When CBS Canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for Criticizing the American Establishment and the Vietnam War (1969)

in Comedy, History, Television | September 22nd, 2025

Rig­or­ous­ly clean-cut, com­pe­tent on the acoustic gui­tar and dou­ble bass, and sel­dom dressed in any­thing more dar­ing than cher­ry-red blaz­ers, Tom and Dick Smoth­ers looked like the antithe­sis of nine­teen-six­ties rebel­lion. When they first gained nation­al recog­ni­tion with their vari­ety show The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour, they must have come off to many young view­ers as the kind of act of which their moth­er — or even grand­moth­er — would approve. But the broth­ers’ cul­ti­vat­ed­ly square, neo-vaude­vil­lian appear­ance was deceiv­ing, as CBS would soon find out when the two took every chance to turn their pro­gram into a satir­i­cal, relent­less­ly author­i­ty-chal­leng­ing, yet some­how whole­some show­case of the coun­ter­cul­ture.

The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour pre­miered in Feb­ru­ary of 1967, and its first sea­son “fea­tured min­i­mal con­tro­ver­sial con­tent,” writes Sarah King at U.S. His­to­ry Scene. There­after, “the show became increas­ing­ly polit­i­cal. The broth­ers invit­ed activist celebri­ties onto their show, includ­ing folk singers Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and singer-actor Har­ry Bela­fonte.

The show also pro­duced its own polit­i­cal mate­r­i­al crit­i­ciz­ing the Viet­nam War and the politi­cians who sup­port­ed it,” not least Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son. Bring­ing on Seeger was a dar­ing move, giv­en that he’d been black­list­ed from net­work tele­vi­sion for the bet­ter part of two decades, though CBS’s cen­sors made sure to cut out the most polit­i­cal­ly sen­si­tive parts of his act.

Even more so was the broth­ers’ own per­for­mance, with George Segal, of Phil Ochs’s “Draft Dodger Rag,” which they end­ed by urg­ing their audi­ence to “make love, not war.” All this can look fair­ly tame by today’s stan­dards, but it locked the show — which had become top-rat­ed, hold­ing its own in a time slot against the cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that was Bonan­za — into a grudge match with its own net­work. Before the third sea­son, CBS’ high­er-ups demand­ed that each show be turned in ten days in advance, osten­si­bly in order to under­go review for sen­si­tive mate­r­i­al. In one instance, they claimed that the dead­line had­n’t been met and aired a re-run instead, though it may not have been entire­ly irrel­e­vant that the intend­ed pro­gram con­tained a trib­ute by Baez to her then-hus­band, who was being sent to prison for refus­ing to serve in the mil­i­tary.

CBS did broad­cast Baez’s per­for­mance on a lat­er date, after clip­ping out the ref­er­ence to the spe­cif­ic nature of her hus­band’s offense. A sim­i­lar strug­gle took place around the “ser­mon­ettes” deliv­ered by David Stein­berg, one of which you can see in the video above. The irrev­er­ence toward U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy, reli­gion, and much else besides in these and oth­er seg­ments even­tu­al­ly proved too much for the net­work, which fired the broth­ers after it had already giv­en the green light to a fourth sea­son of the Com­e­dy Hour. Though they suc­cess­ful­ly sued CBS for breach of con­tract there­after, they nev­er did regain the same lev­el of tele­vi­su­al promi­nence they’d once enjoyed, if enjoy be the word. At any rate, the fall­out of all this con­tro­ver­sy firm­ly installed the Smoth­ers Broth­ers in the pan­theon of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry free-speech war­riors, and their expe­ri­ence reminds us still today that, with­out the free­dom to give offense, there can be no com­e­dy wor­thy of the name.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Steve Mar­tin Make His First TV Appear­ance: The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour (1968)

When The Who (Lit­er­al­ly) Blew Up The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour in 1967

Watch 3000 Years of Art, a 1968 Exper­i­men­tal Film That Takes You on a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 3,000 Years of Fine Art

Revis­it Turn-On, the Inno­v­a­tive TV Show That Got Can­celed Right in the Mid­dle of Its First Episode (1969)

Pink Lady and Jeff: Japan’s Biggest Pop Musi­cians Star in One of America’s Worst-Reviewed TV Shows (1980)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short Introduction

in History, Language Lessons | September 19th, 2025

Teach­ing child vis­i­tors how to write their names using an unfa­mil­iar or antique alpha­bet is a favorite activ­i­ty of muse­um edu­ca­tors, but Dr. Irv­ing Finkel, a cuneiform expert who spe­cial­izes in ancient Mesopotami­an med­i­cine and mag­ic, has grander designs.

