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. 

Slavery and the Fourth of July: Is This the Land Your Fathers Loved?

Frederick Douglass was born a slave, but his life was to later move into a different world. He became an important figure in the US abolitionist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Here, Christopher Benedict looks at Douglass’ views on the Fourth of July and whether slaves could really appreciate Independence Day when they were not free.

Frederick Douglass in 1856.

From Plantation to Platform

The Douglass family, which in 1848 consisted of Frederick and his wife Anna, not to mention their five children Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick Jr., Charles, and Annie, settled into their new nine room home at 4 Alexander Place in Rochester, New York.

From here, Douglass contributed to and edited the abolitionist newspaper North Star, embarked upon speaking engagements in New England, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, made the acquaintances of John Brown and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (whose suffrage movement benefitted from his being the sole public voice of assent), lobbied for the desegregation of Rochester’s learning institutions when Rosetta was forced to leave her private school, supported Free Soil candidates Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams, and sheltered numerous fugitive slaves while assisting them with safe passage to Canada.

These surroundings and circumstances may have been a far cry from the Maryland of his birth thirty years earlier, but his youth spent on Holme Hill Farm in Talbot County, and particularly his year as a rented resource to farm owner and brutal overseer Edward Covey, would never fade into distant memory. His mother was an indentured servant named Harriet Bailey and it was believed by fellow slaves, though never confirmed nor denied, that Frederick’s father was also his white master, Aaron Anthony, which would hardly have been an uncommon occurrence.

After escaping Baltimore for Wilmington, Delaware by train in 1838 using protection papers given to him by a merchant seaman, he first sets foot in free territory after reaching Philadelphia by steamer. A second locomotive journey lands Frederick in New York City where he is reunited with Anna after their engagement back in Maryland and abandons his birth name of Bailey in favor of the alias Johnson. It would be at the urging of the welcomed and securely protected black community in New Bedford, Massachusetts that he then dropped the all-too-common Johnson for Douglas, inspired by the character of the Scottish lord from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (and adding the additional ‘s’).

Because he had become proficient at the trade of caulking at the Baltimore shipyards of his mostly benevolent former possessors Hugh and Sophia Auld, where he began as bookkeeper after Sophia had taught him to read and write (which was then frowned upon and discouraged, necessitating his own covert self-education), Douglass easily finds work in the storied whaling village, joins the congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and subscribes to William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator.

Invited to appear before an abolitionist fair in Concord, MA which was attended by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he then began what would become his hugely successful autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself, published in 1845 (as an aside, this is still celebrated in New Bedford every February with a community read-a-thon sponsored by its Historical Society, which I proudly got to participate in while an unfortunately short-lived resident of the Bay State in 2011-12).

It begged reason for many to accept that an uncultured black man, one that the bulk of white society took on face value to be an exchangeable and disposable commodity rather than a human being with hopes and dreams and love and hurt in his heart, could compose without generous assistance such a thoughtful, highly articulate work of literature.

Nonetheless, the man born into bondage had not only endeavored toward his liberation, but was now embraced within the most illustrious intellectual circles, walking freely and proudly into their literary salons and halls of academia.

Now a distinguished citizen of Rochester, Douglass was asked to deliver a speech from the stage of Corinthian Hall on July 5, 1852 commemorating the anniversary of America’s independence. The irony, if it was not intentional or, for that matter, even at first apparent to some, would be manifested brilliantly and manipulated scorchingly.

As With Rivers, So With Nations

Treading lightly while wading toward troubled waters, Douglass begins on a misleadingly modest note, offering apologies for “my limited powers of speech” and “distrust of my ability”, professing to have thrown “my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together” owing to “little experience and less learning”.

Douglass compares the deliverance of the country’s political freedom to the Passover celebrated by the emancipated children of god, noting the buoyancy inherent to the Republic’s relatively youthful age, 76 years, which he remarks is “a good old age for a man, but a mere speck in the life of a nation.” Perhaps, Frederick suggests, “Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow.” 

