuse River. Twelve massive triangular forts surrounded Liege, forming a circle of thirty-six miles in circumference. Each fortress was located a distance of six miles from the center of Liege. The fortresses were two to three miles apart, with fortifications dug in between to form a connected chain. Fourteen guns were located in each fort under revolving iron turrets and secured in concrete. Built to garrison around 200 men, these forts were made to withstand direct hits from the heaviest of artillery. World opinion viewed the position the most fortifiable in Europe, and expected it to hold out at least nine months against any serious military threat. 

Albert named his former teacher at the Belgian War College, Gerard Mathieu Leman, as the overall commander of the forces surrounding Liege. He could not have selected a better man for the defense of Belgium. At sixty-three years old, the commander would be fighting literally in the city of his birth in 1851. In the prelude of the battle of Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, Abraham Lincoln claimed the newly appointed Pennsylvanian commander George Meade would “fight well on his own dunghill.” Albert must have had the same predispositions of Leman.

In his youth, Leman was admitted to the Belgian Military School in 1867 and proved to be a brilliant student. He opted to serve in the engineers upon his graduation in 1872. In 1880, he was placed in command of the Belgian Royal Engineer Corps. In 1898, he was made professor of mathematics and fortifications at the Belgian Royal Military School. The scholarly papers related to mathematics and siege warfare published by Leman earned him world renown. In 1912, he was made a lieutenant general. Leman was described as a somber, distant man who inspired respect rather than devotion.

Albert appointed him a permanent member of the National Defense Council. This gave him command of the Third Division and the Liege fortified zone on the border with Germany. He zealously studied the approaches to the Ardennes and Meuse River crossings in anticipation of the German invasion. Albert gave Leman a direct order to hold Liege “to the end”. This was a daunting task for the inadequate force he had at his disposal.

Preparation for the attack

Roughly 60,000 soldiers were detached from various units in the German Second Army to form a special striking force to attack and neutralize the forts surrounding Liege. The Army of the Meuse, as it became known, consisted of six brigades under the command of General Albert Theodor Otto von Emmich. General von Emmich was convinced the Belgians would quickly submit.  

General Leman set up his headquarters in Liege on July 31, 1914. On August 3, he ordered the destruction of the bridges, tunnels, and railways connected to Liege as the German forces began to flood across the small Belgian border. The next day the German Army of the Meuse arrayed for battle outside the ring of forts. An ultimatum was sent out to allow the Germans to enter Liege. Leman boldly refused the demand to surrender.

The attack then began, and the Belgians offered much greater resistance than the Germans had imagined. Next time we will continue this little-known tale… Find out what happened here.

Did you find this article interesting? If so tweet about it, like it, or share it by clicking on one of the buttons below!

Further Reading

Davis, Paul K. Besieged: An Encyclopedia of Great Sieges from Ancient Times to the Present. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2001.

Donnell, Clayton. The Forts of the Meuse in World War I. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2007.

Horne, Charles F. The Great Events of the Great War Part Two. Volume II ed. The National Alumni, 1920.

Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Lipkes, Jeff. Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2007.

Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918. New York City: Delacorte Press, 2007.

Pawly, Ronald, Pierre Lierneux, and Patrice Courcelle. The Belgian Army in World War I. Oxford: Osprey, 2009.

Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. The Guns of August. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.

Tucker, Spencer C., and Priscilla Mary Roberts. World War I: A Student Encyclopedia. 5 vols. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006. 

Just how did tobacco companies advertise cigarettes to women?

Cigarette advertisements were banned in many countries some time ago; however, this was not always the case. Prior to World War Two, cigarettes were believed to be good for you and advertising was allowed. And, as women’s power in society grew in the early twentieth century, so did their propensity to smoke cigarettes. Here, Rowena Hartley investigates how cigarette companies got women hooked on cigarettes through advertising…

A German cigarette advertisement, circa 1910.

Cigarettes and Mass Production

Nowadays the glorification of cigarettes is the domain of old movies and television shows, and we are far more likely to see adverts graphically detailing how they can harm us. Despite this, cigarettes have remained highly popular in almost every rank of society for over a hundred years. And yet, to begin with, they were a symbol of wealth. The very first cigarettes were hand rolled, which took precision and time, so could only be purchased by those who had plenty of disposable income. However, at the Paris Exhibition in 1883 American inventor James T. Bonsack presented a working model of his cigarette-rolling machine which could make 300 cigarettes a minute. The Wills brothers in England quickly snapped up this cigarette machine, but it was not long before a similar device called the Bohl machine was invented allowing other cigarette companies to compete in this market. Suddenly the market was flooded and not just with Wills but with Players & Sons, Lambert & Butler, and De Reszke cigarettes amongst others. By World War One cigarettes were the most popular form of tobacco and were being sold for the very accessible price of 5 cigarettes for a penny.

