tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/1930s-31853/articles
1930s – The Conversation
2020-08-26T12:20:42Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/143144
2020-08-26T12:20:42Z
2020-08-26T12:20:42Z
Forced sterilization policies in the US targeted minorities and those with disabilities – and lasted into the 21st century
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353240/original/file-20200817-18-b7q561.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1165%2C26%2C2383%2C2314&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An operation taking place in 1941 on South Side of Chicago.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.rawpixel.com/image/2301130">Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In August 1964, the North Carolina Eugenics Board met to decide if a 20-year-old Black woman should be sterilized. Because her name was redacted from the records, we call her Bertha. </p>
<p>She was a single mother with one child who lived at the segregated O'Berry Center for African American adults with intellectual disabilities in Goldsboro. According to the North Carolina Eugenics Board, Bertha had an IQ of 62 and exhibited “aggressive behavior and sexual promiscuity.” She had been orphaned as a child and had a limited education. Likely because of her “low IQ score,” the board determined she was not capable of rehabilitation. </p>
<p>Instead the board recommended the “protection of sterilization” for Bertha, because she was “feebleminded” and deemed unable to “assume responsibility for herself” or her child. Without her input, Bertha’s guardian signed the sterilization form.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A 1950s era pamphlet that reads: The average feebleminded parent cannot be expected to provide good heredity, a normal home, intelligent care - to say nothing of the many other things needed to bring up children successfully." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353451/original/file-20200818-14-mzzs17.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A pamphlet extolling the benefit of selective sterilization published by the Human Betterment League of North Carolina, 1950.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/p249901coll37/id/14974/">North Carolina State Documents Collection/State Library of North Carolina</a></span>
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<p>Bertha’s story is one of the 35,000 sterilization stories we are reconstructing at the <a href="https://ssjlab.weebly.com">Sterilization and Social Justice Lab</a>. Our interdisciplinary team explores the history of eugenics and sterilization in the U.S. using data and stories. So far, we have captured historical records from North Carolina, California, Iowa and Michigan. </p>
<h2>Eugenics</h2>
<p>More than <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sterilization-united-states_n_568f35f2e4b0c8beacf68713">60,000 people were sterilized in 32 states during the 20th century</a> based on the bogus “science” of eugenics, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1051/medsci/2009256-7641">a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883</a>.</p>
<p>Eugenicists applied emerging theories of biology and genetics to human breeding. White elites with strong biases about who was “fit” and “unfit” embraced eugenics, believing American society would be improved by increased breeding of Anglo Saxons and Nordics, whom they assumed had high IQs. Anyone who did not fit this mold of racial perfection, which included most immigrants, Blacks, Indigenous people, poor whites and people with disabilities, <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674445574">became targets of eugenics programs</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An old map of the United States showing the status of state eugenics laws in 1913. About half the states either have laws or are in the process of creating them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353242/original/file-20200817-14-rlngdx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">By 1913, many states had or were on their way to having eugenic sterilization laws.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/files/original/3f02811d6a83b0f896c4eaa6794ecffc.jpg">Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine</a></span>
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<p>Indiana passed the world’s first sterilization law in 1907. Thirty-one states followed suit. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.3.776-a">State-sanctioned sterilizations</a> reached their peak in the 1930s and 1940s but continued and, in some states, rose during the 1950s and 1960s. </p>
<p>The United States was an international leader in eugenics. Its sterilization laws actually informed Nazi Germany. The Third Reich’s 1933 “<a href="https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/law-for-the-prevention-of-offspring-with-hereditary-diseases">Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases</a>” <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hitlers-american-model">was modeled on laws in Indiana and California</a>. Under this law, the <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674745780">Nazis sterilized approximately 400,000 children and adults</a>, mostly Jews and other “undesirables,” labeled “defective.”</p>
<h2>Anti-Black racism and sterilization</h2>
<p>The team at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab has uncovered some remarkable trends in eugenic sterilization. At first, sterilization programs targeted white men, expanding by the 1920s to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like “feeblemindedness” and “mental defective.” Over time, though, women and people of color increasingly became the target, as <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/fit-to-be-tied/9780813578910">eugenics amplified sexism and racism</a>.</p>
<p><iframe id="SIc36" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/SIc36/4/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway. Until the 1950s, schools and hospitals in the U.S. were segregated by race, but integration threatened to break down Jim Crow apartheid. <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mothers-of-massive-resistance-9780190271718?cc=us&lang=en&">The backlash involved the reassertion of white supremacist control and racial hierarchies</a> specifically through the <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/155575/killing-the-black-body-by-dorothy-roberts/">control of Black reproduction and future Black lives by sterilization</a>.</p>
<p>In North Carolina, which sterilized the third highest number of people in the United States – <a href="https://journalnow.com/news/local/against-their-will-north-carolinas-sterilization-program/image_acfc2fb8-8feb-11e2-a857-0019bb30f31a.html">7,600 people from 1929 to 1973</a> – women vastly outnumbered men and Black women were <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807855850/choice-and-coercion/">disproportionately sterilized</a>. Preliminary analysis shows that from 1950 to 1966, Black women were sterilized at more than three times the rate of white women and more than 12 times the rate of white men. This pattern <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520299948/how-all-politics-became-reproductive-politics">reflected the ideas</a> that Black women were not capable of being good parents and poverty should be managed with reproductive constraint.</p>
<p>Bertha’s sterilization was ordered by a state eugenics board, but in the 1960s and 1970s, new federal programs like Medicaid also started funding nonconsensual sterilizations. <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/population-control-politics-women-sterilization-and-reproductive-choice/oclc/1003747011">More than 100,000</a> <a href="https://nyupress.org/9780814758274/women-of-color-and-the-reproductive-rights-movement/">Black, Latino and Indigenous women were affected</a>.</p>
<p>Many <a href="http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/no-mas-bebes/">felt shame and shrouded these experiences in secrecy</a>, not even telling their closest relatives and friends. Others took to the streets and filed law suits to protest forced sterilization. The powerful documentary “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/no-mas-bebes/">No Más Bebés</a>” tells the story of hundreds of Mexican American women coerced into tubal ligations at a county hospital in Los Angeles in the 1970s. One of them, who became a plaintiff in a case against the hospital, reflecting back decades later said <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/no-m-s-beb-s-looks-back-l-mexican-moms-n505256">her experience “makes me want to cry.”</a></p>
<h2>Forced sterilizations continue</h2>
<p>In the years between 1997 and 2010, unwanted sterilizations were performed on <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/new-documentary-illuminates-the-forced-sterilization-of-women-in-california-prison">approximately 1,400 women in California prisons</a>. These operations were based on the same rationale of bad parenting and undesirable genes evident in North Carolina in 1964. The doctor performing the sterilizations told a reporter the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/07/09/200444613/californias-prison-sterilizations-reportedly-echoes-eugenics-era">operations were cost-saving measures</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Unfortunately, forced sterilization continues on. <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/07/roma-women-share-stories-forced-sterilisation-160701100731050.html">Romani women have been sterilized unwillingly in the Czech Republic</a> as recently as 2007. In northern China, Uighurs, a religious and racial minority group, have been <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/china-forcibly-sterilizing-uighur-women-xinjiang-abortions-contraception-ap-2020-6">subjected to mass sterilization</a> and other measures of extreme population control.</p>
<p>All forced sterilization campaigns, regardless of their time or place, have one thing in common. They involve dehumanizing a particular subset of the population deemed less worthy of reproduction and family formation. They merge perceptions of disability with racism, xenophobia and sexism – resulting in the disproportionate sterilization of minority groups.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143144/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexandra Minna Stern receives funding from the National Institutes of Health-National Humane Genome Research Institute for portions of this research project. </span></em></p>
The US has a long history of forced sterilization campaigns that were driven by the bogus ‘science’ of eugenics, racism and sexism.
