tag:theconversation.com,2011:/nz/topics/1950s-24175/articles
1950s – 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>
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<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>
<figcaption>
<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>
</figcaption>
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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>
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<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/138658
2020-05-19T12:18:06Z
2020-05-19T12:18:06Z
The 1950s queer black performers who inspired Little Richard
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335863/original/file-20200518-83375-10o7e3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C92%2C3802%2C4004&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Little Richard’s rock 'n' roll brought the margins to the center.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/musician-little-richard-poses-for-a-portrait-in-circa-1956-news-photo/73909017?adppopup=true">Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since Little Richard <a href="https://apnews.com/9ea48d685b8fd81ea735a6ea9c8dc2ac">died on May 9</a>, he’s been rightly celebrated as one of the most exciting and influential performers in the canon of American popular music. But in most tributes, the full story of his artistic development has been slighted.</p>
<p>This is a pity, because Little Richard’s music is deeply rooted in an underground tradition of queer black performance that’s also worthy of celebration. Indeed, when I have lectured on Little Richard’s work to my students, they’re often surprised and delighted to learn about the subculture that contributed so much to his artistic persona.</p>
<p>His hairstyle, makeup and lyrics were inspired by fellow performers such as <a href="https://apnews.com/0df25857fbd3f40fb2e3e2f53248a2c3">Billy Wright</a> and <a href="https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/1857-esquerita-and-the-voola">Eskew Reeder</a>. The better their influence is understood, the more the gleefully subversive energy that suffuses Richard’s own work can be appreciated.</p>
<h2>The Wright stuff</h2>
<p>Little Richard – born Richard Penniman – honed his craft as a teenage drag queen in touring minstrel tent-shows and vaudeville revues, as well as in an extended network of clubs and bars in the southern and eastern United States known as the “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Chitlin_Circuit/xpPgygAACAAJ?hl=en">chitlin’ circuit</a>.” In a <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/02/16/275313723/the-origin-and-hot-stank-of-the-chitlin-circuit">1967 interview</a>, singer Lou Rawls offered his own memories of playing the circuit:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“These clubs were very small, very tight, very crowded and very loud. Everything was loud but the entertainment. The only way to establish communication was by telling a story that would lead into the song, that would catch people’s attention.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>African American studies scholars <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mutha_Is_Half_a_Word/GsjnjwEACAAJ?hl=en">L. H. Stallings</a> and <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Looking_for_Leroy/sKRFmvIVcEIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Looking+for+Leroy:+Illegible+Black+Masculinities&printsec=frontcover">Mark Anthony Neal</a> have both observed that, while it wasn’t explicitly identified with sexual outlaws, the chitlin’ circuit nevertheless provided a space for queer black artists to flourish. </p>
<p>It was within one of these spaces in the city of Atlanta – either the <a href="https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/02/14/royalpeacock_wide-c9ea94cb66e8cc3d4a7eec4563c46538e67ed403-s1700-c85.jpg">Royal Peacock</a> or <a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/xPZSHho8Z8bi0jdtIAX3UCtGjyf1j2IbYhX-HXlkPeqGYtFByB_GzyjpT22ebky2oC7FCS_iaPSPDhe-t90vEcJ13NccvWik6reWhkJ6rQYiRlgcvCW11npPoVSCN38FY_Hifqo_eXP8WRAt5_n5-KE">Bailey’s 81 Theatre</a> – that Little Richard first met <a href="https://www.queermusicheritage.com/oct2007bw.html">Billy Wright</a>. </p>
<p>Wright had also started out as a female impersonator but had more recently established himself as a singer. He would score <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wright_(musician)">four top 10 hits</a> on the R&B charts from 1949 to 1951.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335853/original/file-20200518-83371-lf1rkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335853/original/file-20200518-83371-lf1rkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335853/original/file-20200518-83371-lf1rkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335853/original/file-20200518-83371-lf1rkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335853/original/file-20200518-83371-lf1rkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335853/original/file-20200518-83371-lf1rkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335853/original/file-20200518-83371-lf1rkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335853/original/file-20200518-83371-lf1rkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1952 portrait of Little Richard in Atlanta, where he met Billy Wright.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/little-richard-poses-for-an-early-portrait-circa-1952-in-news-photo/74178743?adppopup=true">Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Little Richard admired Wright enormously. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dTr_AgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q=billy%20wright&f=false">In Little Richard’s words</a>, Wright wore “very loud-colored clothin’ and shoethin’ to match his clothin’,” which Little Richard began to imitate. He also copied Wright’s pompadour hairstyle and even began using the same brand of <a href="https://image.glamourdaze.com/2012/08/1940s-makeup-secrets-max-factor-pan-cake1.jpg">pancake</a> makeup.</p>
<p>Billy was equally fond of Little Richard, helping to secure his first recording session with RCA in 1951 – using the very same musicians that had backed up Wright on his own records. </p>
<p>Both men were creditable R&B artists, but their recordings from this period offer no hint of the spectacular flamboyance that they apparently projected in person. The queer style that had brought them together was too outré to even consider trying to capture on tape.</p>
<h2>Hurricane Esquerita</h2>
<p>A year or so later, Little Richard met another young black queer performer named Eskew Reeder at a bus station in Macon, Georgia. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMAJUJ_lEKc">As Little Richard told the story</a>, he picked Reeder up and took him home, where Reeder played him a version of “One Mint Julep” by The Clovers on the piano. Little Richard was bowled over, immediately asking for lessons, and thereafter adopting aspects of Reeder’s style – playing blues licks in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUwDnUDFOM&list=PLQp5unhf_1_hp1iEQ6Xh9xNkINCwvoFX4&index=3&t=0s">uppermost register of the keyboard</a> with the right hand, while supplying a pounding, rhythmic accompaniment with the left. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335826/original/file-20200518-83371-15z468o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335826/original/file-20200518-83371-15z468o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335826/original/file-20200518-83371-15z468o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335826/original/file-20200518-83371-15z468o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335826/original/file-20200518-83371-15z468o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335826/original/file-20200518-83371-15z468o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335826/original/file-20200518-83371-15z468o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335826/original/file-20200518-83371-15z468o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Esquerita could make Little Richard look tame by comparison.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/photo-of-esquerita-photo-by-michael-ochs-archives-getty-news-photo/74270366?adppopup=true">Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Reeder <a href="https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/1857-esquerita-and-the-voola">later suggested</a> that Little Richard’s trademark falsetto whoop was also inspired by his own approach to vocalization.</p>
<p>Eskew Reeder would eventually adopt the stage name of “Esquerita.” It was a phonetic pun on his own name in which we can also hear a winking homoerotic suggestion: “Esquire Eater”; a scatological joke: “Excreter”; and perhaps even a prescient tribute to queer theory: “Askew Reader.” </p>
<p>Esquerita didn’t release any recordings until 1958, more than three years after Little Richard achieved national stardom with “Tutti Frutti”; but Little Richard always acknowledged the original direction of influence.</p>
<p>Esquerita’s 1958 sessions convey a flamboyant wildness that exceeds even Richard’s most exuberant recordings. The almost indescribable B-side, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G5tqli-t7M">Esquerita and the Voola</a>,” is a case in point – a strange mixture of pseudo-classical piano riffing set to a booming floor-tom rhythm, over which Esquerita warbles like a pop-opera Valkyrie. </p>
<p>Today, “Esquerita and the Voola” stands as the missing link between barrelhouse boogie-woogie and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” – a vinyl slice of queer black cabaret that must have left most record company executives and radio DJs utterly baffled.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Esquerita and the Voola.’</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Bald-headed Sally</h2>
<p>In my view, it’s inconceivable that Little Richard would have recorded “Tutti Frutti” if not for these prior encounters. The song draws its manic energy from the queerest stops on the chitlin’ circuit. In fact, the original lyrics were a paean to the pleasures of anal sex:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Tutti Frutti, good booty,
If it don’t fit, don’t force it,
You can grease it, make it easy ...
</code></pre>
<p>Although Little Richard loved incorporating the song into his live shows – <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dTr_AgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q=tutti%20frutti%20good%20booty&f=false">according to him</a>, it used to “crack the crowds up” – he never imagined it could be a hit. </p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dTr_AgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q=dew%20drop%20inn&f=false">But one day in 1955</a>, he found himself in New Orleans at a recording session for Specialty Records with producer Bumps Blackwell. Blackwell hadn’t yet heard anything that excited him when they called it a day and headed across the street for dinner and drinks at The Dew Drop Inn. Liberated from the confines of the studio, Little Richard began to play the barroom piano in the uninhibited style of the clubs. Blackwell’s ears pricked up: This obscene, irresistibly driving number was just what he was looking for. </p>
<p>Pat Boone’s success with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auAK-PEEiW4">a bland cover</a> of “Tutti Frutti” is emblematic of <a href="https://innerself.com/content/social/culture-wars/14776-how-the-1950s-racism-helped-make-pat-boone-a-rock-star.html">the racial inequities of the 1950s music industry</a>. But once you know the origins of the song, the Christian crooner’s clinical and clueless take on Little Richard’s swingingly queer hymn becomes ironically piquant.</p>
<p>A similar frisson energizes the sublimely joyous “Long Tall Sally.” This time, Little Richard and Blackwell didn’t even feel the need to change the words. When Richard hollers in the second verse –</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Saw Uncle John
With bald-headed Sally,
He saw Aunt Mary comin’
And he jumped back in the alley ...
</code></pre>
<p>– even the most naïve listener must know that Uncle John is up to the best kind of no good. But as the scholar W. T. Lhamon Jr. observes in his underappreciated cultural history of the 1950s, “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Deliberate_Speed/LUkI_BRNOP0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=deliberate+speed&printsec=frontcover">Deliberate Speed</a>,” in the drag shows of Little Richard’s apprenticeship, “baldheadedness was preparation for one’s wigs.” So Long Tall Sally – one of the original rock ‘n’ roll bad girls – may also be a bit of a bad boy, while Uncle John may be working both sides of that alley. Today, we might even describe Sally as a seductively nonbinary object of queer desire.</p>
<p>Little Richard’s rock ‘n’ roll brought the margins to the center, and that was one reason why it mattered so much. It’s also another reason to mourn his loss – and to play his music loud.</p>
<p>[<em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=youresmart">You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138658/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ben Saunders does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Little Richard honed his craft as a teenage drag queen. In everything from his hairstyle to his lyrics, we see the influence of gay contemporaries like Esquerita and Billy Wright.
