The National Archives is pleased to participate in the U.S. Digital Registry, the authoritative resource for official third-party websites, social media platforms and mobile apps managed by the U.S. federal government.

The U.S. Digital Registry is an API-generating platform designed to authenticate third-party sites in the federal government in order to help maintain accountability over our digital services.

As more users access services, communicate, and engage with their government online and through social media, the U.S. Digital Registry makes it easier for users to identify official government sites and services, and more quickly access the information they need. Access to accounts is improved as users can search for accounts by platform, language, agency, and topic.

Use the U.S. Digital Registry to find the government services you need. Photo: “Card catalog in Central Search Room, July 31, 1942.” Record Group 64: Records of the National Archives and Records Administration. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/3493244

The U.S. Digital Registry has grown to a resource of more than 8,200 third-party accounts and 350 mobile apps from across the federal government. With so many federal agencies providing services online, it is more important than ever to find ways to enhance access and raise accountability, while providing a platform for developers to use the data to build technological solutions for federal agencies. For example, this visualization presents data from the Registry, and allows users to filter by agency, platform, or keyword.

The National Archives currently has 114 social media accounts listed in the U.S. Digital Registry, including our official Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube accounts.

Services such as these have the potential to help us more meaningfully analyze and make informed decisions about our online presence, and help us gain insight into how to improve our communications, while delivering the best service possible to our customers.

Learn more about the U.S. Digital Registry from the General Services Administration.

With Amherst College’s Bicentennial coming right up in 2021, we in the Archives are working closely with the Digital Programs Department to digitize collections relating to Amherst College history, including the Amherst College Olios and soon, The Amherst Student.  With this in mind, we have revised the finding aid for the Amherst College Early History Collection in preparation for digitization.

The Early History Collection is an artificial collection, meaning a collection of material with varied provenance assembled around a single topic, in this case the early history of Amherst College.

“To the public” pamphlet in Amherst College Early History Collection (Box 3, folder 7)

The Early History Collection contains printed material, legal documents, financial records, correspondence and other papers documenting the history of Amherst Academy, the Charity Fund, and the inception and founding of Amherst College.

Noah Webster, publisher of the Merriam-Webster dictionary and trustee of Amherst Academy since its incorporation in 1815, was president of the Academy’s Board of Trustees in 1821.  Webster played a vital role in fundraising, advocating for, and founding “the Charity Institution,” which would become Amherst College.  The Early History Collection includes Lucius Boltwood’s transcription of Noah Webster’s notes on the history of Amherst Academy and Amherst College.

Lucius Boltwood transcript of Noah Webster’s notes in Amherst College Early History Collection (Box 1, folder 2)

The Charity Fund was the first endowment of Amherst College.  Stanley King writes in The History of the Endowment of Amherst College, “The goal was a fund of fifty thousand dollars.  Pledges and gifts were secured from some two hundred and seventy-five subscribers.  The largest subscription was for three thousand dollars and was paid by the transfer to the College of land in Maine; the smallest was for five dollars.”  The Early History Collection includes four subscription notebooks showing pledges paid in full, as well as pledges paid with labor.

Subscription notebook in Amherst College Early History Collection (Box 3, folder 3)

This collection includes early circulars and catalogs of both Amherst Academy and Amherst College, including the first “Catalogue of the Faculty and Students of the Collegiate Institution” printed in March 1822.

First catalogue broadside of the Collegiate Institution, 1822 Mar in Amherst College Early History Collection (Box OS-1, folder 9)

The Massachusetts Legislature granted Amherst College its charter in 1825—the same year that the college awarded degrees to its first class of 25 graduates.  This collection includes many pamphlets petitioning for or opposing the incorporation of Amherst College, as well as the proposed charter and newspaper articles reporting on the founding and incorporation of the College.

Franklin Herald and Public Advertiser, 1823 Mar 18 in Amherst College Early History Collection (Box OS-1, folder 2)

In addition to the Amherst College Early History Collection, great resources on the founding and early history of Amherst College have been digitized and are freely available online:

History of Amherst College during its first half century, 1821-1871 by W. S. Tyler, 1873

History of Amherst College during the administrations of its first five presidents, 1821-1891 by W. S. Tyler, 1895

A History of the Endowment of Amherst College by Stanley King, 1950

“The Consecrated Eminence” The Story of the Campus and Buildings of Amherst College by Stanley King, 1951

Sketches of the Early History of Amherst College by Heman Humphrey, 1905

Reminiscences of Amherst College by Edward Hitchcock, 1863

FSU Special Collections & Archives recently added 33 late-nineteenth century American paperbacks to our rare book collections. These include such famous titles as Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, and The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. They were published between 1865-1874 by D. Appleton and Company of New York and T. B. Peterson & Brothers of Philadelphia, and, because they still have their original printed paper wrappers and advertisements, they are important artifacts in the history of nineteenth-century printing and the development of the modern paperback.

A Peterson “Cheap Edition for the Million” sold for 35 cents and would include illustrated plates, while the smaller Appleton editions sold for 25 cents. Authors like Dickens are famous for publishing their works as serialized novels, which could be bought in parts to make them more affordable to the growing numbers of working-class readers. Because they were often taken out of their wrappers and bound into single volumes, first editions of Dickens in their original covers (like FSU’s 1865 edition of Our Mutual Friend) are especially prized by collectors and historians.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, London publishers realized the additional fortune they could make on cheap reprints.¹ These were often sold at railway stations and called “yellow-backs” because of their colorful, eye-catching covers. The paperbacks published by Peterson and Appleton attest that the trend of cheap reprints was common on both sides of the Atlantic. Advertisements, like the one pictured above, list other available publications, all of which testify to the growing commodification of print in the nineteenth-century and the new technologies which made it possible.

These nineteenth-century paperbacks can be requested at the Special Collections Reading Room Monday-Thursday 10am-6pm and Friday 10am-5:30pm. For more information about titles in the collection, contact the Rare Book Librarian, Katherine Hoarn.

1. Gaskell, P., A New Introduction of Bibliography, New Castle 2012, pp. 248-9.

We are pleased to announce the availability of additional records relating to the history of Vancouver’s built heritage.

Records of the Planning Department’s early heritage planning and beautification programs have been transferred to the Archives and are now available to researchers, as series COV-S682 Built heritage research files and COV-S684 Heritage planning subject files. These records complement the Archives’ existing holdings related to the City’s Heritage Inventories and other heritage planning activities.

Drawing of Gilford Court from file COV-S682-F206 Pendrell Street

The new series COV-S682 Built heritage research files documents the City’s initial efforts to identify and assess the heritage value and features of structures across the city, beginning with a number of building surveys conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s in support of the Beautification Program. This program’s goal was to improve the visual appeal of city streets through design and construction of amenities such as new street lighting, benches, and sidewalks.

In 1971, the Gastown-Chinatown Architectural Survey, conducted in conjunction with the University of British Columbia, more intensively collected data on structures in those two neighbourhoods that were identified as having possible heritage value or features.

The records from these surveys were collected by the Heritage unit of the Planning Department into files based on street address, to be used as data for Heritage Planners. Forms for both the Beautification Surveys and the Gastown-Chinatown Architectural Survey include information on the building, such as assessed value, owner, physical characteristics, and historical information. Many of the forms include photographs of the building exterior (usually frontage only), which are attached to the forms.

A selection of forms and photographs for 53 Powell Street from file COV-S682-F211 Powell Street 0-131

The series includes records documenting later inventory activities conducted through the 1970s, in neighbourhoods across the city. Later forms tend to be simpler, and contain less qualitative data. In some cases, the demolition of a documented building is noted on the initial survey form.

Part of form for1730 Pendrell Street, from file COV-S682-F206 Pendrell Street

The other new series of heritage-related records, COV-S684 Heritage planning subject files, documents the creation and early implementation of the Planning Department’s heritage program in the 1970s. The series includes minutes of the Heritage Advisory Board, studies on various aspects of heritage preservation, correspondence with planners and representatives in other jurisdictions, and correspondence with external heritage agencies.

We are pleased to be able to make more records on this very popular subject available to researchers.

I’m excited to announce that our speaker for the next Updike Award Ceremony will be Fiona Ross. Dr. Ross will be visiting us from the University of Reading, and she’ll be discussing her work on non-Latin alphabets.
 Fiona Ross is a pioneer in the field, beginning with over a decade at the helm of Linotype’s non-Latin font division. She recently received the Society of Typographic Aficionados’ Typography Award, among other honors.Dr. Ross’s lecture will take place as part of the ceremony to celebrate the finalists of our Updike Prize for Student Typography. The event, which will be accompanied by an exhibition of materials from our Updike Collection, begins at 5:30 PM on Monday, October 17th at the Providence Public Library.The event is free, but we request that anyone interested in attending RSVP at:

http://updike2016.eventbrite.com/

(Thanks to our fantastic sponsors, Paperworks!)

When Robert Moses quit his post on the Board of Trustees at Hofstra University, it barely grazed a slow news day. He had left Hofstra in a huff, citing the dubious ethics of some so-and-so professor, unnamed in the recording above, who in the mind of Moses had committed a serious breach of ethics by using his lofty academic post for base political purposes. Whether this counts as news or not depends on your perspective. It might have been a hot item in Hempstead, but in The New York Times the controversy merited two brief columns on successive days on its double-digit back pages and then disappeared forever. Moses’ irascible nature was old news it seems, even at its freshest.

It helps to be specific when speaking about someone who has drawn the ire of Robert Moses – so many have felt the lash of his tongue, the sting of his pen, or worse, that it’s easy to get confused. The Hofstra professor brought to our attention by our emcee H. V. Kaltenborn, a future Radio-Hall-of-Famer borrowed for this broadcast from NBC, is either Dr. Charles E. Stonier, who earlier in the year had written a report on Moses’ beloved Jones Beach that had summoned the builder’s pique, or Hofstra President Dr. John Crawford Adams, who defended it. Maybe an amalgamation of both.

At this point though, who cares? History, perhaps rightly, offers a collective shrug at the Hofstra hubbub (though the relationship between Moses and his mouthpiece in the incident, Nassau County boss J. Russel Sprague, might be worth a closer look). Robert Moses did a lot of political posturing, pace Kaltenborn’s insistence in the audio above that Moses is “so far apart from politics that he can tell the truth as he sees it.” The truth is there was very little to stop Moses from speaking his mind. And the truth is he was deeply entrenched in politics, virtually immovable, despite his outward appearance as an untainted, above-reproach public servant. And true, Kaltenborn is kind of joking – the full recording, available in full below, is a from dinner hosted by the Long Island Daily Press, and carries a light tone, closer to a friendly roast than the undoubtedly more solemn ceremony that surrounded Moses’ honorary degree from Hofstra, conferred in 1948, in more peaceful times. Kaltenborn is piling on two things at once in his playful introduction: Moses’ combative nature, and his (deceptive) reputation as an upstanding public servant. But the addition of a single grain of sand to Moses’ vast beachheads of righteous rage and political maneuverings would seem to add little to the historical record that isn’t already there. 

Kaltenborn is building here, using the day’s topical grist – Moses’ minor skirmish with a fill-in-the-blank professor – to offer a suggestion for posterity: a book about Moses that wasn’t “laudatory,” one that was called “something like ‘The Ten Greatest Fights of Robert Moses.’” Dr. Hofstra U. wouldn’t make the cut, no. The best “summing up” of Moses’ contentious side, according to Kaltenborn, is The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes, and a political fight par excellence contained in its pages.

Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, greeting Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial

Ickes, though less well-known today, was the New Deal. He was Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior for his entire presidency, and in the early months of FDR’s administration was put in charge of the new Public Works Administration, which became one of the struggling nation’s chief sources of public relief. It was also one of its cleanest, spending $4 billion graft-free dollars over Ickes’ 6-year reign building bridges, highways, and housing throughout the United States. Famously curmudgeonly, and with a smart wit tart enough to match Moses‘, Ickes’ grim demeanor belied a genuine concern for the poor and dispossessed. He was an early champion of racial equality: acting as FDR’s main liaison with the African-American community, he was largely responsible for the formation of FDR’s famous “Black Cabinet.” Indeed, he was one of FDR’s trusted allies, a man FDR called to perform much of his political heavy lifting. For years he kept a diary, published posthumously in three volumes in the 1950s – a diary that Moses, Kaltenborn, and the evening’s attendees are clearly all well familiar with, or at least familiar with one of the stories held its first volume: the time when, in 1934, Ickes found himself in the center of a flame war between Moses and the president.

Roosevelt had long carried a well-established but publicly-hidden hatred of Moses. Shortly after ascending to the presidency, Roosevelt tasked Ickes with informing Fiorello La Guardia that he wanted Moses out. As La Guardia stalled on acting on Roosevelt’s wishes, Ickes prepared PWA Administrative Order Number 129, which would officially command that no New Deal funds would go to any authority that had a public official on its governing body – an order designed to effect exactly one man – Robert Moses. So long as Moses held public office, New York City wouldn’t see a dime in federal funds. La Guardia had little choice, first wavering, then wilting under the pressure of the New Deal fiat, finally promising Ickes in January of 1935 that he would oust Moses from his seat of power, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. However, before acquiescing to the order, La Guardia made the mistake of showing it to Moses, then considered New York’s most capable and dedicated public servants, who leaked it to the press, cultivating a rabid public fervor at Ickes’ perceived vendetta. Ultimately Ickes, La Guardia, and Roosevelt conceded defeat and hastily amended the order, grandfathering in City Housing Commissioner Langdon Post, and huh, look at that… I guess it applies to Moses too. (You can read more here or here.) 

Kaltenborn gives a tendentious overview of the affair in the broadcast above, cherry picking the choicest cuts from Ickes’ Secret Diary, those highlighting Moses contentious nature and Ickes’ and the president’s eventual defeat. After reading a passage describing Moses as a “highly disagreeable and unpleasant person,” he jokes that this is “the kind of biography that Bob Moses likes.”

Perhaps. But “perhaps” in small doses. Small doses in light roasts. Small doses that end with Moses arms akimbo over a vanquished and humiliated foe, with recently raised superblock towers and anger-grey parkways to praise and frame his glower. Those small doses. But even then I have my doubts whether Moses, hidebound and thin-skinned as he was, would have truly taken to such a biography.  Kaltenborn is today perhaps most famous for his “Dewey Defeats Truman” call during the 1948 presidential election. I’d argue history would prove him wrong on this account too, for when Robert Caro published The Power Broker, in September of 1974, 16 years after the recording above was laid to disc, Moses hated it.

Caro had built a beachhead of his own, one made of not tens, but hundreds of Moses’ fights, detailing not just the fair fights like the one traced above, but also Moses’ many mismatched, bullying, red-baiting battles – fights that revealed the often seemingly invisible legacy of indifference to public need in the most powerful public servant in New York history. The Power Broker wasn’t a rival to the outclassed hagiography written by Moses minion Cleveland Rodgers – there’s a reason boxers are split into tranches, from heavyweight down to straw – The Power Broker was a rival to Moses himself, and it severely damaged his reputation, perhaps irreparably. True, by 1974 the man who had fought and defeated a president was feeling forty years of wear, and was already ousted from many of his seats of power, but Caro pulled his punches, cutting down a 3,000+ page manuscript to a “mere” 1344, with Ickes and Order 129 counting for 18 of them.

Kaltenborn’s proposed book hasn’t really been written – Caro’s brilliant doorstop of a book skips over the battle over Moses’ proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway (Lomex), one of Moses’ first real defeats and, I’d argue, certainly one of Moses’ “ten greatest fights.” But if our archives have learned anything from the dozens of Moses’ transcription discs we’ve reformatted in the last couple months, it’s that there is more to Moses than 1344 pages can handle, even when adding the recent 256 page book that covers the Lomex fiasco.

I’m not even sure Kaltenborn’s book is even the best book that could be written yet on Moses. Much of what’s interesting lingers in his small to mid-sized fights – the Title 1 clearance of Columbus Circle, the removal of Tuscarora Nation for the Robert Moses Power Dam at Niagara Falls, maybe even the Hofstra University controversy, which could lend further light to history of Moses’ early pet project, Jones Beach. The details matter because the people involved matter. Few New Yorkers have had such a massive, lasting effect on the lives of his fellow citizens than Robert Moses, and the stories of the men and women who found themselves forced by fate to try to face him down – Jane Jacobs and Shirley Hayes, Clarence Kaskel, Chief Clinton Rickard, Drs. Charles E. Stonier and John Crawford Adams, and, of course, Harold Ickes – deserve to be told too. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150436
Municipal archives id: LT8045

We don’t hear the pieces themselves but do get Cowell’s illuminating and very personal descriptions of each work. He starts off talking about his own Hymning and Fuguing Tunes Nos. 2 & 5, describing a period in Boston in the late 18th century when hymn and anthem writers, cut off from England, came up with their own, uniquely American idiom that was “considered crude but had a tremendous strength and vitality.” His extension of these forms asks the question, “What if America had adopted this style rather than that of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven?”

Then he introduces a Sinfonietta by Dane Rudhyer, describing the ex-student of Debussy’s interest in Oriental philosophy. “It should all sound like one giant gong,” he reports the composer saying. Henry Brant’s Saxophone Concerto is next. Brant has “a Puck-like imagination and humor” when it comes to instrumentation. He is also “the world’s best player on the tin whistle.” Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Three Gymnopedies show her “well-tailored simplicity” which is not to be confused with naiveté. Though Australian, she is “a citizen of the world,” as the very French-sounding piece illustrates. Finally, Cowell describes his own Symphony No. 11, in which each movement reflects “a use that is involved in music,” a lullaby, a work song, etc. Cowell was a relentless advocate of modern music These generous and informative introductions attest to that.

Henry Cowell (1897-1965) did not take the normal route to a career in composition. Born poor and on the West Coast, his musical upbringing exposed him to influences most musicians of the time never encountered. The Wall Street Journal tells how:

Living in San Francisco, the young Cowell and his mother couldn’t afford to attend European operas, so they sat outside the city’s Chinese-opera houses and listened to music few Westerners knew. Cowell regarded non-Western music as equally worthy of attention as European classical music, then a radical philosophy for an American musician, and in the 1920s staged some of the first concerts of non-Western music by non-Western performers on both coasts.

But Cowell’s work was more than just an exercise in assimilating exotic traditions. He was one of those true, stubbornly self-taught American “primitives,” unwilling to accept the conventional musical givens of the day. The Encyclopedia Britannica notes how:

…seeking new sonorities, he developed “tone clusters,” chords that on the piano are produced by simultaneously depressing several adjacent keys (e.g., with the forearm). Later he called these sonorities secondal harmonies—i.e., harmonies based on the interval of a second in contrast to the traditional basis of a third. These secondal harmonies appear in his early piano pieces, such as The Tides of Manaunaun (1912); in his Piano Concerto (1930); and in his Synchrony (1931) for orchestra and trumpet solo. Some of his other piano compositions, such as Aeolian Harp (1923) and The Banshee (1925), are played directly on the piano strings, which are rubbed, plucked, struck, or otherwise sounded by the hands or by an object. Cowell’s Mosaic Quartet (1935) was an experiment with musical form; the performers are given blocks of music to arrange in any desired order. With the Russian engineer Leon Theremin, Cowell built the Rhythmicon, an electronic instrument that could produce 16 different simultaneous rhythms, and he composed Rhythmicana (1931; first performed 1971), a work specifically written for the instrument.

Cowell has a separate place in history as a victim of the harsh penalties given to people engaging in homosexual activities. Convicted in 1936 of having consensual sex with a 17-year-old male, Cowell was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He served four years at San Quentin, where he taught inmates, started a prison band, and wrote over sixty compositions before being pardoned. His musical output after being released is more conservative, based on historical and folk antecedents rather than the more avant-garde explorations described above. Whether or not that is a result of his incarceration is a subject of debate. Cowell’s life, full of incident, of highs and lows, of astounding artistic production and radical innovation, still fascinates. The Juilliard Journal tries to sum him up:

Musical pioneer. Prolific composer. Piano virtuoso. Tireless proponent of new music. Globe-trotter. World-music advocate. Convicted felon. As Juilliard faculty member Joel Sachs said in a recent interview… “The problem with Henry Cowell is that if you had invented his life, no one would believe it.”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150168
Municipal archives id: LT6770

The National Archives is committed to maintaining an “open, inclusive work environment that is built on respect, communication, integrity, and collaborative teamwork.”  Together, we are strengthened by diversity and advanced by inclusion. As part of NARA’s ongoing focus on the subject of civil rights and diversity, both in the historical record and as an organization, I am pleased to announce several exciting initiatives at the National Archives that both celebrate our diversity and provide a forum for education and communication.

Promoting diversity among our staff is an integral part of NARA’s diversity and inclusion strategy. One way we promote such diversity is through Employee Affinity Groups: voluntary, employee-driven groups based around shared interests or life experiences. The groups facilitate professional development, cultural connections, diversity, and communication throughout our workforce.  When the groups started in 2014, we had just two: Stonewall@NARA, a group for LGBTQ employees and allies, and IKE, our veterans group. In the last two years we have added four more to include: HALO (Hispanics and Latinos); disABILITY (Individuals with Disabilities); Say it Loud! (African-Americans); and WAG (Women’s). Among other activities, these groups have been working to develop web resources, identify relevant records, digitize documents, and add them to our Catalog.

Recently, the Stonewall@NARA group launched Discovering LGBTQ History on Tumblr to feature documents reflecting the history of American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender men and women from 1778 to the present.

San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk’s letter President Carter, June 28, 1978. Milk hoped that the President would “take a leadership role in defending the rights of gay people.” National Archives Identifier 152903. Read the full story on Discovering LGBTQ history.

2016 marks the 225^th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, one of our nation’s early attempts to form “a more perfect union.” We are celebrating this milestone with our Amending America initiative, which includes exhibits, National Conversation events, and online activities exploring the rights we have as a diverse society and examining the 11,000 attempts to amend our constitution. As part of this thematic focus, NARA will host a Wikipedia editathon in our Innovation Hub related to LGBTQ rights and the records we hold in the National Archives. This event will take place on Thursday, June 16 and is free and open to the public.

Continuing our tradition of supporting the Wikipedia community, the National Archives is excited to host the Wikimedia Diversity Conference on June 17-18. We are co-organizing the event with Wikimedia D.C., which reflects our shared commitment to embracing diversity. The Wikimedia Diversity Conference aims to address issues of diversity within the editing community of Wikipedia and related projects, including the highly publicized gender gap among Wikipedia editors. This event is an outgrowth of last year’s WikiConference USA at the National Archives, during which the topic of diversity became a major theme. The conference is open to the public, whether you are already a Wikipedia editor or not, especially anyone interested in the subjects of Wikipedia or diversity. The Wikimedia Diversity Conference will include workshops, panels, and presentations that highlight practices, tactics, or ideas addressing diversity in the Wikimedia movement, and related issues such as systemic bias and online harassment.

Wikipedia represents an important venue for NARA to “make access happen,” sharing our records with a wide audience in a way that is relevant to them. Hosting the Wikimedia Diversity Conference reaffirms the National Archives’ commitment to providing access to all government records for everyone. Our work with Wikipedia, and on the theme of diversity specifically, is another example of NARA innovating to achieve our vision of bringing greater meaning to the American experience through government records. You can read more about our Wikipedia strategy in NARA’s most recent Open Government Plan.

I expect NARA’s staff in attendance to offer valuable insight for the conference, as well as to learn and grow from the discussions that take place. We are proud be a part of this project which will encourage diversity in both the Wikipedia and the National Archives communities.

It’s been far too long since we’ve featured a magician from  our Percival Collection! This week’s magician, Viggo Jahn, was originally a window decorator hailing from Copenhagen.

Here’s Viggo Jahn doing something totally inscrutable. Are those thimbles?

According to the November 1953 issue of M-U-M: Magic, Unity, Might, Jahn took up stage magic during the occupation of Denmark in WWII; the “entertainment-starved Danes” were eager for new performers, and a theatrical agent recognized Jahn as “very good looking, intelligent and young, and engaged in a business that required a touch of showmanship”.

After preparing for just three months, Jahn began presenting his manipulations in public, and he quickly improved “by leaps and bounds”. After the occupation was lifted, he began performing in Sweden, then across Europe, and later all over the world. “Wherever the wealthy and the celebrated dined in lovely surroundings, there was Viggo,” says M-U-M. 

The article also notes that “he was still a darned good window trimmer”.

One of our volunteers spotted this in one of the Institute’s lantern slide boxes and called it to our attention:

What was it that attracted his interest? Was it the little round label ‘6054’ which indicated that the slide had originally been one of Sir John Myres’ slides? Was it the beautiful map with incredible detail of ‘Latium and Campania’?

Here’s Vesuvius and the bay of Naples from the bottom of the map:

Or was it this?:

Our volunteer, Robert Petts, is a philatelist and he really knows his stamps. He tells us that this little strip of paper is a re-used edging of a sheet of 1 penny red stamps of Edward VII, printed in 1905. The ‘E’ tells you the part of the year – this sheet of stamps was printed in the first half. The ‘5’ gives you the year. So there you go – it’s amazing what you can learn in the archive when you have great volunteers.

The WNYC American Music Festival played a significant role in promoting American music of every genre and provided a forum for new American composers to get their works heard. Conceived in 1939, the festival began in 1940 and continued for nearly 50 years ending up as a day-long series of concerts called WNYC’s Americathon. Although it was no longer as many as 150 special broadcasts[1] during an eleven day period in February, the station continued to broadcast music by American composers and performers from Lincoln’s to Washington’s Birthday.

This celebration of American music and composers came about at a time of uncertainty at home when much of Europe had succumbed to the brutality of Nazi Germany. As a product of the then city-owned radio station, the American Music Festival was considered one of New York’s responses to “Hitlerian destructiveness and fanaticism.” It was meant to be seen “as an expression of a democracy in terms of human fellowship and [the] cultivation of beauty which constitute the final answer to the tyrannies and stupidity of fascism.”[2] The festival was also a response to an overwhelming cultural presence of European classical music on the airwaves at the time whenever classical music was broadcast. On the eve of the first series of forty concerts Station Director Morris Novik said, “American broadcasters have done a splendid job in developing an appreciation of classical music. Radio must do still another important job by focusing attention on American music, and by demonstrating that Americans have written good –even great—music.”[3]

It was an auspicious beginning for the music festival that set the tone and style for many years to come. This first concert series in 1940 heard from the works of Deems Taylor, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Oscar Levant, Morton Gould and Henry Brant. It included some broadcast premieres such as Brant’s Great American Goof suite and Robert Elmore’s tone poem, Valley Forge, 1777 as well as new compositions by Dante Fiorello, Randall Thompson, Wallingford Riegger and other composers. The audio at the head of this article is the only surviving recording from that first festival in February 1940. It features composer and comedian Oscar Levant at the concluding concert program. In a brief interview beforehand, he comments on the festival and WNYC.

This past week…thanks to the virtually humanitarian auspices of station WNYC, has been dedicated to the performances of contemporary American composers. Performances of modern American composers are about as frequent as social communion with a leper colony. These sparse performances are often accompanied by the same dread of contamination.  So, beware!

There are often problems with any endeavor the first time around, and there no doubt was some need to ‘work out a few bugs’ before embarking on the next series of concerts.

The Lester Young Band at performing at Manhattan Center for the WNYC American Music Festival, February 15, 1941.
(Photo by Harry Rubinstein and courtesy of La Guardia-Wagner Archives CCNY)

Indeed, the WNYC producers returned in 1941 with a substantially larger schedule of concerts and, with added broadcast publicity as well as word of mouth, were instrumental in mobilizing some 5,000 people seeking tickets to the opening concert at Hunter College. Some 2,000 were reportedly turned away that Lincoln’s birthday because there was no room for them.[4] That first concert included Deems Taylor’s, The Highwayman in which Richard Hale sang the baritone role and the Manhattan Chorus, the choral part. Also performing folk songs were Pete Seeger, Lee Hayes and Andrew Rowen Summers, as well as jazz from the Benny Goodman Sextet and The Lester Young Band. At the intermission of the final concert for that second festival year composer Aaron Copland was quite pleased with the outcome.

…As a composer, I feel that the more American music is played, the sooner we will create an important music of our own in this country. This festival, it seems to me, demonstrates, at least two things. One- it shows our composers are writing more music than ever before; that they are more active, creatively, than ever before. And secondly, I think it shows that they are not being performed to the extent that they should be performed…Because the radio public, not having to pay anything for admission to a hall, being able to turn off the radio whenever whatever they hear doesn’t please them, that radio public holds for us, I think, our future American audiences. In closing all I can say is, I hope for bigger and better WNYC festivals in the future…

Third annual WNYC American Music Festival ticket from 1942.
(WNYC Archive Collections)

By February 1942, the United States was still reeling from the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor two months earlier, so it is no surprise that evidence of the festival lacks for that year. Based on the paucity of available information one can only guess that WNYC management and staff were under a lot of pressure at that moment to deal with immediate issues concerning the war and to cut back on some of their festival plans despite its patriotic nature.[5] The following year, however, 97 live festival broadcasts were made.[6]

In reviewing the first five years of the festival in 1944, The New York Times reported that WNYC had accomplished one of its main goals with the festival since it was now “an established institution in the city’s musical life.”[7] ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers got involved, and the festival program read like a Who’s Who of American symphony, opera, jazz and folk music. Included were Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland, Sidney Foster, Robert McBride, Paul Nordoff, Vera Brodsky, Virgil Thomson, Henry Cowell, Josh White, Leadbelly and Alan Lomax, Tony Kraber, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Burl Ives and “other exponents of folk and hill music.”[8] 1944 also brought an engineering advance for the festival since it was the first year the music was heard over the “noise-free” frequency modulation (FM) station W39NY. With the end of the war in Europe approaching, the 1945 festival featured a swing-classical combo with Tommy Dorsey teaming up with Maestro Leopold Stokowski making the jitterbugs go wild.

American Music Festival WNYC logo 1940s and 50s.
(WNYC Archives)

After World War II there was a change in management at WNYC as Director Morris Novik went out with Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia and Seymour N. Siegel came in with Mayor William O’Dwyer. Siegel had long been with the station, and no doubt wanted to continue with something that brought nothing but praise to the broadcaster. Indeed, the festival continued to give a hearing to new and old works by American composers of every genre including songs from Tin Pan Alley and balladeer Woody Guthrie. In 1947 the 8th festival concluded with jam session including Tony Parenti on clarinet, Clarence Williams on piano, Pops Foster on bass and Baby Dodds on drums. The following year saw the Thelonious Monk Quartet make an appearance. Now, a decade in there was a healthy dose of the blues with one of Leadbelly’s final performances followed by Ruby Smith ‘channeling’ Bessie Smith, and the versatile Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry.  By 1950 Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Morton Gould, Paul Creston and Deems Taylor all had first radio performances of their work aired on the American Music Festival. There was a significant jazz presence too highlighted with performances by Miles Davis performed and Stan Getz and an interview with Teddy Wilson.

In 1951 plans for the upcoming 12th WNYC American Music Festival had to be altered for Cold War concerns. The series was to have featured avant-garde composer Edgar Varese’s, “Ionization.” The work called for the use of a siren “as a singing voice among some forty percussion instruments.” But WNYC had to rule it out with regrets since the New York City Civil Defense Office banned all sirens except those used for air-raid warnings.

In 1952 the widow of conductor and composer Serge Koussevitzky awarded WNYC the Koussevitzky Music Foundation’s first award for public service because the festival had, “encouraged creative talent, sent joy and beauty in the form of fresh musical ideas into the homes of its citizens and brought honor to its name.”[9] 1952 also saw the first appearance of the composer John Cage at the American Music Festival. Cage was described as a “younger upstart” whose experiments in rhythm produce “a strange phantasmagoria characteristic of the nation whose music can no more be classified than its society.”[10] In 1953, Leopold Stokowski conducted the festival’s final concert at the Museum of Modern Art. The bill included Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question, and Letter from Morocco by Peggy Glanville-Hicks.[11] It was performed on Lincoln’s Birthday in 1960 at Town Hall in New York by the National Association of American Composers and Conductors Festival Orchestra under the direction of Alfredo Antonini.

It’s worth noting that in 1967 the folksinger Oscar Brand, a long-time station producer, arranged an American Music Festival folk concert at Carnegie Hall with Arlo Guthrie, John Hammond, Tom Paxton, Jean Richie and Len Chandler. Guthrie performed Alice’s Restaurant, described by The New York Times as “an amusing but pointed spoken monolog on the vagaries of law enforcement, the selective service draft and their relation to the war in Vietnam.”[12]

By its 30th year, in 1969, the number of live festival concerts had dropped off from a peak at the beginning of the decade. As the 1970s came in, so too did the city’s burgeoning fiscal problems that were well reflected in the declining American Music Festival programs.

The festival as a vibrant venue for a series of live concerts was revived for a while in the 1980s and with it came not so much a festival but what was called an “Americathon” a daylong live performance that spanned the whole range of American music, from Pulitzer Prize winning composers like Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and David Del Tredici to folk musicians like John McCutcheon and alternative pop singers like the The Roaches to improvising musicians like Muhal Richard Abrams. The programs also included harder to classify ensembles like Butch Morris’ “Conditions” who conducted improvisations by with large-scale ensemble and Music For Homemade Instruments whose load-in of auto brake drums, refrigerator racks and similar “gear” made the backstage area look more like a landfill. These were performed before a live audience in places like the New School, the Juilliard School, and Symphony Space, and broadcast live throughout the day and the evening. Since then, however, the “festival” as such has been largely a designated time for playing pre-recorded American music with occasional live studio and/or concert performances.  

The WNYC American Music Festival was extremely successful in achieving its goals for more than four decades. It was a pioneering effort that became a major New York cultural institution. It promoted the work of American composers, musicians, and conductors. It gave them a fair hearing. In the classical realm, it gave the WNYC listening audience a chance to reflect on American music long overshadowed by the European masters. Overall, it helped to move folk and traditional American music into the mainstream by giving equal weight to all genres of performance.

Finally, seldom mentioned but always present in its heyday and beyond for more than 40 years of festivals was WNYC’s Music Director, Dr. Herman Neuman. As a conductor and composer, he was also on the bill leading festival orchestras over the years. In 1966, some 50 works were performed for the first time at the festival. Perhaps he summed it up best saying, “Some of the music was good, some indifferent, some lousy, but now at least the composers have heard how their works sound in performance.”[13]

By the late 1980s, WNYC’s American Music Festival had run its course. The last few festivals were a shadow of their former glory as eleven days of live concerts were compacted into a day-long “Americathon”. This single day of performances was sandwiched between scheduled broadcasts of American music drawn largely from commercial recordings.

Click here to listen to archive copies of American Music Festival programs on the web.

Village Voice Ad for WNYC’s Americathon ’84.
(WNYC Archive Collections)

_________________________________________________

[1] Lohman, Sidney, “One Thing And Another WNYC Opens Annual Festival on Tuesday,” The New York Times, February 10, 1946, p.51.

[2] Downs, Olin, “Results of Five Radio Festivals,” The New York Times, February 20, 1944, p. x5.

[3] “40 WNYC Concerts to Give U.S. Music,” The New York Times, February 3, 1940, p.9.

[4] “U.S. Music Draws Audience of 3,000,” The New York Times, February 13, 1941. p.24.

[5] Sources indicate that the American Music Festival in 1942 did continue although its clear some momentum was lost. Another reason for the paucity of festival recordings during WWII is due to a change in media from aluminum to glass-based lacquer transcription discs.

[6] “100 Composers Set For WNYC Festival,” The New York Times,  August 6, 1943. p.9

[7] Kennedy, T.R., “WNYC And A Musical Tradition,” The New York Times, February 13, 1944, p. x9.

[8] Ibid.

[9] “WNYC is Honored For Work in Music,” The New York Times, February 13, 1952, p. 35

[10] Downs, Olin, “Foster To Cage: WNYC American Music Festival Presents Native Music of All Characteristics,” The New York Times, February 17, 1952, p. 95

[11] Downs, Olin, “Stokowski Conducts Final Concert of WNYC’s Annual Music Festival,” The New York Times, February 23, 1953, p. 20.

[12] “WNYC Folk Concert Sung in 6 Segments,” The New York Times, February 19, 1967, p.71.

[13] “Army Band Concert Closes WNYC’s Fete,” The New York Times, February 23, 1966, p. 45.

A week or two back, we posted some “then and now” comparisons of photos taken on the west side of the UNCG campus around 1991. Today, we move to the other side of campus (and two decades back in time) to compare some views of Tate Steet that were originally shot around 1971.

In 1970 or 1971, the store block on the east side of Tate Street, which dates from the 1920s, added a new facade to unify and modernize the appearance of the stores. At the same time, a two-story building had opened across the street to house Franklin Drugs, which had previously been across the street in the older store block. Franklin’s was replaced by a men’s clothing store called The Hill, which was only open for about a year, and that’s how we dated the photos.

Armed with the trusty iPhone in “panorama” mode, David Gwynn and Kathy Howard from the digital projects team recreated these images for your amusement.

Tate Street, north from Walker Avenue (1971):

Tate Street, north from Walker Avenue (2016):

Walker Avenue, west from Tate Street (1971):

Walker Avenue, west from Tate Street (2016):

Tate Street, southeast from Walker Avenue (1971):

Tate Street, southeast from Walker Avenue (2016):

Tate Street, northeast from Walker Avenue (1971):

Tate Street, northeast from Walker Avenue (2016):

In a typical breathless whistle-stop visit, Leonard Bernstein drops by the studios of New York classical music station WQXR to promote his 1948 recording of Gershwin’s An American in Paris, celebrating that quintessentially American composer on the 50th anniversary of his birth and discussing his own future plans. The interviewer, taking the subject of Gershwin’s piece literally, asks Bernstein if the last time he was in Paris he found the same things Gershwin did. Bernstein deftly turns the subject to music rather than autobiography, suggesting An American in Paris has to do “not with the city of Paris so much as the decade of the Twenties.” The interviewer stubbornly persists, pointing out the orchestral imitations of French taxi horns, etc. Bernstein allows that there is a “champagne bubble atmosphere” to the music.

The conversation then turns to Bernstein’s imminent departure for Israel, where he is to take up his position of Musical Director of the Israel Philharmonic and lead the orchestra for two months. Mention is made of “the Troubles” taking place at that time in Palestine. Bernstein concludes by giving a picture of his typically frenetic schedule. Immediately following his stint in Israel he has a concert in Paris on the 5th of December and one in Boston on the 9th. We are left with a fleeting glimpse of the then thirty-year-old musical phenom just as his career was reaching the stratospheric heights it would maintain for the next five decades.

1948: Bernstein departing for Israel to assume musical director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO). He is carrying recordings he made with American orchestras for the IPO Music Library.

(Enell, Inc. Music Division/Library of Congress)

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) occupies a solitary and commanding perch not only in American music but American culture. Rarely have the elements of myth and legitimate, recognized accomplishment been so inextricably combined. Alex Ross, writing in The New Yorker, points out how:

…The story of Bernstein plays like a modern American fable. A prodigious boy from Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of Ukrainian shtetl immigrants, one day sits down at his aunt’s upright and begins plinking out notes. Within months, he is outplaying his first piano teacher; within a couple of years, he has mastered “Rhapsody in Blue.” While enrolled at Harvard, he impresses the conductors Dimitri Mitropoulos and Serge Koussevitzky, wins a lifelong friend in Aaron Copland, and, on the side, writes a senior thesis on African-American themes in classical music which is still worth reading. He moves to New York…and in a little more than two years pulls off an extraordinary triple feat: he wins national notice as a conductor when he substitutes for Bruno Walter at the New York Philharmonic; he establishes himself as a concert-hall composer with the rock-solid, formidably eloquent First Symphony, “Jeremiah”; and, with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, he knocks out a hit musical, “On the Town.”

Bernstein’s talents as composer, conductor, pianist, teacher, and increasingly as a cultural icon, made him one of the most sought after performers of his era. The New York Times, in its obituary, recounts how:

…it sometimes seemed that Mr. Bernstein could not possibly squeeze in one more engagement, one more social appearance. During one particularly busy stretch, he conducted 25 concerts in 28 days. His conducting style accurately reflected his breathless race through life.

The adventure Bernstein is about to embark on following this interview proved to be one of the most dramatic and personally memorable of his entire career. The website leonardbernstein.com relates how:

Bernstein, as “musical adviser” of what had been the Palestine Symphony Orchestra when he conducted it the year before, had been touring the war-ravaged country with the ensemble for two months, performing for long-time citizens, new settlers and soldiers alike, a grueling schedule of forty concerts in sixty days. It was not unusual to experience nearby artillery fire mid-concert, and at one performance at Rehovoth, he was called offstage mid-Beethoven piano concerto and told of a possible air raid. According to the Palestine Post, “he returned to the piano as if nothing had happened.” The outwardly unflappable Bernstein said: “I never played such an Adagio. I thought it was my swan song.”

In a time when “classical” music seems far removed from the chaos and violence of the world; when conductors are, to the uninitiated, as indistinguishable from one another as the absurdly antiquated attire they sport, Bernstein’s life and art serve as an illustration that neither of these conditions is a given, should the right man once again appear. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150202
Municipal archives id: LT5551

Are you a Rhode Island artist? Do you make cool stuff, some of which is flat? Do you like to think about food and dining? Do you think the world needs coffee milk-themed wallpaper, and you’re the one who can make it happen?

In 2017, the Providence Public Library will present a food-themed, library-wide exhibition and program series. Alongside the usual exhibit cases, films, workshops, lectures, panels, and other events, we’ll be creating a food-themed installation inside the library. One element of the installation will be a series of large panels featuring food-themed wallpaper* created by a local artist** and inspired by items in our Special Collections.
*Interpreted loosely.
**Could this be you?

We’re currently accepting proposals from Rhode Island artists who are interested in this opportunity to receive funding through our Creative Fellowship program to research and create food-themed wallpaper in 2017! Don’t dilly-dally, because proposals are due by June 30th!

Read the full call for proposals and project timeline here.

Layla Essat is a Masters student in Gender Studies at the University of Stirling.  This is the first of a series of articles on her project placement investigating the Stirling District Asylum archive held by the University of Stirling.

Stirling District Lunatic Asylum first opened its doors in 1869. Located in Larbert, many of its patients had been transferred from the large Royal and Private Asylums in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. Like many institutions of the time, the asylum kept extensive handwritten records, logging and chronicling all under their care. These records for a long time remained stored away and inaccessible but have now found a new home in our very own University archive.

Beginning investigation into the records, I was fairly uncertain of what I was going to find. Undertaking this project in relation to my current Gender Studies Masters at Stirling, my only initial guiding focus was to explore the collection with the aim of discovering the situation of women. With the collection as a whole spanning over a hundred years, it was immediately apparent that a large task lay ahead. In response, I refined my focus to the years 1900 – 1910.

Diagnosis of GPI in admission register.

Ploughing my way through hundreds of pages of admissions registers, a familiar phrase kept popping up as “supposed cause of insanity.” What was this G.P of the Insane and why was it wholly prevalent in married women and men? Immediately fascinated and I was intent on learning more about the female patients this affected. With a quick input into google, I soon found the gendered relationship of this illness opening up.

General Paresis otherwise known as General Paralysis of the insane was first coined in the 1830s. As the name suggests, records state that patients at the asylum suffered from broad and vague symptoms, including fatigue, headaches and insomnia. Similarly, family members reported changes in personality, concentration and memory was severely impaired. They all suffered from slurred speech and facial and bodily tremors. Most notably, and highly typical of this disease, was the presence of delusions. This disease was syphilis.

Photograph of female patient taken on admission to Stirling District Asylum.

The most socially revealing symptom could be seen in the patient’s eyes and was termed Argyll Robertson pupils. Often termed “prostitute’s pupils”, they were large and unreceptive to changes in light. This discovery proved key. From this I speculated a connection between the use of prostitutes by men and the then inevitable transmission of this illness to their wives. The picture suddenly became much bigger and from here, I begin to question who the real victims in this situation were. In an age where a woman’s marital duty was to provide sex, it would prove highly difficult for these women to protect themselves from the inadvertent dangers of commercial sex. Given that symptoms could take up to 20 years to manifest, innocent wives were likely to pay the price of their husband’s pre-marital sexual encounters as well as any current ones. However, my research revealed that perhaps women caught it first- hand. The women in this asylum all came from some of the poorest sections of society. Marriage was often undertaken out of need to ensure financial security and very less often for love. “Casual Prostitutes” were women who engaged in prostitution as a side line to supplement household income, and often pushed to do so by their husbands.

This condition was otherwise termed The Great Imitator for its habit to share its symptoms with many other illnesses. I believe that this issue was far more widespread than it would first appear and suspect that many others with G.P of the Insane simply went misdiagnosed. Given the sheer number of male sufferers observed in the admissions register, I highly doubt that diagnosis of female patients with this condition to be accurate. I encountered several instances where diagnosis was changed upon death. The majority of women I encountered died in the asylum, and of the very few allowed home, prognosis would dictate that they would have died bedbound soon after.

Female case book containing detailed notes on patients admitted to the asylum.

We will perhaps never know the full plight of these women. However, the bottom lines remains; as long as society maintained the notion of a male right and need for satisfaction of sexual energies, the transmission of venereal diseases amongst prostitutes, innocent wives and their philandering husbands would continue. Bluntly, male demand directly facilitated female harm.

Layla Essat, May 2016

In the mid-1940s, a woman leading the news and special events department of a broadcaster in the nation’s biggest radio market was pretty unusual.  But that’s exactly the position held by Lily Supove Blake at WNYC in the post-war period, when hopes for the United Nations ran high, new technology became available and taking some chances with innovative programming was in the offing.

Lilian Thelma Supove was born on March 9, 1910 to Ida Blumer and Jacob Supove. Lily, as she liked to be called, would later put to good use some of the journalistic genes inherited from her father Jake, a newspaper journalist in Europe known for some strong opinions. She graduated cum laude from Smith College in 1929 and was the youngest person in her class. After Smith, she had been a New York City Welfare Department caseworker among other jobs prior to landing at WNYC in 1941.

What she worked on in those early years is not entirely clear, but by 1944 she was writing scripts and producing material for the station’s 20th anniversary programming. Later that year she was the producer for People’s Music, East and West, a concert series from Town Hall presenting seldom heard folk music in collaboration with the East and West Association.[1] The summer of 1945 she was producing a Saturday evening program called Global Neighbors which, according to Variety, got some script assistance from a seventeen-year-old Edward F. Albee.[2] By late 1945 Lily was WNYC’s News and Special Events Director. She coordinated WNYC’s 7th annual American Music Festival of 181 programs, including 137 live broadcasts over the eleven days between Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays in February 1946.[3]

Lily was also hosting and producing the World of Women, and was the host of the weekly interview program Weekend in New York. Among her interviewees were theater director Robert Lewis, actress Anne Jackson, sports writer Everett B. Morris and guitarist Vincente Gomez. 

By late 1946 she had taken three Antioch College interns under her wing to help with the writing, production and launching of a Department of Correction series Toward  a Return to Society. The young Kit Davidson, John Michael Kittross and Rod Serling [4] worked closely with Lily on the shows that were aime

“to acquaint New Yorkers with the work of the Classification Board of the Department of Correction. The series will present radio sessions of the board’s meetings, during which actual cases will be discussed…Dramatic portions of the script are written by Lilian Supove.”[5]

Standing just barely over five feet tall, Lily also took on special assignments from station director Sy Siegel, such as the National Aircraft Show in Cleveland, Ohio in November of that year. There she used a Brush Soundmirror, the first commercially available tape deck in America, (and quite cumbersome), to record WNYC’s first taped programs.[6]

Another trip found her at La Guardia Field on August 29, 1947 for a flight to London on the clipper Constellation to record interviews and finalize arrangements for WNYC’s airing of BBC World Theatre productions.[7] During the flight she interviewed a woman from Manila, who described how she, her husband and children were held in internment camps for three years.

Along with BBC officials her contacts that week in London included no less than George Bernard Shaw. She had written the great playwright with the hope that he would be willing to record a special introduction to The Man of Destiny, one of the BBC produced dramas WNYC planned to air. To her disappointment, she received the following reply:

Quite out of the question. I am too old; and The Man of Destiny needs no introduction. The announcer can read the printed directions with which the play begins in the book if he likes; but this is the utmost that I will sanction.[8]

Lily did, however, have some success scoring an interview with Harold Hobson, drama critic for London’s Sunday Times and early champion of playwrights Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.  They discussed the experimental World Theatre radio series coming to WNYC.

What kind of person was Lily Supove? One rare public reflection on her character and no-nonsense point of view can be found in a September 1947 edition of Film Daily. There, she was one of 372 critics queried on whether American films had improved, failed to improve or regressed in the previous year. She replied:

Film Daily, September 1947
(Library of Congress)

 July 1948 ushered in WNYC’s 25th year on the air, and Lily took the lead on silver anniversary programming. The New York World Telegram wrote with the photo below,  “Across the years–while Mrs. Lilian Blake has been director of special events and news…the station has led the airwaves in culture and also in information about health. This year it claims the record for broadcasting more United Nations news than any other station in the world.”

Preparing for WNYC’s 25th anniversary are (l to r) standing: Miriam Cutler, Dulcie Rogers, Marilyn Tack, Patti Bolton, Lynn Thiras and seated: Anita Paige, Lilian Blake & Rita Ostrow.
(World Telegram photo by F. Palumbo/Library of Congress)

Liiy was active on Election Day 1949 doing, among other things, a ‘beeper phone’ interview with Sid Berry, Special Events Coordinator for the State Department, regarding the Voice of America’s election coverage. Here is the interview, introduced by WNYC Director Sy Siegel.

News and Special Events Director Lilian Supove’s 1947 U.N. ID.
(Courtesy of Edwin Blake/WNYC Archive Collections)

In 1951, Lily and her husband left New York for Tacoma, Washington, where they raised their son Edwin. In the 1970s Lily returned to New York for a few years, working at a number of jobs including copy-editing at the Village Voice (1977-1978). According to her son, she also ran a Vista neighborhood house in Harlem from February 1978 to 1979. There she enjoyed introducing kids to the world outside Harlem, showing them how to use the subway system and taking them on field trips to free concerts and various art museums. And, she made it a point to take them to the New York Public Library to get their library cards. Lily Blake died on May 11, 1991.

Lily Supove Blake’s WNYC calling card.
(Courtesy of Edwin Blake/WNYC Archive Collections)

____________________________________________________

[1] Lohman, Sidney, “Gossip of Radio Row,” The New York Times, pg. X11. Note: The East and West Association was formed during World War II with the goal of aiding the Allied war effort in Asia by helping Americans understand the culture and concerns of the people of China and India.

[2] Variety, August 8, 1945, pg. 32

[3] “Musical Mastodon” PM, February 22, 1946, pg. 16.

[4] According to author Gordon F. Sander, Serling’s pay at WNYC didn’t quite cover all of his expenses and so the former Pacific theater paratrooper took to moonlighting as a parachute tester. “Lilian Blake, his supervisor at WNYC, found out about her subaltern’s somewhat bizarre part-time job when he staggered into the newsroom one winter’s day with a major gash across his cheek. Serling sheepishly explained that the parachute he was testing proved impossible to control, and the wind had blown him into a barbed wire fence. ‘You wouldn’t know it to look at him though,’ said Blake. ‘He was very modestly behaved, not at all the swashbuckling type.’ ” Source: Sander, Gordon F., Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man, Plume, 1994, pg. 57-58.

[5] Lohman, Sidney, “Concerning Radio Row,” The New York Times, November 10, 1946, pg. X9.

[6] “WNYC Airs Magnetic Paper Tape Broadcast,” Billboard, November 30, 1946, pg. 5.

[7] “From the Production Centers,” Variety, September 3, 1947, pg. 36.

[8] Gould, Jack, “The News of Radio,” The New York Times, September 8, 1947, pg. 42.

[9] “WNYC to Hold Own Jubilee,” The New York World Telegram, June 9, 1948, pg. 3.

…At that time Massachusetts was the only state in the Union were palm-leaf was manufactured into hats. The only factories for carrying on this work were located at Amherst, Barre, Palmer and Fitchburg. Of these, the factories at Amherst were the most important as regarded the size of buildings, the amount of business and the completeness of the work done. L.M. Hills & Sons were the largest operators in the business in America. All the leaf used in the work came from Cuba.²

Ever wonder about Vancouver’s advertising past? One piece of the city’s advertising history is the Green & Huckvale Advertising Ltd. fonds. At its height, Green & Huckvale Advertising Ltd. was a Vancouver advertising and public relations agency that handled a mix of corporate, service, retail, government, and manufacturing clients. It was formed in 1975 as Sprackman, Green & Huckvale Advertising, with Joan Green as President and Creative Director Mel Sprackman as Director of Client Services (in charge of accounts and business development), and Marnie Huckvale as Public Relations Director.

Design for Calona “Tiffany” wine. From file AM1453-S4–Calona Tiffany

The fonds consists of textual records, photographs, audio tapes of radio advertisements, and graphic design materials relating to the agency’s early advertising and public relations projects for various local clients.

The core of the Green & Huckvale fonds is its client case files. Each case file contains very detailed records on how an advertising idea was developed and documents every stage of how Green & Huckvale helped its clients establish their public image. This documentation includes research material, ideas formulation, communications with clients, storyboard presentations, radio and TV advertising scripts, graphic designs and advertising campaign strategies.

Expo Centre ad. From series AM1453-S3

Other interesting and informative records are found in the creative design development files (1978-1982), and the Expo 86 project records. They contain very stylish and eye-catching graphic design materials which display the design trends of the 1980s.

Expo 86 poster. From series: AM1453-S3

Expo 86 poster. From series AM1453-S3

Being a successful advertising agency, Green & Huckvale served a wide variety of clients in the private sector, including the BC Automobile Association, Granville Island Public Market, Harrison Hotel, London Drugs, Mohawk Oil, NEC, and Purdy’s Chocolates. The company was also a pioneer in providing public relations services to various levels of government, helping them to promote their services and plans, and to establish a good public image. Its public sector clients included the BC Ministry of Health, BC Ministry of Lands, BC Parks and Recreation, BC Housing, and the City of Vancouver.

Western Elevator presentation. From file AM1453-S4–Western elevator

Sprackman left the company in late 1979. Initially, the agency provided creative services only, but quickly grew into a full-service agency, with clients whose market areas covered all of Canada and the Pacific Northwest. In 1986, the company became dormant and remained so for three years. It was reactivated in 1989, again as a full-service agency, but with staff hired on a project basis only. Green & Huckvale continued to provide print and broadcast advertising in all media, eventually including website design.

Early company logo. From file AM1453-S3-Western Optical Co. Ltd. – research, box 973-E-7 folder 3

The Green & Huckvale Advertising Ltd. fonds documents over two decades of local creative ideas and values. The records also reflect a period of time in which manufacturers and even government sectors were realizing that promotion of their products and services was vital if they wanted to survive or to be more responsive to customers.

[Editor’s note: A earlier version of this post appeared in Archives Newsletter Volume 4, Number 1: Spring 2008]

Join us and REGISTER for the next public meeting of the PIDB!

When: Thursday, June 23, 2016 from 9:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

Doors Open: 9:15 a.m.

Where: The Archivist’s Reception Room, Room 105, National Archives and Records Administration

Address: 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC (Enter through the Pennsylvania Ave. Lobby)

The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) will hold a public meeting to report on its work in developing recommendations to modernize the classification and declassification system.  Members will report on their ongoing investigation into how the use of technological applications will modernize declassification, making it more efficient and effective in the digital age.  Additionally, the PIDB has invited a representative from the White House to discuss the Administration’s policies and initiatives to increase government transparency.  At the PIDB’s last public meeting, Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Alex MacGillivray, spoke of the need for Government to adopt the use of technologies in its work processes to improve access and use of Government information.

We will allot time for questions and comments from the public.

This meeting is open to the public. However, due to space limitations and access procedures, we require individuals planning to attend the meeting to register on Eventbrite.

Attendees must enter through the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance. Please note we require one form of Government-issued photo identification (e.g. driver’s license) to gain admittance. For questions about accessibility or to request accommodations, please contact the PIDB staff at 202-357-5342 or pidb@nara.gov. Two weeks advance notice will allow us to provide access.

Press may contact NARA’s Public Affairs Office at 202-357-5300.

Be sure to stay connected to the Board’s activities and look for more information about the Board on its website and its blog, Transforming Classification.  

Have questions about Public Meeting of the Public Interest Declassification Board? Contact the Public Interest Declassification Board.

In this 1962 “address to the women of America,” Nina Petrovna Khrushcheva, the wife of Premier Nikita Khrushchev, urges the United States to end the cold war by full disarmament and to dump all weapons into the ocean.

Though it is unclear if this recording aired on WNYC, the broadcast was transmitted to American audiences via shortwave radio. A February 19th article in the New York Times describes her “accented but flowing” message:

The Premier’s wife expressed gratification over the ‘peace movement’ of American women. Her formula for world peace was this: ‘Let us sink atom bombs along with the other weapons in the deepest part of the ocean and live without weapons as good neighbors.’

Invoking a national memory of fifty years of war she asserts that her country does not want to fight with the United States:

Our people are engaged in the greatest and noblest undertaking that has ever fallen to man. During the time in twenty years we want, in the main, to build a communist society in our country, a society of plenty, full equality and happiness for all.

Nina was the first wife of a Russian political leader to assume a typical First Lady role, which was projected towards an attentive global audience. This era in Soviet politics, known as the Khrushchev Thaw, emphasized the unraveling of Stalinism and peaceful coexistence with other nations. Nina was the smiling face of the Khrushchev Thaw.

She traveled at Nikita’s side on diplomatic trips to foreign countries, communicated in several languages and had a career as a teacher and communist party leader. When reached for comment, her granddaughter and namesake Nina Khrushcheva said:

…she was rather well educated, certainly better than Nikita Khrushchev, and was once his teacher in political economy…She worked as a propagandist (and apparently a very good one) during the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War, and was very upset when she had to give up her job in the 1930s because Stalin’s mandate was to return women back to the family and end the suffrage movement. She told me once that ‘during World War II she could have been very helpful to the soldiers.’

…she was very proper and professional, her job was to be at the side of the leader and to represent the country on foreign trips so she did what was expected of her to the best of her ability, essentially perceiving those trips as her communist party duty…As a side note, she was also a wonderful grandmother, firm yet forgiving.

From left to right: Nina Krushcheva, Mamie Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev and Dwight Eisenhower at a state dinner in 1959.

(National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons)

 In 1959, the family embarked on a cross country tour of the United States. With fascination, the press described her adventures dining in Hollywood with Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope, dodging questions on foreign policy from the press, sneaking away in San Francisco to do a little shopping and showing off pictures of her grandchildren.

An Associated Press article from September 28th, 1959 recounts how reporters anticipated this visit with catty remarks about her appearance, “some sophisticated reporters commented caustically upon Mme. Khrushchev[a]’s poorly corseted figure, undistinguished wardrobe, placid peasant face and incredible long page-boy-in-snood hair-do.” However, her charm eventually won over the public. The reporter, who was perhaps ignorant of Khrushchev’s de-stalinization policies, further suggested that “There was the feeling that anyone who had the good sense to marry her, stay married to her, and bring her over here couldn’t be all villain, no matter what he was doing during Stalin’s regime.”As Albin Krebs notes in Nina’s 1984 New York Times obituary “she turned out to be her husband’s greatest public relations asset, as Americans took to her cheerful personality and motherly manner.”

After Nikita was ousted in 1964, the couple retired in quiet obscurity to a dacha near Moscow. The Times obituary criticized the Russian government for letting Nina’s death go unnoted by reporters in Moscow for 10 days:

The only public mention of [her death], a brief notice in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva on Aug. 11, referred to her by her maiden name of Kukharchuk and described her as a ‘personal pensioner.’ Her husband’s death notice [in 1971] described him similarly, neglecting to mention that he had once been First Secretary of the Communist Party and Prime Minister.

Nina served a diplomatic spousal role to foreign countries but rarely made public appearances in the Soviet Union. As the couple were never officially married, it is not surprising that the Soviet press would use her legal last name, nor make mention of Nikita’s death at a time when the Soviet Union was reverting back to Stalinist policies. According to her granddaughter:

Since the First Lady position didn’t exist, Nina’s death in 1984 mattered more to the Westerners than to the Soviets. For the West she was one of the political symbols of Khrushchev’s Thaw, of his communism with the human face, but to the Soviets she was just a former leader’s wife. Moreover a leader who targeted Stalinism, something that even today Russia is still conflicted about. Over 50 percent of people consider Stalin’s role in Soviet affairs positive.

 

My utmost thanks to Nina Khrushcheva for providing her commentary. Khrushcheva is a Professor at The New School and a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute. Learn more about the Khrushchev family in her latest book, The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey into the Gulag of the Russian Mind. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150300
Municipal archives id: T4070

Same view (2016):

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We get asked this question a lot from people. Most are simply curious. However, to the staff of the FSU Digital Library (FSUDL), this is actually an important question. Understanding what our most viewed objects are can help us decide what materials to digitize and make public next for our users as well as understand where current research interests lie within the FSU community.

However, it’s not quite as simple as looking at Google analytics or the basic collection usages statistics that our digital library platform gives us. We’ve only had some of our statistic reporting tools in place for a short amount of time so what Google says is our most viewed collection doesn’t necessarily match what the Digital Library itself tells us. For example, Google says that our Yearbook collection is the most viewed collection in the Digital Library; our Digital Library tells us it’s the Heritage Protocol & University Archives collection, the Yearbook’s parent collection, that is most viewed. This shows the different granularity upon which the two systems collect information; one is looking at the entirety of the Digital Library; the other is looking only at a certain level at any given time. That difference is why we need both systems tracking together to get us the information we need to make decisions about projects moving forward in the FSUDL. It’s also helping us to continue to refine how we collect usage information from the FSUDL.

