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February 22, 2010
Herbert Aptheker Undergraduate History
Conference at Columbia University
Lectures by the Recipients of the

Fall 2009 Herbert Aptheker Undergraduate History Prize
EMMA HULSE: "Every Woman a Mighty Angela Davis:

Representations of Race, Class, and Gender in the Free Angela
Campaign"
ANDREW TILLETT-SAKS: "Civil Rights on the Market: Support

and Opposition for the Public Accommodations Bill in the Civil
Rights Act of 1964"
ESTER MURDUKHAYEVA: "Precedents, Protests, and Politics:

Changes in the Prosecution of Rape in England, 1810-1845"
Herbert Aptheker, a Brooklyn native, earned both his

bachelor’s degree and his doctorate at Columbia University. His
doctoral dissertation was later published in 1943 as American Negro
Slave Revolts and is a seminal work on slave resistance.
The Herbert Aptheker Undergraduate History Prize is awarded
by the Columbia Undergraduate Journal of History Editorial Board
from the pool of papers submitted to the Journal for publication.
Award winning authors are invited to present their papers at the
Herbert Aptheker Undergraduate History Conference, for which they
will receive an honorarium of $150.
COLUMBIA UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF HISTORY
I
Volume 2 · Issue 1
Spring/Fall 2009
The Columbia Undergraduate
Journal of History
A Publication of the Columbia University Undergraduate History Council
Contents
ANDREW TILLETT-SAKS: Civil Rights on the Market: Support and Opposition

for the Public Accommodations Bill in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ............. 2
ESTER MURDUKHAYEVA: Precedents, Protests and Politics: Changes in the

Prosecution of Rape in England, 1810-1845 ................................................. 24
EMMA CURRAN HULSE: “Every Woman a Mighty Angela Davis”:

Representations of Race, Class and Gender in the “Free Angela” Campaign80
ROY KIMMEY: The Critic in Question: Eduard Hanslick and Viennese

Musical Identity ........................................................................................... 112
JULIA RENAUD: “We want you to see us live over the life of Hiawatha in his
own country”: The Performance of Nativeness in the Garden River Ojibwa’s
Hiawatha Pageant ........................................................................................ 135
DANIEL MORALES: Mobility in the Windy City: Race, Class and Identity
among Mexican Immigrants in Pre-Depression Chicago ............................ 168
ELIAV BITAN: The Science of Climate Change: Historical Analysis of a

Public Problem ............................................................................................ 211
About the Contributors
ESTER MURDUKHAYEVA graduated from Columbia University in May
2009 with a Bachelor of Arts in History. She is currently a first year
student at Yale Law School.
EMMA CURRAN HULSE graduated from Columbia in May of 2009, Magna

Cum Laude with honors in history. Her thesis explored the memory of
Black Power in Newark, New Jersey. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar
in Guatemala, studying bilingual literacy programs for indigenous
women.
JULIA RENAUD graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in

June 2009 with a bachelor of arts degree in American History and
Literature and a secondary field in History of Art and Architecture. She is
originally from Los Altos, California and now lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
ROY KIMMEY is a 2009 graduate of Harvard College, with a degree in the

fields of history and music. His undergraduate scholarship culminated in a
study of East German protest music, which was a recipient of the Thomas
Temple Hoopes Prize. Kimmey has presented papers at symposia,
including most recently the Harvard Theatre Collection's exhibition
celebrating the centennial of the Ballets Russes. He is currently a research
assistant for the Other Canon Foundation.
DANIEL MORALES is from Azusa California, and studies issues of

citizenship, race, urban history and immigration in the United States and
Mexico. He studied as an undergraduate at University of Chicago,
graduating in 2008 with a BA in American History and is now a PhD
student in American History at Columbia University.
ELIAV BITAN graduated from Columbia University in 2009. A resident of

Maine, he cannot get enough of the ocean or science studies. He is
currently working to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
PRECEDENTS, PROTESTS AND POLITICS
2
Civil Rights on the Market: Support and
Opposition for the Public Accommodations
Bill in the Civil Rights Act of 1964
ANDREW TILLETT-SAKS
O
n July 2, 1964, with the flick of a pen, President
Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of
1964 granting African Americans a degree of
citizenship denied them for centuries. Needless
to say, Johnson’s pen alone did not make civil rights
legislation. The passage of the Act was the culmination of a
long process of change and a complex array of social forces.
The exact nature of these historical processes and forces is
feverishly debated amongst historians. Title II of the Civil
Rights Act guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in all
‘public accommodations’; in other words, any businesses open
to the general public. From July 23rd to August 2nd of 1963, the
United States Senate held hearings on Title II, or the ‘Public
Accommodations Bill’. These hearings, and the particular
nature of support and opposition, provide a window into the
making of civil rights legislation of the 1960s. The testimony
reveals the immense influence of economic considerations on
this legislation. Title II’s advocates decried the market
inefficiencies created by racial discrimination, while its
opponents deplored an alleged invasion of private property
rights. Ultimately, the debate pitted individual interests against
the health of American capitalism as a whole. If the witnesses
in the Senate hearings around Title II are taken at their word–
and there is evidence to suggest that they should be–their
testimonies complicate much of the way we perceive the Civil
Rights era.
Framing the Debate: The Import of Title II