Interestingly, Douglass refers to the free and independent states of America through the use of feminine pronouns, whether as a repudiation of their former British fatherland and/or the noble words and deeds of the nation’s Founding Fathers he feels are now being bastardized, or as an unspoken remembrance of his own birth-giver, the mother he last saw at the age of 7 or 8 when she presented him with a heart-shaped ginger cake and the pet name “Valentine”. 

“Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages,” says Douglass. “They might sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away on their angry waves the accumulated wealth of toil and hardship.”

While the river “may gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on serenely as ever,” Douglass begins the shift in his discourse with the warning that “it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory.”

Dastards, Brave Men, and Mad Men

Conceding that “the point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable”, the nation’s founders were, in Douglass’ estimation, “brave men” and “great men”, also “peace men” who nonetheless “preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage”, “quiet men” who “did not shrink from agitating against oppression”, and men who “believed in order, but not in the order of tyranny.”

Likewise, they had intentionally not framed within their Declaration and Constitution the idea of an infallible government, one which Douglass believed had since become fashionable, while falling out of repute was the deliberate action of “agitators and rebels...to side with the right against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor.”

Douglass’ assertion was that the natural clash of these contemporary ideologies culminated in the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which made legalized sport of hunting down and returning runaway slaves to their masters, and a grotesquely profitable one at that.

George Washington, Douglass pointed out, “could not die until till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men.”

He drives this point home by quoting from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Inhuman Mockery

Now comes Douglass’ direct confrontation of the question pertaining to why he was called upon to give this address on this occasion, the answer to which lay in the larger matter of whether the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” Thomas Jefferson bequeathed to America’s countrymen were rights that extended to him, as well as his kith and kin. If there remained any doubt about the reply, Douglass demolished it.

“The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Unable to equivocate or excuse the great blasphemy of human slavery which made a mockery not only of the Constitution but of the Bible, Douglass declared to his “Fellow Americans” that “above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.”

He raises next the hypothetical argument of whether he and fellow abolitionists would be better served to “argue more and denounce less...persuade more and rebuke less.”

Again, his condemnation of these tactics arrives swift and decisive as a lightning strike.

“Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?”

To do so, Douglass insisted would “make myself ridiculous and to offer an insult to your understanding.”

Unholy License

If the “peculiar institution” of slavery was upheld by American religion in addition to American politics, was it to be viewed as somehow supernal?

That the church largely ignored the Fugitive Slave Act as “an act of war against religious liberty”, how else could its rituals be regarded, Douglass wonders, but as “simply a form of worship, an empty ceremony and not a vital principle requiring benevolence, justice, love, and good will towards man?”

To this says Douglass, “welcome infidelity, welcome atheism, welcome anything in preference to the gospel as preached by those Divines.”

Using the word of god against itself with incendiary righteousness, he recites from the book of Isaiah. “Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me, I am weary to bear them, and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood. Cease to do evil, learn to do well. Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed. Judge for the fatherless, plead for the widow.”

Among the exceptionally noble men that Douglass gives name to are Brooklyn’s abolitionist firebrand Henry Ward Beecher, Syracuse’s Samuel J. May, and Reverend R. R. Raymond who shared the platform with him that day. Douglass charges them with the task of continuing “to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains.”

Penetrating the Darkness

The Constitution will always remain open to the interpretation of those whose will is to bend and stretch the wording of its amendments one way or another to the advancement of a specific agenda. Regardless, Frederick Douglass maintained that it is “a glorious liberty document” in which “there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing” that is slavery.

Similarly, he drew encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, “the great principles it contains, and the genius of American institutions.”

Knowledge and intelligence, time and space, were colliding in many wonderful ways which gave Douglass, ultimately, reason for hope and optimism.

“Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented...I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport, or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light.”