Alexandra Minna Stern, Professor of American Culture, History, and Women's Studies, University of Michigan
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/139548
2020-06-26T12:33:37Z
2020-06-26T12:33:37Z
To achieve a new New Deal, Democrats must learn from the old one
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343030/original/file-20200620-43225-id49cp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=226%2C104%2C3409%2C2625&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Franklin Roosevelt and other administration officials visit a Civilian Conservation Corps Camp during the New Deal.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/franklin-roosevelt-and-other-administration-officials-visit-news-photo/640458921?adppopup=true">Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As the United States reels from the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide anti-racism protests, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-new-deal-ubi.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur">pundits</a> from <a href="https://apnews.com/06bc980d01efba6f1252ad042ea7d29b">both sides</a> of the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-means-the-era-of-big-government-isback-11587923184?mod=hp_lead_pos7">political aisle</a> have speculated that a new New Deal is in the offing. </p>
<p>It could happen. Crises, after all, often produce social policy gains, and the similarities between the 1930s and today are hard to ignore. </p>
<p>Unemployment has reached levels <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm">not seen since the 1930s</a>, widening gaps in the social safety net. The infirm have been forced to work absent paid sick leave. The <a href="https://squaredawayblog.bc.edu">laid off have lost health coverage</a>. And one in 5 <a href="https://www.hamiltonproject.org/blog/the_covid_19_crisis_has_already_left_too_many_children_hungry_in_america">households with young children faces food shortages</a>. </p>
<p>Similarly, when Franklin D. Roosevelt took office unemployment was at 25% and the poverty rate among <a href="https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/aug/17/eddie-bernice-johnson/texas-congresswoman-eddie-bernice-johnson-says-soc/">elderly citizens hovered over 70%</a>. In 1932 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/07/28/the-veterans-were-desperate-gen-macarthur-ordered-u-s-troops-to-attack-them/">World War I veterans demanding bonus payments</a> were forcibly removed from Washington, D.C., by U.S. troops.</p>
<p>But these <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Politics_in_Hard_Times.html?id=PKetAKzdlC4C">conditions don’t automatically result in progressive social policy</a>. Britain muddled through the Depression without social reform, and Germany turned fascist and militaristic, for example.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5285">sociology professor</a> who has <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691050683/bold-relief">written extensively</a> about <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138268/when-movements-matter">U.S. social policy</a>, I think Roosevelt’s New Deal teaches us that several developments have to coincide to generate a long-term social safety net.</p>
<h2>Polls favor Democrats</h2>
<p>First, public opinion has to shift drastically. In the 1930s, Gallup polls revealed strong support for government pensions for the elderly. Today public opinion has grown in favor of several <a href="https://www.dataforprogress.org/memos">social policy initiatives</a>. About <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/two-thirds-of-americans-favor-raising-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-an-hour/">two-thirds of voters support a US$15 minimum wage</a>, which was a <a href="https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/wages-win-public-and-minimum-wage-debate">minority view</a> six years ago. A majority of Americans favor <a href="https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer-national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/">a single-payer health plan</a>. That, too, was a minority view just a decade ago.</p>
<p>The crisis also has to unfold under the watch of a regime opposed to expanded social policies. Herbert Hoover opposed public relief – for the agricultural sector, the unemployed or the welfare state, in general – during the Depression. Instead, he ineffectively relied on <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/hoover/domestic-affairs">mobilizing private efforts</a>.</p>
<p>The Trump administration, likewise, has waged <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-still-wants-to-kill-obamacare-coronavirus-aca">war on Obamacare</a>. It wants <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/how-a-payroll-tax-cut-could-impact-social-security-and-medicare.html">a payroll tax cut</a>, which would slash into Social Security and Medicare. And the Republican Senate opposes <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/us/politics/coronavirus-hunger-food-stamps.html">funding increases for food stamps</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-trump-puts-partisan-spin-on-federal-aid-for-states-republicans-and-democrats-warn-of-coming-financial-calamity/2020/04/27/a542f19e-889a-11ea-8ac1-bfb250876b7a_story.html">federal aid for states facing depleted budgets</a> as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.</p>
<p>The public must also blame the crisis on the party in power and reject that party at the polls. The Republicans lost their congressional majority in 1930, and Hoover suffered a crushing defeat in 1932, with Roosevelt carrying many congressional Democrats on his coattails.</p>
<p>American voters have yet to decide on Trump and the Republicans, but early signs point to rejection. Trump’s approval rating remains <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo">well under water</a>, while <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/309173/americans-trust-governors-among-economic-players.aspx">the popularity of most governors has skyrocketed</a>. <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html">Trump trails Joe Biden by double digits</a> in many presidential polls. Congressional <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-generic-ballot-polls/?ex_cid=rrpromo">ballots strongly favor Democrats</a>. And <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/12/these-are-9-senate-seats-most-likely-flip/?arc404=true">Republican senators in Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina and Maine are in trouble</a>, while their counterparts in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-grow-nervous-about-losing-the-senate-amid-worries-over-trumps-handling-of-the-pandemic/2020/05/09/65691184-915f-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html">Montana, Georgia, Kansas and Iowa</a> seem vulnerable.</p>
<h2>Longstanding political control</h2>
<p>But three other things had to happen in the 1930s before New Deal reforms were implemented.</p>
<p>The first was a long-term shift in political control. Congress did not pass the Social Security and National Labor Relations Acts until Roosevelt’s third year in office. And Congress did not approve the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41840777">Fair Labor Standards Act</a>, which created the minimum wage, until his sixth year in office. </p>
<p>Roosevelt’s first two years were devoted largely to saving banks, encouraging industries to stabilize prices and wages and providing short-term poverty relief. If the Democrats had lost congressional support in 1934, major social reforms would have never seen the light.</p>
<p>Compare Roosevelt’s – and the Democrats’ – hold on power to former President Barack Obama’s, and the prerequisites for extensive reform become clear. Yes, Obama helped pass the Affordable Care Act, but he spent much of his early first term seeking passage of the <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/recovery">Recovery Act</a> to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/us/politics/29obama.html">counter the Great Recession</a>. He had to abandon potential labor and environmental reforms after losing congressional control for good in 2010. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343615/original/file-20200624-132401-g7wqr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343615/original/file-20200624-132401-g7wqr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343615/original/file-20200624-132401-g7wqr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343615/original/file-20200624-132401-g7wqr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343615/original/file-20200624-132401-g7wqr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343615/original/file-20200624-132401-g7wqr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343615/original/file-20200624-132401-g7wqr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343615/original/file-20200624-132401-g7wqr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">President Barack Obama signs the Affordable Health Care during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, March 23, 2010 in Washington, D.C.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-barack-obama-signs-the-affordable-health-care-for-news-photo/97973796?adppopup=true">Alex Wong/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>By contrast, the New Deal reform wave was possible only after congressional elections in 1934 gave Democrats an overwhelming majority, putting legislative control in the hands of liberals. <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/03/fdr-wins-a-second-term-nov-3-1936-955317">Roosevelt won in a larger landslide in 1936</a>, and congressional Democrats expanded their majority. The Social Security Act was <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ctx.2006.5.3.18">amended twice</a>, and the program we know today <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/history/1950.html">was established in 1950</a>, after Democrats had won the presidency for the fifth consecutive time.</p>