3
The achievement of civil rights in the 1960s occupies a
prominent place on the mantel of American historical memory.
Accordingly, scholarship on the era is abundant. Scholarship
largely falls into two schools of interpretation. One emphasizes
benevolence and moral righteousness of American democracy.
Another cites conflict and contentious politics as the engine of
the era’s developments. As they represent the dialogue with
which any new study must engage, both perspectives merit
elaboration.1
Early accounts of the Civil Rights Era often wove civil
rights legislation into the broader narrative of American
Exceptionalism. Taking an overwhelmingly ‘top-down’
approach, these works attributed change to federal politicians.
The American ideal of liberal democracy–argued historians
such as Stephen Lawson and Richard Weisbrot–drove these
politicians to wipe away the ugly blemish on an otherwise ideal
democracy. These historians often focus on the individual
psyches of ‘enlightened leaders’ such as Eisenhower, Kennedy,
and Johnson–on their “awakened consciences” and their “moral
repugnance” for all things racist.2 In this view, America’s
1
This paradigm is not total. Scholarship does exist that provides a more
interactive analysis, weighing both activist resistance and federal initiative. For
effective surveys of the literature, see Steven F. Lawson, "Freedom Then,
Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement," American
Historical Review 96, 2 (April, 1991): 456-471, and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The
Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," Journal of
American History 91, 4 (March, 2005):1233-63. Scholarship also exists that takes
into account altogether different forces than federal benevolence and activist
pressure. For example, historian Mary Dudziak considers the role of Cold War
politics and Harvard Sitkoff takes, amongst other forces, New Deal politics and
organized labor into account. Nonetheless, this paradigm does frame much of the
scholarly debate on the era. See Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for
Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978)
2
Richard Weisbrot. Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights
Movement (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990) 87; Steven F. Lawson,
“Debating the Civil Rights Movement: The View From the Nation,” in Steven F.
Lawson and Charles Payne, Debating the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) 7
4
inexorable march towards freedom finally encompassed
African Americans, as racial equality at last triumphed in the
halls of Washington D.C.3
More recent scholarship shies away from federal
idealism and benevolence as causal factors, shifting the focus
from white politicians to African American activists. Emerging
alongside the wave of new ‘social history’, these accounts
highlight the extraordinary struggles of grassroots activists.
African Americans cease to be gracious subjects acted upon,
and become the agents behind the passage of civil rights
legislation.4 The federal government did not act out of
democratic values; rather, sit-ins, marches on Washington,
freedom rides, and other forms of courageous resistance forced
appeasement from an otherwise reluctant federal government.
The galvanized Black Freedom Struggle left D.C. politicians
with two choices: social disorder or civil rights. An amoral
ruling class chose the latter.5
The different narratives imply particular interpretations of
how civil rights legislation developed in Congress. The idealist,
top-down narrative pits enlightened Northern politicians
against racist Southerners. The debate supposedly divided
along the lines of contrasting views on race relations: the
progressive North advocating equality and the retrograde South
clinging to its belief in a natural racial hierarchy. It was a moral
debate, the non-racists versus the racists. The conflict-narrative,
3
Weisbrot and Lawson are two prime examples of this historiographic school.
Additional examples include Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Robert Kennedy and His
Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978)
4
This is most explicitly exemplified by Charles Payne, Jr.: “Giving local people a
central place in the movement narrative changes how we think about historical
narrative.” Charles Payne, Jr. in Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds.,
Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (New York: NYU
Press, 2005) x
5
Focused studies on grassroots activism, generally with the above implications,
are extremely numerous. Some of the most celebrated examples include Charles
M. Payne. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1995), John Dittmer. Local People (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1995), and Clayborne Carson. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the
1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)
5
on the other hand, homogenizes the federal government into
one monolithic interest group. Internal squabbling undoubtedly
occurred, but the ultimate decision to pass civil rights
legislation reflected the collective capitulation of a reluctant
federal government. Neither of these schools of thought pays
attention to the hearings that preceded the bill’s passage; they
merely deduce the nature of the hearings from the broader
analysis without checking for corroboration. Yet the
Congressional hearings on the issue of equal access to public
accommodations provide an alternative view of support and
opposition to Civil Rights legislation.
A large portion of the Congressional hearings dealt
with the issue of ‘public accommodations’. Title II of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial discrimination in the arena
of public accommodations. As referred to the Senate by the
Committee On Commerce, the bill proposed to “guarantee all
persons freedom from a refusal by an
included establishment or organization to deal with them on
account of race, color, religion, or national origin.”6 In practice,
this meant outlawing any form of “discrimination or
segregation” in
any inn, hotel, motel,…restaurant, cafeteria, lunchroom, lunch
counter, soda fountain,…motion picture house, theater, concert hall,
sports arena, stadium, or other place of exhibition or
entertainment…,[or] any establishment which is physically located
within the premises of any establishment otherwise covered.7
The bill was a substantive mandate, not merely a moral
reproach. It proposed, at the federal level, to create apparatuses
and authority to punish discriminatory practices. Indeed, the
bill permitted the “Attorney General to intervene in such civil
action if he certifies that the case is of general public
importance,” and “authorized aggrieved individuals to file suit
6
U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Commerce, Civil Rights-- Public
Accommodation- Report of the Committee on Commerce, 88th Cong., 1st sess.,
July 23, p. 1
7
Civil Rights Act of 1964, as reprinted in Donald King and Charles Quick, eds.,
Legal Aspects of the Civil Rights Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1965) 336-7
6
in federal court to seek relief against discriminatory practices.”8
Such federal authority to regulate race relations flew in the face
of nearly a century of State and individual rights.9 Moral
suasion and gradualism tossed aside, the bill threw the weight
of federal force on the side of equal civil rights in the
marketplace.
The Public Accommodations Bill thus embodied the
core issue of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. While
strands of Black Power and demands for social rights (beyond
merely formal civil rights) certainly existed in the pre-1965
black freedom struggle, the central demands focused on
equality of citizenship with white Americans. Title II cut to the
heart of Jim Crow segregation, forbidding discrimination in
both a legal and practical sense. More than any other bill of the
era, the bill guaranteed the provision of equal civil rights in the
realm of public life.
Politicians in Congress understood that Title II
embodied the crux of the struggle, and their treatment of the
bill exemplified its profound significance. No other facet of the
Civil Right Act prompted greater resistance than Public
Accommodations. One Congressman noted, “The public
accommodations provisions were so severe they threaten
passage of civil rights legislation, not only in the Senate but
even in the House.”10 Regarding the Civil Rights Act’s
Congressional debates, an historian of the Act remarks, “the
public accommodations section received the bulk of the
time.”11 In the end, Title II required the most amendments of
the Civil Rights Act’s provisions to facilitate passage. Public
accommodations piqued the most stubborn struggle in
8
ibid, 338; Barbara Whalen and Charles Whalen. The Longest Debate: A
Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Washington, D.C.: Seven Locks
Press, 1985) 239.
9
This precedent ran from the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. Emerging during the
heights of Redemption, they ruled the 13th and 14th amendment inapplicable to
maters of private segregation and discrimination. See Mark Tushnet, I dissent:
Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2008) 45–68
10
Bill McCulloch as cited in Whalen, The Longest Debate, 35.
11
Ibid, 166
7
Congress because it most encapsulated the root of the entire
conflict. The debate around Title II thus provides crucial
insight into the civil rights conflict and legislation of the 1960s.
Like the entire Civil Rights Act, the partisan divide
around the Public Accommodations bill fell overwhelmingly
along sectional lines. In the Senate, twenty out of twenty-one
Southern Senators voted against the Civil Rights Act; by
contrast, seventy-two of seventy-six Northern Senators voted
for the Act.12 Although more difficult to quantify, survey of
testimonies and statements in the Senate hearings on Title II
reveal similar tendencies. In total, forty-two Northerners
provided testimonies or submitted statement, compared to
thirty-seven Southerners, and thirty representatives of the
Executive branch of government. These totals encompass all
types of witnesses: from Governors to journalists, Executive
departments to local business-owners. Of the forty-two
Northerners and Executive representatives, thirty-six lent
explicit support to the bill, four gave general abstentions and
two opposed. Southerners saw the bill differently: thirty-four
explicitly opposed, two supported, and one simply did not
comment on the bill. State Governors who submitted
statements or gave testimony followed this pattern–nineteen of
twenty-one Northern Governors endorsed the bill, while eight
of nine Southern Governors opposed. Obviously, a rigid
sectional divide did exist.13
The Fetters of Discrimination: Support for Title II
12
Desmond S. King, Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the U.S.
Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 311. I adopt King’s
method of categorization: “Southern” denotes the eleven states that composed the
Confederacy during the Civil War, while “Northern” encompasses all other states.
Perhaps a more meaningful definition would consider the presence of Jim Crow
segregation as the defining factor, however, varying and indefinite degrees of Jim
Crow laws across Southern states makes this method of distinction somewhat
imprecise.
13
All data in this paragraph is derived from U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on
Commerce, Civil Rights-- Public Accommodation Part 1, 88th Cong., 1st sess.,
July 23-26, 29-31, Aug. 1-2, 1963
8
Advocates of the bill did not base their support for Title II
exclusively on its moral righteousness. The lion’s share of
support cited the potential economic benefits of eradicating
discrimination in public accommodations. To be sure,
witnesses often made mention of the moral repugnance of
racial inequality, but this line of argument occupies
considerably less space in the Congressional transcripts and
often gives the impression of an obligatory, yet token,
acknowledgement. The argument that civil rights in public
accommodations would bolster the economy was extensive and
multifaceted. Particularly in an era of increasing
interdependence of local markets, many proponents argued,
discrimination imposed artificial and inefficient barriers to
commerce. Moving from the abstract to the tangible, witnesses
provided numerous detailed examples of the supposed
economic fetters. Finally, many proponents of Title II
considered the economic consequences of African American
unrest, and by extension the economic impact of appeasing this
unrest.
Capitalist growth is premised on ‘rational’ economic
decision-making, and proponents of Title II argued that
discriminatory practices were irrational. Racial prejudice,
proponents suggested, too often prevented purely economic
decisions and thus threw a wrench into the operations of the
free market. Although variations and elaborations abounded,
this proved to be the premise of most testimony in favor of
Title II. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., the Under-Secretary of
Commerce, began his lengthy testimony, “the main theme of
my statement is the adverse effect of racial discrimination in
public accommodations on interstate commerce.”
“Segregation,” Roosevelt, Jr., continued, “imposes unnatural
limitations in the conduct of business which are injurious to the
free flow of commerce. It inhibits businessmen in making
rational investment decisions; it compels wasteful and
uneconomic duplication of resources…This legislation will
9
help to remove this burden.”14 Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy concurred: “Our whole economy suffers from it.
Discrimination…puts an artificial restriction on the market and
interferes with the natural flow of merchandise…and prevents
the most economic allocation of our national resources.”15 The
Commissioner of the Civil Rights Committee, Robert
Griswold, stated bluntly, “racial discrimination constitutes a
burden upon interstate commerce.”16 Northern State officials
echoed the sentiments of their Executive allies. New Jersey
Senator Clifford Case posited, “Economically speaking, it is a
drag on the country's development and precludes the full use of
its resources, human and material.”17 This line of reasoning
dominated the hearings. Witness after witness attacked
discrimination in public accommodations as inefficient,
lamenting the lost national riches of a more perfectly market-
oriented society.
The argument was not only abstract and theoretical.
Witnesses listed many concrete examples of precisely how
discrimination in public accommodations was stymieing
economic efficiency. The most frequently cited examples
included discouragement of general interstate travel, hesitancy
to hold lucrative national conventions in Southern cities, failure
to capitalize on the burgeoning consumer power of African
Americans, and an inability to develop advanced industry in the
South. One witness cited studies conducted by The Bureau of
Public Roads in the Department of Commerce which calculated
the amount of public accommodations available to African
Americans traveling along particular routes in the South. The
study, and the witness, concluded that accommodations would
be unreasonably sparse, and thus created “adverse effects on
14
Accommodation Part 1, 88th Cong., 1st sess., July 23-26, 29-31, Aug. 1-2, 1963,
689-91
15
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part I, 18-9
16
Accommodation Part II, 88th Cong., 1st sess., July 23-26, 29-31, Aug. 1-2, 1963,
771
17
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part I, 620
10
interstate commerce.”18 Another report cites numerous
organizations that refused to hold conventions in the South
“because of discrimination in hotel and restaurant
accommodations.” Estimating lost revenue of “between $4.5
million and $5 million,” the report laments the many missed
opportunities of potential Southern growth.19 Many witnesses
bemoaned the artificial restraints on African American
consumption. The Secretary of Labor, Willard Wirtz, stated,
“the minority consumer market is largely untapped.” A
Department of Labor study, provided in a report from the
Department of Commerce, concluded “that Negroes in large
northern cities spend more than southern Negroes of the same
income class”–the significance being “the distortion of Negro
expenditure patterns” and the “affect [on the] gross national
product.”20 Finally, several Executive officials pointed to the
inability to advance industry in the South. Discrimination
prevented the cultivation and attraction of educated, skilled
labor, and a lack of skilled labor discouraged advanced industry
from locating production in Southern cities. Secretary Wirtz
conveyed the argument, and its roots in a neoclassical model of
economics, succinctly: “When community conditions prevent
the most economically desirable location of industry, they
restrict the movement of the labor force.”21 All of these
arguments added substance to the criticism that public
accommodations discrimination stultified the national
economy. Citing extensive evidence, Title II’s proponents
effectively moved their support in the name of market
efficiency from the abstract to the concrete.
In addition to these economic incentives, the bill’s
supporters argued that the changing nature of American
capitalism made Title II more important by the day. Markets
were expanding and becoming increasingly interdependent,
necessitating a more expansive range of mobility for goods and
18
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 691-5
19
ibid, 696
20
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part I, 623; Civil Rights-- Public
Accommodations Part II, 695
21
11
labor. An economic problem of the South increasingly became
an economic problem of the nation as a whole, as regional
markets consolidated into a national market. As Attorney
General Kennedy made sure to note, “the country has changed
so much. There is so much more mobility and travel and
shipment of goods now than there was 75 years ago.”22
Midwestern Senators apparently felt this importance as well:
Michigan Senator Philip Hart subtitled his statement “A
Changing and Interdependent National Economy.” “When
State law, or local practice, effectively restricts the
markets…and accommodations for many Americans,” he
declared, “there is, I submit, a very real and evident restraint of
trade and commerce affecting other Americans throughout the
nation…It is my belief the dollar amount of this business-yes,
this commerce-will be staggering.”23 Hubert Humphrey,
Governor of Minnesota, conveyed the potential fruits of a more
inclusive national market: “I am sure that many businessmen in
these States would welcome the opportunity to serve this large
market which is presently barred to them.”24 A unified national
economy was growing in importance, proponents argued, and
the economic detriment of Southern segregation to the nation
increased proportionally.
Racial discrimination created more than just market
inefficiencies–it also generated political resistance. Witnesses
in the Senate hearings expressed regret over this political
unrest, but they did not necessarily identify with the plight of
discontented black activists. They were primarily concerned
with the economic consequences of black protests. Economic
boycotts by African American organizations and communities
certainly caught the attention of the Department of Commerce;
in its joint opening statement, the Department coldly declared,
“when the discriminatory practices employed by such
establishments lead to demonstrations and boycotts…the
economy of our nation suffers.”25 After giving the more general
22
23
24
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 1152
25
12
economic critique of racial segregation, one senator mentioned
the occasional development of economic boycotts. “When this
occurs,” he pointed out, “the effect on commerce takes on an
additional dimension.”26 But beyond direct boycotts, witnesses
believed that black activism caused general instability that
adversely affected local markets. One witness’s report simply
listed examples of local economies damaged by black
resistance. For example, “Retail sales in Birmingham were
reported off 80 percent or more during the protest riots in the
Spring of 1963…One local businessman said several retailers
had told him their books had shown a net loss for the first time
in a generation,” and “In the fall of 1962, businessmen in
Charlotte N.C, hit by drives for desegregation of public
accommodations, estimated their business was cut by 20 to 40
percent.”27 Moreover, the Department of Commerce linked the
inability to attract new industries to the South to the social
unrest seen in many Southern cities.28 For the economy to
function most efficiently, witnesses implied, political stability
was necessary. The combustion of African American protests
needed to be quelled, which a public accommodations bill
would allegedly accomplish. “For that reason,” the Under
Secretary of Commerce concluded, “I think that by and large
our businessmen, North and South, will welcome it.”29
After much debate, Civil Rights advocates in Congress
decided to argue against racial discrimination using Article 1,
Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution–
commonly know as the Commerce Clause. The Commerce
Clause permits the federal government to regulate interstate
trade, stating, “The Congress shall have power…to regulate
commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states,
and with the Indian tribe.” Above the objections of most Civil
Rights activists, Congressmen justified civil rights on these
26
27
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 699-700.
28
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 698; Civil Rights-- Public
Accommodations Part II, 1245
29
13
grounds, instead of invoking the fourteenth amendment.30
Precedent certainly existed for this wide interpretation of the
Commerce Clause; New Deal politicians similarly passed much
of their legislation using the government’s right to regulate
interstate commerce.31
A question thus arises: Did the proponents of Title II
decry the economic burdens of racial discrimination merely as
a matter of expedience? Were the economic arguments simply
necessities to satisfy the requirements of the Commerce
Clause?
Legal technicalities certainly influenced the nature of
the Senate hearings, but the evidence suggests that there was
much candor in the resounding advocacy on economic grounds.
Northern business interests echoed the claims of Northern
Congressmen. Under no constraints to argue within any legal
clauses, the Wall Street Journal commented, “Situations in
which there has been a feeling on the part of entrepreneurs and
businessmen that the opening up of their facilities on an equal
basis would hurt them in terms of dollars, the experience is to
the contrary. It helps them in terms of dollars. It helps the
whole community. It helps the whole Nation, and it helps the
individual business which may be involved.” Of businesses that
had already desegregated, the Journal stated, “A sizable
number, in fact, declare that business has been better than
ever.”32 A June 23, 1964 Journal article asserts that “new Civil
Rights legislation had become all but a necessity, and its aim
can be welcomed,”33 while another calls for “peace and
moderation…[with] businessmen…in the forefront.”34
Moreover, economic historians offer much support to
Congressmen’s contention that the Southern economy became
30
Whalen and Whalen, The Longest Debate, 46
31
For the text of the Commerce Clause as well as its application in the New Deal
era, see William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The
Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996)
32
Quoted in Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part I, 631
33
No author given, “Force by Default,” The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1964
34
No author given, “Period of Adjustment,” The Wall Street Journal, July 21,
1964.
14
increasingly interdependent with the rest of the nation.
According to economic historian Gavin Wright, the few
decades preceding the 1960s witnessed a breakthrough in
regional market integration: “There was a distinct transitional
phase between the war and the 1960s…Since then, economic
growth and immigration have been rapid in almost all parts of
the South, to the point that it is now virtually impossible to find
an essentially regional southern identity.”35 In fact, some
historians have viewed civil rights legislation as merely the
natural effect of market integration. Jack Kirby, for example,
declares, “Change merely seemed sudden during the 1950s and
1960s, when foundations, long before undermined,
collapsed.”36 While it is difficult to penetrate the personal
psyches of Title II’s supporters in Congress, their economic
claims aligned with expressions of national business interests
outside of Congress and corresponded with the real economic
conditions in the nation.
The Senate hearings reveal an additional indication that
claims of economic burdens did not merely veil moral
motivations. Many proponents of the bill proposed that the
federal mandate only apply to businesses of a certain size. The
Committee on Commerce’s statement refers to “numerous
references to the possibility of defining coverage of the act in
terms of dollar volume of sales.”37 Such suggestions riddle the
testimonies, with the Committee going so far as to provide
nineteen pages of tables providing the statistical breakdown of
public accommodations size for each Southern state.38 Notions
of such a ‘cutoff’ generally settled on an annual income of
$150,000. The popularity of this proposal is revealing. The
right to equal treatment in public accommodations was not
35
Gavin Wright. Old South New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy
Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988) 240.
For additional reference, see Bruce Schulman From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt (New
York: Oxford University Press. 1991)
36
Jack Temple Kirby, “Black and White in the Rural South, 1919-1954”
Agricultural History 58 (1984): 442
37
38
15
projected as a ‘human right’, a right that African Americans
deserved on the grounds of human equality. Instead, the notion
of only applying the law to businesses of significant import to
the national economy gained much currency in the hearings.
Some objections to the proposal did arise–but their nature is
similarly revealing. Arguments emphasized the economic
significance of all businesses, even those below the proposed
cutoff. The Pennsylvania Governor’s statement exemplified
this view: “We intentionally did not make the size of a business
the criterion for coverage, because we believe that
discrimination by many small establishments imposes a
cumulative burden on interstate commerce.”39 The
Commissioner of the Civil Rights Commission reiterated the
implication: “What is a small and relatively unimportant
enterprise in a large city often is a large and significant
business in a small community.”40 The opposition to the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 ultimately did not insist on this amendment,
and Congress did not include it in the final bill. Nonetheless,
the popular willingness of supporters to include the income
‘cutoff’, as well as the nature of objections to it, implies a
priority on economic concerns over the promotion of absolute
human rights for African Americans.
Private Property and Individual Liberty: Opposition to Title II
Opposition to the public accommodations bill in the

Senate hearings came predominately from Southern
representatives. Few Southerners defended Jim Crow
segregation; like their foes, opponents to the bill based their
case on economics. They resoundingly attacked Title II as an
infringement on private property rights. Invoking the bogey of
communism, the Southern opposition styled itself defender of
the liberal free market (just as proponents did). These
Southerners did not explicitly endorse racial hierarchy. In fact,
they went so far as to lament racial inequality in the South.
They expressed solidarity with the bill’s moral aims, but
39
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 1151 (emphasis added)
40
16
skepticism and principled objection to the use of federal
coercion to bring them about.
Time and time again, Southern spokespersons in the
hearings defended the right to private property ownership. This
right, they contended, precluded any external coercion of the
use of one’s property. Forcing businesses to accommodate
African Americans would create an undue imposition on
property rights. The Governor of Georgia, Carl Sanders,
summarized, “There exists no authority, constitutional or
otherwise, by which the National Government can dictate the
actions of the private property owner in determining the use or
disposition of his property.”41 Florida’s Governor, Farris
Bryant, framed the issue from a similar perspective: “The
debate in which we are now engaged is over the assertion of a
new right: the right of nonowners of property to appropriate it
from the owners.”42 Opponents portrayed the guarantee of civil
rights in public life as a treacherous betrayal of American
liberty, not as an extension of it. Indeed, individual liberty was
allegedly under attack: “the Federal Government…will be
transformed from that of a beloved and trusted guardian of
individual liberty into the image of a feared and loathsome
monster tyrant.”43 For all the talk of rights, the civil rights of
African Americans received little attention. Private property
was the essential human right, not equality of citizenship: “it is
a human right to own that property and to use that property in
the way the owner desires,” Bryant posited.44 Ostensibly, civil
rights in public accommodations could not be guaranteed
without violating this fundamental human right.
To reinforce their critique of public accommodations
desegregation as an invasion of property rights, opponents of
the bill attempted to associate Title II with communism. Red
Scare politics were alive and well in the halls of the Senate
hearing. More subtle witnesses used tact, connecting Title II’s
alleged limitations on the use of private property with other
41
42
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 928.
43
Attorney Beverly Lake, Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 931
44
17
potential socialistic policies. Governor Bryant of Florida
asserted that the same rationale given for Title II “would
sustain price control or rationing. The same argument would
sustain the equal ownership of property, which can only be
achieved through ownership of all property by the state in the
name of the people.”45 Others were not so subtle. Governor
Ross Barnett of Mississippi declared himself “thoroughly
convinced that this is a part of the world Communist
conspiracy.” Indeed, an attorney from Georgia agreed, “This
legislation would please Khrushchev and Castro.”46 The anti-
communist tactic allowed Title II’s opponents to further
posture as the spokesmen of ‘free enterprise’ and liberal
capitalist democracy. It dramatized their strategic position, not
as the defenders of racial hierarchy, but as the champions of
individual liberty.
Opponents of Title II did not openly object to racial
equality. In fact, they consistently stated or implied that racial
discrimination was immoral and that a change in Southern race
relations was desirable. For example, one Southern Senator
prefaced his otherwise scathing condemnation of a Northern
witness’s testimony, “As far as the moral pronouncements in
your statement, I am in hearty accord.”47 Similarly, Georgia’s
Governor commenced his objection by stating, “Every citizen-
whatever his origin, persuasion, characteristics, or place or
residence-is entitled to equality of opportunity, full access to,
and a voice in all programs and facilities supported to any
degree by public funds.”48 It was the method of the public
accommodations bill to which they expressed their objection.
The opposition’s testimony depicted federal intervention as
both ineffective and tyrannical. They repeatedly insisted that
while racial discrimination did exist in the South and was
indeed a problem, progress had to be made exclusively on a
local level. The Mayor of Atlanta, Ivan Allen, Jr., exemplified
this claim: “I feel confident that you will agree with me that
45
46
R. Carter Pittman, Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 893
47
Senator Mike Monroney, Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 774
48
18
this is as serious a basic problem in the North, East, and West
as it is in the South. It must be defined as an all-American
problem, which requires an all-American solution based on
local thought, local action, and local cooperation.”49 Allen, Jr.’s
testimony acknowledges a “problem” in race relations; it
simply rejects federal intervention as the remedy. Southern
witnesses’ ad nauseam insistence that progress was being made
voluntarily carried precisely the same implications. Governor
Sanders of Georgia provided one example:
My purpose is to let this committee know what has been done, what
is being done by men and women of good will who have worked
together to achieve voluntary solutions to our manifold problems in
the quiet, effective atmosphere of the council table where mutual
respect and a new and greater realization of the rights and feeling of
all our people are allowed to come to the fore…I know and feel that
the progress which we made in Georgia the last 5 years and are
making now should not be periled though a bill the effect of which
would be far worse than the conditions sought to be cured.50
Remarkable consistency ran through the opposition’s
testimonies: the problem of racial discrimination called for
change, but only voluntary local initiatives could
simultaneously be effective and uphold private property rights.
The historian finds little reason to take the Southern
opposition at its word. As evidenced by the ‘massive
resistance’ to the Civil Rights Movement during the early-
1960s, Southern politicians almost certainly overstated the
extent of achieved ‘progress’.51 Moreover, any progress made
had hardly been on voluntary terms. The Southern elite had
used ‘gradualism’ as a euphemism for stagnancy since Brown
v. Board of Education mandated school desegregation in 1954;
actual desegregation came only from additional court mandates
or the use of physical force, such as President Eisenhower’s
1957 deployment of the National Guard in Little Rock and
Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach’s physical removal of
Alabama Governor George Wallace from the doors of the
49
50
Civil Rights-- Public Accommodations Part II, 962, 966
51
For an explication of Southern political resistance to desegregation, see Francis
M. Wilhoit, The Politics of Massive Resistance (New York: George Braziller,
1973)
19
University of Alabama to allow African American students to
enter in 1963.52 These were hardly isolated incidents; conflicts
of the same nature occurred in the New Orleans public school
system, the University of Georgia, and the University of
Mississippi amongst others.53 Southern State legislatures also
actively fought to maintain Jim Crow. One historian describes
State legislatures at the time as “literally swamped with anti-
integration bills,” and notes that “by 1960 well over 200 pro-
segregation statutes, resolutions, and constitutional
amendments had been adopted by the counter-revolutionary
South.”54 The infamous Southern Manifesto–the document
opposing integration and rejecting any federal attempts to
enforce it–bore the signatures of nineteen senators and seventy-
seven representatives from the eleven southern states, leaving
little doubt as to federal Southern politicians complicity with
the resistance.55 A personal history is particularly illuminating.
Georgia Governor Carl Sanders–quoted at length above in
support of “the great progress…made in Georgia in the last five
years”–stated outside of Congress, “I am a segregationist…I
will not tolerate race-baiting or race-mixing.”56 Governor Farris
Bryant, similarly quoted above, declared his “firm belief in
segregation” and contempt for anyone “that stands for
moderate integration” in 1960.57 Unlike their Northern and
federal counterparts, historical context does not support the
veracity of the Southerners’ claims. There is little historical
reason to believe they would, and much evidence to show that
they in fact did not, support an end to segregation and rampant
racial discrimination in the South. Rather, it seems likely that
52
Juan Williams, Eyes On the Prize (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) 91, 194
53
Wilhoit, The Politics of Massive Resistance, ch. 7
54
ibid, 150
55
Dewey W. Grantham, Life and Death of the Solid South (Lexington, KY: The
University of Kentucky Press, 1988) 128; Wilhoit, The Politics of Massive
Resistance, 52.
56
Earl Black, “Southern Governors and Political Change: Campaign Stances on
Racial Segregation and Economic Development, 1950-69” The Journal of
Politics, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Aug., 1971) 711
57
Numan Bartley and Hugh D. Graham, Southern Politics and the Second
Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) 63
20
their ostensibly principled objection to federal coercion was a
smokescreen to fight for a continuation of Jim Crow race
relations in the South.
Conclusions
The Senate hearings on public accommodations challenge

