September 21, 2012

No Poe?

By daseger

The Library of Congress is currently running an exhibition (both digital and material) entitled Books That Shaped America as part of their multiyear “Celebration of the Book”.  There are 88 books in all, and the list is intended to provoke reading, thought, discussion, and additions:  According to the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, it is a “starting point… intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not.” To contribute to this conversation, you can take a survey on the site. I have found myself thinking about the list quite a bit over the last week or so, and every time I make a mental case on why a certain book should be (or should not be) on the list I go to the exhibit website and read the Library’s rationale.

The books include classic examples of both nonfiction and fiction:  the former category includes several works of grammar, cookbooks, scientific books, and quite a few works which call for social reform, pretty understandable given the list’s focus on impact, influence, identity. There are several early primers, but twentieth-century textbooks do not make the grade.  Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery (1796) is on the list, along with Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking (1931), but not Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (the first to use standardized measurements) or Julia Child’s The French Chef Cookbook (which really revolutionized the American palate, in my understanding).

A history of how-to:  The New England Primer (1802), The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1869) and Dale Carnegie’s incredibly influential How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).

The fiction works seem more predictable:  lots of New England authors, I must say, including Salem’s own Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Alcott, Dickinson.  Washington Irving is on the list, as is, of course, Mark Twain.  All the expected southern authors (with the exception of Flannery O’Connor) are included, and many major twentieth-century texts, from The Jungle to In Cold Blood.  The list also includes classic children’s books, including  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Good Night Moon (1947), and Where the Wild Things Are (1973).

Forceful Fiction:  Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951).

Actually, I think that children’s literature is a bit over-represented as compared to other genres.  And I know I’m biased, but history seems under-represented, as well as economics (Sandburg’s Lincoln? Milton Friedman?).  As for fiction, I think I’ve figured out why works by James Fenimore Cooper and Edith Wharton were not included but why no Poe?  Certainly The Raven must be put on the list, at the very least.

Antonio Frasconi illustration for/of The Raven, 1959, in the current exhibition at the Brandywine River Museum: Picturing Poe: Illustrations for Edgar Allen Poe’s Stories and Poems.

11 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Current Events

September 19, 2012

Peine forte et dure

By daseger

Hard and severe Punishment, intended to compel an individual to enter a plea in a legal proceeding in which they had no confidence, or hope: the precedent in the English Common Law that entitled the Court of Oyer and Terminer to crush Giles Gorey to death under a pile of stones on September 19, 1692 for “standing mute”.  For those who take the remembrance and commemoration of the Salem Witch Trials seriously, the next few days are the dark crescendo of the hysteria, escalating toward the execution of the last eight victims on September 22. I wrote about these days in a series of posts last year, so I’m not going to repeat myself, but I did want to explore the history of peine forte et dure a bit more:  Corey’s miserable experience was a singular application of the precedent in American history, but it was a relatively rare infliction in English history as well.

Samuel Clarke,  A Generall Martyrologie (London, 1651).

Peine forte et dure is a late Medieval “innovation” in the English Common Law, first employed in the reign of Henry VI (1421-71).  English courts had always demanded that the accused enter a plea, but it was generally imprisonment and/or starvation that was used to compel submission. The first recorded use of the peine was on a woman, Juliana Quick, who was accused of High Treason because of her malicious slander of Henry–a king who did not command a great deal of respect among his subjects given his sporadic bouts of insanity.  Quick’s comments, ending with thou art a fool, and a known fool throughout the kingdom of England  must have stood out among the throng. Quick died in 1444, and by a century or so later the process was standardized:  the prisoner was stretched on his or her back, and stone or iron weights were placed on the body until the point of submission or death. The next recorded application of the peine also involved a woman, the “Martyr of York” Margeret Clitherow, who failed to enter a plea to protect her Catholic household in 1586. Queen Elizabeth personally apologized to the citizens of York for her torture and execution.

In the seventeenth century, Peine forte et dure was only applied in cases of murder, and more specifically in cases of the murder of family members. There were two very conspicuous cases, both of which were publicized in pamphlets:  William Calverley, a very troubled member of the Yorkshire gentry, was pressed to death in 1605 for failing to enter a plea after murdering his two young children and attempting to murder his wife and a third child, and Major George Strangways died under duress after refusing to plead on charges of murdering his brother-in-law in 1658.  Calverley’s case seems to have almost immediately caught the public’s attention and we have two competing narratives–that of a deranged madman and that of a man driven to extreme measures by the miseries of an enforced marriage.  The Calverley case might even be the source of A Yorkshire Tragedy, an early seventeenth-century play that was once attributed to Shakespeare but is now thought to be the work of Thomas Middleton.