And, despite the fact that they would shortly thereafter experience a bitter falling-out, Douglass ended on a conciliatory note, courtesy of a passage from William Lloyd Garrison:

In every clime be understood

The claims of human brotherhood

And each return for evil, good

Not blow for blow

That day will come all feuds to end

And change into a faithful friend

Each foe

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Sources

• What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, speech delivered by Frederick Douglass July 5, 1852 in Rochester, NY
• Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life, My Bondage and My Freedom, and Life and Times by Frederick Douglass, edited and with notes by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Library of America, 1994)

Gin in 18th century England… Could prohibition work?

Gin arrived in Britain in the late 17th century following the arrival of a new monarch from the Netherlands, King William III. Here, Janet Ford tells the story of how gin’s extraordinary popularity in 18th century England led to Parliament trying to restrict its sale… And how successful these Gin Acts were.

The Gin Shop, a cartoon about drinking too much. By George Cruikshank, 1829.

How popular was gin?

It was estimated that in the year 1730, 10 million gallons of gin were produced. The average Londoner got through 14 gallons of gin a year or two pints a week - which is a lot of gin!

Why was gin so popular?

The main reasons why gin was so popular were the price, its strength and the life of the working classes, who drank it the most. Gin was very cheap, which allowed the poor to drink it. Gin was much more stronger than ale and beer, and so would get people drunk quicker. But life for the working class during the 18th century was difficult, as living conditions were poor, and so having a cheap and strong drink would have numbed the pain of real life and given the poor and working class some relief from their stresses.

The Gin Acts

There were various acts brought in which aimed to restrict the sale and consumption of gin, with the Acts of 1729, 1736, 1749, 1751 and 1760. The 1736 Act, ‘taxed retail sales at 20 shillings a gallon and made selling gin without a £50 annual licence illegal’ (1) and the 1751 act, ‘lowered the licence fee and forced distillers to sell only to licensed retailers trading from respectable premises’ (2). In general, Parliament wanted to make gin difficult to make and sell to the nation.

Why laws were brought in?

There were various reasons why parliament and religious figures, who were also against gin, wanted to make gin difficult to sell and make.

One of the main reasons was the link between gin and crime. Many of those who wanted to ban it believed that gin increased crime. To an extent this would have been true; however, as gin was so popular, banning it could have increased crime, as those who wanted the drink, would have done anything to get it. One of the main examples of a crime being committed that was related to gin was that of Judith Dufour. Judith had been drunk on gin at work, which was normal for her. She also had a two-year-old daughter, who was found naked, apart from a scarf around her neck, strangled in a field. It was found that she had been killed by her own mother, while she was drunk on gin. These stories would have frightened not just politicians and religious figures, but also the general public.

Another reason was the role of women. Beer and ale were mostly drunk by men and not women. But this was not the case for gin, as both sexes drank it. As gin was sold in alehouses, women were starting to drink in them. Parliament and religious figures believed that this increase in interaction between men and women would increase prostitution and corrupt women.

The Effects of the Acts on Gin

One of the major effects the acts had was nothing at all. Gin was still made, sold and drank in various places, such as street corners and gin shops, throughout the 18th century. When the 1729 Act was brought in, production and the amount of gin which was drank did dip, but production increased in the 1730s.

One of the reasons why gin was still made were loopholes in the acts. The First Gin Act stated that gin was made with ‘juniper berrie, or other fruit, specie or ingredients’ (3) - which is what it is made out of. However, a loophole was that people would simply not put juniper berries in gin but use other ingredients in order to produce legal gin. This did make gin slightly dangerous, especially as some people put turpentine in their ‘gin’. If it gave gin a bad taste, the drinkers would not have cared, as they drank gin to get drunk, but it was still dangerous. Another loophole was related to the amount of gin sold. It was only illegal to sell gin if less than a gallon was sold. Many people actually bought over a gallon in order to still have gin. In most cases, it was either wasted, as it was a great deal of gin and storing it was difficult, or people drank it all and became ill or even died.

