“Giving Their All” for America

 

A 1948 Shmoo clock (with store display) from Lux Clock Company.

According to a Harlan Ellison (author, 1934-2018) article, “Shmoo Goes There,” cartoonist Al Capp (1909-1979) had “one great idea”; it wasn’t comic strip “hillbilly” L’il Abner.
Instead, said Ellison, it was the Shmoo.
I disagree. I think both were great ideas.
However, while the L’il Abner cartoon strip ran over 40 years, the Shmoo was a “viral craze” that only lasted from the late 1940’s through the mid-50s.
Besides the comic strip, there were Shmoo toys, clocks, and nesting dolls.

The Shmoo was an animal invented by Al Capp, for his L’il Abner strip.
They were cheerful characters willing to sacrifice anything and everything for humankind.
They laid eggs, and gave milk.
When fried, the Shmoos tasted like chicken; when broiled, they tasted like red meat.
On top of that, Shmoos didn’t begrudge using their ham-shaped bodies to feed humans.
Instead, they were thrilled to be roasted for human pleasure.
Like the tribbles on Star Trek, the Shmoo reproduced asexually at a fantastic rate, and were very affectionate.
Like the newts in novelist Karel Capek’s War with the Newts, Shmoo skin made an excellent leather.

The GPO 1949 savings bond series for children featured the Shmoos. (Click to enlarge.)

In the Dogpatch comic strip, American business people attempted to kill off the Shmoos (because big business couldn’t compete with them).
However, heroic L’il Abner saved a pair, and kept them safe in a secret space.
The Shmoos were so popular that the U.S. issued a colorful premium for purchasing savings bonds for children.
(Al Capp accompanied President Truman at the certificate’s unveiling ceremony.)

Shmoos can be thought of in the same way as America has thought about slaves, indentured servants, and immigrants—as a commodity, to be used by the elite.
On the other hand, when it became apparent that the indigenous peoples wouldn’t “fit” as colonial tenant farmers, America gave the First Americans a choice—assimilation or death.

Mingo (Ed Ames, on left, an actor of Ukrainian descent) was the highly-educated Native American “sidekick” in the TV series Daniel Boone (1964-1970), that starred Fess Parker (right) in the title role.

In Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans, Anthony F.C. Wallace analyses Thomas Jefferson’s “inconsistent” history with indigenous peoples.
While Jefferson appeared to admire Native American character and culture, he engineered Native American genocide by seizing indigenous lands.
(Shockingly, Jefferson was so fascinated by Native American customs than he dug up their burial mounds!)
In 1791:

Rumors flew that. . .the offer to teach the Indians [Native Americans] to raise cattle and tend their fields like white men was merely a ruse to turn Indian men into women (who were the native horticulturists) or “beasts” like oxen and packhorses, to raise corn for the white men.

In the early days of the thirteen colonies, there was a severe labor shortage.
In order to help solve this problem, in 1607, the British Virginia Company set up a system by which Europeans could sell four to seven years of their labor in exchange for passage to the New World.
The British prison system dumped at least 52,000 criminals on our shores, also slated to enter indentured servitude. 

According to “Indentured Servants in the U.S.”—a History Detectives Special Investigation by PBS—one-half to two-thirds of early immigrants arrived as indentured servants.
The mortality rate was high because the agricultural conditions were brutal (plus masters were allowed to beat, and overwork, their servants). Female servants who were raped by their masters (or fellow servants) had their children taken away, and an extra year added to their sentences.
A few former servants eventually bought farms, usually on land vulnerable to indigenous warfare.
All in all, being an indentured servant in America was not a happy life.
Many servants fled, either back to Britain, or deep into the forests.

Although indentured servitude wasn’t officially barred until 1917, the colonial elite grew disenchanted with just using the indentured servant system to solve American labor problems.
(These “ingrates” actually expected some dignity, after they completed their sentences.)
TPTB decided that while the white indentured servants could eventually win back freedom, all the Black indentured servants would become permanent slaves.
The first slave ship that arrived on colonial shores was the White Lion.
It arrived in 1619, before the Mayflower.
(No one honors the descendants of Americans who came over on the White Lion.)

Clarence Lusane’s book, The Black History of the White House, outlines how Blacks built the White House—and built this country—covering the early days of the thirteen colonies, through the start of the Obama administration.
Besides the White House, “enslaved labor built much of early America, especially in the South.”

French poster for Song of the South—based on the Uncle Remus African folk tales (told by former slaves to a white journalist).

It was a patronizing endearment to call older slaves “Uncle” or “Aunt.”

