Today? Gangsta rap—a genre not known for its whimsy—glorifies the hardcore existence of kids whom the system has failed, trapped in a cycle of poverty, compounding the social problems that were heaped on them at birth.
But back to 1931, the year Capone was sent to prison for tax evasion, and local firm Bruce-Roberts published Chicago’s Gangland map, above, from “authentic sources.”
As any civic minded reformer knows, the best way to “inculcate the most important principles of piety and virtue in young persons” is to pack all “the evils and sin of large cities” into something resembling a large-scale comic book.
If the 30 execution orders posted on Dead Man’s Tree doesn’t scare ‘em straight, perhaps 1750 cases of government booze and some scantily clad dancing girls will!
Naturally, the site of 1929’s Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre gets star treatment, with a graphic depiction guaranteed to stir the imagination far more than a visit to the actual site itself.
The publisher thoughtfully included a Gangland Dictionary to further inculcate the impressionable youth and explain the presence of two pineapples in the cartouche.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Other popular ingredients of the period include tongue, English walnuts, flowers, and of course, cheese, with nary an avocado in sight.
Author Eva Greene Fuller had a clear preference for spreadable consistencies, an insistence on “perfect bread in suitable condition” and an eye for detail, evident in such suggested garnishes as smilax and maidenhair fern.
Naturally, there are some misfires amid the 400, at least as far as modern palates and sensibilities are concerned.
The Mexican Sandwich calls for a spoonful of baked beans mixed with catsup and butter, served atop a large square cracker.
The Oriental Sandwich features a spread made of cream cheese, maple syrup, and sliced maraschino cherries.
The Dyspeptic Sandwich is the only one to use gluten-free bread… sprinkled with brown bread crumbs.
The Popcorn Sandwich sounds quite tasty except for the titular ingredient, which is passed through a meat chopper and combined with sardines, prior to being spread with Parmesan and slid under the broiler.
As for peanut butter, it’s a mix-your-own affair, using chopped peanuts and the cook’s choice of mayonnaise, sweetened whipped cream, sherry or port wine.
And children are sure to approve of the School Sandwich, a simple concoction of buttered white bread and brown sugar.
Chop raw beef and onions very fine, season with salt and pepper and spread on lightly buttered brown bread.
Bummers Custard Sandwich
Take a cake of Roquefort cheese and divide in thirds; moisten one third with brandy, another third with olive oil and the other third with Worcestershire sauce. mix all together and place between split water biscuits toasted. Good for a stag lunch.
Aspic Jelly Sandwich
Soak one box (two ounces) of gelatin in one cup of chicken liquor until softened; add three cupfuls of chicken stock seasoned with a little parsley, celery, three cloves, a blade of mace and a dash of salt and pepper. Strain into a dish and add a little shredded breast of chicken; set in a cold place to harden; when cold, slice in fancy shaped and place on slightly butter whole wheat bread. Garnish with a stick of celery.
Violet Sandwich
Cover the butter with violets over night; slice white bread thin and spread with the butter. Put slices together and cover with the petals of the violets.
Most major world cities now boast far-reaching and convenient subway systems, but London will always have the original from which all the rest descend. It will also, arguably, always have, in the Tube, by far the most iconic. The Metropolitan Railway, the first underground train line to open in London and thus the first in the world, entered service in 1863. Other lines followed, run by several different companies, until, says Make Big Plans, all the operators “agreed on a joint marketing strategy in 1908 that featured the now familiar logo with a red disk and the word ‘Underground.’ ”
But by 1913, writes the BBC’s Emma Jane Kirby, “passengers are moaning about unpunctuality, about overcrowding, about confusion and dirt. The Tube, crammed on workdays (some 400,000 people now work in the heart of the city) is virtually empty at weekends and holidays and the company is fast losing money and public support. What we need, thinks [London Underground commercial director Frank] Pick, is stronger branding.” In addition to the immortal logo, he wanted “some eye-catching posters, distinct from general advertisement bills, that will make Londoners of all social classes proud to journey around their city and visit its attractions.”
But a transit system, even the formidable London Underground, is only as good as its maps. Eric Gill, the Arts and Crafts movement luminary who helped design the Tube’s typeface, asked his architect-cartographer-graphic designer brother MacDonald to come up with an eye-catching one. In the result, writes the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America’s Elisabeth Burdon, “all the attractions and amenities of London are laid before the viewer in a manner which is both visually exciting and yet within a comprehensible structure; the city is presented in the manner of a medieval walled town, the curved horizon recalling the medieval world map’s enclosing circle, all bounded by a decorative border in which coats of arms evoke a sense of stability and tradition.”
