Rose Davis

[engmjr419]

The White Man: Identity as Opposition in 19th century America

Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

- The first stanza of The White Mans Burden by Rudyard Kipling from 1899.

1899’s “The White Man’s Burden!” by William H. Walker. The figures of Uncle Sam and Kaiser Wilhelm being carried on backs of subjugated people in the Philippines, India, and Africa. These figures have always been depicted as Caucasian, literal figures of white peoples. This and a series of illustrations are based off a famous poem by a Britain in reaction to American takeover of the Philippines, presenting the White Mans Burden as a thankless but necessary job in “civilizing” the savage, “Half demon half child” people. Source.

               It is odd, as a white person, to hear news of a White Power movement growing in America, specifically among young white men in the right side of the political spectrum. I can’t help but ask, when was power taken from white people? We’ve always been the majority in America, dominating popular culture to a problematic extent. We’ve also dominated education, populate the highest priced residential areas, and make up the richest people in the world (though that is changing in all aspects). So, it’s strange to have watched people protest in Charlottesville with dollar store tiki torches, The president advocate for extreme immigration control, and that same president by advised by a major white nationalist advocate (Who likely influenced the prior decision). I ask again, why do whites need more power? To reference the poem above, does the white man carry a burden?

As American society begins to grip with its past, full of racism, colonialism, exoticism, and taking advantages of minorities, we see this sudden push back from this group of people who advocate for “white power”, more specifically, to defend this “white power”. Throughout their debates, we find references to “white genocide”, through immigration, racial based science, and eugenics, along with linking minorities (specifically the colored minorities) to higher rates of crime (Clark). They participate in this “othering” of “non-white” races, which finds an uncomfortable connection within the very history they (and society as a whole) debate with.

1960s Century propaganda for the Democratic party, illustrating the Democratic party as the respectful, hardworking White Man and the Republican Party as this cartoonish mockery of “the Negro” as a “Carpet-Bagger” (a term for traveling swindlers). Several similar posters can be found, with the same slogan. It should be stated that this is before the Democratic and Republican platforms switched platforms with each other around the early 20th century. Source.

               As American began to find itself in the 19th century, meaning its identity along with the fact the nation had only recently been created, we find the identity of the “White” individual being emboldened by the othering of those races they considered “savage”. The figure of the white man is presented as this master of the nature, this excellent survivalist, who at the same time astounds audiences with his charisma and charm, all the while civilizing the wild world of the American West. It’s outlined by Minstrel Shows, Public displays of “History” like Buffalo Bills Wild West Show and to a lesser extent those of P.T. Barnum, and the depictions of both the white man and the Native American that find themselves in 19th century culture. To illustrate this plainly, look at “The White Mans Burden!” once again, the white man is carried forward only under the mistreatment of the Colored while at the same time this action being called his “burden”.

At the same time all this is happening, this identity allows other marginalized people, particularly the Irish, to integrate into society more easily. The identity of “the White”, in place of nationality, gets solidified in the 19th century as an aspect of being American by “othering” the savage, the minority.

An 1899 Lithographed Advertisement for William H. West’s Big Minstrel Jubilee, Carrol Johnson is depicted in his natural state and In black face. Notice the clear difference in how he carries himself between the two depictions. Source.

               In the beginning of the era, we see both at the same time minstrel shows and minstrelsy in itself become immensely popular (oddly enough among the Northern states) and the westward expansion of America happen leading to Native American displays like Barnum’s and Buffalo Bills Wild West Shows (along with Medicine Shows offshoot). Both participate in the same type of “othering”, the colored (or rather those masquerading as the colored) as a show, a display for the white audiences to look at and place themselves in opposition to.

               The minstrel show started, preceded by what were called “Ethiopian delineation” which stole black culture, around 1828 with Thomas D. “Daddy” Rice creating the character of “Jim Crow” (which was based off a young, disabled black stable hand of the same name). Typically, it consisted of a white man or men, with their faces blackened by shoe polish, performing a series of skits, comical speeches, musical renditions of slave songs in mock dialect, playing instruments, and “Negro” humor (Toll).

It boomed in the entertainment hungry, blossoming cities of the 1820s, “Working-class whites flocked to minstrel shows, where they could define their whiteness against the drama of blackness” (Browden 50). To quote Robert C. Toll of the American Heritage Magazine, “The “Jim Crow” song and dance, observed writer Y. S. Nathanson in 1855, “touched a chord in the American heart which had never before vibrated.” It brought black culture to white Americans.” It at the same time allowed white Americans to other the black figure, positioning themselves as the “civil” White opposition to the cartoony, caricature the minstrel show performers showed. It presented the black figure to an audience, that would have little true interaction with them:

The Northern white public before the Civil War generally knew little about black people. But it knew that it did not welcome blacks as equals and that it did enjoy watching minstrels portray the “oddities, peculiarities, eccentricities, and comicalities of that Sable Genus of Humanity.” With their ludicrous dialects, grotesque make-up, bizarre behavior, and simplistic caricatures, minstrels portrayed blacks as totally inferior. Minstrels created two sets of contrasting stereotypes—the happy, frolicking plantation darkies and the foolish, inept urban fools (Toll).

Both stereotypes that these Minstrel shows presented, neither the truth of these people, were more digestible and thus, more easily universally “othered” as inferior. “Whiteness is defined in opposition to blackness, which becomes performative and ridiculous”, the two become polar opposites to each other (Browden 49).  One is seen as the civilized race, the clear White, and the other is seen as the lazy, silly black.

In this opposition of the White and the Black, we oddly find this integration going on at the same time of separation of race. During this time, Irish Immigrants would be in the same niches of African Americans, being compared and put on the same unequal level as them.

However, these shows of race offered immigrants “the chance to develop an identity that downplayed their own “foreign” ethnicity and offered them an opportunity for a common, Americanized identity in opposition to blackness” Simply put, Minstrelsy as a whole “made a contribution to a sense of popular whiteness among workers across lines of Ethnicity, religion, and skill” (Browder 50). It created this highly specifically American white identity (Some could say it becomes the American identity itself), that enabled the immigrant to integrate themselves more easily into the new America as it lined its sights on skin tone rather than nationality.

Yet, this came at the price of denying Black Americans the same courtesy, as Minstrelsy refused to work in both directions. The White could mock the black by becoming them temporarily, however the Black were ridiculed. The White American could act Black, however the Black American could not “act white”, as it was put for the White was seen as the norm, the goal.

A group of Native Americans (assumed Sac, Fox, and Iowa personages) Barnum had perform at his American Museum to perform dances and “war-like” reenactments. He is recorded as calling them “a lazy, shiftless set of brutes” Source.

               I would be remised to talk about popular displays of race and entertainment (along with arguments of authenticity) without talking about P.T. Barnum and his American Museum. He displayed various African Americans as freaks, like Joice Heth or “What Is It?” who was malformed African American man presented as the link between man and ape, although he wouldn’t allow African Americans into his museums until the 1860s (Browder 56). He offered a similar role Minstrelsy offered to the white audiences, a chance to create White identity in opposition to Blacks he presented as “freaks” and “oddities”. Additionally, Barnum, before Buffalo Bills Wild West Shows would come onto the scene, displayed Native Americans at his museum, presented simply as themselves which was enough to create opposition to the population that would have little interaction with Indians in a non-performance, spectacle based space.

In 1843, he had those Native Americans pictured above perform at his museum for his audiences. He stated, “These wild Indians seemed to consider their dances as realities” referring to the Indian performers refusal to understand the “performative nature of their lives” (Browder 57). Later that same yet, he would present to 24,000 spectators in New Jersey a “Grand Buffalo Hunt” where a “white man dressed as an Indian chased a herd of yearling buffaloes across the Hoboken race course” (57). In this instance, “the national drama of westward expansion was reduced to a child-sized joke”, as Laura Browder puts it.

Later in 1863, He would group up the most popular Indian chiefs in the country in one area, from their peace conference with President Lincoln. One of those chiefs was Yellow Buffalo, famous for his battles, “During the show, Barnum would make a great pretense of saying respectful and admiring things about him, put his around him and so forth….while his patter (which Yellow Buffalo couldn’t understand because he didn’t speak English) described all of his blood-curdling atrocities” (Stewart).

Finally, by 1884, He would present the “Grand Ethological Congress of Nations” (after his days of Museums and into his Circuses), “in which he presented all the known world’s “uncivilized races” and “savage and barbarous tribes”, including a group of North American Sioux people amongst the Zulus, Polynesians and Australian Aborigines” (Stewart). Needless to say, Barnum pictured American Indians as the popular culture did, savage.

He presents these displays of Native Americans as he did his Black American displays, as oddities that find themselves outside of the White, “civilized” society. These “performances” offered yet another chance for the White populace, including immigrants, to define themselves by their Whiteness. “Many immigrants first saw Indians at the museum; it was here that they might affirm themselves as Americans viewing the vanquished subjects of their newly adopted nation” (Browder 57). They hold themselves in opposition to the “wild Indians” and African Americans (Depicted as semi human or mystically old). Barnum offers a in between for Minstrelsy and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, this performance of exaggerated caricature of both Black Americans and Native Americans while at the same time trying to perform in this authentic, historical context.

A poster for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (and Congress of Rough Riders of the World). The description reads “Representing various tribes, Characters and Peculiarities of the wily dusky warriors in scenes from actual life giving their weird ward dances and picturesque style of horsemanship”. The American Indians are characterized as this odd mixture of earthy colors, in these wild and savage positions as they attack a wagon train (based on a real life event) reflecting cultural thought of the Indian as a war-seeking people. The Whites are depicted as innocent, or respectful like Buffalo Bill, sitting on his horse evenly in comparison to the “rough rider” way (which even the horses seem scared of). Source.

In the same vein, Buffalo Bills Wild West Shows (and later Medicine Shows after these shows lose popularity) depicted the American Indian as another opposite to the “White” identity (Although not entirely on the surface level). Buffalo Bills Wild West Shows began in the early 1880s, when these displays of Indians and Buffalo Hunts had become acts of nationalistic, solemn pride rather than the comical acts of Minstrelsy and Barnum’s displays (though it almost replaced Minstrelsy to a point). Buffalo Bill, his real name being William Fredrick Cody, authenticated these shows as being historical in nature, in truth they were recent enough that the lines between reality and history became thin enough to affect eachother (Browder 58).

These shows of “historical events” would present various acts, “The show's constantly changing format consisted of several exhibitions and competitions involving activities such as riding, hunting, shooting, and dancing” along with reenactments of famous battles or particular events, such as the famous “Attack on Settler’s Cabin” where Indians “played” themselves (in this odd act of authenticity against the cultural thought of the Native American) while “white performers would defend a homestead of women and children from native raiders” (White 35-36). These shows started more basic, with basic shooting demonstrations of Annie Oakley, but as the shows became more popular they became more violent, more “loud”, “As one reporter wrote "[t]he more there was of banging pistols and scurrying Indians, the better apparently the spectators liked it" (36).

While these shows were no where near the level of mockery and caricature the likes of Minstrelsy was to the native populations (along with other minorities later allowed to perform), it still portrays a divide and opposites between White and Colored peoples. It is the fantastical version of the Wild West History, that the easterners likely would have never interacted with other than through other people (who would likely be White). The Wild West became Buffalo Bill to eastern audiences and American Indians became walking advertisements for the show (along with being used later in Medicine Shows as mascots for authenticity). Joy Kasson says, In her book overlooking the entirety of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West:

“In its crude form as a dime novel or melodrama, and in its more sophisticated form in the animated outdoor drama, this Wild West story reached for the power of myth. And to attain this mythic level, it required an enemy, a counter-force against which the hero displayed his virtues. American Indians were consistently cast in this role” (161).

The white actors would be displayed as strong, skilled, outdoors men, holding shooting shows, rounding buffalo, acting as the heroes in historical reenactments saving captured women, and defeating those the popular culture considers “savage”. Meanwhile, the American Indian actors, being primarily from the Ogalala Sioux, would be presented doing war-dances, only participating in specifically “Indian” activities, and the fallen in fake battles.

While Buffalo Bill might not have meant the view of them to be so, excuse the phrase, Black and White, it would easily be digested that way in the eyes of spectators. “Stage actors can walk away from the parts they play, but the Wild West confounded distinctions between “reality” and “representation”, and just as Cody was considered a “real” hero because of his dramatic enactments, the American Indians in his company were identified with the villainous roles they played in the show” (Kasson 162). After all, the white man cannot be the loser to the audience of whites, it simply wouldn’t be satisfying.

Kathy White displays this definition of identity through opposition along with the division the White and the Colored have in these shows:

Riding exhibitions and competitions played a key role, although winning and losing depended on the day because competitions were debatably rigged; one Chicago Tribune article boasted that the American cowboy always beat "them all" (Indians, Mexicans, and other foreign performers that were later invited into the show).

Indeed, the definition of identity is often sought in its opposite. What is "right" is what is "not wrong" and in this case, what was "civilized" was supposedly that which was "not savage." One way to be delineated as "not savage" and, therefore, "civilized" was to have a relationship with technology. Correspondingly, Warren notes that the most technological feature of the show, the shooting competition, always saw white Americans victorious over Indians and Mexicans (36).

Through this “othering” of Native Americans as lesser, inferior to the White performers, it creates this affirmation of the “White” identity as higher. Granted, Kathy White also lays out points where Indians were often praised for their strength, their dexterity, ability to ride, and unique customs, however those are all put in opposition to the White, nevertheless. Of course, the Wild West is more complex than it is presented, however the history of it is written by the White victors, and the identity of the “White” is cemented by opposition.

The cover of a Phonoscope produced by Walt Disney in France titled “La Ballade De Davy Crockett”, depicting Davy Crockett fighting a Native American. The figure of Davy Crockett has become ingrained into America history as a true American icon, to the point a racoon tail cap can be directly tied to him without any other context. Source.

               To summarize the cultural image (and ideal) of the White American, we can look no further than Davy Crockett. This performance of whiteness, which exists majorly in opposition to non-whiteness, becomes somewhat tangled together with the performance of being American. From his beginnings as a popular icon in the 1830s, Davy Crocket employed “a combination of autobiography and melodramatic performance to craft an image of himself as an archetypical American, one whose stature depended in part on his ability to keep blacks and Indians in their places” as Laura Browden states. She captures an odd element that repeats in these narratives of the frontier, specifically in context of the White Man, this mixture of Historical context and fantastical exaggeration of prowess. Browden continues, “Crockett’s version of Americanness emerged in opposition to the other; his national identity came not from ancestry, blood, or essence but from his ability to conquer the land and its original inhabitants” (51). Crockett creates this uniquely White American image, that summarizes what Minstrelsy, Barnum’s displays, and Buffalo Bills Wild West Show all demonstrate below the surface.

To expand on this, it is no coincidence we see Crockett also align himself with people like General Andrew Jackson, who owned more than one hundred slaves, “bought with money gained from speculation on land from Native Americans, built his political reputation on his role as an Indian Fighter” (51). The identity of the White American comes from this violent, oppositional force built on this image of the wilderness taming man, who at the same time tings on animalistic qualities (primarily that of raw, brutal strength) that are accepted simply because of his skin tone.

He presents as the white primitive, compared better to the Indian barbarians and the Black savages. Crockett’s status as a white American “was set off against a background of inferior others”, boasting about boiling Indians for medicine for his pet bear, being able to swallow “a nigger whole without choking if you butter his head and pin his ears back”, along with describing Mexicans and Cubans “as “degenerate outlaws,” Indians as “red niggers”, and African Americans as “ape-like caricatures of humanity” (Calling back to the Barnum display of “What is It?) (52). Davy Crockett created, paraded, and summarizes these concepts of Whiteness and Americanness as one null category, and that Identity existing only in opposition above others.

“Buffalo Bill’s Duel with Yellow Hand” by James W. Buel from Heros of the Plains, or, Lives and  Wonderful Adventures of Wild Bill, Buffalo Bill ... and Other Celebrated Indian Fighters ... Including a True and Thrilling History of Gen. Custer's Famous "Last Fight" from 1881. Buffalo Bill is seen the victor of his 1876 duel with Hay-o-wei of the Cheyenne, he reenacts this event in his shows later. He holds the scalped hair and feathers of Hay-o-wei, an odd allusion to a practice Native Americans did.  Source.

               The identity of the White American in the 19th century mostly thrives in Opposition to other races, of skill, of morality, of humanity, and of civility. The theatrical tradition of Minstrelsy, The Displays of P.T. Barnum of both blacks and Native Americans, along with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show all participate in this othering, intentional or not, of race ignoring nationality and blood. While it offers Immigrants an easier integration into American society, it also participates in this unkindness towards the “colored” peoples. Black Americans are depicted as lazy, frolicking slaves or foolish urbanites all the while their culture is stolen and commodified for the White identity to laugh at. Native Americans have their culture commodified as well, used as entertainment and exoticism-focused exhibits, along with having to reenact brutal battles and deaths where they are always the victim. Davy Crockett stands as the figure of ideal White Americanness in opposition to all these stereotypes, this strong, nature conquering frontier man with condoned animalistic traits mixed with this racial oppression of the most American people and Blacks.

A photo of a sign displayed at a Trump Rally being reported on Fox News, reading “Coming for Blacks & Indians First: Welcome to the New World Order”. This “New World Order” is uncomfortably mirroring Antebellum Age America, zeroing in on the most oppressed races in the era (Not to downplay the oppression all other “non-white” races received). Source.

               This growing White Power movement in America finds itself uncomfortably close to the 19th century’s ideals of the White American. Perhaps it is no coincidence though. Is the power the White frontier man had the “White Power” they to reclaim? This perceived strength and domination over the land and its natural people, all the while being seen as the most skilled, civilized, and powerful race all at the same time? Perhaps, moreso, as the percentages of races in America begins to balance more, they begin to see these fears of losing more power, that is more influence over culture than the “power” they already perceived they lost during the 20th and 21st century (perhaps by the movement to remove Antebellum age statues of Slaveowners). I state again, as a white individual, what power have white people lost that isn’t one that we didn’t deserve? If coming to terms with our mixed, racism-tinged past is a loss of power then, it is a loss of power in exchange for further equality.

Browder, Laura. “Staged Ethnicities: Laying the Groundwork for Ethnic Impersonator Autobiographies.” Slippery Characters : Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities, The University of North Carolina Press, 2000, Pgs. 50-51, 56-58.

Clark, Simon. “How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics.” July 1, 2020. Center for American Progress, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2020/07/01/482414/white-supremacy-returned-mainstream-politics/

Kasson, Joy K. “American Indian Performers In The Wild West” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History, Hill and Wang, 2000, Pgs. 161-162

Stewart, Donald Travis. “P.T. Barnum and the Indians.” November 18, 2013. Travalanche, https://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/p-t-barnum-and-the-indians/

Toll, Robert C. “Blackface: the Sad History of Minstrel Shows.” Edited with Introduction by Edwin S. Grosvenor, American Heritage Magazine, Volume 64: Iss. 1, 2019 (Republish of a 1978 Article). https://www.americanheritage.com/blackface-sad-history-minstrel-shows

White, Kathyrn. “"Through Their Eyes": Buffalo Bill's Wild West as a Drawing Table for American Identity.” Constructing the Past, Illinois Wesleyan University, Volume 7: Iss. 1, Article 8, 2006, Pgs. 35-36. https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=constructing

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There is Joy in Simplicity: 19th century Optical Toys

A late 19th century advertisement for the Stereoscope. It advertises the ability to be “Around the World in 60 minutes” reflecting the educational quality people believed the Stereoscope to have. Source.

               I have become engrossed in the world of Yo-Yos lately. This little hunk of plastic with the name Duncan painted on the side, flying through the air on a string. By itself it seems so perfectly simple, however the world of Yo-Yos is deeper than one would think. For instance, there’s several different types of Yo-Yos with their own advantages and disadvantages based on their material and shape. While a Yo-Yo may seem like a simple toy, they also demonstrate a humans ability to learn reflexes. At first, I could barely get the Yo-Yo to come back up but after weeks of continued use I can shoot a dog across the wooden floor of my mother’s kitchen. Toys in a society are truly significant, because they represent what that society wants the young to learn or what they themselves want to play with. They are a form of experimentation.

Just as the yo-yo represents a learning of reflexes, the toys of 19th century America reflect the societal obsession with illusion and vision. Granted, people of the 19th century already had stuff like dolls (which I would argue is still related to vision of the human form), wooden tops and yoyos, dominos, balls, and all other means of play, but the late 19th century sees a boom of vision-based toys. We see the kleidoskope, the thaumatrope, the phenakistoscope, the stereoscope, the zoetrope, and the praxinoscope emerge as these fun little practices in vision. The early hints of film, the basics of animation, the play of illusion all appear in this era.