(This 1946 film is no longer available in the U.S., and isn’t included on any Disney DVD/Blu-ray compilations.)

The curious thing about American slavery, was that slave owners actually expected enslaved people to be content with being slaves!
Clarence Lusane’s book tells how distressed George and Martha Washington were when “disloyal” companion and seamstress, Oney Judge (1773-1848), escaped from their family in 1796, and their magnificent chef, Hercules Posey (also known as “Uncle Harkless”), escaped a year later.
The President’s family had no idea why these valuable, well-clothed, slaves would want to abandon them, especially when they were “humane enough” to treat house slaves “as part of the family.”

Prior to the Civil War, “slaves accounted for nearly 60% of all agricultural wealth” in the Southern states.
After the Civil War, the “abolition of slavery eliminated about $2 billion of Southern capital and reduced Southern land value by roughly the same amount.”
(Data from Wealth and Democracy, by Kevin Phillips.)
All in all, the Civil War made the South much poorer, and the North much richer, because the South’s wealth was tied up in using people as property.

Chow Yun-Fat in poster for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Chinese men wore their hair in a long, braided style, from the 1600s through the early 1900s.

To return to China—without their hair in this style—was an act of treason against the Chinese government, punishable by death.

Between 1865-1869, thousands of Chinese migrants—not immigrants—toiled to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
(Most Chinese men wanted to return to China. That’s why they kept their long, braided hairstyles/queues.)
I remember reading about the saying “not a Chinaman’s chance” (meaning “little or no chance”) in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.
Does the idiom come from so few Chinese workers being able to return to China?
(Many were robbed and murdered, en route.)
Does it come from railroad work being so dangerous, or the 17 Chinese men lynched during the Los Angeles Massacre of 1871?
(For data on the 1871 Massacre, see page 19-21 of White Borders, by Reece Jones.)

Round Trip to America, by Mark Wyman, deals with European migration to the U.S.
(Although there were 20 million arrivals between 1890-1924, the return rate averaged 35%, with some countries averaging 65%.)
This book recounts that during the early 1900s, a high percentage of American industrial jobs were held by recent immigrants.
Carnegie Steel (in Pennsylvania) employed 14,359 laborers, 11,694 of whom were Eastern Europeans.
A Ford auto plant counted 12,880 workers in 1914, and 9,109 were also from Eastern Europe.
A survey of Michigan copper mines (1910) found that 80% of those employed in the mines were born in Finland.
Recent immigrants were very attractive to employers because so few wanted to join unions.
Instead, they “willingly endured lower wages, coarse treatment, and poor conditions.”
(Sadly, many broke labor strikes, when asked.)

While the Pledge of Allegiance clearly says “with liberty and justice for all,” many Americans are just mouthing the words.
(They’ve conveniently forgotten the word “all.”)
As immigrants quickly discovered, Americans may talk a big game about “fairness” and “equality.” However, all some really want is money, and to have other people at their feet.
(Today’s elite doesn’t “hate” the “lower orders”; they just want them to know their place.)

In the last scene of The Best Years of Our Lives, poor white WWII veteran Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) proposes—to Peggy Stephenson (Teresa Wright)—saying “we’ll have to work, get kicked around.”

Although the lobby card made it look like a comedy, this 1946 film dealt with issues like class, and veterans finding work.

Almost 250 years ago, the men of the colonies had their reasons for not wanting to be under the thumb of King George III.
However, not all were desperate for a new government, or not allowing the thirteen colonies to continue as a “cash cow” for Britain.
Some—especially bigwigs owning land in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia—were terrified that the British government would soon end slavery in all its’ colonies,* and then what would happen to colonial wealth? 

Slaves, indentured servants, indigenous peoples, and immigrants (of certain nationalities) have all been expected to know their place, and not consider themselves equal to white, Anglo-Saxon, property-owners.
Indigenous peoples were expected to be passive, as each treaty was broken, and they were left with less and less land.
Americans were taught that Anglo-Saxon people were the “stars” in this country, and everyone else was a “supporting player.”
That’s the myth of America.

*In 1772, the Somerset vs Stewart decision set free 14,000-15,000 Blacks who were residents in Britain. After an American official (Charles Stewart) brought his household to London, his slave (James Somerset) fled Stewart, gained the help of Granville Sharpe (1735-1813), sued for his freedom, and won! (For the full story, read Slave Nation, by Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen.)