the most prominent historiographic interpretations of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. The considerable economic considerations
behind the Congressional push for desegregation belie notions
that sheer idealism toppled Jim Crow segregation. On the other
hand, American politicians were not monolithically backwards
or simply cornered into passing civil rights legislation by
African American resistance. While the influence of African
American protests is evident in the hearings, Executive and
Northern representatives expressed an interest in outlawing
racial discrimination unrelated to simply quelling social unrest.
Social conflict alone did not compel support for Title II in the
Senate. The overwhelming rationale politicians provided for
supporting the bill was to rid the free market of irrational
fetters, and contextual evidence suggests that their testimonies
contained at least some candor.
Yet American politicians were divided. Only Northern
and Executive government representatives purported to
advocate national economic interests. Only they highlighted the
irrationality of racial discrimination in the national capitalist
market. By contrast, Southern politicians presented a solid bloc
against desegregation of public accommodations, and
evidenced little consideration for ‘perfecting’ the national
market.
It is the particular nature of this Southern objection that
most illuminates the political conflict over Title II. As depicted
by historian Eugene Genovese, the pre-capitalist Southern
ruling class espoused an ideology of natural racial hierarchy.58
Yet politically powerful Southerners in the public
accommodations hearings evidenced a complete break from
58
For ideas on racial ideology in the Slave South, see Eugene Genovese, Roll
Jordan Roll, (New York: Vintage Books, 1972)
21
this ideology. As historian Barbara Fields has described,
although racism carried over from the Slave South to the Jim
Crow South, this did not preclude the rise of capitalist social
relations in the region.59 The 1960s political struggle over civil
rights was no reproduction of the Civil War–it did not pit a
Northern capitalist political class against a Southern pre-
capitalist counterpart. Southern politicians represented a
capitalist region and endorsed the credo of liberal capitalism
throughout the hearings: they idolized private property and
praised the ideals of an uninhibited free market. Then why
might the Southern ruling class have objected to appeals to
perfect the national market? Despite their heart-warming
assurances, their objection to federal intervention was almost
certainly an objection to ending racial discrimination.
If the economic system of capitalism tends towards
efficiency, individual capitalists do not. Individual capitalists
tend towards maximizing profit. The extensive racial inequality
in the twentieth-century South served Southern capitalists in
many ways, such as assuring the availability of cheap labor and
largely undermining unionism.60 Abstract notions of market
efficiency were likely of little sway to Southern capitalists with
an eye on maintaining personal power and profits. By contrast,
Northern and federal proponents of capitalism could afford the
broader perspective; they held little immediate interest in Jim
Crow segregation, only in the region as a potential sector of the
national market. Politicians from both regions exalted the
social relations of capitalism, but it is little surprise that
Northerners and federal representatives called for a more
perfect market through the elimination of segregation while
Southerners passionately defended power relations that
contributed to their profits.
59
Barbara Jeanne Fields, “The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture,” in Thavolia
Glymph and John Kushma eds., Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy
(Arlington, TX: University of Texas Press, 1985) 73-94
60
For idea discussion of Jim Crow laws and labor relations in the South, see
Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights (Urbana: The
University of Illinois Press, 1993)
22
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed with Title II
included.61 Despite the particular interests of many of the
nation’s elite, the Federal government managed to regulate
American society in ways that aligned with increasing capitalist
efficiency. Besides the particular issue of discrimination in
public accommodations, the Senate hearings on Title II
evidence such state regulation in different ways. Executive
officials expressed concern for potential harm to the
international image–and consequent ‘moral capital’–of
American capitalism due to racial conflict; Southerners, their
eyes on maintaining segregation, ignored this danger and
obtusely argued that civil rights for African Americans would
actually breed communism. Similarly, as noted, federal and
Northern politicians expressed concern over the political
instability shaking the nation due to segregation; Southerners,
their eyes on maintaining segregation, suggested the
government ignore black protests for fear of appeasement and
encouragement of additional protest. The debate over public
accommodations illustrated a fundamental contradiction in
capitalist societies, one eloquently described by the sociologist
Immanuel Wallerstein: “The economics of capitalism
has…been governed by the rational intent to maximize
accumulation…But what was rational for all entrepreneurs as a
collective group was not necessarily rational for any given
entrepreneur.”62 In American society of the 1960s, passage of
Title II exemplified a successful resolution to this
contradiction. Ultimately, the use of state force intervened to
ensure the path “most rational for entrepreneurs as a collective
group.”
The 1964 Senate hearings regarding racial discrimination
in public accommodations indicate the diversity of social forces
that propelled the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The influence of
moral ideals, the Cold War, and political activism are all
evident in the transcripts. Yet, in addition to these elements,
witnesses flooded the hearings with calls to purify the national
capitalist market, and there is reason to believe it was not a
61
King and Quick, Legal Aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, 336-7.
62
Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983) 17-8
23
mere formality to satisfy the Commerce Clause. Historians
generally have not addressed this element as a social force
behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Federal and Northern
politicians overwhelmingly supported desegregation of public
accommodations, most commonly arguing that racial
discrimination imposed a burden on the natural flow of the
market economy. However, Southern politicians stood in
staunch opposition to the use of state force to eradicate this
‘burden’. They did express market ideals. But, dealing directly
with their own subjects and labor–as opposed to the detached
Federal and Northern politicians–Southerners showed no desire
to take such an abstract economic perspective. Acknowledging
the influence of economic interests does not belittle the
struggle of the countless Americans who put their lives on the
line in the fight for civil rights. Their cause was just, their
efforts were courageous–but they were merely one facet in a
broad whirlwind of historical change. The musings of Scottish
socialist William Morris speak to the frequent complexity of
historical change:
I pondered all these things,…how men fight and lose the battle, and
the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and
when it comes turns out not to what they meant, and other men have
to fight for what they meant under another name.63
Morris’s quote speaks to the complexity of historical
process, but also to the change that is frequently left to be
desired. A more suitable quote for the Public Accommodations
Bill would be difficult to find.
63
Quoted in Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1983) 110
24
Precedents, Protests and Politics: Changes in
the Prosecution of Rape in England, 1810-
1845
ESTER MURDUKHAYEVA
Remnants of the Past
O
n March 21, 1821, five men entered a pub in
Durham, England for several quarts of ale and a
steak supper.1 As the night progressed, the men
became boisterous – it was not long before a fight
broke out. Mr. Dinning, the owner of the pub, attempted to
settle the quarrel and sent his wife to ask the men to pay for
their meal. The argument continued to escalate until one of the
men spotted a young girl in the corner of the pub. If someone
would go with him to his mother’s house, the man said, he
could obtain the money to pay for the meal. The mistress of the
pub called for the girl, her nineteen-year old maid, and ordered
her to go collect the payment.
Ann McDonald, the maid, had been working for the
Dinnings for a little less than a year. At first, she refused to
leave alone with the stranger but her mistress threatened to take
the cost of the meal out of her wages. Ann had little choice but
to leave with the stranger. When she realized that she was
being led away from the houses towards a grass bank, she
screamed. The man raped Ann and walked her home, warning
her not to tell anyone what had happened.
The next morning, Ann told Mrs. Dinning about the
rape and, together with Ann’s father, they called for a doctor
and a magistrate. A constable was sent after the man, Charles
Dixon, who had attempted to flee. After some resistance, he
was apprehended and cried, “I know I have been in fault, but I
hope to get off with two years’ imprisonment.” When called to
1
The Times, August 27, 1821.
25
testify at his trial, the prisoner rose and stated simply, “My
Lord, I have nothing to say.”
As it turned out, his testimony would not be necessary.
Though Ann’s story was confirmed by a witness who had heard
her screams, though her complaint was filed almost
immediately, though the doctor who examined her testified that
there was evidence of violent sex, and though Dixon confessed
to the crime upon arrest, the jury acquitted because of a critical
mistake Ann made on the stand.
When testifying, Ann repeated “the gross expression
frequent in the mouths of sailors which [Charles] applied to
her,” a mistake that left a strongly negative impression on the
judge. By cursing, she obliterated what was most necessary to a
successful rape prosecution: the perception of an “honorable,”
“chaste” victim. The language singlehandedly erased the
massive evidence that was in Ann’s favor. Before the jury
retired, Justice Bayley reminded them of the following:
“This was a case which required careful and anxious
consideration. The feelings were naturally roused in such a
case, and it was therefore necessary to take care that [your]
feelings should not get the better of the cool judgment which
ought to be exercised. It was impossible that a greater injury
could be inflicted on a helpless woman than a crime of this sort
inflicted, and therefore the feelings must be strongly interested.
The evidence of the young woman [would have appeared
better] “if she had declined to repeat the coarse sailor terms.”
[This evidence] might be so broken in upon, that [I] might be
obliged to say that it was not safe to trust her testimony where
life was at hazard.”
When the jury returned with an acquittal, Justice Bayley