 

Covers and illustration from three 17th century pamphlets inspired by the Calverley case:  Two most unnatural and bloody murders, The Miseries of enforced marriage, and A Yorkshire Tragedy. Note the cloven foot in the first pamphlet:  the devil made him do it.  As you can see, the tabloid press is not an invention of the twentieth century!

Colonel George Strangways was a more heroic character; he claimed to have been saving his sister from her up-to-no-good lawyer husband, who was attempting to steal her fortune.  One of his motivations for refusing to enter a plea was the fear that his family estate would be confiscated if found guilty of murder.  The judge ordered the application of peine forte et dure, and Strangways suffered for so long that the witnesses to his torture felt compelled to add their own weight and thus bring about a speedier, and more merciful, death. “Pain” was used as a threat over the next century, but applied in only a few cases, including, of course, Giles Corey in Salem and several notorious highwaymen in the early eighteenth century. In 1772, “the act being barbarous to Englishmen”, it was abolished.

The Unhappy Marksman, London, 1659.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Salem

September 17, 2012

Digging up the Past

By daseger

All good historians, especially those who focus on the pre-modern era, know that much of history is behind a closed door which we cannot crack.  But occasionally someone comes along, usually a nice archivist or archeologist, who opens it up for us.  This week two stories which demonstrate this occurrence very well caught my attention–actually one has been holding it for a while.  So it is time to report.

King Richard‘s Body:

The Battle of Bosworth (1485) marked the end of the life and reign of Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty as well as the last English king to be killed in battle. At his death, Richard’s reputation was already tarnished, but it would become even more so due to the energetic efforts of a sophisticated Tudor propaganda campaign, which employed the able pens of Sir Thomas More and William Shakespeare, among others.  Richard’s vanquisher and successor, Henry VII, did not want to create a shrine for Richard but he also made plans to give him an appropriate, though quiet, royal funeral. Richard’s body was taken to Leicester and put on public display after Bosworth, and then buried rather secretly in the church of Grey Friars Friary, which was destroyed a half-century later during the forcible dissolution of England’s monasteries by Henry VIII.  The burial site of the last Plantagenet was forgotten over the ensuing centuries, until just last week when a team of University of Leicester archeologists dug up the corpse of fifteenth-century man who suffered battle blows similar to Richard’s experience, and who possessed a slightly-curved spine (there were gasps when this was announced) but was clearly not the “crookback” or hunchback of Tudor narratives. If the DNA testing proves conclusive, the royal body was enshrined beneath a city centre parking lot.

King Richard III and Queen Anne during their brief reign; the great 18th century actor David Garrick in the big scene from Shakespeare’s Richard III, c. 1800 (courtesy British Museum) the excavation site in Leicester, and the press conference announcing the discovery of the skeleton, just last week (courtesy University of Leicester).

The Plague Ship:

The last major outbreak of the bubonic plague in the west occurred in Marseilles, France in 1720, when the epidemic was brought to Europe by a merchant ship named the Grand Saint–Antoine on its return journey from the infected and infectious Middle East. Its passengers were allowed to disembark before authorities ordered its burning, and the process took several days, during which the disease spread to the city and its environs, eventually killing over 120,000 people. Just last week, and just as the possible skeleton of a king was being raised to the light, the ship was raised from its watery grave.

1720 print of the Plague of Marseilles by Jacques Rigaud (courtesy British Museum); a plague doctor in Marseilles (1721 engraving by Johann Melchior Füssli,Wellcome Images); and the raised anchor of the Grand Saint-Antoine last week (BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images).

So nice to see crowds observing the raised anchor in this last picture: there were crowds looking at the trenches in Leicester last week as well.  That’s the thing about archeology:  objects (and bones!) generally capture the public’s historical interest far more often than dry dusty texts.  For me, there is just nothing better than seeing people in the present captivated by people in the past.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History

September 14, 2012

Another Cartophilic Collection

By daseger

I’ve posted on trade cards several times, and they remain a form of ephemera that I casually collect. It seems to me that these early business cards are among the least ephemeral of ephemera–so many survive.  And most of them are the standardized children/animals/flowers variety.  So I’m pretty picky:  my collection is full of Salem items, cards with unusual shapes, cards that advertise Sarsaparilla (for some reason, a new interest of mine; when sold as a medicinal tonic at the end of the nineteenth century it contained something like 18% alcohol) and apothecaries in general, and those put out by the home furnishings trades. Occasionally odd images catch my fancy, and I don’t care what they are selling. I really prefer the earliest trade cards, issued in western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but I could never afford them and most of them are in rare book libraries anyway. It’s been a while since I featured any trade cards, so I thought that I’d showcase my most recent finds.

