About Tempus:

Tempus: The Harvard College History Review is the History Department’s undergraduate journal. Tempus was founded by a pair of undergraduates in 1998 as a forum for original undergraduate historical work, through which students have the opportunity to learn from their peers. Tempus also sponsors history events and aims to promote an undergraduate community within the department. In the spring of 2009, Tempus became an online publication. Four years later, in the spring of 2013, Tempus returned to print. Visit us at http://hcs.harvard.edu/tempus to see our latest issue.

The Editorial Board, Fall 2013:

Anne Marie Creighton Editor-in-ChiefForrest Brown Deputy Editor-in-ChiefCody Dales Senior Business EditorMatthew BewleyNathaniel HayAnton KhodakovHarper SutherlandJulia WangHonor WilkinsonJacob Moscona-SkolnikStefan PoltorzyckiMartin Carlino*Alice Han*Santiago Pardo*Eli Lee*

*Congratulations to our new members!

Cover art by Honor Wilkinson, with thanks

Acknowledgments:The editorial staff of Tempus would like to express its gratitude for the support of the Harvard History Department. Special thanks to Ryan Wilkinson for helping revise the papers in this issue. Tempus would also like to thank all those who submitted papers for consideration for the high quality of their work.

1Art and Craft of Modernity

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Note From the Editors ..................................................................................................i

Anne Marie Creighton

1. ‘Country and State Gone Mad’? The 1968 Northampton Dump Dispute and the Rise

of Federal and State Regulation .....................................................................................1

Rebecca Robbins

2. The Art and Craft of Modernity: Louis Comfort Tiffany in a New Light ...............12

Isaac Dayno

3. “The World of Today”: The Polish Pavilion At The 1939-40 World’s Fair .............22

Leah Schulson

4. Dressed in White: A Mysterious Rebellion at San Juan Ixcoy ..................................38

Sascha Berkovitch

5. Up in Smoke: Greco-Egyptian Encounters Through the Cigarette Industry (c. 1880-

1956) ..............................................................................................................................48

Amy Alemu

6. Disputing the Past: Reconciling Family History with Historical Scholarship ...........60

Eli Lee

7. Identity Crisis of the Semitic Museum .....................................................................62

Santiago Pardo

8. “We Are Our Story”: Schama’s The Story of the Jews ...................................................64

Alice Han

9. The Vitality of History .............................................................................................66

Martin Carlino

1

EdiTOr’S NOTE

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the Fall 2013 Issue of Tempus, Volume XIV, Issue 2. Last semester, we received so many quality submissions that we published five papers, which may then have been our largest issue ever. This semester, it happened again. There was so much excel-lent undergraduate historical work that we could not choose any fewer than five papers to publish. This task could only be completed thanks to the tremendous efforts of our authors and the members of our board, all of whom have worked very hard this semester.

The five papers here represent a diversity of subject, method, and location. Three papers examine the twentieth century United States and its modernity. Isaac’s paper, a beautifully written work of art history, uses that lens to examine the artwork of Louis Comfort Tiffany and the electrification of the United States. Leah’s essay examines the Polish-American experience in 1939 and 1940 as centered around Poland’s pavilion in the New York City World’s Fair. The Polish Pavilion, intended to symbolize the young country’s entry onto the modern world stage, opened mere days before the Soviet Army invaded Poland, an ocean away. Rebecca’s paper skillfully shows the role of activist organizations in the much-studied conflict between local and federal/state government in the United States of the late 1960s.We also have two excellent papers from other world regions. Amy’s essay discusses how the cigarette industry proved an important symbolic component of the Egyptian diaspora in early twentieth-century Egypt. As a student of Latin America myself, I am particularly pleased to welcome Sascha’s submission on a vil-lage in nineteenth-century Guatemala.

The papers this year have some of the strongest and most interesting methodologies I have seen in my four years on Tempus. Amy and Isaac’s papers both powerfully use art to prove their point. Leah’s and Rebecca’s papers are based on a large quantity of insight-ful primary source research, above and beyond what is usual for undergraduate work. And Sascha took a very difficult subject, a Maya worker’s revolt about which there are few sources, and showed how Subaltern Studies and local history could add to the usual picture of the event.

We have two features to present to you in print this semester, and two more may be found online because of space constraints. The two in print discuss family history and the history of the Harvard Semitic Museum, close to home. Online, we have a review of a documentary series on Jewish history and a reflection on what history means.

As my time on Tempus ends, I hope you enjoy reading this nearly as much as I have enjoyed helping to create it.

Anne Marie CreightonEditor-in-Chief

1Rebecca Robbins, “‘Country and State Gone Mad’? The Northampton Dump Dispute and the Rise of Federal and State Environmental Regulation,” Tempus, 14.2 (Fall 2013), 1-11.

‘COuNTry ANd STATE GONE MAd’?ThE 1968 NOrThAMpTON duMp diSpuTE ANd ThE riSE OF FEdErAL ANd

STATE ENvirONMENTAL rEGuLATiON

Rebecca Robbins

Northampton Mayor Wallace Puchalski was at his wit’s end. It was August 15, 1968, and the clock was ticking to find a solution to the city’s waste disposal crisis. In just six weeks, a state order banning the burning of trash at Northampton’s only dump site would go into effect—meaning that if city officials were unable to agree on a more ecologically friendly waste disposal method before the looming September 30 deadline, residents would be left without a place to dump their trash. As Puchalski’s efforts to find an alternate solution failed to gain local support, his frustrations finally boiled over at a city council meeting that night. In a performance that The Springfield Union deemed the city’s most heated in 80 years, Puchalski lashed out against his fellow council members, accusing them of “grandstanding” and telling another that his proposals were “idiotic.” But Puchalski saved his most vitriolic criticism for the state-level organizations and agencies—the state Department of Public Health, the state Department of Natural Resources, the Local Pioneer Valley Air Pollution Control District, and the Massachusetts Audubon Society—who he believed were improperly interfering in a municipal affair. These “outsiders,” Puchalski reportedly said, had the nerve to “come in here and tell us we can’t burn anymore.”1

Puchalski was officially a Democrat, but in practice he was a fiscal conservative, committed to keeping the tax rate stable and the budget balanced. More often than not, keeping costs down necessitated keeping the state out.2 The mayor was afraid that heavy-handed state officials and prodding environmentalists were wrenching away control of the city from him—and these fears were not unfounded. Across the country in the 1960s, pollution was showing its ugly colors, prompting a growing consensus among state and federal officials that land use must be more closely monitored—and that municipal 1 “A Night to Remember,” The Springfield Union, August 17, 1968, 17.2 Associated Press, “Arruda Fall River Poll Victor; Lawler Upset In New Bedford Race,” Newport Daily News, November 8, 1961, 7; “‘Hamp’s Mayor Puchalski Says He’s Stepping Down,” The Springfield Union, February 5, 1969, 8.

2 Robbins

governments were not up to the task. In this climate, state governments and federal agencies increasingly began taking up the municipality’s traditional role of regulating environmental matters. Pressured by conservationist groups, state and federal lawmakers started passing strict legislation to protect natural resources. In turn, state-level agencies set to work enforcing these new environmental protection laws with unprecedented vigor. Left without a say in the changing landscape were municipal officials who found themselves stripped of their traditional regulatory powers and burdened with new state-levied regulations.

The rise of the federal and state-level regulation of environmental matters at the expense of municipalities is well documented in the historical literature. Without exception, these histories tell the story of increased environmental oversight in the 1960s as a narrative of powerful and determined state and federal players who swooped in to save the environment by correcting the mistakes of bumbling local officials. In his 1987 seminal text Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985, historian Samuel P. Hays tracks the proliferation of federal statutes and the expansion of federal aid to state governments beginning in the 1930s—changes that he argues empowered the previously impotent state government to “reach farther than it had before” with environmental oversight.3 In 2010, environmental historian Adam Rome added to the discussion with The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, which examines (and largely agrees with) the claim that local governments had done a “woefully inadequate” job of regulating the environment before the state and federal government launched a “quiet revolution” against municipal control.4 Other historical works, namely environmental law scholar Cymie Payne’s essay “Local Regulation of Natural Resources: Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Fairness of Wetlands Permitting in Massachusetts,” have localized the phenomenon within the state of Massachusetts. Despite small differences in focus, these accounts all privilege the roles played by state and federal officials over those of less visible players.

A history of the 1968 Northampton dump dispute tells a different story. It too emphasizes the undeniably impactful role of state and federal legislation and regulatory enforcement, but gives agency to less visible players as well. It brings into the spotlight the leaders of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, who pressured and nudged and wrote letters to state government agencies until they finally took action to respond to violations of environmental regulations at the Northampton open dump. It also highlights the remarkably successful resistance efforts of Puchalski and other Northampton city officials, who for months managed to hold out against the state’s efforts to make them 3 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cam-bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 442. 4 Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cam-bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 229-30.

3Country and State Gone Mad

come into compliance. In doing so, it paints a more complex portrait of these municipal personalities, whose desire to preserve the status quo in Northampton was motivated not by incompetence, but by carefully considered financial and political calculations.

‘MOrE MuSCLE’In 1968, Northampton was a sleepy New England college town. It was home to

just over 27,000 residents,5 most of whom were employed in health care or education. Demographically homogenous, Northampton lay relatively untouched by the social and countercultural movements that were reshaping the fabric of American society. But while Northampton residents kept their backs to the outside world, a segment of that outside world was increasingly turning an eye toward the city’s worsening pollution problems–conditions, a Holyoke (Mass.) Transcript-Telegram article declared, had turned a local waterway into “little more than an open sewer.”6 Meanwhile, the Northampton city dump, a privately owned open-air site where residents, businesses, and truckers hauled their trash to be burned, was raising even more alarms. Burning and disposal practices at the dump allowed smoking refuse to spill into the Mill River, a tributary to the Connecticut River that passes right beside the dump site. That refuse was flowing downstream into—and sometimes being burned in—the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary, the property situated immediately adjacent to the dump. Also troubling was the pollution of the skies. The haze generated by the burning was so bad that an official with the Reading-based Utility Survey Engineering Corporation called the dump “the biggest air polluter in the area.”7 And in a remarkable story, The Springfield Union reported that Northampton officials were blaming a “thick cloud” of smoke emanating from the dump for a car accident that resulted in four injuries.8

As they observed these deteriorating environmental conditions in Northampton, state officials became convinced that Puchalski and other municipal leaders were not willing or equipped to find solutions on their own. Speaking at a public hearing on the issue in 1966, Angelo Iantosca, an official with the state Department of Public Health, expressed irritation that his Department’s repeated warnings about “the deficiencies of the dump” had gone completely unheeded by Northampton officials. Iantosca continued: “Our department is concerned with stream pollution, and has tried to work with city officials to get some action to prevent further pollution to the Connecticut river from the dump. Eventually, something will have to be done about the dump situation in Northampton.”9 5 City of Northampton Annual Report, 1968.6 “Conn. River Below Dam Has ‘Shocking’ Amount Of Dangerous Pollution,” Holyoke (Mass.) Transcript-Telegram, February 21, 1967.7 “Dump ‘Biggest Polluter,’” Daily Hampshire Gazette, January 12, 1968.8 “Four Injured as Cars Hit in Dump Smoke,” The Springfield Union, April 29, 1968. 9 “City Dump Location Said Injurious To Conn. River, Wildlife Sanctuary,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 5, 1966.

4 Robbins

Across the country, more and more state officials were echoing Iantosca’s frustrations with the sluggishness of municipal governments in taking on environmental problems. As Hays notes in Beauty, Health, and Permanence, municipalities have historically lagged on sustainability issues. The cause of this impotence, he argued, has been twofold. First, local government officials have simply lacked the resources—experience, skills, knowledge, and most importantly, money—to improve environmental conditions. Second, municipalities have historically prioritized promoting economic and business development above all other aims of governance.10 In The Bulldozer in the Countryside, Rome identifies a third factor to explain the phenomenon: flawed zoning and subdivision regulations, which often only applied within city limits and therefore rendered the municipality powerless to regulate rural areas.11 As these limitations of city government persisted into the 1960s, state and federal officials reasoned that problems as dire as the ones facing the environment demanded intervention from the authorities who could and would fix them.

And so they took action. In February 1968, the Daily Hampshire Gazette printed an Associated Press wire story headlined “Air Pollution Problems Urgent, Complicated” that outlined the efforts of federal officials to combat the dangerous effects of smog and pollution. The story declared that in the face of “virtually nonexistent” local programs, the federal government was “putting more muscle into the struggle for cleaner air.”12 That muscle resulted in the passage of new pieces of environmental protection legislation, such as the 1963 Clean Air Act, the 1965 Federal Water Pollution Control Act, and the Federal Clean Water Restoration Act of 1966, designed to keep a closer eye on how Americans could make use of their skies and waters. Similar changes were happening in Massachusetts. Within the state bureaucracy, a new department, the Division of Water Pollution Control, was established within the Department of Natural Resources to protect state rivers and waterways.13 The state legislature also passed new laws like the Hatch Act of 1965, the Massachusetts Clean Waters Act of 1966, and the Inland Wetlands Act of 1968 to keep a tighter leash on municipal regulation of the Commonwealth’s natural landscapes.

The Hatch Act, which would figure prominently in the Northampton dump dispute, warrants closer examination. The first wetlands preservation law in the country, it required anyone who wanted to “remove, fill, or dredge any bank, flat, marsh, meadow, or swamp” in state inland wetlands to notify the state Department of Natural Resources, the state Department of Public Works, and city officials.14 The Hatch Act made no

10 Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 432-5.11 Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 229.12 “Air Pollution Problems Urgent, Complicated,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, February 15, 1968.13 “Conn. River Below Dam Has ‘Shocking’ Amount Of Dangerous Pollution,” Holyoke (Mass.) Transcript-Telegram, February 21, 1967.14 Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 162.

5Country and State Gone Mad

qualms about restricting the role of the municipality in governance—a step which did not go unacknowledged. A 1969 Department of Natural Resources report blithely noted that the Hatch Act “does not assign any official or advisory responsibility to the local conservation commission, the municipal agency charged with advising as to the proper use of these wetlands.”15 More and more, even as it gained greater power on other issues, the municipality was being pushed out of the environmental regulatory process in Massachusetts.

ThE prOddiNG SOCiETy

Efforts to more closely regulate the environment were not pushed through by lawmakers and government officials alone. Prior to the rise of the broad-based environmental movement in the 1970s, activism on sustainability issues in the Sixties came largely from private conservationist organizations. In the Commonwealth, that mobilization was concentrated in the Massachusetts Audubon Society. At every step of the way in the Northampton dump dispute, the Society was intimately involved.

The Massachusetts Audubon Society, founded in 1896, has always been separate from its younger and larger spinoff, the National Audubon Society. For more than half a century, the Massachusetts Audubon Society defined itself primarily as a birdwatching, recreational, and educational organization. But in the 1960s, a new leader reoriented the Society in a more political direction. In 1959, Allen Morgan, a young insurance executive who enjoyed the outdoors on the weekends, was tapped as the Society’s new executive vice president. From the start, Morgan did not fit the conventional mold for a leader of the Society, and he certainly never acted like one. According to a retrospective in Sanctuary, the Society’s bimonthly journal, Morgan “saw the need to broaden the scope of the Society’s activities to meet new challenges. He began to garner friends and allies in high places. He was outspoken and well informed…. and he was not averse to moving the organization into the nasty snake pit of the political arena.”16

Morgan saw the city’s dump problem as a natural project for his newly politicized approach. Not only was the pollution of the Arcadia Sanctuary harming the preserve’s wildlife, but the prospect of shutting down the burning dump also served as an opportunity to fulfill the Society’s mission of promoting conservation. Together with Robie Hubley, director of the Society’s Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary and a resident of nearby Easthampton, Morgan set to work tackling an issue beyond the Society’s

15 “Open Space and Recreation Program for Metropolitan Boston,” Volume 4, Massachusetts Open Space Law: Government’s Influence over Land Use Decisions, 41.16 Massachusetts Audubon Society, “The Mothers of Conservation,” Sanctuary: The Journal of the Massachu-setts Audubon Society, January/February 1996.

6 Robbins

traditional scope.17 His first step was to seek an alliance with the state government—one that would ultimately prove essential in ending burning as the method of waste disposal in Northampton. As Morgan would later reflect in a letter to the editor published in the Hampshire Gazette: “In every case, the courts or the appropriate regulatory agencies have supported us.”18

And so, in a series of letters to state agencies, Morgan and Hubley advocated for aggressive state action in the Northampton dump case by suggesting that the Society’s and the Commonwealth’s priorities were the same. Their first round of activism focused on pushing for enforcement of the Hatch Act. In December 1965, just months after the passage of the Hatch Act, Morgan wrote a letter to the commissioner of the state Department of Natural Resources calling the Northampton dump a “flagrant violation” of the new legislation. Morgan asked the commissioner to inform him what steps were being taken or considered at a state level and advise him what he personally could do “toward the final end of abating this nuisance.”19 Six months later, evoking the same concerns, he wrote another letter to the state Department of Public Health urging state officials to “officially investigate” the burning dump as a threat to “public health and welfare.”20 That same month, the state Department of Public Health sent a representative to a public hearing held under the stipulations of the Hatch Act in response to the dump operator’s filing of a land permit renewal application. The state official, along with Morgan and a representative from Hampshire County Sportsman’s Association, objected to the renewal, meaning that the case would be taken up by the Department of Natural Resources. The next day, Morgan followed up with another letter informing state Department of Natural Resources of developments in the case and urging the commissioner to order the open burning dump operator to cease his practices of dumping refuse into the Mill River.21

The Society saw its efforts begin to pay off the following month, when the state ordered Allen to construct a dike made of impervious material to separate the open burning dump from the Mill River. The state’s specifications were highly regimented and precise—the dike was required to be 1,500 feet long, five feet high, and a width ranging between 3 feet at the top and 25 wide at the bottom. The plans for that dike, the state said, must be filed with the state Department of Public Works and the mayor’s office.22

17 “Mayor Traces History of Issue; Calls Special Council Session Tuesday,” The Springfield Union, October 12, 1968, 3.18 Allen H. Morgan, Letter to the Editor, Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 17, 1968.19 Morgan, Letter to Commissioner Charles H. W. Foster in the Department of Natural Resources, De-cember 17, 1965.20 Morgan, Letter to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, May 3, 1966.21 Morgan, Letter to Commissioner Charles H. W. Foster in the Department of Natural Resources, May 4, 1966.22 “State Alleges Dump Violations,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, January 10, 1967, 3.

7Country and State Gone Mad

An editorial cartoon that ran in the Daily Hampshire Gazette in January 1967 parodied the state’s intervention efforts, depicting a long-coated state official telling a more casually dressed municipal worker: “On behalf of the state I want to say this is a fine dike you have built—but could you move it back a couple of feet?”23 The tone here both poked fun at the paternalistic undertones of the state’s orders and made a serious observation about the rise of state power in regulating Northampton’s environmental issues.

As with the Hatch Act efforts, the Massachusetts Audubon Society stayed closely attuned to the progress of the dike order. A staffer in the state Department of Natural Resources sent a copy of the order to Morgan, with a cover letter affirming that his office and the Audubon Society were on the same side of the issue. “The Department has worked diligently investigating this application and has done everything it can and within the scope of this law,” the staffer assured Morgan.24 Hubley too played his part, writing a letter of complaint to the state Department of Natural Resources in October 1966 when still no action had been taken on the building of the dike.25

In addition to petitioning state officials directly, Morgan and Hubley launched a communications campaign to advocate for the closure of the open burning dump. In the pages of the newspapers, they made their case or defended their actions to Northampton and the surrounding communities. In one such example, a May 17, 1968, letter to the editor published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Morgan contested the suggestion that the Society’s filing of a restraining order against Allen had somehow precipitated the flaring dump dispute. In fact, Morgan argued, the roots of the conflict dated back to the 1950s, when “it became apparent that it was beginning to infringe on sanctuary land and that its method of operation was bound to affect seriously conservation value in the area.” Left without better options at the end of “a long series of events,” the Society had had no choice but to “reluctantly [resort]” to court action.26

By 1967, the state government, prodded by the Society, grew increasingly insistent that the dump be closed—but to no avail. In June of that year, with orders to cease burning at the dump still unmet, a spokesperson for the state Department of Public Health told reporters, “Time is running out on the city of Northampton” to come into compliance.27 A month later, in July, the state tried a new approach, sending a letter to Puchalski telling him that his municipality must come into compliance with the state Pollution Abatement Program by taking action to end burning at the dump.28 By 23 Phillips, “City Capers” cartoon, Daily Hampshire Gazette.24 Kenton A. Beaujean, cover letter to “Order of Conditions” addressed to Allen H. Morgan, June 16, 1966.25 Robie Hubley, Letter addressed to Neil Foley, state Department of Natural Resources, October 4, 1966.26 Morgan, Letter to the Editor, Hampshire Gazette, May 17, 1968.27 “City Dump Attacked Once Again,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, June 21, 1967, 3.28 Thomas C. McMahon, Letter addressed to Northampton Mayor Wallace J. Puchalski, re: Implementa-tion of Pollution Abatement Program, July 21, 1967.