Apart from its degree of historical astuteness and cartographical soundness, Gill’s “Wonderground Map,” as Londoners came to call it, contained enough humor that some of the passengers who consulted it missed their trains due to sheer amusement. Kirby points out that, “on the Harrow Road, a farm worker tilling the soil cries ‘Harrowing work, this!’ an exclamation which is countered by the query ‘What is work, is it a herb?’ delivered by an effete gentleman nearby.” A sign placed at the map’s eastern edge points the way to “Victoria Park, Wanstead Flats, Harwich, Russia and other villages,” while “at Regent’s Park Zoo a prehistoric-looking bird eats a child through the bars of its cage as the child laments, ‘and I promised mother I’d be home for tea by five!’ ”
The Wonderground Map attained such popularity that it became the first London Underground poster sold commercially for homes and offices, and remains on sale more than a century later. You can view the whole thing online, and in zoomable detail, here; if you’d like a printable version, you can find one here. The history of London now credits it as having effectively “saved” the Tube, whose reputation for dysfunction and discomfort had reached a critical point. Newer subway systems elsewhere may have since made great technological leaps beyond the London Underground (as my ex-Londoner friends here in Seoul don’t hesitate to remind me), but we can safely say that none will ever inspire quite so beloved a work of cartography.
During the next fifty years mankind will face three great problems: the problem of avoiding war; the problem of feeding and clothing a population of two and a quarter billions which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three billions, and the problem of supplying these billions without ruining the planet’s irreplaceable resources.
Then, in 1958, a young reporter named Mike Wallace had Huxley play prophet on a 30-minute TV show. Overpopulation gets discussed again. But then Huxley returns to some familiar dystopian themes, identifying some emerging threats to our freedoms.
Overorganization: “Well another force which I think is very strongly operative in this country is the force of what may be called of overorganization. Er…As technology becomes more and more complicated, it becomes necessary to have more and more elaborate organizations, more hierarchical organizations, and incidentally the advance of technology is being accompanied by an advance in the science of organization.
It’s now possible to make organizations on a larger scale than it was ever possible before, and so that you have more and more people living their lives out as subordinates in these hierarchical systems controlled by bureaucracy, either the bureaucracies of big businesses or the bureaucracies of big government.”
Abuse of new technologies: “There are certainly devices which can be used [to limit freedoms.] I mean, let us er…take after all, a piece of very recent and very painful history is the propaganda used by Hitler, which was incredibly effective.
I mean, what were Hitler’s methods? Hitler used terror on the one kind, brute force on the one hand, but he also used a very efficient form of propaganda, which er…he was using every modern device at that time. He didn’t have TV., but he had the radio which he used to the fullest extent, and was able to impose his will on an immense mass of people. I mean, the Germans were a highly educated people.
Drugs: I mean, in this book that you mentioned, this book of mine, “Brave New World,” er…I postulated it a substance called ‘soma,’ which was a very versatile drug. It would make people feel happy in small doses, it would make them see visions in medium doses, and it would send them to sleep in large doses.…
If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in “Brave New World,” partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so, making him actually love his slavery.
Not long after Saving Private Ryancame out, the buzz had it that, had nothing but a two-hour blank screen followed its opening sequence depicting the Omaha Beach assault of June 6, 1944, Steven Spielberg would still win an Oscar. The genre of war movies, which goes almost as far back as the medium of cinema itself, falls into periodic exhaustion, but the director of blockbusters like Jaws and E.T. had managed to revitalize it. How did he and his collaborators pull it off, starting with the harrowing World War II battle scene to end all harrowing World War II battle scenes?
Spielberg and company faced one challenge above all others: “the sequence had to be chaotic and coherent at the same time,” says video essayist Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his examination of Saving Private Ryan’s first 28 minutes. All battle scenes try, in one way or another and to varying degrees of success, to depict the near-incomprehensible unpredictability and violence of military combat in a comprehensible manner, but this one accomplishes that goal to an extent many astonished viewers may never have thought possible.
A dozen years earlier, Tony Scott’s Top Gun did something similar with its unusually non-disorienting depiction of aerial dogfighting, but no two films could have a more different attitude to war itself. In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg set the glory to one side and showed all the (often literally) gory details that even avid viewers of World War II movies don’t usually see. Borrowing the visual style from the historical newsreel footage shot on the ground at Omaha Beach and elsewhere, Spielberg also deliberately fills every frame with as much detail of the action as possible, which those real-life cameramen had to shoot on the fly.
“The Omaha Beach scene might seem like the craziest, fastest, most intense scene in all of film,” says Puschak, but he calculates an “incredibly high” average shot length of 7.2 seconds. Instead of cutting, cutting, and cutting some more, Spielberg uses his signature purposeful camera movement and (relatively) long takes to place, and keep, the viewer in the midst of this harrowing event. The scene came out feeling so real that it actually triggered post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in some of the veterans who went to see it — surely not Spielberg’s intention, but proof positive of his ability to “capture chaos with clarity.”
In 1912, a Parisian tailor named Franz Reichelt took a flying leap off of the Eiffel Tower. And it didn’t end well. Squeamish readers, you’ve been warned.
Known today as the “Flying Tailor,” Reichelt made a little mark on history by designing a wearable parachute for aviators–something aviators could use during those dangerous early days of flying. Initially, Reichelt tested his wearable parachute by strapping dummies into them, and dropping them from the fifth floor of his apartment building. Later, he looked for something that could approximate a real flight. And naturally he chose the Eiffel Tower, the tallest building in town. When city officials agreed to let him use the monument, they assumed that Reichelt planned to use a dummy again. Never did they imagine that he’d wear the parachute himself. The newsreel footage above captures the fatal jump–the nervous hesitation at the beginning, the short flight, the unfortunate hole left in the ground.