Ben Saunders, Professor of English, University of Oregon
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/138266
2020-05-11T11:03:53Z
2020-05-11T11:03:53Z
Little Richard’s scream kicked off rock'n'roll and still echoes today
<p>When British author Nik Cohn wrote one of the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GDqHDAAAQBAJ">earliest histories of rock in 1969</a>, his title was the ostensibly nonsensical Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. It was still instantly recognisable, and perfectly conveyed the sense of explosion at the birth of the genre. The phrase was originally coined, of course, by Little Richard – born Richard Wayne Penniman – who died on Saturday May 9 aged 87, and was indisputably one of the seminal rock'n'roll artists.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/852886?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">A host of factors</a> provided fertile soil for the emergence of rock'n'roll as a potent musical force. They included deregulation that allowed radio stations to mushroom across the US; the development of vinyl and the 45rpm record; and new transistor radios that were affordable and portable for the burgeoning teen market.</p>
<p>But a handful of figures at the centre of that mid-1950s musical ignition came to shape the sound of rock'n'roll, and the sensibility of rock for decades afterwards. Where Chuck Berry provided a link to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/chuck-berry-one-of-the-only-musicians-with-a-genuine-claim-to-be-the-founder-of-a-genre-74861">guitar lineages of blues and jazz</a>, along with a dash of urbanity, and Elvis Presley brought elements of country music and a saleable sex-appeal to the mass market, Little Richard infused the genre with a boisterous energy and raw unpredictability.</p>
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<p>As one of the progenitors, with Jerry Lee Lewis, of the piano as a rock instrument, he laid down a template for a relentless playing style. By <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nPmADwAAQBAJ&pg=PT72#v=onepage&q&f=false">evening out the beats</a> from the shuffle of the boogie-woogie piano that preceded it, he helped to define rock’s rhythm.</p>
<p>He also brought <em>volume</em> to the party. His raucous vocals, which could sail from a throaty roar into the upper registers, and pounding piano upped the voltage on the new music and imprinted a sense of urgency onto the rock'n'roll blueprint.</p>
<h2>Born again and again</h2>
<p>While his performing career lasted decades, Richard’s huge impact on popular music came primarily from a handful of singles in his 1950s heyday – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_C9q4tuwXI">Tutti Frutti</a>, Good Golly Miss Molly, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OfhmVmhL7s">Long Tall Sally</a> and Rip It Up among them. His music embodied his own personal contradictions and struggles. Having grown up in a deeply religious family and rebelled to embrace what was widely decried at the time as the “<a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980846">devil’s music</a>”, he rejected rock'n'roll at the end of the 1950s after seeing a vision of a fireball in the sky while on tour in Australia, became born-again, and returned to gospel music. (The fireball was, in fact, the first Sputnik satellite, launched in 1957.) </p>
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<p>He would bounce between a religious life and showbusiness thereafter. He returned to rock in the 1960s for a period, and toured successfully, with backing musicians including Jimi Hendrix. <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=X2drAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT12#v=onepage&q=%22richard%20had%20previously%20banned%22&f=false">He allegedly sacked</a> him after the younger man’s own flamboyant stagecraft threatened to steal the spotlight, although there were pay disputes involved as well. </p>
<p>Richard became an ordained minister in 1970, and in 1977 – after a series of albums that also <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlAtjRYvFIY&list=PLrYQ7Wsg956jVLqz-vZdxLp2dCnhOHnum">incorporated country rock and funk</a> – he returned to evangelical work, feeling impelled by a perilous lifestyle of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XlASUIlNfQ&feature=youtu.be&t=1090">drug addiction</a> to once again leave rock behind.</p>
<p>These contradictions were apparent throughout his career. A large factor in his early success, and lasting influence, was his introduction of androgyny and campness into rock and roll. With pencil moustache and pancake makeup, he took with him into the mainstream aspects of his act in the drag clubs of the early 1950s, <a href="https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article-abstract/46/1/161/759331">cleaning up the explicit lyrics for mass consumption</a>. </p>
<p>His bravura and sexually charged persona were of a piece with his music in making transgression and subversion of social norms a key ingredient in rock'n'roll’s recipe long before homosexuality or queer culture were accepted by conventional society. </p>
<p>But it came at a cost. Having been rejected by his father as a teenager – part of the spur for his entry into the entertainment world – he struggled with his sexuality, variously acknowledging himself as gay and “omnisexual” before vociferously denouncing “<a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7990551/richard-sexuality-religion-history">unnatural affections</a>” in his turn back to religion in later life.</p>
<h2>Enduring talent</h2>
<p>Richard had, nevertheless, pushed open doors that could not be shut. His deployment of an exuberance that was at odds with the standard sexual stereotypes of macho rock was a clear precursor for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTyOVzdCsuU&feature=youtu.be&t=96">Prince</a>, and a direct line can be traced from his vocal gymnastics and driving rhythm to the music of James Brown and Otis Redding.</p>
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<p>Despite his oscillating association with rock'n'roll, Richard remained in the public eye. He made guest appearances in the 1980s in Hollywood movies like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090966/">Down and Out in Beverley Hills</a>, on hit TV shows like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647104/">Miami Vice</a>, and on the records of the stars he had inspired well into the 1990s. He also maintained a successful touring career into the 2000s until ill-health curtailed his activities.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-lop-bam-boom-little-richards-saucy-style-underpins-todays-hits-138263">A-lop-bam-boom: Little Richard's saucy style underpins today's hits</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Having overcome poverty, racism and homophobia, Little Richard’s musical dynamism and theatrical originality shaped the defining characteristics of rock'n'roll. From <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3052732?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">The Beatles</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/MickJagger/status/1259159305657475073">the Rolling Stones</a>, to <a href="https://twitter.com/bobdylan/status/1259222882233745411">Bob Dylan</a> and Bruce Springsteen, his successors have universally acknowledged his influence. The opening salvo of Tutti Frutti and his fiery run of singles in the 1950s were a primal rock'n'roll scream that still echoes today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138266/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p>
Richard Wayne Penniman was one of a handful of pioneers who shaped the original rock and roll sound.
Adam Behr, Lecturer in Popular and Contemporary Music, Newcastle University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/130988
2020-02-13T14:14:08Z
2020-02-13T14:14:08Z
America’s postwar fling with romance comics
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315078/original/file-20200212-61912-op3vlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=125%2C52%2C1067%2C711&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">With over 100 issues, 'Young Love' was one of the longest running romance comics series. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gary Lee Watson Comic Book Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last year, comic book enthusiast <a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/582733/gary-watson-comic-collection-donated-university-south-carolina">Gary Watson</a> donated his massive personal collection to <a href="https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_libraries/browse/irvin_dept_special_collections/index.php">the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections</a> at the University of South Carolina. </p>
<p>As the <a href="https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_libraries/about/contact/faculty-staff/weisenburg_michael.php">reference and instruction librarian</a>, I’m tasked with getting to know the collection so I can exhibit parts of it and use the materials for teaching. One of the great pleasures of assessing and cataloging Watson’s collection has been learning about how comic books have changed over time. Sifting through Watson’s vast collection of 140,000-plus comics, I’m able to see the genre’s entire trajectory.</p>
<p>Before World War II, superheroes were all the rage. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/17/art-spiegelman-golden-age-superheroes-were-shaped-by-the-rise-of-fascism">Reflecting anxieties</a> over the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and the march to war, readers yearned for mythical figures who would defend the disenfranchised and uphold liberal democratic ideals.</p>
<p>Once the war ended, the content of comic books started to change. Superheroes gradually fell out of fashion and a proliferation of genres emerged. Some, such as <a href="http://www.powerhousebooks.com/books/golden-age-western-comics/">Westerns</a>, offered readers a nostalgic fantasy of a pre-industrial America. Others, like <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114164218">true crime</a> and <a href="https://www.outrightgeekery.com/2017/10/18/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-horror-comics-a-history/">horror</a>, hooked readers with their lurid tales, while <a href="https://comicsalliance.com/best-silver-age-sci-fi-covers-gallery/">science fiction comics</a> appealed to the wonders of technological advancement and trepidation about where it might lead us.</p>
<p>But there was also a brief period when the medium was dominated by the romance genre. </p>
<p>Grounded in artistic and narrative realism, romance comics were remarkably different from their superhero and sci-fi peers. While the post-war popularity of romance comics only lasted a few years, these love stories ended up actually having a strong influence on other genres.</p>
<h2>Romance comics’ origin story</h2>
<p>Though today they are most famous for creating “Captain America,” the creative duo of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=gUCgAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA46#v=onepage&q&f=false">launched the romance comic book genre in 1947</a> with the publication of a series called “Young Romance.” </p>
<p>Teen comedy series like “<a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/1/26/13149304/archie-comics-riverdale-evolution">Archie</a>” had been around for a few years and occasionally had romantic story lines and subplots. Romance pulps and true confession magazines had been around for decades. </p>
<p>But a comic dedicated to telling romantic stories hadn’t been done before. With the phrase “Designed for the More Adult Readers of Comics” <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Young_Romance_Issue_1.jpg">printed on the cover</a>, Simon and Kirby signaled a deliberate shift in expectations of what a comic could be. </p>
<p>While most scholars have argued that <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=9pPgDE63U9oC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA127#v=onepage&q&f=false">romance comics tend to reinforce conservative values</a> – making marriage the ultimate goal for women and placing family and middle-class stability on a pedestal – the real pleasure of reading these books came from the mildly scandalous behavior of their characters and the untoward plots that the narratives were ostensibly warning against. With titles like “I Was a Pick-Up!,” “The Farmer’s Wife” and “The Plight of the Suspicious Bridegroom,” “Young Romance” and its sister titles <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=9pPgDE63U9oC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&dq=Comic%20Book%20Nation%3A%20The%20Transformation%20of%20Youth%20Culture%20in%20America.&pg=PA128#v=onepage&q&f=false">quickly sold out of their original print runs</a> and began outselling other comics genres.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315088/original/file-20200212-61958-1y8dre8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315088/original/file-20200212-61958-1y8dre8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315088/original/file-20200212-61958-1y8dre8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315088/original/file-20200212-61958-1y8dre8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315088/original/file-20200212-61958-1y8dre8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315088/original/file-20200212-61958-1y8dre8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315088/original/file-20200212-61958-1y8dre8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315088/original/file-20200212-61958-1y8dre8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Issue #1 of ‘Teen-Age Romances’ (St. John, 1949).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gary Lee Watson Comic Book Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Other publishers noticed the popularity of the genre and followed suit with their own romance titles, most of which closely followed Simon and Kirby’s style and structure. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ndJ7BwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">By 1950</a>, about 1 in 5 of all comic books were romance comics, with almost 150 romance titles being sold by over 20 publishers.</p>
<p>The rage for all things romance was so sudden that publishers eager to take advantage of the new market altered titles and even content in order to save on <a href="https://www.comichron.com/faq/postalsalesdata.html">second-class postage permits</a>. Second-class or periodical postage is a reduced rate that publishers can use to save on the cost of mailing to recipients. Rather than apply for new permits every time they tested a new title, comics publishers would simply alter a failing title while retaining the issue numbering in order to keep using the preexisting permit. To comics historians, this is a telltale sign that the industry is undergoing a sudden change. </p>
<p>One striking example of this is when comics publisher Fawcett ended its failing superhero comic “<a href="https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=72086">Captain Midnight</a>” in 1948 with issue #67 and launched its new title, “<a href="https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=63254">Sweethearts</a>,” in issue #68. In this case, the death of a superhero comic became the birth of a romance comic. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315086/original/file-20200212-61912-e6lwjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315086/original/file-20200212-61912-e6lwjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315086/original/file-20200212-61912-e6lwjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315086/original/file-20200212-61912-e6lwjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315086/original/file-20200212-61912-e6lwjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=651&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315086/original/file-20200212-61912-e6lwjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=651&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315086/original/file-20200212-61912-e6lwjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=651&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Issue #3 of ‘Bride’s Romances’ (Quality Comics, 1953).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gary Lee Watson Comic Book Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With so many new titles flooding newsstands and department stores, the bubble was bound to burst. In what comic book historian Michelle Nolan <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ndJ7BwAAQBAJ&lpg=PR4&ots=e23lp1L4DI&dq=Nolan%2C%20Michelle%20(2008).%20Love%20on%20the%20Racks%3A%20A%20History%20of%20American%20Romance%20Comics.%20McFarland%20%26%20Company%2C%20Inc.&pg=PA62#v=onepage&q&f=false">has dubbed</a> “the love glut,” 1950 and 1951 witnessed a rapid boom and bust of the romance genre. Many romance titles were canceled by the mid-1950s, even as stalwarts of the genre, such as “Young Romance,” remained in print into the mid-1970s. </p>