First, some Salem cards. Frank Cousins was an amazing photographer/entrepreneur who did much to capture and sell Salem a century ago:  the cards for his Essex Street shop, the Bee-Hive, were often issued in interesting shapes.  I always go for any view of the wharves and great examples of typography, and I love the font on Mr. Goodwillie’s card. The last card, presenting a western image of Chinese workers, is extremely interesting:  “others”, particularly Chinese, often appear on late nineteenth-century trade cards, and almost always in a stereotypical, racist and/or jingoistic way.  I’m not sure what’s going on with this card, issued by a Salem pharmacist; most likely it is part of a series.

As you can see, A.A. Smith is offering “petroleum remedies”:  even more unusual is the”magnetized food” on sale at a Brooklyn pharmacy.  I’ve included the back of the card so you can see the pitch:  using children to appeal to their mothers, obviously an age-old practice.  And then there are two cards issued by the Charles I. Hood Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, the leading manufacturer of the equally healthy Sarsaparilla.

“Magnetized Food” trade card from the Library Company of Philadelphia Digital Exhibit: Nineteenth-Century Pharmacists’ Trade Cards from the William H. Helfand Collection.

I thought I was familiar with all the digital databases of works on paper but just recently I found the online collection of the Rothschild family’s Waddesdon Manor, which includes over 700 trade cards from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is an amazing resource for all sorts of things. The Rothschilds were probably the greatest collectors of the nineteenth century, and I was surprised to see so many humble trade cards among their more luxurious acquisitions, but apparently Ferdinand von Rothschild, the builder of Waddesdon, was interested in every aspect of French life and culture in the eighteenth century. Here are three late-seventeenth-century cards from his collection, with which urban outfitters offered their services and wares:  the first one is from a hat-maker, the second from a vestment-maker, and the last one from a furrier. Mere slips of paper that survived all these many years.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History

September 12, 2012

Millinery Marvels

By daseger

Look at these hats!  And fair warning:  the last one is a little racy. Besides the re-dedication of the Witch Trials Memorial ceremony, the other big Salem event of this past weekend was the opening of Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones  at the Peabody Essex Museum.  The exhibition features over 250 hats from the last millennium (although most were fairly modern), chosen by Jones in collaboration with the curators at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where the exhibition was first on view a couple of years ago.  The hats, sourced from Jones’ own workshop, private collections, and the Victoria & Albert, are showcased in an innovative and interactive way that emphasizes not only the objects but also hat-making and hat-wearing. Every time the PEM ventures into the fashion realm–from shoes to wedding dresses to the celebrated closet of Iris Apfel–there are crowds, and I’m sure this exhibition will be extremely popular as hats are immediately accessible. As Stephen Jones says, “With hats, what you see is what you get.”

I went to the exhibition preview late last week and snapped some photographs, but many of them came out murky or flashy so I’m supplementing this preview with images from the Victoria & Albert collection for the sake of clarity: details are very important with hats!

Philip Treacy hat (1995) in Salem and the V & A image.

A display from the Salem exhibition,  a straw hat by Madame Suzy (1937) and Jo Gordon’s “Kiss of Death” hat (1994).

A mock-up of a milliner’s workshop.

In addition to these hats, there was a Tudor cap, a leather Jester’s hat, several Schiaparelli “shoe hats”, baroque nightcaps, bonnets, fascinators, helmets, and avante garde creations of all kinds, including the x-rated example below: Kirsten Woodward’s aptly-titled Sex on the Brain (1996).  Pretty intricate–and intimate.

And pictured below is the master millinery among his hats, from the companion volume to the exhibition, also called Hats:  an Anthology by Stephen Jones (with Oriole Cullen,V & A Publishing, 2009).