These toys exist as echoes of the 19th century American societal interest in deception, vision, and representation of self. In the early 19th century, the American faced challenges of identity, the crowd, later on they faced the mass societal grief and crisis of war, the camera as a view of reality, and the concept of the showman like P.T. Barnum, going into the late years of the era we see the early hints of film come out and the concepts of reality. Throughout the 19th century we see visions-based gadgets appear as supplements to the already ongoing discussions of view. Toys like the kaleidoscope, the thaumatrope, the phenakistoscope, the stereoscope, and the zoetrope and praxinoscope all represent a growing societal interest in vision and experimentation throughout the 19th century.

An 1818 illustration titled “Human Nonsense”, the man in the top hat is so entranced by the kaleidoscope, he doesn’t notice he’s walking directly in front of a bike. The Victorians had what Is now called a “craze” over kaleidoscopes as they allowed exploration of vision. Source.

               The first optical toy to be invented in the Victorian age was the Kaleidoscope in 1816, by David Brewster, who we will see appear again. Jason Farman of Atlas Obscura describes the 19th century kaleidoscope design as, “made from a range of materials, such as tubes made of brass with embellishments of wood or leather or those cheaply made of tin. The base of the tube was typically filled with broken pieces of glass, ribbons, or other small trinkets.” When viewed from one side, the other would appear as a range of fantastical colors, patterns, and shapes. It almost immediately gained massive popularity, amongst both children and adults, scientists, artists, and industry professionals. Scientists “found it useful as a tool to visualize massive numbers” while artists and industrials used it “for patterns on china, paper, carpets, floor-cloths, and other fabrics” (Farman).

It was experimentation in the role of the eye in light, and shape, along with the illusions of beauty, or reality, when viewed close with a magnifier. Truthfully, some people felt betrayed when they found out what was inside of a kaleidoscope, R.S. Dement, a playwright, writes he was “deceived (as a child) into believing that what he saw was at least the shadow of something real and beautiful, when in truth it was only a delusion” (Farman). However, this only further intrigued some of the Victorian viewers:

These new visual tricksters fed into the fascination in the deficits of the human eye and how it could be misled. As people began understanding human vision differently because of these objects, people also began seeing the world through machines like trains, moving walkways, and steamships (Farman).

While the kaleidoscope is simplistic, it is not to be denied it is important as a starting point for the 19th century conversation on vision. A tube that presents to the viewer an illusionary range of symmetrical colors and patterns, created by broken glass, ribbons, and random scraps.

Vignette by George Cruikshank from Philosophy in Sport, 1827. Source.

               The next optical toy to appear was the thaumatrope, appearing in the mid-1820s (when it was first published) by John Aryton Paris. The history of the thaumatrope is a mixed and complex mess of early 19th century scientific figures making a bet, including John Herschel (A popular astronomer), Charles Babbage (A mathematician who made the calculating engine), and David Brewster, however it stands clear as a true foundation of visual interest (Herbert). As much as I talk it up, the toy is extremely simple. It consists of a piece of cardboard with two strings on each end, with a picture on both sides (the classic example is bird on one side and a cage on the other) and when the user twists the strings fast enough the two images appear to become one (The bird appears inside of the cage). The same effect had been created by spinning a coin previously, however the thaumatrope was the first to give “the phenonium a scientific explanation and a device produced to be sold as a popular entertainment” (Gunning 499).

Bird-in-Cage Thaumatrope, the classic example and believed to be the first thaumatrope image created as an example, by Dr. Fitton. This depiction pictures the expected result of twisting the strings. Source.

While it is basic, its an extremely effective toy for teaching a core concept of the 19th century. There is flaw in the human vision, or moreso, the human vision has depths and conditions. From 1827’s Philosophy in Sport by Paris, “I will now show you that the eye also has its source of fallacy” says “Mr. Seymour” as he operates the device (501). Its simplicity allows there to be no questions about interference from the toy’s design, there is no mirror, or screen, or other window the viewer is looking at the toy at through.

“We can operate it and understand its process. But the image it produces is not fixed in space, embodied in pigment or canvas; it occurs in our perception.  Yet while it may be defined as a subjective image, taking place through our individual processes of perception, it is not a fantasy or, in a psychological sense, a hallucination” (513).

There is simply vision, and the effect of the lasting image (called an afterimage) the human eye creates with the reality the user is the sole reason the illusion continues. Tom Gunning captures perfectly what the Thaumatrope meant as a foundational toy, “This device introduces to the Victorian era a new class of images simultaneously technological, optical, and perceptual” (500). It is the perfect device to start the 19th century with a magical simplicity that allows the user to experience illusion in their own hands through natural processes of the eye.

An illustration depicting a person using the phenakistoscope. Of course, it’s impossible to depict the movement accurately in a drawing. Source.

               Later, in 1832, the phenakistoscope was “simultaneously invented…by Joseph Plateau in Brussels and by Simon von Stampfer in Berlin” though other concepts were in the works at the same time (“Phenakistoscopes (1833)”). The so called “parlour toy” is a cardboard disc on a handheld stick with an outer circle of images and an inner circle of slits which the viewer would look through. The “trick” of the toy is to spin it while looking through the slits into a mirror, where the images on the outer circle jump to life in animation through the distortion and the flicker of light as the disc moves. “The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images that appeared to be a single moving picture” (“A Short History of the Phenakistoscope”). Its one of the earliest forms of animation, completely using human sight as its method.

A Phenakistoscope featuring zebras and monkeys in a jungle setting, the zebras would run, and the monkeys would swing when viewed through a mirror. This particular phenakistoscope is from a competing product of the original production, “Mclean’s Optical Illusions or Magic Panorama” from 1833. This is a simplistic image, but phenakistoscopes became more complex as years went on. Source.

Like how the thaumatrope represents a flaw in human vision, the phenakistoscope fully represents the conditionality of vision. The human eye is susceptible to condition, to light, to distortion of light, to illusion. The illusion is only possible through a window, the mirror, showing the young the new concepts of the human eye as an unreliable “narrator” by itself. However, at the same time it shows it through an exciting illusion of movement. The Phenakistoscope saw mass popularity, being published under names like Fantoscope and “Magic Wheel”, leading to further visual toys being produced which would eventually overtake the simple phenakistoscope and thaumatrope. However, before we get into them let us take a quick sideroad into the world of photography.

A 1908 advertisement for a stereoscope viewer in the Pittsburgh Daily Post. It presents the stereoscope as a tool, and as entertainment. Source.

               In 1838, Charles Wheatstone published a paper reporting an odd illusion he had discovered where two drawings of the same object, at slightly different perspectives, were placed next to each other the two would be fused together by the eye into a three-dimensional view of it. It is realized this is exactly how the eye functions, each eye taking its own perspective and the two images fusing together for a full three-dimensional view (Thompson). From Oliver Wendell Holme’s 1859 essay on the Stereoscope (After it gained mass popularity):

The two eyes see different pictures of the same thing, for the obvious reason that they look from points two or three inches apart. By means of these two different views of an object, the mind, as it were, feels round it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes, as with our arms, or with our hands (Jacobi).

Wheatstone created a table-top device to demonstrate this effect more easily and clearly, thus the world’s first stereoscope was created, a product of the 19th century’s scientific endeavors.

However, the mass market version of the stereoscope would not be refined and produced until a decade later, by Davis Brewster (who you may remember as the inventor of the kaleidoscope and involved with the thaumatrope) who crafted it into a handheld model in 1849, enabling a scene to appear anywhere.

The refinement of the stereoscope just so happened to align with the release of the first photographs (the specific type called daguerreotypes) as well, enabling the device to show its true potential. “Once Brewster’s design hit the market, the stereoscope exploded in popularity” writes Clive Thompson of the Smithsonian, “The London Stereoscopic Company sold affordable devices; its photographers fanned out across Europe to snap stereoscopic images. In 1856, the firm offered 10,000 views in its catalog, and within six years they’d grown to one million.” The stereoscope, at least its phenomenon, is possibly one of the most long-lasting of these optical toys, considering 3D magic books are on the shelves that use stereoscope technology and some virtual reality headsets rely on the same visual illusion to function.

A stereograph of Indian people gathered outside of a building, created between 1860 and 1930. Stereographs were viewed as tools for exploring the world without literally traveling, however it also led to people objectifying different cultures as they were not people but depictions of people that lacked relation. Source.

The stereoscope equipped with the stereograph became a scientific tool, a toy, and an educational object. Astronomers used it to peer closer at celestial objects. “Astronomers realized that if they took two pictures of the moon—shot months apart from each other—then it would be like viewing the moon using a face that was the size of a city: “Availing ourselves of the giant eyes of science,” as one observer wrote. (The technique indeed revealed new lunar features)” (Thompson). It also became a tool of education, as a way for the child to view far off locations and immerse in a select scene, which the Victorian believed sharpened the child’s attention as their mind was “chaotic and unfocused”. The mass popularity of the stereoscope enabled mass collections of stereographs to develop, which further allowed people to see far off regions, of India, of Asia, of Africa, and the landmarks of Europe, South America, and their own America.  However, overall, it remains a toy, a device for entertainment, a way to immerse oneself in another world, another plane, another region.

The stereoscope reflects the society’s interest in vision, the world, and the depths of the human eye. The lighting illusionary discovery reveals the eye to be more than seen, a thing to be further explored. The use of the stereograph reveals the human eye to have complex mechanisms of sight, what you see if not simplistic it is made up of two images. People collected hundreds of stereographs that depicted America, landmarks, animals, people, and any other thing you could imagine into countless to indulge in. However, it is important for the Victorian, and us, to remember however, a person inside of a photograph is not a person, it is the depiction of a person.

A 19th century advertisement for the Zoetrope from T.H. McAllister, describing the Zoetrope as “an instructive Scientific Toy, illustrating in an attractive manner the persistence of an image on the retina of the eye.” The nickname “Wheel of Life” comes from the way the images appear to “jump to life”. Source.

               The direct improvement of the phenakistoscope was the cylindrical Zoetrope, first invented by William George Horner in 1834 (only a year or two after the phenakistoscope) who originally named it the Daedalum (the “Wheel of the Devil”) but only marketed in 1887 under the new name of Zoetrope (A combination of the Greek words for life and turn). It improves on the phenakistoscope in two aspects, the user did not need a mirror to observe the effect, and the device could be enjoyed by more than one person at a time. The Zoetrope works in a similar method, along with also being constructed of cardboard, to the phenakistoscope:

Photo included with the article, showing the construction of the zoetrope. Source.

The zoetrope is a mechanical device that produces the effect of motion through a rapid succession of static images, seen through the slits in a rotating cylinder. The sequenced drawings or photographs lie beneath the slits on the inner surface of the cylinder, and as the cylinder spins the viewer looks through the slits at the opposite side of the interior. This scanning action prevents the images from blurring together, and the viewer is treated to a repeating motion picture (Kumar).

The device is considered an early work of animation, along with the flipbook, and acts as a supplement to the evolving concept of human vision, deception, and illusion in the 19th century. From the time of its creation to its market appearance, P.T. Barnum rose to worldwide fame, the Civil war ended, the concept of photographs and spirit photography had arrived, and the societal concept of children had evolved. It is only just then, that the Zoetrope is succeeded by yet another evolution of vision, the Praxinoscope.

An advertisement for the Praxinoscope theatre at the 1878 Exposition Universal in Paris, highlighting its winning of a bronze medal. Source.

               The Praxinoscope was created in 1877 by Emile Reynaud, a Frenchman. It is similar in design to the Zoetrope, however it has one innovation that makes it superior, it replaces the slits used to create the effect with narrow vertical mirrors placed in the center of the drum (Greenslade). This enabled even further wider audiences, along with cleaner, brighter animation which was vital in an era before the lightbulb. The praxinoscope garnered massive popularity, being used in homes, and presented as theatres like the one above.

The zoetrope and the praxinoscope both represent the later ends of the 19th century in terms of the view of vision, as this concept that exists to be explored, a thing that can view through windows into other realities, that of film, of moving pictures, of the modern cinema experience. They stand as foundational objects to the modern film industry, with film coming quickly after their creation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. While these toys are simplistic to the modern viewer, they stand as important milestones of concepts of human vision, of looking askance, and of the eye.

Lithograph by Alfred Mahlau from “Spielzeug, eine Bunte Fibel”, a german book from 1938 by Hans-Friedrich von Geist. The lithograph shows a Kaleidoscope, A Stereoscope, a Zoetrope, along with later film mediums. Source.

               The 19th century was an era of vision, the exploration of it, the evolution of it, and the play of it. Within the century we see the concepts of vision evolve, from the simple exploration of tricks of the eye to the questioning of the credibility of it, alongside it we see these optical toys appearing as exploration of the concepts. The kaleidoscope appears in the early 19th century as an exploration of the interaction of the eye and light. The thaumatrope flips as a exploration of an illusionary sticking image of the eye. The phenakistoscope spins to look at how the interaction of the eye and light can create illusions of movement. The stereoscope appears as another exploration of an illusion the eye creates, being used to explore other regions and concepts. Finally, the Zoetrope and the Praxinoscope make their way in, becoming early concepts of animation by building off the concepts of the phenakistoscope, and enhancing the effect with more slits and mirrors.

While these toys may seem laughably simplistic to us, there is a reason things like yoyos, balls, and dolls are still so amazingly popular along with these very optical toys being recreated and sold. There is a joy in simplicity, there is joy exploring the human eye.

Farman, Jason. “The Forgotten Kaleidoscope Craze in Victorian England”. Atlas Obscura, November 9th, 2015. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-forgotten-kaleidoscope-craze-in-victorian-england

Greenslade, Thomas B. “Praxinoscopes”. Instruments for Natural Philosophy, Keyton College. http://physics.kenyon.edu/EarlyApparatus/Optical_Recreations/Praxinoscopes/Praxinoscopes.html

Gunning, Tom. “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era” Victorian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 3, Indiana University Press, Spring 2012. Pgs. 499-501, 513.

Herbert, Stephen. “The Thaumatrope Revisited; or: "a round about way to turn'm green". The Wheel of Life, https://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/thaumatropeTEXT1.htm

Jacob, Carol. “Tate Painting and the Art of Stereoscopic Photography”. ‘Poor man’s picture gallery’: Victorian Art and Stereoscopic”. Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-poor-mans-picture-gallery-victorian-art-and-stereoscopic/essay

Kamar, Julie. “The Wheel Of The Devil - The History Of The Zoetrope From Ancient China To Pixar”. June 1st, 2012. Thalo, https://www.thalo.com/articles/view/343/the_wheel_of_the_devil_the_history_of_the

Thompson, Clive. “Stereographs Were the Original Virtual Reality”. Smithsonian Magazine, October 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/sterographs-original-virtual-reality-180964771/

“A Short History of the Phenakistoscope” June 28, 2014. Juxtapoz: Art & Culture, https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/news/short-history-of-the-phenakistoscope/

“Phenakistoscopes (1833)”. The Public Domain Review, https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/phenakistoscopes-1833

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The Orangutan in the Room: 19th century and the Figure of Man

Fritz Eichenberg’s 1944 wood engraving illustration of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. This engraving is interesting as it shows the animal as an actual Orangutan rather than a generic ape-monkey creature as previous depictions do. Source.

       In 1839, Charles Darwin published The Voyage of the Beagle, the third account of his journeys on the ship the HMS Beagle with the prior two volumes already out. Later, in 1859, Darwin would publish The Origin of Species presenting his theory of Natural Selection and Evolution. Finally, in 1871 Darwin publishes The Descent of Man, and The Selection in Relation to Sex, where he lays out his concept of Sexual Selection, another form of biological adaptation related but not the same as natural selection. In all of these, Darwin proposed a singular idea that devastated, excited, and confused the public, that Humans and Apes had a relatively common ancestor.

This, along with several other scientific discoveries of the decade like photography and new astronomical concepts, created a vast public interest in science. Darwin specifically created an interest in the figure of ape in relation to the figure of man.

The figure of men in the 19th century itself was a sort of deception, constantly shifting and constantly changing in the new urban landscape. The faces of strangers would be countless, constantly morphing and shifting. Edgar Allen Poe would write about these fears in his short story, “The Man of the Crowd” where the narrator pursues a man who’s face shifts and morphs as he goes around town while Walt Whitman would publish “Faces” exploring Physiognomy, the pseudo-science of studying faces, with lines like:

“This now is too lamentable a face for a man

Some abject louse asking leave to be, cringing

for it,

Some milk-nosed maggot blessing what lets it

wrig to its hole.

 This face is a dog's snout sniffing for garbage;

Snakes nest in that mouth, I hear the sibilant

Threat” (302).

While this figure of man was a constantly shifting mass, the figure of the Ape however becomes this odd, solidified concept by the end of the 19th century. It is man but young, less intelligent but able to learn, capable of incredible violence but easily scared by violence upon him, child-like but immoral. Particularly, the Orangutan becomes this definite symbol of the Ape, shifting in appearance from the generic monkey to the genuine Orangutan form, displaying all the intelligence, horrific strength, and immorality the figure required. It becomes Man but not Man. The Orangutan is put under the name “Wild Man of the Woods”, an odd connection between ape and man. However, the figure of the Ape was not just applied to Apes and Monkeys.

The Native African (and African Americans) are continuously tangled in these narratives of apes and monkeys, being compared to them, related to them, and placed side by side to them in an equality. The 19th century viewer saw Africa as a barbaric, primitive country, full of ignorant, child-like, immoral souls who were in desperate need of Christianity. When explorers, more so invaders, brought relics of this foreign country, particularly animals like birds, fish, and, yes, Orangutans, the figure of the Ape became this outline of Africa.

The figure of the Ape becomes an allegory for the figure of Man itself, through the dehumanization of the natives of Africa and the discussion of what constitutes “Human” intelligence. Orangutans, spelled Orang Outang, become a figure of the exotic to the 19th century viewer, representing all the brutality, mock intelligence, and childlike tendencies they perceived Africa and Native Africans to possess.

From 1826, An illustration of a scene from Jocko, specifically the play based on the Book, about an Orangutan who lives on a Portuguese Trader’s plantation as a servant and pupil. He lives in his own “jungle hut” and spends his time teasing slaves and workers on the plantation. In the plot he saves the traders son but is shot due to belief he is hurting him. He lives long enough to retrieve hidden diamonds from his hut for his master. The book and play represent a significant connection between Man and Ape, along with this odd relation between the plantation slaves and this creature in a hierarchy. Source.

               In the early 19th century, the figure of the Orangutan appears in the theatrical sphere, “Man-Monkey” roles in European and Southern American Theatres (which eventually made its way to America), which saw people dressing up as apes and doing various acts of athleticism. It was a way for the early viewer to consider the relation of man and ape, “nineteenth-century  popular theater  had  found the  vehicle—the  “man-monkey” role—through  which  to engage  with  growing public  interest  in  the nature and origins of humankind” (Cribb, Gilbert, and Tiffin, 156).

The figure of the Orangutan in the theater had little specifics, “this form of theater cared little for specificity when it came to representing  orangutans  or other  primates,  and even  less  for realistic  plots”, the figure of the ape was shifting, never a singular creature. The Ape was not yet alluded to humanity fully, more animal. “The most successful works in this genre excited audiences with the frisson of species similarity through skillfully executed performances, even if their plots were generally unequivocal about where the lines between humans and animals should be drawn” (157). Darwin’s publications only pushed interest in this role further, letting it remain popular until the end of the 19th century where trained Orangutan acts carried on the spectacle of the Human Ape connection.

The “Ape” was always the foreign element, in some scenarios it would be a servant, usually in an “exotic” location, such as one from an 1806 play that depicted one “ fighting valorously alongside him against ferocious “savages”. Others would be “devious and lustful” creatures, In one play called Monkey Island, or, Harlequin Island and the Loadstone Rock from 1824 the plot revolves around a man and a woman trapped on a foreign island, “run by scheming  monkeys  and baboons  that  dress and  behave  like humans.  Their ruler, an “ourang outang,” captures the woman and attempts to rape her, but she escapes” (158).

“Am I A Man and A Brother” from 1861, titled “Monkeyana”, alluding to both contemporary debates about evolution and slavery and the connection between Man and Ape, but more specifically relating the African to Ape. “Monkeyana” is taken from 24 etchings by Thomas Landseer in 1827, a series of satirical cartoons depicting monkeys in human scenarios. In the western tradition, Monkeys embodied sinful qualities. Source.

The Orangutan fell into two narratives, the “Good” Ape” to parade as the good servant or “savage”” as they had become allegorical to in plays set in “The New World”, and the vehicle for debate of species (161). The Orangutan as a figure was used to “probe human fears and foibles in topical narratives” (173). They became this figure through which to explore Africa, a costume for the viewer to easily slip into or for the natives to be forced to wear.