conceded, “it is likely that her evidence was quite true…but in
such a case…your verdict was the one to which you could
more safely come.”
In March 1822, less than one year after Charles
Dixon’s trial, another married man, Henry Anderson, stood
before a judge at the gaol in Durham to face sentencing for the
rape of Sarah Armstrong, a young girl from the fields of
Houghton-le-Spring. Anderson had left his wife due to drinking
problems and an addiction to gambling. It was rumored that
Sarah was not his first victim and that his brother and uncle
26
were both accused and convicted rapists. Anderson’s trial
concluded quite differently from Dixon’s. The judge solemnly
told the defendant, “the crime of which you have been
convicted is one of the deepest die, and of the most aggravated
nature, an offense of the strong against the weak, and only to be
repressed by the severest punishment the law can inflict.”
Henry began to convulse. “A young, innocent, and respectable
woman, has received at your hands the greatest outrage that
could be committed...The sentence of the law is, that you be
taken to the place from whence you came, and from thence, to
the place of execution, and there be hung by the neck till you
are dead.”2
When contrasted with Charles Dixon’s acquittal,
Henry’s conviction, a true rarity in early nineteenth century
England, demonstrates the essential conflict between theory
and practice in the prosecution of rape. The judge’s
denouncement of Henry’s crime – a crime “of the deepest die”
– represented what criminal law technically considered rape to
be. It was, in theory, a crime second only to murder in
depravity and reprehension. Yet in practice, a rape trial
centered on personalities, on the characters of victim and
perpetrator. For a woman to have a case, she would have to
convince a judge and jury that her sexual assault was a “real
rape.”
The legal understanding of rape dated to an
Elizabethan statute, which defined the crime as “the carnal
knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will.”3 The
definition relied on the question of consent, on whether the
sexual intercourse had really been against the woman’s will.
The concept of forcible sex was difficult for many
contemporaries to grasp – doctors frequently testified at trials
2
“Particulars of the life, trial, and execution of Henry Anderson, aged 33 : who
was executed at the drop, in front of the new gaol, at Durham, on Monday the
18th of March, 1822, for a rape, committed on the body of Sarah Armstrong,”
(Newcastle: Hoggett, 1822). Harvard Law School Library. Dying Speeches &
Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides.
3
William Hawkins, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown, Volume I (London:
1721), 108.
27
that rape of a healthy, adult woman was physically impossible.
Rape verdicts in trials of men like Henry Anderson’s and
Charles Dixon’s frequently hinged “on whether the court chose
to believe the victim or the accused.”4 In the Anderson case,
the victim was a young virgin; the accused, an alcoholic
gambler. In Dixon’s case, the victim “sullied” her reputation
and her case by cursing. The purported severity of rape as a
crime did not seem to matter – the victim and perpetrator’s
characters were key.
These are stories that live on in courtrooms throughout
America and Britain today. In 1984, a London police chief
wrote in his local newspaper that “all women who report rape
to the police are lying, mad, or having sexual fantasies.”5 A
2005 Home Office research report revealed that, despite
“decades of feminist lobbying and extensive law reform,” only
5.6% of all rape cases reported to the police ever end in a
conviction.6 “In no other crime is the victim subject to so much
scrutiny at trial, where the most likely defense is that the victim
consented to the crime,” the report stated. “Powerful
stereotypes function to limit the definition of what counts as
‘real rape.’” 7 The societal and institutional biases against
women who file rape complaints have become so notorious and
so ubiquitous that they are now designated as “the second
assault” by sociologists.8 Women born and raised over a
century after Ann McDonald continue to share in her
4
Carolyn A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 82.
5
Outwrite, May 1984, 4. Quoted in Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s
Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845 (London: Pandora Press, 1987),
131.
6
Joanna Bourke, Rape: Sex, Violence, History (London: Virago Press, 2007), vii.
7
Liz Kelly, Jo Lovett, and Linda Regan, “A Gap or a Chasm? Attrition in
Reported Rape Cases,” Home Office Research Study 293, February 2005, ix.
8
Joyce E. Williams and Karen A. Holmes, The Second Assault: Rape and Public
Attitudes (London: Greenwood Press, 1981). For a more recent study, see Patricia
Yancey Martin and R. Marlene Powell’s “Accounting for the ‘Second Assault:’
Legal Organizations’ Framing of Rape Victims,” Law and Social Inquiry, Vol.
19, No. 4 (Autumn 1994), which discusses the biases against rape victims
inherent in institutions from hospitals to courtrooms.
28
experience of shame and public humiliation. Many of the
“obstacles to the successful prosecution of rape at the present
time are almost precisely the same” as those in eighteenth and
nineteenth century England.9
Perhaps because of these evident similarities, much of
the literature emerging from feminist scholars in the 1970s and
1980s focused on the history of sexual violence and its
treatment by the criminal justice system. The goal was to
explain “how slow and partial change in legal conceptions and
treatment of [rape] had been” and to a great extent, continued
to be.10 Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 classic Against Our Will:
Men, Women, and Rape, perhaps the most influential of the
early feminist works on the subject, argued that “from
prehistoric times to the present…rape has played a critical
function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of
intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of
fear.”11
The academic response to Against Our Will, while
critical, was more measured than some popular responses,
which were vitriolic and personally directed at the author.
Acknowledging the weaknesses in the book, many scholars
nevertheless recognized its necessity, and called for other
historians to fill the gaps in Brownmiller’s efforts. “For a book
that claims to be a history of rape, hers is remarkably lacking in
developments,” wrote Edward Shorter in a review for Signs.
“For Brownmiller, the frequency of rape is a historical
constant… [Yet] I anticipate that her work will cause many
other scholars to put this…challenging subject on their
agendas.”12
9
Antony E. Simpson, “The ‘Blackmail Myth’ and the Prosecution of Rape and Its
Attempt in 18th Century London: The Creation a Legal Tradition,” The Journal of
Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Spring 1986), 102.
10
Martin Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in
Victorian England (West Nyack: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77.
11
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1975), 15.
12
Edward Shorter, “On Writing the History of Rape,” Signs, Vol. 3, No. 2
(Winter 1977), 476.
29
In 1987’s pioneering Women’s Silence, Men’s
Violence, Anna Clark presented a thorough and convincing
historicized version of Brownmiller’s thesis, drawing from
Michel Foucault’s contention that legal definitions of rape have
made sex a “public issue, [with] a whole web of discourses,
special knowledges, analyses and injuctions settled upon it
[and] sustained by networks of power.”13 Clark contended that
the discourses of the nineteenth century “structured the
definition of rape around oppositions of chastity and
unchastity, so that a rapist would only be punished if he
assaulted a chaste woman,” reflecting the values of a
patriarchal society where “chastity defines a woman’s value.”14
These definitions “magnified a thousand-fold individual men’s
power to terrify women through rape, for fear served to warn
women to behave according to restrictive middle-class
standards.”15
For Clark, true protest against rape must come from
feminist women. The calls for change, even if nominally about
rape, should really be targeted against the patriarchal structures
that reinforce aggression against women. The framework has
been “frowned upon as representing a kind of feminist
functionalism…in which all evils could be traced to patriarchal
structures.”16 Clark’s understanding of protest limits the
interpretation of both nineteenth century England, and of the
history of sexual violence in general. The protests Clark
envisions were avenues to which nineteenth century women did
not have access due to social conventions and contemporary
moralities. They could not publicly sustain or enforce the kind
of protest and reform that modern feminists (like Clark and her
peers) were able to. Even towards the end of the nineteenth
century, early feminist outrage was aimed at the Contagious
13
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, transl.
Robert Hurley, (London: Penguin, 1978), 34.
14
Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence, 7-9.
15
Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence, 128.
16
Bourke, Rape, 141.
30
Diseases Acts, and not necessarily at the administration of
criminal justice in rape cases.17
Though Clark successfully argues that patriarchal
structures dominated the treatment of rape cases in nineteenth
century England, she leaves little room for the currents of
protest that did exist underneath, and quite frequently, within
the organs of patriarchy. These currents are important not only
because they are surprising, but because they led and
contributed to significant and meaningful changes in the
prosecution of rapes.
The focus of this thesis will be the character, and
influence of, the various nineteenth century protests against the
treatment of rape by the criminal justice system. These protests
are complex and, in many ways, frustrating. They are not the
same as those of Brownmiller, Clark and their contemporaries.
In the early nineteenth century, any proposed legal or
procedural reforms would have necessarily come from men,
from men working in government, in the judiciary, in the
printing presses, and even from those ordinary fathers and
husbands that made up the electorate. Correspondingly, these
calls for change could in the same breath be a sympathetic plea
to reduce the plight and humiliation of rape victims and a
reassertion of the same discourses about chastity and proper
behavior that made successful prosecution of the crime so
challenging. Unsatisfying in many ways, these protests are
nevertheless critical to understanding how and why the
treatment of rape cases began to change and why those changes
were so important.
The first section of this thesis, “Precedents,” will
describe the treatment of rape cases by the English criminal
justice system in the eighteenth century. For eighteenth century
17
The Contagious Diseases Acts, passes in 1864, 1867 and 1869 allowed for
women who were suspected prostitutes to be detained and subject to a medical
examination for venereal diseases. Women who were found to be infected could
be quarantined in hospitals for months. The Acts were controversial because there
were no provisions about male clients of prostitutes. For more, see: Judith R.
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
31
rape victims, the path to a prosecution was obstructed at every
turn by effectively insurmountable obstacles. All cases brought
to the court systems attracted massive attention – the sexual
nature of rape magnified that attention even more. Since most
cases of violence and abuse were handled privately between the
victim and the perpetrator (and often their families), women
who brought forth criminal rape charges were rewarded with
mockery, hostility and humiliation. 18 Judges, and as the
century came to a close, defense counsels, interrogated the
victims for hours about their sexual histories, the assault, and
other invasive and embarrassing topics. Even the slightest
inconsistency in a victim’s story led to an acquittal. The
precedents of these injustices were influential in shaping the
growing change of opinion and tone in the nineteenth century.
The next section of this thesis, “Protests,” draws upon
primary sources to discuss the emergence and character of the
responses to rape prosecutions in the early nineteenth century.
I choose to focus on the calls for change in the patterns of rape
prosecution that came from men in positions of power within
patriarchal structures. There are two main bodies of protest that
I will draw from – legislative and judicial. Studying the
protests and motivations of the actors within these bodies
provides an opportunity to understand how complex the line
between self-interest and advocacy can be.
Legislative changes in the treatment of rape were
largely a part of the massive body of criminal justice reforms
spearheaded by Robert Peel, the Home Secretary for almost a
decade in the 1820s. These changes exemplify the different
motivations behind nineteenth century protests against
prosecution patterns in rape cases. While beneficial to rape
victims, the reforms were frequently a reflection of Peel’s
frustration with the inefficiencies of the criminal justice
system, rather than protests on behalf of rape victims. In one
typical speech, Peel fervently denounced the lack of public
18
J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England: 1660-1800 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986), 124. In many instances, the bias against female
complainants was so strong, that a victim’s father or husband would file charges
on her behalf.
32
funding for rape prosecutions. On the surface sympathetic, the
outcry was targeted against a defense bar Peel felt wielded too
much power. Nevertheless, a significant body of protest
eventually emerged as a collateral effect of the discussions
surrounding criminal justice legislation.
Judicial protests were similarly nuanced. Many judges
continued in the eighteenth century tradition of unyielding
rulings and suspicious questioning of victims motives and
respectability. Others began to alter precedents, however
slowly. The landmark 1811 Hodgson ruling represented a
remarkable change in the tenor of judges towards rape victims
– Judge Baron Wood ruled that the questioning of a victim’s
specific sexual history would not be admissible as evidence.
Though this ruling was partial (the defense counsel was still
allowed to present evidence that the victim “bore a notorious
bad character for want of chastity or common decency”) and
frequently circumvented, it set an important legal precedent
that would be used in rulings throughout the century.19 These
rulings, both individually and collectively, made pursuing a
rape prosecution more attainable for a victim.
The third section, “Politics,” will focus on the 1841
Punishment of Death bill as a turning point in the changing
discourses and opinions about rape. For many who have written
about the history of English criminal law, the 1841 Punishment
of Death bill – which eliminated rape (along with
embezzlement and forgery of stamps) as a death penalty crime
– has generally been considered yet another step in the gradual
elimination of the famed “Bloody Code,” England’s famed
mishmash of criminal law statutes which made hundreds of
offenses punishable by the death penalty.20 However, the
contentious Parliamentary debates over the bill and the narrow
margin by which it passed suggest that the rape clause was of
particular significance.
19
Northern Star, August 27, 1821.
20
For more on the Bloody Code see: V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree:
Execution and the English People, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). For
more about the 1841 Punishment of Death Bill as part of the repudiation of the
Bloody Code, see Chapter Three of this thesis.
33
The death penalty was an extreme punishment and
juries frequently and admittedly looked for any reason to avoid
conviction in order to avoid being responsible for the execution
of a man. This Punishment of Death bill failed in the House of
Commons the year before finally reaching the Lords in June
1841. There, it met with staunch resistance from peers who
were adamantly opposed to the rape clause of the bill. The Earl
of Mountcashell protested that the clause broke down “all those
barriers which had hitherto remained sacred as a protection to
defenseless women.”21 The Marquess of Westmeath “remarked
that the law [would throw] all the hardship on the woman in
cases of violation.”22 Though the bill eventually passed the
Lords, it did so by a very slim margin (64 votes to 60) and only
after several days of contentious debate.
Due to a relatively delayed expansion of franchise,
there was a long English tradition of community interaction
with the state via these methods that differed from participation
through voting. I am drawing examples of protest and change
from four main categories of sources. The first, and most
numerous, are newspapers and periodicals. The articles within
these journals include open letters to the editor and to
legislators, trial transcripts, editorial commentaries and many
other examples of community opinions and involvement in the
criminal justice system. My sample of papers includes main
national publications such as The Times and the Daily News, as
well as local dailies including the Birmingham Daily Post,
Manchester Times and the Liverpool Mercury.
The second category of sources is legal records. The
Old Bailey Sessions Papers (also known as the Proceedings of
the Central Criminal Court, available online) are the records of
all criminal trials held at the Old Bailey in London. For my
discussion of eighteenth century precedents, these records are
extremely enlightening. They include direct transcriptions of
testimony and evidence and help to shed light on how rape was
21
House of Lords Debate, “Punishment of Death,” June 14, 1841,
Hansard, vol 58, cc 486-93.
22
House of Lords Debate, “Punishment of Death,” June 14, 1841,
Hansard, vol 58, cc 486-93.
34
prosecuted and victims were treated. In the nineteenth century,
these records become no more than a pithy listing of names,
crimes and trial results. There are no narratives or biographies
of either criminal or victim. From this point forward, they
become useful mostly for statistical analysis. A much more
important collection of legal records of the early nineteenth
century are the English Reports and the Crown Cases volumes
assembled by William Oldnall Russell and Edward Ryan.
These two collections of legal opinions cover the most
important cases in English common law.
The third category of sources is government records,
the largest collections of which are the Hansard volumes of
Parliamentary debates. The debates are colored with surprising
statements that support the contention that legislators actively
and frequently engaged in attempts to better understand rape as
a crime throughout this time period. The House of Lords debate
on the Punishment of Death bill, from which I have already
quoted, is a critical example of this.
The fourth and smallest category of documents is
literary sources, notably Harvard Law School’s Crime
Broadsides Collection, the Newgate Calendar and several
ballads and melodramas. Despite the extent to which they are
fictive exaggerations of the truth, these sources are useful in
further illuminating community responses to rape as a crime in
general and to specific cases.
With the examination of these protests, I argue that
contemporaries saw massive problems with the patterns of rape
prosecutions and the treatment of rape victims; often, these
problems were the same ones studied by feminist scholars over
a century later. The contemporary protests were not expressed
in feminist terms and most of the time, not expressed in order
to accomplish the feminist goals of challenging the patriarchal
structures of power. Some of the calls for change were born out
of sympathy, others out of practicality, and others out of
political maneuvering. Nevertheless, these forms of protest
contributed to significant, and in many instances, remarkable,
changes that allowed more rape victims to come forward and
seek justice against their attackers. The experience continued
35
(and continues) to be difficult and unjust for many, but in the
nineteenth century, it started to become a little less impossible.
Chapter One: Precedents
The eighteenth century English criminal justice system