<h2>Mass mobilization</h2>
<p>New Deal reforms also relied on the mobilization of activists. The <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=AN5QukE1Qi0C&q=8000#v=snippet&q=8000&f=false">2-million-strong Townsend Plan</a> – with 8,000 clubs across the country – placed intense pressure on Congress. This group demanded universal retirement benefits, about $3,700 per month in today’s dollars. Workers struck for the right to bargain collectively. The unemployed organized and demanded benefits, too. Together, these efforts kept major reforms high on the political agenda.</p>
<p>Though <a href="https://qz.com/1542019/union-membership-in-the-us-keeps-on-falling-like-almost-everywhere-else/">unionization has witnessed steady declines for decades</a>, the labor movement has enjoyed a sporadic <a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-05-01/coronavirus-labor-unions-mobilize-california">resurgence of sorts recently</a>, with <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.nr0.htm">major work stoppages</a> – by United Auto Workers, United Teachers of Los Angeles and United Food and Commercial Workers – in the last couple of years. To implement major social policy changes, labor would need to remain active. The activists of Black Lives Matter movement would have to build on their nationwide protests and redouble organized efforts to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/6/8/21283841/democrats-police-reform-bill-explained-george-floyd">transform police departments</a>. And social policy would benefit from other reform-minded groups mobilizing as well.</p>
<p>Winning lasting social policy reform also required skillful policy crafting. The Social Security Act included taxes on payrolls and over time made its insurance program universal. Benefits for survivors and the disabled were slipped into the program’s coverage in 1939. </p>
<p>However, other programs were mishandled. Roosevelt depleted considerable political capital on the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/surviving-the-dust-bowl-works-progress-administration-wpa/">Works Progress Administration</a>, a program to provide temporary work to the unemployed, which was permanently <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1942/12/04/FDR-orders-liquidation-of-WPA-promptly/6861512356412/">“discharged”</a> after a conservative Congress was elected in 1942. That political capital might have been spent on lasting reform.</p>
<p>If the Democrats win the presidency and control of Congress, they will need to adopt and improve <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/opinion/fdr-warren-2020.html?searchResultPosition=2">universal programs with solid foundations</a>, like Social Security. They also need to avoid squandering political capital on short-term fixes. Some easy first moves would be to lower the age for <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/11/832025550/bidens-health-play-in-a-covid-19-economy-lower-medicares-eligibility-age-to-60">Medicare eligibility to 60, as Joe Biden proposes</a>, and end the wage ceiling on Social Security taxes, while <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/9/12/20860672/elizabeth-warrens-social-security-expansion">permanently boosting benefits by $200 per month</a>.</p>
<p>Most of programs in Obama’s Recovery Act were funded for only a year or two. Under new Democratic rule, grassroots groups – focused on environmental change, racial justice and gun safety, for example – will need to redouble organizing efforts to keep political leaders’ feet to the fire, lending urgency to public opinion for reform. </p>
<p>The lessons from the old New Deal suggest that a new one is possible. But Democrats will need to control Congress, policymakers will need to look beyond the current crises, and activists will need to keep the pressure on to establish lasting structural change.</p>
<p>[<em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139548/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Edwin Amenta receives funding from the National Science Foundation.</span></em></p>
Similarities between the 1930s and today are hard to ignore, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal teaches us that several developments have to coincide to generate a lasting social safety net.
Edwin Amenta, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/129526
2020-01-13T17:15:14Z
2020-01-13T17:15:14Z
The secret origins of presidential polling
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308887/original/file-20200107-123403-cp5awr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Senator Huey Long at the Capitol in 1935.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/senator-huey-long-capitol-jan-1935-249571390">Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the run-up to its January 14 debate in Des Moines, Iowa, the Democratic
National Committee <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/us/politics/dnc-debate-polls.html">called on private polling firms</a> to conduct more polls.</p>
<p>To make it to the debate stage in Des Moines, Iowa, on Jan. 14, candidates
needed 5% support in four qualifying national polls or 7% in two early state
polls. In part because of lack of polling, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/us/politics/january-democratic-debate.html">candidate Andrew Yang will be left out</a>. Candidate Cory Booker was also in line to be left out, but he ended his campaign the day before the debate.</p>
<p>Nowadays horse race presidential polls – in which candidates’ current electoral prospects are estimated scientifically – are expected as a regular part of election coverage. </p>
<p>But the very first scientific horse race poll, which was conducted by the Democratic National Committee 85 years ago, was shrouded in secrecy and may have changed history – even though it was faulty. </p>
<h2>A look back to the 1930s</h2>
<p>In the spring of 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was worried about his reelection. </p>
<p>He was especially concerned about Louisiana Sen. Huey Long, who had created a <a href="http://www.hueylong.com/programs/share-our-wealth-speech.php">Share Our Wealth</a> organization, purportedly with 7 million members. It promoted a program so radical – extremely high taxes on the rich and stipends for all Americans – that these days it would make Elizabeth Warren seem like a Republican and <a href="http://theconversation.com/andrew-yangs-freedom-dividend-echoes-a-1930s-basic-income-proposal-that-reshaped-social-security-125287">Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend</a> look cheap. I examine Long’s program and Roosevelt’s New Deal in my books <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6308.html">“Bold Relief”</a> and <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8325.html">“When Movements Matter.”</a></p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84895/original/image-20150612-1461-3jxgny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84895/original/image-20150612-1461-3jxgny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84895/original/image-20150612-1461-3jxgny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84895/original/image-20150612-1461-3jxgny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84895/original/image-20150612-1461-3jxgny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84895/original/image-20150612-1461-3jxgny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84895/original/image-20150612-1461-3jxgny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84895/original/image-20150612-1461-3jxgny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Roosevelt gives an address.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://fdrlibrary.tumblr.com/post/74836825845/ourpresidents-fdrs-1944-state-of-the-union">The FDR Library</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Long gained a national following, and <a href="http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19350401,00.html">“Candidate Long”</a> appeared on the April 1 cover of Time. Long also ruled his state’s government with semi-dictatorial might, once deploying the National Guard to attempt to <a href="http://pelicanpub.com/proddetail.php?prod=1565543033#.VXrQ_SjjbIo">steal a New Orleans mayoral contest</a>. </p>
<p>Though a Democrat, Long planned to run against Roosevelt as an independent. Long hoped to attract the followers of <a href="http://www.fathercoughlin.org/">Father Charles Coughlin</a>, the “radio priest” and Roosevelt critic who commanded 10 million listeners, and <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8325.html">Dr. Francis Townsend</a> of Long Beach, California, whose Townsend Clubs demanded generous old-age pensions on behalf of 2 million members. </p>