There was a great deal of criticism toward the reformers, as the acts were seen as discrimination towards the working class. This was due to them being the main group who drank it, even if the middle and upper classes were not excluded from drinking gin. Interestingly, the upper classes also drank illegal drinks, as they drank imported brandy, but there were far fewer consequences for them. It was such behavior which encouraged the working class to carry on making and selling the drink, as if the upper classes could do it, why not them? This discrimination made the working class less willing to compromise with Parliament as they were not being treated equally. 

The acts had a negative effect, as there was an increase in violence. There were many riots by the working class, as their drink was being taken away from them and they were being controlled by the upper classes. Another reason for the violence were fines. Those who were found selling gin were fined £10, which was a great deal of money to the poor and working classes. If they were informed on by their neighbors and were found guilty, that person who had informed on them was given some or all of the money. This would have been seen as a good deal, as they were given money without doing much work. However, if informers were found, they were attacked and, in some cases, killed.

In the late 18th century, the production, selling and drinking of gin declined. This was partly due to new acts, such as those of 1751 and 1760 being brought in, which were more about compromise than pure prohibition. Even so, the decline in use was mostly down to the bad harvests, which started in 1757. Parliament put a ban on exports of grain for a few years, which made the distillers angry, but Parliament was more concerned over food for the general population than the distillers. The acts and the bad harvests made gin very expensive for the poor, and most went back to the cheaper alternative of beer.

In the later 18th century, there was the introduction of gin brands, with Gordon’s in 1769 and Plymouth Gin in 1796. Parliament considered such brands both positive, as only a select few were making gin, and negative, as gin was still being made and in some ways became more established as bigger companies were making it.

Were the Acts successful?

To an extent the acts were successful, as they did make gin more difficult to sell. However, the acts actually made the situation much worse in other ways, as they increased violence and worsened the quality of gin. But more importantly, gin never disappeared, even with the decline, as there was still bootleg gin or brands.

And finally, gin has now become very much part of our culture.

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References

• 1/2 www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/18th-century-gin-craze
• 3 Patrick Dillon, The Much Lamented Death of Madam Genava, (Review, 2002) p88

Bibliography

• Gin Lane, www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/w/ william_hogarth,_gin_lane.aspx
• www.history.co.uk
• www.self.gutenberg.org
• Patrick Dillon, The Much Lamented Death of Madam Genava, (Review, 2002)

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 Southern Belle… And Spy in the American Civil War

During the American Civil War, one bold woman in the heart of the Confederacy dared to support the Union cause by freeing her slaves, aiding captured soldiers, and leading a spy ring that extended into the Confederate White House itself. Though her story may be obscure, her boldness and courage during the toughest years in American history tell the tale of a true American hero. Chloe Helton explains.

The Battle of Seven Pines, Virginia May 31, 1862. The battle took place near Richmond where Elizabeth Van Lew was from.

John Van Lew, Elizabeth’s father, was the owner of a wildly successful hardware store when he married Eliza Baker, the daughter of a former Philadelphia mayor. No doubt the prominence and wealth of the Van Lew family created the circumstances which allowed for Elizabeth’s successes in aiding the Union during the war. A well-rounded education and cushy wealth made for an outspoken and independent young woman in Elizabeth, and the distaste for these traits among the Richmond elite may account for some of the reason for an attractive, wealthy young woman like Elizabeth having never married. That is not to say, however, that she did not use her charms: often she was able to persuade high-ranking Confederate men to heed her requests, which allowed the success of many of her anti-Confederate actions during the Civil War.

When Virginia announced its secession from the Union, a celebratory parade marched through Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Perhaps every citizen in the whole city was present for the festivities except Elizabeth and her mother, Eliza. Elizabeth, an ardent Union supporter who after her father’s death had used her considerable inheritance to buy and free the families of her emancipated slaves, soured at the prospect of secession and considered fleeing the city. Not one to flee from unfriendly situations, and much too attached to her beloved family home, she eventually decided to stay, vowing to instead help the Union in any way she could.