was overwhelmingly a system of private prosecution.23 If a
rape victim wanted to take a case through to trial, she was
responsible for filing the complaint, gathering evidence and
witnesses, and presenting her case in court. This presented two
major obstacles for rape victims, especially those from the
lower classes. Firstly, the private accusation system assumed at
least a basic knowledge of laws and of criminal justice
procedure. Secondly, building a case, especially a rape case,
required an exhaustive amount of time, energy, and financial
resources, all of which were in limited supply for working class
women.
It is impossible to know exactly how many cases of
rape went unreported. John Beattie found that in Surrey, there
were only forty-two rape trials in the years between 1660 and
1800. Of those, only five resulted in convictions. 24 Of those
five, three eventually received pardons. 25 The conviction rate
for cases that ever reached the courts was remarkably low,
especially in comparison to property crimes, which had
23
Laurie Edelstein, “An Accusation Easily to be Made? Rape and Malicious
Prosecution in Eighteenth-Century England,” The American Journal of Legal
History, Vol. 42, No. 4 (October 1998), 353.
24
Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 131.
25
Though it is impossible to know with certainty, it is likely that the high rate of
high profile pardons for men convicted of rapes served as yet another deterrent
for women considering seeking a rape prosecution. The 1730 trial of Francis
Charteris for the rape of his servant, Anne Bond, was particularly notorious.
Charteris’s defense was extremely weak and he was known in London as a
libertine who frequently abused women in his service. The press dubbed him the
“Rape-Master General of Great Britain.” A jury convicted Charteris of the rape,
but several months later, he was granted a Royal Pardon. For details about this
case, see Antony E. Simpson, “Popular Perceptions of Rape as a Capital Crime in
Eighteenth-Century England: The Press and the Trial of Francis Charteris in the
Old Bailey, February 1730,” Law and History Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring
2004).
36
conviction rates were over 50%. Beattie and others who have
examined the data from this time period have speculated that
the majority of rape cases were never brought to the authorities.
Due to these inherent difficulties, any rape allegations
that were made were immediately placed under grave
suspicion. It was widely known that successfully prosecuting a
rape was a monumentally difficult task that many, if not most,
would not want to even pursue – the motives of any woman
who came forward were immediately questioned. The most
important impediment to rape prosecutions during this time
period was the fear of malicious prosecutions, a fear expressed
in Matthew Hale’s infamous cautionary warning that rape “is
an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and
harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so
innocent.”26 The legal precedents of this time were very much
wedded to this statement, a belief retreaded and repurposed by
laymen and jurists alike.
As Laurie Edelstein has explained, Hale’s original
statement – which has been quoted ad nauseam in all histories
of rape – could not be explained away entirely by misogyny or
a lack of belief in rape as a ‘real crime.’ On the contrary,
Edelstein finds that Hale considered rape to be a “heinous and
detestable offense that unquestionably deserved the capital
sanction.” It was precisely the seriousness of the crime that led
to his caution – “he was afraid that judges and juries…would
be too quick to condemn the accused once charges were laid.”27
Though Hale’s original concern may have been a noble defense
of the presumption of innocence, the legacy of his statement
was much more deleterious for rape victims.
26
Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae. The History of the Pleas of the
Crown. Edited by Sollom Emlyn in 2 vols (London, 1736.) Reprint. Classical
English Law Texts. (London: Professional Books, Ltd., 1971), 635-6. Hale was
an extremely influential seventeenth century judge, historian and legal scholar.
His opinions and treatises were cited frequently in judicial decisions and are
foundational in the development of common law. For more, see: John Hostettler,
The Red Gown: The Life and Works of Sir Matthew Hale (Chichester: Barry
Rose, 2002).
27
Edelstein, “An Accusation Easily to be Made,” 356.
37
Hale’s warning resulted in a widespread distrust of
women who brought forth rape allegations. A woman who
brought a rape claim to trial was subject to the humiliating
experience of recounting the trauma in lurid detail in front of
an open courtroom filled with men from her community
(women were forbidden from witnessing trials). The Old
Bailey court in London, for example, was a highly public
courtroom. Not only was it filled with spectators, but
transcripts of the trials were sold as pamphlets. Imposing,
“bewigged” defense attorneys and judges asked question after
probing question, seeking inconsistencies in the victim’s
story.28 As seen in the following exchange between Elizabeth
Harris, a nineteen year old daughter of an innkeeper, and a
defense attorney, this experience was unquestionably difficult
and painfully embarrassing:
Q. You must tell what he did to you.
Harris. I do tell you, he forced me quite entirely, to the ruin of my
body.
Q. Did he lie with you?
Harris. Yes.
Q. You say you was so exhausted that you could not hold up
your hands, was you sensible of what he did?
Harris. Yes, as sensible as possible I could be.
Q. Did you feel his private parts?
Harris. I did.
Q. Upon this occasion delicacy must be laid aside, because a
man's life is at stake, and I hope you consider what you are
about, that you are upon your oath.
Harris. I wont speak a word more than is true.
Q. You did feel his private parts?
Harris. Yes, very sharp.
Q. Do you mean by sharp pain?
Harris. Yes, very much.
Q. What did you feel in consequence of that - how long did
you find it so?
Harris. As much as a quarter of an hour.
Q. That is private parts were in your's?
Harris. Yes.
Q. You are sure you tell me the truth?
Harris. Every word.
28
38
After questioning Harris for two days and finding no
inconsistencies in her story, the defense counsel called the
accused man’s maid to provide positive character testimony.
The trial ended in an acquittal. 29
The growing strength of the defense bar made bringing
a rape accusation to court quite difficult. The late eighteenth
century established a precedent (codified in the 1836 Prisoner’s
Counsel Act) that the accused had a right to professional
counsel. Like Hale’s statements, this move to protect the
presumption of innocence had the collateral effect of
stigmatizing rape victims. Early defense counsels were quite
aggressive and could skillfully sway juries. They were familiar
with the law and had professional training in cross-examination
and the presentation of a case. After 1836, they were allowed to
directly address the jury. Rape victims, on the other hand, were
responsible for collecting their own evidence and presenting
their cases. Towards the beginning of the nineteenth century,
victims, especially married women, began to seek the help of
their own lawyers; however, this was an advantage available
mostly to women from wealthy families.30
In addition to the horrifying experience of reliving the
rape in detail, victims were also subject to a litany of
accusations about their sexual histories. In 1791, Lord Kenyon,
a judge presiding over a rape case, stated that “it was expected
that the person who complained of this offense should produce
an untainted and an unsullied character.” In this case, the
victim had prior consensual sex with the accused. The trial
ended in acquittal.31 In 1805, a rape trial ended in acquittal
because the defense counsel called a witness who testified that
the victim confessed that “she had read books of a very vicious
and profligate tendency.”32 In 1829, a rape accusation was
dismissed in Chelmsford when the victim admitted she had
29
Old Bailey Sessions Papers, February 18, 1775, #175.
30
For discussion about the rise and importance of defense counsel in eighteenth
and nineteenth century criminal trials, see Allyson May, The Bar & the Old
Bailey (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
31
The Times, November 2, 1791.
32
The Times, September 19, 1805.
39
been drinking in a public house on the night of her attack. The
judge declared that “it was doubtful whether the woman had
consented, but there appeared to have been no force beyond
disgracefully taking advantage of the drunken condition of the
girl.”33
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Old
Bailey, the central criminal court for London and Middlesex,
held only 65 trials for rape. Of these 65 trials, merely 9 resulted
in a conviction.34 In her study of Kent, Carolyn Conley found
that only 21 percent of rape accusations reached a trial.35 A fear
of malicious prosecutions, among other suspicions about
women, continued to cripple efforts to successfully convict
rapists. As Conley concluded, “judges and jurors frequently
concluded that no man should lose his respectability, let alone
his freedom for [a] mere seduction.”36
These were among the many obstacles rape victims
faced. Successful convictions for rape happened almost
universally under one of two sets of circumstances – “an
encounter between strangers, in which the alleged victim was a
highly respectable woman, usually of a higher social class…or
else violation of a child, which usually only came to light if the
victim showed symptoms of venereal disease.”37 A popular
defense strategy used by men accused of raping adult women
was the medical expert, who was paid to testify that “a healthy
adult woman could not be raped.”38 The eighteenth century
33
The Times, December 12, 1829.
34
Unless noted otherwise, all data from Old Bailey records was compiled by the
author using the records of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers/Proceedings of the
Central Criminal Court. For an interesting discussion about the importance of the
Sessions Papers in contemporary English society, see: Simon Devereaux, “The
City and the Sessions Paper: ‘Public Justice’ in London, 1770-1800,” The Journal
of British Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4 (October 1996). Devereaux argues that the
OBSP “became firmly embedded, not only within the administrative pressures of
a severe penal code…but also in the ideological concerns that underpinned that
system,” 469.
35
Conley, Unwritten Law, 82.
36
Conley, Unwritten Law, 95.
37
Wiener, Men of blood, 84.
38
40
reliance on this kind of testimony resulted in yet another round
of intense questioning – a rape victim, in addition to proving
her chastity, the occurrence of the assault and the emission of
semen, had to prove that she adequately resisted the attack. The
following cross-examination of fifteen year old Sarah Sharpe is
exemplary:
Q. Did you cry out?

Sharpe. He put his hand on my mouth.
Q. You did not cry out much till he hurt you on the bed?
Sharpe. Not till his private parts hurt me.
Q. Did you cry out or not before you was on the bed?
Sharpe. Yes, a little; but not so much.
Q. Was his hand on your mouth or breast before he went into
the bed-room.
Sharpe. On my breast.
Q. Did not you think he would hurt you before he went into
the bed-room?
Sharpe. He said he would stab me; he bade me not cry out. On the
bed he throttled me; he pinched me on my throat that I
could hardly swallow a bit of meat.
Q. So you have not been able to swallow since the second of
March? what was the price you and your mother insisted on
to make you satisfaction?
Sharpe. I do not know any thing about it; I never asked any thing.
Q. You say you sat in the outward room in your shift?
Sharpe. Yes.
Q. Why did you not put on your cloaths?
Sharpe. They were in the next room on the bed; I was afraid to go
for my cloaths; I was afraid to go near the bed.
Q. You was in the other room, why did you not call out for
assistance?
Sharpe. I was afraid of my life; he had the key of the door; he
39
locked the fore room door.
These stories, among many others, are consummate

demonstrations of the known characterizations of the
eighteenth and nineteenth century English criminal justice
system as unsympathetic, and even cruel towards rape victims.
Yet at the same time, in the midst of an undeniably patriarchal
society, against the background of unquestionably biased and
39
Old Bailey Sessions Papers, April 10, 1771, #273, 274.
41
unfair procedural standards, there were signs of dissent, of
“heightened contention and major change in this realm,” of
protest against the status quo.40 On the morning of May 27,
1817, the body of Mary Ashford was pulled from a pond in
Langley Heath, a “purely agricultural region…in spite of its
proximity to Birmingham.”41 Her story would raise a
community in uproar. Though it would not lead to the kind of
legislative or judicial changes that will be discussed later, Mary
Ashford’s case demonstrated the capacity of nineteenth century
England to discuss rape with an eye towards justice for the
victim.
When the police pulled Mary’s body from the water,
they immediately noticed bruising which indicated that she had
been raped before her murder. Fresh blood was found close to
the edge of the water. Footprints were also found, which
seemed to show two people walking and then running,
suggesting some sort of struggle. Since numerous witnesses
had seen him leave a public house dance with Ashford the
previous evening, Abraham Thornton was almost immediately
arrested and charged with her rape and murder.
The trial was held in August with the Times reporting
that “public curiosity to hear this trial [was so great] that the
street in front of the County-hall was crowded before 7 o’clock.
When the gates were opened at 8, the rush was tremendous.”42
Thornton argued that he had consensual sex with Ashford, but
did not murder her. Without any conclusive evidence
connecting him to the crime, Thornton was found not guilty
and was released.
The case of Mary Ashford captivated the public. “That
[Thornton] was guilty and owed his acquittal…to a lucky
chance was an opinion which was not confined to ignorant
sight-seers.”43 The public was eager to punish Thornton for a
crime they were positive he committed. Though the alleged
40
41
Trial of Abraham Thornton, ed. Sir John Hall (Edinburgh and London: William
Hodge & Co, 1926), 1.
42
43
Trial of Abraham Thornton, 45.
42
crime occurred in a small rural village outside Birmingham,
Abraham Thornton’s trial received major national press,
notably thorough coverage in the Times. Public outrage over
the defendant’s eventual acquittal sparked a charged pamphlet
discussion, a virtual canon of local ballads, and no fewer than
three melodramas.
Though in reality, Ashford and Thornton came from
the same class (she was a servant, he was a bricklayer), the two
came to be represented as vastly different in the trial and in
public opinion. In his opening statement, chief prosecutor
Nathaniel Gooding Clarke introduces “the deceased” as “the
daughter of poor parents – of poor but very honest parents.”44
According to all accounts, Ashford was a girl in a “humble
sphere of life, [whose] father was a gardener… [who]
lived…with her uncle…a small yeoman farmer.”45 Thornton,
on the other hand, was immediately described as “the son of a
prosperous builder at Castle Bromwich,”46 and a “well-made
young man.”47 The prosecution almost immediately connected
the defendant with the negative aspects of the libertine myth,
telling the jury that upon seeing Ashford, Thornton exclaimed
“I have been connected with her sister, and I will with her, or
I’ll die by it.”48
The antagonisms became clearer in the post-acquittal
outrage from the public. “Locally, Thornton’s guilt was
assumed from the moment of his arrest…and few people were
disposed to alter their original opinion. That witnesses had been
bribed and that the verdict had been obtained on perjured
evidence was an almost universal conviction in the Sutton
Coldfield district.”49 Thomas Dales, the constable responsible
for questioning and arresting Thornton, was thrown under
44
45
46
47
“Abraham Thornton: Acquitted on a Charge of murdering a girl, and on being
rearrested claimed Trial by Battle, April, 1818,” Complete Newgate Calendar, ed.
J.L. Rayhert and G.T. Crook (London: Navarre Society, 1926) Volume V, 168.
48
Trial of Abraham Thornton, 66-67.
49
43
heavy suspicion. It was rumored that the prosecution was eager
to present evidence from Omar Hall, Thornton’s cellmate, who
wished to testify that “Thornton… had assured him that he did
not fear the results [of the trial] because Dales…had been paid
by [Thornton’s] father to suppress the only piece of evidence
which could convict him.”50 William Bedford, the attorney for
the Ashford family, wrote to Lord Sidmouth asking for Dales
to be “dismissed from the police office with great disgrace.”51
Press coverage also demonstrated an urge to retry Thornton,
with the Times reporting that the case was about to be taken up
again, and that “the oppressive cloud on the unappeased sense
of public justice”52 would be lifted. Corruption from the
“libertine” defendant was immediately assumed. Though he
was by no means a landed aristocrat, he was believed to have
the villainous characteristics associated with that class, and was
met with the brunt force of resentment towards those
characteristics.
Almost immediately after Thornton’s trial, it became a
central theme in various popular pamphlets and plays
circulating throughout England. London sensationalist John
Fairburn published an unambiguously titled pamphlet Horrible
Rape and Murder!! The Affecting case of Mary Ashford, A
beautiful young Virgin, Who was diabolically Ravished,
Murdered, and thrown into a Pit, as she was returning from a
Dance; Including the Trial of Abraham Thornton for the
Willful Murder of the Said, which used language of chivalry
and female honor to lament the crime. George Ludlam’s
provincial Birmingham play The Mysterious Murder, Or,
What’s o’ Clock, focused on the class elements of the story,
placing “the whole play in the context of hard times for the
poor.”53 Ludlam’s play reflects the “complex structure of local
rural, economic, theatrical and print cultures” and its
circulation “at fairs and halls of a popular character”54 rather
50
51
52
The Times, August 25th, 1817.
53
Clark, “Rape or Seduction,” 13.
54
44
than at the theatre, reflects its relevance to the working-class
opinions on the case.
There were several circumstances that made the
response to Thornton’s acquittal so different from the many
other acquittals men received for rapes. Perhaps most
importantly, Mary Ashford was dead. She could not be
humiliated on the stand, cross-examined about her sexual
history and the details of her assault. The community, both
local and national, knew her only as the daughter of a well-
liked family in a small agricultural town. Rather than publicly
bully a scared young girl, Thornton and his defense counsel
were forced to respond to a community appalled by the crime
he was accused of, armed with a mass of class hostility. To the
community, the acquittal was problematic because it seemed so
unfair.
In the end, the uproar surrounding the Thornton trial
did not result in legislative or judicial changes in the way rape
was prosecuted. It was, after all, a murder trial, not a rape trial.
Nevertheless, the Ashford story is important to the story of
these protests. The discussions surrounding and emerging from
the case represented a community whose sense of “public
justice” – the “means by which justice is represented and seen
to be done” – had been perverted.55 The response from the
popular press, from religious figures, from playwrights and
community members, was a protest not only about Mary
Ashford, but about the injustice that was the actual prosecution
of the case. Real progress was yet to come, but the dialogue
concerning rape was already active.
Protests
In June 1822, James Mackintosh’s parliamentary