<h2>Huey Long had a long-range scheme</h2>
<p>Sen. Long had <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=5mWhKFQAAAAJ&citation_for_view=5mWhKFQAAAAJ:u-x6o8ySG0sC">no illusions</a> that he would beat Roosevelt in 1936, but he was playing a longer game. </p>
<p>His plan was to siphon enough votes from the left that Roosevelt would lose to the Republican nominee, whom most thought would be former president Herbert Hoover. Then Hoover would so foul up the economy that the Democrats and the electorate would have to turn to Long in 1940. </p>
<p>Long wrote a book entitled <a href="http://www.ssa.gov/history/hueywhouse.html">“My First Days in the White House,”</a> in which he described how his election would quickly lead to redistribution. But others feared that a President Long might also dispense with further elections, which had happened recently in Germany and was anticipated in Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here">“It Can’t Happen Here.”</a> </p>
<h2>A secretive polling method was devised</h2>
<p>In April, Democratic National Committee chief and Roosevelt campaign manager James Farley sought help from <a href="http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19360302,00.html">Emil Hurja</a>. A private stock analyst and self-taught pollster, Hurja had done some polling for Farley regarding the 1934 congressional elections. Now Farley wanted his pollster to ascertain <a href="http://www.socsci.uci.edu/%7Eea3/Stolen%20Thunder%20ASR%201994.pdf">Long’s potential as a spoiler</a>. </p>
<p>Hurja devised sample ballot postcards asking whom the public would support in the upcoming election: President Roosevelt, an unnamed “Republican Candidate” or Senator Long. </p>
<p>To secure responses, Hurja pretended that a fictional crusading magazine, the then-nonexistent National Inquirer, sought to identify public opinion and transmit it to policymakers for immediate action. Hurja drew his sample from telephone listings and government “relief” rolls, and on April 30, 1935, he mailed out the first of an astounding number of ballots: 150,000.</p>
<p>The sample ballot postcards had prepaid postage; Farley was, helpfully, also postmaster general. Over the next several weeks, 31,000 postcards were returned. The totals were more than 10 times the typical national poll, as Hurja wanted valid results for each state. The cards took so long to roll in that the actual racehorse <a href="http://www.triplecrownraces.com/omaha/">Omaha</a> had enough time to win the two legs of the Triple Crown.</p>
<h2>Results came in and dismay ensued</h2>
<p>The results were shocking to Farley. </p>
<p>Hurja’s estimates gave Roosevelt 49% of the popular vote, with the Republican at 43% and Long at 7%. The Electoral College totals were tight. Roosevelt was winning only by a slim 79-vote margin.</p>
<p>According to Hurja’s analysis, Long’s presence on the ballot would tip 122 electoral votes and several key states to the Republican. A swing of a few percentage points away from Roosevelt would flip the election, similar to how Donald Trump won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote in 2016.</p>
<p>Roosevelt quickly tacked left in policy. He was already demanding the passage of the Social Security Act and a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act">bill protecting the collective bargaining rights</a> of unions. </p>
<p>But on June 19, 1935, Roosevelt suddenly also called for “soak-the-rich” legislation. It would tax extremely high incomes at a stiff rate, raise inheritance taxes and tax undistributed corporate dividends. </p>
<p>The legislation was not designed to yield much revenue, but, as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would later write, was designed to <a href="http://www.socsci.uci.edu/%7Eea3/Stolen%20Thunder%20ASR%201994.pdf">“steal Long’s thunder.”</a></p>
<h2>Farley’s own poll was better</h2>
<p>But the first horse race poll’s premises were faulty, and its results dubious.</p>
<p>Not naming a specific candidate inflated the Republican’s totals. Worse, Hurja completely discounted the ballots of the relief recipients, who were numerous and sharply in favor of Roosevelt, whereas richer Americans overall opposed him. </p>
<p>Also, <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520086470">only the richest 40% of Americans had phones</a>. In addition, <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/155537/little-support-third-party-candidates-2012-election.aspx">experience has since has shown</a> that third-party candidates do much better in polls than in elections. </p>
<p>Not to mention that polls that far away from the general election have to be taken with, as data analyst Nate Silver puts it, <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-begins-the-2016-campaign-and-its-a-toss-up/">“tablespoons of salt.”</a> In any case, naming specific candidates and using a better likely voter model would have shown Roosevelt to be way ahead. </p>
<p>Farley had his doubts about this newfangled polling and relied on a different type of survey. He wrote to Democratic committeemen around the country and asked them how the election was shaping up in their districts. Using their reports, Farley correctly predicted that Roosevelt’s ultimate Republican opponent, Gov. Alf Landon of Kansas, would win only two states. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84924/original/image-20150613-1461-mofhn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84924/original/image-20150613-1461-mofhn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84924/original/image-20150613-1461-mofhn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=791&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84924/original/image-20150613-1461-mofhn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=791&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84924/original/image-20150613-1461-mofhn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=791&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84924/original/image-20150613-1461-mofhn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84924/original/image-20150613-1461-mofhn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84924/original/image-20150613-1461-mofhn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alf Landon got the cover of Time but not the presidency.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LandonTIME.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Roosevelt’s “Second New Deal” deflated his critics. That summer, Long was assassinated. Father Coughlin, Dr. Townsend and Long’s successor, Gerald L. K. Smith, rallied around the independent candidate William Lemke, but his <a href="https://academic.oup.com/whq/article-abstract/1/1/89/1922787?redirectedFrom=fulltext">Union Party ticket</a> attracted less than a million votes. </p>
<p>The first horse race poll helped to change U.S. policy at a critical moment, but may have also helped to discredit this sort of intelligence gathering by presidents. Farley dropped Hurja in 1937, and not until the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy were <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-wizard-of-washington-melvin-g-holli/?isb=9780312293956">pollsters routinely</a> employed again by the White House. </p>
<p>And today, when presidents or campaigns poll, they seem more concerned with questions regarding <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3637632.html">how to frame policies they already support</a> than with responding to the concerns of the public.</p>
<h2>Polling yesterday and today</h2>
<p>This century began with so much polling that many polling aggregators, led by Silver at <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com">fivethirtyeight.com</a> and <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/">RealClear Politics</a>, have become news staples. </p>
<p>Despite mainly mistakenly calling the 2016 presidential race for Hillary Clinton as well as declining response rates, electoral polls, once weighted properly and aggregated, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2019/11/19/a-field-guide-to-polling-election-2020-edition/">remain largely accurate</a>. But, partly because of the success of aggregators, the individual results of private pollsters no longer command headlines. With private pollsters having lost this sort of free advertising, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/11/2/13496432/2016-polls">they have scaled back</a>.</p>
<p>As with other aspects of important news-gathering, it may be time for others
to step in -— including the Democratic National Committee, the pioneer in the
field -— to fill the gap before the next debate.</p>
<p>And this time, the DNC could hire pollsters with better methods. </p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This is an updated version of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-first-horse-race-poll-changed-american-political-history-43164">an article originally published on June 15, 2015</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129526/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Edwin Amenta is currently receiving funding from the National Science Foundation, which has nothing to do with and is not responsible for this piece.</span></em></p>
The very first scientific horse race poll, which took place 85 years ago, was shrouded in secrecy and may have changed history – even though it was faulty.