It’s all a bit macabre, to be sure. And yet Reichelt was onto something. Across the ocean, a successful parachute jump from a plane took place in the United States, leading to a patent for a packable parachute.
Regularly in these pressure cooker days we hear plausible arguments from liberals and conservatives about how democratic institutions have recently failed us, and how uniquely polarized we have become as a people. We also hear often highly implausible claims about how current contenders intend to restore some kind of justice or fairness. Readers of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States will have a different perspective, one in which supposedly democratic institutions were never designed to work for the majority of the country’s inhabitants. And in which, by design, certain minorities have always remained at the bottom of the hierarchy.
“There is not a country in world history,” writes Zinn in his famous radical history, “in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.” Far from a flawed yet exceptional form of government, the U.S. system, Zinn argued, began as a means by which the founders seized the prerogatives of the British for themselves, with no intention of expanding these liberties widely. On the contrary. As Zinn puts it in a chapter called “Tyranny is Tyranny”:
Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.
The American Revolution swapped out one rule by elites for another, in other words, and one empire for another. Or as Zinn wrote in his memoir, there is “something rotten at the root.” Those who object to Zinn’s work may find flaws in his scholarly methodology. Accusations of bias, however—even couched in polite pejoratives like “polemical” and “revisionist”—are pretty much moot. Zinn, who died in 2010, would agree. The necessity of taking a position, after all, was integral to the historian and activist’s entire ethos, such that he titled his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. “The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests,” wrote Zinn, “They were on the side of the rich and powerful.” He always made it plain whose side he took, an approach by nature controversial.
Was he a liberal partisan? Hardly. After taking a beating by police at a protest, Zinn writes, “I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country.” A Communist? “Marx,” wrote Zinn, “was often wrong, often dogmatic… too insistent that the industrial working class must be the agent of revolution.” Zinn admired Marx. He wrote a play about him, Marx in Soho, and describes in the forward how his early reading of Marx, while growing up in working-class Brooklyn, greatly influenced his view of the world.
But after “growing evidence of the horrors of Stalinism” and his experience with the grassroots “participatory democracy” of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Zinn became drawn to anarchism. Decidedly leftist and fundamentally egalitarian, Zinn’s analysis has proven broad enough to warrant admiration from several different political persuasions: from modern liberals to Marxists to libertarian communists to free market libertarians like Reason’s Thaddeus Russell, who pronounced him “no better exemplar of that thoroughgoing, anti-statist left.”
Like another famous anarchist intellectual of the radical campus left, Noam Chomsky, Zinn first came to national prominence in the 60s while organizing protests against the Vietnam War—and like Chomsky, he debated conservative standard-bearer William F. Buckley. Zinn previously protested segregation with SNCC while he taught at Spelman College, writing an influential history of the organization. His tireless activism continued until the very end of his life, and he delivered notable speeches and lectures throughout his involvement in the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, and economic justice movements.
In the Spotify playlist above, you can hear 22 of those talks for a total of 21 hours of Zinn, including that historic Buckley debate, which you can also hear in full at the top of the post. (If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.) After their Tufts University meeting, notes Ed Welchel, Zinn reflected, “I found it curious that Buckley did not seem to understand that unsparing criticism of government is an essential element of a democratic society.”
Seen from the taxi, on the long ride in from the airport, the place looked slower, shabbier, and, in defiance of all chronology, older than New York… the low buildings, the industrial plants, and the railroad crossings at grade produced less the feeling of being in a great city than of riding through an endless succession of factory-town main streets.
The Chicagoan, a homegrown publication that intentionally mimicked The New Yorker in both design and content, offers a different take. From 1926 to 1935, it strove to counteract the city’s thuggish reputation (Al Capone, anyone?) by drawing attention to its cultural offerings and high society doings.
Outside of Chicago, no one cared much. Having failed to replicate TheNew Yorker’s national success, it folded, leaving behind very few surviving copies.
Neil Harris, a University of Chicago Professor Emeritus of History, has righted that wrong by arranging for the university library’s near complete collection of Chicagoans to be uploaded to a searchable online database.
The covers have a Jazz Age vibrancy, as do articles, advertisements, and cartoons aimed at Chicago’s smart set. There’s even a Helen Hokinson cartoon, in the form of a Borden cheese ad.
A search for Lieblings yielded but two:
Copyright The Quigley Publishing Company, a Division of QP Media, Inc.
One from December 1, 1934, above, name checks pianist Emil Liebling in an article revisiting the 1897 Christmas issue of another bygone Chicago paper, the Saturday Evening Herald.
Copyright The Quigley Publishing Company, a Division of QP Media, Inc.
Four years earlier, in Vol. 9, No. 3, Robert Pollack’s Musical Notes column made mention of Leonard Liebling, a critic for the New York American… (I can hear A.J. beyond-the-grave snickering even now).
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest script, Fawnbook, is available in a digital edition from Indie Theater Now. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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