Tobacco Wives and King’s Daughters

Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor, right) and Roy Whitman (John McIntire, left) greet a room of  potential “mail order” brides in a Westward the Women lobby card. (The photos on the board show “picture grooms.”)

The story of how female immigrants made their way to America—and how single immigrant women learned about American ways, and found mates—has always interested me.
I know from my Italian family that sometimes women from the “old country” would travel to the Americas, to marry men they had never met (after very short courtships).
It may seem odd, but this is my Valentine’s Day memorandum.

For a woman to locate a man to marry on her own wasn’t the norm in human societies.
Worldwide, many marriages were arranged by parents, or by religious elders.
In the royal and aristocratic families of Europe, marriages were arranged to keep a select group of bloodlines in control.
However, generally couples saw each other—at least a few times—before they wed.

The DVD for America’s Last Little Italy: The Hill, a 2020 documentary on the St. Louis “Little Italy.”

The subject of the 2020 documentary America’s Last Little Italy: The Hill is the “Little Italy” in St. Louis, MO.
One story is that of “picture brides,” Italian maidens who immigrated to St. Louis to marry specific Italian men.
These arrangements were mainly made from the late 1800s through the early 1900s.
Usually, the women came from the same provinces (or villages) in Lombardy or Sicily, as their prospective bridegrooms.
(Other immigrant cultures, that used the “picture bride” idea, included Japan and Korea.)

When the Americas were settled by various European groups, there were many more men than women.
When you consider that so many women died in childbirth, this was a really big issue.
At first, there was intermarriage with Native Americans, but ruling groups found that to be problematic.
(It was felt that such marriages made the settlements less English, French, and Spanish.)
Governments, and private companies, didn’t want blended societies (European/indigenous) in the “New World.”
They desired societies that were mirror images of their own, back in Europe.
Thus, TPTB sought helpmates for the lonely men who farmed the land (and stole it from indigenous peoples) among the “less prosperous classes” of European women.

The Virginia Company (founded in 1606) was in charge of sections of the North American coast until 1624.
It recruited indentured servants, and “Tobacco Wives” (1620, Jamestown) as marriage partners for the settlers.
Later, the British government transported female convicts to the thirteen colonies (as indentured servants), many of whom also married farmers or started their own farms.
(Women were called “Tobacco Wives,” because sometimes the tobacco farmer husbands paid for their wives’ expenses in tobacco leaves.)

The French handled the issue in a more respectful manner than the British.
From 1663 to 1673, women were shipped to New France to marry French Canadian farmers. These women were called Filles du Roi (King’s Daughters), and many were orphans.
(Some women were as young as 16, but the average age was 24.)
Unlike the English bride program, which was done on the cheap, these women were given a trousseau that included a hope chest, a wardrobe of clothing, and sewing supplies.
Over 40% brought along a modest dowry for their new husbands, given by the French government.

In the early days of colonial America (if they weren’t indentured servants, or tobacco wives), nearly all women arrived with husbands.
Between 1900-1910 (according to Mark Wyman’s Round Trip to America), only 30% of all immigrants were women, a big share to work as house servants, factory women, housewives, and shop girls.
The female to male ratio was higher than 30% for some countries (like Austria and Hungary), and as low as 95.7% male to 4.3% female for Serbs and Bulgarians.
(Workers from Serbia and Bulgaria usually didn’t bring wives, or marry here; they tended to go back to their home countries, after they’d earned a nest egg.)

Potential Chinese female immigrants were treated much worse than European women.
As Reese Jones describes in his book White Borders,* government officials assumed they were prostitutes.
The Page Act of 1875 (the first U.S. restrictive immigration law) focused on Chinese women as “as vectors of disease, as agents of moral decline, and of literally diluting the white race through pregnancy and mixed-race children.”
As a result, Chinese women were asked to prove that they weren’t prostitutes with “intrusive interviews and embarrassing medical examinations.”

