“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.)

“Bad” Blood and Rotten Bodies

Although the Bible preaches (in Leviticus 19:33-34), “to not vex strangers,” and “love them as thyself,” groups have acted with prejudice toward perceived foreigners.
Migrants (foreigners we deal with close-up) have generally been viewed with more distain than people in other nations (foreigners far away).
Also, people in “higher” social classes may perceive the “lower orders” as strangers.
Society has long worried about being polluted by “bad blood.” 

From left to right, laundress (Louise Hampton), undertaker (Ernest Thesiger) and housemaid (Kathleen Harrison)—bargain over deceased Scrooge’s possessions- with rag picker “Old Joe” (Miles Melleson), in a British lobby card for 1951’s A Christmas Carol.

In Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th Century Britain, Kevin Siena describes how British doctors saw the blood in “plebian” bodies.
In a 1659 treatise, Dr. Thomas Willis stated that “depauperated [or impoverished] blood was ‘lifeless’ and ‘a poor thin juice.’”
One hundred years later (1764), Dr. James Grainger postulated that Creoles developed “wasting diseases” because of a “watery poverty of the blood.”
As late as 1841, Dr. George Leith Roupell claimed that “pauper’s lifestyles were deleterious to sanguification [the production of healthy blood].”
For generations, British doctors held to the prejudicial notion that the corrupted blood of the poor endangered “higher” classes.

Rotten Bodies was written just before COVID-19 hit; it explains how Brits were terrified of possible epidemics and plagues during the 1800’s.
These fears resulted in “plebians” being removed to workhouses, hospitals, slums, and prisons—as a type of human garbage.
This fear also resulted in undesirables being “transported” to the American colonies, and (later) to Australia.
(“Transportion” is the term used.
It was a punishment used for many crimes—from stealing, to performing an illegal marriage.) 

Dustman Alfred P. Doolittle (Stanley Holloway, center) sings about being one of the “undeserving poor,” in his song “ With a Little Bit of Luck” (1964’s My Fair Lady).

The musical My Fair Lady is based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play, Pygmalion.

Siena recounts, in chapter five (“Jail Fever and Prison Reform”) of Rotten Bodies, how the birth of the U.S. (in 1776), set off a “public health disaster” in the British prison system.
Thousands of debtors, petty thieves, disrupters, and fallen women—who’d been sentenced to transportation to the thirteen colonies as indentured servants—were stuck in overcrowded prisons, or placed on decrepit prison ships.*
Hundreds died of jail fever while authorities figured out how to strand convicts in Australia.
(Australia was a more permanent solution than America, since colonial America indentured servants sometimes escaped, or returned to Britain after their sentences were up.)

A disheveled Moll is on trial in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, a mini-series based on Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel.

Both Moll (Alex Kingston) and Jemmy (Daniel Craig, on left) end up being transported to America.

Jane Austen’s England, by Roy and Lesley Adkins, also deals with transportation, focusing on the era when Jane Austen lived.
This book mentions Elizabeth Smith, who was transported to the colonies, in 1774, for a seven-year sentence.
(Smith had stolen 12 pounds of sugar, worth 4 shillings.)
I wonder how many descendants of Ms. Smith have learned how she ended up in America.
Or did she return to Britain?

For over three hundred years, transportation was used to deport British criminals from British soil to British possessions (the 13 colonies, the Caribbean, and Australia, but seldom to Canada).
Numbers are difficult to come by.
According to one estimate, about 40,000 convicts were sent to the colonies between 1533-1776.
However, another account says that over 52,000 convicts were transported between 1718-1776 alone!
Those totals seem rather low.
(Between one-fifth, and one-seventh, of the convicts transported, died en route of jail fever or small pox.
After they arrived at their destinations, hundreds died in the colonies, of disease, or from abuse.) 

Poster for Captain Blood, starring Errol Flynn as Peter Blood—an Irish doctor sentenced to life as slave in the Caribbean (1680’s) for treason.

(Dr. Blood escapes and becomes a pirate.)

The poster art was created by Alex (Flash Gordon) Raymond.