8 Robbins

February 1968, the Lower Pioneer Valley Air Pollution Control District ordered Allen to come up with “specific proposals” for change, to be implemented “within two or three weeks.” When that did not happen, in April, the Department of Public Health once again ordered the operator to cease burning at the dump.29 But every day, dump operations continued as normal, and the air and waters remained polluted.

Increasingly frustrated by the lack of results, Morgan decided to take his case to court. In May 1968, the Massachusetts Audubon Society successfully petitioned the Middlesex County Superior Court to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent operation of the dump, effectively shutting down the waste disposal operations in the city.30 Garbage accumulated in the streets of Northampton for several days as Puchalski pleaded with state officials to reverse the court’s decision.31 With nowhere to dispose their rubbish, haulers and truckers cancelled their collection rounds, leaving mounds of trash—more than 52 tons daily—piled up on the sides of the road.32 The restraining order was soon lifted, but the significance of the move lingered; by disrupting urban life, the Massachusetts Audubon Society had succeeded in making sure that everyone in Northampton knew about the dump problem.

‘GuiNEA piG’As the crisis played out, the view looked much different from Northampton City Hall

than it did from state department offices in Boston or from the Society’s headquarters in Lincoln. Puchalski and other Northampton officials felt victimized by state and federal officials eager to test out their new regulatory legislation. Puchalski told reporters he was “frustrated that the dump is under attack by the state while certain other factors pollute the water and air much worse.”33 Voicing the sentiment of many, one city councilor charged that state officials had singled out Northampton as a guinea pig to test its new regulatory efforts.34 Furthermore, Puchalski charged, the state had brought what environmental problems that did exist in Northampton upon itself. He blamed the Department of Public Works for the pollution into the river, saying it had made an “engineering mistake” in moving the pathway of the Mill River too close to the dump. “There was no problem until the Mill River was diverted,” Puchalski reportedly said at one town meeting. “The state did not cut the diversion bed deep enough to allow sufficient flow of water, creating the problem. The problem was handed to us by the state, 29 Department of Public Health order addressed to James L. Allen Re: LPVAPCD – Regulation 3 Northampton – Dump Site off Easthampton Road, April 9, 1968.30 “Judge Orders Closing Of Northampton Dump,” The Springfield Union, May 8, 1968,23.31 “Officials Plead With Court Judge To Reopen Dump,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 10, 1968.32 “Pileup of ‘Hamp Rubbish Put at 52 Tons Daily,” The Springfield Union, May 9, 1968, 35.33 “Solution Of Refuse Disposal Problem Will Cost Greatly,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, March 17, 1967, 3.34 “City Dump Is Closed At Noon; 2 Health Board Members Quit,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, October 4, 1968.

9Country and State Gone Mad

and we are trying to rectify it, but it is a long range matter—one that could take one or two years to solve.”35 (The Massachusetts Audubon Society disagreed with the assertion that the state had caused the problem, writing that that assertion was “totally false.”)36

In Northampton, municipal officials were very happy to keep regulating the environment the way they always had—which is to say, as little as possible. Puchalski’s commitment to the environment was notoriously suspect. Speaking in the heated August 17, 1968, city council meeting, Puchalski drew laughter when he defended his commitment to protecting the Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary. “I’m not against wildlife, everybody knows that,” Puchalski reportedly said. “Why, I’ve got plenty of wildlife where I live.”37 Still, in January 1966, Puchalski reluctantly convened a rubbish disposal study committee populated by municipal officials and advised by a state engineer. The committee was tasked with exploring options for the possible replacement of the open air burning dump.38 Possible solutions on the table included an incinerator, a sanitary burying landfill, or adaptions to the existing burning dump. In its January 1967 report, the committee sided with Puchalski, issuing a recommendation to stay the course. “If the present method of refuse disposal can be modified to overcome the objections from the various Departments of the State, it is recommended that the status quo be maintained as long as possible,” the report read, emphasizing that a decision should made “particularly in view of the impact upon the tax rate of any change.” If only the city could find some way to silence opposition to the burning dump, the report said, “Northampton would be in an enviable position dollar-wise for many years to come.”39

The committee’s call for a fiscally conservative solution spoke to the significance that municipal officials like Puchalski ascribed to cost. Indeed, financial considerations factored perhaps most heavily into Northampton city officials’ opposition to the closing of the burning dump. At the time the dispute was raging, the private burning dump operator, James Allen, was working on a $24,000 annual contract with the city, which had only recently been raised from $14,000 each year.40 Puchalski furiously opposed an initial proposal for an incinerator, citing how much greater the expense would be.41 The costs, he said, could perhaps reach as high as $1 million in start-up costs, to be followed by annual expenditures of $50,000 for operating expenses—costs that could mean an increase of

35 “City Dump Location Said Injurious To Conn. River, Wildlife Sanctuary,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 5, 1966.36 Hubley, Letter addressed to Northampton City Councillor William Ames, October 11, 1967.37 “A Night to Remember,” The Springfield Union.38 “Rubbish Disposal Study Committee Named By Mayor,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, January 21, 1966, 3.39 “Committee On Refuse Disposal Issues Report,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, 21 January 1967, 3.40 “Solution Of Refuse Disposal Problem Will Cost Greatly,” Daily Hampshire Gazette.41 “Rubbish Disposal Study Committee Named By Mayor,” Daily Hampshire Gazette.

10 Robbins

$7 on the city tax rate.42 He voiced similarly strident opposition to the possibility of a sanitary burying landfill, which he estimated could still cost “four or five times” more than the city was currently paying Allen for the burning dump.43

This reluctance on the part of the city to spend money was the root of the problem, according to Hubley. In an October 1967 letter to a Northampton city councillor, Hubley wrote, “Northampton seems to have a history of doing too little, too late. Their fright with undertaking major projects when they are timely puts them in the position of having to undertake even more expensive corrective measures too late.”44 But Puchalski was not issuing any apologies. As he fought to keep the dump on the existing site in the summer of 1968, Puchalski claimed that his stalling had saved the city $180,000 over a three year period. “As a taxpayer, one who intends to make his living in Northampton, I am not sorry for my action,” Puchalski reportedly said.45

Frustrated by what he believed to be a targeted, unwarranted, and expensive attempt by the state to control municipal affairs, Puchalski lashed out once again in a written statement issued several days after the burning dump reopened following its brief October shutdown.46 In his statement, Puchalski bemoaned what he characterized as a pervasive void of common sense in governance, which had thrown Northampton into chaos. He lamented, “Not only has the country and state gone mad, but it is even now in our cities and towns.”47 And as the state pushed forward with the plan for the sanitary landfill dump, Puchalski suggested that he had no reason to think sanity would be restored.

AFTErwArd

By the start of the new year, Puchalski had simply had enough. In February 1969, the once wildly popular mayor announced that after eight years in office he would not seek reelection. He was just 37 years old, but he was exhausted. “I just need a rest from politics,” he told reporters gathered in his city hall office for his announcement press conference, explicitly citing the pressures stemming from the dump dispute.48 With Puchalski a lame duck, city officials finally conceded to the state’s pressures to close the burning dump and approved the sanitary burying landfill as a solution. That landfill—the one Puchalski had tried and failed to block—opened its doors on July 1, the final deadline set by the state for Northampton to cease burning at the old open dump.49 Puchalski

42 “Solution To City’s Refuse Disposal Problems Is Expected This Year, Mayor Informs Council,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, February 3, 1967, 3; “To Bury or to Burn: Problem May Leave Committee in Dumps,” The Springfield Union, February 5, 1966, 20.43 “Solution Of Refuse Disposal Problem Will Cost Greatly,” Daily Hampshire Gazette.44 Hubley, Letter addressed to Northampton City Councillor William Ames. October 11, 1967.45 “Saved $180,000: Mayor,” The Springfield Union, August 23, 1968, 25.46 “Court Challenged As Dump Opens Today,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, 7 October 1968, 3.47 “Mayor Traces History of Issue; Calls Special Council Session Tuesday,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, Octo-ber 12, 1968, 3.48 “‘Hamp’s Mayor Puchalski Says He’s Stepping Down,” The Springfield Union, February 5, 1969, 3.49 “New ‘Hamp Dump Open Today After Prolonged Battle,” The Springfield Union, July 1, 1969.

11Country and State Gone Mad

would leave office the next year a defeated man. It was the end of an era.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, the new state-mandated sanitary landfill dump was earning rave reviews. An approving Daily Hampshire Gazette article reported that the landfill was attracting an average of 115 vehicles each day, including a handful of “tourists”—state representatives and other officials eager to see the newly modernized waste disposal site. The new landfill was not perfect, the article said, but it was such a drastic improvement that “the most frequently overheard comment of Northampton residents after viewing the operation was “it sure beats burning.”50 The Massachusetts Audubon Society was equally pleased. A Society newsletter dated August 5, 1969, acclaimed the new sanitary landfill. In just one month, the newsletter said, the end of burning at the old open dump had already brought “clear skies over Arcadia” and left Connecticut Valley water “in better condition than it had been for many years.” The newsletter also expressed hope that Northampton’s seamless transition to the new sanitary landfill dump might inspire other neighboring Massachusetts towns to make the switch as well.51

In the courtroom, as in city hall, the state had won, yet Puchalski’s resistance tells an even more important story. Puchalski and other municipal officials like him who pushed back against increased state and federal oversight of the environment were part of a broader anti-big government movement that surfaced in America in 1968. At the same time that Puchalski was rallying against the “outsiders” who were trying to control his small city in Massachusetts, presidential candidates Richard Nixon and George Wallace were stoking resentment of activist governance across the nation. Appealing to the demographic of older white middle-class Americans that Nixon called the Silent Majority, the candidates pointed to governmental wastefulness stemming from overbearing regulation as the root cause of the country’s many problems. The conservative backlash they helped spur in response to the activist movements of the decade extended even to places like Northampton.

At stake in debates like the Northampton dump dispute was the question of what role the state and federal government ought to play in shaping municipalities. For every group like the Massachusetts Audubon Society that sought to expand public power, dissenters like Puchalski pushed back. Advocating for a vision that cut down costs, cordoned off private property, and shut out the state and federal government, local officials like Puchalski tried to regain control of municipalities that were slipping out of their grasp as they opened up to the world. But as this world changed, these efforts to put bounds on municipal responsibilities proved increasingly futile. By 1968, the city had grown too big for its traditional guardians.

50 “City’s New Sanitary Landfill Dump ‘Sure Beats Burning,’” Daily Hampshire Gazette, July 28, 1969, 3.51 “To the Massachusetts Audubon Newsletter,” Massachusetts Audubon Society, August 5, 1969.

12 Isaac Dayno, “The Art and Craft of Modernity: Louis Comfort Tiffany in a New Light,” Tempus, 14.2 (Fall 2013), 12-21.

ThE ArT ANd CrAFT OF MOdErNiTy

LOuiS COMFOrT TiFFANy iN A NEw LiGhT

isaac Dayno

“I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or vulgar action.”—Tennessee Williams

On the evening of March 6, 1957, at five o’clock, a massive fire devoured the abandoned Louis Comfort Tiffany estate of Laurelton Hall in Oyster Bay, Long Island. The blaze burned through the night and most of the following day, consuming nearly the entire compound. Huge bronze bells crashed eight stories to the ballroom floor while large minarets and towering glass roofs withered in the heat. Firefighters from eight towns responded to the disaster, although the multitude of wells and fountains on the 600-acre estate that had drawn water away from the main house hindered their effectiveness.1 The firefighters could do little more than watch as the blaze destroyed what had once been among the most magnificent artistic treasures of its age.

Laurelton Hall was the apex of the storied career of Louis Comfort Tiffany and the embodiment of the Tiffany empire. Louis Tiffany envisioned his grand house as an ideal art object in its entirety and filled his estate with marvels from across the world: carpets and tile from the Middle East, ceramic lions from ancient China, and totem poles from native tribes of the Northwest.2 Estate auctions prior to the fire spared the majority of these artworks, though many of the original stained glass windows, architectural elements and other unmovable pieces of the house were lost in the flames. In the Fountain Court at the entry of the Laurelton estate – where a set of four hanging lamps once glittered in Tiffany’s grandest hall in a Hall of halls – there was only ash and stray pieces of twisted glass.

The surviving lamp, installed today at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Figure 1, below) is a curious object; it is an artwork of supreme and singular craftsmanship, worked with the hands and breath of a master. Yet, pulsing at the center of the exquisite glass, it is impossible to ignore the bare electric light bulb beating out its yellow light. The light bulb—a symbol of the forces of industry, mass reproduction, and modernity in America in 1 Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Elizabeth Hutchinson, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006).2 Ibid., 84, 157, 177.

13Art and Craft of Modernity

the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—floats curiously in the center of the globe. Upon examination, a viewer begins to recognize and puzzle over the internal frictions of Tiffany’s creation. The context of the bulb, situated in the heart of this exquisite 1905 Arts and Crafts artwork, reveals an anxiety and dramatic tension between art and industry in a modernizing America.3 The light bulb participates in a gross form of synecdoche, laying bare the nuts and bolts of modernity, the inner gears of mass production, that make beauty possible on a grand scale. The hanging lamp and the bare glass encased within present two visions of modernity, attempting to harmonize the two – one of a decadent aesthetic and unique craftsmanship, the other mass-produced and democratic in its scope. The artistic practice of Louis Tiffany that produced the hanging globe for the heart of his aesthetic empire tells a unique story of America in flux. The inherent reliance of the lamp on the light bulb for both form and function is intimately bound up with the sacrifices Americans made to reach the electric age. Individually, the lamp illuminates how Louis C. Tiffany sought and ultimately failed to reconcile the greater forces of art and commercial industry in a nation struggling to navigate its own transition into the modern age.

3 The Arts and Crafts movement was an artistic period that began in Victorian Britain in the 1860’s as a reaction to industrialization and spread to the United States in the late 19th century. It aimed to restore natural forms and quality of construction and design thought to be corrupted by the forces of mechanization.

Figure 1Hanging globe from Fountain Court, Laurelton Hall

Louis Comfort Tiffany, 190527.9 x 20.3 x

20.3 cm.(11 x 8 x 8 in)

Glass, replaced brass collar.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Louis Tiffany’s lamp is beautiful. Not bound to a table, the lamp hangs above the viewer, as archival photographs of Fountain Court show, inviting inspection from below (Figure 2, right).The glass tapers from its wide neck to a rounded end, like a clinging, inverted raindrop poised before its fall. Staring up at the glowing amber, the piece presents a whirl of colors spinning outward from its base, the rounded shapes of lily pads and soft white flowers swirling across the glass. This dizzying display forces the viewer’s vision upward and around the floating piece, putting the gaze in a perpetual motion that refuses to settle on a single point. Light shimmers through the glass, casting a warm amber glow into the space above. Critically, Tiffany designed the globe not for the home of a client, but instead for the heart of his own aesthetic empire. Strung between the columns of Fountain Court, one can imagine the soft light of the lamp glinting in the trickling water of the central fountain, through the large windows and out over Oyster Bay. It is tempting to classify Tiffany’s 1905 hanging globe as an example of a conservative style that found inspiration in much older periods such as the Gothic, in which stained glass brought to mind the medieval cathedral and the art of glorifying God. Tiffany, ever the aesthete, however, subscribed to aesthetics alone. His art glorified beauty not for the sake of God, but for beauty’s sake. Tiffany’s self-pronounced “unwavering pursuit of beauty” led him to experiment with the medium of stained glass and eventually produce pieces, like his hanging globe, that privilege the aesthetic and revel in their own status as art.4

4 Martin Eidelberg, “Nature is Always Beautiful,” in The Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany, eds. Martin Eidelberg et al. (New York: Vendome, 2005).

Figure 2Archival photograph of Fountain Court,

Laurelton Hall, c. 1925

Charles Hosmer Morse Museum

15Art and Craft of Modernity

Revising the tradition of stained glass to achieve ever more graceful forms, Tiffany drew influence from not only the Aesthetic movement and the stirrings of the Arts and Crafts period, but also from eastern cultures.5 As scholar Alice Frelinghuysen explains in her essay “A Marriage of East and West” on Tiffany’s interior designs, “Tiffany introduced novel materials and forms (glass in many guises, as well as mica, antique textiles, antique woodwork, and barn-style sliding doors) and freely combined decorative elements from a variety of cultures.”6 Tiffany began at the turn of the century to work with marbleized and opalescent glass, inserting opaque and, at times, recycled glass into his work. Tiffany broke from traditional applications of stained glass – wherein each piece was cut from glass sheets and placed within a delicate lead framework to create a pattern – and began to adopt a “largely experimental” style, one that “would have been startling to Tiffany’s contemporaries.”7 Tiffany pushed the boundaries of his own craftsmanship, constantly inventing and reinventing his technique to satisfy his quest for beauty through design.

The ultimate expression of Tiffany’s experimentation, one that would revolutionize his practice and define his artwork, was his late nineteenth-century invention of Favrile glass. The lamp is an early example of the method unique to Tiffany in which colors and decoration were incorporated into the blown glass in its molten stage. The water lilies and drifting pads of the hanging globe were not pasted over the glass, but physically integrated into the material makeup of the object. Tiffany jealously guarded his secret of Favrile glass and the full process still remains unknown. It is apparent, however, that the innovation completely transformed Tiffany’s artistry. As electricity began to illuminate urban life, Tiffany continued to innovate not simply with the glass itself, but also with its means of illumination. Until 1898, Tiffany had no option but to design his lamps around their fuel source: oil. His earlier lamps make the necessary accommodations; squat forms support wide bottoms with glass fuel tubes protruding from their tops (Figure 3, right). One contemporary reviewer described his lamps well in commenting, “they are ugly, yet handsome.”8 These early lamps, lacking both an experimental method in glass production and electric illumination, possess little of the floating grace of Tiffany’s 1905 hanging globe.

5 “The Aesthetic movement approached interior design and life itself as a multisensory experience. Following the dictum ‘art for art’s sake’ and challenging the idea that life imitated art, Aestheticism, of which James Abbot McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde were the most prominent champions, quickly became fashionable. The proponents of the movement found beauty in the mundane, the simple, and the exotic. Borrowing from Western and non-Western sources as well as from contemporary designers such as Morris and Dresser, the avant-garde Aesthetes sought to create a sophisticated ambience, filling their spaces with Japanese fans, blue and white porcelain, sunflowers, and peacocks.” Sara J. Oshinsky, “Design Reform,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, (New York: The Metropolitan Mu-seum of Art, 2000–). http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dsrf/hd_dsrf.htm.6 Alice C. Frelinghuysen, “A Marriage of East and West,” in Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Art-ist’s Country Estate, ed. Alice C. Frelinghuysen (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), 11.7 Ibid., 13. 8 Alfred H. Granger, “Favrile Glass,” in The House Beautiful (April 1900). 278 -279.

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Electric lighting revolutionized Tiffany’s designs, allowing for elegant, elongated forms that were not bound to the awkwardness of oil fuel or even gravity. As Tiffany scholar Martin Eidelberg describes the shift toward electric lighting, “the downward turning of the shades on his new lamps represents a solution possible only with electricity.”9 Incorporating this new source of illumination, Tiffany was able to create hanging lamps, like his four at Fountain Court, that could float untethered to the ground below. The viewer’s ability to wander unobstructed beneath the lamp created an entirely new viewing experience that evolved directly from electric lighting.

Tiffany’s hanging lamp marks a shifting moment in both the technological and artistic evolutions of the United States, illustrating how the worlds of art and technology might move in tandem, one informing another. The advent of electricity, however, presents a nuanced and complicated history that colors potential readings of Tiffany’s lamp.