One of my favorite films on mail-order brides, is 1951’s Westward the Women.
In it, an Italian widow with a young son, and a “fancy woman” who works in saloons—Mrs. Moroni (Renata Vanni) and Fifi Danon (Paris-born Denice Darcel)—represent immigrant women who traveled to the American West.
Mrs. Moroni speaks little English and Mr. Moroni likely died soon after the family arrived in America.
Miss Fifi Danon worked, so she’s fluent in English.

In Westward the Women, Italian widow Mrs. Moroni (Renata Vanni), and her son, are interviewed by Roy Whitman (John McIntire), the man in charge of a “mail-order” bride wagon train to California.

In Westward the Women, Mrs. Moroni and Miss Danon are two of 138 women journeying (from Chicago) to become brides in a remote area of California.
Farmer Roy Whitman (John McIntire) and cowboy Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor) organize a wagon train to bring the brides to Whitman’s town—a town filled with lonely cowboys, farmers, and storekeepers.
The movie seems loosely based on the successful Benton brother trip from Maryland to Oregon, and the not-as-successful Asa Mercer expeditions (1864-1866) from Boston to Seattle.

Poster for Zandy’s Bride, with Hannah Lund (Liv Ullmann) and Zandy Allen (Gene Hackman).

The fractured glass in the picture frame is symbolic of their relationship.

Another favorite movie on women marrying “strange men” is 1974’s Zandy’s Bride.
In this frontier drama—set in 1890s Big Sur Country—Hannah Lund (Liv Ullmann) is a mail-order bride (originally from Sweden), and Gene Hackman is Zandy Allan, her socially-inept, misogynist bridegroom.
This Western was based on the novel The Stranger, by Lillian Bos Ross.
It’s interesting that Zandy sends for a Swedish bride, when there’s a Latina (Maria Cordova, played by non-Latina Susan Tyrrell) who’s eager to marry him.

Photo from Westward the Women, with Patience Hawley (Hope Emerson, the tallest woman)—and the rest of the women—looking at their “picture groom” photos, before the combination square dance/ wedding reception.

Westward the Women ends just after the surviving women meet (and marry) the men.
Even rough cowboy Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor) ends up “getting hitched,” although he never intended to find a wife in Fifi Danon (Denice Darcel).
There’s no bride, however, for Ito Kentaro (Korean War veteran, Henry Nakamura).
The role of an Asian cowboy was played mainly for comic relief.
On the other hand, Zandy’s Bride, begins a little before the wedding between Liv and Zandy, and its’ subject is how the bride and groom get on after they’re wed.

In Westward the Women, the men are grateful to find brave women willing to join them in matrimony, but we never learn how all their stories work out.
In Zandy’s Bride, however, it takes at least a year—and a little distance—for Zandy to recognize the true worth of his mail-order bride. 

According to “Coming to America: The War Brides Act of 1945”—on the National WWII Museum website—over 60,000 foreign women wed American servicemen during WWII.
These women had little time to really get to know their new husbands, but they were determined to join them in the U.S. anyway.
U.S. immigration laws stood in their way.
Congress passed the War Brides Act of 1945, and under this law eventually 300,000 women, plus dependents, were admitted by 1948.

Panel from the “Korean War Bride” tale from All True Romance #11 (1953).

To read the entire story, click HERE.

After the Korean War, more than 6,000 Korean women married American soldiers and immigrated to the U.S.
Besides the difficulties of adjusting to a new and strange culture, these women also faced discrimination, and the ridiculous stereotype that Asian women are docile, weak, and sexually available.

Obtaining an immigrant bride is still a thriving business.
Women greatly outnumber men in countries like Russia, El Salvador, and Guadeloupe, and so women in those lands have been open to becoming mail-order brides.
Some women, from poorer countries, travel to the U.S. to find rich husbands.
(It’s the fodder of reality TV shows like 90-Day Fiancé.)
American men have married foreign women, hoping they’ll make more “traditional” wives than “spoiled” American women.
Did Trump—and his father and grandfather—marry Europeans because they were frightened of American women, or did they believe American women inferior?
(All three generations married European women who needed to become citizens; Donald Trump married two.)