Growing opposition

At first her actions were not hotly opposed within the city. Southerners expected swift victory in the war and initially Northern prisoners were treated well, so even when Elizabeth requested that a captive Northern Congressman who had fallen gravely ill be treated in her own home it was easily allowed, and not much suspicion was aroused. The Congressman, Calvin Huson, Jr., died soon after his relocation despite tender care from the Van Lew ladies, but Elizabeth received a thank-you letter from Union soldiers in Richmond which she kept with her until her death. As the war dragged on supply shortages ravaged the South, and when Elizabeth requested permission to visit the infamous Libby Prison she was told - by the First Lady’s half-brother (a Confederate officer), no less - that a lady like her should not be fraternizing with the enemy. Elizabeth redirected her plea to the Secretary of the Treasury, C.G. Memminger, and after she turned some of his own famous arguments about Christians proving their love for each other through aid even to those who did not deserve it he did grant her request. She used her considerable fortune to buy produce for enemy prisoners in a time when most common city folk could scarcely afford to eat, and the result among her peers was social isolation and death threats.

Van Lew’s induction into espionage did not begin intentionally. Many of the prisoners had acquired pieces of information from the Southerners they came into contact with - guards, doctors, and deserters mostly - and when these bits of hearsay were all compiled it was considerably useful. Elizabeth simply passed it on to Union officers, and because part of her family’s farm was outside the city walls she was easily able to pass on information there without arousing suspicion. Some issues did arise: at one point her pass to visit the prisons was rescinded, but with more manipulation she was able to receive permission again. The prison guards also became wary of her and banned her from speaking to the prisoners. However, this did not discourage her from soliciting information: she poked messages into cloth with pins and slipped pieces of paper into the bottom of a food dish.

Supporting the other side

Despite her valiant and charitable efforts in the prisons, Elizabeth’s real claim to fame began when Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President, began asking for reliable servants for the Southern White House. Van Lew was apparently unable to pass up this opportunity and offered one of her freed slaves for hire, and Davis, who had known her father, accepted. When Mary Bowser began work in the White House, Davis didn’t think she even knew how to read, much less that she had been educated in the North and had photographic memory, so he was careless with his papers around her - too careless. Word soon got out that there was a leak in the White House, but nobody ever suspected the unassuming former slave.

Elizabeth did see other excitement during the war. In 1862 Union forces were tantalizingly close to capturing Richmond, and the feisty Southern belle even prepared a room in her house for General McClellan to stay as her guest. After a powerful speech from Robert E. Lee, however, the Confederates were able to drive them away. Until the next and final invasion of Richmond, Elizabeth bided her time by directing the spy ring she was now leading, which ran so smoothly and efficiently that despite frequent house checks by a suspicious Rebel officer no evidence could be found of her treason. She did protest these annoying visits, eventually housing a Confederate officer as a guest in order to ease suspicion. Van Lew also helped Colonel Paul Revere (a descendant of the Revolutionary Paul Revere) escape certain execution by helping him escape and housing him in her attic.

At the conclusion of the Civil War, as Richmond prepared for the march of Union soldiers into the city, Elizabeth proudly raised the American flag above her home. This bold action caused a mob to descend upon her mansion and she quashed it with feasible threats. After the war, though, Elizabeth’s pro-Union actions were revealed and she faced social isolation throughout the rest of her life. After a stressful stint as postmaster in Richmond and the death of her mother she fell into a depression which lasted the rest of her life. Her bold actions and unrelenting dedication to her cause cemented her in history as one of the most famous spies during the war, however, and her story is an inspiration.

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Reference

• Karen Zeinert - Elizabeth Van Lew: Southern Belle, Union Spy

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.

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. 

The 4 most awesome swords ever…

Swords have been used in all manner of military engagements in history. But which are the best 4 ever? Adrian Burrows (aka Captain Max Virtus) returns to the site and writes a humorous piece in his own inimitable style!

There are three things in this world that are true. The Sun is hot. Water is wet... and swords are awesome.