As the concept of the “Man-Monkey” role developed however, it grew increasingly racial (perhaps just more racial) in various ways. The Ape character would be presented against “Savages”, such as Indians or Africans. They would presented as “Good Savages” like in the 1840 play Bibboo, or the Shipwreck and The Ourang Outang, or the Indian Maid and the Shipwrecked Mariner, where “the orangutan proves himself more faithful than the beautiful and alluring “nut-brown” Indian girl who, Pocahontas-like, defies her tribe to aid the interlopers” (162). In a different instance, African cultures are directly tied to “Apes” such as “one occasion, man-monkey actor Harvey Teasdale deliberately leaped (in full monkey suit) into a group of “Bosjesmans” (a different term for one of the foraging ethnic groups from Southwest Africa) who had been brought to Liverpool to perform their customs” (163).  Later, in 1847, Monkey of the Plantation directly likened the “Bosjesmans” to “orangutans and other primates”. This is a only few instances, amongst numerous ones that have been lost to time.

Charles Darwin depicted as a Chimpanzee from 1871. It was published in newspapers as a mocking of the evolutionary theory, as the culture at the time was heavily religious and saw the relation of Man and Ape as insulting. Source.

The role of and perception of Ape in theatre, specifically Antebellum theatre which consisted a large of Minstrelsy and the mocking of the African American figure, evolved as the 19th century went on. Particularly, the publication of Darwin’s theories saw a change in the figure of the Ape, shifting into these discussions of relation of Man and Ape and being twisted into racial allegories between “Savages” and slaves and if they constitute as human.  

A depiction of Vesperitlo homo presented as less specifically Orangutan and more vaguely simian from 1835. On the right is a depiction of the Bipedal beavers, which ironically appear to be more advanced in development but ignored for the creatures with a distinct human-esc form. Source.

The figure of the Orangutan, at least the face, first appeared in specifically American popular culture in 1835 with the one of the first newspaper-originating fake news, the Moon Hoax, where a series of articles were published in The Sun falsely attributed to John Herschel (they had been made by the editor Richard Locke Adams), one of the most popular astronomers of the time, that reported that life had been seen on the moon. The reports laid out a world of booming foliage, mountainous regions of vermilion, single-horned blue deer, bipedal beavers with huts, and humanoids covered in “short and glossy copper-colored hair” with head hair that was “darker color than that of the body, closely curled, but apparently not wooly” with a face like a “large orang outang” (Locke 15).

The world of the moon in these reports sits as an odd allegory to Africa, this amazingly foreign world with beings that are, as Kevin Young puts it, “stereotypically black” and are close to “a range of racial types” and are bereft of Christianity, and thus, “civilized” society. Two varieties of Vesperitlo homo, the scientific name subscribed to these creatures, exist in this world with the dark skinned variety being immediately criticized and placed hierarchical lower than the lighter skinned variety, simply because the former is observed in mating while the latter is observed in religious and community actions. It reflects the view of the native African the European and American colonizer had, as these brutal, savage people in need of Christian-orientated salvation from basic human interaction.  

Additionally, during this same time the Moon Hoax, African Americans were being presented in sideshows in the same caliber as, you guessed it, Orangutans. “Peale’s Muesum, across from City Hall, was now featuring a “living ourang outang, or wild man of the woods” named Joe; the creature had been wrenched from his mothers breast” though just streets away upstairs of Niblo’s was “Joice Heth…born a slave in Virginia…claimed to have been George Washington’s nursemaid” (Goodman). This narrative of being torn from family is oddly found in both narratives of apes and slaves. P.T. Barnum created a fictional account for Joice Heth he used in the Northern states (which were majorly abolitionist), claiming she was entertaining to save her great-grandchildren from a slave owner, who was written as being “highly respectable” and willing to set them free for “one-third of what they cost him” (Barnum 107). This narrative of being torn from family is found in both slave owners and abolitionist narratives alongside “exotic” animal capturers and advocates. It is this human feeling, this link of man and ape, of the ape and the slave for the 19th century viewer.

A depiction of the Orangutan from Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue from 1931 by Harry Clarke. The Orangutan is depicted as this grotesque elongated humanoid form, corpses of its victims gruesomely thrown around the room. Source.

               Edgar Allen Poe published two stories involving Orangutans revolving around them as an allusion to man and the “exotic”, The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1842 and Hop Frog in 1849.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue is Poe’s and the world’s introduction to the detective genre (being one of the earliest detective fiction story), bringing forth this character of C. Auguste Dupin, an isolated American scholar with a remarkable eye for the non-obvious truth. The scenario Poe puts forth is a classical locked room mystery, two women are murdered on the top floor of a building in the middle of the night, with no obvious way out as the trapdoor leading to the roof is nailed down and the windows appear held down. Forgive me for ruining the ending, if the prior photos did not, but the murderer is an Orangutan, who climbs up a weather pole, through a window with a broken nail, and accidentally murders the women with a razor in an attempt to mock shaving before escaping into the night.

The Orangutan is represented as Child-like, it only kills because it is attempting to copy it’s owner shaving, it only hides a body out of fear of being punished, it only runs to explore. Yet at the same time it is put through an anthropocentric lens, looked at under human morals and behavior (Granted Orangutans are believed to be the closest Ape to humans intelligence wise). In the discussion of Apes and their relation to Man, Poe describes the Orangutans actions as “a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity” (Poe 133). The Orangutan’s backstory finds itself uncomfortably close to how slaves are brought over, though simply put they were treated the same way as the foreigner was seen as less than human, landing in Borneo where it is captured and brought to the Americas with “great trouble, occasioned by the intractable ferocity of his captive” (137). The Orangutan becomes this easy allusion to the foreign, through the treatment the African people saw.

“Hop Frog’s Revenge” by James Ensor, 1898. This illustration depicts the horrific end in all its glory, the crowd of shocked people, the grotesque collection of blackened, burning bodies, with Hop Frog scampering up the chain to his escape. It is interesting the depiction of Hop Frog across most illustrations is this odd, thin, nymph like figure that contrasts his description. Source.

Hop-Frog shows a far very different, and more complex, depiction of the Orangutan, in two specific forms. It is the classic Poe horror story, short, bitter, and distressing. The title character Hop-Frog is a “fool” kept around for his ability to humor others, while also existing as a spectacle as he is called both a Dwarf and a cripple. “Without both a jester to laugh with, and a dwarf to laugh at” says Poe for the reason the monarch keeps Hop-Frog around (441). The plot centers around the king, cruelly forcing Hop-Frog to drink wine against his will as the king laughs at him, then proceeding to kick Hop-Frogs only friend, Tripetta, when she attempts to help him. Hop-Frog, in revenge for the kings cruelty, formulates a plan during the masquerade ball, convincing the King and his Advisors to dress up as Orangutans “the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs” (444), drenched in tar and covered in flax, running into the ball in a jest to scare the guests. Hop-Frog then proceeds to tie up the “Orangutans” with chain (as agreed as part of the jest) but rises them in the air and lights the group of tar-drenched, flax-covered men on fire to the horror of the party guests. Hop-Frog escapes with Trippeta into the night, while the people of the Kingdom watch their king burn into a “fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass” (447).

It is this horrific story of revenge, some argue too much revenge, that depicts Orangutans as both the victim of their own actions and the perpetrator of those actions. I stated earlier that there is two forms of depiction of the Orangutan in this story, one is the “Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs”, the other is Hop-Frog himself.

Hop-Frog and Number One by Stefan Mart in Tales of The Nations from 1933. It depicts Hop-Frog laying out the “Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs” plan to the king and his advisors. This is yet another depiction of Hop-Frog as imp like. Source.

Hop-Frog is never stated flat out called an Orangutan; however, his description is aptly describing one. He is described as “a dwarf and a cripple” due to his “inability to walk as other men do. In fact, Hop-Frog could only get along by a sort of interjectional gait- something between a leap and a wriggle, a movement that afforded illimitable amusement” (441-442). Along with this, he is described as having:

“prodigious muscular power which nature seemed to have bestowed upon his arms, by way of compensation for deficiency in the lower limbs, enabled him to perform many feats of wonderful dexterity, where trees or ropes were in question, or anything else to climb.  At such exercises he certainly much more resembled a squirrel, or a small monkey, than a frog” (442)

His dexterity in climbing is further compared to a monkey’s, “to the centre of the room- leaped, with the agility of a monkey, upon the kings head- and thence clambered a few feet up the chain” (446).

Before Hop-Frog burns the king and his advisors, his teeth are revealed in his rage, “fang-like teeth” which had been repeatedly making a grating sound heard throughout the story, “who ground them and gnashed them as he foamed at the mouth” (446). The grating sound is heard immediately after the King forces him to drink, when he kicks Tripetta, and finally when Hop-Frogs revenge is done.

Furthermore, Hop-Frog is represented as being from “some barbarous region” and “had been forcibly carried off from their respective homes in adjoining provinces, and sent as presents to the king, by one of his ever victorious generals” (442). Tripetta and Hop-Frog arrived together, both representing parts of this “barbarous region”, Tripetta, the exotic beauty who “universally admired and petted”, and Hop-Frog, the barbaric African depicted literally as an animal or as close to one as you can get.

“The Eight Chained Orangutans” thus represents the ultimate revenge for Hop-Frog, to literally turn the king and his advisors into what you are (or what they see you as) and destroy them in front of the kingdom your forced to be a spectacle for. It is literally turning the spectator into the spectacle, a burning mass of blackened bodies. It is the Ape turning human, the human turned Ape, and the King into the Fool.

“Tripetta Dances”, another illustration of Hop-Frog by Stefan Mart. It depicts the king and his Advisors as Orangutans, laughing at Hop-Frog and Tripetta as she dances. Source.

               Both stories created with an Orangutan featured in them in drastically different circumstances. The Murders in the Rue Morgue depicts the Orangutan, and thus all that this figure of the Ape alludes to, as Child-like but dangerous, intelligent to a degree but not enough to be “human”, it is a being that represents the barest echo of the African, a loose connection by shared treatment. On the other hand, Hop-Frog presents the Orangutan as this symbol of the foreign, that is ridiculed and mocked for existing as it looks, that seeks its revenge for actions done against it. It takes an eye for an eye, rather than mocking an action for an action. It’s a development in Intelligence (along with the fact Hop-Frog speaks) towards the viewer. In Hop-Frog, as a character, this leads to horrific consequences, and for the King and his councilors it speaks death for their cruelty upon the foreign, the African.

It is an odd coincidence then that this story that links Ape and Man through action and morality, is published the same year as the theory that linked Man and Ape in evolution.

An early 1860s advertisement for “What is It?”. The text below it reads “Is it a lower order of man? Or is it a higher development of the monkey? Or Is it both in combination? Nothing of the kind HAS EVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE! IT IS ALIVE!” It indulges in these thoughts of hierarchy, the thought that there is “low orders” of man and Africa is where they would be. Source.

               After 1859, the comparison of Ape to Man exploded in the popular culture, leading to more comparisons and more racist allusion. Only three months after Charles Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species, P.T. Barnum introduced in 1860 what he called a “missing link” between man and ape in the figure of “What is It?”. The name came from Barnum presenting the actor to Dickens, who replied “What Is It?”  It played on peoples hierarchical thoughts, racist concepts, and view of Africa along with the growing public interest in this concept of Man being linked to Ape.

To look beyond the image of the Half-Man, Half-Monkey, as P.T. Barnum presented him, we see a black African American performer named William Henry Johnson being described as having “the head like the slim end of an egg, a long broad nose and a prognathous jaw” (Zip The “What Is It?”). However, to the public he becomes not man, but not ape, but “MAN-MONKEY!, a most singular animal, which, thought it has many of the features of characteristics of both the human and brute, is not, apparently, either, but, in appearance, a mixture of both- the connecting link between humanity and the brute creation” (Barnum 134). P.T. Barnum positions “What is It?” as neither man nor what he calls “Brute”, implying ape but the same language is used to describe Native Africans in this period, this link or mixture of the two, neither the figure of Man or the figure of Ape. This depiction as the African as the inbetween of Man and Ape became this popular cultural touchstone, being used in arguments against slavery, and specifically as part of Anti-Lincoln arguments.

“What Is It?” is depicted as this feral, animistic proto-human, indulging in these hierarchical thoughts of Africans as lower, less developed, and thus less “human” yet a “wonderful freak of Nature” ( Barnum 134). Barnum details this narrative of him being captured, all the while directly linking him to apes. “They were in a perfectly nude state, roving about among the trees and branches, in the manner common to the Monkey and Orang Outang” and draws notice to his head which “combines both that of the native African and of the Orang Outang”, he goes on to compare the arms and legs of “What is It” “like those of the “Orang Outang”.

Additionally, Much like the Orangutan of Poe’s early detective story, “What is It?” is presented as child-like at “humanity”, Barnum advertises “The walk of What Is It is very awkward, like that of a child beginning to acquire that accomplishment.” He presents this “link” of Man and Ape, presents it as a mixture of Native African and “Ourang Outang” placing it (and native Africans) underneath the 19th century average middle-class white audience member in the hierarchical mind. “What is It?” presents a fake “direct link” between African and Ape, indulging in racist concepts of Africa and the newfound interest in the connection. It echoes the early 19th century theatrics, with the Man-Monkey, a spectacle of Ape and Man connection.

An illustration of an “Oran Ootan” from 1718’s first edition of Daniel Beeckmans’s A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo. The Orangutan is depicted entirely humanlike, being shown to grow hair only “where it grows on human bodies” as Daniel says. Source.

               For the 19th century viewer, the figure of the Ape, particularly the Orangutan, becomes this symbol of the foreign world. In theatrics Apes are presented against “savages” in equalitys, while at the same time being compared to Man through the fact they are played by men in costume. The Moon Hoax of 1835 echoes and mirrors the views the 19th century person had of Africa as this alien, wondrous world that is in need to colonization, making these bat people that are ranked based on skin tone. The stories of Poe involving Orangutans offer these narratives about the figure of the African in relation to the acts of the White Man, be that those actions will be repeated in mimicry or that those actions will eventually be turned on you in revenge. Finally, “What Is It?” represents this attempt to link the figure of the Man and the Ape, through this racist, hierarchical lens preying on the scientific hungry 19th century American.

As these questions of what “humanity” constitutes went on, African Americans and Native Africans found themselves tangled up in these discussions as people dehumanized them to be “less than human”, becoming Ape. Through Narratives of the Ape, we can see how people see those they consider “less than human”, be that this colorful figure of the Orangutan sidekick, or the mystical Bat People in need of teaching, or this jester who takes bitter revenge. It is human to consider what human is, it is less human to say, “What Is It?”

Cribb, Robert, Helen Gilbert, Helen Tiffin. “Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan”. University of Hawai’I Press, 2014.

Edgar Allan Poe. “Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems”. Introduction by Wilbur S. Scott, Castle Books, 1985, Pgs. 133, 137, 441-442, 444, 446.

Goodman, Matthew. “The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York”. Perseus Books Group, 2008. Pgs. 8-9.

Locke, Richard Adams. “Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made By Sir John Herschel”. The Sun, August 25th, 1835, Pgs. 15-16.

Phineas T. Barnum. “The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It In the Universe.” Edited by James W. Cook, 2005, pgs. 134-135.

Young, Kevin. “Moon Shot: Race, a Hoax, and the Birth of Fake News”. The New Yorker, October 21, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/moon-shot-race-a-hoax-and-the-birth-of-fake-news

Zip the “What Is It?”. Issues 48 & 49, Weird N.J., 2017. https://weirdnj.com/stories/local-heroes-and-villains/zip-the-what-is-it/

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A Spectrum of Scares: The Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, and mid-20th century paranoia

History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.

-          Marsha P. Johnson, A Black Transgender Drag Queen

“A Promotion We Can Do Without” from the Miami Herald, 1954. It accompanies an article about police being “soft” on “perverts” (the typical term for a homosexual in this period) in Miami leading to moral failure. The first line of the paragraph in the top left reads, “Sex perversion is a growing public problem”. Source.

               The history of the LGBT+ community in America is a textbook of struggle, just as Marx claims history to be patterns of class struggle. The lesbian is told she needs a man, the homosexual is blamed for moral failure, the bisexual is called confused, and the transgender called mentally ill. They are constantly alleged to be corruptors, perverts, and conspirators trying to undermine the “normal” straight society, in other wards they are the “other”. In the McCarthy era, we were alleged to be Communists; but then again, who wasn’t?

The year is around 1948, the second World War had only ended 3 years ago, and America is feeling powerful. They’ve come out the victor with their allies and defeated the Nazi Party. However, their society is now forever tinged with this xenophobic culture, powered by anti-German, Russian, and Japanese propaganda, that paints them broadly as, President Donald J. Trump tweeted barely a week ago, the “Red Wave”. As Communist government expands in Eastern Europe, the communist, to the American, becomes a boogeyman, a coverall for any ill moral, counterculture, or otherwise “bad” action that anybody does. Furthermore, the Cold War pushes this even further as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union boil to a tipping point awakening anti-communist hysteria from the 1930s. Simply put, The Soviet Union and the US were goading each other constantly. Thus, begins McCarthyism and the second Red Scare (the first being in the late 1910s during World War 1).

The communist, the so called “Red Menace” becomes the anti-capitalist, the socialist, the critic, the questioner, the democrat, the minority, and, most important to us, the homosexual.

Amidst the McCarthy investigations and hearings, the societal panic, and the illusionary massive plan of the communists to uproot American Society (though we were literally pointing nuclear missiles at eachother), the second Red Scare was used to discriminate further against the “other”. All areas of minority were targeted for being Communist, some directly by McCarthy, from Black Americans, to the non-Christian, to the LGBT community. The figure of the Communist and the “other” became one in the same.

A newspaper headline from 1961 stating the “Reds” blackmail Homosexuals into being Communist spies. The paragraph above it reads, “The F.B.I. knew those two code experts were fruity fellows but nothing was done about it until the boys has already minced off to Moscow.” Their homosexuality is summarized as “perverted pursuits in hotel rooms”. Source

This resulted in the Lavender Scare, a mass investigation and eviction of LGBT, primarily gay people, from United States Government due to fear of them being Communist infiltrators along with public beliefs of the gay person.         McCarthy himself declared the “homosexual” to be a threat to the American lifestyle, as he thought they could be easily blackmailed by the communist into revealing state secrets or be “Corrosive” to their coworkers moralities. The Lavender Scare is the people’s moral fears over the homosexual lifestyle colliding with Mycarterism-era conspiracy fueled paranoia.

A 1950s Newspaper article warning Americans “DON’T Patronize Reds” in the entertainment industry. The last line reads, “every time you permit REDS to come into your Living Room VIA YOUR TV SET you are helping MOSCOW and the INTERNATIONLISTS to destroy America!!!” Source.

          During the late 1940s and stretching into the late 1950s, a “Red Scare” occurs, a conspiracy theory where the American people believed that Communists had infiltrated their society with the goal to bring down democracy. People believed “Reds” had infiltrated government, Hollywood, TV, schools, and any other public place with an express hope of “corrupting” the populace. The era overall is called the “McCarthy Era” after Senator Joseph McCarthy, a right-wing republican who in 1950 rose to prominence by declaring there was “Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army” (Miller Center). In his speech, titled “Enemies Within” he declares:

The great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world is not political, gentlemen, it is moral. For instance, the Marxian idea of confiscating the land and factories and running the entire economy as a single enterprise is momentous. Likewise, Lenin’s invention of the one-party police state as a way to make Marx’s idea work is hardly less momentous…Karl Marx, for example, expelled people from his Communist Party for mentioning such things as love, justice, humanity or morality. He called this “soulful ravings” and “sloppy sentimentality”

He points the finger at the end, claiming:

I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

He later cut this list down to 57, in an address to President Truman, “Despite this State Department black-out, we have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department”. Two of these cases specifically targeted homosexuals.

This speech polarized the nation, creating parties who both believed and dismissed his allegations. McCarthy in the early 1950s would comb over nearly all government departments, questioning countless witnesses (Who a large majority of the time were only accused of being Communist), and in 1954 it all cultivated in its peak, the McCarthy Hearings. The McCarthy Hearings were 36 straight days of televised investigative hearings ran by McCarthy, however this turned public opinion against McCarthy after seeing ludicrous claims by the Senator against trusted people, along with a well written criticism by Edward R. Murrow (Achter). However, the Communist fear would never truly fade, nor the effects this conspiracy theory created.

A McCarthy era flyer, urging the viewer to report any “suspected Communist Activity” to presumably the police or the House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HUAC) which were a committee entirely focused on monitoring Communist activity within the United States. Source.

Countless numbers of individuals were fired, blacklisted, ridiculed, and years of trust swept away from a mere accusation. “Hundreds of elementary and high school teachers were investigated and lost their jobs, sometimes as a result of being named by proliferating "anti-subversive" groups and individuals” (Billington). The McCarthy era wreaked havoc on American society, enabling an easy accusation to sling around by anybody with a near 100% guarantee it would stick even without any solid evidence.

In one instance, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney blame Hollywood Labor conflicts over unionization as “Communist Infiltration”, Walter R. Disney states, “Well, it proved itself so with time, and I definitely feel it was a Communist group trying to take over my artists and they did take them over” ,along with, “I even went through the same smear in South America, through some Commie periodicals in South America, and generally throughout the world all of the Commie groups began smear campaigns against me and my pictures”.