<p>There was the brief popularity of the sub-genre of gothic romance comics in the 1970s – series with names like “The Sinister House of Secret Love” and “The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love.” But romance comics would never approach their brief, postwar peak.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315111/original/file-20200212-61966-vvwu6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315111/original/file-20200212-61966-vvwu6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315111/original/file-20200212-61966-vvwu6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315111/original/file-20200212-61966-vvwu6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315111/original/file-20200212-61966-vvwu6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=696&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315111/original/file-20200212-61966-vvwu6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=696&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315111/original/file-20200212-61966-vvwu6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=696&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gothic romances – like this issue of ‘The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love’ – had a brief run in the 1970s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gary Lee Watson Comic Book Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A brief boom, an enduring influence</h2>
<p>Among collectors, issues of romance comics are less sought after than those of other genres. For this reason, they tend to go under the radar.</p>
<p>Romance comics, however, featured work by pioneering artists like <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/real-life-comic-book-superhero-74267">Lily Renée</a> and <a href="https://www.twomorrows.com/media/MattBakerPreview.pdf">Matt Baker</a>, both of whom worked on first issue of “Teen-Age Romances” in 1949. </p>
<p>Baker is the first-known black artist to work in the comic book industry and Renée was one of comics’ first female artists. Prior to working on “Teen-Age Romances,” they both drew “<a href="https://www.goodgirlcomics.com/good-girl-history/">good girl art</a>” – a set of artistic tropes borrowed from pinups and pulp magazines – for several titles. Their work in both genres exemplifies how earlier pulp magazine themes of desire and seduction could readily be applied to newer genres. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315090/original/file-20200212-61912-w4chvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315090/original/file-20200212-61912-w4chvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315090/original/file-20200212-61912-w4chvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315090/original/file-20200212-61912-w4chvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315090/original/file-20200212-61912-w4chvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315090/original/file-20200212-61912-w4chvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315090/original/file-20200212-61912-w4chvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315090/original/file-20200212-61912-w4chvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘But He’s the Boy I Love’ was one of the few romance comic to feature black characters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gary Lee Watson Comic Book Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After the “love glut,” sub-genre mashups nonetheless emerged. For example, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ndJ7BwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA86#v=onepage&q&f=false">cowboy romances</a> were briefly popular. Later, in response to the civil rights movement, Marvel published the 1970 story “<a href="https://truelovecomicstales.blogspot.com/2016/02/our-love-story-but-hes-boy-i-love.html">But He’s the Boy I Love</a>,” which was the first story in a romance comic to feature African-American characters since Fawcett’s three-issue run of “<a href="https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=360151">Negro Romance</a>” in 1950. </p>
<p>Even after romance comics largely fell out of fashion, the genre’s visual tropes and narrative themes became more prevalent during what’s known as the “<a href="https://www.cosmiccomics.vegas/latest-news/the-history-of-silver-age-comic-books/">Silver Age</a>,” a superhero revival that lasted from 1956 to 1970. Titles such as “Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane” often borrowed heavily from romance for their plots to generate intrigue and tension in the hopes of driving up sales. </p>
<p>Issue 89, in which Lois marries Bruce Wayne, is a prime example of such marketing techniques. Issues such as these were often situated as “what if” narratives that offered readers speculative story lines, such as “What if Lois Lane married Bruce Wayne?” Though they’re generally thought of as separate from the superhero canon, these love stories show that comic book writers had internalized the main narrative techniques of romance comics even if the genre itself was in decline. </p>
<p>But other comics didn’t merely use romantic themes for the occasional gimmick issue. Instead, they made the love lives of their characters a central plot point and a fundamental aspect of their characters’ identities. Comics such as the “Fantastic Four” and the “X-Men” rely heavily on the heated emotions and jealousies found in group dynamics and love triangles.</p>
<p>Take Wolverine. Presumably tough and stoic, he’s so enamored of Jean Grey – and so envious of her love interest, Scott Summers – that you could argue that unrequited love is one of his primary motivations throughout the series.</p>
<p>Thanks to romance comics, even stoic superheroes got bitten by the love bug.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael C. Weisenburg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
During the ‘love glut,’ roughly 1 in 5 of all comic books were romance comics, as publishers scrambled to appease readers’ appetites for scandalous storylines.
Michael C. Weisenburg, Reference & Instruction Librarian at Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections, University of South Carolina
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/119722
2019-07-31T11:41:48Z
2019-07-31T11:41:48Z
How organized labor can reverse decades of decline
<p>Collective bargaining has long been one of organized labor’s most attractive selling points. </p>
<p>In its simplest form, collective bargaining involves an organized body of employees negotiating wages and other conditions of employment. In other words, unions are saying: Join us, and we’ll bargain with your boss for better pay.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, traditional collective bargaining is no longer an effective strategy for labor union growth. That’s because <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/bp235/">employers</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-americas-labor-unions-are-about-to-die-69575">many states</a> have made it incredibly hard for workers to form a union, which is necessary for workers to bargain collectively. </p>
<p><a href="https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-tactics-media-unions-are-using-to-build-membership">My own research</a> suggests unions should pursue alternative ways to organize, such as by focusing on more forceful worker advocacy and offering benefits like health care. Doing so would help unions swell in size, putting them in a stronger position to secure and defend the collective bargaining rights that <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-us-labor-unions-and-why-they-still-matter-38263">helped build America’s middle class</a>.</p>
<h2>Why unions still matter</h2>
<p>Unions <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/37157281_Union_Membership_Trends_in_the_United_States">reached their pinnacle</a> in the mid-1950s when a third of American workers belonged to one. Today, <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t01.htm">that figure stands at</a> just 10.5%.</p>
<p>A big part of the problem is that employers have used heavy-handed <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/bp235/">legal and managerial tactics</a> to block organizing and the elections necessary to form a union. And <a href="https://employment.findlaw.com/wages-and-benefits/what-are-right-to-work-laws.html">more than half of U.S. states</a> have passed so-called right to work laws, which allow workers at a unionized company to avoid paying dues. </p>
<p>The stakes of this challenge are high – not just for unions but for most workers in the U.S. That’s because weaker <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/">unions correlate</a> with lower wages, reduced benefits and greater economic inequality. </p>
<p>Millions stand to gain from a strengthened labor movement, from <a href="https://workersolidarity.net/2019/05/15/uber-stock-sales-flop-as-global-rideshare-workers-strike/">Uber and Lyft drivers</a> in the gig economy to low-wage employees in retail and hospitality. And surveys show nearly half of nonunion workers in the U.S. <a href="https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/a-new-survey-takes-pulse-worker-voice-america">say they would join one</a> if they could. </p>
<p>I believe there are three models traditional unions could pursue to add members without relying on workplace certification and collective bargaining. </p>
<h2>Advocating for workers</h2>
<p>One approach is to build on the success of worker advocacy groups like <a href="https://fightfor15.org/">Fight for $15</a> and the <a href="https://www.domesticworkers.org/">National Domestic Workers Alliance</a>. </p>
<p>Fight for $15, for example, played a leading role advocating increases in the minimum wage in several states, most recently <a href="https://fightfor15.org/connecticut-victory/">Connecticut</a>, while the National Domestic Workers Alliance <a href="https://www.domesticworkers.org/bill-of-rights/new-york">helped secure the passage</a> of the domestic workers bill of rights in New York.</p>
<p>What they all have in common is that they engage in protests and strikes to call public attention to the plight of exploited workers while advocating for economic and social justice. Unions, which used to engage in more of this kind of activism, need to recapture some of that militant spirit. </p>
<h2>Establishing minimum standards</h2>
<p>A second model involves pushing employers to agree to a minimum set of standards for benefits and pay to provide workers.</p>
<p>The Writers Guild of America, which represent screenwriters and others in television, theater and Hollywood, exemplify this model. For example, they establish <a href="https://www.wgaeast.org/guild-contracts/mba/">minimum levels of compensation</a> for specific jobs and duties and then require members – both employers and workers – to adhere to them. It’s a collective bargaining agreement with a potentially much wider reach. </p>
<p>That’s because these agreements are negotiated with employers but also cover independent contractors who sign on as well. Their strength comes from the aggressive organizing and advocacy plus the strategic importance of the workers they represent, which puts pressure on employers to take part and meet the minimum standards.</p>
<p>Other unions could expand this approach to encourage workers throughout industries that have little or no labor representation to join their ranks as affiliated members, which should pressure employers to follow suit.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286319/original/file-20190730-186814-c6metd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286319/original/file-20190730-186814-c6metd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286319/original/file-20190730-186814-c6metd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286319/original/file-20190730-186814-c6metd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286319/original/file-20190730-186814-c6metd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286319/original/file-20190730-186814-c6metd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286319/original/file-20190730-186814-c6metd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Unions peaked in the 1950s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-A-NJ-USA-APHS384972-Labor-Unions-Unit-/4f3c09caec404b409dec31cc37b982eb/153/0">AP Photo/Sam Myers</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Unions with benefits</h2>
<p>Another approach involves focusing on offering special benefits to independent workers in exchange for fees. </p>
<p>Some labor groups already do this, but the workers would benefit from unions combining their collective power to offer more heavily discounted goods and services, such as health care, disability benefits and legal representation.</p>
<p>For example, although the 375,000-strong <a href="https://www.freelancersunion.org/">Freelancers Union</a> can’t negotiate over pay, it offers independent contractors these sorts of discounted benefits. Instead of charging dues, it charges fees for its benefits, essentially operating as its own insurance company. It also advocates for public policy changes that safeguard freelancers from exploitation, such as New York’s <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/nyc-passes-law-forcing-employers-pay-freelancers-time-article-1.2847980">Freelance Wage Protection Act of 2010</a>. </p>
<p>This model is probably the approach most likely to succeed in attracting large numbers of new members. The growing gig economy and low-wage industries like fast food are two areas that could receive benefits from these types of collective entities.</p>
<h2>The endgame</h2>
<p>Ideally, unions would embrace all three of these models, offering discounted benefits to any worker interested in signing on, fighting for minimum standards across industries and putting worker advocacy front and center. By broadening the ways in which workers can join and what they offer, unions will become stronger and closer to the people and communities that they are meant to represent. </p>
<p>But by no means are these models meant to supplant organized labor’s traditional collective bargaining role. My point is that unions should break the straightjacket fixation on traditional bargaining and use alternative models as intermediate steps to the ultimate goal of unionizing more workplaces in order to negotiate collective bargaining agreements on behalf of workers. </p>
<p>To get there, though, unions must mobilize a critical mass of workers. Only then will they break the dynamic of labor’s decline.</p>
<p>[ <em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119722/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marick Masters receives funding from various government and nonprofit organizations and is a senior partner with AIM Consulting. </span></em></p>
Unions should move their focus away from traditional collective bargaining and instead embrace new ways to attract new members, such as by offering discounted benefits and engaging in more advocacy.
