Finding Your People.
[read or listen]
1. George Catlin’s People.
After finding himself sketching judges and juries rather than listening to courtroom proceedings, George Catlin abandoned his fledgling law career and moved to Philadelphia to study art.
His father, a lawyer, was quite disappointed; but in Philadelphia, in 1828, Catlin had a chance meeting with a tribal delegation of Native Americans that charted a remarkable course for the rest of his life.
“If my life be spared, nothing shall stop me from visiting every nation of Indians on the Continent of North America.” — Catlin
In 1830, Catlin traveled to St. Louis — then on the edge of the western frontier — where he met Louisiana Purchase explorer William Clark, then the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the western tribes.
Catlin persuaded Clark to take him along on a four-hundred-mile trip north on the Mississippi River into Native territory where a meeting of tribal leaders was to occur.
At the meeting, the tribal leaders welcomed Catlin, and he busily painted their portraits.
That meeting was the start of Catlin’s six-year odyssey on the American frontier, where he traveled thousands of miles and visited fifty Native American tribes.
Along the way, Catlin painted hundreds of portraits, village scenes and landscapes, and collected untold numbers of cultural artifacts.
He assembled this massive collection into a traveling “Indian Gallery” that he took on a lecture tour of major East Coast cities and to the capitals of Europe.
No one had ever seen anything like it before; and Catlin, more than anyone, seemed to appreciate the uniqueness of his lifework.
Viewing his Indian Gallery as an indivisible whole and unwilling to sell off individual artworks despite mounting debts, Catlin tried repeatedly to persuade the US government to acquire the collection, arguing it was a national treasure.
But an agreed price could never be found, and Catlin reluctantly sold his Indian Gallery to a Philadelphia industrialist for a pittance in order to pay off accumulated debts.
Much later, and years after his death, the industrialist’s widow gave Catlin’s collection, still intact and consisting of more than five hundred artworks and a train carload of artifacts, to the Smithsonian.
Such was his life.
Catlin received little appreciation while he was alive. The accolades came much later.
During his lifetime, art critics were dismissive of his works, calling him an ‘unschooled’ artist and his works ‘primitive,’ and even some modern critics claim Catlin is “B-level.”
But others appreciate the sincerity and directness in his work; and anthropologists hail Catlin as the first American artist to depict the various Native tribes, not as a single stereotype, but as separate and distinct cultures, whose people walked the Earth with dignity.
Catlin’s lifework helped to change European Americans’ perceptions of Native people, and this was a good thing.
Many of his works are now proudly displayed at the Smithsonian, as the national treasure Catlin knew them to be.
2. CIA personality study of Fidel Castro.
The Kennedy administration instituted Operation Mongoose, a covert CIA operation to remove Cuban dictator Fidel Castro from power, in November 1961; and as a part of this effort, the CIA prepared a classified psychiatric study of Castro’s personality.
At the time, Castro had been the leader of Cuba for two years, after spearheading an armed revolution that had ousted from power Cuba’s US-backed president, Fulgencio Batista.
The unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion by US-trained Cuban exiles, which had intended to overthrow Castro, had occurred eight months before; and the Cuban Missile Crisis was ten months in the future.
Below are highlights from the CIA study.
“Although he depends on the masses for support, he has no real regard for them and does not trust them sufficiently to hold elections.
“…[H]e has no capabilities for organization and administration, nor does he have any concern for the implementation of detailed plans.
“The outstanding neurotic elements in his personality are his hunger for power and his need for the recognition and adulation of the masses.
“Whenever his self-concept is slightly disrupted by criticism, he becomes so emotionally unstable as to lose to some degree his contact with reality.
“When faced with defeat, his first concern is to retreat strategically to a place where he can regroup his assets and personally lead another rebellion.”
[Does this remind you of anyone?]
3. Lincoln’s last New Year’s Day Reception, 1865.
President and Mrs. Lincoln hosted public receptions, called ‘levees,’ in the White House Blue Room on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons throughout the autumn-through-spring Washington social season; and special receptions were held there on New Year’s Day.
New Year’s Day was a more formal occasion; and foreign ambassadors, members of the Supreme Court, Cabinet, Congress, and military leaders were invited and expected to attend.
Lincoln and his wife would receive these VIPs first, while standing in the center of the Blue Room, and then the front door of the White House would be opened to the throngs of ordinary people waiting outside.
Lincoln’s last New Year’s Day reception occurred on Monday, January 2, 1865 — a day late because January 1 fell on a Sunday that year.
Here is the Washington Evening Star newspaper’s description of the event:
“In accordance with the time-honored custom, the President held his New Year reception to-day, and we do not remember of ever having seen a larger crowd in attendance upon any similar occasion.
“[A]t 12 o’clock Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln made their appearance in the Blue or Oval room.
“After the officers of the army and navy had been received by the President, the gates to the enclosures were thrown open, when a general rush was made by those eager to gain admittance to the Mansion.
“The President received all with the greatest cordiality and took each individual by the hand.
“The crowd, after passing through the Red, Blue, Green and East Rooms, emerged from the Mansion through one of the side windows, over a substantial wooden platform leading to the portico.
“In order to prevent the handsome carpets of the Mansion from being soiled by the mud and dirt brought in by the crowd, canvas was spread over them.
“At half-past two o’clock the jam was terrible, and many pressed so determinedly to gain admittance that several ladies and children were nearly suffocated, and in some instances ladies and children were raised above the crowd by their male protectors in order to shield them from the pressure.
“One lady reached the door in such a dilapidated condition (her bonnet being smashed and her shawl torn nearly in twain) that she said she would not go into the presence of Mr. Lincoln in that condition, and she inquired the nearest way out.”
4. Special Agent Richard M. Nixon?
In April 1937, twenty-four-year-old Richard Nixon submitted an application to the FBI, the investigative arm of the Justice Department, for a job as a special agent.
He was then nearing his graduation from Duke University Law School and, like many third-year law students, was looking for a job.
Nixon interviewed for the position in July 1937 and then underwent a physical examination but heard nothing further from the FBI.
Years later, during his vice presidency, Nixon approached FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at a party and asked him what had happened to his FBI job application.
After the old files were checked, Hoover told Nixon that he had been accepted for the job, but because of Justice Department budget cuts, his appointment was revoked before he could be notified.
Thirty-six years after he sought the FBI job, President Nixon would fire major figures from the Justice Department in the Watergate ‘Saturday Night Massacre.’
[Irony is not dead.]
5. The ‘sitting-out bag.’
When scientists in the 1880s discovered that the bacteria which causes tuberculosis is present in the aerosol droplets expelled in an infected person’s cough, some urban schools began holding classes outdoors to limit disease transmission among their students.
These open-air schoolrooms provided shelter from wind and rain, but not from cold temperatures; so, parents were encouraged to make or purchase a ‘sitting out bag’ for their child, similar to a cocoon, to keep them warm in cold weather.
These bags were made of wool and similar to a potato sack, and some had hoods and little pull-on bags for their feet.
Ah, fresh air!
Experts say that these bags, which enabled kids to withstand cold temperatures, helped reduce disease transmission.
[Tell this story to the next guy who complains to you about covid masks.]
6. The real-life photography of Jessie Tarbox Beals.
She got hooked on photography with a little camera won in a magazine subscription sales contest; and by 1902, she had abandoned her teaching career and gotten a job as a staff photographer for a Buffalo newspaper.
The photos she took of Sir Thomas Lipton, the inventor of the teabag, on his 1903 visit to Buffalo made all the national papers; and the photography career of Jessie Tarbox Beals was launched.
She would work as a photojournalist for the next thirty years — the first woman to do so — shooting every type of subject for all of the nation’s leading magazines and newspapers.
Her biggest moment came with her photography of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, which led to an invitation to accompany President Theodore Roosevelt to San Antonio in 1905 for a Rough Riders reunion.
At a time when the few women working in photography limited themselves to studio portraiture, Jessie worked out in the real world, lugging her fifty-pound camera, tripod and glass negative plates up ladders, to the tops of stairways and perching on bookshelves, and once, even a hot air balloon, to get a ‘perfect’ shot.
Magazines and newspapers liked the ‘real-life’ spontaneity of her photos; plus, she had good ideas.
Jessie was one of the first photographers to shoot night scenes, and she pioneered the magazine concept of using a series of images, rather than just one, to tell a story.
She also invented the concept of developing a newspaper story idea from an initial photograph — a ‘conversation starter’ — from which a writer would then write copy.
Jessie’s most notable work, which has endeared her to New Yorkers, is the series of photos she took of the artists, writers and other odd and unconventional characters — the ‘Bohemians’ — who inhabited the basement shops and little restaurants of Greenwich Village in the years preceding World War I.
Jessie found a home there, among these fellow free spirits, during this time of social upheaval; and, for a while, she flourished.
But her ever roaming, sometimes lavish, lifestyle extracted a price.
Moving from place to place often during her life made it impossible to save most of her negatives and much of her work has been lost.
And her freelance income left little to spare for a rainy day.
The onset of health problems in her early sixties drained away what little she had left, and she died in a New York charity hospital.
A sad ending, to be sure; but, on the other hand, nearly a hundred years later, people are still talking about Jessie and admiring her work.
And there’s something to be said for that.
7. December 10, 1941, from the New York Times.
Headline: “Roosevelt sees a long, world-wide war.”
— “The War Department made public today an incomplete list of casualties in Sunday’s surprise bombardment of Oahu, Hawaii. The list consisted of 37 names of those killed in action… The Navy has not yet announced a casualty list…”
— Congressmen charged that the US Navy had been “caught asleep” in the Pearl Harbor raid and demanded more information.
— “Secretary of State Cordell Hull said today that the nation was on guard against other surprise attacks…”
— A phony tip of approaching enemy bombers prompted an air raid alert in New York and along the East Coast… “City nonchalant as sirens wail…Passengers refuse to quit bus…Pedestrians ignore order to get off the streets.”
— from Roosevelt’s radio address the night before: “Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together to make war on the whole human race.”
— “War brought a change. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, long an opponent of the President’s foreign policy [is] now an advocate for a total war.”
— “The Administration will urge Congress this week to authorize the President to utilize the war equipment of this country in any way and in any place he deems most effective in prosecuting the war….”
— Congress initiated legislation to extend the term of military service for all presently serving to “six months beyond the period of the war emergency.” The War Department is considering the conscription of all men from 18 to 45 years old.
— “According to the National Broadcast Company, Germany has jammed the radio transmission beams to continental Europe for two days in an effort to prevent the conquered nations from learning of the spread of war to the Pacific.”
— “Britain was tightening her air- raid defenses tonight on the theory that Germany, having announced a halt on the Eastern Front, might switch her air forces back to the West.”
— '“The Mexican Government is sending troops to Lower California, where Japanese raiding attacks and landings might be attempted.”
— “Britain has informed Japan that she will abide strictly by the terms of the poison gas protocol of the 1925 Geneva Convention and has asked Japan’s assurances that she intends to do the same…”
— “Arrests of 12,850 are revealed in Vichy [France]; Jews who entered France since January 1936 are ordered rounded up.”
— “President looks fine despite strain of war.”
— In what the Times called an ‘unusual precaution,’ Secret Service agents made all news reporters line up inside the White House and present their credentials before entering Roosevelt’s office for a press briefing.
— from Washington: “Floodlights which illuminate the dome of the Capitol were ordered turned off tonight for the duration of the war. Arrangements were completed for darkening, at a moment’s notice, of the White House and the grounds in which it stands.”
— “Please do not telephone the New York Times for war news. Every hour on the hour news bulletins are broadcast on Station WMCA — 570 on the dial.
8. Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling.
Their rivalry for the heavyweight boxing title during the late 1930s captivated sports fans across America and Nazi Germany; and like the World Cup games of today, their competition became a stand-in for international politics.
It was the “Brown Bomber,” the pride of Black Americans, against the “Black Uhlan of the Rhine,” and their first fight, in Yankee Stadium in June 1936, drew a radio audience of 57 million.
Schmeling’s victory earned him accolades from Hitler, who sent Schmeling’s wife, a Czech movie star, a personal note and a bouquet of flowers.
For Hitler, it was an Aryan triumph.
Movie stars and J. Edgar Hoover were in the stands of Yankee Stadium for the fighters’ rematch in 1938, and seventy million Americans and one hundred million people across the globe listened to the fight on radio.
This time, Louis was the victor and the fight put Schmeling in the hospital for ten days. No longer a Nazi star, Schmeling was drafted and served for two years as a paratrooper in the Luftwaffe.
Louis would also serve in the war. The US War Department placed his image on a recruitment poster and sent him to overseas military bases for exhibition boxing matches staged for the troops.
After the war, Louis and Schmeling became lifelong friends.
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Thanks for reading. We’ll be back next weekend.