*The process of electrification in the United States was already well underway in 1898,

the year Tiffany introduced his first electric lamp. The introduction of street lighting began first in late-1870’s Paris and London with the use of powerful arc lamps, also called ‘Yablochkov candles’ after their Russian creator. Imported across the Atlantic, streetlights profoundly transformed urban life in the United States, bringing order and safety to streets at night. Like Tiffany’s fuel lamps, gas streetlights required individual lighting and often the flame darkened the glass, reducing the lamp’s effectiveness. In New York electric lighting spread rapidly and, “by 1898, the city boasted 859 incandescent bulbs per 1,000 people and more than 5,000 arc lights brightened public spaces.”10 Lighting also penetrated the world of marketing as it provided an opportunity for the commercialization of darkness, and by the mid-1890’s electric advertising signs had sprung up along Manhattan Beach.11 The fantastic lights of nearby Coney Island lured visitors with the prospect of “electric bathing” and an “orgiastic escape from respectability.”12 9 Martin Eidelberg, “Tiffany’s Studies of Lighting” in The Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany, 22.10 William Sharpe, “What’s Out There? Frederick Remington’s Art of Darkness,” in Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, ed. Nancy K. Anderson (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2003), 35.11 Ibid., 36.12 Richard Le Gallienne, “Human Need of Coney Island,” 1905. Reprinted in Frank Oppel, ed., Tales of Gaslight New York. (Castle Books: Secaucus, NJ, 1985), 307.

Figure 3Oil lamp

Louis ComfortTiffany,

1900

17Art and Craft of Modernity

The spectacular quality of electricity seen at Coney Island helps explain the rapid spread of electric lighting in American public spaces of the last decade of the nineteenth century. As photographs from Chicago of 1893 show, the World Columbian Exhibition of that year brought electricity to the United States on a grand scale. An 1893 guidebook to the Exposition proudly declares the World’s Fair as the most-electrified world event ever held, requiring, “17,000 horsepower for electric lighting… three times the electric lighting power in use in Chicago [daily] and ten times that provided for the Paris Exposition of 1889.”13 The guidebook noted that there were 93,000 incandescent bulbs and 5,000 arc lights at the Fair, and that more than one million dollars—more than an eighth of total construction costs for the entire Exposition—went toward the electrical plant.14 An article from the Hickman Courier from May 5, 1893 similarly presents a grand hall surrounded by spotlights and crowds, describing the opening of the Fair with “miles of machinery and shafting in rapid motion.” The author proclaims that Chicago hosted, “the largest number of electric dynamos ever placed together,” adding, “it may be interesting to learn that not even London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or New York have [any]thing even half as large to boast of.”15 The electricity of the Chicago World’s Fair became not only a source of city pride, but moreover one for America as a whole. The electrification of the central and massive Court of Honor, grandly lit with high voltage arc lights and tens of thousands of bulbs, marked the age of electricity in the growing United States.

The lights of the Court of Honor so brightly illuminated the surrounding white-stucco buildings that fairgoers nicknamed the area the ‘White City.’ These well-lit structures provided a modern backdrop to Harvard historian Frederick Jackson Turner famous declaration to the American Historical Association. The “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” as he said at the fair, the line of the frontier that had distinctly molded American identity, had closed. “Four centuries from the discovery of America… the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”16 The zeal of American expansionism had consumed the Western frontier, displaced its native people and crisscrossed its land with telegraph wires and locomotives. In this vacuum, America needed a new frontier. Yet, even as Turner declared one frontier closed, the new electrical landscape around him had already established itself. Art historian William Sharpe explains how darkness came to represent a new frontier suitable for conquest, stating, “the American night seemed to have all the attributes of a frontier ready to be explored, mapped, settled, and made productive like the West.”17 The use of electricity in 13 John J. Flinn, Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition in the City of Chicago. The Columbian Guide Company. (Chicago: John Anderson Publishing Company, 1893), 17.14 Ibid., 17.15 The Hickman Courier. Hickman, Kentucky. May 05, 1893. 16 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History: Address Delivered at the World Co-lumbian Exhibition, 1893, 1. http://bestclassever.org/Site/websitebestclassever/FrederickJacksonTurner.pdf.17 Sharpe, 30.

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Tiffany’s lamp at this historical moment does more than inspire its form and function – it also a sign of the American obsession with electricity and the spread of the technology into the domestic sphere. The light bulb at the center of the Favrile glass becomes bound up with the precedent set in Chicago in 1893, advertising and street lighting, and obliquely references the new American shift toward eradicating darkness. Even as the night became a new landscape ready for subjugation, however, darkness was already rapidly disappearing across the late nineteenth-century United States, even in its rural outposts. Mark Twain described the phenomenon:

For now the national government has turned the Mississippi into a sort of two-thousand-mile-touch-light-procession. In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of every crossing, the government has set up a clear burning lamp. You are never entirely in the dark.18

Even as one frontier closed, another meant to take its place had already faded. Twain’s words reveal a fin-de-siècle anxiety as the nation steamed headlong into a modern age: in pursuing the advantages of electrical lighting, America had sacrificed its darkness. The electric bulb of Tiffany’s hanging globe manifests the rise of electricity in the United States, but also represents the complexities of early electrification in America.

*The thin wire of the light bulb casts a bright arc beneath the amber currents of glass

flowers and lily pads. The golden curve of the wire glows, just visible, at the heart of the lamp. Drawing close, the low hum of electricity can be heard somewhere above. Tiffany designed his electric lamp to serve the purpose of illumination, but the lamp is so intricately handcrafted and claims such elegance that it seems to reject its own functionality in favor of art for art’s sake. The glowing wires of the light bulb deviate from the lamp’s ethereal illusion and provide a lens through which to examine the interplay of artistry and the machine. The reflexivity of the lamp is remarkable: Tiffany fashioned his hanging globe in a form almost exactly inverse to the light bulb within. The concentric doubling of the electric light bulb at the heart of Tiffany’s exquisite Arts and Crafts creation exposes a friction between blown glass and the mass-produced light. Tiffany used the new form of electrical lighting to create more elegant and intricate pieces that would have been impossible using oil. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, the light bulb was also integral to the theatrics of the World’s Fair and Coney Island, as well as bound up with national ambition and the new frontier. The bulb powers Tiffany’s lamp, allowing it to sparkle over fountains and in grand halls. But the lamp also grapples with its oscillation between decorative art and high art, while also remaining a functional object.

The lamp’s refusal to be taken as a simple functional object is indicative of Tiffany’s style, as well the Arts and Crafts period as a whole. Tiffany struggled to maintain the delicate balance between artist and businessman, extremely self-aware of the complications of 18 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1917 [1883]), 232.

19Art and Craft of Modernity

running an aesthetic empire that might reveal a split between art and industry. As scholar Martin Eidelberg noted of this contradiction, “Tiffany’s empire was an art industry with a factory system.”19 Tiffany employed teams of workers and designers, including men who labored in difficult conditions at large workshops, handling and blowing molten glass. Tiffany also interestingly engaged a core employee workforce of twenty-seven women known as the “Tiffany Girls” who were greatly responsible for the design and execution of much of Tiffany’s most famous work.20 Although highly skilled artists in their own right, none of these women can be found in the company catalogue lists of Tiffany’s pieces. The “Tiffany Girls” became subsumed in the corporate Tiffany factory structure rather than recognized as the designers and producers of many of Tiffany’s Dragonfly, Peony and Wisteria masterpieces. Louis Tiffany preferred to present his company’s work as his own: “Tiffany Studios’ publicity promoted a general impression that Tiffany himself was the chief designer of the lamps… the authorship of the lamps was intentionally left vague.”21 At the 1901 Buffalo World’s Fair, Tiffany presided over a vast company display of more than three thousand art objects.22 Impossibly, he attributed each item to himself.23 In this multitude of glass three main central cases housed Tiffany’s unique and praised new achievement: Favrile glass.

Tiffany safeguarded the knowledge as both an artistic and company secret, though he did patent the glass as early as 1894.24 The hanging globe from Fountain Court demonstrates the magic of the method; the patterns were skillfully incorporated into the material itself by dipping the molten glass base into a series of ground colored glass grains, pausing between each color to reheat the mass of near-liquid silicon.25 In deriving a term for his new form of glass, Tiffany decided the word ‘fabrile’ (from the Old English for ‘hand wrought’ and the Latin ‘fabrica’ – ‘something skillfully produced’), would sound better with a “v” substituted for the “b”.26 The change in spelling is not insignificant; such practices reveal Tiffany’s

19 Eidelberg et al., The Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany. 93.20 Martin P. Eidelberg, Nina Gray, and Margaret K. Hofer, A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tif-fany Girls (London: New-York Historical Society, in Association with D. Giles, 2007), 12.21 Ibid., 42.22 This World Fair also heavily featured electricity: “The Electric Tower symbolized the importance of electricity [and the new Niagara Falls hydroelectric dam] to Buffalo. At 375 feet high, the Tower stood tall over all the buildings at the Fair. The peak held a statue of “Lady Electricity Lighting the World”. 240,000 eight-watt light bulbs were placed all around the Fair, but especially along the length of the Tower and the adjacent Court of Fountains, which together held about 70,000.” Source: Patricia Kosco Cossard and Isabelle Gournay, ed., Essays on the Material Culture of the World’s Fairs (College Park, MD: University of Mary-land Press, 2005).23 Frelinghuysen, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall, 110.24 “Louis Comfort Tiffany and Favrile Glass,” Charles Hosmer Morse Museum, http://www.morsemuseum.org/on-exhibit/secrets-of-tiffany-glassmaking. 25 Eidelberg et al., The Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany, 102.26 Stuart P. Feld, “Nature in Her Most Seductive Aspects: Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Favrile Glass,” The Met-ropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin , New Series, 21 (1962): 106.

20 Dayno

instincts for branding and trademarking his art objects – the same traits seen in corporate research and development and protection of trade secrets. Tiffany was acutely aware of the power of his name and his art form as Favrile glass became both an aesthetic and financial cornerstone of the Tiffany empire. The fact that Favrile glass was handcrafted appealed to an artist such as Tiffany who worked hard to screen the consumer and mechanistic qualities of his work. These practices reveal both Tiffany’s desire to brand his products with hand-craftsmanship and the difficulties of producing unique art objects en masse. Despite the hand and the very breath of its maker, the Favrile glass globe refuses to completely banish its associations with the commercial. It is a product of an art industry and perhaps not entirely alien from the light bulb suspended within it.

*If Tiffany’s hanging globe is not so dissimilar from the light bulb, why is it that this

bulb cannot exist outside the aesthetic object? As Tennessee Williams’s quotation at the beginning of this essay describes, there was something inherently vulgar to the American mind about the bare bulb, as if its form emitted an uncomfortable truth preferably ignored. The light bulb acts as a signifier for the forces of modern life – i.e. mass production, marketing – that allow for the distribution of beauty on a mass scale. Tiffany was possessed by beauty in nature: “Nature is always right’- that is a saying we often hear from the past; and here is another: Nature is always beautiful.”27 But Tiffany’s artworks, as much as they look to mimic nature, cannot be considered part of it. The decorated glass lamp attempts to obscure the bulb in the same way that Tiffany hoped to hide the forces – the invisible hand of both the ‘Tiffany Girls’ and the glass factories that created Tiffany wares for popular distribution – that made his empire possible. Even the source of the lamp’s natural beauty, electricity, has been shown to be a force of modernization readily devouring the darkness of night. The electric light bulb, meant to illuminate the alluring features of modern life, throws light only on the mechanical face of industrialization.

Tiffany encounters an impasse in his hanging globe – he cannot acknowledge the light bulb without confronting the forces of industry and commercialization on which his art depends, but neither can he fully obscure these forces in his artwork. Despite all his masterful craft and devotion to natural beauty, the illusion of Tiffany’s hanging globe begins to break down as the seams of modern life burst open. These competing forces of art and commercial industry, contradictory yet co-dependent, plagued Tiffany throughout his entire career. This fraught artistic practice is even more apparent in examining the younger, World War One generation of Dadaists who navigated art and modern life in a very different fashion. Francis Picabia, the French artist of the New York Dada movement who worked alongside Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, represented an electric light bulb as his Américaine – ‘American Woman’ – in great contrast to that of Tiffany’s light. 27 Louis Comfort Tiffany. Reprinted in “Nature is Always Beautiful.”

21Art and Craft of Modernity

Picabia’s tongue-in-cheek equation of American beauty with industrial technologies marks a definitive departure from the world of Tiffany and the Arts and Crafts Movement. In cramming together the functional, mechanical and commercial with the aesthetic ideal, Picabia recasts as subject the mechanisms of modern life Tiffany attempted to conceal. These themes of modern life again careened into one another and recombined in the commodification of art in early-1960’s Pop Art. Whereas Tiffany once called his factory Tiffany Studios, Andy Warhol would declare his studio The Factory. Though both artists often relied on others to execute work on their behalf, Warhol openly embraced the erasure of the individual, using a stamp to sign his name. Unlike Duchamp, Warhol or others who manipulated and actively engaged the paradox of art and industry, Louis Tiffany was unable to fully reconcile the contradictions bound up with a nation transitioning into modern life.

*Louis Comfort Tiffany’s hanging water-lily lamp reveals the artist’s struggle with the

forces of modernity. In an age where art found itself in an increasingly commercial and industrial world, Tiffany faced the challenge of balancing his pure and natural aesthetic with the realities of early twentieth-century America. His elegant designs, once seen as the apex of the Arts and Crafts movement, would in time be considered lavish and old fashioned; as Eidelberg writes, “By the time Tiffany died in 1933, he had long outlived his age... Tiffany was, in effect, an anachronism.”28 After his death, Tiffany willed his estate of Laurelton Hall and its vast contents to an artistic foundation he had established in his own name, intending his artistic legacy to live on as a testament to ‘beauty.’ As the United States entered the Second World War, however, the trustees gave the property to the Research Committee of the Council of National Defense. The federal government repurposed the Laurelton estate, strangely enough, for a number of military uses, including “camouflage testing.”29 After the war, the trustees, realizing that the taxes and maintenance costs of the property were simply untenable, auctioned off the contents of the property piecemeal. The great Hall stood empty for a number of years, its fountains dry and windows dark. Like his hanging globe, Tiffany’s vision of utopian natural beauty could not fully integrate with the realities of its modernity. On the evening of March 6th, 1957, at five o’clock, the abandoned Laurelton Hall burned to the ground, leaving only ashes and colored glass.

28 Eidelberg et al., The Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany, 35.29 Frelinghuysen, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall, 220.

22 Leah Schulson, “‘The World of Today’: The Polish Pavilion at the 1939-40 World’s Fairs,” Tempus, 14.2 (Fall 2013), 22-37.

“ThE wOrLd OF TOdAy”1

ThE pOLiSh pAviLiON AT ThE 1939-40 wOrLd’S FAirS

Leah schuLson

New Yorkers are used to their planned city: to grids, and grit, and grandeur. But even the most jaded Manhattanite must have been in awe of the scene awaiting them in Flushing Meadows, Queens, on April 30, 1939. Here, they were transported to the “World of Tomorrow:” 1,216 acres of exhibits, shows, food carts, all filled with tens of thousands of people each day.2 Visitors were invited to try out bobsled tracks, ride roller coasters or, if they were particularly daring, brave a 250-foot parachute jump.3 They could practice archery on stuffed—or live—targets, watch “splendid specimens of youth and beauty” perform synchronized swimming at the Aquacade, or gawk at “Strange as it Seems,” a show featuring “six Icelandic albinos…giraffe-necked women from Padeung…and two Romanian sister giantesses, the tallest women in the world.”4 And this was only the Amusement Zone. The Fair had six other wonder-filled zones: Communications, Community Interests, Food, Transportation, Production and Distribution, and Government.

Toward the back of the Government Zone was the Foreign Area. Here the pavilions of approximately sixty nations offered visitors a veritable world’s tour, from dazzling orchids at the Peru pavilion to a replica Moscow subway station.5 Although the fair was intended as a “great demonstration of peace,” growing hostilities in Europe had already left their mark in the area: there was no German or Spanish pavilion present.6 It had also been uncertain whether the half-built Czechoslovakia pavilion would be completed after the German annexation of the Sudetenland—but it eventually was, nestled next to the grand Soviet pavilion.7 1 “Poland’s Pavilion at the Fair Dedicated by Count Potocki,” The New York Times, May 4, 1939, 1.2 Sidney M. Shalett, “Memory of ‘Tomorrow,” The New York Times, April 27, 1941, SM15.3 Official Guide Book of the New York World’s Fair, 1939 (New York: New York Exposition Publications, 1939), 51, 53.4 “Amusements-Aquacade-Performance” (Digital image ID 1652886), New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Gallery, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1652886; Official Guide Book, 65, 56.5 John Markland, “Abroad at the Fair,” The New York Times, June 4, 1939, XX1.6 Ibid.7 Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Europe: Fair’s Remade Geography Still Leaves Problems,” The New York Times, June 19, 1939, 14.

23“World of Today”

The Poland pavilion was typical for the Foreign Area, or even a bit grander. Rising above the Netherlands pavilion next door, its 142-foot tower stood out instantly, covered in 1,200 shields that reflected the sun.8 Visitors passed a gigantic statue of fourteenth-century king Wladyslaw Jagiello, seated atop a horse and holding two uplifted swords, to enter the Hall of Honor where they learned about Polish fashion, saw over 200 scientific inventions, or watched citizens demonstrate traditional skills.9 A full day’s investigation of the pavilion’s 11,000 displays would also yield a model of a prehistoric Polish village, art by old and new Polish masters, and a tourist film entitled “Poland in Flowers.”10 Jerzy Potocki, the Polish Ambassador to the United States, stated at the pavilion’s opening that these vibrant displays were “no boasts, no exaggerated statements—merely a picture of the life of a nation which strives for progress, is eager to enjoy its freedom and anxious to live in peace with its neighbors.”11

That was not to be. Four months later, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, the United Kingdom and France entered the fray, declaring war on Germany. Twenty-four days after that, Warsaw fell, and the country of Poland ceased to exist.12 Through the turmoil of late 1939 and 1940, the fate of the Polish pavilion can be understood in three phases. Before the invasion, it was a place of cultural education and celebration, constructing a Polish identity that was both proudly independent and a worthy of an ally to the United States. After the invasion, it became a site of news and mourning, a space for people to express their support and concern. And in 1940, after it failed to provide an effective center for Polish relief, it fell out of popular concern and became merely a burden on both the Polish government and Fair Corporation. In this progression we can trace the changing role of the American—and, particularly, Polish-American—understanding of their country’s and community’s role in the coming war. Although the role of simple observer and mourner was sufficient at first, it became less and less applicable as the tragedies in Europe unfolded and Americans pushed to provide tangible economic support rather than just sympathy.

*

It was not unusual that the Polish pavilion, even stuck in the Fair’s periphery, could have had such clout. After the groundbreaking London Crystal Palace Grand Exhibition in 1851, it became common for countries to host the exhibits of foreign nations. From the beginning, participant nations used the space to push forward national agendas, be they the 8 “Old and New Unite in Polish Displays,” The New York Times, May 16, 1939, 19.9 Official Guide Book, 143; News Release No. 1,” undated, NYPL Box, 317; “Notes on Certain Exhibits in the Polish Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair,” September 19, 1939, NYPL, Box 1850.10 “Poland’s Pavilion Opens Wednesday,” The New York Times, May 1, 1939, 2.11 Jerzy Potocki, “Remarks at the Luncheon for the Official Opening of the Polish Pavilion,” May 3, 1939, NYPL, Box 2155.12 “World War II,” Encyclopedia Britannica, online edition

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construction of cultural identity, the presentation or celebration of empire, or the pursuit of new economic partners.13 Although the World’s Fair of 1939-40 was focused on scientific and technical advances, foreign exhibitors also used the Fair as a forum to garner support for the coming war.14

Rather than preparing for war, the creators of the Polish pavilion planned for peace, presenting a mixture of Polish tradition and innovation. In order to help the young country make its entrance onto the international stage, the exhibits emphasized an economically viable Poland, able to keep up in science and industry and make a unique contribution to the international market. Paired with this was the promise of a special connection with the United States, whose support was considered invaluable in this endeavor. The idea of a special link between the countries was expressed both abstractly through an emphasis on shared values of democracy and freedom, and concretely in the importance of Polish-American involvement in the United States.