The flooding of the tobacco market meant that, to begin with, cigarette companies spent vast amounts of money advertising their product to secure customers - only to find that their competitors were doing exactly the same thing and thus frequently cancelling out all of their efforts (this had the odd effect that when cigarette adverts were banned it actually meant that the cigarette companies had more profits as they were still selling the same amount of cigarettes). What this has to do with the early days of cigarette advertising is that on the whole smokers make very loyal customers, so once they started on one brand they were likely to continue to buy that same brand. Therefore, cigarette companies, soon after discovering the glory of untapped customers, were unable to show any further growth in the market or any proof that the advertising was working. In search of greater profits the cigarette companies decided to look to a previously ignored market: women.

Cigarettes, Women and sexual promiscuity

To begin with, women were not heavily targeted by cigarette advertisements, as cigarettes were a luxury item; their availability was highly restricted even amongst working men, never mind non-working women. Therefore it was generally only through men that women could access cigarettes and many women experimented with smoking by borrowing their husband’s pack. In itself this did not have any negative connotations but in the late nineteenth century unmarried men and women were closely observed and any behavior deemed inappropriate was quick to be frowned upon. So a man and a woman would have had to stand tantalizingly close to light a cigarette, and this was soon seen as provocative behavior, even foreplay. The image of a man and woman smoking in bed together still has strong and very obvious connotations about their earlier activities, although these implications were not just limited to amateurs. There was soon a strong association between cigarettes and prostitutes as they would often accept cigarettes from customers and then smoke them in the street whilst awaiting further business. This image was furthered by adverts warning men about the dangers of overly friendly women. Adverts of the time show that the combination of a cigarette and red lipstick apparently fits perfectly with “syphilis-gonorrhea”. The other (slightly less insulting) image of female smokers was that of the “New Woman” who was the subject of derision for the newspapers as she smoked heavily, drank heavily, wore men’s clothing, and neglected her household duties.

Despite the stigma, and in some cases because of it, cigarettes began to steadily grow in popularity so that by the end of the 1940s in the USA 33% of women smoked compared 50% of men, and in Britain 40% of women smoked compared to 60% of men. The increase in female smokers partially mirrored the growth of the market in general as cigarettes were becoming increasingly easy to purchase. The early twentieth century also saw a rise in working women, so it was more common for women to buy their own cigarettes and smoke them in and around their workplace. However, during the growth of female smokers from the 1880s to the 1940s, consumption was not just a grass roots movement. It was one heavily manipulated and encouraged by the tobacco industry.

Opening the Market

When tobacco companies started to market to women, they were important commodities. Most men were either non-smokers or dedicated to a particular brand; whereas women had less loyalty as they had not been directly targeted by cigarette companies to anywhere near the same extent. Therefore, there was a high chance that the company which encouraged women to smoke would also be the company who cornered most of that market. It is true that some women were already smoking before cigarette companies began to target them as consumers, but the majority did it at home and in secret in order to avoid the stereotypes associated with female smokers. This was not good for a tobacco company as it meant that there was less word of mouth advertising and fewer cigarettes consumed as women were limited in where they felt comfortable smoking them. This particular issue gave rise to Edward Bernays’ 1929 advertising campaign for Lucky Strike, where in the Easter Day Parade in Manhattan suffragettes would smoke “Torches of Freedom” to show their defiance against male dominance. The marching smokers did cause quite a stir not least in the sales of Lucky Strike, which sold 40 billion cigarettes in 1930 compared to 14 billion just five years earlier. After such shock tactics it became more common to see women smoking in public.

Although women smoking in public were becoming more acceptable there was still a major hurdle to overcome, which was that the cigarettes themselves were still made to suit men’s tastes. In the early days some cigarette companies, such as Wills, were hesitant to create a brand purely aimed at women, but it soon became clear that such attention could mean the difference between attracting and losing customers. In Britain the survey group Mass Observation found that women had to train themselves to like cigarettes or as one described it give “at least an appearance of enjoyment”. While that is also true of men, women were more likely to admit it. This meant that cigarette companies actually began to change the cigarettes themselves in order to have brands which appealed directly and almost exclusively to women. The number of Egyptian and Turkish blend cigarettes increased as their taste was milder and they also looked better in cigarette holders. In a more blatant stunt, Slims created a thinner cigarette in order to make it, and the hand attached to it, appear more elegant. Cigarette companies also began to manufacture jeweled accessories to further encourage smoking as well as brand loyalty. These were often in the form of cigarette cases with mirrors on the inside that made the product look more feminine but also subconsciously made the smoker relate checking her appearance to reaching for a cigarette. So society was open to female smokers, the manufacturers were directly targeting women, and cigarette companies were selling cigarette accessories. The final piece in the jigsaw was advertising.