Marick Masters, Professor of Business and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Wayne State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/103668
2018-12-12T11:42:02Z
2018-12-12T11:42:02Z
How stereo was first sold to a skeptical public
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250050/original/file-20181211-76980-1lfiyac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Record companies released stereo demonstration albums that showcased how sound could move from left to right, creating a sense of movement.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">From the collection of Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When we hear the word “stereo” today, we might simply think of a sound system, as in “turn on the stereo.” </p>
<p>But stereo actually is a specific technology, like video streaming or the latest espresso maker. </p>
<p>Sixty years ago, it was introduced for the first time. </p>
<p>Whenever a new technology comes along – whether it’s Bluetooth, high-definition TV or Wi-Fi – it needs to be explained, packaged and promoted to customers who are happy with their current products.</p>
<p>Stereo was no different. As we explore in our recent book, “<a href="https://www.designedforhifiliving.com/">Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America</a>,” stereo needed to be sold to skeptical consumers. This process involved capturing the attention of a public fascinated by space-age technology using cutting-edge graphic design, in-store sound trials and special stereo demonstration records.</p>
<h2>The rise of ‘hi-fi’ sound</h2>
<p>In 1877, Thomas Edison <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-sound-recordings/history-of-the-cylinder-phonograph/">introduced the phonograph</a>, the first machine that could reproduce recorded sound. Edison used wax cylinders to capture sound and recorded discs became popular in the early 20th century. </p>
<p>By the 1950s, record players, as they came to be called, had become a mainstay of many American living rooms. These were “mono,” or one-channel, music systems. With mono, all sounds and instruments were mixed together. Everything was delivered through one speaker.</p>
<p>Stereophonic sound, or stereo, was an important advance in sound reproduction. Stereo introduced two-channel sound, which separated out elements of the total sound landscape and changed the experience of listening.</p>
<p>Audio engineers had sought to improve the quality of recorded sound in their quest for “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/high-fidelity-sound-system">high fidelity</a>” recordings that more faithfully reproduced live sound. Stereo technology recorded sound and played it back in a way that more closely mimicked how humans actually hear the world around them.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250041/original/file-20181211-76971-99ugt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250041/original/file-20181211-76971-99ugt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250041/original/file-20181211-76971-99ugt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250041/original/file-20181211-76971-99ugt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250041/original/file-20181211-76971-99ugt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250041/original/file-20181211-76971-99ugt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1028&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250041/original/file-20181211-76971-99ugt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1028&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250041/original/file-20181211-76971-99ugt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1028&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A graphic detail, from an RCA inner sleeve, shows listeners how new stereo technology operates.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">From the collection of Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>British engineer <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/06/19/little-known-inventor-stereo-crucial-wwii-radar-honoured-film/">Alan Dower Blumlein</a> paved the way for two channel recording in the 1930s. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that stereo technology was incorporated into movie theaters, radios and television sets. </p>
<p>With stereo, the sound of some instruments could come from the left speaker, the sound of others from the right, imitating the setup of a concert orchestra. It also was possible to shift a particular sound from left to right or right to left, creating a sense of movement. </p>
<p>Although Audio-Fidelity Records offered a limited edition stereo record for industry use in 1957, consumers needed to wait until 1958 for recordings with stereo sound to become widely available for the home. </p>
<h2>A sonic ‘arms race’ to sell the sound</h2>
<p>When stereo records were introduced to the mass market, a “sonic arms race” was on. Stereo was aggressively promoted as the latest technological advancement that brought sophisticated sound reproduction to everyone. </p>
<p>Each of the era’s major record labels started pushing stereo sound. Companies like Columbia, Mercury and RCA, which sold both stereo equipment and stereo records, moved to convince consumers that stereo’s superior qualities were worth further investment. </p>
<p>A key challenge for selling stereo was consumers’ satisfaction with the mono music systems they already owned. After all, adopting stereo meant you needed to buy a new record player, speakers and a stereo amplifier.</p>
<p>Something was needed to show people that this new technology was worth the investment. The “stereo demonstration” was born – a mix of videos, print ads and records designed to showcase the new technology and its vibrant sound.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MVQ0mhxBuf4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Record companies were convinced the public simply needed to be exposed to the new technology to be sold on it.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Stereo demonstration records showed off the innovative qualities of a new stereo system, with tracks for “balancing signals” or doing “speaker-response checks.” They often included compelling, detailed instructional notes to explain the new stereo sound experience. </p>
<p>Stereo’s potential and potency stormed retail showrooms and living rooms. </p>
<p>Curious shoppers could hear trains chugging from left to right, wow at the roar of passing war planes, and catch children’s energetic voices as they dashed across playgrounds. Capitol Records released “The Stereo Disc,” which featured “day in the life” ambient sounds such as “Bowling Alley” and “New Year’s Eve at Times Square” to transport the listener out of the home and into the action.</p>
<p>A particularly entertaining example of the stereo demonstration record is RCA Victor’s “Sounds in Space.” Appearing a year after <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sputnik-launched">the successful launch of the Soviet’s Sputnik satellite in 1957</a>, this classic album played into Americans’ growing interest in the space race raging between the two superpowers.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250046/original/file-20181211-76962-2a3ni1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250046/original/file-20181211-76962-2a3ni1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250046/original/file-20181211-76962-2a3ni1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250046/original/file-20181211-76962-2a3ni1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250046/original/file-20181211-76962-2a3ni1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250046/original/file-20181211-76962-2a3ni1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250046/original/file-20181211-76962-2a3ni1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250046/original/file-20181211-76962-2a3ni1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">RCA Victor’s ‘Sounds in Space’ demonstration album.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">From the collection of Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“The age of space is here,” the record begins, “and now RCA Victor brings you ‘Sounds in Space.’” Narrator Ken Nordine’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ_4UztvbnE">charismatic commentary</a> explains stereophonic sound as his voice “travels” from one speaker channel to another, by the “the miracle of RCA stereophonic sound.”</p>
<p>Record companies also released spectacular stereo recordings of classical music. </p>
<p>Listening at home began to reproduce the feeling of hearing music live in the concert hall, with stereo enhancing the soaring arias of Wagner’s operas and the explosive thundering cannons of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” </p>
<p>Today, rousing orchestral works from the early stereo era, such as <a href="https://csosoundsandstories.org/at-60-rca-victors-living-stereo-imprint-still-going-strong/">RCA Victor’s “Living Stereo” albums from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra</a>, are considered some of the finest achievements of recorded sound.</p>
<h2>Visualizing stereo</h2>
<p>Stereo demonstration records, in particular, featured attractive, modern graphic design. Striking, often colorful, lettering boasted titles such as “Stereorama,” “360 Sound” and “Sound in the Round.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240736/original/file-20181016-165900-1vgn9v1.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240736/original/file-20181016-165900-1vgn9v1.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240736/original/file-20181016-165900-1vgn9v1.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=232&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240736/original/file-20181016-165900-1vgn9v1.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=232&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240736/original/file-20181016-165900-1vgn9v1.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=232&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240736/original/file-20181016-165900-1vgn9v1.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240736/original/file-20181016-165900-1vgn9v1.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240736/original/file-20181016-165900-1vgn9v1.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An Epic Records demonstration album cover features a rainbow of sound.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Collection of Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some stereo demonstration records focused on the listening experience. The ecstatic blond woman on the cover of Warner Bros. Records’ “How to Get the Most Out of Your Stereo” sports a stethoscope and seems thrilled to hear the new stereo sound. World Pacific Records “Something for Both Ears!” offers a glamorous model with an ear horn in each ear, mimicking the stereo effect.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250048/original/file-20181211-76959-4ln59y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250048/original/file-20181211-76959-4ln59y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250048/original/file-20181211-76959-4ln59y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=196&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250048/original/file-20181211-76959-4ln59y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=196&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250048/original/file-20181211-76959-4ln59y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=196&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250048/original/file-20181211-76959-4ln59y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=247&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250048/original/file-20181211-76959-4ln59y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=247&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250048/original/file-20181211-76959-4ln59y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=247&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Record companies tried to hook listeners with demonstration records featuring vivid graphics.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">From the collection of Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These eye-catching design elements became an important part of the record companies’ visual branding. All were deployed to grab the attention of customers and help them visualize how stereo worked. Now they’ve become celebrated examples of midcentury album cover art.</p>
<p>By the late 1960s, stereo dominated sound reproduction, and album covers no longer needed to indicate “stereo” or “360 Sound.” Consumers simply assumed that they were buying a stereo record. </p>
<p>Today, listeners can enjoy multiple channels with surround sound by purchasing several speakers for their music and home theater systems. But stereo remains a basic element of sound reproduction. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/how-digital-technology-spawned-retros-revival-54302">As vinyl has enjoyed a surprising comeback lately</a>, midcentury stereo demonstration records are enjoying new life as retro icons – appreciated as both a window into a golden age of emerging sound technology and an icon of modern graphic design.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103668/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Sixty years ago, stereo promised to forever change the way people listened to music. But how could record companies convince customers to buy a new record player, speakers and amplifier?