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture, Current Events, Design

September 10, 2012

Two Memorials

By daseger

This weekend the Salem Witch Trials Memorial was rededicated, 20 years after its installation and after a year of renovation and fortification by its original mason.  The Memorial remains the only Witch-trial-related initiative that I can bear in Salem, and the ceremony marking its re-dedication was, for the most part, simple and respectful, just like the Memorial itself.  Descendants of the 20 victims were present, and they placed flowers and rosemary (for remembrance) on their ancestors’ symbolic “graves”, granite benches marked with their names and dates of death built into an encompassing granite dry wall. As you enter the green rectangular courtyard that is the Memorial, surrounded by the colonial gravestones of the Old Burying Point outside of its perimeter, you can read the victims’ protestations of innocence, which are carved on paving stones.  Just like the actual words that were uttered, they are cut off , by the Memorial walls.

Exterior and interior views of the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, designed by James Cutler and Maggie Williams and built by Hayden Hillsgrove; the descendants of the victims of 1692 stand by their ancestors’ markers; John Willard’s marker/bench.

The Witch Trials Memorial is successful because it is so strikingly simple in its understatement:  it does not tell us how to feel.  The victims speak for themselves, until they are cut off.  Unfortunately, the proclaimed mission and attendant speeches associated with the Memorial and the other official commemorative initiative, the Salem Award, attempt to impose a redemptive lesson about tolerance which I believe diminishes the historical tragedy of 1692. If you emphasize the ideal of tolerance above everything else, the presupposition is that the accusers of 1692 were not tolerant of the victims’ aberrant belief system, when there is no historical evidence that the latter were practicing witchcraft. It is always difficult to reconcile the past and the present and not lose sight of one or the other.

Just last summer, an equally evocative memorial to the victims of another seventeenth-century series of witch trials, the Vardø trials in the Finnmark region of northeastern Norway, opened to the public. As with the Salem installation, the Steilneset Memorial is a collaboration between an architect and an artist: Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and the late French-born artist Louise Bourgeois.  The Vardø trials, which occurred in two distinct phases in the dead of the Arctic winter (in 1621 and 1662-63), resulted in the execution of 91 people for the crime of sorcery. Zumthor’s two-structure memorial is a far more elaborate construction than Salem’s, but still absolutely austere. The architecture and the art represent both the individual victims and the collective tragedy, via one illuminated window for each of the victims in the long gallery building and a perpetually-burning chair in the “cube” structure next door. Like the Salem Memorial, Steilneset focuses completely on people, and lets its viewers draw life lessons.

The Steilneset Memorial in summer and winter, overlooking the Barents Sea, and the last creation of Louise Bourgeois,  “The Damned, The Possessed and The Beloved”.  Photographs by Bjarne Riesto.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Design, History, Salem

September 7, 2012

Eternal Elizabeth

By daseger

Today is the birthday (in 1533) of Queen Elizabeth I, a fact that would have been well-known in her own time.  The coincidence of Elizabeth’s birthday with the eve of the nativity of the Virgin Mary was not lost on her subjects, and obviously enhanced her public reputation as the Virgin Queen. In a Protestant England shed of its saints, Elizabeth must have offered some consolation. There is so much to say about Elizabeth, but too much to say in a blog post and little that has not been said before. In addition to her rather remarkable lifetime, the thing that has always impressed me about Elizabeth is her durability; even though she was a mortal person who died in 1603 she never really seems to go away. Every generation has had its Elizabeth:  the seventeenth century brought her back as a stark orderly contrast to Civil War-strife, there were lots of comparisons between Elizabeth and the equally-long-reigning Victoria in the nineteenth century, and we have certainly had our share of Elizabeths–from Bette Davis to Cate Blanchett to Judy Dench and Helen Mirren–in the last century.

Images of Elizabeth:  her lifetime.  Except where noted, all portraits are from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The “Clopton Portrait”, 1560, one of my favorites:  a portrait of the young queen before she became the subject of sophisticated royal iconography. Private Collection.

The “Pelican Portrait”, c. 1575, often attributed to Nicholas Hilliard.  Here we have a highly stylized Elizabeth and all sort of symbolism.  This mask-like face will be the template for some time.  The pelican brooch on her bodice is a reference to self-sacrifice:  a long-held legend told of pelicans feeding their children with their own blood.  At around this time, it was clear that Elizabeth would not marry, therefore she had sacrificed her personal desires for the English people. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

One of several official Armada portraits, this painting by George Gower marks the wondrous victory over the “invincible” Spanish Armada in 1588.  Elizabeth is now well on her way to becoming larger than life.

Elizabeth does not age in her portraits in the 1590s, even though she is in her sixties.  Her waistline gets smaller and smaller, and she wears increasingly fantastical clothing.  Commissioned by Bess of Hardwick in 1592, this painting is still at Hardwick Hall.  It has been copied many times, and the amazing skirt has served as the inspiration for wallpaper and textiles in the twentieth century. The drawing, from the collection of the British Library, is dated 1775.