Reframing Our Relationship to Life

Ismael (Richard Basehart) and Queequeg (Friedrich von Ledebur) in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick. “Heathen” Queequeg represented the goodness that Christianity preaches, but seldom obeys in practice.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (1851), is arguably one of the greatest works in literature, and the subject of many critical studies.
One of the clearest interpretations* I’ve found is that Captain Ahab represents the will to dominate the world (above all other considerations), while the white whale represents unpredictable Life.

Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) dies plunging his harpoon into the white whale. Ahab didn’t care about his ship staying sound or the lives of his crew; he only desires revenge. (Does this remind you of a presidential candidate whose name begins with a T?)

Stories in which the creatures of the ocean fight back against humanity are also found among the first science-fiction tales.
In 1870, French author Jules Verne (1828-1905) wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, in which giant squid capsize ships.

1912 book cover of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

H.G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote the short story “The Sea-Raiders” (1896), about large predatory squid that creep ashore to devour human beings.
In 1936, Karel Čapek (1890-1938) wrote War with the Newts, a novel about intelligent salamanders who win primacy over the earth.
The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham (1953), is the story of entities from beneath the oceans attacking coastal towns, eliminating the glaciers, and sinking vessels.
In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm (2015), a team of marine biologists are able to communicate with an amoeba-like intelligence that is attacking humankind, and has lived in the oceans for millions of years.
This memorandum compares the last three novels in the above list.

Book cover of Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts.

War with the Newts begins with a Czech seaman Van Toch “discovering” intelligent newts off the coast of Sumatra.
Captain Van Toch finds that the nearly human-sized black salamanders are “teachable” and willing to bring him precious pearls in exchange for human-made tools.
He travels back to Czechia to persuade a businessman (Mr. Bondy) to fund money-making schemes that use the newts.
For the first few years, their company just uses the newts to gather pearls.
(However, that industry merely reaps a 30% profit.)
Unsatisfied with those numbers, the company begins to use the newts for elaborate hydro-engineering projects.
During the next few years, humans become ever more dependent on the newts: as a free labor source, and as consumers for human goods.

Book cover of The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham.

Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes is told from the viewpoint of a married couple (Phyllis and Mike Watson) who are science writers for a British competitor to the BBC.
Another main character is a scientist named Alastair Bocker.
At first, Dr. Bocker believes that humankind can coexist with the beings from the deep, but he later realizes that war is necessary.
The mysterious entities begin to sink ships, and the observation chambers sent to investigate them.
Then, they send gigantic jellyfish-like beings to carry off humans, injuring those that they don’t absorb.
Eventually, the creatures melt the icecaps causing the sea level to rise, so that the earth population is reduced by at least four-fifths.

Original German book cover of Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm.

In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm, marine biologists gradually begin to understand that attacks by sea creatures, worms that destabilize the continental shelf, lobsters that spread poison, and swarms of white eyeless crabs are all a connected strategy.
They’re able to communicate with the amoeba-like creatures (controlled by a collective intelligence, the Yrr) that attacked humanity.
The novel concludes with a seeming truce between humankind and the newly-discovered marine life-form.

Čapek’s War with the Newts deals with humanity becoming dependent on sentient beings that it considers “inferior.”
However, the “subservient” amphibians become the primary power on the planet, as they remake the globe to match their own needs.
In The Kraken Wakes, an intelligence comes from the stars, and proceeds to remolding the earth as its’ new watery habitat.
(In both novels, the battle isn’t so much a war against humankind, as gentrification.)
In The Swarm, the goal of the “hive mind” may be to increase ocean area, but its’ other goal is likely to stop humanity from harming the ocean ecosystems. 

Book cover of Out of the Deeps, the American (heavily-edited and shortened by one chapter) version of The Kraken Wakes.

Motivations aside, the actions of the creatures are similar.
The newts create earthquakes which result in tidal waves, causing great loss of human life, and many more livable shorelines for the salamanders.
The alien creatures, in The Kraken Wakes, melt the polar ice caps raising the sea level by 120 feet, thereby killing and displacing millions of humans.
In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm, worms (created by the amoeba-like Yrr) destabilize the continental shelf, causing a massive tsunami, again killing millions.

One quality that the three novels share with Moby Dick is a dark view of human behavior.
In one segment of Čapek’s The War with the Newts, a German newspaper proposes that “because of its German environment that this [the German] newt had developed into a different and superior sub-species, indisputably above the level of any other salamander.”
The Kraken Wakes also points out human defects: the ridiculous infighting as human governments drop nuclear bombs willy-nilly, blame each other, and fail to cooperate against the deep-sea menace.
The Swarm finds comic qualities in the grotesque, nativist belief systems of U.S. government officials.

All three of the science-fiction novels deal to some extent with religion.
In War with the Newts, humankind’s cruelty to sentient creatures is on constant display.
(American Black ministers are among the few that show any compassion toward the enslaved newts.)
In The Kraken Wakes, Mike Watson (speaking of humanity and the creatures in the Deep) tells his wife: “We can’t both inherit the earth.”
In The Swarm, religious groups are thrown into chaos by the concept that humans aren’t the primary life-form on the planet.
(In the epilogue, a Catholic bishop sprinkles “the waves with holy water and ordering the devils to depart.”)

The Swarm is more driven by ideas on ecology than either War with the Newts or The Kraken Wakes.
In the earlier novels, the salamanders and the alien entities (that arrive on earth via fireballs) wish to remake the earth, to make it a better home for their species.
However, the hive mind in The Swarm—by sinking and disabling ships, disrupting deep sea cables, and starting epidemics—seems set on saving the marine ecosystem from humanity.
Only when the Yrr realizes that it may have some commonality with humankind, does it stop its’ onslaught. 

Although many passages in the Bible preach that humanity should live peacefully with nature, people seem most impressed by the line in Genesis 1:26 about humankind having “dominion.”
Most ignore Genesis 9:1-19 in which Noah promises God that he, and his progeny, will become good stewards for “every beast of the earth.”
U.S. history shows that although the first stewards of the North American continent—the 600 Native American tribes—wanted to live in harmony with nature, the conquering (European Christian) worldview was to use the earth as a wealth source: killing beavers and bison to extinction, searching for gold and other minerals, creating havoc in ecosystems.

According to an article in Hakai (hakaimagazine.com), and reprinted in Smithsonian Magazine, humans “kill, collect or otherwise use about 15,000 vertebrate species, mostly for nonfood reasons.”
According to Dr. Andrea Reid (a scientist quoted in *”Humans Take Out More Wild Species Than Any Other Predator on Earth”) “if we want wild species—fish and beyond—to survive, we need to reframe our relationship with them, perhaps from predator to steward.”

*War in Melville’s Imagination, by Joyce Sparer Adler, The Gotham Library, 1981, pages 55-78.

Robots and the “Truth” of Reality

A scene from one of the first productions of R.U.R. (London, 1921)

I recently read Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (first performed in 1921), and can’t help but draw analogies from R.U.R.—the first story about robots— to The Matrix film series.
R.U.R. is short for Rossum’s Universal Robots, and Rossum was the last name of the two scientists, who created synthetic creatures* built from organic matter who look identical to human beings.
The purpose of the robots is to act as servants to humanity.
Capek (1890-1938) called his play a “comedy of science.”
Basically, the artificial creations revolt, and this results in the extinction of the human race.

R.U.R. has three acts plus an epilogue, and the play is set in the years 2000, 2010, and 2011.
The location is a robot factory, on a remote island.
At the beginning of the play, robots have become cheap to produce, and are available for work all over the world.
Gradually, robots are taking over all human jobs. The main characters are:

• Miss Helena Glory, lovely daughter of the robot factory’s President, and secret representative of a group (the Humanity League) that wants to rescue robots from slavery,
• Harry Domin, the factory General Manager, who keeps Dr. Rossum’s secret of robot creation in his office,
• Dr. Hallemeir, Head of the Institute for Psychological Training of Robots,
• Dr. Gall, the top experimental scientist, who wants to create more and different types of robots,
• Radius, an experimental robot that works in the factory library, and
• Alquist, the Head of Robot Construction.

The robot Radius (Patrick Troughton, with arms raised), in the BBC's 1948 live production of R.U.R.

The play is obviously a comedy, or a parable, because motivations are unclear, and some plot lines simply don’t make sense.
Why does Helena accept Harry Domin’s marriage proposal, and remain on the island?
Why does Helena put her goal of ending robot slavery on hold for ten years?
How is Rossum’s secret formula for creating robots so easy to destroy?
How is Radius able to lead a robot revolution from the island?
Could there be a communal robot brain?

In Act One, Helena visits the island (ostensibly, to tour the factory), but her purpose is to save the robots because they may have souls.
Poor Helena is naïve, and she can’t distinguish robots from humans (to the general amusement of her hosts).
By the end of the first act, she accepts Harry Domin’s marriage proposal, and at the beginning of Act II, she is living comfortably in their apartments.
It appears that she has given up her goal of saving robots.

It's fascinating that in Capek’s vision of 2000, we’ve already entered the era of “truthiness”—the quality of something being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.
Domin explains to Helena that the world’s text books are simply propaganda—“the schoolbooks are full of paid advertisements and rubbish,” and the outside world has been deceived as to the true story of the origins of the robot underclass.