Edwin Amenta, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/88356
2017-12-07T06:06:30Z
2017-12-07T06:06:30Z
When the British government expects volunteers to help refugees, it’s back to the 1930s
<p>Refugees are awkward. Their arrivals are typically unpredictable and hard to anticipate. They raise immediate logistical difficulties, and frequently give rise to difficult diplomatic and political situations. </p>
<p>While each new movement of refugees can feel unprecedented – this is an illusion. Over the last century, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Making_of_the_Modern_Refugee.html?id=UAkarK3gLDgC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">each decade has seen</a> significant movements of refugees fleeing war, mass atrocities, political repression and civil breakdown. </p>
<p>Those looking for solutions to current refugee movements often turn to history to provide answers to today’s refugee situation. The 1930s offer compelling, if often disheartening, comparisons with the present. As today, 1930s Britain found itself in a rapidly changing world, and one in which its imperial influence was in decline. </p>
<p>In Europe, the internationalism of the 1920s that led to the creation of the League of Nations as a vehicle to prevent international conflict was in retreat. The 1930s saw instead a toxic combination of economic depression, the rise of totalitarian communism and <a href="https://theconversation.com/theres-a-warning-for-the-brexit-age-from-the-british-fascism-of-the-1930s-70936">fascism</a>, and the ongoing insistence of the major powers, including Britain, to put their own national interests first.</p>
<p>In the 1930s, a European state’s authority to control its own borders, and how to treat its population within those borders, was sacrosanct. This principle of state sovereignty meant the democratic powers were unwilling to challenge the treatment of people under Germany’s Nazi government. It also meant that there were <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5iswDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT30&lpg=PT30&dq=Zara+Steiner,+%27Refugees:+The+Timeless+Problem&source=bl&ots=iWvl00M7EN&sig=8DvNWaKl-DdvFTOXJH5PVAgTcgw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwievrbR2ujXAhUEDOwKHaEOCMEQ6AEILDAB#v=onepage&q=Zara%20Steiner%2C%20'Refugees%3A%20The%20Timeless%20Problem&f=false">no international mechanisms</a> requiring any nation to receive refugees once they had left Germany.</p>
<p>And rather than giving refuge to Jews and others fleeing Nazism, democratic nations instead <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5iswDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT30&lpg=PT30&dq=Zara+Steiner,+%27Refugees:+The+Timeless+Problem&source=bl&ots=iWvl00M7EN&sig=8DvNWaKl-DdvFTOXJH5PVAgTcgw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwievrbR2ujXAhUEDOwKHaEOCMEQ6AEILDAB#v=onepage&q&f=false">engaged in</a> “competitive restrictionism”: each feared they would bear the brunt of refugee arrivals if they didn’t maintain strict visa requirements. <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Whitehall_and_the_Jews_1933_1948.html?id=uF45zYcPt68C">Britain</a>, alongside countries including the US, Canada, Australia and South Africa, maintained <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paper_walls.html?id=GOLa_9S4lXkC">“paper walls”</a> keeping out many thousands of refugees, in part citing concerns that allowing Jews in would only increase antisemitism. </p>
<p><em><strong>Read more: <a href="https://theconversation.com/british-media-suspicion-of-child-refugees-goes-back-to-the-1930s-73942">British media suspicion of child refugees goes back to the 1930s</a></strong></em></p>
<p>By September 1939, Britain <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Whitehall_and_the_Jews_1933_1948.html?id=uF45zYcPt68C">had accepted </a> roughly 80,000 refugees – mainly German and Austrian, but also some Czechs – out of the 500,000 to 600,000 refugees who sought entry. </p>
<p>The British government’s immigration policy up to 1939 <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1919/92/pdfs/ukpga_19190092_en.pdf">classed refugees</a> along with all other “aliens”, or non-British subjects. And no alien was granted entry who might “become a charge on the rates”, that is, to receive state welfare payments. For refugees forced to leave behind their possessions and money this was an enormous hurdle, particularly when <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/British_Policy_and_the_Refugees_1933_194.html?id=xa38gqg3WcwC">regulations also barred them</a> from taking up most paid work. </p>
<p>The parallels with today’s world are striking. The UN is deprived of the influence it wielded during the Cold War. There is a global rise of nationalism, Islamophobia and economic protectionism. And ever tightening immigration and asylum regimes mean refugees and the dispossessed continue to risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean or the Channel tunnel.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196972/original/file-20171129-12016-1s14u2k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196972/original/file-20171129-12016-1s14u2k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196972/original/file-20171129-12016-1s14u2k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196972/original/file-20171129-12016-1s14u2k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196972/original/file-20171129-12016-1s14u2k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196972/original/file-20171129-12016-1s14u2k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196972/original/file-20171129-12016-1s14u2k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A protest against Donald Trump’s refugee policies in London, February 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisdare/32340040080/in/photolist-RgMacW-RjKbKS-Gr8syr-SDoqFD-Rh2JtN-RFaeux-QDDdV2-cvUBVd-cvURTQ-cvVarb-cvVxcS-RuXMJN-RDBRdY-QyPkKf-cvVe55-cvV99S-cvVbRs-cvV9wo-cvVbrs-cvVmj5-cvVt3S-cvV5Pq-cvV4cN-cvUzHS-cvUNjh-cvVzDh-cvUMUE-5mrJdA-Qs4pwh-cvVgiW-cvV3as-cvV8hh-cvVwJ9-RxJZvv-cvVAA9-cvVk87-RHc8cM-SgxRvN-SkdKwB-Skc3Xn-QuMo8P-SgvddA-Rjt5eC-SgxhLu-R3vf93-REYCh3-HDAcMK-Jsgnow-RCBEy7-B2iWXw">alisdare1/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Local groups step up</h2>
<p>In the face of inaction by governments, in the 1930s, as today, newly formed refugee organisations sprang up to meet the challenge. </p>
<p>Both national organisations, such as the German Jewish Aid Committee, and local refugee organisations in towns across Britain sought to cut through this problem by guaranteeing to cover all of an individual refugee’s costs while in the UK. Fundraising material stressed again and again the crudeness of the equation they faced – that the number of refugees they could save: “Depends entirely upon the amount of money subscribed.”</p>
<p>But across Britain – even in towns as small as <a href="https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/opus4-ubp/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/5929/file/pardes18_s21_34.pdf">Worthing</a>, where the Refugee Committee supported over 500 refugees – undaunted volunteers collected clothing, food parcels and financial donations. They pooled their ration coupons and spoke up publicly about the need for international solidarity. They invited the refugees of the town for tea, took them to the cinema and on outings. They wrote to those who had come to Britain only to be interned as enemy aliens after 1940, sending them messages of support, food parcels and continued to look after family members.</p>
<p>We might expect that the stark reckoning facing such committees – their guaranteed sponsorship equalled the rescue of one refugee – has been consigned to history. In fact, it was revived last year via the Conservative government’s <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/community-sponsorship-scheme-launched-for-refugees-in-the-uk">community refugee sponsorship scheme</a>. This stands both as a symbol of the commitment of voluntary groups to actively enable refugees to come to Britain, and entrenched state reluctance to commit resources to their reception and resettlement. The refugees selected come as part of the government’s Vulnerable Person Resettlement Programme, and are mainly Syrian families from camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.</p>
<p>In order to be accepted under the scheme, civil society groups must prove an extensive and long-term commitment to any sponsored family. Groups are expected to provide housing for each family, as well as <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/community-sponsorship-scheme-launched-for-refugees-in-the-uk">help them</a> “to integrate into life in the UK, access medical and social services, arranging English language tuition and supporting them towards employment and self-sufficiency”. When they have fulfilled all the requirements, one family is granted entry to Britain.</p>
<p>The red tape surrounding the scheme was such that in January 2017, six months after its launch, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jan/18/uk-community-refugee-scheme-has-resettled-only-two-syrian-families">only two families</a> had been settled under it. But even when refugee groups are successful, the fact remains that, as in the darkest days of the late 1930s, the British government seems committed to ducking responsibility for some of the world’s most vulnerable citizens.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88356/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Becky Taylor received grant funding from The Wellcome Trust to carry out archival work associated with this article.</span></em></p>
Then as now, volunteer groups are stepping in where governments won’t.