Transportation wasn’t just used to punish thieves and prostitutes.
Those considered “treasonous” against the King—either for speaking up against his policies, or for religious reasons—were punished by being sent to America.
Carpenter and Puritan, John Coad, wrote the memoir, A Memorandum of the Wonderful Providences of God to a Poor Unworthy Creature.
This book details Coad’s experiences during the Duke of Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1688.
He was wounded during the rebellion, and ended up being transported to Jamaica.
The character, Dr. Peter Blood—in the 1935 swashbuckler Captain Blood—is partially based on John Coad.

Famed cinematographer, James Wong Howe (The Rose Tattoo and Hud).

Anti-miscegenation laws prevented Howe from marrying his wife (author Sonora Babb), until 1948.

According to an IMDb mini-biography, the couple searched for three days, until they found a judge who was willing to marry them.

Returning to the subject of blood, the U.S. Senate worried about “pollution” when it debated the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
In Reece Jones’ book, White Borders, he describes how Senator John Franklin Miller (1831-1886) argued for the Act, saying that the U.S. should “keep pure the blood which circulates through our political system” and not allow “the debasement of our civilization through the injection. . . of a poisonous, indigestible mass of alien humanity.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 wasn’t repealed until 1943!
(Besides severely limiting Chinese immigration, this law (that lasted over sixty years) prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens, or voting.)
In the end, it finally was repealed (says Jones in White Borders)—not for moral reasons, but because China was our partner in WWII.

An issue discussed in White Borders, and Rachel Maddow’s Prequel, is how the American eugenics movement greatly influenced Adolf Hitler, and his credo that immigrants and Jews were “a poison in the body” of Germany.
Hitler lauded the American Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in Mein Kampf.
He had a copy of American fake scientist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) in his bunker, when he committed suicide.

The 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act had two major goals, but only one was clearly expressed in the legislation.
Goal One was to limit Asian immigration to the U.S.; that one was crystal clear.
Goal Two was to shift the immigration flow back to Northern Europe, and away from Southern and Eastern Europe; that goal was disguised.
The “trick” was to implement a quota system built on the 1890 census.
The largest share of “immigrant slots” went to Britain at 65,721, a quota seldom used up.
Where the Act had the greatest effect was in limiting Italians, Greeks, Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians, and Romanians.
For example, 222,260 Italians were allowed to enter the country in 1921, but only 2,662 Italians were allowed in 1925.
(Data from Round Trip to America and White Borders.)

Portrait of Dr. Charles Richard Drew.

Dr. Charles Richard Drew (1904-1950) was an American surgeon and researcher who specialized in preserving and storing blood for transfusions.
His innovative techniques and systems (especially with blood plasma) kept thousands of U.S. and British soldiers alive during WWII, and continue to save lives today.

Dr. Charles Drew was Black.
In 1942, he resigned as his post—as Medical Director of the American Red Cross—after his organization refused to change its’ unscientific policy of segregating blood by the “race” of the donor.
The Red Cross did discontinue this policy six years later (1948) after it finally ruled that there was no reason to segregate blood.

* “More than 60% of those found guilty at Old Bailey in 1774 [the chief criminal court of London] were transported [to the 13 colonies].” (page 147, Rotten Bodies: Class & Contagion in 18th-Century Britain, Kevin Siena, Yale University Press, 2019).

Prepared for Democracy on the Anniversary of January 6th?

In Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) Gary Cooper plays a homeless man who’s used by corrupt forces to control a budding populist movement.

Capra kept the plot secret until the film's release for fear of American fascists utilizing it for propaganda purposes, and filmed five different endings.

Liz Cheney has spent years learning how the Federal Government works.*
That’s why I take it seriously when Cheney says, in her book Oath and Honor, that the U.S. is “on the precipice of losing” its’ system of government because “a free society that abandons the truth—that abandons the rule of law—cannot remain free.”

On the other hand, most U.S. citizens are fairly ignorant on how Government runs.
Despite this, they seem to have great faith in the overall stability of the checks and balances system.
We seem to believe that the political system will continue ( as if on autopilot), without everyone needing to vote. 

As Rachel Maddow reveals in Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, the late 1930’s was also a time when the U.S. political system was tested.
During that period, admired hero and aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), said that Americans should “guard their heritage” from the “Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.”
Popular Catholic radio broadcaster, Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979), called for a General Franco-style armed revolt against “invaders of our spiritual and national rights.”
(Tens of millions listened to his sermons, and some set up arsenals!)