*White Borders, by Reese Jones, Beacon Press, 2021.

Wealth and Cultural Identity

A representation of Metacomet, Metacom or King Philip (as he was variously known), as drawn by Paul Revere.

In her book, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, Jill Lepore explains the roots and aftermath of King Philip’s War (1675-1676) in which thousands of Native Americans, and Puritans, died—men, women, and children.
In the aftermath part, she explains how famous American actor, Edwin Forrest, won great success (in 1829) with a play he had commissioned: Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags.

The play, Metamora, is the story of a noble Native American chief driven to war by English treachery.
Rapturous audiences applauded the defiant words of a long-dead First American.
Oddly enough, this play was performed during the same era when President Andrew Jackson put through the Indian Removal Act of 1830!
(This notorious Act forced more than 60,000 people to be moved to the other side of the Mississippi River, in a “Trail of Tears.”
(Thousands of Native Americans died along the way, or soon after arriving in Kansas and Oklahoma.)

Nathaniel Currier (of Currier and Ives) representation of Edwin Forrest as Metamora in the play Metamora, the Last of the Wampanoags.

In Act Two of the play, Metamora proclaims:

White man, beware! The mighty spirit of the Wampanoag race are hovering o’er our heads; they stretch out their shadowy arms to me and ask for vengeance; they shall have it. . . From the east to the west, in the north and in the south shall cry of vengeance burst, till the lands you have stolen groan under your feet no more!

What is it that made English-Americans applaud as a white actor bellowed out these words?
What is it, that made Americans alternately praise the beauty and power of Native American cultures, and then commit genocide against them?
That’s the issue that Jill Lepore deals with.

A representation of Massasoit (also known as Ousamequin) with his warriors. Massasoit was the father of Metacomet (King Philip).

Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags was loosely based on the life of King Philip (1638-1676, also known as Metacomet/Metacom), chief of the Wampanoags.
(The Wampanoags, or People of the First Light, lived in Cape Cod, and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.)
Philip was the second son of Ousamequin/Massasoit—the same chief/sachem who saved the Pilgrims in the first Thanksgiving (1621)—and he succeeded his father in 1662, after his elder brother died.

By the end of the war (as discussed in The Name of War), half of New England towns were reduced to ashes.
Many Christian indigenous people (who had assimilated and were living on their farms) were transported to island prison camps, left to starve and to die.
After King Philip was killed—and his head hung in the center of Plymouth, Massachusetts—the brief war ended.
Hundreds of indigenous noncombatants were sent into slavery—to the West Indies, and possibly North Africa—alongside the wives and children of known combatants.
(The slave money—from selling Native Americans—helped rebuild after the war.)

King Philip was blamed for uniting with the Narragansett tribes, and for starting the war.
Purportedly, the war began after three Wampanoag men were tried, and hanged, for killing John Sassamon—a Christian, Harvard-educated indigenous man—who was both a schoolmaster and a minister.
(Supposedly, King Philip was angry because Sassamon had informed the English that Philip was planning a war.)
Native American leaders, however, were becoming very tired of Englishmen both taking their lands, and trying to convert them to the British way of life.
The Wampanoags and the Narragansetts attacked various New England towns, and (after more than a half century of peace) the Puritans had a full-scale war on their hands.

A representation of King Philip negotiating with the Pilgrims.

A major point in The Name of War is that the war came at a time when Puritan religious leaders were concerned that living close to indigenous peoples was making white Americans “less civilized” and “less English.”
Lepore notes:

Building a “city on a hill” in the American wilderness provides a powerful religious rationale, but on certain days. . .it must have fallen short of making perfect sense. When the corn wouldn’t grow, when the weather turned wild, these are the times when the colonists might have wondered, What are we doing here? . . . as many as one in six sailed home to England in the 1630s and 1640s, eager to return to a world they knew and understood.