committee on criminal law reform delivered a report to Robert
Peel, the newly appointed Home Secretary. The report was a
result of three years of research into the mindboggling tangle of
statutes, legislation and common law precedent that constituted
English criminal law. There was little order to the madness –
55
Devereaux, “The City and the Sessions Papers,” 468.
45
“the system looked in theory exceptionally severe, but in
practice its cruelty was tempered by its incoherence.”56 There
were about two hundred crimes that technically merited the
death penalty – some crimes that, in practice, had not been
punished by an actual execution in decades.57 At the same time,
the report noted that there were more executions per capita in
England and Wales than anywhere else in the world. English
criminal law, according to Mackintosh and his colleagues, was
both barbaric and illogical.58
The campaign to restructure this body of law had been
active since the beginning of the century, but this was the first
official attempt to propose suggestions. After receiving the
report, Peel informed Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, that
“he intended to tackle the reform of the criminal law.”59 For the
next several years, Peel worked obsessively to promote his
vision of a criminal justice system – centralized, state-
controlled and clearly defined. Historian V.A.C. Gatrell has
excoriated Peel for focusing less on “repudiating the barbarism
of past times” and more on “restoring the law’s credibility
against public attack, and…making it more efficient, even more
punitive.”60 These doubts about Peel’s vision emerged even
during own his time.
A segment of both Parliament and the public believed
in the importance of community policing and crime prevention
– they saw Peel’s plans as seeking to undermine individual
liberties and increase his own power. He was, more often than
not, successful despite resistance. Yet the push against his
proposed reforms often frustrated Peel. In a speech delivered
before the House of Commons on March 9, 1826, Peel
explained the need to consolidate criminal law, reiterating that
“the law, of which all men are supposed to have cognizance
56
Douglas Hurd, Robert Peel, (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2007), 73.
57
Hurd, Robert Peel, 72.
58
House of Commons Debate, “Criminal Laws,” June 4, 1822. Hansard, vol. 7,
cc790-805.
59
60
V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994), 568.
46
[and] which all are bound under heavy penalties to obey,
should be as precise and intelligible as it can be made.”61
One of Peel’s most controversial reforms was the push
to increase state control over the administration of criminal
justice – in effect, demolishing the system of private
prosecutions which had dominated English legal tradition. Peel
saw crime as an act of disobedience against the state. In his
opinion, a burglary on a street corner was as much of a
transgression as a massive protest or uprising. As a
consequence, he believed that the state should have the
authority to prosecute and punish all crime, not just acts of riot
and high treason. It was the responsibility of the state to defend
its interests; for Peel, the interests of individual safety were the
interests of the state.
Peel legitimized his call for reform by calling attention
to the inefficiencies and the injustices of the system as it stood.
“By withholding the authority altogether,” Peel argued “you
frequently close the avenues of justice in instances in which the
poorest classes are the sufferers.”62 Among these sufferers, Peel
argued, were rape victims, especially those from impoverished
backgrounds. Indigent victims who could not afford private
attorneys were frequently subject to cruel and humiliating
interrogation by experienced and talented defense attorneys, a
practice Peel found to be abhorrent. For many victims, Peel
argued, the varied costs of private prosecution were prohibitive
and in contradiction to the purported aims of justice.
What distinction in point of moral guilt, nay, in many cases,
what distinction in point of injury to the sufferer, is there
between actual rape and the attempt to commit a rape? The law
calls the latter offense a misdemeanor, it expects that the party
aggrieved…shall overcome all the natural feelings of delicacy
and shame, and shall appear in a public court to prove the
disgusting details of the injury she has received; it requires the
sacrifice of time…and after all, inflicts on the injured party the
heavy penalty of paying the whole expenses of the suit…can
we expect that private individuals will take upon themselves
61
House of Commons Debate, “Consolidation of the Criminal Laws,” March 9,
1826. Hansard, vol. 14, cc 214-44.
62
1826. Hansard, vol. 14, cc 214-44.
47
the invidious duty of lodging the complaint, the painful task of
arranging the proofs, and finally the whole costs of
prosecution, and all this out of a pure abstract love of justice
and tender care for the public interests?63
Fundamentally, Peel believed that crime was above all

a public wrong, not a private injury. For him, rape was not a
crime of property, as precedent suggested. By attacking a
woman, the rapist did not take the property of her father or her
husband. Instead, he violated the laws of a state, and it was the
state’s responsibility to decide what his crime was, to prosecute
it, and to execute his punishment. This is still quite a distance
from the modern feminist understanding rape as a violent
attack against a woman’s body and will. Labeling Peel’s
broader efforts to seize state control over criminal law a protest
against rape would be tenuous at best. His protest was against
what he considered to be an inadequate system of private
prosecution that left too much discretion in the hands of the
judiciary and defense counsel.
Nevertheless, Peel’s growing focus on public funding
of prosecutors meant that wealth, or lack thereof, became less
of an obstacle for women seeking to bring rape charges. In the
eighteenth century, except in the most egregious cases such as
the trial of Francis Charteris, allegations of rape from female
servants against their masters were doomed to failure. Few
were recorded, although it is almost certain that many
occurred.64 As the nineteenth century progressed, not only were
more allegations made, but more cases proceeded past
magistrates into courtrooms.65 The idea that a master could
rape a servant, laughable in an eighteenth century mindset that
saw rape as a property crime, was beginning to be understood
as an act of violence. By introducing rape as a crime worthy of
consideration within the larger framework of massive criminal
63
1826, Hansard, vol. 14, cc 214-44.
64
Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence, 104-9.
65
For the most complete discussion of violence against working women, see:
Shani D’Cruze, Crimes of outrage: sex, violence and Victorian working women,
(London: UCL Press, 1998), 88-95.
48
law reform, Peel opened the door for more explicit public
discourse about the injustices inherent in the prosecution of
rapes.
In August 1826, The Republican, a small radical
publication, published an open letter to Home Secretary Peel
from a gentleman who called himself ‘RH.’ The letter was
entitled “On the Defects of our Criminal Code, in respect to the
Crime of Rape, or forcible Violation.” It was a sophisticated
and complex interpretation of the failure of criminal justice to
prosecute and prevent rapes. The letter was also a poignant plea
for reform and provided critical insights into the kind of
debates that would propel reform throughout the next decade.
Despite claiming to possess little professional legal
knowledge, RH expressed an acute understanding of the way
rape victims were treated and the crime was prosecuted. He
immediately drew attention to the dramatically low conviction
rates for rape. “I may venture to affirm that not more than one
out of every twenty cases that are taken before a jury obtains a
verdict for the capital offense.”66 RH fixated on the irony that
while rape was technically considered an abhorrent
transgression, offenders continued to assault women with
impunity.
RH laid out three major reasons why the prosecution of
rape was so difficult. First and foremost, the death penalty was
an impediment to conviction, not because the crime did not
warrant it, but because “many persons will rather remain quiet
sufferers, than attempt to swear away the life of a fellow-
creature…and juries will reject almost positive evidence rather
than give a verdict when the consequences are so terrible.”67
Secondly, the required proof of emission was in many instances
impossible to provide and an unnecessary obstacle, since the
“offence [was] just as heinous without it as with it.”68 Finally,
RH argued that “it is an unnecessary cruelty to the injured
66
RH, 214.
67
RH, 214.
68
RH, 214.
49
parties, to question them, as they now are questioned, in our
courts of justice.”69
In the next two chapters, I will discuss some of the
issues raised in RH’s letter and their role in public discourse
and protest about the treatment of rape. While there is no way
to know whether Peel read RH’s letter, and thus, no way to
know whether it was an influence on public policy, the Home
Secretary’s legislative efforts in regards to rape paralleled RH’s
suggestions almost entirely. Judicial rulings began to reflect the
patterns of thinking about rape exhibited in this letter. Perhaps
the slowest to change, the public was also beginning to
perceive rape as more of a crime of violence against a person,
rather than a property crime against a father’s or husband’s
possession. It is important to remember that many, if not most
of these protests, were not targeted at alleviating the suffering
of rape victims, though like Peel, many used such language as
justification. The motivations for these protests were personal,
political and religious, among others. RH’s letter, while
perhaps not exemplary of the totality of nineteenth century
thought, provides us with several important jumping points into
the past.
In RH’s letter, significant discussion is devoted to what
was perhaps the least exciting and most procedural factor in
rape trials – the evidentiary constraint that required proof of
both penetration and emission to constitute a rape. For RH, the
proof of emission was nonsensical – “we frequently read that
the prosecutrix clearly proved that a forcible violation had been
effected, but failed in giving the requisite legal evidence. She
might have sworn, that she was overpowered by superior
strength, had her mouth stopped to prevent her calling for
assistance, her hands bound or held so that she could not
struggle, and that she was compelled to submit to the will of
the prisoner; and yet because she cannot swear to one particular
point, a verdict of not guilty is given, and her ravisher escapes
punishment.”70 While on the surface technical, legalistic and
dull, the emission requirement and its removal in 1828 sparked
69
RH, 215.
70
RH, 214.
50
discussion about rape which sought to reform rape law based
on the very patriarchal principles that made it so unjust in the
first place.
The opinion expressed by RH was by the late 1820s
widely accepted by judges and laymen alike. In 1823, the
judicial precedent was set in R v. John Burrows. In that case,
the victim had testified that she was being raped, but the attack
was interrupted before emission. Justice Holroyd ruled that
though he was unsure whether the crime was completed, he
would leave it to the jury to decide. This was in direct
opposition to the general procedure, which would have
mandated an immediate dismissal of the case when the proof of
emission was not met.
The jury convicted and the case was appealed to the
Twelve Judges, the High Court of England. They found that “if
something occurs to create an alarm to the party while he is
perpetrating the offense it may be for the jury to say whether he
left the body…because of the alarm or whether he left it
because his purpose was accomplished.”71 Because the
conviction was upheld, the Burrows ruling set the precedent for
removing the burden of proof of emission from the prosecutrix.
The 1828 Law of Evidence Act which enacted this
precedent into legislation, could in most ways be categorized as
another one of Robert Peel’s administrative measures. He
prided himself on his ability to push forward a condensed
version of the criminal code which “made sense.” His speech in
favor of the act was not one of his most eloquent – he needed to
do very little convincing, as it was clear that public and judicial
opinion was in support of this reform. The logic he did use was
nevertheless quite interesting.
“It was well known, that in the cases of rape…two
kinds of proof were necessary to conviction” Peel began. “As
far as regarded the suffering of the unfortunate female who was
the victim of the offense” proving emission was not necessary
to establish the attack, the reprehensibility of the moral offense,
71
William Oldnall Russell and Edward Ryan, Crown Cases: Reserved for
Consideration and Decided by the Twelve Judges of England, from the year 1799
to the year 1824 (London: A. Strahan, 1825), 519.
51
or the magnitude of the crime.72 As Anna Clark writes, Peel
and his contemporaries understood that many rapists do not
ejaculate, and that “a woman’s terror and pain, not to speak of
ignorance, often prevented her from perceiving this
occurrence.”73 The line of reasoning so far seemed to parallel
RH’s – the evidentiary requirement was an unnecessary burden
that prevented both prosecution and conviction.
Yet in his speech, Peel referred to a much older source
to justify this legislation. “It had been well observed by lord
Hale, that although rape was a most detestable crime, and ought
to be severely punished, it was one upon which a charge could
easily be made, hard to be proved, and harder still to be
contradicted…If [Hale] thought that any alteration of the
law…would lead to false accusations, he would be the last to
offer such proposition…But [Hale] was of the opinion, that [the
proof of emission] required in such cases was unnecessary.”74
In order to promote legislation that would make the prosecution
of rape easier, Peel alluded to the very statement that had made
the prosecution of rape nearly impossible for over a century.
It is worthwhile to consider why Peel used this tactic.
Ostensibly, the argument that the proof of emission made it
nearly impossible to prosecute rapists should have been
sufficient on its own. There were cases upon cases that could
have been used as evidence to support this notion and the
Burrows ruling already established case law precedent. Peel’s
reform of the criminal law was rooted in a preoccupation with
increasing the power of the state to successfully prosecute and
punish criminals – if his goal was to continue along this path,
the arguments were laid out for him.
By calling upon Hale’s authority, Peel justified
continuing worries about malicious prosecutions. He needed to
set the minds of doubters at rest by convincing them that
removing this evidentiary requirement would only make it
72
House of Commons Debate, “Law of Evidence Bill,” May 5, 1828, Hansard,
vol. 19, cc 350-60.
73
74
House of Commons Debate, “Law of Evidence Bill,” May 5, 1828, Hansard,
vol. 19, cc 350-60.
52
easier for rapists to be punished, that it would not have the
collateral effect of increasing the so-called ‘malicious
prosecutions.’ By saying that even Matthew Hale supported
removal of the emission requirement back in his time, Peel was
reassuring his audience that this law would not undermine the
interests of men, no matter how much lip service he gave to the
notion of relieving victims’ suffering.
Historian Martin Wiener has given Peel much more
credit for pushing forth this legislation. By making proof of
penetration the major evidentiary requirement, the law “more
clearly defined the offense as one of violence rather than of
illegitimate taking, a crime against a woman as a person rather
than as the property of her husband or father.”75 Though
Wiener’s interpretation may be overly exaggerated, the Act
was indeed a massive accomplishment and progression for
nineteenth century rape law, both practically, in easing
prosecutions, and ideologically. Prior to this legislation,
penetration, or the actual physical violation, was not enough to
prove a rape. By requiring emission to prove rape, the law
interpreted rape as a crime of ‘soiling’ – emission, after all,
carried with it possibility of conception. By removing this
requirement, the law began to treat rape as first and foremost a
physical violation of a woman’s body.
Returning to RH’s letter, we come to another critical
flash point for nineteenth century discussions about rape. The
humiliation of rape victims in their communities and in the
courtroom was a major concern for RH, and as we will see, for
judges, legislators, and laypeople alike. “When a female desires
to bring her ravisher to punishment, she has to go before a
public court and to be questioned on the minutiae of a forced
connection before hundreds of the other sex, while those of her
own sex, who may be willing to hear and to countenance her,
are excluded.”76 The language used by RH resembles the
language used by Brownmiller, Clark and other feminist
historians one hundred and fifty years later. Even more
75
76
RH, 215.
53
surprisingly, these issues had already begun to be addressed as
early as 1811, in the landmark ruling of R. v. Hodgson. 77
Both the circumstances that led to the trial, as well as
the ruling itself, were in their own ways remarkable and
reflective of the growing developments in British rape law.
Harriet Halliday, a sixteen year old servant girl, had been
returning to work after a visit to her parents’ home on Good
Friday. She was approached by a strange man, who asked her
where she was going. He offered to walk her to her masters’
home and put his arms around her. She refused, striking him
across the face. He struck her back – “knock for knock…I will
see thee home yet!” he cried out.
Harriet continued to struggle as William pulled her into
a stable until she “fainted away and [William] accomplished
his purpose.” When Harriet returned to consciousness, she
continued to cry out, until she was at last heard by a passerby.
“They have found us out,” William said, “but they shall not
find thee out, for I will kill thee in this place.” Nevertheless, he
became frightened, pushed Harriet out of the stable and fled.
Fortunately for Harriet, the passerby who had overheard her
cries was a prominent local surgeon. He would testify at her
trial that he found Harriet “in a state of great distress” with torn
and bloody clothing.78 After being examined by the surgeon,
Harriet returned to her masters’ house and told them what had
happened.
Hodgson’s defense counsel, Mr. Raine, was, as
expected, extremely aggressive and confrontational. During
Harriet’s cross-examination, he immediately asked whether “it
was the first time she had been connected with a man.” Here,
the trial turned from interesting, to momentous. As soon as the
words had left Raine’s mouth, Justice Baron Wood interjected,
“observing that it was an improper question, which witness had
no occasion to answer.” This was a major departure from the
common practices of impeaching a prosecutrix’s sexual history,
as described in the previous chapter. Wood also attempted to
77
The Times, August 14, 1811; The Times, August 15, 1811.
78
The surgeon served as Harriet’s benefactor in funding the prosecution, making
this a rare instance of a rape allegation brought forward by a lower class victim.
54
limit the effectiveness of two defense witnesses (Hodgson’s
friends) who claimed that they had seen the pair together
without her showing any resistance. Though he could not
forbid the friends from testifying, when the jury returned with a
plea for mercy attached to their guilty verdict, Baron Wood
“asked upon what ground” they dared to give a
recommendation for mercy. The jury was confused – the
recommendation was standard practice in rape cases where the
defendant presented witnesses that testified to his good
character. Stunned and unprepared, the “foreman was not
prepared to state any.”
At sentencing, Baron Wood expressed further fury.
Presented with petitions for mitigation to transportation from
the prosecutrix, her master and her witnesses, the Justice was
unyielding towards Hodgson. After sentencing seven men to
death and suggesting that they should “hold out hopes of
mercy” from a pardon, Wood turned to Hodgson. “You here
have been found guilty of violating the person of a young
woman, which is an offense…[that] ought to be impartially
punished with death…Such a series of brutal and cruel conduct
I have never heard detailed in a Court of Justice, and…I hope
never to hear again…By your own declaration…it is probable
[that] other unfortunate females have been the victims of your
brutality, who have not had the courage to avow and seek
justice, but who have pined under dire outrage in silent
affliction…I hope this example of justice will operate to deter
others… warned by your fate.”
Unsurprisingly, the language of this ruling shocked
many. Defense counsel immediately appealed, on the grounds
that Wood did not allow for questioning of the prosecutrix’s
sexual past, which in turn, did not allow them to impeach her
credibility. Wood referred the case to the Twelve Judges of
England, a tribunal of justices who heard appellate cases. The
judges unanimously backed the initial decision and declared
that “upon an indictment for a rape, the woman is not
compellable to answer, whether she has not had connection
with other men or with a particular person named; nor is
55
evidence of her having such connection admissible.”79 As we
will see later in this chapter, it is important to note that this was
still very much a partial ruling – it forbid only specific
questioning and left room for more general impeachments of
the prosecutrix’s characters, a loophole that was continually
exploited by other judges and defense counsel.
By not allowing women to be cross-examined about
their specific sexual histories, the Hodgson ruling reflected
what was becoming a fact of life and society – women were
sexually active before marriage. The average age of marriage
for women continued to rise at the beginning of the century –
by 1829, it was 25.80 Sexual relations began to be seen as more
of a norm in courtships. Virginity, while still highly prized, was
no longer a prerequisite for conviction. As Wood would say in
a later ruling, even if a woman had sex in the past, it did not
justify a rape.
Throughout his career, Wood continued to preside over
rape cases with the same kind of zealousness he displayed in
the Hodgson ruling. In 1821, he forbid another defense counsel
from pursuing a line of questioning aimed to uncover the
victim’s sexual history. The attorney objected – “this is the first
time I was ever checked in this manner…At [Queen
Caroline’s] trial, the questions were put much stronger.” Wood
did not relent, and in his speech to the jury went on to say that
even if the victim had previous sexual relations, “that has
nothing to do with the prisoner at the bar; she has no right to be
ravished on that account…I will not suffer a witness to disgrace
herself…[I do not approve of] the mode of hunting and
terrifying witnesses when put into the box, and the whole
history of their lives raked up, as a set-off against their
evidence; for who amongst us, at one time or another, has not
committed one foible.”81
79
William Oldnall Russell and Edward Ryan, Crown Cases: Reserved for
Consideration and Decided by the Twelve Judges of England, from the year 1799
to the year 1824 (Philadelphia: T. & J.W. Johnson, Law Booksellers, 1839), 211.
80
Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 461n.
81
Northern Star, August 27, 1821.
56
Wood’s protests can perhaps be understood better in
terms of his devout religious beliefs and his unorthodox
judicial philosophy – “an inflexible determination to resist any
contagion from the prejudices of others.”82 It was Hodgson’s
unwillingness to repent that irked the judge – the defense
counsel seeking to provide justification for the rape only
underlined that the defendant would not admit wrongdoing.
Wood did believe rape to be a horrific crime; but then again, so
did Matthew Hale. The difference between the two jurists was
that Hale’s jurisprudence led him to support the rights of the
defendant. Wood’s religious beliefs led him to support the
rights of the victim. Yet this outrage continued to be contingent
on a very particular archetype of rape victim, the kind who did
not deviate from the norms of propriety.
Harriet Halliday was extraordinarily fortunate – she
was a young girl, who worked for a respectable family and was
backed by a very wealthy and well-established benefactor. She
was an ideal victim even by eighteenth century standards. It is
difficult to completely paint any of these rulings or legislative
changes with a progressive brush, as they were as reliant on the
characters of victim and rapist as the system they were
attempting to reform. (It would take decades, perhaps even
over a century, before the idea that prostitutes could be raped
was accepted in legal circles, for example.) Nevertheless,
Wood’s speeches are interesting because they, perhaps
inadvertently, extended the trust afforded to victims.
The second interesting element of Wood’s rulings is
the acknowledgement of rape victims suffering in silence – in
part, he sought to use the Hodgson ruling as a warning to others
that crime committed would be crime punished. This is a
fascinating predecessor to Peel’s future legislative reforms. As
Gatrell has written, the Home Secretary “was the first politician
of note to shape and exploit a rich vein of anxiety about the
decay of moral values to which increases in ‘crime’ supposedly
testify.”83 The idea that criminal law should be targeted to root
82
The Annual Biography and Obituary for the Year 1825 (London: Longman,
1825), 468.
83
Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 572.
57
out the crimes that went unpunished would come to be
exploited to its full extent by manipulating rulings like
Hodgson to suggest that people who commit the most heinous
of crimes risk going unpunished.
On its own, the Hodgson ruling seems unquestionably
visionary, even by the standards of our own time.
Unsurprisingly, however, many of Baron Wood’s peers did not
agree with his position or with the Twelve Judges’ holding. In
an 1834 case, Justice Williams explained that he could not
understand how the ruling could be “in strict accordance with
the general rules of evidence.” Williams went on to allow
defense counsel to question the prosecutrix about whether she
had consensual sexual relations with the defendant prior to the
alleged rape.84 In 1836, in another parliamentary report on the
criminal law, MP Sir Frederick Pollock expressed the kind of
intense dissatisfaction with the Hodgson decision many other
judges had been expressing in their own rulings and opinions.
“if his counsel could have addressed the jury [on the girl’s
moral character] he must have been acquitted, and it was a
conviction that gave dissatisfaction to the whole Bar, and I
believe to the public…There can be no doubt of his innocence
of the crime as charged upon him, though probably he had been
in a situation to create considerable suspicion…I have no doubt
she was at first a consenting party, but that she was forcibly
detained a longer time than was convenient to the domestic
arrangements of the family in which she was a servant, and
having been detained, probably by some degree of force,
during the latter part of the interview, she converted the whole
matter into a charge of rape.”85
84
R. v. Martin, 172 Eng. Rep. 1364. This line of questioning continued to be
affirmed as admissible evidence in rape trials well through the 20th century. Even
today, “of all the rape cases that come across prosecutors’ desks, stranger-rape
cases have the best courtroom odds, with 68 percent ending with a conviction or
guilty plea. But when a woman knows her assailant briefly (less than 24 hours), a
mere 43 percent of cases end in a conviction. When they know each other longer
than 24 hours, the conviction rate falls to 35 percent. Even fewer, 29 percent, of
intimate partners and exes are punished.” Sabrina Rubin Erderly, “The date-rape
‘doctor’ they could not convict,” Self, November 2008. Accessed on
www.msnbc.com.
85
Royal Commission on the Criminal Law, 2nd report (Parliamentary Papers,
1836, xxxvi, 4-5), quoted in Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 472-3n.
58
Other judges used the nebulous distinction between