Jonathan Schroeder, William A. Kern Professor in Communications, Rochester Institute of Technology
Janet Borgerson, Senior Wicklander Fellow at the Insitute for Business and Professional Ethics, DePaul University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/84853
2017-09-29T14:26:10Z
2017-09-29T14:26:10Z
How Hugh Hefner’s world helped Donald Trump get into the White House
<p>Hugh Hefner, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/sep/28/hugh-hefner-founder-of-playboy-magazine-dies-aged-91">who has died</a> at the age of 91, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/sep/28/hugh-hefner-obituary">considered himself</a> the luckiest man on the planet. And with his silk pyjamas, bunny girls and private jets, he managed to have quite an impact on the modern world. </p>
<p>As the founder of Playboy magazine, he revolutionised the imagery of heterosexuality in popular culture, changing people’s bedroom and courtship habits in the process. He may even have influenced the path of modern American politics.</p>
<p>Hefner launched Playboy in the early 1950s, when the norm of American popular culture was depicted by images of wholesome families in the home by the likes of <a href="https://www.nrm.org/collections-2/art-norman-rockwell/">illustrator Norman Rockwell</a>. It was a period when American society was experiencing <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Powers-t.html?mcubz=0">waves of moral panic</a> over the corrupting influence of comic books on youth. </p>
<p>But while Disney was producing <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047757/">The Mickey Mouse Club</a> on television, Hefner was taking young women barely a few years older than its star <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002088/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm">Annette Funicello</a>, and publishing pictures of them, scantily-clad, in his magazine. </p>
<p>With Playboy, Hefner legitimised the kind of photographic depiction of female nudity that had previously been the remit of privately viewed postcards or pinups in men’s locker rooms. All of a sudden, however much social conservatives and cultural critics frowned, nude women were on display in a mainstream magazine. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188161/original/file-20170929-19823-1sqf8qg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188161/original/file-20170929-19823-1sqf8qg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188161/original/file-20170929-19823-1sqf8qg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188161/original/file-20170929-19823-1sqf8qg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188161/original/file-20170929-19823-1sqf8qg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188161/original/file-20170929-19823-1sqf8qg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188161/original/file-20170929-19823-1sqf8qg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hanging out with Hugh.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/hollywood-august-18-holly-madison-hugh-130539233?src=K_cZLUyipfoEX8slpEOkdQ-1-20">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The 1950s was a decade of resurgent social conservatism in the US. The government partnered up with the business world to shepherd the population back into the home from World War II and industrial assembly lines. Returning soldiers were supposed to marry their sweethearts, go to college, move with their families to the newly built suburbs and commute to work by train or in the new family car. </p>
<p>Yet even at the height of this new “normalcy”, voices in the mainstream were expressing doubts about the impact of conformity on the soul of the population. Novels like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview26">Revolutionary Road</a> depicted couples trapped in the new middle-class existence. Books including <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/yelp-and-the-wisdom-of-the-lonely-crowd">The Lonely Crowd</a> and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-the-organization-man-can-tell-us-about-inequality-today">The Organization Man</a> were critical of a uniformity that threatened to make people automatons and emasculate men. </p>
<p>On screen, films such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048545/">Rebel Without a Cause</a> grappled with the panic over juvenile delinquency – suburban teenagers full of drive (sexual and otherwise), but no direction, rebelling against any and all social authority.</p>
<p>It was from this mainstream conformity that Playboy promised to help men break away. As scholars such as <a href="http://barbaraehrenreich.com/barbara-ehrenreich-bio/">Barbara Ehrenreich</a> have pointed out, Hefner sold social rebellion packaged in business culture – the life of an eternal bachelor, who can wine and dine women and take them to bed, but drop them like a hot potato if the word “marriage” is even mentioned. </p>
<p>Hefner empowered men to cast aside the millstones of being a grown-up, and behave like boys in adult bodies – with adult sex drives. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"913240335358111744"}"></div></p>
<p>Hefner and his magazine created aspirations for American men which involved a radical switch from the earlier social customs of committed courtship or “going steady”. They embraced a culture of men dating freely – and not even exclusively. Playboy was selling the James Bond lifestyle to middle-class men. </p>
<p>Emboldened by the increasing availability of female contraception, men bought not only Playboy, but also the products advertised in it. They spent their money on bachelor pads, stereo systems, high-end kitchen equipment – all in a bid to practice what Hefner preached. </p>
<h2>Naked ambition</h2>
<p>But aside from the material side of things, the millionaire publisher saw himself as a social activist. It is true that he championed freedom from censorship. Hefner also hired African-American comedian and activist Dick Gregory <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hugh-hefner-gave-dick-gregory-his-big-break-1043953">to work at his club</a> in 1961, in the midst of civil rights tensions across America. </p>
<p>Earlier, in 1955, his magazine included a satirical science fiction story, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/09/28/for-hugh-hefner-gay-rights-were-part-of-the-sexual-revolution/?utm_term=.85a5843322cf">The Crooked Man, by Charles Beaumont</a> about heterosexual men being persecuted in a homosexual society. Justifying its controversial publication Hefner wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society, then the reverse was wrong too.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet Playboy also depicted women only as sexual toys for men or as “gold diggers” – busy laying the marital trap that should be avoided by single men at all costs. </p>
<p>Hefner may have also promoted the kind of persona that helped carry Donald Trump to the White House. In 1983, the owner of Playboy’s magazine rival Hustler, Larry Flynt, <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/qkbzjx/larry-flynt-profile-2016">ran for president</a> as a libertarian candidate. He was not a major contender, but the straight-talking alpha male has become a familiar feature of political office – think California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, or <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001818/">Jesse Ventura</a> in Minnesota. </p>
<p>Donald Trump socialised with Hefner, appeared on a front cover of Playboy magazine, and was the subject of interviews in its pages. </p>
<p>With his regular and showy involvement in the beauty pageant industry, Trump was clearly a “Hefnerite” entrepreneur. The 45th president’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html?utm_term=.d17714b670d4">words about women</a>, privately and publicly, may have actually endeared him to some male voters as someone who “tells it like it is”. He is presented as someone who speaks his mind like a “real man” – not caring a whit about offending progressive sensibilities. </p>
<p>These male voters may have felt “oppressed” by political correctness as much as Hefner’s followers felt trampled by the imperative to marry. The Trump brand may be even more brash than Playboy – but there is much of Hefner in it. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/playboy-magazines-return-to-nudity-is-a-naked-bid-to-cover-up-its-irrelevance-73179">Playboy magazine's return to nudity is a naked bid to cover up its irrelevance</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84853/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gyorgy Toth 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>
He changed how we see women, sex, and politicians.
Gyorgy Toth, Lecturer, Post-1945 US History and Transatlantic Relations, University of Stirling
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/70917
2017-01-12T13:19:23Z
2017-01-12T13:19:23Z
Music has the power to rock the state, but youth movements will find the state always bites back
<p>Among records recently released to the National Archives is a file from the 1980s entitled “<a href="https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2016/12/31/policing-acid-house-parties-in-1989-what-the-new-thatcher-government-papers-reveal/">Acid house parties</a>” which details the government’s disquiet over the growing phenomenon of raves, the large, open-air dance events in which thousands of young people, guided by organisers using new technologies such as pagers and mobile phones, descended upon fields to party. </p>
<p>The response was a series of laws imposing strict conditions and harsh penalties, with the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/V/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves">Criminal Justice Act 1994</a> infamously outlawing music “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jul/21/criminal-justice-bill-protests">characterised by a series of repetitive beats</a>”. While many at the time may have felt immediate action was required to prevent the collapse of civilisation as we knew it, in fact this was merely the latest in a long line of moral panics over popular music through the 20th century. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/01/unspeakable-jazz-must-go-strong-opinions-impact-jazz-american-culture-1921/">cultural mixing pot of jazz</a>, and even traditional music and ballads or bawdy songs in music halls had at some point caused anxiety among the powers that be. But it was during the rock’n’roll era that this process of music putting the fear into the state was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xgx4k83zzc">turned up to 11</a>.</p>
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<h2>Slash the seats</h2>
<p>Even before the arrival of Elvis Presley’s gyrating pelvis, fears about rock’n’roll were brewing from the transgressive collision of Afro-American rhythm and blues, white youths, and sex – all during the fraught racial politics of 1950s America. Crossing cultural boundaries and national borders, rock’n’roll became a global phenomenon, with fears for the youth of the day gripping almost every nation. The United Nations even <a href="https://www.unodc.org/congress/en/previous/previous-02.html">convened a special conference</a> in London in 1960 to discuss the problem of juvenile delinquency.</p>
<p>In Britain, the arrival of rock’n’roll in 1955 collided with a pre-existing panic over the Teddy Boy youth movement, sparked by a notorious gang-related murder in Clapham in 1953. The Teds embraced the new music and the press was filled with reports of Teds slashing cinema seats while dancing to Bill Haley and the Comets’ “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgdufzXvjqw">Rock Around the Clock</a>” from the closing credits of Blackboard Jungle – an American movie about, ironically, juvenile delinquents.</p>
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<p>But rock’n’roll cleaned up – Elvis joined the army, and squeaky clean crooners and apostate rockers like Cliff Richard took the edge off pop music. The next moral panic came with the <a href="http://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1125&context=libraries_facpub">British Beat boom</a> in 1964, when <a href="http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_real_quadrophenia_mods_vs._rockers_fight_on_the_beaches">running battles broke out between mods and rockers</a> in seaside towns. Rockers were the descendants of the Teds, who had abandoned Edwardian frock coats for leather jackets. The mods were associated with bands like The Who, The Yardbirds and the Small Faces, with a sharp dress sense favouring suits, a clear collective identity, and an often undeserved reputation for misbehaviour. </p>
<p>The out-of-touch Conservative government under Alec Douglas-Home passed in 1964 The Malicious Damages Act and The Misuse of Drugs Act, banning the amphetamines that it was claimed fuelled the mod scene. This was the first time an explicit association was made between narcotics and pop music subcultures. From now on, the two would regularly be grouped together. </p>
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<h2>Busted</h2>
<p>Fifty years ago this year, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/10/newsid_2522000/2522735.stm">police raided the home</a> of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and arrested him, singer Mick Jagger and gallery owner Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser. The trial was a global media event, not least for the behaviour of the judge at the trial who constantly chided and condemned the “petty morals” of the band before jailing them.</p>
<p>The response to the convictions was extraordinary. As well as the expected vocal protests of Rolling Stones fans, the editor of The Times – an “establishment” newspaper – published an incendiary editorial, <a href="https://www.iorr.org/talk/read.php?1,1755802,1756208">Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?</a>, attacking the judge for seeking to make examples of the two bandmates. Ultimately Jagger and Richards successfully appealed against their sentences, although clearing his name was a Pyrrhic victory for Richards, in the light of his subsequent life dogged by heroin addiction and many brushes with the law. </p>