While some religious leaders—like Baptist Roger Williams and Puritan John Eliot (creator of the “Indian Bible”)—were intent on Native Americans converting and assimilating, other leaders wanted the First Americans to live in separate villages, if they lived at all.
At the same time, many leaders like King Philip never became Christians, and decided that the only path to keeping their freedom, was to fight back.

Mingo (Ed Ames, left) with Jeremiah (Jimmy Dean, right) in “The Imposter” (season 4, episode 16) of Daniel Boone.

Mingo and Jeremiah were pretending to be British officers, so as to steal experimental rifles for the Revolutionary War. (Mingo attributed his darker skin to sea adventures.)

The TV series Daniel Boone starred Fess Parker in the title role, and aired from 1964-1970.
(Daniel Boone lived from 1734 until 1820, and so he lived about 100 years after King Phillip.)
Non-indigenous Ed Ames played Boone’s Oxford-educated, half-Cherokee friend, Mingo, for 72 out of the 165 one-hour episodes.
Ed Ames’ parents were immigrants from what is now Ukraine.

Mingo was not a real historical figure.
However, he reminds me somewhat of John Sassamon (mentioned above)—a Harvard-educated Algonquian, raised to be Christian by his Native American parents.
John Sassamon, like Mingo, lived on both sides of the cultural divide.

“Mingo” was short for “Caramingo,” and his English father was the fourth Earl of Dunmore.
From the Native American perspective, “mingo” is a word for “chief” in the Choctaw language.
Besides John Sassamon, Mingo’s character also resembles Joseph Brant—a Mohawk, who was a captain in the British Army—and was educated at Moore’s Indian Charity School (the precursor to Dartmouth College). 

Other members of the large Daniel Boone cast were “Rosey” Roosevelt Grier and Jimmy Dean.
Former football star “Rosey” Grier played escaped slave, Gabe Cooper, for 16 episodes.
Singer and actor, Jimmy Dean, (whose voice we hear in sausage commercials) played three different frontiersmen (including Jeremiah) in 15 episodes.
Reviewers have criticized the series for not being historically accurate, pointing out that Boone never wore a coonskin hat.
(The real Boone preferred more-elegant felt hats to hunting hats.)

Last panels from “The Murderers’ Cave,” a Gold Key Fess Parker: Daniel Boone comic book (#2, 1965).

(You can read the entire story HERE!)

Mingo is accused of crimes in Daniel Boone TV episodes like “My Brother’s Keeper” (season 1, episode 3), and “A Rope for Mingo,” (season 2, episode 11).
However, the story drawn in the comic book “The Murderers’ Cave” never aired.
In this story, Mingo is accused of murder by two disreputable white men, but their word is believed over Mingo’s, because he’s only a savage.
By the end of the trial, Daniel Boone says; “You are free now, Mingo! But you understand, they have to enforce the law . . .” and Mingo responds: “I understand, Daniel . . . but my people can never be free under such laws!”
(Was the dialogue “too liberal” for the times?
Is that why this particular script never aired?) 

Nearly 350 years later, we (in the U.S.) are in a similar position to the New England indigenous tribes versus the New England Puritans during King Philip’s War.
On one side, about half of us want to live in a melting pot—with all of us having our different religions, and our different identities—but trying not to step on one another’s toes.
On the other hand, about half of us want to be “Englishmen,” with an out of proportion attachment to material possessions.*

*Jill Lepore notes, in The Name of War, that Native Americans rejected “the English conflation of property and identity, saying: We have nothing but our lives to loose [lose] but thou hast many fair houses cattell [cattle] & much good things.” (Italics and bold face mine.)

“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.