Visitors, after all, entered the pavilion via the Court of Honor, a large hall envisioned by Commissioner General Stefan de Ropp as a place where “democratic traditions of the country will be stressed.”15 At the center of the exhibit was a statue of then-president Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, paired with a stained glass window showing an idyllic view of modern Poland.16 The atrium also featured a collection of Polish founding documents that established civil liberties commonly celebrated as American values, as well as the Jagiellonian globe, a 1543 creation hailed as the first to have America labeled on it.17 There was also an exhibit about the role of Polish immigrants and Polish-Americans in the early days of the United States.18 In fact, these efforts to knit Poland and America together even predated the construction of the pavilion itself. The press release announcing the Hall of Honor focused mainly on the release of a new Polish stamp, showing George Washington in front of an American flag, flanked by Thomas Paine and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish hero of the American Revolution.19

13 Paul Greenhalgh, “Origins and Conceptual Development,” in Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Expositions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 10, 12.14 Britain, for example, used its pavilion to rally aid without violating America’s strict anti-propaganda policies. Nicholas J. Cull, “Overture to an Alliance: British Propaganda at the New York World’s Fair, 1939-1940,” Journal of British Studies, 36.3 (1997): 325-354; Marco Duranti, “Utopia, Nostalgia and World War at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair,” Journal of Contemporary History, 41.4 (2006): 671.15 William H. Standley, to Dr. Monaghan, October 28, 1938, NYPL, Box 317. De Ropp’s statement, which was intended for inclusion in the “Pictorial Preview of the Fair,” was enclosed in this letter.16 Ibid.17 This included the 1430 Polish version of the Constitution’s Habeas Corpus clause. Packet of informa-tion, primarily for the Fair’s Department of Feature Publicity (undated), NYPL Box 317.18 “Poles Praised by Lehman,” The New York Times, November 17, 1938, 18.19 “News Release No. 3,” March 9, 1938, NYPL, Box 317.

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While the stamp was meant for a Polish audience, the press release was not, and literature put out by the Polish planners was strongly geared toward convincing Americans of a special bond between the countries. The official brochure for the pavilion opened with an excerpt from a 1937 radio address by President Roosevelt under the heading, “The United States and Poland:”

Because we hold this ideal of liberty in common, ours has been a long and unbroken friendship with the people of Poland. From the days of our struggle to achieve Nationhood, unbroken by any rift through the century and a half of our life as a Nation, the American people and the people of Poland have

maintained a friendship based upon this common spiritual ideal.20

The excerpt was followed by another paean to the countries’ connections, this time from Polish Ambassador Jerzy Potocki. His “Invitation” expressed his hope that the pavilion “will help the American people to deepen their understanding of Poland…for only by understanding each other’s character, ambitions and aspirations can we strengthen…the friendship and mutual sympathy which has for a century and a half united our two nations.”21

Even the New Yorker who did not make it to the Fair found the same sentiments echoed in the newspaper. As early as November 17, 1938, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Poles Praised by Lehman,” in which the governor of New York lauded the coming pavilion and, in particular, its exhibit about Polish immigrants and their descendants:

Americans of Polish origin have greatly contributed to the upbuilding of America. They have taken a leading part in industry, the arts, science, commerce and agriculture…The people of our country will always be grateful for the great contribution which Generals Kazimeriz Pulaski and Tadeusz Kosciuszko made to the cause of liberty and democracy….and [the display] will further cement the friendly relations

which have always existed between the United States and Poland.22

This repeated emphasis on the Polish role in the creation of America inextricably linked Poland to the American mythos. However, the pavilion planners sought to move this connection from a thing of the past to a guideline for the future, both politically and economically. The first official press release about the Polish pavilion gave Potocki’s explanation for Poland’s decision to spend over a million dollars on its exhibit:

20 “POLAND in the World of Tomorrow: The Polish Pavilion,” pamphlet, published by the Republic of Poland Exhibit, pg. 2, undated, NYPL, Box 317. The original address was given on October 11, 1937, ac-cording to the pamphlet.21 Ibid., 4. 22 “Poles Praised by Lehman,” 18.

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It is worth it because of the traditional bonds of friendship which have for centuries united our two countries. We feel that by showing America what we have done and what we can do in the way of producing goods and commodities which are needed in this country, we can develop trade, supply each

other’s needs and thus strengthen our relations still further.23

By integrating Polish business into the American economy, Potocki pushed for recognition of Poland in the economic and technological fields.

Exhibits about astronomy, chemistry, and, of course, radioactivity only strengthened his claims about Polish technical prowess.24 The Hall of Science featured 200 Polish inventions, as well as a statue of Copernicus.25 Although some of the inventions may have seemed more like rural improvisations than scientific breakthroughs—car tires made from potatoes, for example—others had clearer economic value, such as the “centrifugal mill capable of crushing the hardest minerals into powder.”26 Even the cultural exhibits had a distinctly modern tinge. The fashion display, for example, featured Polish natural silk sewn into “the latest patterns of fabrics of Polish design,” and a pair of dioramas showed the port city of Gdynia first as “a small fishing village in 1921 and [then] as it is today—a modern seaport of 130,000 inhabitants.”27 As Potocki explained in the same press release, it was clear that “Poland… [was] making a tremendous effort to present to the American people a clear and complete picture of her industrial development and trade possibilities.”28

It is worth noting that these two emphases—passionate democracy and economic innovation—fit well into the carefully constructed theme of the World of Tomorrow. As David E. Nye succinctly explains, the main purpose of the Fair was to show “how science and technology would shape the future.”29 There is no question that the Polish pavilion’s approach was a perfect embodiment of these efforts to celebrate “democracy, as a way of government and as a way of life, with all her freedoms,” as the Official Guide Book promised.30 But it seems that the Polish adherence to the theme was more of a lucky coincidence than a Fair Corporation-imposed result; the theme simply matched the needs

23 “News Release No. 1,” undated, NYPL Box, 317. 24 Marie Curie, after all, was a proud daughter of Poland. Oficjalny Przewodnik Po Nowojorskiej Wystawie Swiatowej (Official Guide to the New York World’s Fair) (New York: Exposition Publications, 1939.) Although the advertisement and some of the headers were English, I am indebted to Google Translate for assistance with navigating the booklet.25 Standley, to Monaghan, October 28, 1938.26 “Old and New Unite in Polish Displays,” The New York Times, May 16, 1939, 19; De Ropp enclosure in Standley, to Monaghan, October 28, 1938.27 “Poland to Show Styles,” The New York Times, July 17, 1938, 17; Official Guide Book, 143.28 “News Release No. 1,” undated, NYPL Box, 317.29 Nye, “Ritual Tomorrows,” 5. 30 Official Guide Book, 41.

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of the Polish government.31 In particular, it allowed the Polish government to construct a fruitful new identity for the country—a necessity, considering Poland’s youth. Although the idea of Poland had been around for centuries, a series of partitions in the late eighteenth century had rendered the country extinct in 1795. Despite a consistent string of uprisings and dedicated cultural maintenance in the nineteenth century, Poland was not officially reestablished until 1918.32 However, the following years were marked by internal disputes, as different parties vied for power in contests that sometimes turned bloody, and the growing power of Poland’s neighbors demanded delicate handling.33

The pavilion was an opportunity for the new iteration of Poland to construct a fresh identity and, in particular, to build a new understanding of the country in the American mindset. According to Ambassador Potocki, the Fair was “the first time that the Polish Government has participated in an international exposition on such a large scale,”—not all that impressive a claim, considering that the country was not even thirty years old.34 By emphasizing the existing connection between the two countries, even if that connection had been interrupted by Poland’s disappearance shortly after American Independence, the pavilion reminded people that this partnership would be a continuation rather than a new, and therefore potentially risky, endeavor.

The deterioration of the situation in Europe in the late 1930s made building this connection all the more important. The organizers did their best to minimize the situation in Europe; little in the exhibits hinted at the encroaching Nazi force. Although the crossed swords of the Jagiello statue fronting the pavilion had a bellicose air, the Fair’s recommendation that Poland bring a naval vessel to New York during Polish Week was met with disinterest and never came to fruition.35 Potocki, speaking at the opening of the pavilion on May 3, said little about war preparations, instead focusing on how the pavilion allowed visitors to “visualise [sic] the efforts and work which were accomplished in modern Poland during the last 20 years.”36 The same day, Whalen mentioned the worsening situation in Europe only to dismiss it: “Gentlemen, you have here, in terms of future history, much of the best answer you could give to those inflammatory questions [about war].”37

When the possibility of war was mentioned, speakers frequently used the state of the pavilion as a symbol for the security of Poland. This was most evident at the July 31 Although there are instances in the sources where the Fair planners asked if the Polish planners were interested in participating in a certain program or Fair practice, they rarely suggested specific exhibit ideas or vetoed Polish suggestions for anything other than practical concerns.32 “Poland,” Encyclopedia Britannica, online edition.33 Ibid.34 “News Release No. 1,” undated, NYPL Box, 317.35 McCormick, “Europe,” 14; President of the Fair Corporation to Vice-Commissioner General Antoni Milkowski, April 25, 1938, NYPL, Box 317. 36 Jerzy Potocki, “Remarks.”37 Grover A. Whalen, “Address at the Polish Pavilion Opening,” May 3, 1939, NYPL, Box 2130.

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1938 ceremony for the laying of the pavilion’s cornerstone. Potocki, who gave the keynote address, reassured listeners that “as our participation in the New York World’s Fair shows, we devote our energies to the pursuits of peace rather than to thoughts of war,” and their participation meant that the country did “not foresee any dramatic events in the political situation within the near future.”38 The newspaper headlines the next day were filled with this tie between the Fair and peace: “Polish Envoy, at Fair, Doubts European War” in The New York Herald Tribune; “Poland’s Pacifism Described at Fair” in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle; and “Peace Held Certain at Polish Fair Rite” from the New York Evening Journal. According to the last of these, “beginning of construction of the Polish pavilion at the World’s Fair today gave a tacit promise of political tranquility in Europe.”39 Even as Europe inched toward war, speakers continued to connect the pavilion and Poland. Ten days before the invasion, a Polish festival at the Fair provided a forum for 20,000 Polish-Americans to “[roar] their defiance of Nazi Germany” and prepare a letter to tell the Polish government that “thousands…send you cordial greetings from the World of Tomorrow, which will be a world of justice and democracy.”40

While Poles were not necessarily pleased with their country’s decision to pour money into a symbol of Poland abroad, the pavilion was at first immensely well-received by Polish-Americans. By early 1939, John Pateracki had contacted Fair Corporation President Grover Whalen, introducing himself as the President of the Polish-American Participation Committee and explaining that they had “been actively engaged since last December in developing amongst all the Americans of Polish extraction an interest in the New York World’s Fair.”41 Although the Committee had not been involved in designing the pavilion, Pateracki was a main planner for the Fair’s week-long Poland Days in October, which featured involvement by a number of “large Polish Organizations, Societies, and groups.”42 The city’s annual Pulaski Memorial Day Parade was designated as the Week’s closing event and was expected to draw a hundred thousand people.43 The actual turnout on October 15th may have been greater. One estimate put the number of spectators at 300,000, and the Fair received frequent letters asking for the exact dates for Poland Day, as well as

38 Quoted in “Stone Laid at Fair for Polish Center,” The New York Times, July 6, 1938, 44.39 Bob Levitt, “Peace Held Certain at Polish Fair Rite,” New York Evening Journal, July 6, 1938, NYPL, Box 1954. All other articles referenced are from the same date and were in NYPL Box 1954.40 “Polish-Americans Defy Nazi Power,” The New York Times, August 20, 1939, 34.41 John A. Pateracki, to Grover Whalen, March 16, 1939, NYPL, Box 317.42 It was Pateracki who sent Fair officials the tentative schedules. “Polish American Participation Commit-tee, Inc.: Tentative Program of Activities,” stamped February 10, 1939, NYPL, Box 317.43 Ibid.

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other Polish-American events.44 By July, the masthead of the Polish-American Committee included thirty committees and required three pages to list all officers.45

Just as the pavilion helped build Poland’s identity, its attempts to reconcile national pride with its affection for America mirrored the balancing act facing many Polish-Americans. The revival of Poland forced the almost six million Polish-Americans—many of whom had lobbied for Polish independence—to choose whether to return to their homeland or remain where many had by now established strong roots.46 Due to Poland’s shaky economic and political situation, many chose to stay, just as a growing wave of American nativism drove both assimilation and the banding together of the Polish-American community.47 As Polish-American and Polish identities diverged, many immigrants tried to keep their children grounded with cultural education, both from the Catholic Church and in ‘Polish Schools.’48 High culture was especially valued in these schools—and so the pavilion’s large collection of art and technology provided the perfect opportunity to teach young Polish-Americans about the value of their heritage. And since the exhibits so closely connected Poland and America, they allowed for these Polish-Americans to see their mixed identity as logically consistent. Unsurprisingly, a contest for a free trip to Poland, which required participants to write essays on “My Impression of the Polish Pavilion” and “What I Would Like to See in Poland,” was entered mainly by Americans of Polish descent.49

*

Any uncertainty that Polish-Americans felt toward their homeland vanished on September 1, 1939, when the Nazis invaded and set into motion the complex set of pacts and alliances that would plunge the continent into war. Although Poland had a large army, it was an outdated one, and, once the Red Army joined the fray on September 17, the country had little time left.50 The pavilion became an impromptu memorial, where visitors came to express their outrage and support. To an extent, this reaction demonstrated the success of the Polish pavilion in becoming a major site of Polish identity in America. But the reaction overshadowed the exhibits, reinforcing the image of Poland as a victim, indefensible and unsustainable, that had defined the area for centuries: the very identity that the entire pavilion actively tried to counteract. There was a general shift in the Fair from utopian ideals to the celebration of nostalgia, as the Fair was forced to walk the line 44 “100,000 Poles Here in Pulaski Tribute,” The New York Times, October 16, 1939, 9; John Krol Jr. of Tren-ton, N.J., for example, wrote on behalf of the Young Republicans of Trenton who wished to come to the Fair on a “day when the occasion will relate to Poland or to the American citizens of Polish descent.” John Krol Jr., to the Information Bureau, Februray 28, 1939, NYPL, Box 719. 45 John A. Pateracki to H.A. Schwartzman, July 27, 1939, NYPL, Box 719.46 John J. Bukowczyk, A History of Polish Americans (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 67. 47 Ibid., 69.48 Ibid., 71-4. 49 “Free Poland Trip is Prize for Essay,” The New York Times, September 9, 1939, 9.50 “Poland,” Encyclopedia Britannica, online edition.

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between escapism and intense awareness of the events—a line that mirrored the American desire to mourn from afar and as individuals, but remain uninvolved as a country.51

Coincidentally, Polish National Alliance Day had been slated for September 2nd, meaning that members of the Polish-American organization and their families had already planned to be at the Fair. But even the previous day saw “the foreign pavilions, particularly those of nations likely to play leading roles in the struggle abroad, [act] as magnets. Poland’s building was almost a morbid center of attraction…”52 In a move indicative of how well the Foreign Area served as a global microcosm, the Fair hired sixteen additional armed policemen “to stand guard at the Russian, Polish, British, French and Italian buildings,” as 10,000 members of the Polish National Alliance filled the Court of Peace.53

Talk of the invasion dominated the day. As with the cornerstone ceremony in 1938, the speeches emphasized the role and symbolism of the Fair on the global stage—but now as a haven from war rather than as a symbol of peace. Whalen informed the gathered masses that they were welcomed “with hearts full of understanding and sympathy because we know you can’t celebrate today without looking back home….In the World of Tomorrow you are entitled as well as we are to happiness, peace and contentment.”54 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia echoed these statements in his own condolences, holding that “we are happy to have you here, and I sincerely hope that in this hour of sorrow you can, under the circumstances, get as much pleasure as possible.”55 The initial Polish push for a connection between the two countries had reversed. Poland was now at the center of American public discourse, and it was Americans who were expanding their narrative to embrace Poland. Indeed, Governor Lehman wrote that the “cordial, friendly and sympathetic relations” that had “always [been] maintained” were “stronger than ever today.”56 Local political leaders, even though they could not officially speak for the country, could do so implicitly by speaking on behalf of the Fair. As La Guardia noted that “only the President and Secretary Hull could speak for the nation,” he simultaneously assured the Polish crowd that “from a human standpoint there was no doubt where America stood,” letting the symbolism of the Fair speak for itself.57

In the days and weeks that followed, the Polish pavilion remained firmly entrenched in its symbolism. However, it became less a symbol of the future and more a memorial to the 51 Duranti, “Utopia, Nostalgia, and World War,” 663. A Gallup Poll from two days before the invasion found that 84% of respondents did not think that the United States should “send [its] army and navy abroad to fight against Germany.” Question qn8a, Gallup Poll #168, August 30, 1939, The Gallup Brain, http://brain.gallup.com/documents/questionnaire.aspx?STUDY=AIPO0168.52 Sidney M. Shalett, “Europe’s Turmoil Reflected at Fair,” The New York Times, September 2, 1939, 10.53 Ibid.54 “Sympathy in Crisis Cheers Poles’ Day,” The New York Times, September 3, 1939, 18.55 Ibid.56 Ibid.57 Ibid.

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past. The people and accompanying loss became the exhibit, overshadowing the carefully constructed arrangement of artwork, crafts, and technology. The New York Times noted on September 4 that there was “an air of almost morbid curiosity” about the exhibits in many of the affected pavilions.58 “The outstanding center of attraction was the Polish pavilion, where a grim silence greeted the questioner. At 8 P.M., approximately 90,000 persons had marched in and out of the building,” a full 20,000 more than had come on Polish National Alliance Day.59 Though the crowds died down after the first few weeks, newspapers continued to note the poignancy of the exhibit: a writer for the New York Times noted the “funereal air…as the visitors walked soberly past showcases containing products of Polish factories that have since been shattered by German bombs.”60

Although the pavilion had become a place for many visitors to direct their anxieties about the War, the planners moved forward with its events with little modification. In the second week of October, “Poland Days” went on as planned, with an extravaganza that included 150 dancers, 250 singers, and a nineteen-gun salute.61 A memorandum to the Fair’s employees about the event simply mentioned the story behind the traditional horn-blowing they might hear and explained that “the fountains will be set in the national colors while the Trytons play the Polish National Anthem,” a tribute typical for the Fair’s national celebration days.62 However, as communities—and then countries—were wiped off the map, it became increasingly difficult to pretend that anything was normal. The New York Amsterdam News branded the event as “a program designed to keep alive the national spirit of a people who, at the moment, have no land of their own,” despite the fact that the ceremonies had been planned for ten months.63 There were still some attempts to rebrand the pavilion as a sign of the power of the Polish people: Governor Lehman told the masses at the Court of Peace ceremony that “[t]he spirit of a great people cannot be destroyed by oppression….It will live on and rise again to become once more a symbol of the resistless [sic] fight for men for liberty and justice.”64 As if to drive the point home, the Fair announced that day that the Polish pavilion would return for the 1940 season. Although no logistics had been formally worked out, it was presumed that the “Poles in 58 “Foreign Area Calm after Tense Days,” The New York Times, September 4, 1939, 20.59 Ibid. 60 Sidney M. Shalett, “Hull Will Speak at the Fair Thursday,” The New York Times, September 18, 1939, 23.61 John A. Pateracki, to Edward J. Hickey of Special Events, October 6, 1939, NYPL, Box 719; Press Release from the Polish-American Participation Committee, slated for release Saturday, October 14, 1939, NYPL, Box 719.62 A.K. Morgan, Director of Displays, “Memorandum to All Employees,” October 13, 1939, NYPL, Box 317.63 “Bargain Days This Week-End,” New York Amsterdam News, October 14, 1939, 9.64 Sidney M. Shalett, “Futurama Listed for the 1940 Fair: Celebrating Polish Day at the World’s Fair,” The New York Times, October 15, 1939.

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America” would maintain the site, much as Czech-Americans had done earlier that year.65

The same could not be said for a number of other countries that were questioning the value of maintaining a gilded exhibit overseas. The announcement that the Fair would return for a second season had appeared in the papers the day after the German invasion of Poland, which led President Roosevelt to promise that the Fair was “one of the many channels by which [a] continuing conception of peace may be made known.”66 But significant effort would be necessary to get countries to promise to return and preserve the Foreign Area despite the European trouble. The situation was dire enough that, as soon as the 1939 season ended, Whalen left for Europe, heading into a war zone to negotiate with fifteen governments and, in doing so, to save the World of Tomorrow.