A 1947 comic by the Catechetical Guild Educational Society warning about Communist Infiltration. It puts forward a story of Communist heads step by step breaking down American society, through class conflict, division, corrosion of morals, race war, and media until they manage to elect a Communist president, leading to food rationing, book burning, and the murder of Catholics. One panel reads “And here goes the greatest trash ever written – THE BIBLE!” linking Communism to comical levels of Atheism (and thus amorality). Source.

       The McCarthy Red Scare has all the key points of a conspiracy theory, as described by Hofstadter in Harper’s Magazine 1964 edition. He paints the Conspiracy finger-pointer as such,

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point”

McCarthy and other believers of this “Red Menace” saw the complete downfall of the United States in the future, the upheaval of society, and the destruction of freedom. In the comic book shown above, Americans saw Communists breaking apart American society step by step, inciting race wars, media races, and snapping of moral coils to push America into Communism, which to the American was presented as a removal of all freedom. Hofstadter stakes, on the actions of the perceived conspirator, “He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.”

From a 1949 trial of the American Communist Party Leaders on a charge of conspiracy, the Government states against the Communist Party through John F. X. McGohey,

“In each of these schools it is reiterated constantly that the students are being trained as professional revolutionaries. Marxism, they are taught, is not merely dogma, it is a guide to action. . . . At the proper time, they are taught—the proper time being a time of national crisis, unrest, disorder brought about by a severe depression or war”, and further in, “They teach that this revolution cannot be without violence, for to be successful the entire apparatus of the Government must be smashed”

In a 1947 accusation of John Howard Lawson, an organizer of the Screen Writers Guild and leader of Hollywood’s Communist Party in the 1930s, John Charles Moffitt declares to the HUAC that Lawson instructed:

It is your duty to further the class struggle by your performance.

He said: If you are nothing more than an extra wearing white flannels on a country club veranda do your best to appear decadent, do your best to appear to be a snob; do your best to create class antagonism.

He said: If you are an extra on a tenement street do your best to look downtrodden, do your best to look a victim of existing society.

They believed “there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy to undermine free capitalism”, that government had been “infiltrated by Communists that American policy has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests”, and that “the country is infused with a network of Communist agents…that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans” (Hofstadter). To summarize, the continued existence of the United States, at least to them, rested on unearthing and outing the “Reds”.

Several News Headlines of the era, all talking about the organized purging of gay men and women from Government, ranging from calling them Homosexuals to Deviates to “Sex Perverts”. One reads ““sexual perverts have infiltrated our Government in recent years” were “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists.”” Source.

               As is the case with Conspiracy Theories, those who believe in them find it far too easy to associate the conspirators with the “other” of society. Jewish people were blamed for the Black Death, and thought to be in Anti-Catholic organizations, African Americans celebrities are associated with the Illuminati, and Gay men and women were thought to be communists or simply painted as such to be ousted. This was the Lavender Scare.

In this era of McCarthyism, thousands of gay employees, or just suspected gay employees, of state and federal governments were investigated, questioned, outed, and fired (Adkins). This was amid the wave of congressional investigations for communists, “bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation”, painting the homosexual red and claiming them to be Communists, Communist sympathizers, or blackmailed to reveal state secrets. This was in addition to the major societal view of the time, calling homosexuals “sex perverts” or “deviants”, being listed as a mental illness in the official psychological database, and being jailed for even looking “non-conforming to one’s birth sex” in parts of the country.

Even before McCarthy’s claim to Communist Conspirators, the homosexual was being persecuted in this era. This was because World War 2 created an unexpected side effect, a rising community of LGBT (and thus societal visibility) due to many homosexual people finding themselves in the same army bunker.

“In 1947 the U.S. Park Police initiated in the city a "Sex Perversion Elimination Program," targeting gay men for arrest and intimidation.” Only a year later, Congress passes the act “for the treatment of sexual psychopaths”, facilitating the arrest, punishment, and jailing of people acting on same-sex desire, labeling them mentally ill. Judith Adkins summarizes the view of the time, “Homosexuality was perceived as a lurking subversive threat at a time when the country was coping with tremendous social change as well as rising anxiety about another lurking subversive threat: Communism.”

A 1950 report by an investigative committee of Government, concluding that homosexuals were unsuitable for employment in the Federal Government due to “security” reasons. Source.

McCarthy blamed the homosexual figure claiming, “the government had been infiltrated by homosexuals, and that they posed a threat equally as grave to national security”. In his address on February 20th, 9 days after his President Truman address, McCarthy linked homosexuality and Communism citing two cases of Homosexual men in Government, stating “practically every active Communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way” and implied “that the men in these two cases were susceptible to Communist recruitment because as homosexuals they had what he called "peculiar mental twists” (Adkins). The pressure from McCarthy and other republicans caused the State Department to have fired 91 homosexuals as “security risks”. Later the US Senate, led by the “Hoey Committee”, investigated employed homosexuals “and other sex perverts” within the government:

Although they could not uncover a single example of a homosexual American citizen who had betrayed secrets as a result of blackmail, they wrote a highly circulated and influential report that asserted that gay men and lesbians exhibited weak moral character and had a “corrosive influence” on their fellow employees. “One homosexual can pollute a government office,” the Senate report concluded (Johnson).

The rhetoric the believers pushed directly linked the two, assumptions about Communists mirrored the societal beliefs about homosexuals. “Both were thought to be morally weak or psychologically disturbed, both were seen as godless, both purportedly undermined the traditional family, both were assumed to recruit, and both were shadowy figures with a secret subculture” (Adkins).  However, there was one key difference that pushed the Lavender Scare further. They weren’t finding Communists, but they were finding Homosexuals. It is important to recall then, the two were the same figure to America.

In a particularly distressing action, President Eisenhower, backed by the 1950s Congressional investigations and the Hoey Committee’s report, created an executive order in 1953 that specifically banned homosexual men and women from working all jobs within the US Government. “That order explicitly added sexuality to the criteria used to determine suitability for federal employment. With the stroke of a pen, the President effectively banned gay men and lesbians from all jobs in the U.S. government—the country's largest employer” (Adkins). Private businesses followed suite, enacting their own discriminatory probing, hiring, and firing practices specifically targeting LGBT individuals.

It echoes the “Paranoid style” of Conspiracy theory that Hofstadter stated, “Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.” The goal was to eliminate the homosexual from government, and in a way, they succeeded at least for a few decades. In particular, the homosexual of this represented a sexual freedom that the straight individual was not allowed, they were the sexual deviant, the pervert, they offered the populace “an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns” (Hofstadter). Primarily, how society was changing, in terms of the sexual discussion and sexuality (as a whole) was developing as the LGBT community in America truly began to grow.

LGBT+ were massively fired and thrown out of government, outed against their will, and forced to deal with the consequences. “Not only were LGBT federal employees fired, but many others were also simply fired for “guilt of association” in knowing someone who was LGBT” (Gleason). This ruined Queer lives, not only for the loss of a job, but also being thrown into the public eye, into a society that was aggressively anti-LGBT led to many people dying, either by suicide or by murder. They faced Stigma from the federal government, along with the larger society, “many of the federal investigations and resulting firings lead to dismissed employees’ suicides — most of which were later covered up by the federal interrogators.” The Lavender Scare did not gain massive public knowledge however, this anonymity managed to save many by not outing them on a major scale which certainly would have resulted in massive suicides and death.

The Mattachine Society marching for a “National Gay Task Force”. The Mattachine Society is held as one of America’s first “homophile” acceptance societies, pushing for acceptance and change within American Society. Source.

Investigations continued in through the 50s, though this is not to say there was no fightback. Brave sorts such as Frank Kamney stepped up, taking his case of dismissal to the Supreme court. Even though he lost, he started a wave where a few federal courts began agreeing with him in the late 1960s leading to more right for LGBT people within Government. In 1950 the Mattachine Society was founded (later investigated themselves for assumed Communist behavior) by Kamney, and later in 1955 the Daughters of Bilitis was created, both LGBT civil and political rights groups. As I stated before, LGBT communities can be found in struggle.

While it is not the revolution McCarthy and others were fearing from Communists, it is still a revolution of the rights of the LGBT individual. It is the beginning of a change in American Society, the Lavender Scare created from fear a public outcry for homosexual acceptance.

The Lavender Scare officially ends in 1975, for civil servants, after the Civil Service Commissions announced that gay people could no longer be legally fired or barred from federal government jobs based purely off their sexuality. However, it left behind a trail of discrimination and queer lives ruined by McCarthyism, public paranoia, and Cold War-era fear.

The anonymity, as “the Lavender Scare featured no public naming of names and no dramatic spectacles in which the accused testified”, I stated before saved the lives of countless LGBT People. However, it also made them into vague concepts. The full tragedy of this event is lost except the whispers found in transcripts of Committee hearings, mementos, private diaries, and unpublished records. We only have the outlines of these discriminated people, shaped in government papers.

A PSA from the Mattachine Society in 1960, stating that “Homosexuals are Different, but we believe they have the right to be.”  The final line reads “Mattachine defends the rights of homosexuals and tries to create a climate of understanding and acceptance.” This stands in the face of the Lavender Scare, a push for acceptance where the Government offered none. Source.

               The McCarthy era stands as one of the largest instances of a Conspiracy Theory taking over the American populace. “The Red Menace” was this constant specter haunting the American lifestyle, it was the boogeyman, the big threat to the Nuclear Family standing in as the face of the possible Nuclear War. However, it also became anybody who was othered by society, the African American, the critic, the curious, and the homosexual. The Lavender Scare was a massive event of LGBT discrimination within American Government. It is a vital event to understand to understand the history of struggle that LGBT people have had in America. However, a person can live their entire life without knowing about it, even when they know of the Red Scare.

It is a silent history, a color that blends into the background of the Spectrum of Scares America witnessed in that era. However, it shows itself plain in LGBT history, as both a low point for Queer lives and a high point for LGBT Rights, as the Mattachine Society was founded during it. While the Stonewall Riots would appear around a decade later, the Lavender Scare is part of the foundation for LGBT rights in America.

Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist, on his podcast InfoWars, claiming that the Government has produced a “Gay bomb” that infuses chemicals into the water to induce homosexuality in people. This quote “turning the friggin frogs gay” has become a meme amongst LGBT people, due to the absurdity of it. Source.

It is interesting to see the echoes of the Lavender Scare though, as a Conspiracy Theory, in modern day America. People believe LGBT+ people have a central agenda, labeled the “LGBT Agenda”, that they have a centralized goal as a community beyond equal human rights. Right Wing Republicans such as Mike Pence, who endorses Conversion Therapy, and Alex Jones, who is known to believe that the government has produced chemicals to turn people gay (among other Conspiracy theories), echo McCarthy’s absurd accusations that Homosexuals posed a threat to national security and reports that they “pollute a government office”.

Minorities seem have this inability to escape being the conspirators in Conspiracy theories. It always appears that they are the target, the revolutionary, the “Red Menace”. Conspiracy Theories offer people a different way to look and perceive the world, however that also offers ideal situations for racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism to thrive as it is easy to pin the charge onto the minority class. After all, who would benefit more from societal upheaval? Certainly not the white, straight man.

Achter, Paul J. “McCarthyism.” Britannica, August 16th, 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/McCarthyism

Adkins, Judith. ““These People Are Frightened to Death” : Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare” Prologue Magazines, Vol 48, No. 2, 2016. National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/lavender.html

Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964. https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

Johnson, David K. “The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government” The University of Chicago Press, 2004. OutHistory, http://outhistory.org/items/show/1425

McCarthy, Joseph R. “Enemies from Within”. 1950. History Matters, historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6456/

Miller Center, “McCarthyism and the Red Scare.” University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/age-of-eisenhower/mcarthyism-red-scare

Congress, House, Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, 80th Congress, 1st Session, October 1947 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1947). History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6441

“Communists are second to none in our devotion to our people and to our country”: Prosecution and Defense Statements, 1949 Trial of American Communist Party Leaders. History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6446

“We Must Keep the Labor Unions Clean”: “Friendly” HUAC Witnesses Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney Blame Hollywood Labor Conflicts on Communist Infiltration. History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6458

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Missionaries to the Moon! God made the stars, exoticism, and the Moon Hoax of 1835

An illustration of a paper boy announcing the news of life on the moon from The American Heritage (1969). The story of the “lunar discoveries” was highly profitable for the paperboys, enabling a comfortable life for a few weeks. Source.

If you found out that an astronomer had sighted a utopian society of orangutan-faced bat people on the moon, what would you first thought be? To attempt to communicate with them? Maybe shrug and go on about your day? Write it off as a hoax? For some people in the 19th century, the first thought was to convert the flying, utopian bat people to Christianity.

In the late summer of 1835, an article was published in the New York Sun by its editor Richard Adams Locke, that would forever change journalism, fiction, and hoaxes in the American Sphere; it was also failed satire. In a series of articles, supposedly republished from a scientific journal and authored by John Herschel, the Sun revealed that life had been found on the moon, deer like unicorns, bison-esc creatures, and humanoids with thin membrane, bat-like wings. According to Locke it was supposed to be satire on the rapid scientific discoveries of the era alongside the newspaper culture, however it proved to be too believable. It gained massive popularity, spread by newsboys, talk, and other newspapers commenting on it, and people truly believed there was life on the moon that year.

Obviously, there wasn’t, but the event stands as a massive turning point in American culture. It’s one of the earliest mass instances of “yellow journalism” and newspaper-based hoax.

An illustration from the 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verns. The book is about the Baltimore Gun Club building a cannon to literally shoot people to the moon. Source.

It may not be surprising to find out that stories about the moon are nothing new. People have been looking up to it at night forever, after all. In a particularly similar pair of stories in 1638, The Discovery of a World in the Moone by John Wilkins and The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwins was published inspired by Galileo’s observations of the moon from his telescope. In the latter, a Spanish nobleman finds a species of swan-like birds in the West Indies who he attaches a harness to and they fly to the moon where they find “a place with plants, animals, and most surprisingly, a utopian civilization of tall, Christian people” (“Peoples & Creatures of the Moon”).

In a similar vein, the hoax was surrounded by a culture enthused about the celestial, scientific discovery, and religion. Hayley’s comet was set to return to earth after being gone for around 77 years, prompting interest in the heavens. John Herschel, one of the most popular astronomy of the century, had published Treatise on Astronomy only a year prior to great cultural acclaim. Poe had published a similar work about a journey to the moon via a newspaper crafted balloon published only weeks prior, which he would state was plagiarized. Finally, the 19th century was an era of scientific advancement, prompting even the most low-class person to be intrigued. Simply put, it was the perfect landing pad for the Bat People to land on.  

The Moon Hoax of 1835 is surely an interesting event, that exposes certain aspects of the culture around it through its portrayal of the moon people, reactions to them, and the actions people attempted to take. As I stated before, some people’s reactions to the articles was to attempt missionary work upon the moon inhabitants. They wanted to send bibles, in odd hope to make them see the “error of their ways”. The audience placed the hierarchy of being, human morals, and imperialism onto the fictional people, reflecting how they treated Africa, China, and other “barbaric” countries.

This Moon Hoax is a form of exoticism through the (telescope) lens of fiction, as everything in the 19th century seems to be a discussion of race. It is the century that had the Civil War, blackface and minstrelsy, and de-legalization of slavery. Furthermore, around the year of 1835 figures like Joice Heth, Tom Rice, and other race-based attractions had become popular amongst the populace. In a culture that seems in an endless discussion of race, its impossible for the Moon Hoax to avoid it. To make a fictional “other” Locke had to look upon what society considered the “other”. Thus, The Moon Hoax of 1835 mirrors the way Americans viewed foreign countries through exoticism and imperialism. The moon was simply another foreign culture.

“The Whiteman’s Burden” from 1899 depicting Uncle Sam trudging after Britian’s figure of John Bull while stepping on stones labeled Barbarism, Oppression, Superstition, Ignorance, and Vice towards the top labeled “Civilization”. On his back, Uncle Sam carries racist caricatures of the non-white nations, most obviously Africans with Native American elements. Notice how they are drawn almost animalistically. Source.

               The concepts of Exoticism and Imperialism tend to go hand in hand, one fetishizing a culture while the other overtakes it. British had already been colonizing land since the 17th century, including land within Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia. While America would not truly begin a full on colonization project, the so called “Colonial project”, until the late 19th century, the nation would still hold onto the imperialist thoughts of the British who they had only parted ways with barely half a century ago.

Exoticism, a trend where a culture becomes enamored in the foreign to dehumanizing degrees, was everywhere in the 19th century. To the 19th century viewer, the exotic was fantastical, eye catching, and seemingly fictional. “New Yorkers could sample what seemed to be all the exotica the world had to offer: stuffed birds and reptiles, Indian utensils, Indian dresses, and sometimes the Indians themselves. Peale’s Museum, across from City Hall, was not featuring a “living ourang outang, or wild man of the woods” named Joe” (Goodman 8-9). “Exotic” humans were on the same level as foreign objects, compared to apes (like Joe) and mystical concepts, thus “The more compelling attractions, though, were always the human ones” (9). That summer, Joice Heth was already on display, an old black woman claiming to be George Washington’s Nursemaid from 1674, playing into peoples odd beliefs of the foreign, magical powers of the slaves. Heth stands as a singular figure in a long history of “black people on parade, from the auction block to the menagerie, from the first Africans captured and brought as slaves to James in 1619 to  Ota Benga, shown in the Bronx Zoo as a pygmy savage in 1906” (Young 34).

The cover of the sheet music for “Zip Coon: A favorite comic song” sung by Mr G.W. Dixon from 1834. Dixon was a popular American entertainer, most notable for performing in Blackface as he sang “Coal Black Rose” and, obviously, “Zip Coon”. The lyrics of Zip Coon include “O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler” mimicking the language of African Americans. Source.

To add onto this parade of black figures, the imitation of the black figure had already become popular in the early 19th century through Minstrelsy. Minstrelsy being a form of theatre where white individuals would dress up in Black Face and exaggerate the actions and language of Black Americans to imitate them for humor. Figures such as G.W. Dixon and Thomas D. Rice (often stated to be the Father of Minstrelsy) were already performing before 1835. Thomas D. Rice is notable for playing Jim Crow, and adapting and popularizing a traditional slave song called “Jump Jim Crow”

Along with this, the new scientific discoveries and culture of the early 19th century was being used in tandem with Religion and Racial discussion:

“with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference. Science, religion, and conceptions of race all confirmed one another: the Bible, the stars, and even the shapes of heads were enlisted over and over again to prove established prejudices true. “Objective” investigators constantly rediscovered that Negroes, Indians, and other dark races (some of them European, mind you) were indeed still inferior” (Young).

The culture surrounding race in the 19th century repeatedly tried to prove that it was truly important. People sought proof that the races were hierarchical, the white was superior, and that the “dark” were inferior. The “dark races” were caricatured as mishappen, monstrous (as seen in Joice Heth posters), and inhuman like the cartoon below.

“Puzzled which to Choose!! or, The King of Tombuctoo offering one of his daughters in marriage to Capt-“ from 1818, depicting an African king offering one of his daughters up for marriage to a white sea captain. The “wild” Africans are presented in grotesque, almost inhuman figures from the daughters exaggerated head shapes, to the faces of the crowd behind them. Meanwhile, the white foreigners are pictured as calm (save that one man on the left) and elegant in both figure and composure. Source.

In this era of Exoticism, and even today, the faces and bodies of non-whites are shown animalistically, to degrade them as being less than human. Later into the 19th century, figures like “What is It?” would be presented “beside “the great living Black Sea Lion” or literally beneath an albino family of “White Negreos, or Moors” and “What Can They Be? These most strange and MYSTERIOUS ANIMALS! Two in number and of distinct species, found in a cave in the hither-to unexplored Wilds of Africa” (Young 38). The foreign land would be presented as exotic, otherworldly, a region in need of taming (usually Christian-orientated taming).

Missionaries were one of the earliest to explore Central and Southern Africa in the early 19th century, before true colonization began. While these were viewed as good efforts, motives including teaching Africans to read and further education and helping those harmed by the slave trade (that had been outlawed In Britain only a year before the Moon Hoax), the main goal of these missionaries was to convert (“19th Century White Missionaries”). Christianity was used as a weapon against the Africans, calling their culture sinful and pushing Christianity as “civilization”. A first line from a collection of missionary accounts reads, “We have in this volume brought together the names of several of our most distinguished female heroines, who have toiled and suffered on heathen soil” (Eddy). Harriet Newell, called the proto-matyr by the author, describes the foreign world in regards to the Christian church, “the wail of a dying world as it echoed over land and ocean and sounded along our shores; she had not realized the great fact that every blackened tribe constitutes a part of the universal brotherhood of man” (13).

Let us not forget, the winner writes the history of the war and the missionary writes the account of their work. Missionaries accounts were some of the only exposures the early 19th century individual got to other cultures. This is not to say missionaries did not have a genuine interest in helping the African people, it is only to say that Christianity was used as a tool of Imperialism during this century with the goal of an abstract concept of civilization.