While the Digital Library platform might not be the best fit for tracking what collection is most viewed, it is the platform which can tell me the answer to the question that prompted this blog post: what is the most viewed object in the Digital Library? Right now, this still is not an easy question to answer (takes a bit of work to get it out of the DL system) but I can say that the Tally-Ho of 1952 (the FSU student yearbook) has been viewed 990 times since we started tracking at object level at the beginning of this year.

In second place is Paul Dirac’s dissertation with 755 views and rounding out the top 3 is a Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey clown college (because who doesn’t love clowns?) In fact, this item is also in our top ten of exit pages meaning this object is often what people are looking for so they leave the FSUDL after finding it.

We’ll continually be working on tracking usage in the Digital Library to make sure the materials we share in the digital environment are the most useful and interesting to all our users. What do you think we should digitize next?

2016 Portals Creative Fellow Walker Mettling put together an amazing, Special Collections-themed comics compilation and story night– and you’re invited!

The event, coming up on Monday, June 6th, will feature stories written and read by local artists Veronica Santos, Caitlin Cali, Dailen Williams, Jim Frain, Keegan Bonds-Harmon, Jeremy Ferris & Julia Gualtieri. Library friend and neighbor Joe DeGeorge will provide musical interludes. This event will also feature the release of a brand new, Special Collections-themed issue of the Providence Sunday Wipeout, a large-format comics newspaper. Wow!

This not-entirely-literary evening will be hosted by Walker Mettling. See you on June 6th at 6:30 p.m. in the PPL Auditorium!

Yesterday, PIDB member Sanford Ungar attended a briefing by Dr. Cheryl Martin entitled, Decision Support Technology for Records Declassification Review and Release. Dr. Martin’s briefing was jointly sponsored by the ODNI and CIA as part of the research supporting the Congressionally-Directed Action tasked by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to the Director of National Intelligence in Section 321 of the IAA for FY2015: Report on Declassification Process.

Dr. Martin’s briefing expanded on the findings she presented at the PIDB’s June 25, 2015 public meeting concerning declassification technology pilot projects conducted at the Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin. As part of the President’s Second Open Government National Action Plan, the CIA and NARA teamed with Dr. Martin and the CCU to develop a Sensitive Content Identification and Marking (SCIM) tool to assist the declassification review of over 87,000 emails from the Reagan Administration.

After successfully demonstrating the capabilities of the SCIM tool, the CCU continues supporting the CIA in its efforts to develop and apply the technology to its declassification review processes. Dr. Martin’s briefing brought agency officials together to hear an in-depth description of the piloting efforts and to discuss as a community the potential next steps for developing the SCIM tool and expanding its application at agencies.

The PIDB has a history of making recommendations for improving technological capabilities in support of declassification. The work of the CCU will have significant implications on how agencies grapple with the challenges of performing declassification in an increasingly digital world. The new challenges brought on by the exponential growth of digital information require new solutions routed in technology and automation. Not only will technology support declassification decision making in the future, it likely will replace some components of the declassification process in its entirety. Developing these technologies requires new policies that favor an increase in automation and improved risk management across government. As importantly, agencies requires resources (i.e. funding) devoted to declassification modernization to ensuring the public has access to government information now and in the future.

The PIDB thanks Dr. Martin and the CCU, as well as the ODNI, CIA, NARA, and all the agencies who attended the briefing. The participation of agencies at this briefing and at the meetings of the PIDB’s Declassification Technology Working Group demonstrate the commitment the government shares to improve public access to its information in support of transparency and openness.

One of the most rewarding parts of my work is sharing the treasures of the National Archives with kids and their families.

Through the support of the National Archives Foundation, we continue to host sleepovers in the Rotunda of the National Archives. These events give kids the chance to spend the night next to America’s most precious treasures: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, while engaging them in activities that help them learn about our nation’s history, and explain the important role of the National Archives.

One of the activities during our sleepovers provides an opportunity for kids to write letters, as I did, to the President of the United States, which are then delivered to the White House.

Kids at the National Archives sleepover write letters to the President of the United States. February 6, 2016. Photo by Jeffrey Reed.

Our latest delivery received a response directly from the President!

It is a privilege to continue to host these events for kids and their families, and encourage them to become more involved in their government. For more information, please visit archivesfoundation.org/sleepover.

“Race Relations in America,” is the self-proclaimed theme of the 1962 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners. The prize, whose mission is to recognize works of social justice, goes to three books, Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, The Forbidden Man, by Gina Allen, and Anti-Slavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America by Dwight Lowell Dumond.

As the books represent three different genres (memoir, novel, and work of history) the host has a difficult time getting the conversation going. Gina Allen speaks of her novel being about how “barriers lead to a lack of understanding, and in the lack of understanding you have the germs of hate.” Dumond, a professor of history, starts out with a rather dry exposition of the anti-slavery movement, before characterizing the institution itself as “a form of social insanity.” Griffin, the most well-known of the three, whose “stunt” of having a dermatologist to darken his skin so he could travel throughout the South as a black man, is a more passionate, voluble witness.

Griffin describes the hardship of simply having nowhere to eat, to get a glass of water, or answer any other bodily needs, of the dread he felt leaving his room, of having to think very carefully before taking any action, with the threat of violent consequences lurking behind the most innocent impulse. Of blacks and whites in America he proclaims, “We know nothing whatsoever about each other!” Allen refers to an apparently common phrase of the time, the “hate stare” blacks encounter from racist whites. She also points out how racism destroys white families and as well as black. Dumond speaks of the brain drain the South has suffered for many years as any white with the conscience or intelligence to question the system of apartheid is forced to leave.

There is still, in 1962, a widely-held belief that the Negro is genetically inferior. Much time is devoted to debunking these and other myths. Griffin speaks of how, when hitch-hiking, he was invariably asked about the black man’s enormous sexual appetite. The conversation, with its conspicuous lack of black representation (this in a year that saw the publication of James Baldwin’s Another Country) is a well-intentioned but disturbing snapshot of the white literary community trying to formulate a response without engaging the very people whose predicament is being discussed.

Gina Allen (b. 1918) was the author of many books and articles. The Forbidden Man was her first novel. Kirkus Review called it:

An earnest, angry and often moving novel about integration in the Spanish-White-Negro-town in the southwest…There is a touch too much melodrama and too many side plots in this story, but the author has right, knowledge and indignation on her side, and the central scenes, of a Negro teacher at bay among the disturbed from an even more disjointed background, are frequently stirring.

Dwight Lowell Dumond (1895-1976) taught for many years at the University of Michigan. Anti-Slavery was his magnum opus. As the university’s memorial tribute notes:

Dumond’s antislavery publications were cited in oral argument by counsel for the plaintiffs in the school segregation cases to supplement their written briefs.

John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) was a novelist, journalist, and social activist. It is hard to overstate the impact Black Like Me had in a time when the inequities of the South were not widely reported and, even when done so, not widely believed. Something about the bizarreness of Griffin’s self-willed transformation, perhaps the very urgency such a drastic act implied, made his revelations more than mere muckraking. Jonathan Yardley, book critic for the Washington Post, recalled its effect when revisiting the book fifty years later.

I was 21 years old, newly graduated from Chapel Hill. I had written sympathetically about the emerging black protests for the student newspaper, but I was deeply ignorant about the truths of black life in America. That it took a white man to begin my awakening is, in hindsight, distressing, but Griffin’s story managed to put me in a black man’s shoes as nothing else had. …”Black Like Me” had a transforming effect on me, as apparently it did on innumerable others. That it has remained in print for more than four decades is testimony to its continuing influence, in great measure because it is taught in high schools and colleges.

Fittingly, the last word is given to Griffin, who states, “We don’t have a race problem in the United States, we’ve got a problem of racism.”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150268
Municipal archives id: LT9452

“I left Harpoot the 17th of May, going alone three days’ journey to Diarbekir, somewhat to the scandal of the missionaries along the way. However, I knew the road well and was not in the least afraid, and after all nothing happened.” (Dora Mattoon, letter of Dec 3, 1915)

What inspires a woman to throw over her life from one day to the next, to go from apparent comfort and a great job in a big city to a remote post in a country she’s never been to, where they speak a language she hasn’t studied at all?  And what would possess her to leave the first country after five years of hard work for an entirely different one, retraining herself all over again?  How does she go from here:

to here:

–and from being this person (I love the body language here):

to becoming this person:

What percent of her decision springs from a spirit of adventure, and what percent from “missionary zeal”?

In the case of Dora Mattoon, it was 110% of each.  She couldn’t be contained.

Broadway Tabernacle, ca. 1905

On March 2, 1911, the 27-year-old Dora read an obituary in the New York Times for missionary Maria B. Poole.  Maria, who had earlier attended Dora’s church, the Broadway Tabernacle, had died at the mission station in Harpoot, Turkey, of a heart attack after complications from pneumonia.  According to Dora’s diary, the story of Maria’s life and work inspired Dora to take her place, almost from one day to the next.  She thought quietly over the idea for a few months before announcing her decision in early May.  Dr. Charles Jefferson, her pastor at the Broadway Tabernacle, wrote to console her worried parents:

“Your daughter seems to have worked this problem out all by herself.  I never once spoke to her on the subject of missions, and was quite surprised when a short time ago she came to me, and told me she was going to apply for the position left vacant by our missionary, Miss Poole.  I do not believe that anybody talked to her, or coaxed her into it, or even persuaded her, but that she worked it all out alone in her own heart.  And she seems to be quite firm in her decision, feeling convinced in her own mind that she is doing what is right and best.  She does not like to go so far from you and her mother, but she feels that you have four other girls… Under the circumstances, then, I do not see what is to be done but to let her carry out her plan.  She is a mature woman, in good health, old enough to know her own mind, and to measure her own powers, and however hard it may be for you to have her go so far from you, I believe that in time you will become adjusted to it… She can write to you often, and every seven years she can come home… Having been in Turkey once myself, I do not think of it as far away.”  (Letter of May 2, 1911 from Charles Jefferson to Alfred Mattoon.)

By October, Dora was on a ship heading for Turkey to take Maria Poole’s place in Harpoot.

Harpoot mission station, ca. 1910.