As I sit here in the ‘sword wing’ of my house, I find myself gazing over racks and racks of blades and I start to consider... which of these are the Top 4 Most Awesome Swords. EVER (everyone does a Top 5 or a Top 10, I'm going for a Top 4).

This is tricky. After all there are so many swords in my warehouse to consider. In one of the boxes I have one of Napoleon's swords (I paid a mere $6.4 million dollars for it back in 2007, it's rather pleasant, the blade is gold encrusted and look's great but highly ineffective at completing basic sword requirements like chopping off limbs). Then there is the rather impressive 132cm long sword that belonged to the Scottish Hero William Wallace, surprisingly dubbed the Wallace Sword. Not to forget the rather impressive Tizona, the beautiful blade made of Damascus Steel that the Spanish Hero El Cid used to battle the Moors. But none of these blades were strange enough to belong in an Escapade in Bizarrchaeology. So that's why I settled on the following bizarrely brilliant weapons.

4. Khopesh Sword

The Ancient Egyptian Khopesh Sword is based on one simple question: why have a sword or an axe when you can have both? And thanks to King Eannatum of Lagash - who was the first to give this weapon a go back in 2500 BC - now you can. The Khopesh was rather short at 24 inches long but the blunted end proved very effective at being used as a hook to surprise an unwitting opponent. The sword was incredibly popular, and was an Egyptian warrior’s weapon of choice and must have fashion accessory for close to 1,200 years.

3. Seven Branch Sword

Why settle for one, two, three, four, five or six blades on your sword when you can have seven? That's a motto to live your life by and that's exactly what the Baekje Dynasty in Ancient Korea around 372 AD did. They constructed this mightily impressive and over bearingly bladey Seven Branch Sword. This weapon was never intended for battle and was instead built for ceremonial purposes. But having sharpened up the Iron blade and swung it around a bit I can assure you that it is highly effective as chopping seven melons in half. AT THE SAME TIME…

2. Gladiator Scissors

There are many different Gladiator types, the net and trident wielding Retarius and the gladius swinging Samnite amongst the most well known, not so the scissor holding Scissor Gladiator. The tube like metal casing protected the Gladiator's forearm in a bout, whilst the curved blade at the end allowed for parrying, slicing and hooking. In Ancient Rome, these three features combined to make for a crowd-pleasing weapon.

1. Urumi Swords

The problem with using a sword in battle is that it can be rather restrictive - it has a specific length of blade that only has a certain attack distance. This does not apply to the Urumi Swords and that is precisely what makes the Urumi Swords so phenomenally awesome. Imagine a sword crossed with a slinky and you have a Urumi Sword. Developed in the southern states of India during the Maurya Dynasty, this bladed whip like sword can only be used by an expert trained in Indian Martial Arts. Why? Well, the danger is that as you flail around with this giant extendible sword you might accidentally cut your own face off. Which believe me you would not want to do.

The standard Urumi consists of only one blade that is four to five feet long; however, the Sri Lankan version has up to THIRTY TWO blades attached to one handle. Not only that but the warrior would fight with one Urumi in each hand, leading to SIXTY FOUR blades whizzing around the place.

And the best thing about the Urumi? After you've finished the swings, spins and turns that make up the attack pattern you can wear the Urumi around your waist like a belt. Which surely must be the best belt ever. So not only is the Urumi the most awesome sword ever it is the most awesome belt ever too.

So, there you have it, the Top 4 Most Awesome Swords. EVER according to Captain Max Virtus. Does your list differ? Have I caused a horrible and irreproachable offence by not including your favorite historical sword? Then let us know in the comments below.

PS - Whilst this list was called the Top 4 most awesome swords. EVER, it did not include swords not invented yet. Otherwise this list would have obviously contained a Light saber.

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Captain Max Virtus takes history to the Max every week in Escapades in Bizarrchaeology. Find out more at https://bizarrehistory.wordpress.com.

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.

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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. 

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