A French print published alongside the 1935 story, claiming to show all the Moon’s creatures and plants. The lushness of it is reminiscent of the forests of Africa and South America. Source.

    The Moon Hoax thus illustrates the most foreign area possible to the 19th century reader, the moon. Exoticism is a part of why the hoax became so popular, the description of another world, with odd, strange creatures, people, and geography. The land is described, “It was an oval valley, surrounded except at narrow opening towards the south, by hills, red as the purest vermilion, and evidently crystallized” along with animals:

“Having all the external characteristics of the bison, but more diminutive than any species of the bos genus in our natural history. Its tail is like that of our bos grunniens; but in its semi-circular horns, the hump on its shoulders, and the depth of its dewlap, and the length of its shaggy hair, it closely resembled the species to which I first compared it” (Locke 10).

The account of the Moon Hoax uses this mixture of scientific language with the fantastical, an attempt to make the world seem real through evidence but at the same time “exotic”. The moon would appear to the populace as proof of the hospitality of the universe, a gift of god. However, that so called “missionary moon” is set against the history of exoticism, “not just in the black of outer space but in the perceived darkness of Africa, which, to most of the Sun’s readers, may have seemed just as distant, hostile, and in need of saving” (Young).

The Moon of Locke’s Moon Hoax is representative of peoples thoughts of the foreign countries, particularly Africa. Its notable that Locke says these observations of the moon from the Cape of Good Hope, a headland in South Africa. The appearance of the inhabitants, most particularly the Bat People, find themselves uncomfortably close to “a range of racial types” and “stereotypically black” (Young).

“Vespertilio homo” from Neapel, 1836. The Bat People are depicted as covered with dark hair, with thin anatomy, and bat wings. Source.

Vespertilio Homo are noted as having “short and glossy copper-colored hair”, a face like a “large orang outang”, and “The mouth, however, was very prominent, …and by lips far more human”. Their hair is described as “a darker color than that of the body, closely curled, but apparently not wooly” (Locke 15). They are instantly claimed as being rational beings, simply for being human-esc in form in context to the “Great Chain of Being” (a Christian belief that the human form is the top of a hierarchical pyramid). The activities of these beings are described as “their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum (social etiquette)” , simply put, the narrator shames them for less “civilized” entertainment implied to be of the sexual variety (16).

Upon seeing a different tribe of these creatures, the narrator describes them as “larger stature than the former specimens, less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety of the race” calling back to the pseudoscientific beliefs of the “Dark” races being inferior (21). Locke creates this lighter skinned version of the bat people, puts them at a higher civilization structure than the darker one, and then has the narrator state them to be the improved variety.  The narrator praises the lighter skinned variety of bat people for this odd activity of sharing fruit and indulging in a triangle-based religion, while the darker variety get shamed for indulging in each other.

The Bat People of the Moon are placed under this Christian tinted, anthropocentric lens (Along side the telescope lens) that value their actions based on human morality and religion. Who says that the Bat People are the most civilized species, when the biped beavers appear to have huts? They are considered such simply because they resemble the human form, thus they are forced under this colonial lens, the same one the African people and other “barbaric” nations are put under. The darker skinned variety are instantly labeled “heretics” just as the Africans were by missionaries, while the lighter variety are praised for indulging in what appears to be religion. They are placed under the imperial lens, that states what a culture should and shouldn’t do in line with the Christian ideal.

So, to finally talk on the matter that people wanted to send Bibles to the Moon, it seems like a logical conclusion to the 19th century Missionary-orientated Christian. They are given a fictional, foreign world, bereft of the “Holy Ghost”, that echoes the cultures view of Africa, Asia, and other foreign areas If you cannot send missionaries to the moon, bibles are the next best thing.

The New Negro by Allan R. Freelon. A form of an African American wanders in a strange world, notice the hanged bodies in the background in front of three crosses alongside a face of African art. Source.

      The Moon Hoax of 1935 stands as an important cultural flagstone in American Culture. It is stated to be the birth of the modern concept of fake journalism and alerting readers to begin reading askance. It stands as an important point of spiritual and celestial interest. It also an excellent way to see how fiction interacts with culture, and how that culture represents itself inside how fiction depicts. The Bat People are echoes of the African, the Asian, the Indian, and how the American and English saw these people. They are placed under a lens of anthropocentric values, then immediately criticized for not meeting those values. These fictional mashups of bat and man are degraded, praised, criticized, and ranked from seemingly insignificant actions that are characteristic of animals. The fact people wanted to convert them is no surprise, it seemed to be the first action the 19th century person did upon meeting a foreign country. Let us not forget the Crusades, after all.

This hoax stands to me as the opposite of Afrofuturism (A sci-fi genre that explores the diaspora of African people with modern society). It is a strange exploration of race, of a new world, of a new century where the Moon is inhabited by Bat People and humans want to convert them to Christianity. As people argue if fiction affects reality or not, it is clear that reality affects fiction. If the Moon Hoax of 1935 is not also evidence for the reverse, then what is?

Works Cited

Eddy, Daniel Clarke. “Daughters of the Cross: or, Woman’s Mission”. Dayton and Wentworth, 1855. Pg. 13.

Goodman, Matthew. “The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York”. Perseus Books Group, 2008. Pgs. 8-9.

Locke, Richard Adams. “Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made By Sir John Herschel”. The Sun, August 25th, 1835. Pgs. 10, 15-16, 21.

Young, Kevin. “Moon Shot: Race, a Hoax, and the Birth of Fake News”. The New Yorker, October 21, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/moon-shot-race-a-hoax-and-the-birth-of-fake-news

Young, Kevin. “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News”. Graywolf Press, 2017. Pgs. 34-38.

“19th Century White Missionaries”. BBC World Service. https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/8chapter4.shtml

“Peoples & Creatures of the Moon”. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-sagan/articles-and-essays/life-on-other-worlds/peoples-and-creatures-of-the-moon

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The 19th Century Myth of the American Identity

Norman Rockwell’s “The Right to Know” from 1968. The viewer is seated in front of a crowd of faces of mixed race, age, and gender all anticipating an answer. It was made as commentary on the 1960s as a period of anxiety and the impact on American opinion towards the Vietnam War. Part of the section of text reads,

“We are the governed, but we govern too. Assume our love of country, for it is only the simplest of self-love. Worry little about our strength, for we have our history to show for it. And because we are strong, there are others who have hope.” Source

Who, or What, is the average American? The concept is a mystery to most people. After all, you cannot say the stereotype of the white, male, Christian, conservative American (founded in the 1950s utopia of Americana and Norman Rockwell) is the average, as that ignores the concept of the “Great American melting pot” ,as School House Rock puts it, that America seems to enjoy so much (though people have recently brought up the idea of a tossed salad instead). The simplest answer might to point to yourself and state you are the average American, yet anybody reading this could be any combination of race, gender, religion, sexuality, and cultural origin, so that solution becomes mute.  The country is so large that we have different cultures on the west, east, north, and south borders along with the middle. I live in the south, along the Gulf Coast, and we distinctly have a French, Spanish, and African influence upon us, made obvious from New Orleans to Mobile and our Food culture. Can you state we are the same American as a New York individual influenced by British, Italian, and Dutch founding?

“The High Tide of Immigration – A national Menace” a political cartoon depicting Uncle Sam fleeing from a tide of “Riff Raff Immigration” that all appear distinctly Mexican, Asian, and ambiguously “ethnic”. The year does not matter, as we see this Anti-Immigrant (largely Anti-Hispanic) rhetoric still today. Source

Additionally, throughout America’s history it has a distinct population of immigrants from nearly every other country in the world. A large population find their roots in German, Russian, Scottish, Irish, Asian, and African immigrants (or slaves) that came to America over the sea. The very founding fathers we lovingly carved into a sacred Native American mountain came from British immigrants. Yet, we are conflicted in our would-be identity as our culture appears very anti-immigration. As Gene Tierney, a popular film actress, is quoted saying in the mid-20th century, “that strange conflict in the American character: we pride ourselves on being the melting pot of the world, but we insist on regarding most immigrants with suspicion”

“Slaves Waiting for Sale” by Eyre Crowe from 1861. Source

America finds itself as this odd nation, embarrassingly young against most of the world’s countries, without a solid identity. Even among the Americas, North America stands out as Central and South America have a distinct Native and Spanish culture. North American has a native population of Native American, with their own distinct culture, yet that culture was pushed aside and mixed (more so violently assimilated) with British, French, Italian, African, and Dutch cultures along with various other spices of other nations. Thus, who can say what the identity of the average American is? Individuals of 19th century America found themselves asking the exact same question.

In the early 19th century not even half a century passed (not enough for a full generation) since the revolutionary wars end, in 1783, and America was aggressively anti-British. Thus, the new American people, a majority of whom were previously British, found themselves in this identity crisis. What is the American Identity?

People looked nearly everywhere for this identity, in their own imagination (Eager to escape the monarchical British founding), in the culture of the foreigner, and in the people (and their folk culture), who roamed the streets of the city and the countryside. In the 19th century, America found itself in a crisis of identity, attempting to create one through myth, of its founding, of its culture, and of the self. The 19th century American identity is a myth created in a void of one.

An early method of identity the American populace indulged was this attempt to “change” how America was “founded” (ignoring the reality the land existed long before any European stepped onto it). The British colonizing the east coast would not do in this new nation that saw Britain as this militaristic, greedy nation with the war of 1812 only pushing this reputation further (Ironic, isn’t it?). Thus, various people created myths of founding, that is myths about who founds American culture.

One such myth is the story of Christopher Columbus, that explorer who sailed in “1492 on the ocean blue” accidentally finding the east coast of the Americas instead of India, as he planned. While this story is not directly tied to the founding of the American nation, it is about the origin. Prior to the late 18th century and the early 19th century, the story of Christopher Columbus had already gained popularity being centuries at this point but gained new fame among the newly freed American individual as a story of origin. Washington Irving, an author we’ll discuss soon enough as a creator of American identity, even published a fictional biographical account “by” Columbus titled A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1823 (which ironically helped perpetuate the myth of a flat earth again).

Christopher Columbus thus stood to the 18th and early 19th century individual as the most prominent figure to relate to America’s newfound freedom (along with the Founding Fathers), unrelated to the British. “Christopher Columbus,  it  seems, was  the  historical figure  most  useful in  the “search  for a  usable  past” which had  18th-century  Americans – colonial subjects of the British Crown seeking independence – look for meaningful  beginnings” (Paul).

A postage stamp depicting the Pilgrims and the Mayflower, Source

Another to be considered is the Pilgrims, people seeking religious freedom from a religion restricting monarchy. This paints the view of how settlers, more so colonizers, of this “New World”, and thus America, would be seen as this freedom seeking population going to the “Promised Land” from the cruel British Monarchy. As Heike Paul states in his book, The Myths That Made America:

“These  religious dissenters  from England  thus were  often  cast as  morally  superior to  the  men of  the  Virginia Company in early Americanist scholarship, and the ‘cradle of American civilization’  has often  been  located in  their  early New  England  settlements.”

Taking on the Pilgrims as the beginnings of “American civilization” fits snugly with the 18th and 19th century American thought regarding the British, as militaristic, and monarchical restrictors of free will. Granted, the British empire at the time was a massive force of colonization.

A book jacket for a 1929 edition of Irving’s A History of New York featuring the Dutch colonizers. The Jacket declares “It is our own history, as American as New York, the Woolworth Tower, the Statue of Liberty and the stones on which Manhattan is built”, showing the American connection to this fake history. Source

Washington Irving created one of the more popular myths of founding in 1809 (along with a significant part of American culture), bringing the Dutch into the picture (noticing a trend yet?). In his book A History of New York, Irving creates this fake history of the founding of America through the Dutch settlers of Amsterdam (later becoming New York) where he braids together real history and his fictional setting with satire about the British. He creates this figure of the American Historian in Diedrich Knickerbocker, an impish old fellow of Dutch origin (relating to the American identity as the foreigner).

In contrast to the concept of the British as these military-oriented, violent colonizers who seek to restrict free will, the Dutch settlers are portrayed as bumbling, but charming, hardy common men who seek a simple life and “care far more about eating, drinking, and napping than they do governance” (Morrow). Additionally, they are presented as highly community oriented, lax enough to spend all day smoking together or spend an entire party staring at fireplace tiles. Irving portrays the “resistance” of the Dutch against the British as child-like:

Not one of or honest Dutch citizens would venture to church or to market, without an old fashioned spit of a sword, dangling at his side, and a long Dutch fowling piece on his shoulder- nor would he go out of a night without a lanthorn; nor turn a corner, without first peeping cautiously round, lest he should come unawares upon a British army…

Finally, to strike to a violent blow at the very vitals of the Great Britain, a grand caucus of the wiser inhabitants assembled; and having purchased all the British manufactures they could fire, they made thereof a huge bonfire- and in the patriotic glow of the moment, every man present, who had ah at or breeches of English workmanship, pulled it off and threw it most undauntedly into the flames – to the irreparable detriment, loss and ruin of the English manufactures (313-314).

Despite these efforts, the Dutch fully believed that the “fate of old England depended upon the will of the New Amsterdammers” (314), satirizing both the view of resistance by the British and the confidence the new Americans saw in themselves. The book became so popular, as both a satire and an origin myth, that the narrator became a cultural figure and became a part of American Identity himself. He became part of the 19th century myth. In the final edition of A History of New York from 1848 Irving states:

“When I find its very name become a ‘household word’ and used to give the home stamp to everything recommended for popular acceptance such as Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance companies, Knickerbocker steamboats, Knickerbocker omnibuses, Knickerbocker bread, and Knickerbocker ice; and when I find New Yorkers of Dutch descent priding themselves on being ‘genuine Knickerbockers’—I please myself with the persuasion that I have struck the right chord” (Morrow).

The American people, primarily the New Yorkers, fully indulged this myth of the American identity to the point its still seen today in New York, most clearly in the New York Knickerbockers.

A drawing interpreting the headless horseman from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as a mouse with a squash head riding a squirrel. The legend continues to see many iterations, adaptations, and retellings in the modern day as a staple of Halloween. Source

Another one of Irving’s tales, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, stands as a significant cultural piece in the 19th century along with modern day as part of American identity. Originally published in a collection of 34 short essays titled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. In 1820 while Irving was living in Europe, the story became immensely popular in the United States as Irving’s fame had already settled thanks to A History of New York and Knickerbocker (Who is considered the narrator). The story is assumed to have been inspired by European myths of similar spirits. It is most relevant as a staple of Halloween; however, it sits as another piece of Dutch culture that Irving attempted (and succeeded) to make into the American identity.

The tale, if you didn’t know somehow, concerns the tall, lanky, implied to be Englishman, Ichabod Crane, the new schoolteacher for the sleepy, Dutch-settled little hovel of Sleepy Hollow, falling in love with the Dutch daughter, Katrina Van Tassel, and his rivalry with Brom Van Brunt, the burly son of the town. Ichabod after leaving a party, gets chased down by a spirit of the Headless Horseman, a German soldier who worked for the British beheaded by a cannonball, (the tale of which he had been told earlier that night) and his fate is left up in the air as a pumpkin smashes into him. Depending on how one reads or adapts it, either Brom or Ichabod could be the hero, as Ichabod desires to marry Katrina for her wealth while Brom rivals him.

           “In his devouring mind’s eye he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion-sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back, in a side dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living” (Irving 38-39).

Ichabod and Brom Bones as depicted in Disney’s adaptation of the story, clearly showing the described physical difference between the two. Source

Ichabod is characterized as being smart, cultured but greedy and fearful of the spirits despite his eagerness for them, looking at a thriving farm full of animals and seeing nothing but food and wealth, and singing psalms to himself to ward off wayward spirits on his way home at night. He is contrasted against the Dutch, as this thin “Scarecrow” like man against the content, hardworking “plump” Dutch. He is a stereotype of the British, lanky, educated, and greedy for the labors of others along with being from Connecticut, an important port state for the British as a part of the Triangular Trade (”Connecticut in the 1700s”).  If Ichabod is to be considered the concept of a British-blooded colonizer, then Brom Van Brunt is to be considered the Dutch settler, described as “Burly, roaring, roistering blade, …Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood” (Irving 40).

It is implied by the end, Brom (and the Dutch housewives who indulged Ichabod’s spiritual interests) chases Ichabod, the Anglo-Saxon, out of the Dutch settlement using the fears of the spirits by dressing as the Headless Horseman and using the produce of the hardworking Dutch farmers. “Brom Bones too, who shortly after his rival’s disappearance conducted the blooming Katrina in triumph to the altar, was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin” (54). Irving ingrains this story of the Dutch settlers, driving the Englishmen out of their sleepy, utopia-like home through use of the spiritual myth, into American culture, ingraining it with aspects of the foreigner identity, where it thrives even in the modern day.

An illustration of a “Hot Corn Seller”, a common job for lower class women where they sold cooked, warm corn cobs as an early form of street food. The figure of the “Hot Corn Girl” stands as an important aspect of American Culture as a figure of the common person among the rising Middle Class. Source

A question that the 19th century American had was, “What does the American look like?” as in what is an American in this newly created nation? Various made concepts were made, from Benjamin Franklin’s “Self-Made Man” that emphasized independence and self-learning, to Emphasizing certain aspects of the self like strength, the image of the militia men, nationalism, and the role of the common man. The letter writings of Lydia Maria Child emphasize the role of the common man, more importantly, the common man in combination with “the foreigner” as a symbol of what an American is.

Child emphasizes across most of her writings, the wondrous diversity that the American cities offered, as she was both an abolitionist and in disagree of the trend of the time to become suspicious of the foreigner. From a letter in 1841, addressed to no-one:

In a great metropolis like this, nothing is more observable than the infinite varieties of   character. Almost without effort, one  may happen to find  himself, in the course of a few   days, beside the Catholic kneeling before the Cross, the Mohammedan bowing to the East, the  Jew veiled before the ark of the testimony, the Baptist walking into the water, the Quaker keeping his head covered in the presence of dignitaries and solemnities of all sorts, and the Mormon quoting from the Golden Book which he has never seen (56).

She views this diversity as a characteristic, not a coincidence, of the American character. The character of the city, and America, is constant change and difference, She wrote “More, perhaps, than any other city, except Paris or New Orleans, this is a place of rapid fluctuation, and never ceasing change” (56).

Additionally, she sees the common voice as a cure to the noise of the city, represented in the archetype of the “Hot Corn Girl” that was popular during the 19th century.

Sometimes, the harsh sounds are pleasantly varied by some feminine voice, proclaiming in musical cadence, “Hot corn hot corn!" with the poetic addition of “Lily white corn! Buy my lily white corn!” When this sweet, wandering voice salutes my ear, my heart replies—

'Tis a glancing gleam o' the gift of song—

And the soul that speaks hath suffered wrong.

There was a time when all these things would have passed by me, like the flitting figures of the magic lantern, or the changing scenery of a theatre, sufficient for the amusement of an hour (2).

She represents the common voice, the role of the common man or in this case woman, as a reprieve and the heart of the city. Without the people, the city would be nothing but “harsh sounds” and an unpleasant labyrinth of stone. It is the people, the common man, to Child that make the city, and America, able to live in. The innovations of the city to her, are the fruits of labor of the working man, the American populace. “In that steamer (a steamboat), see you not an appropriate type of the busy, powerful, self-conscious Present? Of man's will conquering outward Force; and thus, making the elements his servants?” (4). Thus, she specifies the American as a community of working men, the common men by which their will the “outward force” will be made into invocation.

Most importantly, she states a need of a connection and love within that community, a shared interest in the other so that the whole may survive. She says, after a story about a donkey, “If affectionate treatment will thus idealize the jackass, what may it not do? Assuredly there is no limit to its power. It can banish crime and make this earth an Eden” (135). To Child, an American is the common man, who indulges a connected, diverse community.

           A nations entire cultural identity cannot be found out within a century, much less 1/4th of one. However, the new America still attempted, and one may call it “American Innovation”. Through stories, myths, tales, and idealizations, America made a culture for itself, built on the backs and cultures of foreigners, freedom seekers, and impish Narrators who got a basketball team named after himself. Like everything stated to be “truly American” the 19th century myth of the American identity exists as an odd mixture of various cultures, from the colonization foundation of the British, to the ideology of the Dutch from Irving, to the self-construction of Franklin’s “Self-Made Man”, to Child’s feverish celebration of Diversity in the face of xenophobia. Perhaps it is silly to even try to state there is a singular American identity, if America truly is a melting pot a side of tossed salad it seems odd to try to force that into a singular mold. However, I will still try as seems the boldness of the American.