Dora thrived in Turkey. She loved the people – the natives and her colleagues – and she loved the work. Her particular job was to be a touring missionary, to visit small villages in the region and to meet with the “Bible women” there. The Bible women were native Armenians who taught Bible lessons to their fellow citizens for a small salary, and it was Dora’s job to be sure they had what they needed, spiritually and materially. At first she used an interpreter, but over time she learned Armenian and Turkish and was able to conduct meetings herself.

Armenian family in Turkey.

Dora’s work required that she travel from Harpoot across land that was often dangerous from snowstorms, rainstorms, flash floods, and dense fog, not to mention Kurdish tribesmen, who in Dora’s letters seem to alternate between rescues and robbery. Dora traveled by horseback, often for days at a time between one village and the next, and for months at a time over the course of an entire tour. Finding shelter usually meant a stay in a native khan (an extremely rustic inn) where she would share a blanket with fleas on the floor in a smoky, windowless room, separated from other occupants by a blanket curtain. She almost always had a male escort, usually the long-time missionary Henry Riggs, but occasionally she went alone on shorter trips or was accompanied by Mariam Varzoohi, a native teacher in the girls’ college. Dora traveled across hills, jumped off falling horses, waded up to her thighs in snow, got soaked to her skin, and seems to have relished all of it. Whether she’d been a mountaineer before she came to Turkey or whether she realized her love for it in Harpoot, it became a lifelong attachment.

“The northern way is pleasanter than the southern in that one passes over mountains most of the way, and the khans are better on the whole…I was absent from Harpoot almost five weeks, and two days was the longest time I spent in any one place, so you may know life in one way did not become monotonous. Our principal topic of conversation between here and Sivas was our rascally arabdaji [guides]. This was my first experience of traveling in Turkey without a man, and I find a woman has to do a deal of fighting to get along alone.” (Letter of Nov 13, 1913.)

The work of a traveling missionary was Dora’s favorite work, “the cream of missionary work,” but with the departure of several colleagues from the station she had to give it up in order to teach at the girls’ school in Harpoot. She loved this work too, but she never ceased to miss touring, which seems to have been the highlight of her career. Nevertheless, she threw herself into teaching with enthusiasm, embracing her “eagerness to tread in unknown paths.”

“You ask about my orphanage correspondence. Our orphans are each supported by people in America, and so every once in a while I have to get the children to write letters to their caretakers, have the letters translated, and send them off with a personal word of my own.” (Letter of Aug 14, 1913.)

Recess at Girls School in Harpoot.

Harpoot’s attractions included Earl Ward, who had been in Turkey since 1909. Dora had met Earl’s twin Mark (both Amherst Class of 1906) before she left for Turkey, so finding Earl at Harpoot would’ve been no surprise. Falling in love with him might’ve been a surprise, though:

“You remember, mother, I used to say men were a nuisance – though I did find them ever so good chums as you know…” (Letter of Oct 17, 1912.)

“Mark [Ward] talked to me more than once about Earl and how much he needed me, though I wouldn’t have it that way at all and came out here with my mind fully made up that whatever happened I simply wouldn’t marry Earl Ward.” (Letter of Oct 17, 1912.)

“…his faults loomed clearer than his virtues for some time!” (Letter of Aug 14, 1913.)

Good chums Dora and Earl worked and played together for the few years they overlapped in Harpoot.

“I hope none of you in this enlightened age and generation picture a missionary as a man who wears a frock coat and a long face and goes around preaching of fire and brimstone. The missionaries I have known are the finest, most earnest, whole-souled, jolly people I’ve met in many a long day.” (From left, Dora, Mary Riggs, Earl. Letter of Mar 1, 1913.)

Dora and Earl near a well (?) on the plain outside Harpoot.

Earl’s tour in Harpoot ended in July of 1913, when he returned to the U.S. and began to work for the YMCA.  When he left, Earl and Dora were already engaged and planned to marry when Dora’s tour was up a long two years later.

Dora left Turkey in the spring of 1915, by which time the war had reached Harpoot. That winter, from her home in Massachusetts, she wrote to her sisters, reflecting on what had happened in the brief time since she’d left:

“I wonder where all those dear [Harpoot] friends are now? Many if not most of them killed, I suppose. How dear they all were, and how I loved and admired them! When I came away three of our professors and one of our teachers were in prison, along with eight or ten others of the prominent Armenians, and torture and massacre and deportation had not yet then begun. They came with full force later!” (Letter of Dec 3, 1915.)

In March of 1916, after a brief furlough in the United States, the newlyweds headed for Calcutta, India, on YMCA business. It’s difficult to be certain from only her letters home, but at first Dora seems to have struggled to find her place in India. The climate was hard on her, but in addition she seems to have become an adjunct to Earl’s work in Calcutta rather than having her work equal to his as it had been in Turkey. Her letters suggest that her role was to be primarily a helpmeet to Earl, especially as hostess to people associated with his work, and to do this work so regularly that it was exhausting. Dora needed to be busy, to do her own work, and to feel useful, and while she loved Earl and supported his work, her frustration is apparent in her letters to family.

After a few years and another brief furlough, the Wards were sent to Bombay, and here Dora seems to have gotten back into a role she loved. While Earl devised programs for men and boys, Dora did the same for women and girls.  Their duties introduced them to the “chawls” in neighborhoods where their work would take place:

“The chawls are great blocks or tenements of concrete, four storeys high, with twenty rooms on a floor and about five persons to a room probably!  We figure there are about 8,000 people in the 22 chawls in that particular area.”

Earl in front of chawls.

The Wards also traveled around India to inspect other social work sites:

“We had three weeks in Nagpur and spent practically all the time studying the welfare work.  I visited the day nursery, or creche, which is being done at the mill, and I also spent some time at an infant welfare center which is being run by the municipality.  Then I went to the villages with Irene’s trained nurse and some of her teachers, and Earl spent a lot of evenings, and I some too, visiting the night schools, which is the big approach to people.  The welfare work is financed by Empress Mills, who employ 25,000 workers.  They live in villages, or bustees, and the welfare work is being done in the bustees.  I also looked into the Project Method of teaching…”

Dora was back in business. Click on an image below for gallery.

During vacations the Wards traveled in India as they had in Turkey. Over time Dora became “an old India hand,” familiar with the ways of India – its history, religions, customs, foods, and how to get around. Click for gallery:

After another tour of duty in Calcutta from 1930-32, the world economy forced the YMCA to downsize and the Wards were called home. They were never again posted abroad but remained very active in the U.S. with social work similar to what they had done in Turkey and India.

The Dora Judd Mattoon Ward Papers contain diaries, correspondence, photographs, a nearly full set of the “Harpoot Newsletter” by Ernest Riggs, and other materials about the lives of Dora and Earl Ward. One of its chief strengths is in showing how the lives of missionaries evolved in response to circumstances and changing needs. Dora and Earl started out as “missionaries” in Turkey, but in India they referred to themselves as “social workers” or “welfare workers,” and their work seems distinctly less religious and more specifically related to health, education, and welfare. Where Dora’s work as a touring missionary in Turkey involved a lot of religious teaching, her work in India was more about setting up programs for women and children, and Earl’s was the same for men.

The papers are also important as a record of events in Turkey and India in the first third of the twentieth century. Although the couple seems not to have been especially “political,” their letters contain many comments about the state of affairs first in Turkey during World War I, and later in India during the declining years of the British Raj.

We welcome researchers seeking to use the many Ward collections at Amherst College — those of Edwin St. John Ward (AC 1900), Earl Ward (AC 1906), Mark Hopkins Ward (AC 1906, his papers to be processed soon), and Dora J.M. Ward — or one of the many other missionary collections in our holdings.

Note:

Most of the photographs in this post are by Earl Ward, a few probably by Dora Ward or Fay Emmett Livengood, a fellow missionary in Turkey.  Many of Earl’s photographs, including several used in this post, were digitized by his nephew Richard Ward, Class of 1942.

 All of the letters in the Dora Judd Mattoon Ward Papers were transcribed by Dora’s faithful niece and our donor, Nancy Kline.

The following testimony is excerpted from the U.S. Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce hearing on S. 814 to amend the Communications Act of 1934, December 8, 1943.*

My name is John V. L. Hogan. I am by training and occupation a consulting engineer. I have been interested in radio, first as an amateur, as far back as 1902. My first professional connection was with Dr. de Forest. That was when I was still in school. I was his laboratory assistant.

I left Yale to join the National Electric Signaling Company as a telegraph engineer, and then I worked through the position of chief research engineer and finally manager, and then, in 1921, just before broadcasting became a beginning industry in the United States, I established my own practice as an independent consulting engineer with a laboratory and office in New York, which I still maintain.

I happen to be the controlling stockholder of Station WQXR in New York, which was an outgrowth of laboratory work in television, strangely enough. We had an experimental sound channel as a part of our television work and it was found that radio listeners who had no television receivers could hear the sound portion of our program, even though they could not see the pictures, and they liked the kind of music that we put on the air and they asked for more of it. So I came down and had talks with Lieutenant Jett and Commander Craven about the possibilities of a broadcasting station which would put emphasis on better engineering, I think I might say, than had been common in the broadcasting art up to that time and which would therefore reproduce not only music but speech more clearly, more realistically, more naturally than was common in broadcasting.

I pointed out that the phonograph was improving, that the talking pictures were improving with respect to the realism of their sound, but that radio did not seem to be doing all it could. So with the blessing of the Commission, we tried to do that very thing, and since about eight years ago the station has grown from a very modest beginning to a cleared-channel independent 10,000-watt station in New York with a very large audience, and for the past two years or more it has been not merely successful from the audience point of view, but it has also been earning its salt.

_____________________________________

*Source: U.S. Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce hearing on S. 814 to amend the Communications Act of 1934,U. S. Government Printing Office, 1944, pg. 810.

See also: A Report to Listeners by John V. L. Hogan.

Happy 119th birthday to John MacKay Shaw, founder of our Childhood in Poetry book collection and bibliophile extraordinaire.  To celebrate Mr. Shaw, and in our ongoing commemoration of 400 Years of Shakespeare, we present a Scope and Content Note for John Shaw’s papers in the style of title pages from the early hand-press era.  Mr. Shaw would surely appreciate our gesture, as the Shaw rare book collection feature works by Shakespeare along with many, many other authors.

Further Reading on Mr. Shaw and his collection:

• A Book Collector’s Legacy
• Research Guide on the Shaw Collection
• Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Shaw Collection