Advertising Cigarettes to Women

Advertisers have found that the best way to sell their products is by having one clear selling point that they focus upon to attract the consumers’ attention. Once a brand is more established they can begin to have more ambiguous adverts, or introduce a new selling point to remind consumers of their product, such as offering a toy meerkat in order to compare insurance companies. However, in the early days of selling women cigarettes, most of the tobacco companies tended to focus on two main areas: health and style.

It was not until the 1950s that cigarettes were directly linked to throat and lung disease, so to begin with there were many adverts that recommended cigarettes on health grounds. Some cigarettes were even advertised on the basis that they helped alleviate sore throats. And even when this was proved false Lucky Strike slightly altered their advertisements to say that physicians agreed the cigarettes were “less irritating because it’s toasted”; this managed to keep the attraction without making any suable claims. The other health claims at least had an element of truth in them as cigarettes also advertised their ability to relieve stress and encourage weight loss. The adverts relating to health benefits were aimed at both men and women, but stress and slimming claims were more commonly aimed at women rather than men. One of the original claims made for encouraging women to smoke was that women were of a more nervous disposition and so would need the calming influence of cigarettes to help control their anxious tendencies. Similarly after many years of corset advertisements it was not a great leap to point out the slimming effects of cigarettes; again Lucky Strike was the forerunner of this phenomenon with their “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”. Even so, although health advertisement continues to be a popular selling point, the majority of cigarette brands focused on far more fashionable ways of selling cigarettes. 

A Lucky Strike advert from the 1930s showing the supposed health benefits of smoking. Source: tobacco.stanford.edu, available here.

Red Lips

It is a noted phenomenon in fashion that what originally might be seen as scandalous soon becomes another fashion item. Just as miniskirts and saggy jeans first shocked and provoked reaction, cigarettes soon went from a scandal to a fashion statement. Smoking is still a highly social activity and many smokers started due to their belief that it made them look sophisticated, an idea encouraged by film and television, as from the 1930s onwards almost every actor and actress seemed glued to a cigarette for most of the programs’ running time. For actresses such as Audrey Hepburn the cigarette holder became a vital part of her look and one that she is rarely seen without. Similarly, some actresses actually advertised for tobacco companies, for example Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night) for Chesterfields and Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity) for L&M Filters. Other tobacco companies bypassed the need to use actresses’ popularity to sell their products by creating highly stylized adverts such as Will’s Gold Flake which merely hinted at the sophistication cigarettes could bestow. Companies such as Slims and De Reszke adapted the product itself to entirely focus the product on women. Slims thinned their cigarettes and De Reszke began a “Red Tips for Red Lips” campaign in the 1930s where they cultured the end of the cigarette so that any lipstick marks would not be visible. However, despite the growth in the market, De Reszke’s Red Tips advert was one of the first cigarette adverts that directed itself solely at the female market.

In conclusion, although many of the adverts mentioned here were used to appeal to both men and women, in a matter of years women went from being an ignored market to making up almost half of consumers, a change which was in a large part down to the power of advertising. But, as with men, once female smokers were hooked and their loyalties claimed by a specific brand then it was back to the drawing board for the advertisers as they tried to find a new market to appeal to.

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References

• Matthew Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800-2000: Perfect Pleasures, (Manchester University Press, 2000); https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UjM8t6Ul73YC&dq=smoking+in+popular+culture&source=gbs_navlinks_s (Especially Chapter Four: ‘Player’s Please: The Cigarette and the Mass Market).
• Wills, B.W.E. Alford, WD & HO Wills and the Development of the UK Tobacco Industry, 1786-1965 (Methuen, 1973).
•  Wendy Christensen, ‘Torches of Freedom: Women and Smoking Propaganda’, The Society Pages, February 27 2012, http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-freedom-women-and-smoking-propaganda/
• Penny Tinkler, ‘”Red tips for hot lips”: advertising cigarettes for young women in Britain, 1920-70’, Women’s History Review, 10:2 (2001) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612020100200289