The audience learns in Act Two that much has happened in ten years.
Human workers, in an attempt to keep their jobs, began killing robots, and governments (motivated by greed) reacted by giving the robots weapons, and allowing robots to kill off humans by the thousands.
Humans have become sterile, and no children are being born.
Essentially, humans are becoming more like robots, and robots are becoming more like humans.
Robots now outnumber humans 1,000 to one.
Helena commits two pivotal actions in act two:

1. she prevents Radius from being killed (sent to the stamping mill) for insubordination, and
2. she destroys the only two copies of the secret formula for creating robots.

It becomes apparent in Act Two that the robots are planning a revolt, and Harry Domin proposes a counterattack—the creation of nationalistic robots.
In Domin’s vision, factories in different countries “will produce Robots of a different color, a different language.” 

They’ll never be able to understand each other. Then we’ll egg them on a little in the matter of misunderstanding, and the result will be for ages to come every Robot will hate every other Robot of a different factory mark.

However, humans are unable to activate this plan, because they simply don’t have enough time.
In the third act, Radius leads the other robots in killing all the humans on the island, with the single exception of Alquist.
(One executive actually tries to tempt the robots into not killing them with stacks of money, but his attempt is futile.)
Alquist is kept alive in hope that he can reconstruct Rossum’s formula, and create more organic robots.

The Epilogue takes place one year later, and Alquist has been unable to make any progress in his assigned task.
No other humans have been located on the planet, and eight million robots have died.
It’s predicted that within 20 years, all robots will die.
However, it’s revealed that before he was slaughtered, Dr. Gall (the lead science for the factory) had secretly created two special robots—a male robot named Primus, and a robotic recreation of Helena.
These robots have been sleeping for a couple of years, and they visit Alquist in his lab.
Unlike other robot models, they dream, and feel love for each other.
They protect each other from being dissected by Alquist—who considers them to be his last chance to figure out the secret of robot creation.
The last lines of the play are:

Primus (holding her): I will not let you! (To Alquist.) Man, you shall kill neither of us! 

Alquist: Why?

Primus: We—we—belong to each other.

Alquist (almost in tears): Go, Adam, go, Eve. The World is yours.

Helena and Primus embrace and go out arm in arm as the curtain falls.

Similar to the story of R.U.R., in The Matrix saga, there are two separate societies—biologicals and synthetics—and they battle for survival.
However, while in both stories, the synthetic beings win, they do not kill them in The Matrix stories.
Instead, mechanicals use humans as power sources to keep the world running.
In a way, The Matrix is R.U.R. turned inside out.
In The Matrix, humans are the slaves and the mechanical beings hold the cards (the reverse of what is initially true in R.U.R.)

Neo (Keanu Reeves) awakening in a pod in The Matrix.

In R.U.R., it’s the robots who are sent to the dissecting labs, and constructed in the factory (where their flesh is made in kneading troughs, brains and livers prepared in vats, and nerves spun in spinning mills).
In The Matrix trilogy, it’s millions of humans in pods who exist in the harvesting fields, where their bodies provide energy so life may continue.

Neo (Keanu Reeves) looking at a row of human battery pods in The Matrix.

Just as Dr. Gall proposes that they “introduce suffering” to the robots as an “automatic protection against damage,” in 2003’s The Matrix: Reloaded, the Architect reveals to Neo that the Oracle discovered that “Humans needed to be given a choice” in order to survive psychologically. (Actually, humans are only given the illusion of choice.)

Another similarity is that the synthetics feel far superior to the humans in both stories.
In a conversation with human Helena (in Act Two), Radius tells her: “You are not as strong as the robots. You are not as skillful as the robots. The robots can do everything. You only give orders. You do nothing but talk.”

Poster from a WPA production of R.U.R. (1930's)

Both stories contain an “Adam” and an “Eve.”
In The Matrix, it’s Neo and Trinity.
In R.U.R., the couple is Primus and Helena.
In The Matrix: Reloaded, the Architect tells Neo that his five predecessors were designed to develop an attachment to fellow human beings.
However, Neo is an anomaly; he has developed an attachment to Trinity.
In R.U.R., Primus and Helena can hear each other’s thoughts telepathically, and are entranced by the sun rising, and the sounds of birds singing.
The question remains: Does it really matter whether either couple is “real” or “synthetic?”

* Capek derived the word “robot” from a Slavic word for “forced labor”—“robota.”
Today, a creature made from organic material would be described as an “android,” and only a truly mechanical creature would be termed a “robot.”