“general” and “particular” evidence to continue to allow for
questioning about the victims’ character. The most aggressive
and inventive defense counsel could work around the Hodgson
ruling with relatively little effort. The easiest way to do this
was to present witnesses who could testify to the victim’s past
sexual relations and ask the prosecutrix to deny this evidence –
putting the victim in the awkward position of choosing between
committing perjury and admitting to prior sexual relations.86
Even when they did not allow for questioning based on
Hodgson appeals from the prosecution, judges would
editorialize to juries about being aware of the female tendency
to lie, especially about sexual matters.
Other justices felt bound by the Hodgson ruling and
did not let their personal dissatisfaction interfere with the way
they presided over cases. In 1827, Justice Park, a judge
notorious for favoring the defendant in rape cases, stopped
defense counsel from questioning a victim about her sexual
past, even though “for his own part, he dissented from the
doctrine thus laid down [by the Twelve Judges].”87 Other
judges took Hodgson and expanded its scope to cover trials for
attempted rape.88 In 1827, during a trial for attempted rape,
Justice Baron Vaughan told the jury that “it was a hardship in
cases of this kind…that [the victim] had not only to undergo
the wounded feelings and sufferings occasioned by the injuries
they had received, but were obliged to come before strangers,
and before a male audience, to disclose the details of the
case.”89 Vaughan mirrored many of Baron Wood’s practices in
presiding over rape cases – during an 1829 case, he interrupted
a surgeon who was testifying on behalf of the defense that the
86
It wasn’t until the 1871 R v. Holmes & Furness ruling that the issue was
resolved. The Court concluded that this tactic was not in line with Hodgson and
that it opened up an “endless and unjust trial of the prosecutrix herself.” Wiener,
Men of blood, 99.
87
The Times, April 19, 1827.
88
This precedent was set in the 1817 ruling of R. v. Clarke.
89
The Times, September 5, 1827.
59
victim was not a virgin.90 Though Hodgson has been criticized
by feminist scholars as a flimsy ruling that was circumvented
throughout the century, it did set an important precedent and
introduced the voices of several justices who, for better or for
worse, would speak on behalf of rape victims when those
victims could not speak for themselves.91
As we have seen, discussions about rape in this time
period were charged with conceptions not only about gender
relations, but also about politics, religion, the rise of national
government, the role of crime in society and so forth. What I
have termed as ‘protests’ about rape were, quite evidently,
about more than rape. Nevertheless, they brought the issue into
the light of public discourse in a way it had not been during the
eighteenth century. Peel’s removal of the evidentiary
requirement of emission revealed the existing tensions between
men who desired to be simultaneously tough on crime,
protective of their wives and daughters and suspicious of the
motivations of women. The judicial rulings in Hodgson,
Burrows and other cases highlighted the voices of judges who
have long since been forgotten, but who often provided the
strongest support that rape victims they would ever receive.
Rape had a powerful effect on exacerbating these
tensions, as we have seen in this chapter. In the next chapter,
we will discuss how these discourses, these protests, these
strains came to a powerful head in 1841, when RH’s first
proposal was finally realized, when, in a storm of sound and
fury, the death penalty was removed as a punishment for rape.
Politics
There is a little known postscript to the story of