Becky Taylor, Reader in Modern History, University of East Anglia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/79905
2017-07-13T20:12:08Z
2017-07-13T20:12:08Z
Friday essay: painting ‘The Last Victorian Aborigines’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177798/original/file-20170712-14452-7760to.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=236%2C0%2C1996%2C1576&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail from Percy Leason, Thomas Foster, 1934, oil on canvas, 76.0 x 60.8 cm, State Library Victoria, Melbourne
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gift of Mrs Isabelle Leason, 1969 (H32094) © Max Leason</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>During the night of September 7 1936, the last remaining thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, popularly referred to by the name of “Benjamin” since his death, died in the Hobart Zoo. The official cause of death was neglect/exposure. Benjamin’s passing marked the extinction of a species. </p>
<p>Only 59 days before Benjamin died the Tasmanian government had introduced legislation to protect the species – a seemingly pointless gesture. The creature had been held captive in the zoo for three years before his death, and during that time my grandfather recalls seeing him.</p>
<p>To my mind, the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger is one of the single greatest tragedies in Australia’s history, so recently I asked my grandfather what it felt like being there; to which he replied: “Honestly, we didn’t think much of it at the time.”</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177285/original/file-20170707-3057-svrimq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177285/original/file-20170707-3057-svrimq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177285/original/file-20170707-3057-svrimq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177285/original/file-20170707-3057-svrimq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177285/original/file-20170707-3057-svrimq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177285/original/file-20170707-3057-svrimq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177285/original/file-20170707-3057-svrimq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177285/original/file-20170707-3057-svrimq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Benjamin, the last recorded Tasmanian thylacine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Two years before the passing of the last Tasmanian tiger, artist and illustrator Percy Leason painted 46 portraits of Aboriginal people from Lake Tyers mission in Victoria. They were exhibited as The Last Victorian Aborigines and were designed to capture Aboriginal people before they became – as was popularly expected – extinct. Leason’s motivation to paint may have been rooted in salvage anthropology, but the images themselves have more to offer than a practical, ethnographic record.</p>
<p>Leason’s portraits are a window in time. They speak of a period when people were categorised by their blood. He labelled his subjects “full bloods”, a term used to signify that a person had no non-Aboriginal ancestry. </p>
<p>Although Australia has officially rejected the notion of blood quantum and genetic arithmetic, even today there is a popular and erroneous perception that it is possible to measure the proportion of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ancestry through “blood”. Light-skinned Aboriginal people frequently have their authenticity questioned and their identity challenged. </p>
<p>There can be no doubt that generations of settler Australians descend from Aboriginal ancestors, unacknowledged and unremembered: using the terminology of the day, half-castes gave way to quadroons and then to octoroons, and then for many they simply became “Australian”. </p>
<p>Of course, this too represents a kind of extinction. Although the idea that Aboriginal people were a dying race had circulated since the late 19th century, and it found renewed interest in the 1930s. This zenith of the extinction discourse also found form in Daisy Bates’s serialised articles, which were later edited into <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bates/daisy/passing/">The Passing of the Aborigines</a>. </p>
<p>That Leason almost simultaneously painted what he called the “last Victorian Aborigines” is emblematic of these ideas. For him, these portraits of what he called the last “full bloods” tied him to both the popular idea of extinction and salvage anthropology.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177288/original/file-20170707-3066-1i3p47e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177288/original/file-20170707-3066-1i3p47e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177288/original/file-20170707-3066-1i3p47e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177288/original/file-20170707-3066-1i3p47e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177288/original/file-20170707-3066-1i3p47e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177288/original/file-20170707-3066-1i3p47e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177288/original/file-20170707-3066-1i3p47e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Percy Leason.
Thomas Foster 1934
oil on canvas
76.0 x 60.8 cm
State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs Isabelle Leason, 1969 (H32094)
© Max Leason</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Wistful thinking</h2>
<p>Well regarded by his peers, Leason achieved significant status as an artist in his time. The Last Victorian Aborigines drew great crowds of people when it opened at the Athenaeum Gallery in September 1934. </p>
<p>The exhibition coincided with the Melbourne centenary, and at this time people all over the city were thinking about the future. Leason’s portraits spoke about the future, by depicting what he considered to be the past. </p>
<p>Reflecting on this now, I can’t help but wonder what curiosity it was that drew in audience members. It is clear from reviews of the time that both Leason and the wider community considered the portraits anthropological exercises; they were a catalogue of loss, a record of extinction. The audience might have acknowledged the tragedy and the melancholy sadness the images were thought to represent, but one wonders if many also considered them nostalgic, perhaps with the wistfulness of regret.</p>
<p>Natural scientist and anthropologist Donald Thomson photographed the same people Leason painted, and for the same reasons. In this way Leason saw himself as being like Thomson: both were impassive recorders, both were anthropologists, both were cataloguers, both were deliberately ethnographic in their approach. The difference was that Leason believed his portraits were superior to Thomson’s photographs.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177977/original/file-20170712-11517-c0lu1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177977/original/file-20170712-11517-c0lu1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177977/original/file-20170712-11517-c0lu1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177977/original/file-20170712-11517-c0lu1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177977/original/file-20170712-11517-c0lu1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177977/original/file-20170712-11517-c0lu1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177977/original/file-20170712-11517-c0lu1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177977/original/file-20170712-11517-c0lu1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Donald Thomson, the Australian anthropologist.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is undoubtedly a certain success in Leason’s portraiture that is lacking in Thomson’s photography. He captures a tenderness and humanity Thomson overlooks. </p>
<p>Leason’s gestural brushstrokes and delicate use of light suggest a hesitancy in his approach. He sees an elusiveness in his subjects: these are an ethereal, fragile people, on the brink of extinction. His portraits preserve and record them for posterity. </p>
<p>Thomson’s 50mm lens, however, is both literal and frank. It is possible, if not likely, that the stark and uncomfortable body language and expressions seen in Thomson’s photographs were also present in Leason’s studio. His chosen medium allowed Leason to capture an essence of his subjects that Thomson’s photographic techniques missed; painting also allowed him certain liberties that photography did not. </p>
<p>Photography, while never strictly objective, does at least have an obvious connection to reality. The subjects in a photograph exist as they appeared, at some stage or another.</p>
<p>Of course, subjects are posed, backgrounds contrived and compositions carefully curated, but the photographer is never able to entirely control the image. The subjects have agency, and they can and do “stare back”. </p>
<p>Painting, on the other hand, allows an artist a greater opportunity to interpret their subject. The way in which Leason’s portraits interpret their subjects infers a meaning that does not necessarily have any bearing on reality. They show a vanishing people, faces literally fading into the background – these Aboriginal faces are like water in your hands, slipping away. They are fuzzy. </p>
<p>Thomson’s photographs are undeniably real. They represent a culture that, despite Leason’s suggestions, is not going anywhere. </p>
<h2>The logic of elimination</h2>
<p>Artistic licence enabled Leason to frame his subjects so they seem aware of their supposed fate, giving this supposed fate an air of inevitability. In the 1930s there was a practical, economic advantage for settlers like Leason to suggest that Victorian Aboriginal people were becoming extinct. Aboriginal people were seen as an obstacle to land acquisition. The late historian Patrick Wolfe referred to this as settlement based on “the logic of elimination”. </p>
<p>Leason’s subjects were not passive. Edward Thomas Foster, like all Leason’s male subjects, was shirtless. His arms folded behind his back push forward his chest, clearly showing his scarification marks. While Leason had control over the painting, it appears Foster subverted his interpretation. His eyes are sharp and intense, perhaps more so than any other portrait.</p>
<p>Clara Hunt, a senior woman and noted weaver, was described by Leason as reluctant and shy. Her portrait is unlike the rest of his female portraits, as she is fully clothed. Her expression appears resolute, if not severe.</p>
<p>Mrs Hunt had disrobed for a photograph by Thomson earlier, but seemingly in an act of defiance she refused for Leason. Mrs Hunt was the oldest woman to pose for Leason, and perhaps it was due to her seniority and position that she was able to subvert the artist’s request.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177287/original/file-20170707-2992-1vllklf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177287/original/file-20170707-2992-1vllklf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177287/original/file-20170707-2992-1vllklf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177287/original/file-20170707-2992-1vllklf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177287/original/file-20170707-2992-1vllklf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177287/original/file-20170707-2992-1vllklf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177287/original/file-20170707-2992-1vllklf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Percy Leason.