Some artists, and thinkers, saw the danger in the 1930’s.
Little-known British author Katharine Burdekin wrote Swastika Night (1937).
This is an alternative history science fiction story in which Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis, won.
(It’s spooky that this work was written just as WWII was beginning!)
In this prescient novel, a male character muses about Democracy (italics and bold face mine):

In a democracy no man of character is willing to give up his right of private judgment. . . there is also the large mass of weaker men, who must be told always what to do . . . I still do not see how democracy can be made to last long enough to develop character in a sufficient number of people. . . And there is another thing. Has a democracy ever started in a community, a nation, where the men all really considered themselves equal, no one fundamentally and unalterably superior to any other?

In 1940, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt expressed similar (if more optimistic) thoughts in her article “The Moral Basis of Democracy” (italics and bold face mine):

If human beings can be changed to fit a Nazi or Fascist pattern or a Communist pattern, certainly we should not lose heart at the thought of changing human nature to fit a Democratic way of life. . . Real Democracy cannot be stable and it cannot go forward to its fullest development and growth if this type of individual responsibility does not exist, not only in the leaders but in the people as a whole.

Katharine Burdekin and Eleanor Roosevelt reached similar conclusions—that a Democracy was only possible if everyone (people of whatever social class and skin tone) was equal, and if everyone was willing to compromise.
(The other choice is first chaos, and then Authoritarianism.)

Italian poster for 1956’s Alexander the Great, in which Richard Burton played Alexander—the Macedonian ruler who conquered all the Greek tribes and most of western Asia.

Alexander inherited power over Macedonia from his father Philip (Fredric March).

Maintaining a Democracy isn’t easy.

It’s not even natural.
For a very long time, “might makes right” seemed to be the rule, and people are mainly concerned about their own needs.
Eventually, humankind developed “the Divine Right of Kings,” and “royal blood,” myths (so sons could succeed fathers).
(This made the passing down of power slightly less contentious.)

Servilius Casca (Edmund O’Brien) struck the first blow against Julius Caesar (Louis Calhern) in 1953’s Julius Caesar.

(Roman senators feared that Julius Caesar would make himself monarch of Rome, but actually, his fall led to a string of emperors.)

Beginning in the 6th century BC, the Greeks, and later the Romans, experimented with people ruling themselves.

In the Greek city-state of Athens, however, slaves and women were excluded from voting.
In Roman society—during the periods when people were allowed to vote—only aristocratic men could vote.
Roman society still maintained the fiction that rule was “with the consent of the governed.”

Europe began to flirt with democratic concepts in the late 1600s.
In 1689, the British Parliament established a Bill of Rights (used as a model for the U.S. 1789 Bill of Rights).

Workers riot in the 1927 science-fiction classic Metropolis.

Critics have called the politics of the film “incoherent”, since both communists and fascists believe that the movie validates their respective philosophies.

One hundred years later, in 1789, the French people rose up against aristocratic rule.
Ten years later Napoleon Bonaparte gained control of France, however, and he eventually crowned himself Emperor.
Today, the British don’t vote directly for their Prime Minister.
Presidents of France are elected by voters—usually, in a two-round system—because there are several political parties.

The U.S. was the first “modern” experiment in Democracy.
However, the U.S. was handicapped with confusion over who was in charge.
In a perfect world, the Declaration of Independence should have read “all humankind is created equal.”
Instead, Black enslaved people, Native Americans, and women were all left out.
Were some Founders really thinking “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant wealthy men,” when they proclaimed “all men are created equal?”
Have Americans always lived in a Democracy in which one group is more equal than others?

Two factors have helped to keep Democracy stable: the U.S. had a large middle class, plus plenty of room to “spread out.”
(Was it “from sea to shining sea,” and Manifest Destiny, that kept Democracy alive?)
However, the size, and prosperity, of the middle class has shrunk since the 1970s.
Today, 66.6% of the total wealth in the U.S. is owned by 10% of the earners and the lowest 50% of earners only hold 2.6% of the total wealth.
(The balance tilts further every year.)

Why are schools so relentless positive about the strength of American “checks and balances” system?
Why are the times—when the rules were bent by people in high places—discussed in academia, but not in textbooks?
We should know more about the occasions when mistakes were made, so we can prevent errors in the future.