<p>A cascade of music celebrity raids followed, and by 1967 a backlash had emerged against youth counter-cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, with the likes of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/763998.stm">Mary Whitehouse campaigning for a return to “traditional values”</a>. Medical and psychiatric professionals added their voices to those of the reactionaries, as there were legitimate concerns about the proliferation of drugs: 1967 was the first “<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/07/lsd-drugs-summer-of-love-sixties">Summer of Love</a>”, when the music and art of the era was laced with LSD. Although not all favoured prohibition there was clear evidence of harm that had to be addressed.</p>
<p>Questions linger over the establishment’s targeting of groups such as the Beatles and the Stones, and others such as Jimi Hendrix. The press almost certainly tipped off the police over drug use at Richards’ home, and there is evidence of <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1323236/The-Acid-King-confesses-Rolling-Stones-drug-bust-set-MI5-FBI.html">police collusion with the media</a>. And the establishment itself was not innocent: the Metropolitan Police’s drugs squad later had to be gutted of corrupt policemen after it was discovered that <a href="https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/the-fall-of-scotland-yard/">senior officers had committed perjury</a> to defend a known drugs dealer. Were pop stars targeted to deflect attention from serious criminals who had the police in their back pocket?</p>
<h2>The moral minority</h2>
<p>Sometimes the problem was not drugs but obscenity. Even if it seems absurd today, The Beatles song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19sAewJH22I">I am the Walrus</a> was struck from BBC playlists due to the lyric: “Boy you have been a naughty girl and let your knickers down”, while The Sex Pistols were forced to argue the precise meaning of the word “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/vb8c/">bollocks</a>” in court. Elsewhere, anarcho-punks The Anti-Nowhere League and Crass also <a href="http://www.nme.com/photos/the-songs-they-tried-to-ban-1413829">found themselves in the dock for the use of obscene language</a>. </p>
<p>The most notorious attacks on popular music on grounds of obscenity was undoubtedly the <a href="http://europe.newsweek.com/oral-history-tipper-gores-war-explicit-rock-lyrics-dee-snider-333304?rm=eu">Parents Music Resource Center</a> in the US during the 1980s, who demanded warnings on record sleeves alerting parents to explicit lyrical content. Their list of what they regarded as the most egregious examples of obscenity, known as the “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/pmrcs-filthy-15-where-are-they-now-20150917">filthy fifteen</a>”, contains both heavy rockers and comparatively tame pop acts.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The result of a congressional enquiry was an agreement by the Recording Industry Association of America and manufacturers to add the now iconic “Parental Discretion Advised” sticker on certain records. Not only did this often act as an incentive to adolescent purchasers rather than a warning, but there is significant evidence that the industry agreed not as a sop to the moral lobby but <a href="http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=younghistorians">in return for a levy on blank cassette tapes</a>, ensuring the industry could profit from the practice of home taping records. </p>
<h2>Folk devils</h2>
<p>Sometimes it was not the musicians but their fans that worried the authorities. The skinhead, punk, rasta and raver scenes have all been viewed as, <a href="http://www.underground-england.co.uk/news/mods-v-rockers-traditional-english-seaside-entertainment-2/">in the words of the sociologist Stanley Cohen</a>, “<a href="https://infodocks.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/stanley_cohen_folk_devils_and_moral_panics.pdf">folk devils</a>”: those who seemed to champion disorder. Authorities struggled with the question of whether bands are responsible for the actions of their fans. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cYApo2d8o_A?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Two famous cases from the 1980s saw heavy metal legends Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest blamed for the suicides of several fans. It was claimed that Judas Priest had inserted a subliminal message into the track <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqAPVB4u9Zs">Better you than me</a>, and that Ozzy’s track <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UoPYv0Kq-0">Suicide solution</a> was an incitement to suicide – something Osbourne denied. Both court cases failed, but raised important questions about the relationship between fans and bands. Even after the end of the conservative-dominated 1980s, the 1997 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6moDcEkSnY">blamed on Marilyn Manson’s music</a> in much the same way.</p>
<p>The last decades of the 20th century were the high tide of moral panics over popular music, with almost every development in musical subcultures generating unease and outright hostility from the authorities, morality campaigners, and opportunistic newspapers editors looking for the next trend to decry and sensationalise. </p>
<p>In recent years the potential for music to shock or generate controversy seems to have lessened. Even members of boyband <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2637722/ONE-DIRECTION-EXCLUSIVE-Joint-lit-Happy-days-Watch-Zayn-Malik-Louis-Tomlinson-smoke-roll-cigarette-joke-marijuana-way-tour-concert.html">One Direction escaped largely unscathed</a> from tabloid exposure about recreational drug use, which a generation earlier had <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/friday_review/story/0,3605,461173,00.html">ended the careers of the likes of East 17</a>. </p>
<p>Certainly, there is greater toleration or acceptance of the harder edges of musical cultures. But the passing of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-did-the-mind-boggling-new-drugs-bill-make-it-through-parliament-53612">Psychoactive Substances Act 2016</a> shows that anxieties about youth culture and behaviour are still part of the political landscape. And it takes only a fraught atmosphere, the search for a scapegoat, and ill-judged responses from popstars to turn a headline into the next moral panic.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70917/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clifford Williamson works for Bath Spa University.</span></em></p>
The 20th century saw battle lines drawn between music-driven youth movements and the state like none before.
Clifford Williamson, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British and American History, Bath Spa University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/65969
2016-10-28T09:27:49Z
2016-10-28T09:27:49Z
Suez crisis was when Britain gave in to US cultural dominance – here’s how
<p>Reflecting on his experience of teaching English in Malaysia during the build-up to independence in 1957, the author of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, conceded in his autobiography <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yeQ9wr5SrmgC&pg=PA406&lpg=PA406&dq=Anthony+Burgess+We+all+had+to+yield+to+American+culture&source=bl&ots=SZUsXIwV0c&sig=A-YchCi4gOTnJzO-DOlR45zGdWo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjGzNWsk_vPAhVCCcAKHf1mDqcQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=Anthony%20Burgess%20We%20all%20had%20to%20yield%20to%20American%20culture&f=false">Little Wilson and Big God</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We all had to yield to American culture, and my lessons would sometimes consist of a close examination of an item in Time magazine, briskly dealing with the new phenomenon of Elvis Presley or the Suez crisis as seen from an American angle.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This admission reveals the intertwined histories of British imperial decline, the post-war rise of popular culture and the realisation that America was to be the new giant of geopolitics. </p>
<p>Since 1956, <a href="https://theconversation.com/60-years-after-suez-a-tale-of-two-prime-ministers-65970">the Suez Crisis</a> has become much more than a political event that marked a definitive shift in geopolitical relations between Europe, America and the Middle East. It has come to symbolise <em>the</em> moment when the myth of European colonial superiority could no longer be sustained. </p>
<p>British responses to the end of empire and the rise of America in part expressed anxiety about the nation’s changing national and cultural identity. In John Osborne’s seminal play <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/may/21/theatre.samanthaellis">Look Back in Anger</a>, which premiered just months before Suez, Jimmy Porter laments that there “aren’t any good, brave causes left” since his post-war generation could no longer invest in the “romantic picture” of Empire. As well as looking back, with a pointedly nostalgic view of British colonial expansion, Porter looks forward to the emergence of a “dreary” American Age where “all our children will be American”. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/07/politics">cultural sociologist Richard Hoggart</a> would give weight to Porter’s rather flippant prediction in his influential 1957 study The Uses of Literacy. Upon observing the teenagers – or “jukebox boys” – who populated the fashionable milk bars of suburban England, Hoggart remarked that their clothes, hairstyles and even their very facial expressions and postures, all indicated that they were “living to a large extent in a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life”. </p>
<p>The concern expressed by both Osborne and Hoggart is palpable – American dominance will not merely be registered on the surface of British life but will transform future generations on a much deeper national and even psychological level.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143292/original/image-20161026-11256-17wsifv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143292/original/image-20161026-11256-17wsifv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143292/original/image-20161026-11256-17wsifv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143292/original/image-20161026-11256-17wsifv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143292/original/image-20161026-11256-17wsifv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143292/original/image-20161026-11256-17wsifv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143292/original/image-20161026-11256-17wsifv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alan Sillitoe captured the mood perfectly with his The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>End of Empire angst</h2>
<p>Anxiety and nostalgia are a significant dimension of post-war responses to the Suez Crisis. Yet many writers of the era, such as Burgess, <a href="http://www.sillitoe.com/">Alan Sillitoe</a> and <a href="http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4207/Caute-John-David.html">David Caute</a> who had direct experience of decolonisation through national or colonial Service provide us with more. In a number of the “end of empire” novels published in the aftermath of Suez it is possible to read an awareness of the potential durability of imperial relations. </p>
<p>While still in many ways being compromised by an attachment to empire, Burgess’s <a href="http://amirmu.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/tropical-tempers.html">Malayan Trilogy (1956-9)</a> in particular evinces a concern with the power of mass culture to promote consumer capitalism and enable a shift in – rather than an end to – imperialism.</p>
<p>Burgess was stationed in Malaysia between 1954 and 1957, offering him a rather unique insight into the waning of British power, the fruition of Malaysian independence and the rise of American dominance. The emerging influence of America is alluded to in <a href="http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/books/article/1581739/rewind-book-time-tiger-anthony-burgess-1956">Time for a Tiger</a>, Burgess’s 1956 debut and the first instalment of his trilogy. Discussing the possible appointment of an American headmaster at the school where the novel’s protagonist Victor Crabbe is working, it is argued that such a decision “would be a complete betrayal of the ideals on which the Mansor School was based” and would symbolise “surrender to a culture which, however inevitable its global spread, must for as long as possible meet a show of resistance”. </p>
<h2>Facing the music</h2>
<p>That resistance is revealed by the end of the trilogy to be virtually impossible when American influence is felt at the same time that Americans are notable by their absence. In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1783537.Beds_in_the_East">Beds in the East</a>, written in 1959, a jukebox – the primary marker of American cultural imperialism identified by Hoggart – is depicted as having reached Malaysia. It is installed in a shop owned by the father of the Chinese character Robert Loo, whom Crabbe has been instructing in the composition of classical music. </p>
<p>Robert is interrupted from writing his first concerto, which he hopes will celebrate “Merdeka” or Malay independence, by the unveiling of his father’s new purchase:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Soon it stood naked and shining in sunlight, stripped of its crude cerements, a portent and a god. “Ah”, breathed the crowd.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this moment, the cultural and national comradeship from below, as represented by Robert’s symphony, is displaced by the deified commodity. It is not the actual music that inspires the awed response of the locals but the romanticised product associated with the lure of America. </p>
<p>The turmoil surrounding Suez can be seen as the moment when the reality of British imperial decline became impossible to avoid. Post-war literature offers us an insight into another national fear at the heart of this pivotal historical event: for both the colonies fighting for independence and for Britain, decolonisation meant subordination to a new American empire. And it was to have the power of Elvis and jukeboxes at its disposal.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65969/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Whittle receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council</span></em></p>
It was 1956 – and for Britain, things would never be the same again.