The 19th century myth of the American identity, at least one variation of it, was a community focused, diverse concept founded on Irving’s Dutch foundation and indulged by a culture that supported unity against the British and celebration of Diversity as a trait. They created a culture in the absence of one, ignoring the Native American and villainizing the British. It is easy to see then why America was and is seen as this haven of the foreigner, with that sparkling image of the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island, a nation where peoples ideologies and culture are not forcibly thrown out but indulged and mixed in, in a simple word “freedom”. While that may not be the reality, it is the dream that America still upholds. Thus, I cannot say what the American is or what it looks like, since if we are to believe both the 19th century concept of the American and the modern day concept; there can never be a singular idea of an American. The singular American Identity is a myth, forever to be remain plural.

Child, Lydia Maria. “Letters from New-York”. 1841. Pgs. 2,4, 56, 135.

Irving, Washington. “A History of New York”

Irving, Washington. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, Edited by Charles Neider, 1820. Pgs. 34, 38-39, 40, 54.

Morrow, Ann. “New York’s Other Moniker.” August 2017. History Net, https://www.historynet.com/new-york-other-moniker-knickerbocker.htm

Paul, Heike. “The Myths that Made America: An Introduction to American Studies” 2014.

“Connecticut in the 1700s”. April 3rd, 2005. Hartford Courant, https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2005-04-03-0504050729-story.html

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Death, Photography, and The Monetization of Grief of the living in 19th century America

“A bright, a glorious smile passed over her face, and she said, brokenly,--"O, love,--joy,--peace!" gave one sigh, and passed from death unto life!

"Farewell, beloved child! the bright, eternal doors have closed after thee; we shall see thy sweet face no more. O, woe for them who watched thy entrance into heaven, when they shall wake and find only the cold gray sky of daily life, and thou gone forever!"

- The passing of little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852.

Memento Mori by Master IAM of Zwolle, Housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Source

Memento Mori, or to put it in simple non-Latin terms, “Remember you will die”. It is a phrase, a concept, and an artistic movement and convention (of specifically European origin). A Memento Mori, as an artistic movement, is a convention, where an element or icon of death is inserted to remind the viewer or reader of their own mortality. It can be something as simple as a cemetery to something vague as a raven, from skulls to ghosts. Death is a cultural foundation, a religious basing, and a fear for nearly every living creature, human or not. It is not an overstatement for me to say that Death influences nearly every aspect of culture, as much as life does, after all people say, “There’s two things you can’t escape in life, death and taxes”.

Countless drawings, stories, songs, poems, and all other forms of media have been made about the topic of death, confronting, talking to, seducing, defeating, tricking, accepting, and becoming death. Death has been personified, characterized, romanced, killed, and tricked in countless numbers of fictional situations by numerous characters, ranging from Dante’s Inferno exploring the Christian view of the afterlife to the Animaniacs annoying Death in a parody of The Seventh Seal. It is thus interesting to humor the concept of death being photographed.

The 19th century saw the invention of the modern concept of a camera, the first photograph being developed during this century along with the use of it as a scientific and artistic medium.  It also became a spiritual one, or at least a target of spiritualists (those who hoped to back spiritual beliefs with scientific-esc approaches) in this era.

The era is characterized by The Civil War (The specific era of the Civil War is called the Antebellum era), the racial dynamics at play, and the mass emergence of cities because of the Industrial Revolution. However, with these cities came a mass cultural shift and fear, people were unsure if their own eyes were trustworthy as they were ignorant to who and what was trustworthy in this unfamiliar environment of the city (in addition to the conmen, humbugs, and identity crisis of the era). Photography, by nearly everyone, was seem as a solution to this, as Photography was thought to be able to show what the “blind eye cannot see” that is, reality in its truest view. Spiritualists took full advantage of this concept claiming photography to be able to reveal the world beyond our eyes, the spirit world.

A postmortem photograph, depicting a mother holding her deceased child, Photographed by Hans P. Kraus Jr. Source

Spirit Photography would not be as shocking to the 19th century individual as one would think though, as postmortem photography was quickly ingrained into the culture surrounding death and its customs. This new culture of spiritualistic photography preyed on the death culture of the era, indulging the culture of mourning and grief, along with preying on people’s emotions and hopes. These individuals grief, plagued by war and rapid cultural shifts in the 19th century, played into the success and how people perceived and interacted with Spirit Photography and Spiritualism as a whole.

        For the 19th century people, grief was not simply an emotion, it become their lifestyle. Death was common, unavoidable, and depressingly hungry for children and then adults during the Civil War. Mourning, in the face of massive daily deaths in The Civil War (around 600,000 casualties by the end) and a desperate desire to find identity amongst the uncertainty of the city and the newly created middle class, became a need and people turned to other cultures:

But it was in the 1830s and 1840s that we saw mourning become an art form. There were many books written on the subject of how to mourn, what to wear, when to wear it. Of course, when Prince Albert died in 1861 and the Queen of England went into mourning, society on both sides of the ocean took on mourning with a vengeance.

That same year, the American Civil War began and death on a massive scale touched communities and families North and South. Mourning became a central fact of wartime life. Formal black mourning clothes -- even items of underwear and accessories like gloves and handkerchiefs had to be black -- were a society-wide necessity (Levins).

A photograph of a 19th century mourning woman, looking over an empty chair. Source

The Victorian social culture surrounding death demanded a public display of grief and emotion, putting immense social pressure on those grieving. The growing, new middle class of America hoping to emulate the “higher” classes absorbed new social cultures, the mourning culture from the “high-class” Victorians. People become fully engrossed in mourning, wearing black veils, clothing, jewelry made from hair of the deceased along dark jewels and dusty stones, their home décor would turn into collections of mementos, photos, objects, clocks, and other things in remembrance of the past (“19th Century Mourning”). Veils were used for multiple purposes, both emotional and spiritual:

"If I were to go out on the street in mourning in the 1860s, I would have covered my face with the veil. One reason is that it would shield the fact that I had been crying. You wouldn't see the tears of the mourner. But another of the superstitions they believed in back then was that spirits of the departed would hover around those they loved. And if a passerby looked directly on the mourner's face, that spirit might attach itself to that person. So, the veil was a protection for the wearer as well as a protection for others” (Levins).

People were instructed to mourn for months and years, the acceptable time depending on “Who” died (the longest being spouses at 1 to 2 ½ years), and there were set stages for women, deep mourning, second mourning, and half mourning which grievers would move through (Ken). The camera truly indulged this culture, as people kept lockets, wallet sized frames, and furniture-adjacent galleries of photos of the dead around.

A display of 19th century home décor during a grieving period in the National Museum of Funeral History’s exhibit. Source

This mourning was not only for grief sake, but also to show off wealth to some. Wakes and Funerals were social events, why not dab your eyes with your top-dollar lace handkerchiefs? For instance, “Memorial pictures, stitched using delicate silk threads and fine silk fabric, showed not only the financial wealth of those in mourning (all of that silk was not cheap), but also the financial freedom of the individual maker” (DePauw). Grief became a business all in itself, Mourning jewelry became a fashion statement of both sadness in the face of a loved one’s passing (represented by dark colored stones) and the livings wealth, being able to afford silk portraits, photographs, and brand new black dresses (that just so happened to have a nice silhouette) along with all the usual fees of a funeral.

However, this is not to discount the use of this décor or practicality of it. The funeral industry has not yet blossomed as would think of it today. Funerals were held at home, with the body displayed typically in the parlor area (which evolved into the living room after the funeral industry advances thanks in part to the Civil War’s death count). Declaring a person was truly dead was a week-long affair, as the exhibit in the National Museum of Funeral History states “During the days following a person’s death, the body was closely observed for three days to make sure the person didn’t wake from a deep sleep or illness before the funeral and burial – thus the term “wake” we use today for visiting/viewing the recently deceased.” So, the home of the grieving would have to be decorated for a long period, as the wake, the funeral, and the after period would need to be chaperoned by socially accepted mourning.

A 19th century daguerreotype of a recently deceased child, captured by Hans P. Kraus Jr. Source

        The invention of the photograph, specifically the daguerreotype, offered 19th century mourners a new way to grieve through direct, realistic imagery of their loved ones, dead or alive. To the grieving, “the introduction of the daguerreotype, a 19th century photography technique, enabled Victorians to capture spectral photographs of loved ones which illustrated their attitude towards intimacy and death” (Marks). A majority of photographs during the 19th century were not of the living however, but of the dead, these “spectral photographs” were results of the photography trends where the recent deceased were photographed to be remembered in increasingly odd and curious ways.

Postmortem photography became a trend, just as mourning culture had, due to the high fatality rate within the 19th century, especially among children and infants due to miscarriages, disease, and harsher living conditions along with the fact the first child labor law was only signed in 1836 in Massachusetts. This is in accordance with the cost of getting photographed or painted during the regular day to day to the lower and middle classes. It is true to say “at a time when paintings were expensive, the daguerreotype invention was an increasingly affordable way to remember and respect a loved one” (Marks) It was likely this would be the only photograph ever taken of the individual or the only full family photograph.

We should not ignore either the photographers view of this, as one Charlie E. Orr put it, “unpleasant duty to take the picture of a corpse” (Christian). The process of taking a Postmortem photograph was a challenge (more so in positioning than the requirement the subject had to sit for a long period) for the newly created photographers, as cameras were few and far between in the early 19th century meaning most photographers were likely young and lacked experience. Charlie E. Orr himself wrote a brief article to assist those who had to do this “unpleasant duty”.

A lineup of a families children, the youngest had died before her fifth birthday (as was sadly common) and she is propped up to appear standing with her siblings. Source

A tintype photograph of a recently deceased infant, the child’s eyes were hand-painted to appear open, circa 1870. Source

The corpses of the deceased were displayed a variety of ways, depending on the tone or way the passed wanted to be remembered or the current trends style and thought of children, from laying down like one would do in a casket or perhaps in their sleep, to interacting with loved ones directly, to being propped up with their eyes open to appear alive (Some photographs had eyes painted on afterwards). The cadavers of babies would be decorated in flowers, held by their mothers, depicted next to siblings, dressed in their best and held up to appear lively, and surrounded by their toys. The composition of these photographs changed throughout the 19th century, as photography as a medium developed, the role of children changed, and the concept of death evolved:

Postmortem photographs taken prior to the 1860s depict death as if it had just happened; many images from this era share similar poses and details. Most of these photographs concentrate on just the face or head, laid out on furniture in the home or placed on a bed or in a child’s buggy. With many photographs showing the body laid out, sometimes on a bed, the viewer is invited to understand the death as a visual representation of the “last sleep.” These photographs were not intended to dupe the viewer into assuming the deceased was still alive but rather they would be posed in such a way that to recall or depict the subject as if they were just asleep, thus softening the sad reality that they had died. In this way, the postmortem photograph represents the body at peace.

A black mother, holding her deceased child, likely post 1860 based on the composition. Source

… With this changing role (from labors to schoolchildren), postmortem photographs of children also began to change. For example, this photograph (a similar one posted above) from 1860 depicts a recently deceased young girl, who is sitting on the lap of her mourning mother. The mother’s face is straight and unwavering, looking directly at the camera. She holds her daughters hand for the last time, as her small body is cradled by her mothers. Her mother is clearly in mourning. Many photographs of this decade began to include the presence of loved ones, either around the body of the recently deceased, or embracing or touching them in some way. (Christian).

While these photographs may seem horrifying, even disrespectful to us in the modern day, it should be restated this may have been the only photo of the individual, the only time families (mostly middle or higher class) could get a memento or a family photo including the passed.  In other words, it is a Memento Mori for the Victorian and Antebellum family. It is death immortalized, in the medium thought to truly represent reality by the 19th century person.

Two “spirit-pictures” captured by Mumler, the woman on the left with her child and the woman on the right holding a baby with a man behind her. can you notice similarities between the composition of postmortem photographs and these photographs? Source , Source

        It is not then too much of a leap then to see how people would want to believe in Spirit Photography (mid 1800s), as they had already been taking photos of the deceased for decades at this point.  Spirit Photography as a concept was created by Spiritualists of the 19th century, hoping to validate their spiritual beliefs via the upcoming technology and scientific areas, where they believed spirits would show up in photographs, labeled “spirit-pictures” as cameras were believed to have the ability to “see the real world our eyes wont show us”. The Spiritualists can be summarized as a “loosely organized semi-religious group active in the mid-to-late 1800s. They shared a number of core beliefs: that human spirits are eternal; that spirits possess superior wisdom from which the living may benefit; and that spirits can communicate with the living world “(O’Hearn). One Spiritualist said on the topic of Spirit Photography in 1862, “If this phenomenon in spiritual manifestations be genuine, it is the greatest and the best yet given to outside perception in the catalogue of a long variety which bear incontrovertible evidence of the truth that spiritual communications are what they claim to be” (Kaplan 39). Spiritualism found popularity in part to the massive cultural stress that the Civil War created. In the face of massive death and sadness, it seems only just they began to see the dead as higher beings and hoped there was an afterlife that awaited them.

However, the one famously called the creator of this concept was not a spiritualist, though he later grew into one believing himself a medium publicly, but an amateur photographer by the name William Mumler who took the first “spirit-picture” in 1861. Mumler himself states in his 1875 autobiography published in the Boston: Colby and Rich newspaper, “I felt that the innumerable hosts of living, intelligent beings who had passed to a higher life were with me, to sustain and assist in fighting the ignorance, bigotry, and blindless of the human race in this their earthly condition” (79). The method, the most probable, was recalled by Mumler from another, “his opinion was that the negative was taken upon an old glass that had previously been used for the same purpose, but had been insufficiently cleaned; and when a second negative was taken upon the same glass, the latent form, so to speak, was re-developed sufficiently to give an indistinct and shadowy outline” (70). This method has been reproduced multiple times, though several other methods Mumler may of used have been suggested, and to this day people are still photoshopping ghosts into photographs (though not with the same method).

The publics belief in Spirit Photography, that it could really capture the spirits of the dead, was indulged by their own mourning culture which included the trend of postmortem photography, long periods of mourning, and remembrance of the dead, alongside the horrors of war. One William Cornell Jewet, desperate for the Civil War to end, sought out Mumler for help:

“Sir,” said he, “I must consult with the spirits of distinguished statesmen. We need their counsel. This cruel war must stop. Brethern slaying brethren, it is horrible, Sir. Can you show me John Adams? Can you show me Daniel Webster? Let me look upon the features of Andrew Jackson” (64).

This is not to shame the grieving for falling for this humbug, but to simply give credit to why it was successful. In a culture that indulged death so openly, why not seek out those who claim they can speak and view those spirits of the dead?

Two spirit photographs captured by Mumler, the left a man with a ghostly spirit touching an anchor emblem on his jacket the right a woman being stroked on the head by a younger woman. Source, Source.

        These “spirit-pictures” helped people mourn and grieve over their lost loved ones (especially if they had never gotten a photo of them previously). The spirits of people were pictured holding the hands of the living, touching significant objects, being held by mothers, on the laps of fathers, and behind the participant lovingly wrapped around them. An associate, of Mumler named William Silver said in regards to the Spirit Photographs “persons who had lost their relatives and others dear to them… sometimes would not part with [their spirit photographs] for thousands of dollars” (Leja 21). It’s even clearer the response these photos indulged when viewing statements from customers, recalled by Mumler, in a society seemingly obsessed with remembrance and the capture of reality. Four different responses from Four different men, who received photos of their sister, wife, and children respectfully:

“On developing the negative, the form of a young lady was seen sitting in the chair, supported by what seemed to be a pillow at her back. Mr. Ewell and his family recognized this as his sister, who passed away in this position of consumption” (Kaplan 74)

(When recounting a customer’s experience) “I took one out and held it up to the light, when I unexpectedly discovered it in a perfect likeness of my wife” (77)

“This was a beautiful test, and Mr. S. found it difficult to restrain the tears, as he gazed upon the truthful likeness of his spirit-child” (76)

“Mr. Miller, on receiving his pictures, stated that it was an unmistakable likeness of his boy, and there was not enough money in the world to displace it” (77).

In a particularly famous situation (and photograph), around 1869 the widow of the late president, Abraham Lincoln, who died in 1865 (around 5 years after Mumler started) visited Mumlers studio to get a spirit photo taken in hopes of seeing her late husband. Mrs. Lincoln draped in mourning attire visited the studio under the alias “Mrs. Lindall” and had her photo taken as a “test”. Mumler said, “When my wife resumed her normal condition, she found Mrs. L weeping tears of joy that she had again found her loved ones, and apparently anxious to learn, if possible, how long she could join them in their spirit home” (93). By far the most interesting thing is that the photo Mumler took is widely considered to be the last known photo of Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln alive. In it, Abraham Lincoln appears (At least his head) his hands lovingly placed on her shoulders in a final embrace.

A spirit photo of Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln with Abraham’s spirit behind her, taken by Mumler in 1869. Source

P.T. Barnum, an open opposer of Mumler and Spirit Photography, stated the hope these Spirit Photographs instilled in people and why Spirit Photography was so lucrative:

“Mothers came to the room of the artist, and gratefully retired with ghostly representations of departed little ones. Widows came to purchase the shades of their departed husbands. Husbands visited the photographer and procured spectral pictures of their dead wives. Parents wanted phantom-portraits of their deceased children. Friends wished to look upon what they believed to be the lineaments of those who had long since gone to the spirit-land. All who sought to look on those pictures were satisfied with what had been shown them, and, by conversation on the subject, increased the number of visitors (62).

It’s obvious why people sought out spirit photographs, sometimes to trick and reveal the truth of Mumler, but a larger majority sought him out for emotional comfort in the mourning process.

        However, while these photos gave comfort and help in the mourning process for some, we cannot ignore what Mumler gained from his trickery (hint: it’s a lot), and more importantly, what he charged. As Megan Garber of the Atlantic declares on the topic of Mumler, “While he was ultimately selling nostalgia and comfort, what was he technically selling were portraits of clients posed alongside the "spirits" of their deceased loved ones. He sold those for between $5 and $10 apiece.” Let us remember that this “5$ and 10$ apiece” is in mid-1800s standards, if we convert it to modern currency using an inflation calculator, these grieving souls be paying around 156$ to 313$. Additionally, that would only be one sitting, Mumler typically had people sit for multiple sittings for a spirit to appear (when he likely could have done it in one). This price was done in part to keep the “vulgar multitude” away referring to the lower classes, as an associate of Mumler stated (Leja, 21).

Returning to our friend William Jewet, he sat for a minimum of 4 different sittings in addition to “paying fifty for what he had witnessed” and later he “ordered duplicates of these photographs to the value of $20 more” meaning Jewet, paying 10$ for each sitting, spent at least 110$  on Mumler’s fraudulent “spirit-pictures” (Kaplan 64-67). This equals about 3,444$ today for the desperate hope that the wisdom of the nation’s forefathers would bless him and help the war end.

While these spirit photographs could be called harmless if Mumler was simply producing them for free or for the cost of camera supplies, the action quickly turns into a humbug and manipulation of the mourning when he charged 10$ for the photos, which was nearly “five times the usual rate for portrait cartes de visite” (Leja, 21). Rightfully so, Mumler was put to trial for these photographs and was charged with “two felonies and one misdemeanor, all having to do with fraud, larceny, and “obtaining money by trick and device.”” (24).

Mumler was not found guilty, as the prosecution failed to persuade, however his career never truly recovered afterwards. Additionally, “the failure of the prosecution was not complete, however. It had educated those following the trial in the technical processes of photography and the opportunities they provided for chicanery, and it had prompted skeptical looking” (57). Mumler ironically had both made people aware that photography could be deceiving, breaking the illusion it was the truest view of reality, and created an uplift in spiritualists, those believing the human spirit to exist beyond death and creating the modern iteration and portrayal of ghosts.

         The 19th century was a century plagued by death and distress. The Civil War by its ends in 1865 took the lives of over 600,000 men (The 2nd most deadly US event taken only by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic). Diseases ravaged the new, tightly packed cities, resulting in massive death, especially among children who already had lower chances of survival. The new cities brought anxieties to people, making them uncertain of the masses and promoting a worldview of looking at things with suspicion and danger. This daily, constant death took its toll on the culture, ingraining death into nearly every part of life. Culture itself became a Memento Mori of sorts. Because of this, the people of the 19th century gained a significant interest in Spiritualism, Religion, and Exoticism, with desperate hope there is some life after death or that the spiritual has reasoning found in our world. This belief pushed people to want to believe in Spirit Photography, those pitiful mourners hoping to see the faces of the deceased once more as they were in the living flesh or seeking the advice of forefathers to end a blood, awful war.

Various Covers of TIME’s special reports of the Coronavirus all sharing the phrase “When the World Stops”, Source

It is distressing to me then to look at our own culture, amid a health pandemic and resulting cultural shift, to see similar trends in Photography and desperate hope in the spiritual. In the last year, what I call “Disease Photography” has become part of 2020’s culture, photographs of hospitals stacked wall to wall with people, the faces of doctors and nurses wrapped in protective cloth and masks, empty arenas and venue halls, crowds of people their faces hid behind protective masks or inside houses in fear of an invisible threat. It would be irresponsible to say that this event will have no impact on our culture, as Death Photography expanded into the early 20th century, People still “photograph” ghosts today, and the figure of a woman draped in black with a veil covering her face is still significant. The modern iteration of the ghost, after all, was accidentally made by a humbug, created by a man seeking to profit off a cultural crisis. What will stay after this year is over? What will remain after the virus has moved on? For me, it surely will be a remembrance that I will die.