*

The true story of the 1940 season, however, is less about world peace and more about economics. The Fair struggled to repay its investors; meanwhile, the efforts of the Polish-American community turned toward relief for its countrymen rather than support for the ghost of a pavilion. Unless impromptu memorials are formalized, they fade away, and the Polish pavilion proved no exception. The Polish government did change some exhibits, but it was unable to create a strong enough center for aid and action to capitalize on the previous fall’s outpouring of sympathy. This failure was exacerbated by both the Fair Corporation’s strict financial rules and the mix of nostalgia and mourning that pervaded the entire park, rendering the pavilion even more ineffective in its unwillingness and inability to commit fully to memorialization.

This was unfortunate, because the pavilion needed to be more profitable than ever. Following the 1939 season, the Fair had barely managed to pay back its debts and was only able to fund winter maintenance with money garnered from advance rentals for the 1940 season.67 Although President Roosevelt promised that he would ask Congress for federal funding, and most of the individual exhibits were paid for by the relevant country or business, the Fair Corporation was not the money-making organization that most of the large donors had hoped it would be. At one point, the Corporation was even forced to temporarily withhold gate receipts because they were unable to pay the $525,000 that 65 Ibid.66 Sidney M. Shalett, “Fair in 1940 Revealed as Certainty in Spite of the War Peril,” The New York Times, September 3, 1939, 18. 67 Sidney M. Shalett, “Banks, Builders Paid Off By Fair, ’40 Fund Assured,” The New York Times, October 14, 1939, 1.

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would have been owed to supporters.68

Heading into the 1940 season, however, the Corporation faced other concerns. For one, celebrating the “World of Tomorrow” would have seemed hopelessly out of touch in light of the war. The Fair struggled to create a new identity that balanced acknowledgement of the war and escapism via nostalgia.69 As Duranti explains, the aspects of the Fair that most appealed to the 1940 crowd were those evoking “a folksy country fair which offered fairgoers a nostalgic escape from events abroad.” 70 However, the Foreign Area continued to attract interest; it was, after all, impossible to ignore Europe. Organizers changed the theme to “Peace and Freedom,” and the speeches on Opening Day 1940 showed a sharp break from the celebrations of unity through science that had marked the previous year. Commerce and economic freedom were still mentioned, but Governor Lehman’s address also delved into the American obligation to face “the rape of Poland, the enslavement of Norway, Finland, Czecho-Slovakia, Denmark, and the ruthless invasion of Holland and Belgium.”71 The Deputy Commissioner of the Finnish pavilion, Y. A. Paloheimo, gave a speech on behalf of the foreign nations explaining why they had chosen to stay.72 The answer, yet again, centered on relations with America, and he told the crowd:

If our governments wanted to continue their participation notwithstanding all this, it is therefore perfectly clear how much the appreciation of the American people means to everyone [sic] of us. Indeed we all stand for peace and freedom…although at present these ideals seem to be gravely endangered…our

governments consider it as their moral duty to express their firm belief in these noble concepts.73

However, such idealism was matched by a measure of denial, and the decision to play news of the war on the radios scattered around the Fair was unpopular enough to prompt a quick reversal.74

Nonetheless, the war was impossible to hide in the Foreign Area, where the Soviet pavilion was now absent, replaced by a performance space called the “American Common.” A number of defeated countries had also been forced to withdraw, including the Netherlands and Denmark.75 Poland, however, did not only return—it expanded, taking

68 Shalett, “Fair’s 1940 Bandwagon Picks up Speed,” 9.69 The best explanation for the shift in the Fair’s theme appears in Duranti’s “Utopia, Nostalgia and World War at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair,” Journal of Contemporary History, 41.4 (2006).70 Duranti, “Utopia, Nostalgia and World War,” 663, 678.71 The full text of these speeches was reprinted in “The President’s Message and Fair Speeches,” The New York Times, May 12, 1940, 43. 72 “Big Foreign Area Assured for Fair; 49 Exhibitors Due,” The New York Times, February 27, 1940, 1.73 Press Release: “Y.A. Paloheimo’s Speech at Official Ceremonies on Opening Day,” May 11, 1940, NYPL, Box 2130.74 Duranti, “Utopia, Nostalgia, and World War,” 352.75 “Big Foreign Area,” The New York Times, 1.

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over the Soviet spot in the Hall of Nations as well as part of the Lithuania exhibit.76 Part of this expansion was turned into a war information center, “where Polish-Americans or exiled Poles may come for whatever information is available about their homeland.”77 This was accompanied, however, by typical Fair trappings, including an “exhibit of Polish art, a tea room, and a souvenir counter.”78 These were not the only changes; the new official pavilion description promised visitors “photographs of shelled cities, empty universities, [and] refugees streaming over the roads,” as well as flags at half-staff and a bust of the new president-in-exile, the world-famous pianist Ignace Paderewski.79

The elderly Paderewski may have seemed an odd choice for the parliamentary president of the Polish government-in-exile, but his selection was part of a broader strategy to garner foreign support.80 He had served as the nation’s first premier in 1919, and brought a unifying presence to a government tasked with trying to cobble back together an army and handle a significant refugee problem.81 Above all, he was a highly recognizable name that would help spur donations. Neutral America was a key target for a public relations push, and the Polish pavilion had the potential to keep Polish culture and concerns in the American mind until the Polish could establish a more formalized bureau.

However, the Polish government was suffering from a severe lack of funds due to the seizure of its bank accounts and the expenses of war, and the plan did not match economic reality.82 By the end of the first season, the pavilion’s commissioners were arguing with Fair organizers about who was responsible for repairs. The Fair was initially patient, and the Director of Foreign Participation promised Vice-Commissioner Antoni Milkowski in October 1939 that he could “count on [them]… to do everything [they] possibly can to lighten the burden which has fallen on your Commission.”83 In some cases, it made sense that the pavilion required special accommodations—the Concessions Department, for example, revised a contract forbidding countries from selling products not made within their borders because they “cannot enforce requirements which the Polish Commission is physically unable to fulfill.”84 But the Fair also needed money and became impatient with the pavilion’s organizers. In response to a request to lower the rate for participation, the 76 The poetic justice of this act was well acknowledged, and Commissioner Baron Stefan de Ropp noted that “Russia seems to have backed out of the community of nations. I am pleased that it is Poland taking her place.” “Poles Take Space of Soviet at Fair,” The New York Times, May 3, 1940, 11.77 Ibid.78 Ibid.79 “Exhibits: A World of Wonders,” The New York Times, May 5, 1940, 15. 80 “Paderewski: I’ll Deliver Poland from Captivity,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 24, 1940.81 Ibid.82 Brochure for the American-Polish Memorial Committee, undated, NYPL, Box 317.83 E.F. Roosevelt to Antoni Milkowski, October 9, 1939, NYPL, Box 317.84 E.F. Roosevelt to J.T. Noonan, June 15, 1939, NYPL, Box 317.

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Head of Concessions, Rowland P. Bardell, complained that

We have shown special consideration to Poland….so far as to expend in the rehabilitation of their building some $10,000…Mr. Holmes advises me that for some time past Mr. de Ropp and his associates have been chiseling with him and with others throughout the Fair to obtain special favors, and that his

constant complaints almost constitute a nuisance.85

Poland’s reliance on the Fair only increased when its new Polka Tea Room was so underused that they closed it. When de Ropp informed the Fair of this, he mentioned also that many workers were being paid half-wages.86

Although Finland, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia found financial support from their American nationals, the Polish government met waning interest from the Polish-American community, in terms of both attendance and economic support. The Polish-American Participation Committee seems to have disbanded, and the second season saw a motley collection of events, including Polish Workmen’s Aid Fund Day, Polish World War Veteran’s Day, and an abbreviated two-day Polish Days.87 While some of these events drew respectable crowds—Kosciuszko Day brought in 8,000—major events like the Pulaski Memorial Day Parade, which in 1940 attracted half a million spectators, were disaffiliated from the Fair.88

The waning of official involvement seems to have been largely because the pavilion did not capitalize on the sympathy for Poland by creating a space for aid. It remained a site for memorializing, and on the anniversary of the German invasion, there was a small and solemn ceremony in which employees paid their respects.89 As Stanislaus A. Blejwas explained, “most Polish Americans identified with the Polish American Council…[which] supported the Polish Government-in-Exile but concerned itself primarily with apolitical, humanitarian aid for Polish victims of Nazi and Soviet aggression.”90 The main impulse was to aid Polish sufferers: during the winter, many of the pavilion’s exhibits were featured in an art show organized to raise money for Polish refugees.91 By March 1940, the organization was overwhelmed by trying to both raise money and provide relief, and the Paderewski Fund for Polish Relief was founded to “apply itself entirely to the raising of funds,” in order

85 Rowland P. Bardell, Head of Concessions, to the Chairman of the Board, June 1, 1940, NYPL, Box 317.86 Commissioner General Stefan de Ropp, to Director of Government Participation J.C. Homes, July 15, 1940, NYPL, Box 317. Ropp noted that the Polka Tea Room “had everything, including good food, delight-ful surroundings, excellent service and not bad publicity, with the exception of clients.”87 NYPL, Box 720. 88 “Poland’s Outlines Called ‘Indelible,’” The New York Times, May 31, 1940, 14; “Polish-Americans in Pulaski Tribute,” The New York Times, October 7, 1940, 19. Unlike the previous year’s coverage, which billed the parade as the closing event of the week-long Polish Days, this article does not even mention the Fair, and the parade took place two weeks before the Fair’s events.89 “Big Throng at Fair Ignores Gray Sky,” The New York Times, September 2, 1940, 18.90 Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Old and New Polonias: Tensions within an Ethnic Community,” Polish-American Studies 38.2 (Autumn, 1981), 61. 91 “Potocki Makes Plea for Polish Relief,” The New York Times, December 14, 1939, 10.

36 Schulson

to free up the Commission.92 John Pateracki, former president of the Polish-American Participation Committee, reappeared in the news as a committee member raising money to send books to Polish soldiers.93

The pavilion lagged behind in these efforts. Within days of the 1939 invasion, visitors had tried to use the pavilion as a site for contributions, and officials had to refuse “$384 in pennies, nickels and quarters” given by “insistent” visitors and removed a basket with a sign that read, “Please help Poland. Your donations to our worthy cause may help to preserve peace in the civilized world.”94 A number of the exhibits were sold at an auction to benefit Finnish and Polish relief, although the “purchasers [were] asked to lend the objects to the pavilion for the duration of the Fair.”95 The terms of this agreement also seem to have changed that year; the Vice President in Charge of Finance wrote to de Ropp toward the end of 1940 noting that, while willing to waive some revenue charges for relief contributions, they could not “waive the collection of revenues which were part of the income originally counted upon to reimburse these debenture holders” simply because so many countries were asking for concessions on this point.96 The Fair was not in an economic position to cut any breaks; only leftover funds could be used for relief.

But the pavilion did not have the money to pay its staff, let alone make up the $60,000 it owed. In order to help the government-in-exile with its debts, the American-Polish Memorial Committee was convened. The Times heralded its formal beginning in an article entitled “Poles Seek Funds for Fair Memorial.”97 That was not fully accurate—apart from de Ropp, Polish surnames were infrequent on a 71-name list of Bells, Chesters, Lees, and Rosenblatts. For although the Committee was headquartered in the Polish Consulate, it was run almost entirely by Fair leaders and New York industrialists of the ilk that were the leading donors to the Fair.98 And it seems that the Committee was mainly interested in recovering the $60,000 owed to them by the Polish government; thus, it would “sell” each of the 1,200 shields of the pavilion’s central tower for $50 apiece, buy the tower and the Jagiello statue from the Polish government, and use any extra money “to maintain and expand the Polish exhibit at the Fair for the rest of the season.”99 Their plan was perhaps unrealistic: $50 in 1940 had the buying power of approximately $830 today.100 Moreover,

92 “Drive to Aid Poles Opened at Dinner,” The New York Times, March 19, 1940, 9. 93 “Plea for Polish Books,” The New York Times, December 1, 1940, 37.94 “Foreign Area Calm After Tense Days,” The New York Times, September 4, 1939, 20. 95 “Polish Objects on Sale,” The New York Times, March 27, 1940, 14.96 G. V. Pach to Stefan de Ropp, October 14, 1940, NYPL, Box 317.97 “Poles Seek Funds for Fair Memorial,” The New York Times, September 17, 1940, 23. 98 “Brochure for the American-Polish Memorial Committee,” undated, NYPL, Box 317.99 Ibid.; “Polish Memorial on Fair Site Urged,” The New York Times, June 25, 1940, 24.100 Jane Tibbett, Assistant General Chairman of the Paderewski Fund, “Letter to the Editor: Funds Need-ed for Poland,” The New York Times, April 27, 1940, 9; CPI Inflation Calculator, Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm.

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this plan was in the interest of the fair, not of Poland: funds would stay within the Fair rather than going to help efforts abroad.101

Although they managed to raise $15,000 by mid-September, it is unclear whether the American-Polish Memorial Committee actually raised sufficient funds; the tower disappeared from the news after the close of the 1940 season. The statue of Jagiello resurfaced in early 1945 when a coalition of Polish New Yorkers lobbied to have the statue moved from Flushing Park to Central Park.102 It may seem like an odd campaign, considering the Polish-American community’s detachment from the pavilion, but it tapped into earlier symbolism. By this point, the Allies were finalizing plans for postwar Europe, and Poland was in clear danger of falling under the governance of the U.S.S.R., leading to a “unified Polish-American lobby to prevent the Soviet dismemberment and takeover of Poland.”103 The central issue had thus veered away from relief and returned to questions of Polish identity. Although the World’s Fair had long since ended, bringing the statue to Central Park would bring the pavilion back into the public eye. It would thereby remind Americans of their obligations to Poland, obligations stretching back into time, and implied again on that crisp September day in 1939.

*

The Jagiello statue still stands in Central Park today, with “POLAND” emblazoned on its side and swords upraised in a challenge to the turtle pond. Although the plinth carried an explanation of Jagiello’s significance, there is no acknowledgement of the statue’s original home at the Polish pavilion, or of the efforts to bring it to its final resting place. In some ways, peaceful isolation, removed from its history, is a fitting end to the story of the pavilion. Once a project of economic and international identity, the pavilion was briefly a center of support and remembrance, before it finally faded into irrelevance, having proven itself an insufficient relief effort. But while the pavilion might have failed at the end, it did become an American stand-in for Poland. American interaction with the pavilion mapped closely onto the American sentiment to the situation overseas: interest and sympathy at first and, later, a desire to provide relief but not military aid. The pavilion’s decline pointed to a growing divide in understandings: between the Fair and the American public, and between the American public and the horrors taking place across the Atlantic. The pavilion, in its latter days, became more a representation of the Polish state during its long years of non-existence than of its short heyday of autonomy. The Polish could only hold onto an abstract sense of their nation, looking back toward their heritage and forward to an uncertain future.

101 “Polish Memorial on Fair Site Urged,” The New York Times, June 25, 1940, 24.102 “Plan Jagiello Memorial,” The New York Times, March 5, 1945, 21.103 John Raxzilowski, “American Polonia in World War II: Toward a Social History,” Polish American Studies 58.1 (2001), 65.

38 Sascha Berkovitch, “Dressed in White: A Mysterious Rebellion at San Juan Ixcoy,” Tempus, 14.2 (Fall 2013), 38-47.

drESSEd iN whiTE

A MySTEriOuS rEBELLiON AT SAN JuAN ixCOy

sascha beRkovitch

On the night of July 17, 1898, a group of indigenous Mayan rural workers in San Juan Ixcoy in western highland Guatemala murdered the local habilitadores, ladino officials, and to cover up their crime, killed all but one of the remaining 30 ladinos in town, women and children included. The circumstances of the event are peculiar: How was murdering an entire village of people a method of hiding a crime? How did but one ladino manage to survive? What made indigenous workers turn to cold-blooded murder in the first place? The methodology of this essay draws influence from the Subaltern Studies movement, which seeks to identify the motives of indigenous people themselves within the larger framework of peasant revolt and economic conditions during an era of clear economic and social domination by another ethnic or social group. This essay shows that while the conditions of the revolt emerged out of the broader economic framework of Guatemala, religious motives of the indigenous population in San Jan Ixcoy explain why the event took such a drastic turn.

From the two available accounts—one written by North American historian David McCreery and another by historian and Mayanist Adrián Recinos in his Monograph of the Department of Huehuetenango—we can piece the event together as follows. On the night of July 17, 1898, a group of indigenous workers from outlying hamlets assembled in the town village of San Juan Ixcoy. According to one witness, they wore white, an attempt, as McCreery describes, “to distinguish themselves from their intended victims.”1 Although McCreery and Recinos agree that the intended victims were local habilitadores, they offer contrasting views on how the natives proceeded. McCreery states that the workers first set ablaze the town hall building where many habilitadores were asleep, then waited outside to execute them as they fled; Recinos maintains that the natives swept through the village

1 David McCreery, “Land, Labor and Violence in Highland Guatemala: San Juan Ixcoy (Huehuetenango), 1893-1945,” The Americas, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Oct. 1988): 242, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1006787 (December 2, 2012).

39Dressed in White

before arriving at the town hall.2 In any case, it seems clear that by morning the nearly 30 ladino men, women and children in the town had been murdered, with the exception of Javier Escobedo, a mute with a “penetrating ingenuity [who] understood the seriousness of the situation and stealthily took refuge in the town Church, which the Indians had opened.”3 In the morning, McCreery writes, the natives realized that some of their intended victims had escaped, and fled to the mountains. Soldiers from surrounding areas soon arrived, killed an unknown number of villagers, and sent around 60 to trial in the capital.4

Recinos usefully places the event within a microhistory of the department of Huehuetenango, which contains the town of San Juan Ixcoy. The department itself is vast, consisting of rich soil and a diverse climate that in Recinos’ words “calls the attention of the practical man and the contemplative spirit.”5 It is also one of Guatemala’s most populous departments, with nearly twice the population of each other department in the western highlands at the turn of the twentieth century.6 Yet situated as it is in the northwest corner of the country, far from commercial centers and the more accessible coast, Huehuetenango has historically remained in isolation.7 In an 1883 correspondence, a British citizen recounted to his Earl the recent travels of a doctor to the northern departments of Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz: “He described to me the scenery as magnificent,” the citizen wrote, “But he says they are, from their mountainous nature, only cultivable in a very small degree, and offer, therefore, no prospect for colonization, but will remain the haunt of the Indian.”8

Set high in the Cuchumatán mountains, with a population that in 1954 consisted of just 60 ladinos and 5,000 indigenous Mayans living in outlying hamlets, San Juan Ixcoy’ isolation was remarkable even for its department.9 Although it had endured land conflict for centuries between ladino-dominated municipalities to the north and the east, it remained largely unaffected by broader changes to the country’s land and labor structure until the early 1890s. In 1891 and 1893, ladinos from a municipality to the south attempted to purchase an area that included what was considered community land.10 The governor of Huehuetenango, sensing a scheme to acquire labor, blocked this first attempt, but a second attempt issued in a greater challenge. The ladinos applied for land in the south of San Juan Ixcoy that was just on the Chintala border. In a counter effort, the community principales

2 Ibid., 242; Adrián Recinos, Monografía del departamento de Huehuetenango, 2nd edition (Guatemala: Editorial del Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1954), 364.3 Recinos, 364; author translation.4 McCreery, “Land,” 242.5 Recinos, 3; author translation.6 McCreery, “Debt Servitude,” 741.7 Recinos, 3.8 F.R., Saint John, “Inclosure in No. 111,” in Misrule in Guatemala: Correspondence, accessed through Archives Direct, Confidential Print: Latin America. 9 Recinos, 362.10 Ibid., xi.

40 Berkovitch

of San Juan registered their own claim for the land based on “ancient titles.” The resulting mediation involved considerable surveying and titling costs that the community could not afford. San Juan’s leaders signed a contract with a local habilitador sending community members to a finca – a large plantation – to work for the coffee harvest in exchange for covering the fees involved in the land dispute. Tensions rose among natives when the surveyor appeared to favor ladino claims. The surveyor became frightened when community leaders withdrew from the commission; he fled when the government decided against sending troops for his protection. The habilitador, however, unaware of these developments, continued to pressure the community for its promised workers. Deeply discontented with both situations, the natives refused to comply.11 Thus we arrive at July 17, 1898.