Matthew Whittle, Teaching Fellow in English (Contemporary and Postcolonial), University of Leeds
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62441
2016-09-25T19:30:56Z
2016-09-25T19:30:56Z
Sixty years on, Maralinga reminds us not to put security over safety
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138727/original/image-20160922-11676-1khqhq1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Blasted trees in the aftermath of a bomb test at Maralinga.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is September 27, 1956. At a dusty site called One Tree, in the northern reaches of the 3,200-square-kilometre Maralinga atomic weapons test range in outback South Australia, the winds have finally died down and the countdown begins.</p>
<p>The site has been on alert for more than two weeks, but the weather has constantly interfered with the plans. Finally, Professor Sir William Penney, head of the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, can wait no longer. He gives the final, definitive go-ahead.</p>
<p>The military personnel, scientists, technicians and media – as well as the “indoctrinee force” of officers positioned close to the blast zone and required to report back on the effects of an atomic bomb up close – tense in readiness.</p>
<p>And so, at 5pm, Operation Buffalo begins. The 15-kilotonne atomic device, the same explosive strength as the weapon dropped on Hiroshima 11 years earlier (although totally different in design), is bolted to a 30-metre steel tower. The device is a plutonium warhead that will test Britain’s “Red Beard” tactical nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>The count reaches its finale – <em>three… two… one… FLASH!</em> – and all present turn their backs. When given the order to turn back again, they see an awesome, rising fireball. Then Maralinga’s first mushroom cloud begins to bloom over the plain – by October the following year, there will have been six more.</p>
<p>RAF and RAAF aircraft prepare to fly through the billowing cloud to gather samples. The cloud rises much higher than predicted and, despite the delay, the winds are still unsuitable for atmospheric nuclear testing. The radioactive cloud heads due east, towards populated areas on Australia’s east coast.</p>
<h2>Power struggle</h2>
<p>So began the most damaging chapter in the history of British nuclear weapons testing in Australia. The UK had <a href="http://www.industry.gov.au/resource/Documents/radioactive_waste/RoyalCommissioninToBritishNucleartestsinAustraliaVol%201.pdf">carried out atomic tests</a> in 1952 and 1956 at the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia, and in 1953 at Emu Field north of Maralinga.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">British nuclear bomb test sites in Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jakew/Wikipedia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The British had requested and were granted a huge chunk of South Australia to create a “permanent” atomic weapons test site, after finding the conditions at Monte Bello and Emu Field too remote and unworkable. Australia’s then prime minister, Robert Menzies, was all too happy to oblige. Back in September 1950 in a phone call with his British counterpart, Clement Attlee, he had said yes to nuclear testing without even referring the issue to his cabinet.</p>
<p>Menzies was not entirely blinded by his well-known anglophilia; he also saw advantages for Australia in granting Britain’s request. He was seeking assurances of security in a post-Hiroshima, nuclear-armed world and he believed that working with the UK would provide guarantees of at least British protection, and probably US protection as well.</p>
<p>He was also exploring ways to power civilian Australia with atomic energy and – whisper it – even to buy an <a href="https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/walsh51.pdf">atomic bomb with an Australian flag on it</a> (for more background, see <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/historical-journal/article/rethinking-the-joint-project-australias-bid-for-nuclear-weapons-19451960/DCE2FC212FCE7F81F5A6951B21357916">here</a>). While Australia had not been involved in developing either atomic weaponry or nuclear energy, she wanted in now. Menzies’ ambitions were such that he authorised offering more to the British than they requested.</p>
<p>While Australia was preparing to sign the Maralinga agreement, the supply minister, Howard Beale, wrote in a top-secret 1954 cabinet document: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Although [the] UK had intimated that she was prepared to meet the full costs, Australia proposed that the principles of apportioning the expenses of the trial should be agreed whereby the cost of Australian personnel engaged on the preparation of the site, and of materials and equipment which could be recovered after the tests, should fall to Australia’s account.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Beale said that he did not want Australia to be a mere “hewer of wood and drawer of water” for the British, but a respected partner of high (though maybe not equal) standing with access to the knowledge generated from the atomic tests.</p>
<p>That hope was forlorn and unrealised. Australia duly hewed the wood and drew the water at Maralinga, and stood by while Britain’s nuclear and military elite trashed a swathe of Australia’s landscape and then, in the mid-1960s, promptly left. Britain carried out a total of 12 major weapons tests in Australia: three at Monte Bello, two at Emu Field and seven at Maralinga. The British also conducted hundreds of so-called “minor trials”, including the highly damaging Vixen B radiological experiments, which scattered long-lived plutonium over a large area at Maralinga. </p>
<p>The British carried out two clean-up operations – Operation Hercules in 1964 and Operation Brumby in 1967 – both of which made the contamination problems worse.</p>
<h2>Legacy of damage</h2>
<p>The damage done to Indigenous people in the vicinity of all three test sites is immeasurable and included displacement, injury and death. Service personnel from several countries, but particularly Britain and Australia, also suffered – not least because of their continuing fight for the slightest recognition of the dangers they faced. Many of the injuries and deaths allegedly caused by the British tests have not been formally linked to the operation, a source of ongoing distress for those involved.</p>
<p>The cost of the clean-up <a href="http://www.industry.gov.au/resource/Documents/radioactive_waste/martac_report.pdf">exceeded A$100 million</a> in the late 1990s. Britain paid less than half, and only after protracted pressure and negotiations. </p>
<p>Decades later, we still don’t know the full extent of the effects suffered by service personnel and local communities. Despite years of legal wrangling, those communities’ suffering has never been properly recognised or compensated.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Maralinga landscape today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wayne England/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Why did Australia allow it to happen? The answer is that Britain asserted its nuclear colonialism just as an anglophile prime minister took power in Australia, and after the United States made nuclear weapons research collaboration with other nations illegal, barring further joint weapons development with the UK.</p>
<p>Menzies’ political agenda emphasised national security and tapped into Cold War fears. While acting in what he thought were Australia’s interests (as well as allegiance to the mother country), he displayed a reckless disregard for the risks of letting loose huge quantities of radioactive material without adequate safeguards.</p>
<p>Six decades later, those atomic weapons tests still cast their shadow across Australia’s landscape. They stand as testament to the dangers of government decisions made without close scrutiny, and as a reminder – at a time when leaders are once again preoccupied with international security – not to let it happen again.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Liz Tynan will launch her book, <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/atomic-thunder/">Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story</a>, on September 27. A travelling art exhibition, <a href="http://blackmistburntcountry.com.au/">Black Mist Burnt Country</a>, featuring art from the Maralinga lands, will open on the same day.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62441/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liz Tynan 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>
On September 27, 1956, an atomic mushroom cloud rose above the Maralinga plain - the first of seven British bomb tests. Why was Australia so keen to put UK military interests ahead of its own people?
Liz Tynan, Associate professor and co-ordinator of professional development GRS, James Cook University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/64212
2016-09-15T01:57:42Z
2016-09-15T01:57:42Z
The twilight of the mom and pop motel
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137653/original/image-20160913-4980-1dj0vk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona, is one of the few remnants of America's mid-20th century motel boom. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Wigwam_Motel,_Holbrook,_AZ_04048u_edit.jpg">Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1939, when John Steinbeck <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/01/0102_020104wir66.html">imagined Highway 66</a> as “the road of flight,” he evoked the crushing realities of Depression-era migrants who’d been pushed off their land by failing crops, relentless dust and heartless banks. </p>
<p>Struggling to find some sense of home on the road, these environmental and economic refugees searched for hope against a backdrop of unfathomable loss. On the road to California, they’d rest and recuperate in army surplus tents, hastily constructed Department of Transportation camps and <a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/user/rosethornil/media/A%20A%20A%201%20Sears%20Homes/Hillrose%20in%20West%20Lafayette/p97b_SMH1916_Chicks1_zpsb237d905.jpg.html">Sears Roebuck chicken-coop cabins</a>.</p>
<p>They could hardly imagine the surreal indulgences of the tourist road that would begin to emerge after World War II: renting a room built to resemble a country cottage and adorned with plastic flowers; snapping photos of a neon cactus glowing through half-drawn window shades; sleeping in a concrete tepee appropriated from Native American culture. </p>
<p>They could, in short, never foresee the rise of the roadside motel. </p>
<p>But after its heyday in the mid-20th century, the traditional mom and pop motel – once ubiquitous along American highways and byways – has largely slipped from the public imagination.</p>
<p>Today’s road-tripper generally prefers lodging that boasts a professional website, guarantees a fast internet connection and promises easy-on-easy-off interstate access, leaving the older motels built along two-lane roads and numbered highways to go to seed. </p>
<p>As Mark Okrant writes in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/No-Vacancy-Demise-Reprise-Americas-ebook/dp/B008EFC3J4#nav-subnav">“No Vacancy: The Rise, Demise and Reprise of America’s Motels,”</a> approximately 16,000 motels were operating in 2012, a sharp drop from a peak of 61,000 in 1964. In subsequent years, that number has surely declined further. </p>
<p>Even so, <a href="https://savingplaces.org/stories/in-defense-of-historic-motels">efforts to preserve</a> mom and pop motor lodges – particularly along Route 66, “the highway that’s the best” – indicate a desire among many historians and motorists to reclaim something of the motel spirit not yet entirely lost. </p>
<h2>Before the motel…the farmer’s field?</h2>
<p>To understand America is to travel its highways. </p>
<p>In the first three decades of the 20th century, America cemented its love affair with the automobile. For the first time, most people – no matter their struggle or station in life – could hop in their cars, hit the road and escape from the places and circumstances that bound them. </p>
<p>Of course, there were few of the amenities available to today’s interstate traveler. West of the Mississippi, camping was the most common alternative to expensive hotels. For motorists who didn’t wish to traipse across stuffy lobbies in road-worn clothing, the convenience and anonymity of a field or lake shore was an attractive option. </p>
<p>Back east, tourist homes provided another alternative to hotels. If you look around in dusty attics or antique shops, you can still find cardboard signs that advertise “Rooms for Tourists.” For example, the Tarry-A-While tourist home in Ocean City, Maryland, advertised, “Rooms, Running Water, Bathing From Rooms. Apartments, Modern Conveniences. Special rates April, May, June and after Labor Day.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137796/original/image-20160914-4963-1sj2gho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137796/original/image-20160914-4963-1sj2gho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137796/original/image-20160914-4963-1sj2gho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137796/original/image-20160914-4963-1sj2gho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137796/original/image-20160914-4963-1sj2gho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137796/original/image-20160914-4963-1sj2gho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137796/original/image-20160914-4963-1sj2gho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137796/original/image-20160914-4963-1sj2gho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Tarry-A-While tourist home in Ocean City, Maryland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Because tourist homes were frequently located in town, they differed from most contemporary motels, which are often found near highways, away from the city center. However, each tourist home was as unique as their owners. In this, they contributed to a central tradition of the American motel: mom and pop ownership.</p>
<h2>Fill up your tank and grab a bite to eat</h2>
<p>As the Depression wore on, it became profitable to offer more amenities than those available at campsites. Farmers or businessmen would contract with an oil company, put up a gas pump and throw up a few shacks. Some were prefabricated; others were handmade – rickety, but original. In the book <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Motel_in_America.html?id=CXzZikNoClsC">“The Motel in America,”</a> the authors illustrate the typical visit to a “cabin camp”: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“At the U-Smile Cabin Camp…arriving guests signed the registry and then paid their money. A cabin without a mattress rented for one dollar; a mattress for two people cost an extra twenty-five cents, and blankets, sheets, and pillows another fifty cents. The manager rode the running boards to show guests to their cabins. Each guest was given a bucket of water from an outside hydrant, along with a scuttle of firewood in the winter.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By the 1930s and ‘40’s, cottage courts (also known as tourist courts) emerged as a classier alternative to dingy cabin camps. Each cottage was standardized along a theme, like “rustic or "ranch,” and most were built around a public lawn. As the English Village East in New Hampshire’s White Mountains advertised: “Modern and homelike, these bungalows accommodate thousands of tourists who visit this beauty spot in Franconia Notch.”</p>