His employ­er, the British Muse­um, has over 130,000 tablets span­ning Mesopotamia’s Ear­ly Dynas­tic peri­od to the Neo-Baby­lon­ian Empire “just wait­ing for young schol­ars to come devote them­selves to (the) monk­ish work” of deci­pher­ing them.

Writ­ing one’s name might well prove to be a gate­way, and Dr. Finkel has a vest­ed inter­est in lin­ing up some new recruits.

The museum’s Depart­ment of the Mid­dle East has an open access pol­i­cy, with a study room where researchers can get up close and per­son­al with a vast col­lec­tion of cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia and sur­round­ing regions.

But let’s not put the ox before the cart.

As the extreme­ly per­son­able Dr. Finkel shows Matt Gray and Tom Scott of Matt and Tom’s Park Bench, above, cuneiform con­sists of three components—upright, hor­i­zon­tal and diagonal—made by press­ing the edge of a reed sty­lus, or pop­si­cle stick if you pre­fer, into a clay tablet.

The mechan­i­cal process seems fair­ly easy to get the hang of, but mas­ter­ing the old­est writ­ing sys­tem in the world will take you around six years of ded­i­cat­ed study. Like Japan’s kan­ji alpha­bet, the old­est writ­ing sys­tem in the world is syl­lab­ic. Prop­er­ly writ­ten out, these syl­la­bles join up into a flow­ing cal­lig­ra­phy that your aver­age, edu­cat­ed Baby­lon­ian would be able to read at a glance.

Even if you have no plans to rus­tle up a pop­si­cle stick and some Play-Doh, it’s worth stick­ing with the video to the end to hear Dr. Finkel tell how a chance encounter with some nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring cuneiform inspired him to write a hor­ror nov­el, which is now avail­able for pur­chase, fol­low­ing a suc­cess­ful Kick­starter cam­paign.

Begin your cuneiform stud­ies with Irv­ing Finkel’s Cuneiform: Ancient Scripts.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a 4000-Year Old Baby­lon­ian Recipe for Stew, Found on a Cuneiform Tablet, Get Cooked by Researchers from Yale & Har­vard

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

Learn Ancient Greek in 64 Free Lessons: A Free Online Course from Bran­deis & Har­vard

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

Hear What the Lan­guage Spo­ken by Our Ances­tors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sound­ed Like: A Recon­struc­tion of the Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guage

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist in NYC.

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A 107-Year-Old Irish Farmer Reflects on the Changes He’s Seen During His Life (1965)

in History, Television | September 18th, 2025

Talk to a clear-head­ed 107-year-old today, and you could expect to hear sto­ries of ado­les­cence in the Great Depres­sion, or — if you’re lucky — the Jazz Age seen through a child’s eyes. It’s no com­mon expe­ri­ence to have been formed by the age of radio and live deep into the age of the smart­phone, but arguably, Michael Fitz­patrick lived through even greater civ­i­liza­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion. Born in Ire­land in 1858, he sat for the inter­view above 107 years lat­er in 1965, which was broad­cast on tele­vi­sion. That device was well on its way to sat­u­rat­ing West­ern soci­ety at the time, as the auto­mo­bile already had, while mankind was tak­ing to the skies in jet­lin­ers and even to the stars in rock­et ships.

The con­trast between the world into which Fitz­patrick was born and the one in which he even­tu­al­ly found him­self is made stark­er by his being a son of the land. A life­long farmer, he can hon­est­ly reply, when asked to name the biggest change he’s seen, “Machin­ery.”

Not all of his answers come across quite so clear­ly, owing to his thick dialect that must sure­ly have gone extinct by now, even in rur­al Ire­land. Luck­i­ly, the video comes with sub­ti­tles, mak­ing it eas­i­er to under­stand what he has to say about the advent of the “mow­ing machine” and his mem­o­ries of the Bodyke evic­tions of the eigh­teen-eight­ies, when mêlées broke out over a local land­lord’s attempt to oust his des­ti­tute ten­ants.

One can come up with vague­ly anal­o­gous events to the Bodyke evic­tions in the mod­ern world, but in essence, they belong to the long stretch of his­to­ry when to be human meant to engage in agri­cul­ture, or to over­see it. The Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion did­n’t hap­pen at the same pace every­where at once, and indeed, Fitz­patrick lived the first part of his life in an effec­tive­ly pre-indus­tri­al real­i­ty, before wit­ness­ing the scarce­ly believ­able process of mech­a­niza­tion take place all around him. He expe­ri­enced, in oth­er words, the arrival of the civ­i­liza­tion into which we were all born, and to which we know no alter­na­tive. As for those of us of a cer­tain age today, we can expect to be asked six or sev­en decades hence — assum­ing we can go the dis­tance — what life was like with only dial-up inter­net.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Real Inter­views with Peo­ple Who Lived in the 1800s

Philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell Talks About the Time When His Grand­fa­ther Met Napoleon

1400 Engrav­ings from the 19th Cen­tu­ry Flow Togeth­er in the Short Ani­ma­tion “Still Life”

A Rare Smile Cap­tured in a 19th Cen­tu­ry Pho­to­graph

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

in History, Language Lessons | September 17th, 2025

We may take it for grant­ed that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems devel­oped with the Sume­ri­ans around 3400 B.C.E. The archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence so far sup­ports the the­o­ry. But it may also be pos­si­ble that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems pre­date 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets by sev­er­al thou­sand years. And what’s more, it may be pos­si­ble, sug­gests pale­oan­thro­pol­o­gist Genevieve von Pet­zinger, that those pre­his­toric forms of writ­ing, which include the ear­li­est known hash­tag marks, con­sist­ed of sym­bols near­ly as uni­ver­sal as emo­ji.

The study of sym­bols carved into cave walls all over the world—including pen­ni­forms (feath­er shapes), clav­i­forms (key shapes), and hand stencils—could even­tu­al­ly push us to “aban­don the pow­er­ful nar­ra­tive,” writes Frank Jacobs at Big Think, “of his­to­ry as total dark­ness until the Sume­ri­ans flip the switch.” Though the sym­bols may nev­er be tru­ly deci­pher­able, their pur­pos­es obscured by thou­sands of years of sep­a­ra­tion in time, they clear­ly show humans “undim­ming the light many mil­len­nia ear­li­er.”

While bur­row­ing deep under­ground to make cave paint­ings of ani­mals, ear­ly humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also devel­oped a sys­tem of signs that is remark­ably con­sis­tent across and between con­ti­nents. Von Pet­zinger spent years cat­a­logu­ing these sym­bols in Europe, vis­it­ing “52 caves,” reports New Scientist’s Ali­son George, “in France, Spain, Italy and Por­tu­gal. The sym­bols she found ranged from dots, lines, tri­an­gles, squares and zigza­gs to more com­plex forms like lad­der shapes, hand sten­cils, some­thing called a tec­ti­form that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feath­er shapes called pen­ni­forms.”

She dis­cov­ered 32 signs found all over the con­ti­nent, carved and paint­ed over a very long peri­od of time. “For tens of thou­sands of years,” Jacobs points out, “our ances­tors seem to have been curi­ous­ly con­sis­tent with the sym­bols they used.” Von Pet­zinger sees this sys­tem as a car­ry­over from mod­ern humans’ migra­tion into Europe from Africa. “This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new inven­tion,” she writes in her book The First Signs: Unlock­ing the mys­ter­ies of the world’s old­est sym­bols.

In her TED Talk at the top, von Pet­zinger describes this ear­ly sys­tem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through abstract signs as a pre­cur­sor to the “glob­al net­work of infor­ma­tion exchange” in the mod­ern world. “We’ve been build­ing on the men­tal achieve­ments of those who came before us for so long,” she says, “that it’s easy to for­get that cer­tain abil­i­ties haven’t already exist­ed,” long before the for­mal writ­ten records we rec­og­nize. These sym­bols trav­eled: they aren’t only found in caves, but also etched into deer teeth strung togeth­er in an ancient neck­lace.

Von Pet­zinger believes, writes George, that “the sim­ple shapes rep­re­sent a fun­da­men­tal shift in our ances­tors’ men­tal skills,” toward using abstract sym­bols to com­mu­ni­cate. Not every­one agrees with her. As the Brad­shaw Foun­da­tion notes, when it comes to the Euro­pean sym­bols, emi­nent pre­his­to­ri­an Jean Clottes argues “the signs in the caves are always (or near­ly always) asso­ci­at­ed with ani­mal fig­ures and thus can­not be said to be the first steps toward sym­bol­ism.”

Of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that both the signs and the ani­mals were meant to con­vey ideas just as a writ­ten lan­guage does. So argues MIT lin­guist Cora Lesure and her co-authors in a paper pub­lished in Fron­tiers in Psy­chol­o­gy last year. Cave art might show ear­ly humans “con­vert­ing acoustic sounds into draw­ings,” notes Sarah Gibbens at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. Lesure says her research “sug­gests that the cog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms nec­es­sary for the devel­op­ment of cave and rock art are like­ly to be anal­o­gous to those employed in the expres­sion of the sym­bol­ic think­ing required for lan­guage.”

In oth­er words, under her the­o­ry, “cave and rock [art] would rep­re­sent a modal­i­ty of lin­guis­tic expres­sion.” And the sym­bols sur­round­ing that art might rep­re­sent an elab­o­ra­tion on the theme. The very first sys­tem of writ­ing, shared by ear­ly humans all over the world for tens of thou­sands of years.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Trac­ing Eng­lish Back to Its Old­est Known Ances­tor: An Intro­duc­tion to Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Language–It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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How a 19th Century Scientist Created Incredibly Realistic 3D Models of the Moon (1874)

in History, Science | September 17th, 2025

At the moment, there’s no bet­ter way to see any­thing in space than through the lens of the James Webb Space Tele­scope. Pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, that ten-bil­lion-dol­lar suc­ces­sor to the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope can see unprece­dent­ed­ly far out into space, which, in effect, means it can see unprece­dent­ed­ly far back in time: some 13.5 bil­lion years, in fact, to the state of the ear­ly uni­verse. We post­ed the first pho­tos tak­en by the James Webb Space Tele­scope in 2022, which showed us dis­tant galax­ies and neb­u­lae at a lev­el of detail in which they’d nev­er been seen before.

Such images would scarce­ly have been imag­in­able to James Nas­myth, though he might have fore­seen that they would one day be a real­i­ty. A man of many inter­ests, he seems to have pur­sued them all dur­ing the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry through which he lived in its near-entire­ty.

His inven­tion of the steam ham­mer, which turned out to be a great boon to the ship­build­ing indus­try, did its part to make pos­si­ble his ear­ly retire­ment. At that point, he was freed to pur­sue such pas­sions as astron­o­my and pho­tog­ra­phy, and in 1874, he pub­lished with co-author James Car­pen­ter a book that occu­pied the inter­sec­tion of those fields.

The Moon: Con­sid­ered as a Plan­et, a World, and a Satel­lite con­tains what still look like strik­ing­ly detailed pho­tos of the sur­face of that famil­iar but then-still-mys­te­ri­ous heav­en­ly body: quite a coup at the time, con­sid­er­ing that the tech­nol­o­gy for tak­ing pic­tures through a tele­scope had yet to be invent­ed. Nas­myth did use a tele­scope — one he made him­self — but only as a ref­er­ence in order to sketch “the moon’s scarred, cratered and moun­tain­ous sur­face,” writes Ned Pen­nant-Rea at the Pub­lic Domain Review. “He then built plas­ter mod­els based on the draw­ings, and pho­tographed these against black back­grounds in the full glare of the sun.”

In the book’s text, Nas­myth and Car­pen­ter showed a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic pre­science with their obser­va­tions on such phe­nom­e­na as the “stu­pen­dous reser­voir of pow­er that the tidal waters con­sti­tute.” You can read the first edi­tion at the Inter­net Archive, and you can see more of its pho­tographs at the Pub­lic Domain Review. Com­pare them to pic­tures of the actu­al moon, and you’ll notice that he got a good deal right about the look of its sur­face, espe­cial­ly giv­en the tools he had to work with at the time. There’s even a sense in which Nas­myth’s pho­tos look more real than the 100 per­cent faith­ful images we have now, that they vivid­ly rep­re­sent some­thing of the moon’s essence. As mil­lions of dis­ap­point­ed view­ers of CGI-sat­u­rat­ed mod­ern sci-fi movies under­stand, some­times only mod­els feel right.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Sur­viv­ing Pho­to­graph of the Moon (1840)

The Very First Pic­ture of the Far Side of the Moon, Tak­en 60 Years Ago

The Full Rota­tion of the Moon: A Beau­ti­ful, High Res­o­lu­tion Time Lapse Film

The Evo­lu­tion of the Moon: 4.5 Bil­lions Years in 2.6 Min­utes

The Ulti­mate Full Moon Shot

A Trip to the Moon (1902): The First Great Sci-Fi Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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When Michelangelo Created Artistic Designs for Military Fortifications to Protect Florence (1529–1530)

in Art, History | September 16th, 2025

Michelan­ge­lo was born in the Repub­lic of Flo­rence, with the tal­ent of… well, Michelan­ge­lo. Giv­en those begin­nings, it would have been prac­ti­cal­ly impos­si­ble for him to avoid entan­gle­ment with the House of Medici, the bank­ing fam­i­ly and polit­i­cal dynasty that ruled over Flo­rence for the bet­ter part of three cen­turies. By the time of Michelan­gelo’s birth, in 1475, the Medici had been in pow­er for four decades. At the age of four­teen, he was tak­en in by Loren­zo de’ Medici, known as “il Mag­nifi­co,” in whose house­hold he received artis­tic train­ing as well as philo­soph­i­cal knowl­edge and polit­i­cal con­nec­tions.

It was with Loren­zo’s death in 1492 that this first streak of Medici dom­i­nance ran into chop­py waters. When the fam­i­ly was expelled from Flo­rence two years lat­er, Michelan­ge­lo took his leave as well, begin­ning the peri­od of his career in which he would sculpt both the Pietà and the David.

Only in 1512 (after var­i­ous trou­bles in Flo­rence that includ­ed the four-year theoc­ra­cy of Savonaro­la) were the Medici restored to pow­er, but they also had the papa­cy: the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII com­mis­sioned a great deal of work from Michelan­ge­lo, though he sel­dom saw eye-to-eye with those par­tic­u­lar patrons.

When Flo­rence rebelled against the Medici in the late fif­teen-twen­ties, Michelan­ge­lo took the side of the repub­li­cans. Their gov­ern­ment select­ed him as one of the “Nine of the Mili­tias” meant to design for­ti­fi­ca­tions for the threat­ened city (a resump­tion of ear­li­er, aban­doned Medici plans) in 1526, and before long appoint­ed him gov­er­na­tore gen­erale. It was in that capac­i­ty that he drew the sketch­es seen here, which con­sti­tute his plans for a set of for­ti­fi­ca­tions against the Medici-backed siege that spanned 1529 and 1530. How­ev­er artis­ti­cal­ly strik­ing, their designs were nev­er actu­al­ly built, at least not in any­thing like their entire­ty.

As it hap­pened, Michelan­ge­lo had backed the wrong horse: the siege was ulti­mate­ly suc­cess­ful, and the Medici retook pow­er under the aegis of Holy Roman emper­or Charles V. This put the artist in a dif­fi­cult posi­tion, and for a peri­od of months he was forced to go into hid­ing. With his death sen­tence in effect, he lay low in a small cham­ber beneath the Basil­i­ca of San Loren­zo, now part of the Medici Chapels Muse­um, whose walls are cov­ered in draw­ings, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, in his unmis­tak­able hand. The artis­tic skills he’d kept sharp dur­ing that peri­od of inter­nal exile would prob­a­bly have kept serv­ing him well enough in Flo­rence after Clement VII guar­an­teed his safe­ty there. But it seems he’d had enough Flo­ren­tine intrigue for one life­time, the rest of which he wise­ly opt­ed to spend in Rome.

via BLDGBLOG

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Secret Room with Draw­ings Attrib­uted to Michelan­ge­lo Opens to Vis­i­tors in Flo­rence

How Michelangelo’s David Still Draws Admi­ra­tion and Con­tro­ver­sy Today

New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculp­tures

Watch the Painstak­ing and Nerve-Rack­ing Process of Restor­ing a Draw­ing by Michelan­ge­lo

The Sis­tine Chapel: A $22,000 Art-Book Col­lec­tion Fea­tures Remark­able High-Res­o­lu­tion Views of the Murals of Michelan­ge­lo, Bot­ti­cel­li & Oth­er Renais­sance Mas­ters

Michelangelo’s Illus­trat­ed Gro­cery List

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Albert Einstein Gives a Speech Praising Immigrants’ Contributions to America (1939)

in History | September 16th, 2025

There have been many times in Amer­i­can his­to­ry when cel­e­bra­tions of the country’s mul­ti-eth­nic, ever-chang­ing demog­ra­phy served as pow­er­ful coun­ter­weights to nar­row, exclu­sion­ary, nation­alisms. In 1855, for exam­ple, the pub­li­ca­tion of Brook­lyn native Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself offered a “pas­sion­ate embrace of equal­i­ty,” writes Kath­leen Kennedy Townsend, “the soul of democ­ra­cy.” We can con­trast the vibran­cy and dynamism of Whitman’s vision with the vio­lent nativism of the anti-immi­grant Know-Noth­ings, who reached their peak in the 1850s. The move­ment was found­ed by two oth­er New York­ers, gang leader William “Bill the Butch­er” Poole and writer Thomas R. Whit­ney, who asked in one of his polit­i­cal tracts, “What is equal­i­ty but stag­na­tion?”

Almost 100 years lat­er, we see anoth­er nation­al­ist move­ment tak­ing hold, not only in Europe, but in the States. Before the U.S. entered World War II, its views on Nation­al Social­ist Ger­many were decid­ed­ly ambiva­lent, with glow­ing por­traits of its leader pub­lished through­out the 30s, and a siz­able Nazi pres­ence in the U.S. From 1934 to 1939, for exam­ple, Ger­man groups in the U.S. orga­nized mas­sive ral­lies in Madi­son Square Gar­den. Addi­tion­al­ly, the Ger­man-Amer­i­can Bund pro­mot­ed the Nazi Par­ty through­out the U.S. with 70 dif­fer­ent local chap­ters. These orga­ni­za­tions held Nazi fam­i­ly and sum­mer camps in New Jer­sey, Wis­con­sin, Penn­syl­va­nia…. “There were forced march­es in the mid­dle of the night to bon­fires,” says his­to­ri­an Arnie Bern­stein, “where the kids would sing the Nazi nation­al anthem and shout ‘Sieg Heil.’”

Need­less to say, these scenes made a num­ber of minor­i­ty groups and immi­grants par­tic­u­lar­ly ner­vous, espe­cial­ly Jews who had just escaped from Europe. One such immi­grant, physi­cist Albert Ein­stein, had made the U.S. his per­ma­nent home in 1933 when he accept­ed a posi­tion at Prince­ton after liv­ing as a refugee in Eng­land. He would go on to become a force­ful advo­cate for equal­i­ty in the U.S., speak­ing out against the racial caste sys­tem of seg­re­ga­tion. In 1940, Ein­stein gave a lit­tle-known speech at the New York World’s Fair to inau­gu­rate an exhib­it that paid “homage to the diver­si­ty of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion.” On the dis­play, called the “Wall of Fame,” were inscribed “the names and pro­fes­sions of hun­dreds of the nation’s most notable ‘immi­grants, Negroes and Amer­i­can Indi­ans.’” (See the first page of the typed list above, and the full list here.)

Ein­stein’s speech comes to us via Speech­es of Note, a sib­ling of two favorite sites of ours, Let­ters of Note and Lists of Note. Below, you can read the full tran­script of the speech, in which Einstein—having adopt­ed the coun­try as it had adopt­ed him—-declaims, “these, too, belong to us, and we are glad and grate­ful to acknowl­edge the debt that the com­mu­ni­ty owes them.”

It is a fine and high-mind­ed idea, also in the best sense a proud one, to erect at the World’s Fair a wall of fame to immi­grants and Negroes of dis­tinc­tion.

The sig­nif­i­cance of the ges­ture is this: it says: These, too, belong to us, and we are glad and grate­ful to acknowl­edge the debt that the com­mu­ni­ty owes them. And focus­ing on these par­tic­u­lar con­trib­u­tors, Negroes and immi­grants, shows that the com­mu­ni­ty feels a spe­cial need to show regard and affec­tion for those who are often regard­ed as step-chil­dren of the nation—for why else this com­bi­na­tion?

If, then, I am to speak on the occa­sion, it can only be to say some­thing on behalf of these step-chil­dren. As for the immi­grants, they are the only ones to whom it can be account­ed a mer­it to be Amer­i­cans. For they have had to take trou­ble for their cit­i­zen­ship, where­as it has cost the major­i­ty noth­ing at all to be born in the land of civic free­dom.

As for the Negroes, the coun­try has still a heavy debt to dis­charge for all the trou­bles and dis­abil­i­ties it has laid on the Negro’s shoul­ders, for all that his fel­low-cit­i­zens have done and to some extent still are doing to him. To the Negro and his won­der­ful songs and choirs, we are indebt­ed for the finest con­tri­bu­tion in the realm of art which Amer­i­ca has so far giv­en to the world. And this great gift we owe, not to those whose names are engraved on this “Wall of Fame,” but to the chil­dren of the peo­ple, blos­som­ing name­less­ly as the lilies of the field.

In a way, the same is true of the immi­grants. They have con­tributed in their way to the flow­er­ing of the com­mu­ni­ty, and their indi­vid­ual striv­ing and suf­fer­ing have remained unknown.

One more thing I would say with regard to immi­gra­tion gen­er­al­ly: There exists on the sub­ject a fatal mis­com­pre­hen­sion. Unem­ploy­ment is not decreased by restrict­ing immi­gra­tion. For unem­ploy­ment depends on faulty dis­tri­b­u­tion of work among those capa­ble of work. Immi­gra­tion increas­es con­sump­tion as much as it does demand on labor. Immi­gra­tion strength­ens not only the inter­nal econ­o­my of a sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed coun­try, but also its defen­sive pow­er.

The Wall of Fame arose out of a high-mind­ed ide­al; it is cal­cu­lat­ed to stim­u­late just and mag­nan­i­mous thoughts and feel­ings. May it work to that effect.

The speech is remark­able for its egal­i­tar­i­an­ism. The exhib­it works more or less as a “who’s who” of notable personalities—all of them men. Of course, Ein­stein him­self was one of the most notable immi­grants of the age. And yet, his ethos is Whit­man­ian, cel­e­brat­ing the mul­ti­tudes of labor­ers and artists “blos­som­ing name­less­ly” and those who have “remained unknown.” The coun­try, Ein­stein sug­gests, could not pos­si­bly be itself with­out its diver­si­ty of peo­ple and cul­tures. That same year, Ein­stein would pass his cit­i­zen­ship test, and explain in a radio broad­cast, “Why I am an Amer­i­can.” 

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein Explains How Slav­ery Has Crip­pled Everyone’s Abil­i­ty (Even Aristotle’s) to Think Clear­ly About Racism

20,000 Amer­i­cans Hold a Pro-Nazi Ral­ly in Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1939: Chill­ing Video Re-Cap­tures a Lost Chap­ter in US His­to­ry

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Rare Audio: Albert Ein­stein Explains “Why I Am an Amer­i­can” on Day He Pass­es Cit­i­zen­ship Test (1940)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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Everything That Went Wrong During The Wizard of Oz’s Seriously Troubled Production

in Film, History | September 15th, 2025

The Wiz­ard of Oz is now show­ing at Las Vegas’ Sphere. Or a ver­sion of it is, at any rate, and not one that meets with the approval of all the pic­ture’s count­less fans. “The beloved 1939 film star­ring Judy Gar­land, wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the great­est Hol­ly­wood clas­sics, has been stretched and mor­phed and adapt­ed to fit the enor­mous dome-shaped venue,” writes the New York Times’ Alis­sa Wilkin­son. This entailed an exten­sion “upward and out­ward with the help of A.I. as well as visu­al effects artists. The cool tor­na­do cre­at­ed by Arnold Gille­spie for the orig­i­nal has been trad­ed for some­thing dig­i­tal, and even­tu­al­ly you can’t see it at all, because you’re inside the fun­nel. New per­for­mances and vis­tas have also been gen­er­at­ed,” which is “at best ques­tion­able” eth­i­cal­ly, to say noth­ing of the aes­thet­ics.

Yet even giv­en the con­sid­er­able mod­i­fi­ca­tions to — and exci­sions from — the orig­i­nal film, “most audi­ences will glad­ly over­look all of this, wowed by the sheer scale of the spec­ta­cle.” The Wiz­ard of Oz has, as has often been said, the kind of “mag­ic” that endures through even great defi­cien­cies in pre­sen­ta­tion.

That qual­i­ty first became appar­ent in 1956, sev­en­teen years after the movie’s release in cin­e­mas, when it first aired on tele­vi­sion. Though the dra­mat­ic tran­si­tion from black-and-white to col­or would have been lost on most home view­ers at the time, “45 mil­lion peo­ple tuned in, far more than those who had seen it in the­aters,” says the nar­ra­tor of the It Was A Sh*t Show video above. Anoth­er broad­cast, in 1959, did even bet­ter, and there­after The Wiz­ard of Oz became an “annu­al must-see event” on TV, which even­tu­al­ly made it “the most-watched film in his­to­ry.”

That sta­tus jus­ti­fies the movie’s infa­mous­ly trou­bled pro­duc­tion, which is the video’s cen­tral sub­ject. From its numer­ous rewrites all the way through to its fee­ble box office per­for­mance, The Wiz­ard of Oz encoun­tered severe dif­fi­cul­ties every step of the way, which gave rise to rumors that con­tin­ue to haunt it: that an actor died from poi­son make­up, for exam­ple, or that one of the munchkins com­mit­ted sui­cide in view of the cam­era. While the pro­duc­tion caused no fatal­i­ties — at least not direct­ly — it did come close more than once, to say noth­ing of the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll the com­bi­na­tion of high ambi­tion and per­sis­tent dys­func­tion must have tak­en on many, if not most, of its par­tic­i­pants. Even hear­ing enu­mer­at­ed only its clear­ly doc­u­ment­ed prob­lems is enough to make one won­der how the pic­ture was ever com­plet­ed in the first place. Yet now, 86 years lat­er, its Sphere rein­ter­pre­ta­tion is rak­ing in $2 mil­lion in tick­et sales per day: an act of wiz­ardry if ever there was one.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Ear­li­est Sur­viv­ing Filmed Ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz (1910)

The Wiz­ard of Oz Bro­ken Apart and Put Back Togeth­er in Alpha­bet­i­cal Order

The Com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz Series, Avail­able as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

Hear Wait­ing for Godot, the Acclaimed 1956 Pro­duc­tion Star­ring The Wiz­ard of Oz’s Bert Lahr

Watch the Sesame Street Episode Banned for Being Too Scary, Fea­tur­ing The Wiz­ard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West (1976)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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