In examining the circumstances of San Juan Ixcoy, it may be tempting to conclude that the revolt emerged purely from situational factors. The land proceedings certainly created tension between natives and ladinos, and the natives were clearly infuriated. Unfortunately, there are few facts to support this conclusion: our lone source, McCreery, contains a five-year gap in concrete dates, from the attempts at land acquisition in 1893 to the rebellion in 1898. It seems entirely plausible that the land process would take less than five years to resolve—when ladinos initially applied to purchase land in the same area in 1891, after all, it took less than two—and that additional factors emerged leading up to July 17, 1898.12 Whatever the case, the unique setting of San Juan Ixcoy sheds light on mysteries regarding the actions and motivations of the rebels. Although massacring an entire village might initially seem an absurd way to cover up a crime, in the small village of San Juan Ixcoy, with such a small ladino population, located in a deep valley surrounded by mountains,13 it might well have made sense.

McCreery’s account of the massacre places it within broader developments of the Guatemalan economy and labor industry, and indeed these developments contributed to social changes that spurred indigenous response. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the international division of labor became more pronounced, with developed European countries and the United States emerging as the manufacturers and suppliers of industrial products and Latin America supplying raw materials and food.14 In Guatemala, amid declining prospects in the cochineal, or carmine dye, industry, which had consumed most of the country’s capital and labor, the state, Economic Society and the Consulado de

11 McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 288-9.12 Ibid., 288-9.13 Recinos, 363.14 J.C. Cambranes, Café y campesinos en Guatemala, 1853-1897 (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria de Guate-mala, 1985), 59.

41Dressed in White

Comercio combined forces to increase propaganda promoting the cultivation of coffee by small producers. The process was gradual: many producers remained hesitant to replace cochineal, which continued to reap higher profits than coffee in good years, and others suffered enormous losses after failing to grow coffee in the humid lowlands. It was clear by the 1860s, however, that despite early difficulties, coffee would become Guatemala’s staple export crop.15

Unlike cochineal, which had a regional character, coffee cultivation spread to all of the country’s departments, eliminating the previous isolation of agrarian markets. Moreover, regions that Spanish colonists formerly had marginalized became definitively incorporated into the national economy as large tracts of uncultivated land were cleared and transformed for agricultural production. This change in agriculture created a need for new infrastructure, including the creation of more banks and the construction of smoother roads, new ports and railway lines in coastal areas, and the implementation of steamboats to navigate inland rivers. Particularly in the capital, purchasing power increased, as reflected in the expansion of businesses and manufacturing hubs. Their stability was closely linked to coffee farms, which overtook older colonial haciendas as new units of agrarian production.16 Although these innovations helped to make coffee a full half of the value of Guatemala’s exports in 1871, problems remained with the reach of infrastructure and services. These problems related particularly to labor supply: although there was an abundance of indigenous people for the emerging fincas, most simply would not work, avoiding mandamiento orders and failing to honor wage advances given to them. The Ministry of Government offered little help, rejecting most attempts by departmental governors to regulate local labor.17 That same year, a frustrated group of coffee planters from the country’s western departments led a Liberal revolution that overthrew the Conservative “Dictatorship of Thirty Years,” and launched what became known as the Liberal Reforma.18

Under the Liberal Reforma, when the government established programs of fast-paced change, the state felt it necessary to intervene in the labor supply in order to generate a sufficient number of workers.19 “If the government were to leave the agriculturalistas to their own resources and without the most effective possible cooperation of the government,” directed President Justo Rufino Barrios in 1876, “their efforts to develop enterprises would fail due to the negligence and propensity for deception of the Indians.”20 In the following years, Barrios’s state took upon itself the conversion of highland natives into seasonal 15 David McCreery, Rural Guatemala: 1760-1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 161-3.16 Cambranes, 59-61.17 McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 168.18 David McCreery, “Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, 1876-1936,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Nov. 1983): 736, accessed 26 September 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2514903.19 David McCreery, Development and the State in Reforma Guatemala (Ohio: Ohio University Center for Interna-tional Studies, 1983), 1; Cambranes, 173.20 McCreery, “Debt Servitude,” 740.

42 Berkovitch

wage laborers, with debt servitude emerging as a fully legal system. In November 1876, he issued a circular to departmental governors which revived the practice of forced wage labor, and, in April 1877, he issued the country’s first rural labor code, Decree 177. By grouping workers and their employers into three categories – the patron (employer), the colono (resident worker) and the temporalista (“temporary or day laborer”) – and detailing the rights and responsibilities of each, the document assured that debt contracts for labor would be enforced in the form of mandamientos.21 Coffee growers received the regulations with enthusiasm, but debate surfaced in light of a new 1879 Constitution granting personal freedom to all Guatemalans.22 To some, this guarantee ran counter to both the agricultural requirements and “inherent and acquired vices” of the natives. Although President José María Reyna Barrios received high praise from the press after effectively abolishing forced native labor in 1893, a revised rural labor law enacted the following year recuperated for the planters most of their previous control. Finally, in 1898, amid the tension provoked by a sudden collapse in the world coffee market and the assassination of Reyna Barrios, the mandamiento system was reinstated quietly but completely.23

In Guatemala’s new coffee economy, the Indian population in effect faced three choices: debt servitude on a finca, military service, or flight. Unwilling to break family and community bonds, the vast majority chose the third option and sought out contracts as temporalistas. A system developed in which labor contractors, known as habilitadores due to the habilitación (“cash advance”) they offered, rounded up indigenous laborers, and sent them to the coast as needed for seasonal labor. Working primarily during July-August, when corn was scarce in indigenous highland villages, habilitadores could be categorized into two types: the habilitador-agent, who represented one or a group of fincas and advanced owners’ money to workers in debt, and the traista, who used store credit or loans that eventually forced natives into signing work contracts that were then sold to the highest bidder.24

In either case, indigenous workers were severely exploited, and their situation only worsened when they arrived at the fincas themselves. Workers were required by law to submit their contract and libreta (“pay book”), which together recorded their obligations and outstanding debt to ensure that neither they nor their employer committed fraud. When the workers had paid off the amount they owed, they were permitted to leave. This system easily lent itself to exploitation: since most indigenous people were illiterate, and had only limited Spanish-speaking ability, employers would often refuse to balance their workers’ libretas. As a common joke during the time went, “Ten pesos I’m giving you, 21 Ibid., 742; McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 188-9. 22 J. Antonio Villacorta, Historia de la República de Guatemala, 1821-1921 (Guatemala: La Tipografía Nacio-nal, 1960), 467-70.23 McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 189-90, 193; McCreery, “Debt Servitude,” 743.24 McCreery, “Debt Servitude,” 744.

43Dressed in White

ten pesos I’m writing in your book, and ten pesos you owe me makes a total debt of thirty pesos.”25 They might resort to other tricks, such as using an oversized box to measure tasks for the coffee harvest.26 By some accounts, debt servitude in Guatemala was less expensive for employers than owning black slaves in other parts of the world.27 Along with acute health risks on the lowland estates posed by humidity, insects, frequent rain and insufficient shelter, this manipulation contributed to extremely poor working conditions that could be prolonged for years.28 Moreover, if a male worker failed to fulfill his obligations, the habilitador occasionally resorted to enlisting his wife and children to work harvesting or sorting coffee; at other times, workers were jailed with the cooperation of local authorities. Husbands would often be talked into accepting money for the future labor of their wives, who themselves faced sexual harassment at the hands of finca owners or the habilitadores.29

Given these conditions, it is no surprise that the natives devised methods of resistance. Although the state power structure prevented them from avoiding labor on the fincas altogether, McCreery notes that they understood their central role in coffee cultivation and used it to bargain for concrete advantages, including higher wages and smaller tasks. In some cases, Indian responses turned violent, particularly in highland villages when habilitadores attempted to drag workers to the fincas by force.30 In this context, the massacre in San Juan Ixcoy, a western highland village, stands as a striking example of the growing tensions in a new labor structure brought about by the Guatemalan economy’s shift to coffee. Yet the fact remains that this display of power occurred largely within the framework of state institutions, as open rebellion was bound to end in destruction.31

A purely economic perspective, therefore, does not quite explain the raging fury of the events of San Juan Ixcoy. For this, we must turn to Subaltern Studies’ focus on putting peasant revolts in the context of local patterns of subjection and rebellion. Among Mayans during the nineteenth century, these patterns emerged in three key threads: the indigenous discontent which contributed substantially to Rafael Carrera’s rise to power during the late 1830s and early 1840s, the violent uprising during the Caste War in Chiapas, and various instances of indigenous revolt in Guatemala during the period immediately preceding the massacre of San Juan Ixcoy.

During colonial rule and throughout much of the early Republic, a motín de indios,

25 McCreery, “Debt,” 750.26 Ibid., 752; Cambranes, 199.27 Cambranes, 232.28 McCreery, “Debt,” 753; Cambranes, 201.29 McCreery, “Debt,” 753-4.30 Ibid., 755.31 Ibid.

44 Berkovitch

or riot by natives, typically emerged in response to the ongoing abuse of indigenous people at the hands of provincial elites. Appealing to a certain ruler, the King or the President, natives would assemble in the town plaza with documents supporting their cause. The militia would then be enlisted to brutally suppress the outbreak that the upper classes so feared.32 This series of events played out in riots in departments bordering Huehuetanango, the department of San Juan Ixcoy. In a dramatic riot on April 17, 1815 in Quetzalteco in the department of Quetzaltenango, a K’iche’ native climbed on a table in the plaza in front of government offices with a document allegedly freeing K’iche’s from recently-decreed tribute obligations.33 A rebellion in Totonicapán five years later overthrew the traditional power structure altogether. In this department, enraged natives drove out Spanish officials and declared one of their own King.34 Throughout this period, land tenure was a problem, with particular trouble in the Mita district in the eastern mountains. As early as August 1824, the villagers there chased ladino administrators from town, beating a high official with sticks.35 Tensions in this area increased over time, with rural complaints focused on the size and control of communal lands called ejidos. These tensions culminated in the Livingston Codes of 1837, which were designed to enhance governmental control. On March 6, 1837 in the town of San Juan Ostuncalco in Quetzaltenango, villagers instructed to build a “model jail” in keeping with the Codes launched a full-blown attack on officials, showing so much strength that a column of troops was required to quell the outbreak. Four soldiers and twenty natives had been killed by the time the town was occupied.36 This event signaled the onset of the Mita revolt, a widespread uprising of indigenous and ladino peasants in the Mita district that accelerated into civil war; eventually the Liberal government was overthrown by Rafael Carrera, a charismatic, mixed-blooded caudillo.37 Although grievances over economic and land policies were fundamental, according to Ingersoll, religion provided the crucial spark for action. Displaying a blend of “paganized Catholicism,” which included fanatic worship of images of the saints and loyal devotion to parish priests, the native masses also invoked indigenous religious traditions in the rebellion.38 32 Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2 and Severo Martínez Peláez, Motínes de indios (Guatemala: Ediciones en Marcha, 1991), 79-80.33 Greg Grandin, In The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 73.34 Hazel Ingersoll, “The War of the Mountain: A Study of Reactionary Peasant Insurgency in Guatemala, 1837-1873,” (Ph.D. diss., The George Washington University, 1972), 52, retrieved from ProQuest Disserta-tions and Theses, http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/288449180?accountid=11311, (288449180).35 Ibid., 66.36 Ibid., 75, 105.37 Ibid., vii, 75, 105.38 Ibid., viii, 80-1.

45Dressed in White

In religious terms, the event resembles the Caste War of Chiapas, Mexico, which took place three decades before. In 1867, amid flaring tensions between indigenous Mayans and white officials, residents of the village of Chamula began to worship a clay idol that had allegedly come from the sky. Building new figures, to which they claimed the idol had given birth, the cult spread to surrounding hamlets, where it evolved into a focus on the necessity of finally exterminating the ladinos, their proclaimed enemy. The movement needed a propitiatory victim, and on Good Friday in 1868, villagers carried out a striking ritual: the crucifixion of an 18-year-old boy. The key perpetrators were imprisoned – although authorities ignored the crime of the crucifixion itself – and a ladino from the nearby city of San Cristobal, aware of the Caste War already underway in Yucatan, placed himself at the head of the growing movement and began military training of the Chamulas. Conflict erupted a year later, on June 12, 1869, when he and more than 1,000 natives killed a priest and his helpers who had attempted to remove the idols from the villages. Over the next five days, the massacre continued in surrounding towns: houses were burnt and men, women and children were killed, totaling over 100 victims. In the coming days, the government managed to pacify the uprising with heavy military force.39 The events of this revolt have direct implications for our analysis. Here, ethnic and religious factors contributed to violence that was considerably more intense than any motín de indios leading up to the Mita revolt. It was also more violent than any expression of peasant unrest in rural Guatemala that preceded the massacre of San Juan Ixcoy.

Keenly aware of the centuries-long exploitative structure of European domination, the indigenous Maya of Guatemala had previously focused their demands on concrete aspects of the labor system’s day-to-day operations, including improved habilitaciones or the removal of an abusive supervisor.40 They also recognized the likelihood of repression by force – in one case, an administrator called in soldiers from a nearby town when his workers complained about their food rations– so that discontent more often than not took the form of petitions.41 As most workers were illiterate, they came to rely on a local shyster, who acted as a lawyer but had no degree. The result was a set of documents ranging from unintelligible ramblings to eloquent examinations of law and history.42 Another option was flight, either to nearby Mexico or Belize or, more commonly, to one’s home community.43 The latter choice was usually executed with the intent of stimulating further negotiation, as home communities were the first place an administrator might look for missing workers. These negotiations turned out to be fairly effective – corrupt officials were sometimes disciplined 39 Adapted from Diane Nelson, “Crucifixion Stories, the 1869 Caste War of Chiapas and Negative Con-sciousness: A Disruptive Subaltern Study,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 24, No. 2 (May, 1997): 334, http://www.jstor.org/stable/646754 (September 26, 2012).40 McCreery, “Debt Servitude,” 755.41 McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 281.42 Ibid., 285.43 Cambranes, 270-2.

46 Berkovitch

or removed altogether, and in general natives held more leverage in these cases from within their communities. Yet as McCreery points out, all this did nothing to undermine the labor system which was in itself abusive.44

While discontent persisted well into the twentieth century, moreover, violence remained the “least common” native response.45 It is all the more surprising, then, that such a dramatic massacre occurred at San Juan Ixcoy. Through the methods of Subaltern Studies, focusing on understanding the revolt in light of religious and ethnic factors as well as economic concerns, we may begin to address these peculiar details of the San Juan incident. Of particular importance is the claim that indigenous rebels dressed in white and chose a Sunday evening to execute their plan (other revolts occurred on Saturday and Monday, notably bypassing the Christian Sabbath).46 Although sources explain that the rebels wore white in order to identify themselves, this assertion does not make much sense. If rebels planned to overtake the village and massacre its sleeping inhabitants, would there be any need to distinguish themselves from victims, who differed conspicuously in race, class and clothing?47 Besides, what would be the point of wearing white after nightfall? The answers to both questions might lie in the Caste War in Chiapas, which surpassed the scale of violence in San Juan Ixcoy. As the Chamula rebellion grew out of a blending of “paganized Catholicism,” so too, perhaps, did that of San Juan Ixcoy. The rebels would have worn white, then, not as a distinguishing feature, but as part of a religious ritual. For the striking fact is that the natives not only chose a Sunday for their rampage, but left the Church entirely untouched.48 The lone survivor, moreover, managed to enter the Church – which the rebels themselves had opened – and hide behind the altar. Indeed, the white clothing worn by the rebels may have related to the traditional Christian symbol of white as purity and righteousness, in this instance assuming the double meaning of the righteous revenge of the oppressed against the white oppressor.49 In any case, we have reason to argue that the ferocity of the revolt of San Juan Ixcoy, more drastic than previous rebellions, stemmed not only from the despotic labor structure, but as further incendiary factors, from ethnic and religious motives.

44 McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 285; McCreery, “Debt Servitude,” 755.45 Ibid., 283.46 See note 41.47 A May 1894 decree, exempting natives from military and labor service if they “know how to read and write and are abandoning traditional dress,” suggests that there remained a distinction in dress between na-tives and ladinos. See McCreery, “Debt Sertitude,” 743.48 The day of the week was found by means Ancestor Search (http://www.searchforancestors.com/utility/dayofweek.html). Significantly, none of the other revolts in the analysis with concrete dates fell on Sundays: April 17, 1815 (the outbreak in Quetzalteco) was a Monday; March 6, 1837 (the outbreak in San Juan Os-tuncalco) was also a Monday; and June 12, 1869 (the outbreak in Chamula) was a Saturday. 49 Anthropologist Victor Turner, for example, has remarked in his study of Ndembu ritual, that whiteness, “more than any other color, represents the divinity as the essence and source.” See Victor Turner, The For-est of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (New York: Cornell University Press, 1967), 76.

47Dressed in White

Taking our historical methods into consideration, we may now make some tentative conclusions about the revolt of July 17, 1898. The seeds of the revolt were planted with Guatemala’s shift to coffee production during the late nineteenth century and the disrupted labor structures that followed. These exploitative structures manifested themselves in the land conflict of San Juan Ixcoy, a particularly remote village of a particularly remote department, during the 1890s. It seems likely that, angered by unfair treatment and enflamed with religious fervor, the native Mayans of San Juan Ixcoy gathered on July 17, 1898 in preparation for perhaps the only Sunday revolt recorded in that area. They wore what seems to have been a ritual white. Their murderous rampage through the village left only the church standing, where a survivor found refuge behind the altar, beneath an image of Saint John, the town’s namesake.50

Although the events of the San Juan Ixcoy rebellion remain outside of the historical narrative, these events result from a variety of complex actors and actions; consequently, we must approach them through a number of diverse frameworks. In the case of the indigenous Maya, a group that has all too often found itself closed out of broader patterns of traditional historical development, a multi-faceted approach becomes particularly necessary. Through its utilization, we may begin to piece together the complex web of experiences that shapes the Mayan historical narrative.

50 Ibid., 364.

48 Amy Alemu, “Up in Smoke: Greco-Egyptian Encounters through the Cigarette Industry, (c.1880-1956)” Tempus, 14.2 (Fall 2013), 48-59.

up iN SMOkE

GrECO-EGypTiAN ENCOuNTErS ThrOuGh ThE CiGArETTE iNduSTry

(C.1880-1956)

amy aLemu

What began in 1952 as a military coup to purge Egypt of the vestiges of colonialism soon became an all-out revolution of ideals, re-asserting Egypt’s sovereignty to the rest of the world. Gamal Abdel Nasser, co-leader of the military and ideological revolutionary forces and later President of Egypt, advocated anti-imperialism as an approach by which Egypt could grow politically, economically, and culturally.1 This governing philosophy, which argued for a stronger Egyptian voice on the global stage, required some decisions that would receive a mixed reception. In the name of preserving Egypt’s “true” character, one such policy was to make economic conditions so unfavorable for immigrant foreign communities that they would be forced to leave.

The Greco-Egyptians, a majority of whom had emigrated to Egypt in the latter half of the nineteenth century, had by that time fully immersed themselves into the fabric of Egyptian society.2 They may not have always intended to make Egypt their home: Alexandra Papadimitriou, a Greek who had lived in Egypt for the majority of her life, remembered that the move to Egypt was not intended to be long-term.3 However, as the Greeks set foot on Egyptian soil, they encountered an unexpected landscape, a stage upon which they would redefine their core identities. They began by estranging themselves from Egyptian culture and immersing themselves in Egypt’s foreign community. After the nominal overthrow of British rule in 1922, however, coupled with important developments in commercial manufacturing, many Greeks realized they would have to adapt to the times. This strategy worked for several decades, but the advent of Egyptian nationalism and the rise of Nasserian politics thirty years later would finally muscle the Greeks out of what had become their second homeland.1 These revolutionary ideological forces would be spearheaded by the Egyptian National Front, which will be discussed in the latter part of this paper.2 Alexander Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, (London: Ithaca Press, 1989), 7.3 Egypt: The Other Homeland, directed by Yorgos Avgeropoulos (2011; Athens, Greece: Small Planet Produc-tions, 2012), DVD, 15:30.