There are many examples when “the system” failed.
In the little-discussed 1876 election, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote, and would also have won the electoral college vote.
However, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes still became the nation’s 19th president, in a “smoke-filled room,” allowing both parties to end Reconstruction!
In Prequel, Rachel Maddow reveals how powerful Senator Burton K. Wheeler (1882-1975) engineered the firings of two Department of Justice employees, so as not to further publicize his pro-fascist deeds.

Unless we own up to the fragility of our system, we may lose it altogether.
It seems that our schools, textbooks, religions and parents haven’t done an adequate job of building character in the American voter, or changing human nature so it fits a Democratic (rather than an Authoritarian) model.
Why are so few of us prepared for living in a Democratic system?
Why do so few people vote?

*Liz Cheney represented Wyoming in the U.S. House from 2017-23. Before that, she was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development. In Oath and Honor, Cheney explains how her parents taught her American history, and about being a citizen.

Outside the “Norm,” and Madness

Benny Russell (Avery Brooks) writes for Incredible Tales, a science-fiction magazine, in 1950s New York in the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars.”

(Other members of the writing staff look on.)

In the “Far Beyond the Stars” episode (season 6, episode 13) of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) is given a vision, by an alien race, of himself as Benny Russell—a science-fiction writer in 1950’s America.

During the episode, he is beaten by two policemen, endures aggression from shopkeepers, and is criticized by his Editor for writing “unbelievable” stories in which a Negro man is a starship captain.
Benny begins to question his own sanity.

While I was writing the 10/1/23 memorandum “Fit to be Tied (in a Straitjacket),” I didn’t cover the effect of being Black, on whether people may be confined for behaving in a way that seems “mad’ or “out of the norm.”

In 1851, an American health “expert,” Samuel A. Cartwright (1793-1863), invented a new “disease of the mind.”
He called it “drapetomania”—the wish of slaves to escape from their masters.
According to Dr. Cartwright, any slave who wanted to escape from his/her state of slavery, was by definition “crazy.”
(Similar beliefs about women, caused men to place their wives in insane asylums.
If a housewife wasn’t content with her lot in life, she could be locked up, or a few generations later, lobotomized!)

After the Civil War, Southern states set up mental hospital facilities specifically for Black patients.
Between 1861-1882, asylums (with separate wings for Black patients) opened in at least seven states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
“Treatments” included experimental surgeries and forced sterilization.

In the Heat of the Night (the 1967 film) starred Sidney Poitier as Detective Virgil Tibbs.

Reacting to being slapped, Detective Tibbs slaps a wealthy plantation owner.

(It was Poitier’s idea for Detective Tibbs to return the slap.)

A generation later, Confederate veteran John Fulenwider Miller (1834-1905) arrived on the scene.
He was superintendent of a North Carolina state mental institution for Black patients from 1888 to 1906.
Dr. Miller claimed that the Black nervous system was “less sensitive to environments.”
At the same time, he theorized that Blacks were “unable to handle freedom,” because they were “mentally weaker” than white people.
His medical journal articles influenced generations of medical professionals, and caused great harm to patients.

Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) is chained to John "Joker" Jackson (Tony Curtis) in a lobby card for Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones.

Kramer’s goal was to stress that all human beings have the same nature.

About 50 years later, Clennon Washington King Jr. (1920-2000) was a university professor, minister, and politician.
In 1958, he tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi for summer classes, but was denied.
Local authorities couldn’t arrest him for this attempt, so instead Reverend King was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, for twelve days. 

Between the 1920s through the 1980s, as many as 100,000 to 150,000 people a year (often Black, Latin, Native American, and recent immigrants) were sterilized in the U.S. and its’ territories.
Frequently, this was done without their consent.
Patients were vulnerable to this procedure because they were being confined—in mental institutions, or in prisons.

Hospital patient McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) talks with hospital orderly Turkle (Scatman Crothers) in a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Dr. Arthur L. Whaley (Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas) has stated that today Black patients are more likely to be hospitalized in mental hospitals than white patients who have the same symptoms.
Also, Blacks are incarcerated longer in mental hospitals, and are more likely to be restrained with drugs.

Not only are Blacks more likely to be forcibly committed to mental institutions; they are burdened by various false perceptions.
According to a 2017 article (published by the American Psychological Association*) Black men are perceived as larger, and more threatening, than white men of the exact same size and weight.
This has resulted in Black men—especially those undergoing a mental health crisis—being murdered in interactions with police, even when they are unarmed.
According to the same study, Black men with darker skin tones, are feared more than Black men with lighter skin tones!