Elizabeth Ever After:

Line engraving by Crispijn de Passe the Elder, after Isaac Oliver, 1603.  A very influential image, disseminated widely in the seventeenth century, and influencing images of Elizabeth to the present.  As an example, look at Alix Stone’s costume design for Elizabeth in a production  of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana, 1966.  Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In a 1868 lithograph, a Vision of Queen Elizabeth tries to rouse Queen Victoria from her prolonged mourning following Prince Albert’s death:  snap out of it!

Modern Elizabeths:  Bette Davis, one of my favorite Elizabeths, in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), and Cate Blanchett in the poster for Elizabeth (1998).  I love the poster (which is based on the “Coronation Portrait” of Elizabeth in the center–the original portrait, attributed to Nicholas Hilliard, was destroyed by fire and this is an early seventeenth-century copy), and Cate Blanchett, but the movie is a historical hot mess!

Appendix:  the best book on representations of Elizabeth:  Sir Roy Strong’s Cult of Elizabeth.  Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

September 5, 2012

Books for Back to School

By daseger

The Fall Semester starts today, and I get to impose reading on college students who are, make no mistake, reluctant readers. In my opinion, and experience, this particular generation is particularly reluctant:  they have so much else to do!  They have to keep track of their friends’ activities on Facebook, they have to check their phone messages, they have to text every waking thought and state of being, and as I teach at a large public university, they have to work.  In terms of daily priorities, I imagine that reading is very far down the list.  I do not despair, because once I get them to read (by forcing them to write papers) it is clear that the majority of my students can comprehend and analyze texts quite well, but I find myself putting more and more thought and time into choosing the books for my courses as I know that these books have a lot of competition:  they have to catch my students’ attention, and hold it.

I am teaching courses on Medieval Europe, Tudor-Stuart England, World History, and the Expansion of Europe this semester, and here are some of the texts that I’ve chosen for these courses, with a little bit of the rationale for my choices.  All of these courses (except for Expansion of Europe, which is a graduate seminar) have (boring) textbooks that the students read (I think/hope) for background, and several monographs which are the basis of their papers.  I will spare you the textbooks, which are a completely different teaching issue.  I’m almost to the point of ditching the textbooks altogether but not quite yet.

Another realization that has (much too slowly) dawned on me is that my students “learn” most of their history from movies, so when I get them in a class they have preconceived notions that I have to take on. Usually I get students who love Tudor England or medieval Europe, but actually know very little about these eras.  I used to reproach them, but now I’m more inclined to take advantage of their rather romantic interests.  For the Tudor-Stuart course, I’m actually assigning a biography of Anne Boleyn, for whom a veritable cult exists.  Anne Boleyn is now clearly more popular than even her superstar daughter Elizabeth I, so they’re going to read all about the tragic queen/master manipulator in context, from a reliable source:  Eric Ives’ updated biography is accessible yet scholarly, and I’m going to give them an essay prompt for the book that will force them to dig deeper.

Speaking of digging deeper, my medieval course is going to have a strong archeological theme this semester. Too often material sources (as opposed to literary ones) are not given serious consideration by historians, but students find archeology fascinating.  So I’ve chosen tw0 texts that I think should really illuminate (and de-romanticize) the Middle Ages for my students:  Barbarians to Angels.  The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter S. Wells, and Colin Platt’s King Death. The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late Medieval England.
I threw some architectural history in there too with Philip Ball’s Universe of Stone.  A Biography of Chartres Cathedral, which I also chose because it was written by a non-academic.  I like to contrast scholarly and trade publications in my courses, and my students (like the general reading public) inevitably favor the latter.

World History is a tough course, for both the students and myself:  it’s “big” history, hard to grasp.  We have a two-course core curriculum world history requirement at Salem State, and so our entire department (and a battalion of adjunct professors) teaches it.  I have to admit that I bring my decidedly Eurocentric perspective into my world history courses; I just can’t help myself.  The book that I chose for this semester’s course, Paul Freedman’s Out of the East:  Spices and the Medieval Imagination, reveals this bias, as it examines “the East” from a western focus. I’m hoping some of my students might point this out in their papers.  A somewhat similar book, perhaps more successfully global in its approach, is one of the eleven books I’ve assigned for my Expansion of Europe seminar, Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat.  The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Modern World.  I cannot recommend Brook’s book highly enough:  whether you know a little bit about the seventeenth century, or a lot, it accomplishes what the best history books do:  transportation to another world.  My students better like it.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture, History

September 3, 2012

Iron Animals

By daseger

It seemed like everywhere I went this (past) summer there were animals made of iron or some other metal.  Large or small, inside or out, they were in shops, parks, and museums.  So I snapped away, and here are some of my favorites, in chronological order of sighting.