49Up in Smoke

What remains, then, is a history of the ebb and flow of cultural trans-Mediterranean identity. The Greeks initially looked to past identities while grappling with their own cultural challenges in Egypt. So, too, did Nasser and his supporters look to a remembered understanding of the Greeks in order to justify their present fight against imperialism. The Greek community had come to Egypt in search of economic preservation while holding on to initially problematic viewpoints. The two cultures then found some sort of homeostasis, which in turn empowered the Egyptians to project the same outmoded perspectives onto the Greek immigrant community. This “ebb and flow” of cultural international history is both a personal and impersonal phenomenon; while individuals may bear witness to important trans-cultural relationships, they themselves do not shift trends in their community at large. To analyze some of these more impersonal cultural forces through the perspective of individuals, the cigarette offers a concrete historical tool for the documentation of the Greco-Egyptian relationship through the twentieth century.

The first Greek cigarette merchants arrived in Egypt during the 1870s, after the Ottomans nationalized the tobacco industry.4 In navigating their place in the Egyptian cultural landscape, the immigrant merchants looked to ancient Greece and Egypt to define both themselves and their brands. During the interwar period, with the arrival of mechanized processes of rolling cigarettes and Egyptian independence in 1922, the Greeks in Egypt faced a turning point: driven by market forces that made their old ways ineffective, the Greeks turned to their fellow Egyptians as both new consumers and new competitors. This shift, the Greeks’ adaptation to change, and their ultimate immersion in the Egyptian community made the rise of Egyptian nationalism all the more complicated. When nationalism and Soviet romanticism culminated in the 1952 Revolution, Nasser found himself able to expel foreign citizens who jeopardized the “true” voice of the Egyptian people. Unwittingly employing the same perspectives of the past that characterized the first Greeks who came to his country, Nasser justified his actions by targeting a Greek population that no longer existed, one that had come to Egypt in the wake of colonial rule.

This framework tells the story of the nuanced and shifting identity politics that emerged as the Greeks moved from pro-colonial to pan-Mediterranean at different points in their brief history in Egypt. The Greeks in Egypt used the cigarette to make the transition from foreigners appealing to foreign consumers (1880s-1922) to merchants serving domestic markets that emerged after a turning point in Egyptian independence and factory mechanization (1922), to de facto Egyptians maneuvering in an increasingly problematic market, culminating in revolution (1932-1956). Only this history, this cultural phenomenon, could produce an individual like Popi Deligiorgi, who, reflecting on her life in Egypt as an ethnic Greek, could reply, “I felt at home. I was never a stranger.”5

4 Relli Shechter, “Selling Luxury: The Rise of the Egyptian Cigarette and the Transformation of the Egyptian Tobacco Market, 1850-1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35, no. 1 (February 2003): 55.5 Egypt: The Other Homeland, 02:57.

50 Alemu

FirST ENCOuNTErS (C.1880-1922)

When the Greeks first arrived in Egypt in the last decades of the 19th century, they did what seemed natural, appealing to foreign communities and their own classical past to justify both their economic ventures and their presence in a new home country. In this sense, clinging to the glories of a shared ancient past made present cultural transitions easier. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Greeks were a part of a burgeoning foreign class; in Alexandria alone, the foreign percentage of the population grew from 14.5 to 19 percent from 1897 to 1917. From 1897 to 1907, the Greek population itself grew by almost 40 percent to 62,973 people.6 As comforting as it would have been to be amongst a fifth of the foreign Egyptian population, the Greeks saw themselves as a population apart. As one Greek still living in Egypt observed, “The British were distant because of their empire, the French as well.”7 Lord Cromer, the British consul-general in Egypt (1884-1907), conceded to a similar conclusion, highlighting the isolation of the English: “there is little social sympathy between the English and any class of European in Egypt.”8 With no aspirations of empire, the Greeks could be more extroverted to those they cared to please. Besides, as we will see, being social made good business sense.

The Greeks initially saw Egypt as a geographically convenient (and legal) place to restart their cigarette businesses. As such, their first customers of choice were not the Egyptians themselves, but the foreign market. British troops who established their country’s occupation of Egypt in 1882 were Greek cigarette manufacturers’ first clients. Their growing taste for Egyptian-Turkish tobacco blends was critical for the early success of Greek firms.9

Quickly moving away from common soldiers, Greek cigarette producers became successful by targeting their manufacturing processes and advertising techniques to a high-class foreign consumer. Common themes in the Greek-Egyptian supplier-consumer relationship were an emphasis on personal relationships, hand craftsmanship and personal skill, and exotic flair. Often, cigarette manufacturers met their first clients at social clubs, where the cigarette producer would ask for someone’s stray cigarette. The producer would smoke the cigarette, remember the aroma and tobacco taste, and reproduce the same cigarette in his factory. He returned to the club, impressed the same client with his tobacco skills, and secured a consistent customer base for the future.10 Therefore, important skills in a company’s early stages were forming personal connections and touting the expertise of a 6 Nancy Y. Reynolds, “National Socks and the ‘Nylon Woman’: Materiality, Gender, and Nationalism in Textile Marketing in Semicolonial Egypt, 1930-1956,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 43 (2011): 24.7 Egypt: The Other Homeland, 03:57.8 Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 24.9 D. Quataert, “Ottoman Reform and Agriculture in Anatolia 1876-1908” (Ph.D thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 97.10 Manos Haritatos and Penelope Giakoumakis, A History of the Greek Cigarette, (Athens: The Hellenic Liter-ary and Historical Archice, 1997), 136.

51Up in Smoke

tobacconist, one who could create appealing tobacco blends that could both mimic and set his brand apart from the competition.11 The “craft” of the cigarette extended to its contents and to its packaging, for the finest cigarette brands would monogram individual clients’ cigarettes with their initials or insignia. This was a testament to the consumer’s social status and priority to the manufacturer.12 With these values, the first Greek firms soon attracted the attention of royalty. George Kyriacou produced “King George Egyptian Cigarettes” for the British monarch, and Angelos Helmis served the Imperial Court of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prince George of the Hellenes.13

Greek advertising for Egyptian cigarettes at the turn of the twentieth century often appealed to a foreign demand for luxury products with Orientalist images. The advertisements used stereotypical Orientalist motifs: immorality, overt sexuality, and liminal spaces.14 On one cigarette box, produced by Kyriazi Frères in 1900, a well-adorned vessel floats on a calm, glistening sea (Image B). A single pyramid looms in the background on a floating patch of land. The luxury depicted in the scene—the brilliant crimson of fabric draped elegantly over the side of the vessel, the garlands adorning the ship, the color and warmth afforded by the red, orange, and pale green color scheme—all played into the commodity market that Kyriazi Frères sought to enter. The crimson fabric stands out as an immediate reference to wealth, the richness of the fabric evoking a sense of rarity. This box would allure a potential elitist customer, using exotic Egypt to do most of the selling.

Another category of advertisements from this period played upon the exhilarating immorality of smoking. A box produced by Nestor Gianaclis in 1905 depicts a redheaded woman in a beaded bra offering a flaming box of cigarettes to a slinking, dark-skinned devil (Image C). The devil leers at the illustrated cigarette box, inviting the spectator to take his or her own peek at the cigarettes within by physically opening the box itself. These advertisements exploited feminine sexuality, often within the context of the predatory Oriental. Another poster for Gianaclis frames a smoking turbaned Arab with droopy, amorous eyes leaning into a bashful blonde. Covering herself with a flowing white dress, the woman seems at once perplexed and enthralled by the man and the smoke from his cigarette. All of these advertisements play off of each other, providing easy references to an exotic land populated by “Others,” tempting consumers’ vices and darkest fantasies. The cigarette claimed to offer transcendence of the cultural barrier between “us” and “them.”

Another mechanism of engaging with the fantastic vis-à-vis the Egyptian cigarette was the classical past. Greeks engaged in this sort of nostalgia as a means of justifying their present identity crisis in the midst of a transitioning cultural climate. An easy source for this

11 Haritatos and Giakoumakis, History of the Greek Cigarette, 139, 147.12 Ibid., 135. (See Image A for a facsimile illustration of cigarettes with personalized monograms).13 Ibid., 146, 155.14 Orientalist here refers to the term invented by Saïd in his seminal work, Orientalism.

52 Alemu

Image AFacsimiles des Formats

Source: Haritatous and Giakoumakis, History of

the Greek Cigarette,135.

Image BKyriazi Frères box

Source: Haritatous and Giakoumakis, History of the Greek Cigarette, 143.

Image CNestor Gianaclis box

Source: Haritatous and Giakoumakis, History of the Greek Cigarette, 154.

53Up in Smoke

were the supposed “golden ages” of ancient Greece and Ptolemaic Egypt. When Nestor Gianaclis set up a vineyard in Alexandria with extra funds from his cigarette business, he named his finest white wines the “Cru des Ptolemés” and the “Reine Cléopatre.”15 These names are emblematic of multiple cultural interactions: the use of French as a vestige of the Napoleon’s Egyptian Occupation of 1798 and the lasting effects of imposed culture (also seen in the use of Frères by Kyriazi Frères), nostalgia for Cleopatra and Ptolemaic Egypt, and the ancient Greek practice of wine production.16 Gianaclis was lauded for the fact that he had “revived a Hellenic-Ptolemaic practice in Egypt that had died twenty centuries before.”17 While trying to cope with present cultural differences by literally recreating past traditions, the Greeks in Egypt would be forced to reckon with changes to come in the next few decades.

1922: A TurNiNG pOiNT

The twenties were a turning point in both the cigarette industry and the Greek political position in Egypt. During World War I, the first Greek firms witnessed a market boom, their workers receiving high wages and output reaching approximately 400,000 cigarettes daily.18 However, in the interwar period, the mechanization of the cigarette factory crept its way into the Egyptian market. The first Greek firms that had prided themselves in the quality of their hand-made product would have to adapt to the new system or risk falling behind. The numbers presented a daunting challenge. According to data historian Alexander Kitroeff, “the production cost of 1000 hand-made cigarettes was 21.5 piastres [while] the cost of the same number produced by machine was only 1.5 piastres.”19 Moreover, the ceiling on daily output was broken, since mechanized factories could now produce over one million cigarettes daily. The problem was two-fold: the mechanization of cigarette production made smaller firms lose pace with the market while allowing for larger corporations, like Eastern Tobacco Company (a subsidiary of British-American Tobacco), to muscle their way into the Egyptian market. Working with an Egyptian entrepreneur named Matossian, Eastern Co. swiftly bought out competitors who were facing losses running hand-made production lines at high operational costs.20 For those Greeks who did stay in the business—and the country—adapting to a burgeoning segment of Egyptian consumers would provide an opportunity for future success.

At the same time as the cigarette market became de-stabilized, in 1922, the British announced the end of their military occupation of Egypt. For the Greeks, this moment brought with it the undermining of British power and the recognition of Egyptians’ will to 15 Quataert, “Ottoman Reform and Agriculture in Anatolia,” 115.16 For information on French occupation effects, see Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 24.17 Quataert, “Ottoman Reform and Agriculture in Anatolia,” 115.18 Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 106.19 Ibid., 107.20 Roger Owen, “The Study of Middle Eastern Industrial History: Notes on the Interrelationship between Factories and Small-Scale Manufacturing with Special References to Lebanese Silk and Egyptian Sugar,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16.4 (November 1984): 483.

54 Alemu

self-rule. One leader in the newspaper Tachidromos expressed what Kitroeff deems a “growing anxiety” in the aftermath of a 1919 street revolt: “yesterday we lost something more valuable than the blood of our fellow-Greeks and the property of our ruined merchants. We lost all faith in the nominal and in the veritable [British] authorities.”21 While some Greeks bemoaned the inefficacy of British power, one Egyptian student taking an English class in Cairo exclaimed, “Why is your army still in our towns? I will be Julius Caesar; I will be Napoleon; I will be Nelson; and I will drive the British soldiers out of our country!”22 These powerful words speak to the self-assured classical past to which the Egyptian Greeks reached in the hope of understanding their present cultural identity.

The Greek position was uncertain: the independence of 1922 alienated them from both their home country and the dominant British powers. As Kitroeff explains, the Greeks “could rely much less on the Greek government,” forcing them to turn to the Egyptians for support.23 This change in terrain manifested itself in the Greeks’ cigarette marketing strategies. To adapt to the changing times, Greek firms redefined their market by shifting to Egyptian royalty instead of Western regents, as well as by marketing to the local population, which meant embracing the very forces of social mobility that had destabilized their cigarette dominance.

Firms that remained in the Egyptian market adapted to social changes by appealing to the Egyptian royalty. King Fuad and King Farouk of Egypt replaced the kings of England and the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the most esteemed clients of the Greek firms. George Kyriacou, the former supplier of King George V, was now a direct supplier for King Farouk I.24 Greek cigarette makers also adopted nostalgic images to strengthen their connection to Egypt. One such story was story was the life of Muhammad Ali, Egyptian regent from 1805 to 1848. Ali was born in Kavalla, Greece, which introduced him to the lucrative tobacco market, and eventually opened the doors to a market for aspiring Greek entrepreneurs with tobacco from Turkey. This established the framework for the two countries’ Mediterranean encounters under a shared cigarette commodity. The Greek dignitary Michalakopoulos presented King Fuad in 1929 with an invitation to Kavalla to witness the unveiling of a statue of Muhammad Ali, commissioned by the Greeks themselves.25 It was a physical recognition of the importance of Egyptian nostalgia for surviving Greek businesses.

Changes in Egyptian society in this period created a new group of young, middle class consumers for Greek cigarettes. Previously relegated to menial labor positions, Egyptian entrepreneurs now entered the scene and started jumpstarting their own ventures, aided by

21 Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 46.22 Donald M. Reid, “Cromer and the Classics: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Greco-Roman Past in Modern Egypt,” Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 1 (January 1996): 17.23 Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 53.24 Haritatos and Giakoumakis, History of the Greek Cigarette, 146.25 Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 67-68.

55Up in Smoke

imported rolling machines from the West. This phenomenon of social mobility would inform the ways Greeks looked at their own changing clientele—from that of a specialized luxury market to a mass consumer market. For instance, historian Relli Shechter has identified an emergent effendi class of upwardly mobile social Egyptians that took on the cigarette scene with force. There existed three strata of smoking classes in Egypt: the masses who smoked shisha, the uppermost elite who preferred cigars, and the dynamic young middle classes—the Egyptian bourgeoisie, if you will—who opted to smoke cigarettes.26

This unique cultural moment afforded Greek firms a key demographic for their advertisements. Targeting the Egyptian effendiyya was a way for Greek cigarette manufacturers to speak to modernity. The trope, in this case, was the caricature of “the fashionable male…clad in a European suit, wing-tip shoes, fancy tie, tarbush, and sometimes carrying a walking stick and/or cigarette.”27 This image is epitomized in a 1931 Kyriazi Frères advertisement, published in the Ruz al-Yusef newspaper. In it, two well-dressed Egyptian government officials share a cigarette in their office. The men in three-piece suits engage in a dialogue that is recorded below the illustration, in which one man declares, “I can’t smoke anything else but this cigarette. I [also] noticed that the basha [upper-class rank] and many of our friends and colleagues here and in the club smoke it as well.”28 With an emphasis on the “club” and the workplace, Kyriazi Frères highlighted public spaces that were recognized by socially ambitious Egyptian consumers. Instead of marketing to a foreign class that stood only to bask in their present and past glories, the same Greek firms appealed to a future for a growing Egyptian elite.

The cigarette became emblematic of change and traditionalism, a reaffirmation of the past that evoked the terms of the future. This modernity-traditionalism dichotomy was represented in changes in the Egyptian cigarette labor force. While Egyptian men witnessed opportunities for dramatic change, women became more economically independent, although within the limits of traditional gender norms. With the mechanization of the cigarette factory, women were hired in droves as unskilled laborers, providing them with opportunities for employment and self-sufficiency.29 At the same time, in keeping with both the modernizing and overtly traditional forces behind the cigarette commodity, mechanization also brought with it the exacerbation of gender divisions in the factory scene. In photos taken from a tobacco production plant in the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s (a market removed, but still reflective of the Egyptian case), “male workers were represented in relation to contemporary technologies, while female workers were almost always depicted

26 Shisha here refers to tobacco traditionally smoked in a hookah waterpipe.27 Reynolds, “National Socks and the ‘Nylon Woman,’” 55.28 Relli Shechter, “Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context,” 489.29 Gûlhan Balsoy,“Gendering Ottoman Labor History: The Cibali Régie Factory in the Early Twentieth Century,” International Review of Social History 54 (December 2009): 65.

56 Alemu

performing manual tasks.”30 This division of labor allowed for the incorporation of women into the unskilled work force, but discriminated against them for their presumed lack of technical know-how.31 In this way, the cigarette offered both modernity and traditionalism to Greek and Egyptian society.

NATiONALiSM ANd 1952: NOSTALGiA rEviSiTEd

The conflicting forces of modernity and traditionalism that defined the cigarette market through the 1930s would set the stage for revolution. Nationalist discourse and ideology increased through the thirties and forties, culminating in Nasser’s overthrow of the quasi-imperial regime in 1952 and subsequent rise to power. The dramatic power transition would challenge the role of the Greeks and their Egyptian cigarettes. This transition was one that swelled from the masses, particularly the working classes. In one address from al-Liwa given in the aftermath of a tramway workers strike by the Nationalist Front, the ideological figureheads of nationalist fervor, the Front saw “proof that a new power has emerged in Egypt which cannot be ignored—the awakening of the power of the working class… and desire to be men like other men.”32 This groundswell was at once distinctly masculine, gritty in its humble beginnings, and ideologically (if not formally, yet) Soviet in its proletarian rhetoric.

The Greeks were invariably a part of this movement in some way, themselves key participants in the industrial processes in which the first battles for nationalism were fought. At different moments, they could be for or against the nationalist movement; in this, they were nevertheless absolutely integrated into the Egyptian fight. In workplaces with Egyptian and Greek workers, nationalist ideas crossed ethnic boundaries.33 The cigarette industry was an especially heterogeneous space for “transmission” between peoples. Even the fact that Greeks were the originators of the largest cigarette companies in the country, as well as the industry itself, “was congruent with nationalism in this period, [1931].”34 However, as the Greeks themselves were not one homogenous minority in Egypt, having integrated themselves on an individual basis into the sociopolitical landscape, their position on nationalism was not so clear. Many Greeks clung to the vestiges of imperial rule, preferring stability to what would await them after revolution. At the same time, still many others fought alongside their fellow Egyptians in the National Front. Popi Deligiorgi remembers, after twenty days of being involved with the National Front, finding her face emblazoned on the newspaper covers in the metro news booth, with the headline: “Young Women in the 30 Ibid.31 For an American example, see Dora L. Costa, “The Wage and the Length of the Work Day: From 1890s to 1991,” Journal of Labor Economics 18, no. 1, (January 2000): 156-181.32 Zachary Lockman, “Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism, and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899-1914,” Poetics Today 15, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 177.33 Lockman, “Imagining the Working Class,”186.34 Reynolds, “National Socks and the ‘Nylon Woman,’” 53.

57Up in Smoke

Egyptian National Guard.”35 Deligiorgi stands, light playing off of her face and bottle green army jacket, holding a rifle and looking into the distance. She, a Greek college student, was in that moment the face of an Egyptian nationalist movement. She was the hope for change at a point in the movement where her Greek ethnicity did not seem antithetical to Egyptian political self-determination.

But Egyptian nationalism pushed Greeks out of the cigarette market. Cigarettes became a unifying symbol for Egypt. Take one illustration printed in the Ruz al-Yusuf newspaper on May 8, 1933. Three lit cigarettes are depicted, filter-down, to look like smoking factory chimneystacks (Image D). Nationalist leader Makram ‘Ubayd is quoted below the illustration: “I smoke only this Egyptian cigarette.”36 The illustration lends itself to proletarian rhetoric, with the stark graphic quality and the industrial motifs, and the assertive quotation (this Egyptian cigarette) lends a sense of urgency to the propaganda. Symbolic of fierce nationalism, the cigarettes depicted in the illustration do not even come from a Greek company. The monogram at the base of each cigarette refers to Mahmud Fahmi’s cigarette enterprise, known for promoting strong nationalistic propaganda by differentiating themselves as “true” Egyptian cigarettes.37 The cigarette itself can be interpreted as a synecdoche for the Greek population in Egypt as a whole; their origins were distrusted and their validity in the Egyptian scene questioned in the wake of nationalist self-definition. With the future of Egypt at stake, the populace holds firmly to a revisionist narrative of unstoppable industry and systemic political efficiency. Cigarettes, and the Greeks who brought them to their new homeland, were respectively co-opted and muscled out.

35 Egypt: The Other Homeland, 32:47.36 Relli Shechter, “Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Politics in Egypt, c.1919-1939,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 492.37 Relli Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000, (I.B. Tauris, 2006), 113.