Mrs Clara Hunt 1934
oil on canvas
76.1 x 61.0 cm
State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs Isabelle Leason, 1969 (H32096)
© Max Leason</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Survival</h2>
<p>In the years since Leason’s death in 1959 his popularity and reputation have faded. The legacy of these infamous portraits, however, is still very well known. Perhaps most importantly they remain for contemporary Aboriginal people an important and elegiac reminder of their ancestors. </p>
<p>As a record of a dying race they inevitably failed. And yet many people have internalised the same logic of elimination that links authentic Aboriginality to blood. The term “full blood” may have been dropped in everyday conversation, but questions like “What part Aboriginal are you?” are still incredibly common for Victorian Aboriginal people.</p>
<p>Just as art played a part in creating this problem, it now plays a role in its solution. Contemporary Victorian Aboriginal artists such as Bindi Cole Chocka offer stinging reproach to those who have vilified city-based Koorie people for not being black enough, and mock outsiders’ obsession with the skin colour of Aboriginal people as a marker of their authenticity. While Aboriginal people are still sorted into classifications whereby dark-skinned Aboriginal people are accepted as authentic and fair-skinned Aboriginal people are seen as fraudulent, artists are provoking audiences to consider their own understanding of race and how their unexamined preconceptions might be inherently racist.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177978/original/file-20170712-19675-iinqe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177978/original/file-20170712-19675-iinqe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177978/original/file-20170712-19675-iinqe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177978/original/file-20170712-19675-iinqe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177978/original/file-20170712-19675-iinqe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177978/original/file-20170712-19675-iinqe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177978/original/file-20170712-19675-iinqe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177978/original/file-20170712-19675-iinqe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Not really Aboriginal, 2008, Bindi Cole Chocka, pigment print, 100.0 × 120.0.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2016</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It seems Leason never moved past the notion that Aboriginal people in Victoria were defined by their blood; however, years after painting the portraits, he did reflect back on the series and say: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the portraits of the Victorian Aborigines are only ethnographic incidentally, just as a Raeburn portrait is incidentally ethnographic in that it reveals an individual of the Scottish race. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is an important point, because it shows that there was a moment when Leason eventually recognised the humanness of his sitters.</p>
<p>The 46 people in Leason’s portraits convey a duality: on one hand they exemplify his misunderstandings by seeming resigned to their fate; on the other they subvert it by refusing to disappear, by the continued existence of their culture today. They are depicted as resigned, when they were not. They are described as vanishing, when they were not. </p>
<p>Victorian Aboriginal people today do not find our identities rooted in blood quantums, but rather in our awareness, our histories, our characters, our families.</p>
<p>In what I can only describe as a historical coincidence, Percy Leason was born two years after my Aboriginal great-great-grandmother, in the same region. Land records list them as neighbours. Perhaps he played with her, or attended the school that was 50 metres beyond their property boundary – I will never know. Yet I can look at the portraits he created and wonder, was his sensitivity the result of lifelong contact, or is it a vicarious connection that has led me to such a sympathetic reading?</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This article is published in the catalogue for the exhibition <a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/brave-new-world/">Brave New World: Australia 1930s</a>, which is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria until October 15 2017.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79905/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Myles Russell Cook works for the National Gallery of Victoria. </span></em></p>
Anthropologist Percy Leason thought he was painting the extinction of Victoria’s Indigenous people in the 1930s. He was wrong, but his portraits, part of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, are surprisingly sympathetic.
Myles Russell Cook, Curator of Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Victoria and Phd Candidate, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/70936
2017-01-17T10:52:36Z
2017-01-17T10:52:36Z
There’s a warning for the Brexit age from the British fascism of the 1930s
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152861/original/image-20170116-27907-4pfk1u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Part of a mural commemorating the 1936 Battle of Cable Street. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattbuck007/14208831125/sizes/l">mattbuck4950/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In an office in London a maverick politician and a journalist discuss the challenges facing Britain. The politician’s views are unorthodox, and many establishment figures dislike him, but his popularity with the public cannot be ignored. At a time when there are so many questions facing the country, the journalist advises his readers that a nation beset by economic decline, a loss of social cohesion, a fraught relationship with Europe, and a growing distrust of “established” power cannot afford to ignore him.</p>
<p>As contemporary as this situation sounds it actually took place in 1937, when the writer Beverley Nichols met Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists and recorded their conversation in the penultimate chapter of <a href="https://archive.org/details/newsofenglandora028301mbp">News of England</a>, under the title “Unknown Quantity”. The interview provides a reader today with a timely reminder of how much the issues of the present can echo those of the 1930s.</p>
<p>News of England was a study of a nation in crisis, or as its subtitle attested, “a country without a hero”. Before meeting Mosley, Nichols led his reader around a land dangerously divided along regional, economic, and social faultlines, where industrial communities had declined into poverty while students in the Oxford Union debated points of principle. Its title suggested a work dispatched by a correspondent from another country, but its content was much closer to home. He wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Let us walk through this country that we love so much, and even before we have listened to the chatter of our companions, the very stones in the streets will tell us that there is something wrong. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>We may imagine readers asking themselves whether England’s potential saviour was actually Mosley, a fascist politician, described in the book as: “The only man […] who has in him the qualities of that hero for whom the country has waited so long and waited in vain.”</p>
<p>Uneasy as he was with the British Union of Fascists’ racial and anti-semitic policies, Nichols could not overlook the party’s potential to be a reviving force in the nation’s life in the late 1930s. Although the party was largely dismissed by the nation’s political class, Nichols saw its membership as possessing an almost religious faith in their cause: a faith that could, he argued, be what the country needed if it were to be made whole again. </p>
<p>Mosley, however, was soon to be interned by the British government, which in 1940 found its strength and purpose in fighting fascism rather than seeking national regeneration through it. Although Mosley <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VBi_DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=mosley+1947&source=bl&ots=Nn156N2I8x&sig=tFZmCdlVqMWmbg8PohPXBWodLFk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi3q_qM0cbRAhXpDsAKHYMIBVAQ6AEIPDAI#v=onepage&q=mosley%201947&f=false">tried to re-enter political life</a> after World War II ended in 1945, he would never again be invoked by anyone but his most partisan supporters as the “hero” that Nichols saw him to be. Once known, the “unknown quantity” ceased to be appealing.</p>
<h2>The nostalgia business</h2>
<p>Today, much of Britain’s 1930s and 40s past <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Ministry_of_Nostalgia.html?id=G_uHrgEACAAJ&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y&hl=en">has been recycled</a> and used in ways often at odds with its original ethos. Rather than focus on the social divisions that Nichols saw in his travels in 1937 it is easier to celebrate a more palatable narrative of wartime survival through shared endurance. This was surely the nation’s “finest hour”, made possible by those who obeyed the advice to “Keep Calm and Carry On”. That the famous slogan, now seen on everything from coffee mugs to phone cases, belonged to a poster that was printed but never actually used, is a reminder of how this process is more complex than the simple nostalgia it appears to be. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152863/original/image-20170116-27921-c7jv38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152863/original/image-20170116-27921-c7jv38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152863/original/image-20170116-27921-c7jv38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152863/original/image-20170116-27921-c7jv38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152863/original/image-20170116-27921-c7jv38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152863/original/image-20170116-27921-c7jv38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152863/original/image-20170116-27921-c7jv38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Looking back in anger.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/x1brett/6418416525/sizes/l">Brett Jordan/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is easier, of course, to appeal to the certainties of a simplified past: the nation’s lost but still-recoverable “greatness”. Much of the rhetoric of Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party, for example, appeals to a vision of a Britain that could be revived if its post-war absorption into Europe could only be reversed. There have been repeated calls for greater <a href="https://twitter.com/nigel_farage/status/746003555123924992?lang=en-gb">national “control”</a> and encouragement for the view that a “better” Britain still existed under the layers of European legislation that had smothered it. </p>
<p>Pro-Brexit rhetoric in 2016 called upon voters to reverse the nation’s perceived “loss” of control to “Brussels” – by which the Leave camp meant the European Union as a whole – and the political elite that had presided over it. The British people were urged, instead, to trust their own common sense and put their faith in those who defined themselves by their political marginality. </p>
<p>Looking back at News from England reminds us that anxiety over national malaise is nothing new. But the 1937 interview with Mosley also highlights the dangers of seeing the “charismatic” figure as the potential solution to the crisis. Nichols stressed that his thoughts on Mosley were informed by a deep love of the blighted country that his book surveyed. However, the meeting should remind us that the “hero” of one year can prove to be the villain of later ones. It is a point worthy of consideration in a country in which another self-styled political outsider, who has ostensibly stood down as leader of his party, continues to feature so frequently on the political stage.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70936/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter James Lowe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The ‘hero’ of one year can prove to be the villain of later ones.