Works Cited

Christian, Kelly. “The Unpleasant Duty: An Introduction to Postmortem Photography.” March 9th, 2016. The Order of the Good Death, http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/unpleasant-duty-introduction-postmortem-photography

DePauw, Karen. “Mourning in the 19th century.” October 16, 2014. Connecticut Historical Society Museum & Library, https://chs.org/2014/10/mourning-19th-century/

Garber, Megan. “When Cameras Took Pictures of Ghosts.” October 30th, 2013. The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/when-cameras-took-pictures-of-ghosts/281010/

Historical Ken. “19th Century Mourning Practices.” July 10th, 2011. Passion for The Past, http://passionforthepast.blogspot.com/2011/07/19th-centurt-mourning-practices-revised.html

Kaplan, Louis. “The Strange Case of William Mumler Spirit Photographer.” Pgs. 39, 62-79, 93. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Leja, Michael. “Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp.” University of California Press, 2004. Pgs. 21, 24, 57.

Levins, Hoag. “A LIVELY LOOK AT THE HISTORY OF DEATH : Exploring the Architecture and Rituals of Civil War-Era Mourning.” Camden County, N.J. : Civil War Connections http://historiccamdencounty.com/ccnews43.shtml

Marks, Anna. “Death and the Daguerreotype: The Strange and Unsettling World of Victorian Photography.” December 30th, 2016. Vice, https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgqj3z/the-daguerreotype-unsettling-world-of-victorian-photography

O’Hearn, Megan. “But it looks so real! The parallel rise of photography and Spiritualism.” October 20th, 2016. Artstor, https://www.artstor.org/2016/10/20/but-it-looks-so-real-the-parallel-rise-of-photography-and-spiritualism/

“19th Century Mourning.” National Museum of Funeral History, https://www.nmfh.org/exhibits/permanent-exhibits/19th-century-mourning

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P.T. Barnum, Exoticism, and the Magic of Marketing

“Constantly being advertised a life commercialized and disguised

As Happiness in pills and potions, fancy threads, and cars in motion

Hypnotized by gilded lies to line the pocket of so few…

Big Brother’s watching you and tryin’ to sell you something new…

The revolution is in your mind.”

                    - Revolution by Heartless Bastards, source

You’ve done it before! You liked a commercial, everyone has. You saw it on TV, online, on a billboard, a bus, a bench, a cereal box, in a magazine, a book, or even, perhaps, the side of a building.  People enjoy those Old Spice commercials with Terry Crews on the horse, those talking Superbowl babies (who have aged terribly) , somebody likes those creepy Burger King ads with The King, and people have nostalgia over vintage advertising they remember seeing in their childhood like the iconic Tootsie-roll Pop ad with the owl. Who can forget that signature CRUNCH after all? People watch commercials, they quote advertising, and they wear marketing (I’m wearing one right now regrettably). Countless people wait yearly for the Superbowl just for the advertising, seeing it as the best of the best of people trying to sell stuff to them.

The world’s first legal TV Commercial, a ten second ad by Bulova Watches, aired July 1st, 1941. Source

Advertising is everywhere in our lives nowadays, as the new digital age allows ads to populate the isolated corners of nearly everything. The modern person does not even typically realize how much advertising we as a culture digest in a singular day until you really think about it, including every single source and type of marketing. The popular culture of the modern day almost completely consists of brands and companies, from Apple to Android, from Nintendo to Microsoft, from Nike to Adidas, brands and icons create the pop culture tapestry we weave. One of the most famous pop art pieces is literally a painting of a Soup company’s product (granted it is an artistic comment on consumerism). It is fitting then that the man who is regularly called the origin of Modern American culture, P.T. Barnum, used roughly similar advertising methods and mechanisms we do today, for better or worse, even starting some of these trends.

Afterall, there is not much difference between the Snake Oil salesmen of yesteryear and the Essential Oil salespeople of today. Through his publications, speeches, humbugs, posters, and all other means of marketing, P.T. Barnum reflects modern marketing techniques, using an icon to market oddities, branding to establish environment, and methods like exoticism and signaling to include the consumer.

A late 1800s Meat and Livestock Ad from San Jose, California. Source.

               Advertising's main goal, in general, is to capture the attention of the viewer and influence them to purchase or indulge in a product, service, or experience. They may target new audiences, old audiences, or current audiences that already use their product. They do this in a variety of ways, from attempting to relate to an audiences emotions, personal life, self, or situation (we see this a lot during our current COVID-19 era as we see numerous commercials using the phrase “In these unprecedented times”) to being eye-catching or memorable to being intentionally controversial or remarking on current social issues (though this method tends to backfire as you’ll see) (“Advertising”).

Interestingly, in this digital era we also see an influx of brands attempting to “humanize” their image via twitter and other social media platforms or spaces as a form of marketing to relate to the audience (such as Wendy’s twitter). Below is an instance of this attempt, Nescafe trying to use the growing LGBT+ community in the United States as an audience by humanizing the brand using LGBT+ community language to relate to them (badly and in a tone-deaf way). We can also see this specific form of audience targeting during June, as it is LGBT+ pride month.

An advertisement for Nescafe Azera’s Americano instant coffee’s limited edition “Identity” tin design featuring several gender expression symbols. Source.

The 19th century saw a surge in new advertising methods as the industrial revolution enabled the ability to mass-produce products, requiring a need to differentiate them. Prior to around the mid-19th century, advertising was more narrative in length, an example “Peter Smith, Merchant, has received a large shipment of merchandise at his shop in Market Street, which he will sell on reasonable terms; among which are buttons, wire, Bibles, hats, fine ribbons, feather beds, and pocket knives” (Gatrell). The later 19th century saw a promotional tone emerge, easily recognizable by modern viewers. The new mass-production methods also enabled more variance in advertisements:

Newspapers and, later, magazines were the media most often used for advertising for most of the 19th century, but they were rather slow to adopt color and vividly promotional messages. Advertising began to appear in other places and in other formats: in theater programs, on maps, calendars, postcards, menus, envelopes, decals, in many forms of booklets and leaflets (almanacs, sales catalogs, etc.), and imprinted on utilitarian objects such as trays, ink blotters and can openers (Gatrell).

P.T. contributed, used, and revitalized various marketing means (some of being new creations of the industrial revolution), in some instances “Barnum produced multiple promotional pamphlets for the same exhibition; and this is to say nothing of the thousands of newspapers advertisements, playbills lithographs, posters, and souvenir photographs in conjunction with the pamphlets” (Cook 103).  He used newspaper advertisements, posters, public events and boasts, media tours, and various others means to get his creations publicized, criticized, and discussed. (Foster). P.T. Barnum specifically chose for these to be eye-catching or attempting to relate and include his audience within the advertisement, using exaggeration and exoticism, to draw the viewer in and make them curious for his curiosities.

Two Variations of “Wonderful Albino Family” advertisement depicting the family. Source, Source.

We can clearly see this eye-catching advertising through several of his posters, from Joice Heth with her long, claw like hands and weathered pure black skin, to the “Wonderful Albino Family” above who have exaggerated hair, skin paleness, and foreign aspects. However, these advertisements have layers that attempt to include or relate to the audience at the same time. In the “Wonderful Albino Family” advertisement while the exaggeration of the foreign aspects captures people’s exoticism, the trend where people are drawn to things from unknown or foreign regions, it still holds aspects of the 19th century middle class lifestyle, like the violin, dress of the children, and the nuclear family.

An advertisement for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Source.

Brands, as I said, are an important part of the pop culture environment in the modern day however they still held importance in the 19th century considering it’s where they were born. The industrial revolution allowed the creation of the modern-day concept of brands to be formed, as products could be made faster, quicker, and more importantly, massively produced to the point there was a need to differentiate similar products from one another. “There was a growing use of names that did not directly relate to the manufacturer. Identifiable names had to be developed to enhance the appeal of, for example, a soap, or create a distinctive image for a cigarette” (“The History of Brands”).

Throughout his career, P.T. Barnum become a brand in himself, possibly one of the first true brands, his face become linked with this museum, his circus, and his entire life of humbugs. Afterall, he himself boasted, “It was now unnecessary to put his name on the posters. The mere sight of his face was all the information the public needed” and “Whenever my manager advertises that I am to be present, he estimates the increase in the receipts to be £200 per day” (Cook 1). If that is not a brand, I don’t know what is as if it is not a product so recognizable you can recall it from a simple image. It is also possible that P.T. Barnum was the one of the first worldwide brands, as the former president Ulysses S. Grant said “Wherever I went, in China, Japan, the Indies, &c., the constant inquiry was, “Do you know Barnum?” I think, Barnum, you are the best-known man in the world”. However, this infamy may be partly Barnum’s boasts, as was his tendency.

His brand became an extension of himself, as we see that commonly with people like Jeffree Star and other celebrity owned brands (ironic considering Barnum had one of the first Celebrity-led marketing campaigns), his name became ingrained in the brand and him along with it as its icon. He demonstrated a new step in the commercial entertainment industry, a type of fame that was “American made, mass produced, and globally distributed” (1).

An advertisement trading card featuring Jumbo advertising a soap Brand, 1880. “Trade cards” were popular during the 1880s and 1890s as color printing became available. Source.

P.T. Barnum’s brand carried certain expectations regarding the quality, performance, and specifically environment of the experience. P.T. Barnum by the time he had his museum, and most definitely by the time he had his circus, had gained his reputation as a displayer of oddities, a man who showed humbugs, and as a place for everybody to see the odds and ends of the world. Much like how Disney has specific rules banning smoking or drinking inside the parks along with use of artificial smells and music, P.T. Barnum attempted to uphold a certain environment within his facilities.

“During the late 1840s, for example, Barnum did not simply embrace temperance principles and sign the teetotaler pledge (a movement against drinking alcohol). He also framed his pledge and hung it in the entrance to his museum, hoping to recruit a more “respectable” class of consumer”. Barnum’s efforts to regulate public taste, moreover, necessarily coexisted with his market-driven need to appease, flatter, and indulge. (Cook 104)

Barnum attempted to specifically market to certain audiences, those of families, upper class consumers, and the newly created middle class (AKA those with money). He was targeting a specific audience, like those brands during Pride Month when they change their iconography to rainbows. He banned smoking within his American museum, and drinking was not allowed in his circuses to please the families, and an air of mystery was kept around every single humbug, illusion, and oddity to draw people in.

An advertisement for “What is It?” depicting him being viewed by the white consumers. Source.

“What is It?” is a primal example of this “air of mystery” that Barnum collected around his advertisements, P.T. Barnum marketed him, presumed to be a disabled black man, as “The What is it? Or, Man-Monkey! A most singular animal, which, though it has many of the features and characteristics of both the human and brute, it is not apparently, either, but, in appearance, a mixture of both” and “…pronounced by them (scientists) to be a connecting link between the wild native African and the brute creation” (134-135). “What is It?” is called by Barnum to be this mysterious connection between the “wild native African” and animal, a link to the presumed state of Africa and the newly expanding sciences. The advertisement also stresses the respectibility of the exhibit despite the subject matter. He never states him (let us at least give him that courtesy) to be man or animal, but something in between, between truth and deception.

“What is It?” also displays a common marketing element in Barnum’s advertisements, the act of exoticism and exaggeration, along with the inclusion of white faces to relate to the viewer. P.T. Barnum’s audience would be majority white, considering legal slavery would only end in 1863 and the large population of the newly freed Black Americans would find themselves as part of the lower classes, or segregated from the venues Barnum displayed himself in. Barnum wrote in a response letter to the New York Tribune in 1855, in regards to allowing blacks and whites to mix “I shall manage the Baby Show, as I manage all other enterprises in which I engage, with a respectful deference for the social usages of the community I seek to please” (204). Let us remind ourselves, the community he sought to please was the new middle-class, a sea of white.

Thus, the advertisement pictures several white middle-class consumers staring and perceiving the “exotic” element, “What is It?” dressed in presumably tribal clothing holding a rustic spear. It also exaggerates the white audience’s heights in relation to the black individual, making them seem taller and him seem smaller, crouched, and more animalistic. The marketing selects the specific audience, of the white-middle class, relates to them through depiction of white faces, and pulls them in using their exoticism and views of the African race and country, as Kevin Young puts it, “heathen jungle to be tamed, Christianized, colonized, bested, bought” (28).

Kendall Jenner handing Pepsi over to the police officers in the commercial. Source.

This act of Exaggeration and attempt of relation, sinking into Exoticism, is clearly seen in a recently controversial ad depicting Kendall Jenner advertising Pepsi, aired during the Black Lives Matter protests of Police Brutality after Michael Brown’s death in 2014. The ad depicts Kendall Jenner approaching the protest, crosses the empty space between the sides, hands a police officer a Pepsi, and suddenly the fighting stops, music swells, and everybody happily converges thanks to…Pepsi of all things. Correctly, the ad was immediately criticized for being tone deaf, insulting to the movement, and trivializing of the issues Black Americans go through in America. Aurielle Marie, a protest organizer, clearly states why people were angry at the ad, “In a political moment drenched in the blood, sweat, and tears of working-class Black folks who resist systemic violence, the use of our work to forward to financial gain is a violent, sinister act devoid of morality.”

The commercial exaggerates Pepsi’s influence on this complex situation, implying “No protest is complete without a Pepsi”, along with bordering on exoticism, preying on the public’s interest of the protests surrounding Michael Browns death and Black Americans (Marie). I argue that this commercial is a modern example of exoticism, as many Americans (specifically white Americans) didn’t feel a connection to these protests, looking askance at the situation, and thus they felt the whole issue foreign.

P.T. Barnum through his various means of marketing, his posters, newspaper publications, museum banners (Which became the norm), lithographs, boasts, public exhibits, and more showed the first concepts of the modern marketing method, targeting specific audiences and classes of people, by relating to them and including them in the advertisements, and peaking their curiosity in the product. He himself brand icon, becoming linked to his entire franchise indefinitely, used this brand to create a specific environment to cater to specific audiences, and used techniques like exaggeration and the popular culture of exoticism to relate to his audience (who knew little to nothing of the truth of Africa). It is somewhat interesting that these marketing techniques have only changed slightly in the past few centuries, though perhaps that is simply proof that humans don’t change much overall. As I stated before, snake oil salesmen and essential oil salespeople aren’t that different. Both push a product claiming to be a medical cure, with little to no scientific backing, towards people desperate for such things in an era of disease. I dread to think what P.T. Barnum would be like today, especially in context of social media.

“Advertising”.  The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, November 13th 2019. https://www.britannica.com/topic/advertising

Foster, Ashley. “The End of a Publicity Era: How Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ Founder Affected Marketing and Public Relations”. January 20th, 2017. https://bigcom.com/2017/01/pt-barnum-marketing-and-public-relations/

Gartrell, Ellen. “More About Advertising Ephemera and the Advertising Ephemera Collection”. Emergence of Advertising in America. https://web.archive.org/web/20160629013641/http://library.duke.edu:80/digitalcollections/eaa/guide/ephemera/

Marie, Aurielle. “OpEd: Pepsi and the Systemic Violence of Capitalism”. April 6th, 2017. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/oped-pepsi-systemic-violence-capitalism-n743166

Phineas T. Barnum. “The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It In the Universe.” Edited by James W. Cook, 2005, pgs. 1-2, 104, 134-135, 204-205.

“The History of Brands”. https://www.britishbrandsgroup.org.uk/brands/the-history-of-brands/

Young, Kevin. “The Freaks of Dame Fortune”. Bunk : The rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, 2007, pg. 28.

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Skipping along the Surface: Exaggeration in the Antebellum Era

Illustrations from a collection of animal fables, The Public and Private lives of Animals from 1877. Source.

       In the early half of the 19th century, the cities were where you wanted to be. An unexpected number of young people were suddenly packing their humble, rural lives and going to the city in hopes of wealth, social life, and to join the tail end of the industrial revolution.

From the moment people set foot in these utopias of stone and iron, the culture around them shifted. These people were no longer in their small towns where everybody knew everybody else (think Huckleberry Finn) instead they were in large cities, with streets full of bustling strangers (who you could never know every single of as more arrived daily). This caused a massive cultural shift in how people interacted with each other (not unlike our technological age), where people feared each other, the unknown, the stranger.

An illustration of a New York Street from the book “Nooks and Crannys of Old New York” (1899). Source

Granted, a fear of strangers has always been present, however there is a stark difference between a single carpetbagger (a lovely word I know) entering your small farming town and an entire street being filled with faces you don’t know. This fear of being unable to discern who can be trusted and who cannot from face alone, caused people to turn to Advice manuals, psuedosciences, and become interested in the externality of the human form with daguerreotype (a form of early photography) galleries, the “art” of Minstrelsy, and what the surface of the form tells. This use of Exaggeration of the human form in the 19th century, from Literature to the pseudoscience of Physiognomy to Minstrelsy, served as the surface of underlining societal fears and beliefs.

The term “Exaggeration” typically simply means, as defined by Merriam – Webster “an act or instance of exaggerating something, overstatement of the truth.” However, I will be asking you to, well, exaggerate the meaning a bit, to include any act twists the truth, draw excessive notice to certain aspects to something, or overall, to make a situation seem comedically unrealistic.

Count Alfred D’Orsay’s 1843 Help Manual on Proper Etiquette, Howe’s 1856 Complete Ball-room Hand Book. Source / Source

        This mass migration of the youth to urban areas caused moralists to worry over how these young middle-class people separated from the “surveillance” of their families, towns, and churches would learn how to “properly” live life. Thus, this issue was solved by dozens of teachers, clergymen, and writers in the 1830s who published numerous manuals for living life, in an endless number of topics, like the ones pictured above. These manuals instructed young readers how to have proper manners, morals, appearance, good habits, along with more specific topics like proper dress, ball room dance, what to eat, when and whom to marry, among all other things (Haltunnen 1).

While some were simple etiquette books other manuals exaggerated the dangers of the city, likely only furthering this fear of strangers. While new arrivals were likely easy targets for what these authors describe as “Confidence Men” who preyed on trust, the descriptions of them and their influence was often fantastical. One manual stated, “The moment the inexperienced youth sets his foot on the sidewalk of the city, he is marked and watched by eyes that he never dreamed of” later on in the same passage, “There is she…who now makes war upon virtue and exults in being a successful recruiting-officer of hell.” (2)

These manuals would use words and phrases like “Seducer” and “Force of Evil” to describe the criminals in the cities, linking them to the devil and hell (as Christianity still held a firm grasp on people). Some even claiming the mere presence of these young people in the city can “corrupt them”:

“Feel as they may, contact with evil it is impossible to avoid. If they walk the streets of the city, or tread the floors of the hall, it is to see the sights, and hear sounds, and be subjected to influences, all of which, gradually and imperceptibly, but surely and permanently, are drawing the lines of deformity on their hearts” (5).

They would twist and exaggerate these conmen into masterful archetypal villains, cloaked in the shadows of the large city buildings. In the antebellum advice literature, the dramatic plot became an “inexperienced young man had just set foot in the city when he is approached by a confidence man seeking to dupe and destroy him” (3). This exaggeration of these conmen simply stood in because of people’s fears about strangers in this era (and their influence), along with the fears people had about being duped and deceptions.

The Norton Critical Edition Cover for The Confidence-Man. Source

      Herman Melville, famously known for Moby Dick, published a satirical book in 1857 about “Confidence Men” simply titled The Confidence-Man, commenting on people’s fears of these conmen and the general fear of “the other” people held. In this book, nearly every character is questionable regarding their motives, personality, and “truth” as it were, with very little description regarding them beyond appearance. Some characters only characteristic is their appearance, like “the man in the gray suit” who is a supposed charity man, making light of how people constantly questioned the people around them on surface level characteristics. The man in the grey suit makes a plea of charity, of confidence, to a rich man after explaining his dream of a “world-wide” charity fueled by the taxation of the entire globe:

"Eight hundred millions! More than that sum is yearly expended by mankind, not only in vanities, but miseries. Consider that bloody spendthrift, War. And are mankind so stupid, so wicked, that, upon the demonstration of these things they will not, amending their ways, devote their superfluities to blessing the world instead of cursing it? Eight hundred millions! They have not to make it, it is theirs already; they have but to direct it from ill to good.” (The Confidence Man, pg. 61)

The expanse and exaggeration of this scheme was obviously a prodding to the audience, as the man repeats the phrase “Eight Hundred Millions” to draw the listener back in time and time again as they get lost in his words. While this man is purposely left grey, he uses the language help manuals specified to “Confidence Man” later in the book egging a woman on by preying on her religion and morals. “"Entire stranger! …Ah, who would be a stranger? In vain, I wander; no one will have confidence in me… No one can befriend me, who has not confidence” He says, stretching a hand out to the woman in true or mock desperation, exaggerating his words so it seems he has no assistance in the world (despite the fact two other people gave money to him earlier in the book) (68). The book allows a fog to be cast over everybody, the conmen might be a singular conman in costumes, multiple conmen, or not conmen at all, it is up for the reader to decide after all.