The “Racial Bias” study involved men.
However, I’m sure that if a similar study were performed involving Black women, there would be a similar result.
The Kentucky police department must have perceived Breonna Tayler as a dangerous “superwoman.”
Why else were three heavily-armed policemen sent to search the apartment of an emergency room technician?
Why did Sandra Bland end up dead in a Texas jail cell?
Was it for not showing “sufficient respect” (as a Black woman) to a white male state trooper, after a lane change traffic stop?
The African American Policy Forum (#SAYHERNAME) has a lot of data on this subject. 

*”Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat,” by John Wilson, PhD, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, March 13, 2017.

Worshipping "Aryan" Blondness

Poster promoting the 1936 Berlin Olympics in England and America.

It’s amused me that Nazis placed the tall, blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed “Aryan” on a pedestal despite the fact that Hitler (and most Germans) didn’t fit the Aryan stereotype.
This memorandum describes two science fiction alternative history novels—one from 1974 and another from 1937—that dealt with the blond Aryan stereotype and Nazism.
This piece also touches on the roles for blond men on screen. 

“Aryan” was originally just a language term.
It referred to the prehistoric peoples who spoke Indo-European languages, and “Indo-European” covers a big area, Europe, the Iranian plateau, and northern India.
During the 1850s, the term “Aryan” was “adapted” by French “thinker” Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) to refer to “white” Europeans (that is, Northern Europeans who weren’t Jewish).
Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis, fixed upon De Gobineau’s discredited theory that “whiter-skinned” Europeans were intrinsically “superior” to Southern Europeans (and the rest of the world population).

The original cover for The Iron Dream illustrated its’ yellow-haired hero (shown above).

Later editions showed Hitler on the cover, to clarify that The Iron Dream was a satire!

In 1974, Norman Spinrad spun the satirical science-fiction tale The Iron Dream.
(I’m told it was a big hit on college campuses.)
The Iron Dream contains a post-apocalyptic novel called “Lord of the Swastika” (written by an alternate-universe Adolf Hitler), along with an afterword by a fictional editor/historian called Homer Whipple.
The afterword is set on an Earth in which WWII was never fought, and in which Hitler immigrated to the U.S. (in 1919) and became a hack science-fiction illustrator/writer, in New York City.

According to the Iron Dream afterword, “Lord of the Swastika” was Hitler’s final work, written just before his death (in 1953) of causes probably related to syphilis.
In Whipple’s afterword—supposedly written five years after the Hitler novel was created (1958)—most of Europe and Africa (including Great Britain), had become the “Greater Soviet Union.”
The U.S. and Japan are tight allies, because only they hadn’t gone Communist.

Hitler’s novel, on the other hand, is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth in which a nuclear holocaust has made most humans mutants.
While a few settlements remain in which human-looking people predominate, most cities contain deformed mutants, plus another type of mutant (Dominators).
Like Professor X in the Marvel Universe, the Dominators are able to telepathically control others.
Their power is so frightening to “true humans” that Dominators are killed as soon as they’re identified.
The Earth is living in an uneasy truce. 

Doc Savage, the 1930s pulp hero created by Lester Dent, was not an Aryan superman.

His eyes weren’t blue; they were light brown, flecked with gold.

A "hero" (named Fenric Jaggar) comes on the scene to claim his "birthright as a genotypically pure human"
(“Feric” is close to the German word for iron (ferric); “Jaggar” is similar to a word for warrior or hunter.)
Feric is described as “a tall, powerfully-built true human in the prime of manhood.
His hair was yellow, his skin was fair, his eyes were blue and brilliant.
His musculature, skeletal structure, and carriage were letter-perfect, and his trim blue tunic was clean and in good repair.”
(As you can see from this excerpt, Spinrad was trying his best to imitate the over-the-top writing style of a pulp writer.)

At first, Feric just wants to live in a “true human” society.
After he discovers that “true humans” are living in close proximity to mutants, he decides on genocide as the best solution.
As Feric builds a following, he uses visual symbols—flags, swastikas, and uniforms of “shiny black leather”—to manipulate the mass psyche.
These tools are just as important as his magic weapon (the “Great Truncheon of Held”) that he found in the Emerald Wood, and which only he is able to wield.