<p>Unlike downtown hotels, courts were designed to be automobile-friendly. You could park next to your individual room or under a carport. Along with filling stations, restaurants and cafes began to appear at these roadside havens. </p>
<p><a href="http://nyx.uky.edu/dips/xt7x696zwx82/data/2008ms016/03/0367/0367.jpg">The Sanders Court & Cafe</a> in Corbin, Kentucky, advertised “complete accommodations with tile baths, (abundance of hot water), carpeted floors, 'Perfect Sleeper’ beds, air conditioned, steam heated, radio in every room, open all year, serving excellent food.” And yes, that food included the fried chicken developed by Harland Sanders, the Kentucky colonel of KFC fame. </p>
<h2>The rise of the motel</h2>
<p>During the 1930s and ‘40’s, individual cabin camp and cottage court owners, known as “courtiers,” dominated the roadside haven trade (with the exception of Lee Torrance and his fledgling <a href="http://amhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/object_582.html">Alamo Courts chain</a>). </p>
<p>For a time, courtiers lived one version of the American Dream: home and business combined under the same roof. Then, during World War II, almost everything road trip-related was rationed, with tires, gasoline and leisure time at a premium. But many troops traveling across the country to be deployed overseas saw parts of America that they would later want to revisit upon their return. </p>
<p>After the war, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, frustrated by the difficulty of moving tanks across the country, promoted a plan that mimicked the German autobahn: the <a href="https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/history.cfm">Federal Interstate Highway System</a>. But the first of these four-lane highways would take over a decade to build. Until then, families took to whatever highways were available – cruising over rolling roads that followed the curves and undulations of the countryside. Whenever it suited them, they could easily pull off to visit small towns and landmarks.</p>
<p>At night, they found motor courts – no longer isolated cottages, but fully integrated buildings under a single roof – lit by neon and designed with flair. They would soon be referred to as “motels,” <a href="http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/photos-from-the-vault/article39505317.html">a name coined</a> by the owner of the Milestone Mo-Tel (an abbreviation of “motor hotel”) in San Luis Obispo, California. </p>
<p>While motel rooms were plain and functional, the facades took advantage of regional styles (and, occasionally, stereotypes). Owners employed stucco, adobe, stone, brick – whatever was handy – to attract guests.</p>
<p>With families swarming to and from the rest stops that multiplied along the highways of postwar America, many of the owners settled in for a life’s work. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137665/original/image-20160913-4942-1rviuqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137665/original/image-20160913-4942-1rviuqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137665/original/image-20160913-4942-1rviuqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137665/original/image-20160913-4942-1rviuqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137665/original/image-20160913-4942-1rviuqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137665/original/image-20160913-4942-1rviuqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137665/original/image-20160913-4942-1rviuqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137665/original/image-20160913-4942-1rviuqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Roy’s Motel and Cafe in Amboy, California, along Route 66.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roy%27s_Motel_and_Cafe_under_a_full_Moon.jpg">Photographersnature/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The good times wouldn’t last. Limited-access interstates, built to bypass congested downtowns, began to snake across the nation in the 1950s and 1960s. Before long, small-time motor courts were rendered obsolete by chains like Holiday Inn that blurred the distinction between motels and hotels. Single-story structures gave way to double- and triple-deckers. The thrill of discovering the unique look and feel of a roadside motel was replaced by assurances of sameness by hosts from coast to coast.</p>
<p>Today, with most travelers using the Interstate Highway System, few people go out of their way to find roadside motels. Fewer still remember the traditions of autocamps and tourist courts. However, a growing number of <a href="http://sca-roadside.org/">preservation societies</a> and <a href="http://www.route66news.com/">intrepid cultural explorers</a> have begun to hit the exits and travel the original highways again – exploring remnants of Route 66, Highway 40, and U.S. 1 – searching for that one singular experience just around the bend.</p>
<h2>No place to escape</h2>
<p>You could argue that the decline of mom and pop motels signifies something else lost in contemporary American life: the loss of friction, of distance, of idiosyncrasy. In my book <a href="http://www.hamptonpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=978-1-57273-885-5">“City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia,”</a> I write of a nation defined less by travel than by the illusion that one may gather up all the world – all the same and dependable parts of it, at least – and navigate its safe interiors without fear of surprise.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137663/original/image-20160913-4963-109xx54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137663/original/image-20160913-4963-109xx54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137663/original/image-20160913-4963-109xx54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137663/original/image-20160913-4963-109xx54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137663/original/image-20160913-4963-109xx54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137663/original/image-20160913-4963-109xx54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137663/original/image-20160913-4963-109xx54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The comfort of sameness: Thousands of Holiday Inns now dot the American landscape.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/meshal/356748316/in/photolist-xwqR3-8LGb2X-5cojEu-4z9Q9d-bnXZNN-4z5B84-8rVcyB-dkBvLJ-4z5uFp-4z9TrA-dMTuNu-afBLAm-dkBHQ2-nH6a4P-4z5vot-4z5ymX-4z5BRP-4M8Dhq-dkBudg-4z9P3Y-4z5yTe-2gGMbd-4z9TEf-4z9PtS-5LpKMj-fv9dc7-4vabVc-7FLvaF-6TFfww-5gPJSh-boDpdb-4tg9Da-7ZcYLa-dr6DX4-7GBhUK-bg4yyt-6uTcmR-boDtDh-a3GSe4-aCrRVS-8VLRj1-dm9UeG-f4gxiK-7gf2BY-dCWZMe-cVJuhu-67iULu-boDuoh-qpPvNm-85Q5N9">meshal alawadhi/flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is pleasure – and some degree of satisfaction – in this fantasy. But there is something missing too. I don’t necessarily want to call it “authenticity.” But we might imagine motor lodges – those of the past and those that remain today – as representative of a pleasant and peculiar fantasy of freedom: a way to escape the global continuum of constant flow and effortless connection. They’re a departure from the script of everyday life, a place where travelers can still invent a new persona, a new past, a new destination.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64212/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Wood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
What does the shuttering of traditional roadside motels say about America’s relationship with travel and freedom?
Andrew Wood, Professor of Communication Studies, San José State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/53026
2016-01-21T10:47:37Z
2016-01-21T10:47:37Z
Woody Guthrie, ‘Old Man Trump’ and a real estate empire’s racist foundations
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108650/original/image-20160119-29762-1bwnl12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Woody Guthrie lived in Fred Trump's Beach Haven apartment complex for two years.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nick Lehr/The Conversation</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed his name to the lease of a new apartment in Brooklyn. Even now, over half a century later, that uninspiring document prompts a double-take. </p>
<p>Below all the legal jargon is the signature of the man who had composed “This Land Is Your Land,” the most resounding appeal to an equal share for all in America. Below that is the signature of Donald Trump’s father, Fred. No pairing could appear more unlikely. </p>
<p>Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings, which I discovered on a recent trip to the <a href="http://woodyguthriecenter.org/archives/">Woody Guthrie Archives</a> in Tulsa. These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire.</p>
<p>Recalling these foundations becomes all the more relevant in the wake of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-a-bigot-and-a-racist/2015/12/01/a2a47b96-9872-11e5-8917-653b65c809eb_story.html">racially charged proclamations</a> of Donald Trump, who last year <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/10/the-middle-class-housing-empire-donald-trump-abandoned-for-luxury-building/">announced</a>, “My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy.”</p>
<h2>A champion for equality</h2>
<p>By the time he moved into his new apartment, Guthrie had traveled a long road from the casual racism of his Oklahoma youth.</p>
<p>He’d learned along the way that the North held no special claim to racial enlightenment. He had written songs such as “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1nzojwEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:ISBN1258516411">The Ferguson Brothers Killing</a>,” which condemned the out-of-hand police killing of the unarmed Charles and Alfonso Ferguson in Freeport, Long Island, in 1946, after the two young black men had been refused service in a bus terminal cafe.</p>
<p>In “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=skT4nQEACAAJ&dq=Woody+Guthrie+Folk+Songs&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y">Buoy Bells from Trenton</a>,” he denounced the miscarriage of justice in the case of the so-called “Trenton Six” – black men convicted of murder in 1948 by an all-white jury in a trial marred by official perjury and manufactured evidence. </p>
<p>And in 1949, he’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Paul Robeson, Howard Fast and Pete Seeger against the mobs of <a href="http://www.trussel.com/hf/peekskill.htm">Peekskill</a>, New York, where American racism at its ugliest had inspired 21 songs from his pen (one of which, “<a href="http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/My_Thirty_Thousand.htm">My Thirty Thousand</a>,” was recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco).</p>
<h2>A postwar housing haven – for whites</h2>
<p>In the postwar years, with the return of hundreds of thousands of servicemen to New York, <a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/55efq7hy9780252038181.html">affordable public housing</a> had become an urgent priority. </p>
<p>For the most part, low-cost housing projects had been left to cash-strapped state and city authorities. But when the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) finally stepped in to issue federal loans and subsidies for urban apartment blocks, one of the first developers in line, with his eye on the main chance, was Fred Trump. He made a fortune not only through the construction of public housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them.</p>
<p>When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed “Beach Haven.” </p>
<p>Trump would be <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/23/ike-didn-t-like-trump-s-dad-at-all.html">investigated</a> by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of US$3.7 million.</p>
<p>What Guthrie discovered all too late was Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of the FHA’s guidelines for avoiding “inharmonious uses of housing” – or as Trump biographer <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/The-Trumps/Gwenda-Blair/9780743210799">Gwenda Blair puts it</a>, “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.” As Blair points out, such “restrictive covenants” were common among FHA projects – a betrayal, if ever there was one, of the New Deal vision that had given birth to the agency.</p>
<h2>‘Old Man Trump’s’ color line</h2>
<p>Only a year into his Beach Haven residency, Guthrie – himself a veteran – was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood, which he’d taken to calling “Bitch Havens.” </p>
<p>In his notebooks, he conjured up a scenario of smashing the color line to transform the Trump complex into a diverse cornucopia, with “a face of every bright color laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows.” He imagined himself calling out in Whitman-esque free verse to the “negro girl yonder that walks along against this headwind / holding onto her purse and her fur coat”: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> I welcome you here to live. I welcome
you and your man both here to Beach Haven to love in any
ways you please and to have some kind of a decent place to
get pregnant in and to have your kids raised up in. I'm
yelling out my own welcome to you.
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing – both public and private – out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ....
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>And as if to leave no doubt over Trump’s personal culpability in perpetuating black Americans’ status as internal refugees – strangers in their own strange land – Guthrie reworked his signature Dust Bowl ballad “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a blistering broadside against his landlord: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Beach Haven ain't my home!
I just cain't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had succumbed to the death sentence of Huntington’s Disease, <em>Village Voice</em> reporter Wayne Barrett published a <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/how-a-young-donald-trump-forced-his-way-from-avenue-z-to-manhattan-7380462">two-part exposé</a> about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire. </p>
<p>Barrett devoted substantial attention to the cases brought against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> God dont
know much
about any color lines.
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps – father and son alike – might well have been arrogant enough to see it as one. After all, if you find yourself “way ahead of God” in any kind of a race, then what else must God be except, well, “a loser”? And we know what Donald Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/08/losers-a-list-by-donald-trump/">thinks about losers</a>.</p>
<p>One thing is certain: Woody Guthrie had no time for “Old Man Trump.” </p>
<p>We can only imagine what he would think of his heir.</p>
<p><em>“Racial Hate at Beach Haven,” “Beach Haven Race Hate,” “Beach Haven Ain’t My Home” and Guthrie’s untitled notebook writings: all words by Woody Guthrie, © copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., all rights reserved, used by permission.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53026/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Will Kaufman received funding from the Broadcast Music Industry Foundation (BMI-Woody Guthrie Fellowship).</span></em></p>
In the 1950s, Woody Guthrie lived in one of Fred Trump’s buildings. In newly discovered, never before published writings, Guthrie bitterly rails against the developer’s color line.
Will Kaufman, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Central Lancashire
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.