Leonine specimens: Illustration in Giambattista della Porta’s De humana physiognomia (Naples, 1602). Source

      This fear of strangers pushed people to figure out methods of determining who is “malicious” and “conniving” in the streets. What better place to turn than a pseudoscience entirely focused on outer appearance? Physiognomy is a pseudoscience about determining people’s inner characteristics by their outer appearance. It focuses on how people’s heads, features, and sometimes limbs are shaped, sized, and compared with themselves and each other. It is readily apparent why people in the 19th century readily enveloped this, choosing to exaggerate people’s appearance for the sake of satisfaction.

Physiognomy have roots dating back to 500 BC, where “Aristotle wrote that large-headed people were mean, those with small faces were steadfast, broad faces reflected stupidity, and round faces signaled courage”. In the 1600s, the first book regarding Physiognomy was published by Giambattista della Porta, believed to be the “Father” of the psuedoscience. The above illustration is from that book, comparing humans to animals (that one being a rather odd-looking lion), implying shared personalities. He guessed that humans have a “pure essence”, suggesting “that one could deduce an individual’s character from empirical observation of his physical features” (Waldorf).

Various books were published regarding Physiognomy in the 19th century, including Comparative Physiognomy: or, Resemblances Between Men and Animals in 1852 and Portraits of Patients from Surrey County Asylum in 1855. We can see the fascination of Physiognomy continue into the 1900s with books such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader from 1902, and The Physiognomy of Hands from 1917.

An illustration from Comparative Physiognomy, comparing “Negreos” to the profile of a fish, pg. 171. Source.

     Comparative Physiognomy: or, Resemblances Between Men and Animals thus calls back to the first book of Physiognomy, comparing the human form to that of animals and implying shared traits with an emphasis on nationality. From simply reading the chapter list it becomes obvious there is some racial bias in play (Which comes all too easily to Physiognomy).  Germans, Englishmen, and Prussians are compared to animals representing strength and cunning like lions, bulls, and cats while “Negroes”, Jews, and “Chinamen” are compared to prey and service animals like fishes, goats, and hogs. The book states, “Are not those half-closed, drowsy eyes, as seen in the portrait on the following page, a striking element of Chinese beauty?”  and “The best point in the character of a hog is not a ravenous disposition, but simply a taste for anything and everything—an un-bounded appetite, perfect digestion, and great tendency to grow fat” (Redfield, 167-168).

An illustration from Comparative Physiognomy comparing a portrait of a woman to that of a hog, pg. 167. Source

In the chapter that compares Africans to the fishes along their coast, the author states an interesting argument:

Catching negroes is akin to fishing, and the caught are stowed away on board vessels like cod-fish and whale oil; and were it not that they resemble fishes, and that there is a feeling of this, and a dim perception of it, the business would be perfectly infernal. There is always something to relieve men from the charge of being devils incarnate, and to place them in a position in which their reformation is not to be despaired of  (81).

James W. Redfield, M.D. (the author of this strange fiction) implies, moreover states, that Physiognomy, the exaggerated dehumanization, enables them to conduct the act of slavery without being condemned in the eyes of god. By dehumanizing the people they are enslaving, comparing them to mere fish on a pole, it enables them to characterize the other. By exaggerating the African form, they enable themselves to follow the beliefs they hold, primarily the act of slavery.

It is curious then that Physiognomy manages to survive to our present day, from the stereotype of the “jewish” nose and exaggeration of African Americans lips, to my mother saying my hands are “piano players hands” to people being described as “mousey” to the term “stuck-up” which comes from Physiognomy thinking.

          Various works of the time touched on the topic of Physiognomy either by using the pseudo-science, either seriously or satirically, reversing it as means of discussion, or using it as a means to explore identity. We return to our friend Herman Melville, as he forces the reader to use Physiognomy to decern people, primarily a character called “Black Guinea”. “Black Guinea” is described as “cut down to the stature of a Newfoundland dog; his knotted black fleece and good-natured, honest black face rubbing against the upper part of people's thighs” he later is continually being described as having a “Newfoundland-dog face”. This use by Melville is both a racial and Physiognomy comment, as “Black Guinea” is first treated as if he literally were a dog and later he is considered a conmen, a white man in black makeup (Melville, 13-25).

Lydia Maria Child in her older years. Source.

Lydia Maria Child, known for her skills at letter-writing and endeavors for racial justice, fights this pseudoscience by stating the “incongruities” plain in life. Child writes to an unknown, probably nonexistent, recipient about a Scotsman she met:

“A regular Sawney, with tartan plaid and bag-pipe. And where do you guess he most frequently plies his poetic trade? Why, in the slaughter house!...There, if you are curious to witness congruities, you may almost any day see grunting pigs or bleating lambs, with throats cut to the tune of  Highland Mary, or Bonny Doon, or Lochaber No More.”

Alongside this, she talks about a sea captain, “Few have interested me more strongly than an old sea captain, who needed only sir Walter’s education…his familiarity with legendary lore, to make him, too, a poet and romancer” (Child, 58). By revealing these incongruities in life, she breaks this simplicity Physiognomy attempts to create, by showing a Scotsman playing beautifully in a place of slaughter, and a sea captain as a poet, a romancer of the masses (a slight jab at “Confidence  Men” as well).

Walt Whitman, a poet famously attributed as creating the modern poem, also comments on Physiognomy. In his poem Faces he has lines “Do you suppose I could be content with all if I thought them their own finalé (truth)?” and “This face is a dog’s snout sniffling for garbage. Snakes nest in that mouth, I fear the sibilant threat” And later in, a whole stanza criticizing judging people from the surface:

“I saw the face of the most smear’d and slobbering idiot they had at the asylum,

And I knew for my consolation what they knew not,

I knew of the agents that emptied and broke my brother,

The same wait to clear the rubbish from the fallen tenement,

And I shall look again in a score or two of ages,

And I shall meet the real landlord perfect and unharm’d,

Every inch as good as myself” (The Portable Walt Whitman, 103-105).

Whitman argues that the exaggeration and focus on the human outer form, does not truly state the complexities a human has reducing them to, as he says, a “smear’d and slobbering idiot”. He says you cannot be content if you simply took people at face value, quite literally in this context.

An advertisement for the Virginia Minstrels, a pioneer minstrel show company from 1843. Source.

       Finally, exaggeration of the human form in this era is blatantly seen in the tradition of Minstrel shows, otherwise called Minstrelsy. Minstrelsy in the basic sense was white men in blackface, performing the enslaved African Americans dances and songs in an exaggerated caricature. Popular performers of this style were Jim Crow and Tom Rice (jokes on African Americans skin color and occupations). Minstrel shows were popular from the early 19th century, reaching its high point in the years 1850 to 1870. The advertisement above is from one of the most popular and pioneer minstrel groups, the Virginia Minstrels (“Minstrel Show”). This tradition typically had the performers exaggerating their lips and nose, performing a form of theatrical physiognomy.

Again, we return to our friend “Black Guinea” from Melville’s Novel, The Confidence-Man. A part of “Black Guinea’s” implied con is that he is accused of being a white man in black face. “He's some white operator, betwisted and painted up for a decoy. He and his friends are all humbugs” states a man with a wooden leg (Melville, 18). Prior to this, “Black Guinea” is acting extremely exaggerated as these minstrels would be, stating he lives “On der floor of der good baker's oven, sar” then reveals that the baker is the sun, and crawling around like a dog as stated previously. Additionally, he performs a popular minstrel act that readers in the era would know,

“Still shuffling among the crowd, now and then he would pause, throwing back his head and, opening his mouth like an elephant for tossed apples at a menagerie; when, making a space before him, people would have a bout at a strange sort of pitch-penny game, the cripple's mouth being at once target and purse, and he hailing each expertly-caught copper with a cracked bravura from his tambourine” (15)

This exaggeration is used to further cloud what “Black Guinea” really is, is he a crippled black man exaggerating his identity for the sake of the white crowd, or is he a white man in black face performing the illusion of blackness in exaggeration? The book never tells for sure.

      Exaggeration in art has, is, and will always be a part of the process. As humans focus on certain aspects, those aspects get enlarged, spotlighted, exaggerated to the point their impossible to ignore. These exaggerations can reveal concerns and beliefs of that society, from the Antebellum help manuals fears of young getting conned, to Melville’s pessimistic satire on way people interacted, to cartoons depicting grown men as cowering children, to comparing humans to fish, to the overtly racist acts of Minstrel shows. These over-the-top, fantastical views of the world reveal to us, in the present, the society’s deepest beliefs and fears of the new age.

It is peculiar then how some of the Antebellum era manages to reflect our own, from the polarized political state, to the discussions of race as unanswered, silenced minorities seek a voice, to the new era of interaction we have over the metaphorical city of the internet.  I may be making yet another exaggeration to add on top of the ones I have already shown. What can I say but, it is just another skipping stone along the surface of our culture.

Works Cited

Child, Lydia Maria. “Letters from New-York”. 1841. Pg. 58.

Halttunen, Karen. “Confidence Men and Painted Women : A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830-1870.” 1982, pg. 1-5.

Melville, Herman. “The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade.” 1857. Pgs. 13-25, 61, 68.

“Minstrel Show”. Encyclopædia Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, September 2nd, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/art/minstrel-show

Redfield, James W. M.D., “Comparative Physiognomy or Resemblances between Men and Animals.” 1852, pgs. 81, 167-168.

Waldorf, Sarah. “Physiognomy, The Beautiful Psuedoscience.” The Iris, October 8th, 2012. https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/physiognomy-the-beautiful-pseudoscience/

Whitman, Walt. “The Portable Walt Whitman.” Edited by Michael Warner, December 30th, 2003. Pgs. 103-105.

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Joice Heth and the Antebellum Depiction

An advertisement for Joice Heth from 1835 Source

Imagine, if you will, it is December of 1835. It’s the end of another week and you’re attending an exhibition in a hotel to settle down. You pay 25 cents at the door for admission, and you’re herded into the exhibition hall where a sea of white faces gathers around a central figure. In the middle of room, is an old black slave woman, filling the room with the smell of an old pipe. 

Her face is a field of wrinkles, her eyes stare blankly out without movement, and her nails are long, unkempt, and filthy. This is Joice Heth, the main attraction, the supposed nanny (or mammy) of George Washington, the father of a country. She entertains the crowd with catholic hymns, historical stories, and warm quotes while the mass of people poke, prod, and examine her beyond any reasonable boundary.

Who and what is she? It would not matter if you were young or old, rich or poor, Slave owner or Abolitionist. You would simply be a face in the crowd, looking at her, examining her, and considering her. Is she really George Washington’s nursemaid? Is she an automation made of black tar, whale bone, and India rubber? Okay, granted she definitely isn’t an automation made of tar, but curiosity still parades the mind thanks to rumors, gossip, and discussion amongst the audience.

To funnel these thoughts into a single sentence, a viewer’s background, social class, culture, and race influence how they digest and interact with entertainment. In this case, the entertainment is an enslaved old black woman paraded around the country under a guise of historical connection. How would you look at her? Would you see her as a pitiful slave? A fellow deceiver of the masses? A mummy? An automation? An animalistic creature? The nursemaid of George Washington? To be more direct, how a society and culture creates racial concepts, class, stereotypes, and caricatures influenced how the audiences of Barnum viewed, interacted with, and discussed Joice Heth.

           Throughout her travels with Barnum and Lyman, a curious multivalence marked the exhibit of Joice Heth. Did her decrepitude mark her as a human oddity, to be marketed like the Chinese woman with “disgustingly deformed” bound feet, the Virginia dwarves, and the Siamese twins whose paths she often crossed on the touring circuit? Was it her scientific value as an embodiment of the different aging processes of the different races that merited her display? Was she an attraction because of patriotic value as a living repository of memories of a glorious past? Because she was a storehouse of ancient religious practices? Or simply because she was a good performer? (Reiss 81).

Joice Heth was P.T. Barnum’s breakout humbug, the 161-year-old 46-pound nanny of George Washington. Barnum quickly discovered as he carried out exhibitions of Joice Heth, that the exhibit was not popular because it was extremely believable but because it wasn’t. The possibility that it was both real and not real enabled layers of discussion to build onto the act. This also preyed upon the growing concerns over identity and deceptions in the growing urban space, especially over increasing anxieties about race with identity in increasingly Abolitionist northern states.

P.T. Barnum played his role in presenting himself in that growing anxiety about deception, but Joice Heth played her own role as well. Race in the period of Joice Heth was beginning to be further looked at (this is ironically reflective of our current issues), especially in regard to identity and the desire for scientific assertions. (79).

Barnum’s first humbug manages to continue postmortem of both Joice Heth and P.T. Barnum, for little is known truthfully about her. The most information about her we have is from a twelve-page pamphlet published by Barnum, which was used for advertising so the information in it is questionable minimally and completely fabricated at worst (I lean for the latter).

A depiction of Heth and Barnum from the Potsville Herald, 1835. Source

Joice Heth was legally purchased by P.T. Barnum from John S. Bawling, who had previously been exhibiting her, for the price of 1000$. Barnum in future years made contradictory claims about his ownership of her as a slave. “In 1854 he claimed to be "the proprietor of the negress," while in 1869 he wrote that his payment only made him "proprietor of this novel exhibition”. These differing claims were made to save face, as the American Anti-Slavery Society had already been founded in 1833 and slavery was illegal in the North in the areas where Barnum was exhibiting the woman (The Joice Heth Exhibit).

The only definite thing we can say is Joice Heth died in 1836 of natural causes (despite Barnum’s claims and people’s theories that she wasn’t dead, the corpse was a fake, the autopsy was a hoax, and that she was preparing a tour of Europe as a phial of ashes) and that she was blind, paralyzed in both legs, and toothless. At the time of her autopsy (which Barnum still made an exhibition of at 50 cents a ticket) she was declared to be somewhere in her 80s, which is still pretty good considering the average lifespan of a slave was somewhere in the mid-20’s (Reiss 78).

The cover of the 12-page pamphlet published by an unknown author (presumably P.T. Barnum and co.)  Source

“Joice Heth, the subject of this short memoir, was born on the Island of Madagascar on the coast of Africa, in the year One Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy-four. Of her parents little or nothing is known, save what she herself relates of them…At the age of fifteen she was cruelly torn from the bosom of her parents and her native land by one of those inhuman beings, who in those days, to enrich themselves, made merchandise of human flesh” (Cook 104).

To fully view how people from different Antebellum backgrounds viewed Heth, we first can look at how Barnum presented Heath. In his pamphlet overviewing her, he mixed both Abolitionist wording with the Antebellum narrative of slave and slave owners. In the above except he says she was “cruelly torn from the bosom of her parents” but later on stating “A highly respectable gentleman of Kentucky…who has generously offered to set them free on being paid two-thirds of what they cost him” in regards to a deal from the owner of her great-grandchildren (a story that was created in face of Abolitionist criticism). This is to both satisfy the increasingly Abolitionist North and the Slave-owning south majority, though we cannot ignore that both sides had elements of the other in them at the same time.

He emphasizes that Joice was “treated by them (the Washingtons) as an hired servant rather than a slave” and “as to accommodate her in the enjoyment of the constant company of her helpmate (Peter)” referring to her transfer to another owner. The narrative continues like this, implying she has “great thankfulness” and she “is highly pleased with the idea of her remaining as she is, until death may finally close this mortal scene with her”, her life ended in Barnum’s possession. One cannot say if she was truly complicit in the act, satisfied with her role, mistreated as an object, or otherwise as the only account we have is from the mouth of Barnum who I personally would take with a grain of salt (as he was the proprietor of family-friendly deceptions) (Cook 105).

Top: The depiction of Joice Heth used in advertising from 1835 to 1836. Source

Bottom: An illustration from P.T. Barnum’s autobiography, Source

Furthermore, we must look at how Barnum and others presented her in depictions and in writing as many newspapers ran stories about the hoax. Many drawings, paintings, and sketches of Joice Heth depict her very differently, from alien-looking, to human, to more animalistic in nature from caricature to truthful depiction. The drawing above on the left is from the advertising poster used by Barnum, depicting her with dark, bark-like skin, elongated hands (referencing her supposed long, talon-like nails), and the clothing of the traditional mammy character (a bonnet and an aproned dress).

The drawing on the right is Barnum’s autobiography in 1855, in it she looks immensely less grotesque. The depiction used as advertising by Barnum is obviously an exaggerated caricature for the purposes of drawing in a crowd. It brings to my mind the concept of a “Tar baby” from the stories of Briar Rabbit, who also had roots from slave tales.

A depiction of Tom Rice, a popular minstrel show actor. Source

Caricatures of Black people and other people of color would be not foreign to the audiences of Joice Heth. Afterall, minstrelsy would have been in full swing by the time P.T. Barnum got possession of Heth. Even before then, caricatures of black faces, racist archetypes (specifically in our case the mammy), and exoticism (specifically the mystical minority concept) would be in the minds of the white faces observing her. Caricatures of these people would depict dark, almost pure black skin, exaggerated anatomy, and archetypical clothing, all of which is seen around Joice Heth.

Newspapers at the time described her in various ways, multiple from the New York area calling her an “animated mummy” (a bit harsh if you ask me). The New-York Evening Star describes her as “very much like an Egyptian mummy escaped from the Sarcophagus” while the New-York Sunday News said “This living mummy, on whose head 161 winters have sprinkled their snows” (Cook 108). A letter to the Editor of the New York Transcript shows some beliefs about “blacks” in relation to Heth’s passing and autopsy:

Another important physiological fact should be stated, which is, that blacks have a much greater tenacity for life than whites, and were it not that, like the domestic horse, they are broken down by servitude, they would live to much greater ages than the Circassian race -- and in the case before us, had it not been for the affectation of the lungs… together with what must have been fatigue to her, travelling and being subjected to the annoyance and importunity of her visitors, it is not improbable that the vital spark might have continued to flicker considerably longer (The Joice Heth Exhibit).

While this belief may seem completely odd and illogical to us at this point, let us not forget that a small population of our culture believes the world to be flat. People of the Antebellum era held the black individuals in their society at a different level, wherever that be on a lower one or a mystical one, typically both.

A political cartoon by Mark Knight of the Herald Sun of Serena Williams. Source

Blacks and other races in American society (among others) typically face racial based Dehumanization and Objectification, where the individuals presumed humanity is metaphorically taken from them and then the belief they have conscious, independent thought. This process obviously was done to slaves as they were treated as property rather than conscious individuals. It still occurs today, for example Serena Williams as well as many other Black Americans being called “gorilla” amongst other things and portrayed animalistically like the controversial political cartoon above.

Barnum does this with Joice through several points, from presumably purchasing her as legal property, to claiming and indulging in the fact she enjoys “Animal food” (it is unclear if that means horse, chicken, or dog), to creating an entire rumor that she is an Automation created from “India rubber, Whalebone, and springs” which only pushed audiences to further prod and examine her to further his humbug, “Her debility was a draw, too, for many came to gaze on- even to touch her- marvelously decrepit body” (Cook 105-106, Reiss 79).

Moreover, from the various newspapers and media calling her a “mummy” to Barnum publicizing, dramatizing, and broadcasting her autopsy as a “spectacular display of race”. As Benjamin Reiss puts it further, the autopsy “dramatized some of the new meanings of Racial Identity and provided an opportunity for whites to debate them (in a displaced register) as they gazed upon or read about her corpse” (79). Joice Heth was continually objectified by the masses, as a topic for discussion, as a thing to examine, and as a being to figure and unearth it’s identity.

The audiences of Joice Heth were probably never made up of one individual group. Poor or rich, Young or Old, Abolitionist or Slave owner, Southerner or Northerner. Each face in that sea of individuals had an individual thought and concept of Joice Heth, if she was real or fake, human or machine, aged beyond human limit or simply mundanely old, a pitiful slave held under Barnum’s thumb or a fellow deceiver who was comfortable in her servitude.

For whoever and however the viewer may have seen her, their opinion was influenced by what they were presented and what rumors they digested, their view of Black americans and slavery as a whole, and their fears or beliefs of identity and race. Joice Heth served to the masses as a way for them to further their concept of identity, race, deceptions in the growing urban site, and assert their influences on the new Antebellum era.

It is ironic then how I, another white face in the crowd, am looking upon Heth and considering her for myself in this era of racial discussion. That I am yet another white individual talking for Heth, in place of her own voice.

Phineas T. Barnum. “The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It In the Universe.” Edited by James W. Cook, 2005, 104-108.

“The Joice Heth Exhibit.” The Lost Muesum Archive, https://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/exhibit/heth

Benjamin Reiss. “P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race” American Quaterly, No. 1, Vol. 51, 1999, 78-107.