Feric gains power among “his people,” and begins a bloody World War against the Dominators and the rest of the lizard and parrot-people mutants.
In Whipple’s afterword, he decries the “nauseating violent excesses,” “blatant phallic symbolism,” and complete lack of female characters in “Lord of the Swastika.”

I didn’t enjoy the endless battle scenes, but I did enjoy the ending before the ending of The Iron Dream.
The ancient leader of the Dominator mutants faces off with Feric, and before the mutant dies, he’s able to push a button, and set off several nuclear bombs.
Feric survives, but he’s no longer a “genotypically pure human.”
Neither is anyone else born on the planet Earth.
(This wasn’t the actual ending of the novel, but I wish it was.)

(Control-click on the cover to enlarge to read the cover text)

Cover of Swastika Night. British author Katharine Burdekin used the pen name Murray Constantine.

Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night is a much better read, and (unlike The Iron Dream) rich in psychological insights.
This science-fiction tale also deals with the tall, blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed “Aryan” stereotype.
However, it was written in 1937, thirty-seven years before The Iron Dream was written, and the very year that WWII began.

Swastika Night is set on an alternate Earth more than 700 years after Germany and Japan have won WWII.
The two countries have split the world between them, and a main character is Alfred EW 10762, an ordinary-looking thirty-year-old airplane technician who’s traveled from subjugated Britain to visit the “Holy Places” in Germany, where long-dead Adolf Hitler is worshipped in the Nazi state religion.(There’s a sacred spot along the Rhine River where Hitler swam across.)

Englishman Alfred meets an elderly Nazi Knight named Frederick Van Hess (descended from Rudolf Hess).
(The ruling class doesn’t have numbers in their names.)
Van Hess has preserved a family manuscript for over 25 generations that reveals the long-hidden true history of the world.
This manuscript contains a real photograph of Adolf Hitler.
Alfred learns that Hitler was not a seven-foot-tall warrior with long golden hair, and a “noble rugged brow.”
Germans didn’t create civilization, and weren't always the “Master Race.”
One subject of Swastika Night is how Alfred deals with the discovery that everything he’s been taught since childhood is a lie.

In some ways, Swastika Night was a precursor to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Unlike Atwood’s vision, however, women aren’t split into two separate classes—“elevated wives” and “child-bearing women.”
Instead, in Burdekin’s Nazi society, all women are “kept in pens: their heads are shaved bald, they wear formless gray sacks, and their only purpose in life is to produce sons for their masters.” 

Rosa Klebb (Lotta Lenya) and Grant (Robert Shaw) in the James Bond film From Russia with Love.

Since blond hair usually darkens with age—and only 2% of the world population has blond hair anyway—many actors have resorted to peroxide to represent the blond, blue-eyed “superman” on stage and screen.
Dark-haired English gentleman, Robert Shaw, dyed his hair blond to play the muscular villain (Grant) in From Russia with Love, and Panzer tank commander Col. Hessler in Battle of the Bulge. 

Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier), with Yorick’s skull, in a photo released for the 1948 film Hamlet.

Actually, unless blond hair is matched with a muscular build, blond men aren’t always “supermen.”
According to theatre lore, Lawrence Olivier dyed his brown hair platinum blond so he could play the “archetype Dane” in Hamlet.
(As a result, other actors—especially younger actors in student productions—began to sport blond hair when playing “Hamlet.”)
Olivier believed that blond hair weakened the forcefulness of his appearance, and was better suited for the part.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) views his “Creation” (Peter Hinwood) with appreciation, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I’m pretty sure that Peter Hinwood, the “Creation” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), was a natural blond.
However, he dyed his hair lighter for the role.
(His physical form was perfect, but his personality was a bit “wimpy” in Rocky Horror.)

Speaking of blond hair indicating weakness in a man, according to a 2011 study* brown hair in men is associated with being attractive, intelligent and competent, while blond hair in men is associated with being “needy.”
After all, isn’t it “tall, dark and handsome?” and not “tall, blond and handsome?”

*”British Men’s Hair Color Preferences: An Assessment of Courtship Solicitation and Stimulus Ratings,” V. Swami and S. Barrett, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Vol 52, 2011, December.