All Summer long: horse sculpture by Deborah Butterfield in the atrium at the Peabody Essex Museum; in the midst of what used to be a Salem street.

Early July:  a stag and yet another noble horse at Smith-Zukas Antiques @ Wells Union Antique Center, Route One, Wells, Maine.

Late July:  a climbing tree frog by North Shore artist Chris Williams in Ipswich. 

Late August:  Big cats by Wendy Klemperer face off each other in Lenox.

Late August, again:  a tortoise and a hare in Copley Square, Boston.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culture, Travel

August 31, 2012

Factory Girls and Boys

By daseger

I always feel a bit sorry for myself on Labor Day weekend, as it’s back-to-school time and usually I am engaged in a mad dash to get my course syllabi done.  Of course this is ridiculous, as I have the cushiest job ever and most of the summer I’ve been free to do as I liked.  It’s good to remind myself what labor really is, and nothing does that better than the photographs of Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940), who transitioned from educator to social activist, all the while armed with a camera.  In 1908 Hine became the official photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) and began his life’s work:  documenting child labor across the United States. This was a time when one in six children between the ages of five and ten worked outside the home in “gainful occupation”, and the percentage increases dramatically for children over the age of ten.  The members of the NCLC began a successful campaign to end child labor and Hine’s often-haunting photographs were their chief weapon.

In the fall of 1911, Hine was in New England, then at the height of its industrial history, documenting child labor in Boston, Lowell, New Bedford, Lawrence and Salem. There are 17 photographs of Salem children, all accessible at the Library of Congress, which has a vast Hine collection. Most of the child laborers are shown outside of their place of work, presumably because their employers didn’t allow the conspicuous photographer inside. My favorite has always been this group of smiling girls, workers at the Cass & Daley Shoe Factory on Goodhue Street.

Caption:  Group of girls working in Cass & Daley Shoe Co., Salem.  Saw a number of children from 14 to 16 (apparently) and two or three probably under 14.  Smallest girl in photo is Odella Delisle.

Smiling Salem girls, for the most part, a striking contrast to one of Hines’ most famous child laborers, Addie Card of North Pownal, Vermont, captured in August of 1910.  Hines’ captions for this photograph are perhaps even more poignant than the image: an anaemic little spinner, 12 years. Girls in mill say she is ten years. She admitted to me she was twelve; that she started during school vacation and now would “stay.”  Of course many have wondered what become of Addie Day:  here is one exploration.

Back in Salem, a few more of my favorite Hine photographs from the fall of 1911:  a group of somewhat serious boys outside the factory with some very serious men (the factory owners?) behind them, and young John Parent, quite alone despite the fact that there are people all around him.

Caption:  Group, all working in #2 Spinning Room. Smallest boy (right hand end of front row) is Rene Barbin, 61 Perkins St. Next to Rene is Philip Beaulieu.  Next to Philip is Alfred Corriveau, 14 Perkins St. Smallest boy in back row is Willie Irwin, 16 Perkins St. Next smallest in back row is Ernest Dionne, 5 Prince St. 

Caption:  Boy is John Parent, 14 Congress St. Works in Spinning Room #2, Fifth Floor.

There is only one Salem photograph in which Hine was allowed into the factory, where he photographed a ragged-yet-dignified Henry Fournier before some massive machinery.  I’m sure Hine wanted to get the machines in his photographs whenever possible, because they represent both the work and the potential danger.  A Smithsonian/National Archives traveling exhibition entitled The Way We Work (opening this weekend at Historic New England‘s Governor John Langdon House) includes a Hine photograph of child laborers in Georgia that is particularly haunting with regard to danger:  small barefoot boys who appear as almost part of the machines on which they work.

Caption:  Henry Fourner [i.e., Fournier?], 261 Jefferson St., Castle Hill; has been sweeper and cleaner in #2 Spinning Room two months.

Caption:  “Bibb Mill No. 1, Macon, Ga. Many youngsters here. Some boys and girls were so small they had to climb up on to the spinning frame to mend broken threads and  to put back the empty bobbins”.

58 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem