In that time honored tradition favored by demagogues throughout history, Trump wants to continue having rallies even after he’s sworn in.
Adolph Hitler and his adoring supporters at the Nuremberg Rally 1935
Donald Trump just can’t bear being away from the adulation of his throngs of adoring fans whipping his supporters into a frenzy, amidst the ongoing rash of racist, sexist and xenophobic attacks that have increased since his election .
History Attention Must Be Paid
Nothing says Happy Holidays like the gift of a good ol’ American gun. For decades Americans of all ages have squealed at the sight of a shotgun at Christmas.
And nothing cheers up a dull droopy holiday party like target practice in your own home. For generations, holiday target practice – whether in the parlor, living room or family den- has been an American tradition since the late 1930’s.
Like any holiday hostess, Helen Van Dam wanted to make sure her guests had a swell time at her annual holiday celebration. The Depression was over and by 1937, life was back to being a bowl of cherries.
The eggnog was made, the yuletide pudding all prepared and the recipe for her aunt’s fruit cake bursting with sugar and spices and fruit galore had been followed to a tee. But Helen had been so busy preparing for the party, wracking her brains for just the right party entertainment that she was way behind in her Xmas shopping.
Jeepers Creepers!
T’was the week before Xmas and all through the house everyone was full of good will and holiday spirits – except one lone sad, housewife who had troubles. Helen was a girl who hadn’t had the foresight to face her Christmas present problem early and squarely.
So here it was just about time for Old Nick to make with the reindeer and the big brown sack and she still hadn’t made up her mind about presents, or how to amuse her party guests.
Even the mistletoe began to droop!
Exhausted, she plopped down in her big overstuffed club chair, flipping through this weeks issue of Life Magazine. Luckily, her eagle eye spotted an advertisement that would solve both her problems
It was the gift that would kill 2 birds with one stone…literally.
Vintage ad 1937 Targeteer Daisy for Christmas
“Once every two or three years along comes one Christmas gift that’s ‘just the thing’ for anyone on your list. This year, Targeteer fit the picture,” begins this 1937 advertisement.
“No matter how many problem names you have to worry about, here’s a gift that suits your purse and purpose perfectly. For the youngsters or their grandma- for the office boy or boss. Targeteer will be the prize package under the tree.”
“Because the pistol is built for harmless fun- (You can shoot it, without casualties, in the living room); and because it has the feel that makes you want to draw a head and squeeze the trigger.”
“Put Targeteer on your list for any member of the family and just to make sure that Christmas doesn’t come and go without added cheer, get one for yourself today.”
Yes it was a sure-fire gift for everyone in the family.
And just as importantly, it was just the party fun she was looking for. No dull game of cards or charades for Helen’s guests… they’d be a trigger-happy bunch.
“Here’s an idea for the distracted hostess, at a loss to amuse her guests…The Targeteer air pistol.” So announced the copy in this ad.
“For ‘smart giving’ – adult guest entertaining- short-range target practice in your living room get the amazing new Daisy Targeteer.”
“Step up and try your eye – test your skill with the Targeteer, the new exciting table target pistol set . Only $2.”
“You’ll get a kick out of popping a bull’s-eye with this handsome blue steel pistol with its 10 in barrel. And you’ll really wake up and live when you make the ‘birdies’ spin…a shot you can execute neatly at 12 feet.”
“Targeteer comes with 2 sets of targets…a handful of good old bulls eyes with a new color scheme and a brand new spinner type. The package itself is a backstop. Put it anywhere- indoors or out.”
“You don’t have to worry about wreckage. This air pistol is so safe you can shoot it at your hand without injury. 400 Rounds of tiny B-B ammunition included provided hours of fun.”
Helen really hit the bull’s-eye with this one… this Xmas she’d really be a pistol packin’ Mama.
“History won’t forget that when the streets of Charlottesville echoed with evil, Donald Trump responded with silence.” Tom Perez. L) Image via Andy Campbell Twitter R) Nazi Germany
There’s no way to whitewash this – it’s time to pay attention to history again.
History played out in front of us all this past weekend and we could not look away from the vile images.
Angry torch wielding white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. August 11, 2017.
Angry people carrying torches in the dark of night, hate-filled faces waving Nazi flags and proudly performing the Nazi salute. But this footage was not Adolph Hitler’s 1930’s Germany airing on the History Channel. It was breaking news on CNN and NBC, clogging up every Twitter and Facebook feed.
And it was right here on red, white, and blue American soil in the sleepy city of Charlottesville, that idyllic town in Virginia that is the home of my father’s beloved Alma Mater, the University Of Virginia. My father, whose four years at this Jeffersonian college coincided with Hitler’s rise in Germany overseas would be appalled to know Nazi flags were being waved in his former college town.
Even more appalling I never thought I’d be living in a country where the wave of a Nazi did not immediately inspire our President to be outraged, disavowing these groups by name.
Protesting the hate and Nazis in Charlottesville. Former KKK leader David Duke who was at the Charlottesville rally said that protesters “were determined to take our country back. Were going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump,” he said. “That’s what we believe , that’s why we voted for Donald Trump.”
Imagine a different world where our president would have shown shock and revulsion when the incident happened not taking days to offer a tepid response – one where he did not single out the neo Nazis. Trumps refusal to condemn the white nationalists who had explicitly said they were participating in the rally because they supported him. He could have told them emphatically he does not seek their support and firmly reject it.
Making America White Again
White Supremacists felt emboldened by Trump’s silence. Not surprising since that anti-Semite Steve Bannon who made white nationalism mainstream through Breitbart, is still President Donald Trump’s Goebbels…er…Chief Strategist.
Finally on Monday succumbing to pressure Trump spoke more forcefully, primarily because it seemed as though he were forced to do so. Like a chastened child who had been scolded and made to apologize, he robotically read his prepared speech, remarking unremarkably that “racism is evil.”
Now months after Trump took office he has finally said the word white supremacist, it’s a little too late. After the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville leaders of white nationalists claim success.
History has never seemed more relevant. Now we need to listen to what’s not being said.
Last summer with the weight of history hanging heavy as the Republicans nominated Donald J. Trump as their candidate for president, historians spoke out as never before.
We didn’t listen then.
We need to listen now.
It’s a post worth repeating, so we don’t repeat history.
We need to take a hard look at history. A Vanity Fair cover from July 1933 showing a despondent Uncle Sam seated on the Western hemisphere with storm clouds above can serve as a somber harbinger for our own times. Illustration by Paolo Garretto
A dozen distinguished historians from David McCullough to Ken Burns have bonded together to create a Facebook page called Historians on Donald Trump, dedicated to educating the voters on the disturbing threat trump poses to American democracy.
Historian Robert Caro called Trump a “demagogue” who appeals to the ugliest parts of human nature.
“History tells us we shouldn’t underestimate him,” Caro said. “History is full of demagogues and sometimes rise to the very heights of power by appealing to things that are unfortunately a part of human nature: racism, which I think is a part of human nature no matter how hard we try, and excessive virulent patriotism that goes by the name xenophobia.”
Joining them are Historians Against Trump, a group of history professors, museum professionals, public historians and scholars who are concerned about the ominous precedents for Trump’s candidacy. In a published open letter they wrote: “The lessons of history compel us to speak out against a movement rooted in fear and authoritarianism.”
They are all urging us to take a hard look at history.
I didn’t need the urging
History surrounds me on a daily basis. Literally and figuratively.
The Depression era discrepancy between “the haves” and “have not’s” is illustrated in this Vanity Fair cover “Fat Cat and Hobo” from October 1933. The Vanity Fair of May 1933 (R) illustrates an unpredictable Washington DC , optimistic one minute, foreboding and disastrous the next. Illustration Vladimir Bobritsky
The flotsam and jetsam from over the past hundred years, the vintage advertising, articles, newspapers, booklets and illustrations that permeated the American Twentieth century mass media play in an endless loop through my mind, cluttering it like so many teetering stacks of vintage magazines and books that clutter my art studio.
In my constant field of vision, are a series of framed vintage Vanity Fair magazine covers from 1933 that powerfully illustrate that most tumultuous year, a year that would have far reaching global consequences. and offer a somber forewarning to our own troubled times.
Many are illustrated by Italian artist Paolo Garretto arguably one of the great European illustrators of his time, his graphic covers expose the unsettling climate of the 1930’s including Hitler’s rise to power.
These compelling images of that unsettling time serve as a cautionary tale.
The cover of Vanity Fair December 1933. Figures representing U.S. Italy, France and England “tangle’ over Hitler. Illustration Paolo Garreto
As I listened to a speech in Cincinnati a few weeks ago, a rambling Trump maniacally defending the use of the Star of David in his anti Clinton image, it was clear he was pandering to his racist anti-Semitic supporters. As I looked up at the vintage Vanity Fair covers that hang directly in front of my computer, I felt a chill.
An expert demagogue whipping discontented working class voters into a frenzy, stoking racial resentment and exaggerated threats, giving the disenfranchised a bogeyman to blame misrepresenting the facts and exploiting economic insecurities.
Sound familiar?
Vanity Fair Covers 1932 Hitler and Mussolini
The use of ethnic stereotypes,the exploitation of fear of foreigners, and the concerns about national decline is an ugly stew of propaganda straight from a fascist recipes book .
It’s a recipe for disaster.
But confused and angry voters can take the bait.
1933
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Rachel Maddow said that she has been studying Adolph Hitler in the first few months of his tenure as German chancellor:
“Over the past year I’ve been reading a lot about what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor. I am gravitating toward moments in history for subliminal reference in terms of cultures that have unexpectedly veered into dark places, because I think that’s possibly where we are.”
Cover Vanity Fair November 1933. Artist Paolo Garretto envisioned the globe as a bomb with a fuse waiting go off as diplomats stand at the top of the world seemingly oblivious.
1933 opened with Adolph Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany. The great theme of his speeches throughout the previous year was that “politicians had ruined the Reich.”
Some thought a Hitler government would be a farcical affair. The right had the illusion that Hitler was a lightweight, a ridiculous Austrian demagogue whose oratorical gifts they could exploit while “managing” to contain him.
Over the course of the one year these magazine covers appeared, Hitler was elected as chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag’s Enabling Act was passed after the burning of the Reichstag, enabling police to bypass courts giving Hitler everything he needed to set up a totalitarian state making him dictator of Germany
This was quickly followed by massive Nazi Book burnings, legalized eugenic sterilization, boycotting of Jewish businesses, prohibition of trade unions and forbidding all non Nazi political parties in Germany.
The very month FDR was telling a frightened nation we had nothing to fear but fear itself, Dachau the first Nazi concentration camp opened.
It was a frightening time.
There are compelling reasons to feel grave concern today.
Pulitzer prize winner Ron Chernow, one of the historians on Historians on Donald Trump page remarked in a video : “I have been deeply disturbed by the Trump campaign — more deeply disturbed than by any other presidential campaign in our history.
“We’ve all been horrified by the many shocking statements this man has made, but no less frightening have been the omissions,” he continued.
“I’m disturbed by the words missing from the Trump campaign: liberty and justice, freedom and tolerance,” he added. “The only historical movement that Trump alludes to is a shameful one: America First,” he said, referring to Trump’s foreign policy slogan, which shares its name with an anti-Semitic group from the 1940s.”
“Please, please, please folks don’t let it happen here,” Chernow pleaded.”
We have the power to stop it.
Copyright (©) 2017 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved
Just in time for Halloween the frightening ghosts and goblins of anti-Semitism past have arisen from their slumber. This virulent strain of hate never really disappeared, merely reawakened.
And it is deadly.
I am scared.
I am haunted.
I am a Jew.
I am haunted by the solemn voice of my childhood Rabbi whose thunderous High Holiday sermons referencing the Holocaust declared “Never Again,” sentiments echoed by Hebrew school teachers.
I am haunted by the countless conversations overhead as a child of anxious parents and family friends debating plaintively … “could it happen here?”
I am haunted by the knowledge that for my parent’s generation, a generation of Jews who lived a life of assimilation yet kept one eye open for that display of anti-Semitism that has always lived right below the surface.
I am haunted by the fact that my parent’s generation was right to believe that anti-Semitism never really left …that it was just a matter of time.
And that time is now.
Among the tragic victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting were several seniors with living memories of the Holocaust. Just as the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling so are those who have first-hand memories of that horrific time.
That Greatest Generation who bore witness to the greatest atrocity of our time, the Holocaust, also bore witness to some of the most virulent anti-Semitic periods here in America.
People like my parents.
Photo by Margaret Bourke-White Life Magazine
By the spring of 1945, the unspeakable details of the European concentration camps began slowly being spoken about.
Through the war, few Americans were aware of its scale. Like most Americans, my mother and her family had their first glimpse of that atrocity when gruesome and heartbreaking images of the Holocaust appeared in print for the first time in the May 7, 1945 issue of “Life” magazine.
Photo by Margaret Bourke White Life Magazine
It was unimaginable – Jewish bodies stacked like hardwood found at a liberated concentration camp. The gruesome display of haunted living corpses, smoldering piles of charred bodies, the atrocities that the allied troops had uncovered. The graphic images recorded for all time by Margaret Bourke-White were bone-chilling and would be seared into my 19-year-old mother’s mind.
This abomination was the unthinkable culmination of nearly two decades of growing anti-Semitism that she and other Jews had witnessed.
Unlike me, my parents had grown up with the constant assumption of anti-Semitism.
It was a childhood punctuated by parades of marching brown-shirted men with outstretched arms and swastikas, cemeteries desecrated and synagogues vandalized. Incendiary anti-Semitism spewed over the airwaves and grand public halls were filled by hateful Nazi rallies spreading vile propaganda.
Perceived as greedy, dishonest and all too powerful, Jews were restricted where they could go and where they could enjoy themselves.
This was America in the 1930’s.
Despite the fact that many, like my grandfather, had served their country in the Great War and felt themselves to be “real Americans,” no matter how assimilated, the Jew was still the “other.”
Many hotels, clubs, and colleges restricted or prohibited Jews from visiting, attending, or becoming members. That was the norm for my parents. Jews were barred from prestigious law firms, admitted to medical schools on a quota basis and excluded from employment by the phrase “Christian.”
A suspicious public still saw Jewish people as different, unassimilable, and threatening. When my mother visited a college friend in Ohio a group gathered at the train station to sneak a peek at “the Jew” to see whether it was true they actually had horns.
As Hitler was rising to power in Germany the U.S. was producing its own anti-Semitic demagogues.
Though the news of the Nazi persecution moved from the front page to the inside of the newspapers, Jews were not only frightened with what was happening in Germany, there was the unspoken fear – “Could it happen here?”
One of the most popular and dangerous voices was Father Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest and propaganda king who peddled hate, spouting vile anti-Semitism on his radio program. No flash in the pan, this popular program attracted 40 million listeners for over a decade.
To Coughlin, the New Deal became the “Jew Deal,” liberals were communists and the faithful must “Think Christian,” “Buy Christian” and “Beware of World Jewry.” By the late 1930’s Father Coughlin was speaking out in favor of the Nazis and blaming Jews for political and economic troubles.
Henry Fords articles in The Dearborn Independent attracted the attention of Adolph Hitler 1920
That familiar “Globalism” trope had dovetailed nicely with Henry Ford who a few years earlier had outlined the “Jewish World Conspiracy” in his newspaper the “Dearborn Independent.”
His anti-Semitic views echoed the fears and assumptions of many Americans. The articles referred to Jews as the root of Americas and the world’s ills and were reproduced in the book “The International Jew: The Worlds Foremost Problem.”
Suffice to say my grandparents only purchased Chryslers for their motoring pleasure.
Even Lucky Lindy, my father’s childhood idol, became a Nazi Sympathizer.
All-American hero Charles Lindberg began espousing “America First” a slogan embraced by Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930’s. No friend of the Jews he famously commented: “We are all disturbed about the effect of the Jewish influence in our press, radio, and motion pictures.”
Even as American’s read about the Jews being attacked on the streets of Nazi Germany there was great resistance for increasing immigration quotas fearing the potential flood of undesirable immigrants.
As the waiting lists for U.S. immigration visas swelled so did anti-Semitism.
By 1939 bills in Congress were proposed to end all immigration for 5 years. Speeches by Senators insisted that the time had come to “Save America for Americans.”
While those exclusionary words echoed in our halls of Congress, the fated “St. Louis” the German ocean liner filled with Jewish refugees was refused entry into the U.S. and turned back.
That same year the German American Bund held an “Americanization” rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden denouncing Jews and their conspiracies. The rally was attended by 20,000 uniformed men wearing swastika armbands and carrying Nazi banners.
With the end of WWII, the sober realities of what hate could bring were made manifest.
After the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed perhaps the hope was the world would be cleansed of that virulent strain of hate. Perhaps the greatest generation hoped to eradicate anti-Semitism as they had with polio.
So yes, gone would be the overt anti-Semitism of my parent’s youth, but it was never far from their minds.
For my own childhood, anti-Semitism seemed to be a relic of the past. Because I would grow up living in an unprecedented time of acceptance for Jews it would be easy for me to be lulled into a sense of security.
Because what happened in Nazi Germany was such a terrible atrocity it felt impossible to imagine ourselves capable of causing anything that resembled it. Certainly, societies would stop, reverse, and repair long before plunging into such appalling depths.
I wanted to think “never again” was a statement of fact. In my America, that kind of hate can’t exist.
Except it can.
The specter of anti-Semitism has always hovered around us, the shadowy world of hate like a sinister ghost I chose not to want to see it.
But even as an American Jew, I learned through osmosis the coded language and dog whistles of hate and bigotry. To Jewish eyes and Jewish ears the tropes of today are familiar, as familiar as the ancient prayers of Kaddish said in temple.
As shocked as I am today at this ugly display of hate perpetrated in a Pittsburgh synagogue, I am haunted by the fact my parents might not be.
My parents were haunted by the ghosts of anti-Semitism.
Though I never believed in ghosts, I do now.
I am spooked.
I am a Jew.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Depressing news- income inequality in America isn’t new.
Frigid winters during the Great Depression could be particularly cruel as the chasm between the toasty haves and the chilly have not’s grew wider.
Decked out in their luxurious Russian Lynx or Persian lamb fur coats, harsh winter was no problem at all for the well-to-do; struggling to pay for the winter coal delivery was a problem for many.
As income inequality becomes the defining issue in this country today, the stark division seen in Depression era advertising seems oddly familiar.
While hardship, hunger and human despair was haunting much of the country in 1930, the fortunate 1% were apparently living life large.
As banks were failing, home evictions rising, and breadlines at soup kitchens lengthening, winter meant only one thing to those with deep pockets – a winter vacation.
Vintage advertisement Studebaker Cars 1930 Lake Placid
“How significant, then, that so many of these play-bound motor cars should be Studebaker’s smart straight Eights.
Although it was the height of the Depression it was also, we learn in a December 1930 ad, “the height of the winter sports season” where Lake Placid attracted an elite selection of ski bunny swells.
Arriving at the plush resort in the Adirondack Mountains of N.Y. in their snazzy Studebaker Eights announced to the world they had arrived.
Clearly these play-bound fat cats schussing down the slopes as the economy spiraled downward, were part of the elite. That this ad ran in “Good Housekeeping” alongside helpful articles suggesting “budget saving meal tips” seems mind-boggling.
While everything was falling – industrial output, unemployment, wages, prices and human spirits, the rich need only worry about accidentally falling during a ski run.
“Flashing down the snow buttressed highways from Au Sable Forks toward Lake Placid, ride mainly those of means and discernment,” the ad explains as if it needed explaining, to those counting their every penny.
At a time when men re-sharpened and reused old razor blades and used 25 watt light bulbs to save electricity, few but those of means could afford a new car. When a Ford costing $495 was a pipe dream, a basic Studebaker starting at $1,395 was unthinkable.
Vintage Chrysler Imperial advertisement 1930
For sheer luxury, the Chrysler Imperial Eights costing $ 3595 were ” everything the word “‘Imperial’ signifies…as the dictionary says ‘fit for an emperor; magnificent; imposing; superior in size or quality.”
“Even if you have your own chauffeur,” this Chrysler Imperial ad informs us, “you will want to do the driving.”
As rampant unemployment and poverty became more and more common, the wealthy lived in a world that remained insular, arrogant, and out of touch.
Sound familiar?
Perfect for the country club set was their own personal Pitcairn Autogiro, a precursor to the helicopter. This 1930 ad entices the reader : “Open areas surrounding almost any country club offer room for the owner of a Pitcairn Autogiro to fly directly to his golf game. The practicality of such use has long ago been demonstrated by those owners of the Pitcairn Autogiro who have flown to football games, race tracks, hunt meets and other social gatherings.”
The folks in these advertisements, these owners of fine country homes, town houses and yachts, seem oblivious to the crumbling economy around them.
But then again so did their President.
In his December 2, 1930 message to Congress an optimistic but delusional President Herbert Hoover said “…that the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.”
That December as the International Apple Shippers Association faced with a surplus of apples decided to sell them on credit to jobless men for resale at 5 cents each, the wealthy began packing their Louis Vuitton steamer trunks for their winter cruises.
Vintage Ad French Line Cruise Ships 1930
Naturally every need would be taken care of: “Bronzed and mustachioed tars whose Breton forefathers saw America before Columbus…well trained English-speaking servants within call…all is well-ordered for these fortunate travelers.”
For those less sports-inclined, a winter cruise was a brilliant escape from harsh winter.
“Say Goodbye to All That,” cheers on the headline in this 1930 ad for French Line Cruises.
A sumptuous liner with its spacious salons and charming staterooms where nothing is lacking, would take you far away from wretchedness and misery and all that!
“Rackets and riveters cross town traffic and subways brownstone fronts with basement entrances conferences and conventions aren’t you fed up with them all?” the reader of the ad is asked.
Who needed to be reminded of desperate men in threadbare suits selling apples on the street corner, hoboes and Hoovervilles?
“Now is the time when executives come back from lunch wondering why nothing tastes good anymore. Now is the time also when smart people give themselves a taste of good salt air and few weeks abroad,” tempts the French Line advertisement.
Assuming the reader of this ad which appeared in “Fortune” magazine has a chauffeur the copy goes on to say:
Seymour they say, ‘get out the trunks. We’re off on the vast deep’.. And presto! The moment they set foot on deck they’re in France!
Ask your travel agent about voyaging on France afloat…and as the skyline vanishes from view wave your hand sniff in the salt breeze and say Goodbye to all that!
President Hoovers first reaction to the slump which followed the crash in October 1929 had been to treat it as a psychological disorder. He had chosen the word “Depression” because it sounded less frightening than “panic or “crisis”.
By the end of 1930 and unemployment rose sharply passing 4 million, meant a great deal of people were indeed “depressed.”
A secure job. a warm home, and food on the table; many during the Depression had already said goodbye to all that.
For members of the well-heeled class everything was aces!
Especially if you listened to one of their own, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon the banker, businessman, industrialist, and member of the prestigious and wealthy Mellon family.
In the same year these ads ran, Mellon responded to the dire economic times commenting: ”I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism. During the winter months there may be some slackness or unemployment, but hardly more than at this season each year.”
That dynamic duo of Wall Street and Washington was personified by Andrew Mellon.
Regarded in the roaring 20s as the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton, only one year after the crash he was mocked by middle-class children chanting:
Mellon pulled the whistle
Hoover rang the bell
Wall Street gave the signal
And the country went to hell
File This Under Let Them Eat Cake Department- The disconnect today between the have and have nots was brought into sharp relief when Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross commented he didn’t understand why unpaid government workers are going to homeless shelters and food banks rather than taking out loans to pay their bills.
Copyright (©) 2019 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved
It was the 1930’s. While a rotund and darn proud of it Kate Smith was belting out “God Bless America” causing a lump to form in our throats, and our antiseptic kitchens were tastefully adorned with ceramic mammy and pappy salt and pepper shakers, American’s chuckled nightly to the number one radio show on the air, “Amos and Andy” voiced by 2 white men.
Ain’t dat sumpthin.
Seen through today’s lens, 1930’s America would appear to be a dark decade when it came to racial attitudes.
Its not suprising then that Kate Smith that patriotic Songbird of the South has suddenly come under scrutiny due to the unearthing of several songs she recorded with Columbia records that contain overt racist lyrics.
Along with “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” is another cringe-worthy number called “Pickanniny Heaven” that was performed in a 1933 movie “Hello Everybody.” Smith dedicated the song to “a lot of a little colored chillen’ listening in, in an orphanage in New York City,” then singing about “the place where the good little Pickanninies go” where “great big watermelons roll around, getting in your way.”
Whether crooning about darkies, picking cotton or pickanninies, the words are offensive to contemporary ears.
Not helping her newly tarnished reputation would be an advertisement from 1939 that she appeared in which was quite frankly typical of its day. When she wasn’t belting out “God Bless America” Kate Smith lent her good name endorsing many products including one for Calumet Baking Powder, which she promoted on her radio show.
Advertising has a long histsory of perpetuating sterotypes of blacks. The Mammy was the hands down favored stereotype for women in print advertising.
These bandanna bedecked black women were loyal to a fault; the sometimes sassy servant with a heart of gold made sure m’ white lady’s spotless home ran smoothly and made sho’ dem’ chilen’ of the misses were well fed and well clothed.
This ad, not short on sexism too, tells the heartwarming story of Babs a young bride who longs to be as good a baker as her dear ol’ Mammy. Frustrated by one cake failure after another, she sends away for a recipe book she heard advertised on Kate Smith’s radio program. Finally thanks to Kate Smith, Calumet and their recipe book, her husband- pleasing cakes now rival Mammys.
To show her deep appreciation, Bab sews a Mammy doll to send to Kate Smith. If that sentimental tale doesn’t bring a tear to your eye , I don’t know what will:
“I always wanted to be as good at baking as my old mammy – and now I am! All on account of your recipe book and that wonderful economical and sure-fire Calumet. So wont you keep this Mammy doll in your dressing room to remind you of your grateful listener.”
Does all this prove Kate Smith is a racist? I tend to think not. This was Kate Smith’s America. She was a product of her time and as offensive as we view these images and words they must be seen in the context of the times they appeard.
Ironically, even the iconic song “God Bless America” itself came under attack when it was first sung by Kate Smith in 1938. In America there was always enough hate to go around.
Songwriter Irving Berlin who wrote “God Bless America” was a Jewish immigrant (born Israel Baline, the son of a Jewish cantor who fled persecution in Europe). Though the song was a hit when Smith performed it on her radio show , there were some who questioned a yiddishe boychik like Berlin the right to evoke God and to call the United States his “home sweet home.”
In 1940, the song was boycotted by the KKK and the Nazi-affiliated German American Bund.n fact , a newspaper of a domestic pro-Nazi organization voiced their opposition to the songwriting , “[I do] not consider G-B-A a ‘patriotic’ song, in the sense of expressing the real American attitude toward his country, but consider that it smacks of the ‘How glad I am’ attitude of the refugee horde.”
God Bless America.
A year ago I was haunted by the ghosts of antisemitism. On a Shabbat morning, it reared its ugly head at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh when a heavily armed white supremacist took out 11 lives in less than 11 minutes.
One year later I would like to report that the attacks have dissipated. That vandalism has stopped. That buildings are no longer defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, cemeteries desecrated, and swastikas have disappeared from walls of schools. I would like to report that anti-Semitism has faded, retreated into the recesses of memory.
I would dearly like to say I no longer live in fear.
I can’t say any of that.
Anti-Semitic acts just like my anxiety have not ebbed.
I am still afraid. For my community and for myself. Acts of anti-Semitism haven’t disappeared. They have increased. Over the past year, we have seen hate enter our most sacred spaces. According to the Anti Defamation League, the nationwide count of anti-Semitic incidents are at record levels.
Today we can honor the Tree of Life Synagogue victims and reflect on anti-Semitism America
Today we remember the worst anti-semitic attack in US history when a gunman shattered the sanctity of Sabbath taking the lives of 11 innocent people as they prayed.
From the Vault:
Just in time for Halloween the frightening ghosts and goblins of anti-Semitism past have arisen from their slumber. This virulent strain of hate never really disappeared, merely reawakened.
And it is deadly.
I am scared.
I am haunted.
I am a Jew.
I am haunted by the solemn voice of my childhood Rabbi whose thunderous High Holiday sermons referencing the Holocaust declared “Never Again,” sentiments echoed by Hebrew school teachers.
I am haunted by the countless conversations overhead as a child of anxious parents and family friends debating plaintively … “could it happen here?”
I am haunted by the knowledge that for my parent’s generation, a generation of Jews who lived a life of assimilation yet kept one eye open for that display of anti-Semitism that has always lived right below the surface.
I am haunted by the fact that my parent’s generation was right to believe that anti-Semitism never really left …that it was just a matter of time.
And that time is now.
Among the tragic victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting were several seniors with living memories of the Holocaust. Just as the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling so are those who have first-hand memories of that horrific time.
That Greatest Generation who bore witness to the greatest atrocity of our time, the Holocaust, also bore witness to some of the most virulent anti-Semitic periods here in America.
People like my parents.
Photo by Margaret Bourke-White Life Magazine
By the spring of 1945, the unspeakable details of the European concentration camps began slowly being spoken about.
Through the war, few Americans were aware of its scale. Like most Americans, my mother and her family had their first glimpse of that atrocity when gruesome and heartbreaking images of the Holocaust appeared in print for the first time in the May 7, 1945 issue of “Life” magazine.
Photo by Margaret Bourke White Life Magazine
It was unimaginable – Jewish bodies stacked like hardwood found at a liberated concentration camp. The gruesome display of haunted living corpses, smoldering piles of charred bodies, the atrocities that the allied troops had uncovered. The graphic images recorded for all time by Margaret Bourke-White were bone-chilling and would be seared into my 19-year-old mother’s mind.
This abomination was the unthinkable culmination of nearly two decades of growing anti-Semitism that she and other Jews had witnessed.
Unlike me, my parents had grown up with the constant assumption of anti-Semitism.
It was a childhood punctuated by parades of marching brown-shirted men with outstretched arms and swastikas, cemeteries desecrated and synagogues vandalized. Incendiary anti-Semitism spewed over the airwaves and grand public halls were filled by hateful Nazi rallies spreading vile propaganda.
Perceived as greedy, dishonest and all too powerful, Jews were restricted where they could go and where they could enjoy themselves.
This was America in the 1930’s.
Despite the fact that many, like my grandfather, had served their country in the Great War and felt themselves to be “real Americans,” no matter how assimilated, the Jew was still the “other.”
Many hotels, clubs, and colleges restricted or prohibited Jews from visiting, attending, or becoming members. That was the norm for my parents. Jews were barred from prestigious law firms, admitted to medical schools on a quota basis and excluded from employment by the phrase “Christian.”
A suspicious public still saw Jewish people as different, unassimilable, and threatening. When my mother visited a college friend in Ohio a group gathered at the train station to sneak a peek at “the Jew” to see whether it was true they actually had horns.
As Hitler was rising to power in Germany the U.S. was producing its own anti-Semitic demagogues.
Though the news of the Nazi persecution moved from the front page to the inside of the newspapers, Jews were not only frightened with what was happening in Germany, there was the unspoken fear – “Could it happen here?”
One of the most popular and dangerous voices was Father Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest and propaganda king who peddled hate, spouting vile anti-Semitism on his radio program. No flash in the pan, this popular program attracted 40 million listeners for over a decade.
To Coughlin, the New Deal became the “Jew Deal,” liberals were communists and the faithful must “Think Christian,” “Buy Christian” and “Beware of World Jewry.” By the late 1930’s Father Coughlin was speaking out in favor of the Nazis and blaming Jews for political and economic troubles.
Henry Fords articles in The Dearborn Independent attracted the attention of Adolph Hitler 1920
That familiar “Globalism” trope had dovetailed nicely with Henry Ford who a few years earlier had outlined the “Jewish World Conspiracy” in his newspaper the “Dearborn Independent.”
His anti-Semitic views echoed the fears and assumptions of many Americans. The articles referred to Jews as the root of Americas and the world’s ills and were reproduced in the book “The International Jew: The Worlds Foremost Problem.”
Suffice to say my grandparents only purchased Chryslers for their motoring pleasure.
Even Lucky Lindy, my father’s childhood idol, became a Nazi Sympathizer.
All-American hero Charles Lindberg began espousing “America First” a slogan embraced by Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930’s. No friend of the Jews he famously commented: “We are all disturbed about the effect of the Jewish influence in our press, radio, and motion pictures.”
Even as Americans read about the Jews being attacked on the streets of Nazi Germany there was great resistance for increasing immigration quotas fearing the potential flood of undesirable immigrants.
As the waiting lists for U.S. immigration visas swelled so did anti-Semitism.
By 1939 bills in Congress were proposed to end all immigration for 5 years. Speeches by Senators insisted that the time had come to “Save America for Americans.”
While those exclusionary words echoed in our halls of Congress, the fated “St. Louis” the German ocean liner filled with Jewish refugees was refused entry into the U.S. and turned back.
That same year the German American Bund held an “Americanization” rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden denouncing Jews and their conspiracies. The rally was attended by 20,000 uniformed men wearing swastika armbands and carrying Nazi banners.
With the end of WWII, the sober realities of what hate could bring were made manifest.
After the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed perhaps the hope was the world would be cleansed of that virulent strain of hate. Perhaps the greatest generation hoped to eradicate anti-Semitism as they had with polio.
So yes, gone would be the overt anti-Semitism of my parent’s youth, but it was never far from their minds.
For my own childhood, anti-Semitism seemed to be a relic of the past. Because I would grow up living in an unprecedented time of acceptance for Jews it would be easy for me to be lulled into a sense of security.
Because what happened in Nazi Germany was such a terrible atrocity it felt impossible to imagine ourselves capable of causing anything that resembled it. Certainly, societies would stop, reverse, and repair long before plunging into such appalling depths.
I wanted to think “never again” was a statement of fact. In my America, that kind of hate can’t exist.
Except it can.
The specter of anti-Semitism has always hovered around us, the shadowy world of hate like a sinister ghost I chose not to want to see it.
But even as an American Jew, I learned through osmosis the coded language and dog whistles of hate and bigotry. To Jewish eyes and Jewish ears the tropes of today are familiar, as familiar as the ancient prayers of Kaddish said in temple.
As shocked as I am today at this ugly display of hate perpetrated in a Pittsburgh synagogue, I am haunted by the fact my parents might not be.
My parents were haunted by the ghosts of anti-Semitism.
Though I never believed in ghosts, I do now.
I am spooked.
I am a Jew.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men…Only the Shadow Knows.”
Happy Days are Here Again! I can’t wait to warm up the tubes of my massive Magnavox mahogany radio in anticipation of a Presidential fireside chat!
I am ready to have my confidence restored, my spirits buoyed, and be reassured of our democracy. Of course, because this is not 1939 and our president is not Franklin D. Roosevelt but Donald J. Trump, I am also ready to be disappointed.
Hoping to channel FDR, DJT wants to have a live televised fireside chat with the nation to read the full transcript of his “perfect” call with the Ukranian president, proof positive there was no wrongdoing.
The thought of that is perfectly dismal. He is likely to go down in flames.
Along with being a natural leader, FDR was a communications natural.
Whereas Roosevelt masterfully used the relatively new medium of radio to speak to Americans to instill trust and comfort a troubled nation, Trump’s motives for his “fireside chat” is purely self-serving.
Not unlike his tweets.
Twitter is, in fact, Trump’s own version of FDR’s fireside chats. Just as Roosevelt saw the potential of mass media to communicate with the widest audience directly, so twitter is Trump’s tool to speak immediately to the American people.
The Presidential communications comparisons end there.
Roosevelt lifted the nation’s spirits during two great national crises- the Great Depression and WWII. Trump’s tweets are mean spirited, divisive, and abusive; he attacks and bully’s others, praises himself, assaults ally nations, and lavishes praise on dictators.
The Great Depression had spread across the globe by the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933. Our economy had declined dramatically with bank failures, industry crippled, and 13 million unemployed.
As President, he needed to calm the fears, restore the confidence of Americans and gain support for the programs of the New Deal. Skillfully he would drive home the point the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
On Sunday, March 12, 1933, only 8 days after his inauguration, Roosevelt took to the airwaves giving his first fireside chat.
Though most of the radio speeches were not actually in front of a fireplace, the very first fireside chat was.
The term “fireside chat” was not invented by FDR but by a CBS executive in a 1933 press release
Microphones of the National, Columbia, and Mutual Broadcasting systems were installed on the ground floor of the Executive Mansion in front of the fireplace in the Diplomatic Reception Room. The 3 major networks cleared their schedules for the live broadcasts.
That evening at 10pm, radio’s evening prime time, our President spoke directly to the nation. With his cigarette burning down in its ivory holder, FDR explaining how banks work. Like nearly all the fireside chats Roosevelt began with the greeting, ”My Friends”
“My friends I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.”
Speaking simply without condescension, he translated the complexities of an industrial economy into phrases and metaphors almost anyone could understand. His language plain and functional, as though speaking neighbor to neighbor.
He asked people to trust what he and Congress were doing to resolve the problem. It created a great connection between FDR and the public and helped prevent a complete collapse of the banking system.
From March 1933 to June 1944 FDR addressed Americans in some 30 fireside chats, Broadcast on the radio he spoke on a variety of topics from the New Deal, to unemployment to fighting fascism in Europe to military progress in Europe and Pacific.
These fireside chats would be seared into the memory of those who heard them. People like my mother. Everything stopped when a fireside chat began. The country came to a halt when FDR began to speak
On Sunday nights, the network cleared all their regular programs as families gathered in their living room encircling their radios.
Roosevelt’s fireside chats reached record-breaking audiences.
His patrician voice could be heard emanating from car radios with the windows rolled down, resonating out of apartment windows, suburban cottages and farmhouses alike. One could walk into any defense plant and Rosie the Riveter would put down her welding instruments for a few minutes as the factory filed with the presidents voice uninterrupted on the radio
Although most listened in their own homes, some movie theatre would halt a screening and switch over to the broadcast so the audience could listen. When FDR finished, the movie resumed.
Listeners to the fireside chats deluged the WH with letters and telegrams. Though it was requested to have more fireside chats he resisted.
“Fireside chats” conveyed the intimacy of communications.
During the war when nerves ran especially high, my teenage mother would recall how her family would gather together in her Crowne Heights living room around the large Philco radio that stood in the corner. As her father adjusted the large glowing amber dial of the massive carved mahogany set, he would announce in a hushed tone that “President Roosevelt is about to tell us how the war is going.” Silence was expected.
Roosevelt’s fireside chats were markedly different from his orations from a podium and demonstrated his expertise before the radio microphone.
The president warm and folksy, modulated his voice to evoke a sense of friendly intimacy.
As if addressing listeners directly and personally, it was my mother would recall, “just President Roosevelt and the American people in what sounded like a one to one conversation. As if he were speaking just to you.” FDR always said he wanted to capture the spirit of a man in his own home talking informally to his neighbors in their living room.
Mission accomplished
It was a unique gift of communication, assuring Americans during a time of grave crises that if we all stood together, freedom and justice would prevail and fear would be conquered by hope.
When FDR was elected president in 1932 it was his promise to bring us out of the Great Depression. Today anytime Trump speaks he sends us deeper into depression
Today we find ourselves again in crisis.
This crisis, as the ones then, is a crisis that will define America as to who we are and what we really believe about democracy. Just as we did then, once again we fight fear and greed. Meanness and intimidation have taken over and the voices of reason and calm have been mocked. Trump’s voice devoid of civility and compassion can’t inspire us.
He is incapable.
In 1933 a radio listener from California wrote to FDR: ”Your voice radiates so much human sympathy and tenderness, and Oh, how the public does love that.”
Oh, how I would love to tune into a fireside chat to listen to our president. Just not Donald Trump.
The greatness that still runs in America’s soul has a deep hunger to be reawakened.
By a real leader. Not one who continues to stoke the fire of hate in our nation.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
It can’t happen here.
Yet it can and it is.
This year is ending in an epidemic of anti-Semitism. It must end. The ugly past has become present in the most horrifying way as anti-semitic vandalism has exploded. This past weekend, the 9th anti-semitic attack in NY in the past week occurred on the seventh night of Hanukkah when celebrating Jews were attacked by a machete-wielding man in Monsey NY.
As a Jew, as a New Yorker and as a concerned American, I am filled with fear.
A year ago I was haunted by the ghosts of antisemitism. On a Shabbat morning, it reared its ugly head at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh when a heavily armed white supremacist took out 11 lives in less than 11 minutes.
One year later I would like to report that the attacks have dissipated. That vandalism has stopped. That buildings are no longer defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, cemeteries desecrated, and swastikas have disappeared from walls of schools. I would like to report that anti-Semitism has faded, retreated into the recesses of memory.
I would dearly like to say I no longer live in fear.
I can’t say any of that.
Anti-Semitic acts just like my anxiety have not ebbed.
I am still afraid. For my community and for myself. Acts of anti-Semitism haven’t disappeared. They have increased. Over the past year, we have seen hate enter our most sacred spaces. According to the Anti Defamation League, the nationwide count of anti-Semitic incidents are at record levels.
The FBI states that Jews were victims in 60% of religiously motivated hate crimes in the US in 2019 with 105% increase in physical assaults over the previous year.
This post bears repeating until the anti-Semitic attacks stop.
From the Vault:
The frightening ghosts and goblins of anti-Semitism past have arisen from their slumber. This virulent strain of hate never really disappeared, merely reawakened.
And it is deadly.
I am scared.
I am haunted.
I am a Jew.
I am haunted by the solemn voice of my childhood Rabbi whose thunderous High Holiday sermons referencing the Holocaust declared “Never Again,” sentiments echoed by Hebrew school teachers.
I am haunted by the countless conversations overhead as a child of anxious parents and family friends debating plaintively … “could it happen here?”
I am haunted by the knowledge that for my parent’s generation, a generation of Jews who lived a life of assimilation yet kept one eye open for that display of anti-Semitism that has always lived right below the surface.
I am haunted by the fact that my parent’s generation was right to believe that anti-Semitism never really left …that it was just a matter of time.
And that time is now.
Among the tragic victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting were several seniors with living memories of the Holocaust. Just as the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling so are those who have first-hand memories of that horrific time.
That Greatest Generation who bore witness to the greatest atrocity of our time, the Holocaust, also bore witness to some of the most virulent anti-Semitic periods here in America.
People like my parents.
Photo by Margaret Bourke-White Life Magazine
By the spring of 1945, the unspeakable details of the European concentration camps began slowly being spoken about.
Through the war, few Americans were aware of its scale. Like most Americans, my mother and her family had their first glimpse of that atrocity when gruesome and heartbreaking images of the Holocaust appeared in print for the first time in the May 7, 1945 issue of “Life” magazine.
Photo by Margaret Bourke White Life Magazine
It was unimaginable – Jewish bodies stacked like hardwood found at a liberated concentration camp. The gruesome display of haunted living corpses, smoldering piles of charred bodies, the atrocities that the allied troops had uncovered. The graphic images recorded for all time by Margaret Bourke-White were bone-chilling and would be seared into my 19-year-old mother’s mind.
This abomination was the unthinkable culmination of nearly two decades of growing anti-Semitism that she and other Jews had witnessed.
Unlike me, my parents had grown up with the constant assumption of anti-Semitism.
It was a childhood punctuated by parades of marching brown-shirted men with outstretched arms and swastikas, cemeteries desecrated and synagogues vandalized. Incendiary anti-Semitism spewed over the airwaves and grand public halls were filled by hateful Nazi rallies spreading vile propaganda.
Perceived as greedy, dishonest and all too powerful, Jews were restricted where they could go and where they could enjoy themselves.
This was America in the 1930’s.
Despite the fact that many, like my grandfather, had served their country in the Great War and felt themselves to be “real Americans,” no matter how assimilated, the Jew was still the “other.”
Many hotels, clubs, and colleges restricted or prohibited Jews from visiting, attending, or becoming members. That was the norm for my parents. Jews were barred from prestigious law firms, admitted to medical schools on a quota basis and excluded from employment by the phrase “Christian.”
A suspicious public still saw Jewish people as different, unassimilable, and threatening. When my mother visited a college friend in Ohio a group gathered at the train station to sneak a peek at “the Jew” to see whether it was true they actually had horns.
As Hitler was rising to power in Germany the U.S. was producing its own anti-Semitic demagogues.
Though the news of the Nazi persecution moved from the front page to the inside of the newspapers, Jews were not only frightened with what was happening in Germany, there was the unspoken fear – “Could it happen here?”
One of the most popular and dangerous voices was Father Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest and propaganda king who peddled hate, spouting vile anti-Semitism on his radio program. No flash in the pan, this popular program attracted 40 million listeners for over a decade.
To Coughlin, the New Deal became the “Jew Deal,” liberals were communists and the faithful must “Think Christian,” “Buy Christian” and “Beware of World Jewry.” By the late 1930’s Father Coughlin was speaking out in favor of the Nazis and blaming Jews for political and economic troubles.
Henry Fords articles in The Dearborn Independent attracted the attention of Adolph Hitler 1920
That familiar “Globalism” trope had dovetailed nicely with Henry Ford who a few years earlier had outlined the “Jewish World Conspiracy” in his newspaper the “Dearborn Independent.”
His anti-Semitic views echoed the fears and assumptions of many Americans. The articles referred to Jews as the root of Americas and the world’s ills and were reproduced in the book “The International Jew: The Worlds Foremost Problem.”
Suffice to say my grandparents only purchased Chryslers for their motoring pleasure.
Even Lucky Lindy, my father’s childhood idol, became a Nazi Sympathizer.
All-American hero Charles Lindberg began espousing “America First” a slogan embraced by Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930’s. No friend of the Jews he famously commented: “We are all disturbed about the effect of the Jewish influence in our press, radio, and motion pictures.”
Even as Americans read about the Jews being attacked on the streets of Nazi Germany there was great resistance for increasing immigration quotas fearing the potential flood of undesirable immigrants.
As the waiting lists for U.S. immigration visas swelled so did anti-Semitism.
By 1939 bills in Congress were proposed to end all immigration for 5 years. Speeches by Senators insisted that the time had come to “Save America for Americans.”
While those exclusionary words echoed in our halls of Congress, the fated “St. Louis” the German ocean liner filled with Jewish refugees was refused entry into the U.S. and turned back.
That same year the German American Bund held an “Americanization” rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden denouncing Jews and their conspiracies. The rally was attended by 20,000 uniformed men wearing swastika armbands and carrying Nazi banners.
With the end of WWII, the sober realities of what hate could bring were made manifest.
After the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed perhaps the hope was the world would be cleansed of that virulent strain of hate. Perhaps the greatest generation hoped to eradicate anti-Semitism as they had with polio.
So yes, gone would be the overt anti-Semitism of my parent’s youth, but it was never far from their minds.
For my own childhood, anti-Semitism seemed to be a relic of the past. Because I would grow up living in an unprecedented time of acceptance for Jews it would be easy for me to be lulled into a sense of security.
Because what happened in Nazi Germany was such a terrible atrocity it felt impossible to imagine ourselves capable of causing anything that resembled it. Certainly, societies would stop, reverse, and repair long before plunging into such appalling depths.
I wanted to think “never again” was a statement of fact. In my America, that kind of hate can’t exist.
Except it can.
And it does.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
If supermarkets are a showcase for the American way of life, the profusion of colorful packages and containers are the glitzy showgirls winking, shouting, and seducing us to select only them. Each shopper free to choose from an array of thousands of dazzling options points to our democratic freedom of choice.
Or so we choose to believe. Wink, wink.
Brand names, packaging, and supermarkets form the trifecta of 20th-century food retailing. Codependent, the success of one reliant on the other. Together they changed not only the way we ate but how we shopped.
“Rows of bright, trim packages, individual as people; rows of familiar shining tins and gleaming bottles, colorful, cheerful, gay, each with a host of possibilities- what was more attractive than a well-stocked, well-kept grocery shelf,” rhapsodized General Foods in their 1929 cookbook that was an ode to corporate packaged foods.
Oh, the choices!
That bounty was what awaited the up-to-date homemaker of the 1920s when she shopped at any of the thousands of new self-service grocery stores that were sweeping the nation.
“Along with aeroplanes, skyscrapers, and metal furniture, self-service shopping all tell of swift changing ways of doing things,” General Foods extolled.
Mrs. Modern could pick and choose from the plethora of packaged products on the shelves of her local Piggly Wiggly. Though not quite as large as the soon-to-be-supermarket (that phenomenon was still waiting in the wings) these self-service grocery stores were groundbreaking.
Gone were the days where she had been dependent on the clerk at the grocer to advise and fetch all her items, adhering strictly to her list. Gone where the days of open bins and barrels filled with foods sold in bulk to be doled out by the clerk at his discretion. Grocery stores were now just plain old fashioned.
Why depend on the advice and persuasion of a store clerk when she could now wander the stocked aisles herself and choose what was best for feeding her family.
The forward-looking homemaker filled with all the latest nutritional knowledge didn’t need anyone to tell her what to buy and what to consume.
She didn’t need a salesman.
Or did she?
Modern Food Packages- Designed For the Housewife. “An amazing amount of care goes into the designing of modern food packages. Each package must give maximum protection to the product, maximum convenience to the housewife.” General Foods Cook Book 1930
Technology and American know-how would change the physical shape of food purchasing causing a major cultural shift to packaged consumer goods and shelf-stable food.