Peter James Lowe, Associate Professor in English Literature, Bader International Study Centre, Queen's University, Ontario
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/65918
2016-10-06T09:10:23Z
2016-10-06T09:10:23Z
Jarrow crusade: 80 years on the marchers’ message about unemployment and anonymity still resonates
<p>On October 5 1936, 200 unemployed men from Jarrow in north-east England <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwone/jarrow_01.shtml">set out for London</a> carrying a petition asking for work to be brought to their town. Their march, which took just under a month, has become a historic landmark symbolising the depression of the 1930s, the human suffering it induced and England’s north-south divide. </p>
<p>Medical students volunteered to tend to the marchers’ blistered feet and fragile bodies, which had been enfeebled by a diet on the borderline of malnutrition. The crusade exposed the longer-term effects of impoverished diets: William Cameron had all this teeth removed during the march, others were hospitalised or sent home, and heavily indebted 45-year-old Thomas Dobson had heart failure, dying eight weeks after the crusade’s return to Jarrow. </p>
<p>The route graphically illustrated England’s inequalities. Jarrow had the dubious honour of being the nation’s capital of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KsFtTZ0TLiQC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=jarrow+infant+mortality+1936&source=bl&ots=5odncW-8Ed&sig=N9yE5MNabWYGD510HNvON-MS8Wg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwicyZDX_8DPAhUFCcAKHc1dBn4Q6AEIPjAF#v=onepage&q=jarrow%20infant%20mortality%201936&f=false">infant mortality</a> at the time. You were twice as likely to see your child die before the age of one in the town than in the country as a whole, and three times as likely as in Market Harborough, the Leicestershire town that the march passed through after 18 days on the road. </p>
<p>When the marchers arrived in Hyde Park, London on October 31, much of the capital was thriving with new industries and booming construction. The contrasts are powerfully illustrated in Thomas Dugdale’s 1936 painting <a href="http://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-arrival-of-the-jarrow-marchers-in-london-viewed-from-an-interior-133052">The Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers</a>. </p>
<p>Rebuffed by the government, the march did not bring work to Jarrow. It was World War II that revived employment in the town and the post-war settlement that ended overcrowding. However, from the mid-1970s, Jarrow once again became a <a href="http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1986/nov/05/unemployment-jarrow">site of high unemployment</a> and the forgotten march began to re-emerge from the historical oblivion into which it had slipped. </p>
<h2>Dead towns</h2>
<p>There are a dwindling number of people left alive who can remind us of the stigma of the <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/alevelstudies/1930-depression.htm">means test</a> that was required to qualify for unemployment benefit or what health provision was like before the NHS. The decade of the 1930s widened inequalities just as the current age of austerity <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-one-of-the-wealthiest-countries-in-the-world-is-failing-to-feed-its-people-41872">has done today</a>. </p>
<p>That’s why the ghosts of the crusade still hang over austerity Britain. Since the 2008 financial crash, workplaces have closed and household names such as <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7751064.stm">Woolworths</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35834473">British Home Stores</a> have gone into administration. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-british-steel-industry-beyond-repair-54617">threats to steel manufacturing</a> in Redcar, also in north-East England, and Port Talbot in Wales, are eerily reminiscent of a 1939 warning by Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Town_that_was_Murdered.html?id=SQ0lAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">The Town That was Murdered</a>, a book about Jarrow. Recession has strewn the world with murdered towns and cities – ports transformed by containerisation, closed steel works, as well as mining centres and factory towns that have lost their principal reason for existence. In the 1930s, there were an estimated 50m unemployed globally, <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2015/04/27/working-together-for-jobs?CID=ECR_TT_worldbank_EN_EXT">today it’s more than 200m</a>. </p>
<p>When viewing the images of the Jarrow crusade today, there is a danger of falling into a nostalgic trap of discriminating between the apparently deserving poor of the past and the undeserving poor of the present. In this view, the honest men of the crusade with their heads held high were not like undeserving single mums and “scroungers” on the “benefits street” today. </p>
<p>But we forget that the unemployed of the 1930s also faced a press that <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/In_search_of_the_scrounger.html?id=aA0vAAAAMAAJ">depicted them as dole cheats</a> and dole brides (who married while on benefits), and a burden on public finance. The great triumph of the Jarrow crusade was that it humanised the victims of austerity. The marchers’ public meetings held in the evenings after their day’s marching relayed the experiences of the depression and of long-term unemployment. </p>
<h2>Fight against anonymity</h2>
<p>Time has anonymised the marchers as it anonymises the current victims of neo-liberal austerity. For this reason, the commemorations of the march in 2016 have asked “who were the marchers?” Each marcher has a name, a life story beyond the march. All the marchers deserve to be recovered from this anonymity in order to discover their overcrowded living conditions, the waste of their talents, the ill health and hardships that they and their families endured. </p>
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<p>During the project to commemorate the 80th anniversary, <a href="https://www.southtyneside.gov.uk/article/57103/Film-Who-Were-The-Marchers-">children at Jarrow’s schools</a> have discovered crusader forebears. Great grandsons and daughters discovered Philip McGhee, a crane operator and keen footballer at St Bede’s Football Club; Robert Maughan and John Mogie of the mouth organ band; Joe Symonds, later a Labour MP for Whitehaven; Jimmy Hobbs who was 20 at the time of the march and went on to join the navy during World War II.</p>
<p>To put a human face to the suffering inflicted during global crises helps us to pose great questions about our age: unemployment, inequality, homelessness and de-industrialisation. </p>
<p>To challenge the Jarrow marchers’ anonymity is to challenge the fatalism of the age. The crusaders therefore provide a potent lesson for trade unions and social movements today: their battle against injustice and inequality can be an inspiration for those who despair. Though the government denied their immediate demands, the Jarrow marchers contributed to a sea change in the political consensus that brought the post-war welfare state to the UK.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65918/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matt Perry a reçu des financements de Economic and Social Research Council Impact Accelerator Fund. </span></em></p>
Why the 200 men who marched from the north-east to London in October 1936 must not be forgotten.
Matt Perry, Reader in Labour History, Newcastle University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.