Image DRuz al-Yusuf illustration

Source: Relli Shechter, “Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Develop-

ment Context,” 493.

58 Alemu

Gamal Abdel Nasser smoked cigarettes. In one photo of him, he sits cross-legged in military uniform, cigarette poised in his left hand as he drinks from a jug in his right.38 Nasser looks noticeably unpretentious, at ease, and dynamic. Part of this dynamism is provided by the gesture of holding a cigarette in mid-swig, making Nasser at once esteemed and a part of mass consumer culture. This photo speaks to his greater nationalistic philosophy.

In a 1955 Foreign Affairs retrospective article on the 1952 Revolution, Nasser employed rhetoric that drew upon a narrative of anti-imperialism and national self-awakening. His people faced “a struggle between the nation and its rulers on one hand, and a struggle between the nation and foreign intervention on the other.”39 Thus, the people shook off the “foreign yoke” of their oppressors and rose as one in revolution. 40 Nasser repudiated the countries who represent old-fashioned colonialism and the powers who “refused to move with the times.”41

That Nasser applied this view of Greeks living in Egypt reflected the complex position of Greeks in Egyptian society as economically assimilated and yet still separate. Though the Greeks came to Egypt with purely economic or even financially mercenary motivations, they had, over fifty years later, largely integrated themselves into the social frameworks of Egyptian society. They were a nostalgic group, but also willing to adapt to “the times.” In one representative quotation, a Greek archaeologist still living in Egypt lauded Nasser: “he gave dignity to a people who hadn’t been appreciated since the time of the Pharaohs.”42 This statement reflected the antiquated and modern nature of the Greeks; they both

38 Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East, 148. See Image F.39 Gamal Abdel Nasser, “The Egyptian Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, (1955), 201.40 Nasser, “The Egyptian Revolution,” 199.41 Ibid.42 Egypt: The Other Homeland, 31:21.

Image EGamal Abdel Nasser

Source: Relli Shechter, Smok-ing, Culture and Economy in

the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000,

(Cairo: American University Press in Cairo, 2006), 148.

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accepted Nasserian nationalism and evoked classical references with rose-tinted nostalgia. Understanding the significance of their cultural assimilation, Efthimios Soulogiannis remembers Nasser saying, “I can’t make an exception to the Greeks.”43 Ironically, it was not an “exception” that the Greeks were looking for by the 1950s. They wanted economic sustenance (not legislation banning foreigners from specific employment sectors), education for their children, and acceptance. Their contributions to the cultural fabric of their new homeland served to give rise to the very power who sought to redefine his country at their expense: Nasser smoked a cigarette that he refused to acknowledge was Greek.

In the end, with the nationalization of the cigarette industry in 1956, the Greeks were at last pushed out of the industry they had founded. It was remarkably similar to what they had experienced in the late nineteenth century under the Ottoman Empire, which brought them to Egypt in the first place. If Nasser was looking at the Greeks who first entered his country in the 1880s, he might have been more justified in his anti-imperialist motivations. However, as it stood, with the mutability of cultural identity, the Greeks in Egypt were more fully integrated, and internally self-defined, by their Egyptian roots.

Alexandra Papadimitriou remembers her life in Egypt, giving an interview for a 2012 Al Jazeera documentary titled Egypt: The Other Homeland. Cigarette with trailing smoke in hand, Papadimitriou speaks of a city that “was often compared to Paris and London.” Wistfully, she remembers, “Alexandria… was fabulous.”44 Her generation nostalgically remembers a time when the Greeks could socialize and make a living in a country on the other side of the Mediterranean. What is left of their history of cultural integration into the Egyptian social landscape informs an understanding of Egypt’s struggle to articulate its own voice on the global stage. The cigarette commodity highlights a moment in Mediterranean history in which a culture that was bolstered by imperialist systems came to be fully integrated into the social framework of Egypt. However, in the same spirit that Greeks looked with skewed nostalgia on their own homes, Nasser and the burgeoning nationalist Egypt looked to the Greeks with complex cynicism: “not making an exception” to the Greeks was about fighting a universal enemy that, in this case, no longer existed. This cultural process was not necessarily personal; though the products of the change were the intense friendships of those who live to remember their Greco-Egyptian relationships, the process itself was moved, as evidenced in the case of the cigarette industry, by market forces and the adaptation of cigarette manufacturers to mechanized, changing modes of production. Good business sense brought the Greeks to Egypt in the first place and compelled certain firms to adapt to the changing times, but love of home and country makes those same Greeks remember their time in Egypt with great tenderness today.

43 Ibid., 40:41.44 Ibid., 23:52.

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diSpuTiNG ThE pAST

rECONCiLiNG FAMiLy hiSTOry wiTh hiSTOriCAL SChOLArShip

eLi Lee

In December 1977, my mother’s family fled Saigon on a hastily arranged fishing boat, slip-ping out across the moonlit sea toward a refugee camp in Thailand and, eventually, to the United States. This was their second flight. The first had been out of northern Vietnam in 1954, where previously, Ho Chi Minh’s Communists had abducted and executed two of my great-grandfathers as enemies of the state.

Throughout my childhood, a dim awareness of those events always lurked somewhere in the back of my mind. I knew that my mother’s family had come from Vietnam. Past that, my understanding of what had happened was a muddled patchwork of allusions and infer-ences. Around my junior year of high school, however, my grandparents must have decided that I was old enough to know the details. Suddenly, they were more than willing to tell me exactly what had happened to them and their families in Vietnam—a story more detailed and compelling than any textbook I’d ever read. This eye-opening revelation coincided with my developing interest in history: I had to know more.

Last summer, I read Fredrik Logevall’s recently published Embers of War, an exhaustive history of the Indochina Wars. I was drawn to the material by its connection to my fam-ily’s own history—by the possibility that it might give context to the accounts of hardship and tragedy that my grandparents had disclosed. When it came to those events, however, the book seemed strangely unconcerned and even dismissive, couching its description of the Communist purges in the language of efficiency. “Under [Ho Chi Minh] operated a bureaucracy,” writes Logevall, “that was capable, disciplined, and ruthless—techniques such as… execution… were standard… the mass exodus of middle-class professionals… removed a major source of potential opposition to [Communist] authority.” 1 The ruthless-ness that had uprooted my family had here been reduced to an unfortunate but necessary idiosyncrasy of Communist policy—an insignificant detail in Ho Chi Minh’s quest for Viet-namese nationhood.

I wasn’t sure what to think of this. My problem wasn’t that Logevall’s narrative favored the Communists; it was that his arguments were, in fact, quite persuasive. As the book progressed, I found myself sympathizing with Ho Chi Minh, and the Communists’ ac-tions—even those that had directly harmed my antecedents—seemed wholly justifiable. For

1 Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War, (New York: Random House, 2012), 634.

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the first time, my family’s oral history had intersected with the historical scholarship that I was reading, and the two accounts fundamentally disagreed about the nature of events. In situations like this, I wondered, where should one’s historical allegiance lie?

The use of one’s own family as a resource is a highly controversial tactic in historical research. Akemi Kikumura, in her defense of family history scholarship, cites the position that “group membership provides special insight into matters (otherwise obscure to others) based on one’s knowledge … and one’s intuitive sensitivity and empathy.”2 Conversely, the critical view of family history states that this “insider” perspective is inevitably subject to personal biases, distorting the historical truth.3

It was this latter suggestion that haunted me after I finished Embers of War. Logevall’s work was exceptional—well-researched, comprehensive, and compelling. His conclusions, however, directly opposed the opinions of my family members, who had experienced the book’s events firsthand. My rational, scholarly self was ready to accept Logevall’s version of events, but tribalism, or perhaps the evocative power of my grandparents’ first-person accounts, pushed me in the other direction. To allow my views to be informed so strongly by those of my family would be to confirm the bias alleged by critics of the “insider” per-spective. Was I, then, to ignore my grandparents’ narratives completely? I felt strongly that their grievances had value; the question was how to acknowledge that value in my historical assessment of the book’s events without becoming biased.

The solution was at once glaringly obvious and, in a way, counterintuitive. Instead of viewing my family’s oral history as a narrative, I had to take a step back from it. To interpret it impartially, all I had to do was treat my family members’ accounts just as I would any other primary source. This meant examining my grandparents’ tales critically—questioning them deeply, for the first time ever. It also meant looking not only at what my grandparents said but also how they said it—their tone, their phrasing, even the emotions that stirred in them as they reached back into memory. My grandparents’ grievances had value in that they were grievances—expressions of anger and mistrust that must have been shared by many members of the North Vietnamese middle class. Indeed, the sentiments of this particular group of people were a subject that had been almost entirely neglected in Embers of War. My family’s past enriched my reading of history, and it had even gone further, revealing unexplored topics—fertile ground for new scholarship. I could accept the book’s conclusions, but now I had my family’s account as a rational counterbalance; using this private history, I could fill in experiential details that went beyond the scope of the text. By interpreting oral tradition as a primary source, I was able to supplement the literature, instead of contradicting it. In the end, there didn’t have to be any conflict between the two.2 Akemi Kikumura, “Family Life Histories: A Collaborative Venture.” The Oral History Review 14 (1986): 1-7.3 Ibid.

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idENTiTy CriSiS OF ThE SEMiTiC MuSEuM

santiago PaRDo

On April 5, 1982, Harvard’s Semitic Museum reopened.1 The museum had closed twen-ty-five years earlier because of both financial issues and lack of interest. The reopening of the Museum was intimately tied to the rise of the Department of Near Eastern Lan-guages and Literature, headed by Frank Moore Cross, the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages.2 The growing department wanted to reclaim the building where the Semitic Museum’s collection was being stored; previously, it had been office space for the Center for International Affairs.3 Cross assumed the role of curator initially, but due to his teaching and research responsibilities he opted to take the title of director and have Carney Gavin run the daily operations.4 This dual leadership would make the re-opening more complicated, since Cross and Gavin held different visions of the Semitic Museum’s ideal future.

Cross believed that the museum existed to serve the needs of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literature.5 He believed that the museum should be an in-stitution through which students could perform research and professors could enrich their classes, not one for broad public outreach. He envisioned the museum as a place where future students could be sponsored to go on digs in the Near East or sort and catalog the artifacts sent back by the museum’s archeologists.

Gavin, on the other hand, believed that the museum should cater to the public’s interest. In the beginning, he was in a better position to execute his vision. He organized exhibits and programs designed to establish the Museum as a center of general, accessible education.6 Since its inception, the museum had constant financial troubles, but Gavin had a remarkable gift for fundraising and found ways to put on these exhibits for the public.7 The museum grew in reputation. Gavin saw the positive response from the com-munity—attendance, volunteering, and fundraising all increased—as proof that he was taking the Semitic Museum in the right direction.

Years of fundraising before the museum’s reopening created a vast donor and

1 Lavka Bractiman, “University’s Semitic Museum to Re-Open After 40 Years,” Harvard Crimson, March 17, 1982. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/3/17/universitys-semitic-museum-to-re-open-after/2 Christopher S. Wood, “Dollars and Scholars: The Rebirth of the Semitic Museum,” Harvard Crimson, April 22, 1982. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/4/22/dollars-and-scholars-pthere-is-nothing/3 Ibid.4 Ibid.5 Frank Moore Cross, “A Reply to Martin Peretz,” Harvard Crimson, December 13, 1993. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1993/12/13/a-reply-to-martin-peretz-pbdbespite/6 Wood, “Dollars and Scholars.”7 Ibid.

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volunteer base that helped Gavin reclaim the building and sort through and catalog the collection for display. At one point, the Harvard football team got on a truck and went to Brandeis University to reclaim a particularly heavy collection that had been loaned out and never returned.8 Such local involvement supported Gavin’s vision and he contin-ued to win grants and donations. Cross recognized Gavin’s ability to gather funding and support, but saw his efforts in creating public exhibits as a diversion from the museum’s primary goal.9

The change in the museum’s mission was obvious when the museum reopened. The opening showcased a traveling exhibit on pre-World War II Jewish community objects from the Polish community of Danzig, which Gavin had booked for its popularity.10 All of the museum’s collections were of ancient Semitic cultures, so the Danzig exhibit was a large step in the new direction. This was the Museum’s first time catering to public interest with only a loose correspondence to the topic of ancient Semitic culture; Gavin’s agenda had taken over.

Gavin’s vision for the museum was ultimately cut short by Harvard itself. In 1993, it was discovered that despite his tremendous fundraising, the Museum had a $1 million deficit.11 An advisory committee discovered that ninety percent of the museum’s deficit came from its Public Programs Account.12 The very programs critical to Gavin’s vision caused fiscal stress that threatened the museum with permanent closure. The committee recommended cutting the staff by two-thirds and restructuring the museum to focus on academic research.13 The university ended up firing all ten employees, Gavin included.14 The Semitic Museum began to transition into a departmental institution along the lines of Cross’ original vision.

Even though Gavin’s vision of the Semitic Museum succeeded at first, it proved to be fiscally unsustainable. University museums constantly face the question of the role they must play within a university. Do they focus only on internal academic research? Do they take an active community role and focus on educating the general public? The conflict between Gavin and Cross exacerbated that dilemma at the Harvard Semitic Museum before it took on the form it has today.

8 Janet Tassel, “The Museum Trail: The Harvard Semitic Museum Rises Again,” The Biblical Archaeologist 46.2 (1983): 106.9 Cross, “A Reply to Martin Peretz.”10 Wood, “Dollars and Scholars.”11 Anna D. Wilde, “Report: Slashing Staff of Semitic Museum,” Harvard Crimson, November 3, 1993. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1993/11/3/report-slash-staff-of-semitic-museum/12 Ibid.13 David Gellis and Daniel Rosenheck, “No Easy Task,” Harvard Crimson, June 7, 2001. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2001/6/7/no-easy-task-plike-the-rest/ 14 Alessandra M. Galloni, “Museum Review Debated,” Harvard Crimson, December 1, 1993. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1993/12/1/museum-review-debated-pas-the-10/

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“wE ArE Our STOry”

SChAMA’S ThE STOry OF ThE JEwS

aLice han

“The Jewish imagination is paranoia confirmed by history.” In the opening few min-utes of Simon Schama’s new 5-part documentary series, The Story of the Jews, a guest of-fers up that strikingly black-humored remark in response to Schama’s question, “Is Jewish culture always expecting the worst?” Assembled around Simon Schama’s intimate Passover dinner, a group of Jews gather to share personal histories and symbolic rituals; their be-lief that Jewish history is a singular mix of celebratory levity and despondent pessimism is confirmed by this remark and Schama’s documentary as a whole. Around this Seder dinner with friends, the British historian and broadcaster exposes the viewer to a world of Jewish traditions, humor, argumentativeness and intense reflection. Celebrated for an array of popular books and documentaries on subjects ranging from the French Revolution to Dutch art, Schama is not one to shy away from documenting epic stretches of history. The Story of the Jews, which comes out this spring, might be his most ambitious work. Spanning some 4000 years of both Jewish and world history, the series reveals itself as a deeply per-sonal endeavor for Schama, whose strong Jewish roots vivify the personal recollections that blend with larger-scale historical forces.

Schama’s trademark deftness in linking and illuminating key historical themes through time shines throughout the series. Beginning with Freud, the self-described “godless Jew,” and ending with the words of the “survivor’s Talmut,” Schama consistently stresses the Jewish focus on the mind and the cultural emphasis on memory, learning and reflection on the vagaries of life. “Sorrow in happiness, such a Jewish idea,” Schama claims, as he reveals how Jews in the Shtetl in Russia, hardy of body and mind, found joy in grief and grief in joy. Digging into the personal histories of Moses Mendelssohn and Josephus and Arnold Schönberg, Schama emphasizes how a people who had no long history of armies, states or lands, turned to the mind for survival. He examines the role of texts such as the Torah and the Talmud in exemplifying and perpetuating the Jewish compulsion to tell their stories from one generation to the next.

Schama’s personal story collides with the interconnecting patchwork of individual his-tories and the larger tapestry of world history itself. Schama credits his own decision to become a historian to this rich and diverse Jewish story. Schama is able to weave the Jew-ish exodus to Israel with his own experiences and recollections working as a teenage on a Kibbutz in Beit HaEmek in Northern Israel, inspired by his Zionist Socialist ideals and the

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brawny activism of those agricultural collectives. This personal re-discovery of his youth is countervailed by Schama’s present-day distaste for how Palestinian communities were up-rooted by the Kibbutzes and, later, during the Jewish State’s seizure of the occupied territo-ries. Reminiscing about the “secular, outward-looking Israel” of his youth, Schama opines how it has been overrun by a shift in the last few decades towards an Israel insisting “on religion, nationalism or security—on separation and difference.” Such transitions between past and present, memory and politics, although potentially dangerous and politically load-ed, are cradled by Schama’s singular gift for storytelling, helped along by the richness of his vocabulary, emotional frankness. and the charismatic panache for which he is known.

The Story of the Jews escapes the criticism often leveled at television documentaries. The likes of Simon Schama, David Starkey, Bethany Hughes and Niall Ferguson—TV histo-rians, as they have been called—have long been criticized by the academic establishment. Many scholars have lambasted these “telly-dons” or “popular historians” for “dumbing down” the academic scholarship of history in the pursuit of mass viewership, money and celebrity. However, this critique has underestimated the difficulties faced by the young and growing field of documentary as a form of historical communication. Schama and others need to walk a tightrope, balancing the need to engage and connect with the audience with the rigor of conveying accurate, insightful, and balanced historical knowledge. Historical documentaries must avoid the twin pitfalls of “scissors-and-paste history without meaning or significance” and “propaganda or historical fiction,” as English historian E. H. Carr called named the categories.

We can take another leaf out of Carr’s radical historiography, What is History?, by real-izing the importance of injecting new and imaginative interpretations of the past through media such as historical documentaries. As Carr writes, the historical record is a “corpus of ascertained facts” available to the historian “like fish in the fishmonger’s slab.” The his-torian cannot change the facts, but he “cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.”

In this light, Schama uses every fish in the sea. He imbues the story of the Jews with a powerful back-and-forth dialectic between individual and world history, the mental and the physical life, past and present, celebration and mourning. The result goes beyond conventional depictions of Jewish history. What is even more powerful for audiences to glean from Schama’s collection of histories, however, is his insistence that history matters because “we are our story.” This is true not only of the Jewish story in which Jews today are keenly marked and defined by their diverse and collective past; Schama makes the implicit and persuasive claim that the histories we tell—whether by the book, the voice or film—in-variably affect us mentally and physically, influencing how we view ourselves and what we contribute to the “story without an end.”

66 Features

ThE viTALiTy OF hiSTOry

maRtin caRLino

In light of the recent assault on the humanities, I have asked myself what it is that at-tracted – and continues to attract – me to the discipline of history. Only in the last few years have I been able to offer a satisfactory answer. Since the beginning of high school, the main focus of my academic energies – I like to say “my historical muse” – has been Abraham Lincoln. His life, and the themes of American history which he embodies in our nation’s conscience, have proven fertile intellectual ground. But more importantly, I have derived tremendous personal inspiration from studying his life and legacy.

I could cite dozens of examples, but the passage most prominent in my memory is from a letter Lincoln wrote to the son of an old Springfield friend. When I a high school senior deep in the process of college applications, I was heartened by Lincoln’s confidence that “it is a certain truth, that you can enter, and graduate in, Harvard University; and hav-ing made the attempt, you must succeed in it.” The personal relevance of this exhortation is obvious, but more generally the “assurance […] that you can not fail, if you resolutely determine, that you will not,” has been one of the guiding principles of my life.1

Ever spurred on by such sentiments, my own explorations of history have never failed to yield satisfaction, nor, despite the century and a half of study that has preceded me, have I ever felt that I was merely treading old, tired ground. Even this study of a single character and his historical moment has had depth enough to sustain itself for more than a century, a fact that speaks to irrefutable vitality of the study of history. Here lies both the main source of my attraction to the discipline and my assertion of its worth. I have never felt myself, literally or figuratively, buried under stacks of musty tomes like the tweed-jacketed historian of the popular imagination. Rather, I am a part of a living con-versation, a negotiation of historical truth. The study of history, in my view, is a chorus of all the historians and scholars who have come before me, a chorus to which I may mean-ingfully lend my own voice and which will carry on long after I have fallen silent.

1 “To George C. Latham,” 22 July 1860, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953-1955), vol. 4, 87.