The big game-changer happened in the 1880s when folding cardboard cartons for crackers and cereal could be made by machines.
But it was Uneeda Biscuit that took the crackers out of the barrel.
National Biscuit Companie’s patented, moisture-proof In-er-Seal wrap for Uneeda Biscuits launched in 1900 promised that their crackers would not get soggy or stale while waiting to be purchased. The airtight container, a cardboard box lined in wax paper ensured every customer received the same high-quality product at the same price nationwide.
The packaging not only insured freshness, it enabled manufacturers to turn from selling out of cracker barrels to providing individualized, identical packages.
All stamped with brand names.
With a name worthy of a Don Draper, few missed the meaning of the brand name U-nee-da, the first multimillion-dollar ad campaign.
Packaging which at the end of the nineteenth century was still only a means to protect a product had now become a thing-in-itself.
The purity of the factories was emphasized by manufacturers. Vintage Postcard Postum Cereal Company stating they are the largest Pure Food Factory in the world.
Like many of her generation, my great grandmother was suspicious of packaged goods. She was used to purchasing things at the small grocery store where food was sold in bulk or shopping at outdoor markets of pushcarts where she could rely on her senses.
With factory packaged food that she could not smell or even see, the products she was buying were naturally suspect. Why should this unseen food, produced in a giant factory by who knows what kind of workers and recommended by no one, be better than homemade or better than food chosen by a local grocer and small local manufacturers?
She did not trust food disguised in packages.
But you could trust that American ingenuity would come to the rescue.
Clever ad men turned the doubter’s argument on its head.
Not only could factory produced foods be more sanitary they said because they were untouched by human hands and then packed in protective packages, but the customer could rest easy that with its brand name on the package, the company would have the incentive to take responsibility for its products and guarantee its own accountability. Corporate Foods took the guesswork out of not only how to use their product but why only their’s was the best.
To Market and Marketing
As food and other household products came to be individually wrapped and more easily transportable it was only a matter of time before someone thought of a new way of selling them.
And so in Memphis 1916 Clarence Saunders hit on the novel proposition that he patented under the name Self Serving Store. He called it Piggly Wiggly. The precursor of the supermarket.
“At last women are free to make their own decisions when they buy food. There is no one to persuade, to urge at Piggly Wiggly- women choose for themselves –help themselves,” a 1929 ad for Piggly Wiggly promised.
Without a grocer, a clerk, or salesman, the products themselves had to do the tempting and the choices could be perplexing.
Self-service stores all depended on name brands to sell themselves. And only the most dependable names deserved to be on m’ lady’s shelf. But which were the most dependable?
The increasing size of the stores, the increasing number of items, the increasing competition for the buyers’ attention by items displayed so that the buyer could reach them for herself, made branding and packaging into a newly sophisticated industry.
The salesman was nowhere to be seen. Yet he was very much there.
Each colorful item cried out- their’s was grander, more wholesome, more tempting more easily digestible, with more nutritional value than the other one, preferred by more women and thousands of mothers agree.
Bombarded with nutritional information as never before, the homemaker was also bombarded with choices. Who could she trust?
Suddenly there was anxiety about the right choice.
The Housewife was now a scientist n the kitchen
Mothers have always fretted about their family’s diet.
What was different beginning in the 1920s were the new attitudes towards nutrition. Food itself entered a modern scientific age. Along with new ways of shopping were new ways of eating. Women absorbed the most up to date information showing her new ways to think about diet and digestion. Exciting scientific advances and discoveries about food seemed to unfold every few weeks.
Although it was a German scientist who had come up with the new idea of classifying foods into proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, it was American industry that was putting it to good use in the hawking of their products.
Scientists had recently discovered vitamins, and the corporate food manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon touting their product as “protective foods.” Words like fresh, pure, and wholesome were factory food favorites. Every new product claimed scientific backing for their nutritional theories. These messages were conveyed in advertising and on the packages themselves.
General Food’s family of fine foods wanted Mrs. Homemaker to be part of their family
Even armed with the latest scientific advice on sound nutrition, the housewife needed assurance she was choosing the right product for her family.
Articles in womens magazines warned: None but the most dependable products – the ones worth knowing- should have a place on your pantry shelves; for here stands that select company you depend upon for everyday needs and emergencies day in day out.
Forward-looking food manufactures, as well as food editors, urge housewives to know the products they buy- know what they are made of and how the important component of food were discerned only in a scientific lab by a trained expert eye.
The overwhelming new power of packaging then came from self-service.
Now that the modern homemaker had to rely on her own judgment for choosing products it was up to the food manufacturers and the ad agencies to assure her of their quality. And the wisdom of her judgment in selecting the right one. Theirs.
Fortunately, corporate food manufacturers were working overtime, establishing home economic departments and consumer services to assure the American woman of their quality.
You don’t have to trust guesswork anymore, the homemaker was re-assured. And you don’t have to take just anyone’s say so. The sanitary testing kitchens of food manufacturers were all working overtime to put their knowledge at m’ lady’s disposal. Who could provide more authoritative judgment about a food product than the esteemed directors of the Home economics department in the many corporate manufacturers of fine food?
For the family’s health and well being, only their product, they claimed, had the exact nutritional elements that offered purity, wholesomeness, and dependability that could be used as vital food by the millions of cells in the body.
Everyone was vying for the attention of Mrs. Homemaker to entice her to make their product a regular pantry occupant.
“Guesswork has given way to knowledge about food selection, about what to eat.”
And the early Mad Men of Madison Ave would be happy to impart that knowledge.
Every package in the food market was now in competition with every other. Now the package- as well as, or instead of, the product- was what was advertised.
Take a name brand and take it easy!
Next : The First Supermarket. And to better display this abundance supermarkets were waiting in the wing.
You Might Also Enjoy: How Supermarkets Changed Us
Copyright (©) 2020 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved
Many have drawn parallels between our troubled times and the late 1930s, and it might be helpful to see how they celebrated during the festive Christmas season.
Anti Semitism was on the rise, fascists were taking over Europe, and a world at war was just around the corner, but in 1938, there was plenty to celebrate at Christmas time for Americans.
And plenty of suggestions on how to have fun.
Life was just a bowl of cherries when you don one of these fun rubber masks sure to add some spice and laughs at your Christmas party.
Is that Hitler I see kissing a Glamor girl under the mistletoe? Do I spy Mussolini having a tete-a-tete with an ape over the welsh rarebit? Uh oh, looks like Stalin is getting a bit tipsy from too much eggnog! Can’t take that Uncle Joe anywhere!
These fun masks were made in 1938 by Don Post Sr. who made history by creating the first over-the-head latex mask.
The only fun mask missing from this 1930s coterie of characters is Neville Chamberlain who might enjoy partying with the 3 authoritarians with his promises of appeasement.
Postscript
In the 1950s Hollywood discovered Don Post Studios and put its talents to work on many motion pictures, television shows, commercials, and stage projects. Because of Don’s relationships throughout Hollywood, he pioneered the art of product licensing, resulting in amazing licensed masks from Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, and the Universal Classic Monsters.
Looks like he was onto something in 1938.