William Hodgson – he was never executed for the rape of
Harriet Halliday. A year and a half after his conviction,
Hodgson was pardoned on the condition that he serve in the
90
Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 474.
91
Clark and D’Cruze both criticize the ruling, as does Zsuzsanna Adler in Rape
on Trial (London: Routledge, 1987), 70.
60
army.92 The rate of pardons for rapists was much higher at the
beginning of the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth
century. When RH wrote his letter in 1826, the rate of rape
prosecutions was already on the rise – it was the rate of
convictions, and even more interestingly, the rate of executions
that was on a precipitous decline.93
“It is often said,” RH wrote, “that a very severe
punishment is not so great a restraint upon the viciously
inclined, as a more moderate one…this is correct only when the
severe punishment is distant or uncertain, and the mild one,
prompt and seldom failing, almost certain to follow the
commission of the offense.”94 This was, of course, Peel’s
reasoning as well. Though he congratulated himself on being
merciful – “there is not a single law connected with my name
which has not had as its object some mitigation of the severity
of the criminal law,” he bragged in 1827 – Peel sought to make
punishment more efficient, not less serious or less likely.95
Although the gradual elimination of the “Bloody
Code” has been traditionally attributed to a legislative
acceptance of a popular distaste for executing men for crimes
other than murder, a more realistic and honest reading lies in
the motivation to prosecute and punish more effectively and
more often.96 Public revulsion and the reluctance of juries to
convict sparked the reduction of capital offenses, but legislators
did not always share in this revulsion against the death penalty.
The era of Peel’s tenure was highly punitive and the aims of
criminal law reform were largely steeped in this tradition even
after he left his post as Home Secretary in 1830.97
92
The Times, May 10, 1813.
93
House of Commons Debate, “Criminal Laws,” May 21, 1823. Hansard, vol. 9,
cc397-432.
94
RH, 213.
95
Quoted in Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 567.
96
For the traditional interpretation of the elimination of the ‘Bloody Code,’ and a
classic overview of criminal justice in this era, see: Leon Radzinowicz, History of
English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 (5 volumes, London:
Stevens, 1948-1986).
97
For the most complete, nuanced and insightful discussion of the death penalty
in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, see: Gatrell, The Hanging Tree.
61
While the number of death penalty statutes began to
fall as early as 1823, rape did not seriously enter the discussion
of criminal law reform in Parliament until 1837. The earliest
advocate of removing rape as a capital crime was William
Ewart, one of the most outspoken opponents of the death
penalty in the House of Commons.98 Acknowledging that there
was a “very strong opinion entertained with respect to the
propriety of inflicting the punishment of death in cases of
rape,” Ewart continued that, “in all the places to which he had
referred, the punishment of death was not inflicted for the
commission of that crime…the crime was so difficult and so
uncertain of proof, that there was the greatest difficulty in
bringing the jury to convict.” He concluded that if the death
penalty were taken away, “the same obstacles would not
exist.”99
This part of his speech was not referred to by a single
other member of Commons for the duration of the debate –
instead, the MPs discussed removing arson as a capital crime.
Yet Ewart introduced the idea because he understood that
conviction rates for rape happened to be low at a time when
legislators sought high conviction rates. A man with very
radical ideas, Ewart hoped to capitalize on the prevailing desire
to punish effectively in order to eventually eliminate the death
penalty altogether. “[We should] only proceed on the principle
of wishing to render punishment certain…if [we] continued the
punishment of death in any case but murder, the difference
Also see: Brian Block, Hanging in the Balance: A History of the Abolition of
Capital Punishment in Britain (Winchester: Waterside, 1997). For literary and
cultural responses to the death penalty, see Executions and the British Experience
from the 17th to the 20th century, ed. William B. Thesing (Jefferson: McFarland,
1990).
98
S. M. Farrell, “Ewart, William (1798–1869),” in Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004),
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9011 (accessed April 9, 2009).Ewart
would later advocate for the elimination of the death penalty entirely.
99
House of Commons Debate, “Capital Punishments,” May 19, 1837, Hansard,
vol. 38, cc 907-26.
62
between the verdicts of the juries and the words of the law
would be as great as it is now,” Ewart said.100
At the time of Ewart’s first speech, people were not yet
ready to have a discussion about the death penalty and rape. By
1840, however, it had become clear that rape, like larceny and
burglary, had become an outdated capital crime – the last
execution for the crime had taken place in 1836. Conviction
rates were, in some places, lower than they had been in the
eighteenth century. The few death sentences that were given
were summarily commuted to transportation for life.
Contemporaries interpreted the low rates as symptomatic of a
general unwillingness to convict non-murderers of death
penalty crimes. In 1840, legislators brought a bill proposing the
removal of rape as a capital crime to the Commons. The MPs
discussed it over the course of three separate days – June 23,
July 15 and July 29.
Historians of death penalty abolition have not paid
much attention to the details of this debate. Like the criminal
law reforms of the 1820s, reform of capital punishment was
proceeding at such a rapid pace throughout the 1830s and into
the 1840s that this bill seems to be another unremarkable
stepping stone in the gradual elimination of England’s famed
“Bloody Code.” The bill seems even more irrelevant when it is
noted that forgery and embezzlement were the other two
clauses – for the scholars who treat death penalty reform by
rattling off lists of condensed statutes, a simple note that “the
number of capital offences continued to be reduced throughout
the 1830s and 1840s” seems adequate.101
Yet it is quite clear from the discussions which
emerged from this bill that removing rape from the list of
capital crimes was not a routine measure. The debates
highlighted central questions surrounding the responsibility and
role of the Parliament in determining criminal law. Some
believed that the decision of juries to not convict defendants of
100
House of Commons Debate, “Capital Punishments,” May 19, 1837, Hansard,
vol. 38, cc 907-26.
101
Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (London: Longman
Group, 1987), 270.
63
rape – for whatever reason – should be held paramount.
Parliament, if it was the voice of the people, should not
legislate in order to override their opinions. Yet the MPs who
supported the bill envisioned an entirely different responsibility
– the responsibility to advocate on behalf of victims, the
responsibility to execute the laws of the state, the responsibility
to legislate based on overriding moral or pragmatic concerns,
not on public opinion.
For some men in Parliament, alleviating rape victims’
suffering was an overriding moral concern. For others, the
primary concern was increasing the efficiency of the state to
punish. The debates preceding the passage of the Punishment
of Death Bill brought to light a variety of opinions about rape
and its moral and social implications that extend beyond a
blanket vision of the time period as an oppressive, patriarchal
state. Some of the most poignant and effective calls for reform
came from those who accepted patriarchal norms.
On June 23, 1840, the House of Commons seriously
discussed removing the death penalty as a punishment for rape
for the first time. By the outset of the debate, judicial decisions
and procedural practices were starting to favor the prosecutrix
in rape cases. Juries, however, remained susceptible to
favoring defendants and doubting the motivations of women
who brought rape charges. The law was much kinder to rape
victims than juries were willing to be. Indeed, even during the
debates, the appropriateness of the death penalty for rape was
often framed around the danger of malicious prosecutions.
According to MP Fitzroy Edward Kelly, if he were to “select
from the whole catalogue of human crime one which above all
others ought not to be subjected to the punishment of death, he
should say it was the crime of rape.”102
Kelly believed that rape was inappropriately
categorized as a capital crime because of the unreliability of
victim testimony in accusations. “The evidence of rape must
always depend upon the testimony of a single witness [who]
might commit perjury for the purpose of retrieving her own
102
House of Commons Debate, “Punishment of Death,” June 23, 1840, Hansard,
vol. 55, cc 18-41.
64
character…An innocent man might be brought home from
transportation, but could not be recovered from death,” Kelly
stated.103 This argument was rooted in a fundamental mistrust
of female intentions and, essentially, an eighteenth century
conception of what a “real rape” was. Though there was an
overwhelming body of case studies where a jury did not
convict despite overwhelming evidence against the defendant,
Kelly simply refused to relieve himself of the notion that the
death penalty was too severe and too risky for a crime like
rape.
Acknowledging the controversy of this speech, Kelly
warned that there would be a “great diversity of opinion” on
the subject.104 In Parliament, the MPs considered their positions
as elected officials to be quite important, especially when
discussing issues that affected disenfranchised members of the
population. One MP believed so forcefully in his mandate that
he declared himself “to be the advocate of Woman… [in]
demanding that the crime of rape be put in another category of
punishment.”105 The sentiment would be echoed in the House
of Lords the following year, when the Marquess of Westmeath
proclaimed that “Parliament had no right to pass such a
measure, without consulting…the feelings of the female
portion of the community.”106
While these exultations were mostly rhetorical,
Parliament’s determination to be the voice of women, to
express what their real interests were, pervaded the discussions
of the rape clause in this bill. Although they frequently
discussed the crime in broad, theoretical strokes that revealed a
misunderstanding of the plight of actual rape victims, members
of Parliament genuinely considered themselves as speaking on
103
vol. 55, cc 18-41.
104
vol. 55, cc 18-41.
105
House of Commons Debate, “Punishment of Death,” July 29, 1840, Hansard,
vol. 55, cc 1078-101.
106
House of Lords Debate, “Punishment of Death,” June 11, 1841. Hansard, vol
58, cc 458-9.
65
behalf of women,. As a result, they struggled to come to a
consensus on this clause in a way they had not experienced
with prior debates about the death penalty.
Even traditional proponents of capital punishment
reform had mixed feelings about this bill. Lord Russell recalled
that when the issue was first introduced by Ewart in 1837, the
prevailing opinion was that rape, especially in aggravated
cases, warranted capital punishment. Since that time, though,
there had not been a single execution for rape. Judges
consistently recommended royal pardons for convicted rapists.
If the judges who spent their careers presiding over rape cases
recommended mercy, “it might be a ground for calling upon
the House to take away the punishment in such cases,”
suggested Russell.107
Russell believed strongly in the severity and magnitude
of rape as a crime. He was fixated on the institutional
difficulties the state faced when it tried to adequately deter
rape. His strongest supporter on the matter, Dr. Lushington,
concurred:“The punishment of death [for rape] was,” he
argued, “in consequence of the state of public feeling,
abolished de facto – not by law be it observed”.108 Rape victims
would find it easier to come forward if they had greater
certainty that their attacker would be punished. Potential rapists
would be deterred when faced with the guarantee of a
punishment. For Russell and Lushington, the passage of this
bill was of deep interest to the well-being of the community
and to the decline of crime.
The MPs repeatedly struggled with this argument.
Thomas Wakley insisted that the government needed to retain
the power to execute men convicted of aggravated rape. If a
jury refused to convict and a judge recommended mercy,
Wakley argued, the problem lay with their lack of judgment,
not with the death penalty:“What [are we] to do with these sort
of persons, as they might…from a mawkish sentimentality,
107
vol. 55, cc 18-41.
108
vol. 55, cc 733-49.
66
refuse to inflict any punishment?”109 As George Muntz frankly
stated it, “what the committee had to determine was, which was
the greater evil, rape or murder.”110
The June 23 and July 15 debates continued in such a
manner. The proponents on either side were unwilling to
compromise and those in the middle were not successfully
swayed by the arguments. The bill’s chances for passage were
decreasing precipitously, and the final nail in the coffin came
on July 23, with a fierce denunciation from none other than Sir
Robert Peel.
With the exception of a brief minority government in
December 1834, Peel had not held office from 1830 to late
1841. Separated from daily reports about crime, disorder and
distress, Peel’s attention had, in the words of biographer
Douglas Hurd, “wandered away from the subject [of the
Condition of England].”111 He was more concerned with
Catholic Emancipation, parliamentary reform and other large-
scale political issues.112 The Whig government under Lord John
Russell had picked up Peel’s mantle of criminal law reform and
social justice. The Whigs focused on tackling questions of
poverty, notably with the 1834 Poor Law which established the
(ultimately disastrous) system of workhouses to replace other
forms of relief. Though Peel supported these Whig initiatives,
he could not back a reform of capital punishment that was
supported by the opinion of juries and the public rather than
state interests. For Peel, the removal of death penalty statutes
had to be pursued carefully and clinically with the primary goal
of retaining state power.
Peel began his speech with a somewhat snide jab at the
Whig leadership. He stated that he “was of the opinion that
they were right in making the amelioration of the criminal code
proceed gradually…but he could not [support] the carrying out
109
vol. 55, cc 733-49.
110
vol. 55, cc 733-49.
111
112
67
[of] that amelioration to the extent which [they] proposed to
carry it out.”113 He challenged the notion that juries were not
convicting because of the death penalty. Instead, he argued, the
“moral guilt of the prisoner was not sufficient for the jury,
and…in many cases, the fear of death did not deter the offender
from the commission of crime.”114
This was a remarkable statement. First and foremost, it
undermined Whig criminal law reform by questioning their
interpretation of jury decisions, the primary support for their
proposals.
It also expressed an acute understanding of how the
public understood and treated rape, an understanding that was
much more nuanced than Lushington’s unending retreads of
prosecution and conviction statistics. While Lushington read
these statistics as proof that sympathetic juries were motivated
by repulsion for capital punishment, Peel understood that many
juries refused to convict because they did not see rape as a ‘real
crime.’ While the Whigs gave juries credit for visionary
thinking about capital punishment, Peel remained skeptical.
Peel was not impressed by how strongly the Whigs weighed the
actions of juries in their arguments and contended that the state
could not relinquish its power to execute rapists; it could not
capitulate to public opinion.
Peel refused to accept that rape was a crime
undeserving of the death penalty and capitalized both on his
masterful manipulation of emotions and what would today be
termed as blatant appeals to populism:“Suppose the violation of
a poor woman by a wealthy man, under the circumstances of
aggravation…or the case of a conspiracy on the part of a rich
man to effect the violation of a woman in humble life…were
cases such as these, when violence little short of taking life was
committed…were they to be passed over with an ordinary
113
vol. 55, cc 1078-101.
114
vol. 55, cc 1078-101.
68
punishment?”115 Allowing for anything less than the maximum
punishment in these cases would do no more than anger public
sentiment and “lessen the sense that ought to be entertained of
the enormity of the crime.”116 While these appeals were
unabashedly political, they drew attention to the victim and to
the experiences and the suffering of those who relied on the
criminal justice system for some form of justice or retribution.
Though he was knowingly defending his policies and his vision
of justice, Peel was at the same time providing a perspective
that had been greatly lacking in the Whig discussion of rape,
which itself had so heavily prioritized jury opinion.
Peel’s experience as a criminal law reformer afforded
him some extra liberties in discussing what did and did not
warrant the restructuring of the death penalty. Though he had
claimed over a decade earlier that he worked only to mitigate
the criminal law, it was quite clear that Peel was in many ways
supportive of a very retributive system of justice, one that
would leave the level of retribution to the discretion of the
government. Ewart attempted to defend the bill against Peel’s
speech. However, other than a pointed jab -- “if [certain
Members] imagined it would at all affect themselves, they
would not consider it very desirable to die”117 – Ewart could
little to contest Peel’s points. At the end of the day, the bill
failed, 78 votes to 51. The issue would be put off until March
of the following year.
When the bill was presented again on March 8, 1841,
the debate in the Commons was nowhere near as contentious as
it had been the prior year. Armed with statistics, the nineteenth
century’s most powerful tool, Lord John Russell defended the
rape clause with much stronger conviction. Starting with 1834,
he traced a rise in rape convictions as sentences began to be
commuted to transportation sentences. “The result…of these
115
vol. 55, cc 1078-101.
116
vol. 55, cc 1078-101.
117
vol. 55, cc 1078-101.
69
returns was this,” he said, “Since it had become the practice in
cases of conviction to inflict the minor punishment of
transportation, the proportion of convictions had been
greater.”118 The primary support for Russell’s reasoning was
pragmatic, not moral. If rapists were not being convicted when
the death penalty was the only option and were being convicted
when there was a more moderate punishment, the choice was
clear. On this issue, Russell said, it would be wise to defer to
the opinion of the juries.119
By this point, opposition to the bill had more or less
died down. Some MPs even began to argue for future visions of
rape law reform, but ones that would not be realized for
decades. Sir John Campbell, the Attorney General at the time,
supported the bill, but argued that even removing the death
penalty would not solve the problem of rape, since it would still
leave the crime undefined: “Suppose a common prostitute
violated without her consent by three or four men – that would
be rape in construction of the law; but no judge would
[execute] that man.”120 Campbell struck at an interesting
dilemma at the heart of this legislation. If the ostensible goal
was to increase the punishment of rapists, how could the state
do so if it could not even satisfactorily define or enforce what
actions constituted rape?
Campbell’s remarks hearken back to the idea of a “real
rape” standard in public and legal opinion. Whether the public
found all rapes, some rapes, or no rapes to be morally
repugnant was still a question up for debate. Robert Peel,
voting ‘no’ on this bill once again, warned that “[if] the offence
was committed by members of the higher classes of society, for
the gratification of the most brutal passions…public
indignation might be so great that the House would find it
118
House of Commons Debate, “Amendment of the Criminal Law,” March 8,
1841, Hansard, vol. 57, cc 47-65.
119
1841, Hansard, vol. 57, cc 47-65.
120
House of Commons Debate, “Punishment of Death,” May 3, 1841, Hansard,
vol. 57, cc 1408-31.
70
expedient to retrace its course.”121 Peel was immediately
rebuffed by Charles Buller, an MP from Liskeard, who
adamantly stated that “there were no capital convictions which
so little satisfied the public mind as those for rape.”122
Perhaps because these questions were so difficult to
resolve, the members of the House of Commons who did
support the bill chose to couch their support in terms of
pragmatism and the need to improve conviction rates. Even in
these early years of state-controlled criminal justice
administration, there was a desire to improve the efficiency of
the law’s ability to punish. Though he admitted that rape was a
reprehensible crime, Russell noted that as legislators, the MPs
“could not assume themselves the Divine power, and affix to
every moral crime the penalty that ought to be attached to it.”123
By focusing on practicality rather than ethics, Russell
disavowed the Parliament’s function as a creator and enforcer
of a moral agenda through criminal law.
This disavowal not shared by the House of Lords. The
bill finally reached the peers on June 14, after passing the
Commons with a final vote of 123-61. Ostensibly, the debate in
the Lords should not have been as contentious as it was, since
many peers traditionally deferred to the lower House on issues
of criminal law reform. According to Lord Brougham, since
the Commons had come “forward with the majority of two or
three to one in favour of this clause…[the Lords] should agree
to it.”124 Brougham restated Russell’s statistics and urged the
need to trust the judgment and behavior of juries, who “could
not be prevailed upon for any consideration to be made parties
to what must turn out to be the destruction of human life.”125
121
vol. 57, cc 1408-31.
122
vol. 57, cc 1408-31.
123
1841, Hansard, vol. 57, cc 47-65.
124
House of Lords Debate, “Punishment of Death,” June 14, 1841, Hansard, vol
58, cc 486-93.
125
58, cc 486-93.
71
Lord Abinger agreed, stating that the death penalty for rape led
“anxious” jurors to “seize upon every trifling pretext or formal
legal nicety in order to destroy the evidence of the woman.”126
Others, even those who supported the bill, were not
willing to accept that the crux of the issue was about the
efficiency of punishment. Rather, the Lords’ debate turned on
moral issues and on deciding what the appropriate punishment
for rape was. The reluctance of juries to convict and their
heightened suspicion of women were not only a violation of the
administration of justice, but a violation of the woman’s right
to present her story as a victim. There was a peculiar sense of
awareness about the victim’s experience. Justice was
understood as retribution for the victim, rather than a
demonstration of power by the state. “If [we] passed this law,”
the Earl of Wicklow warned, “[we] would sanction what the
people of this country would never confirm – that sodomy and
rape were not crimes of so heinous a character as to deserve
death.”127
There were several voices of this kind of opposition to
the bill. The Marquess of Westmeath, the same man who
earlier called for a survey of the nation’s women before passing
the bill, later added that this clause “threw the whole hardship”
of rape onto the victim. For Westmeath, shielding women from
the potential collateral effects of this bill was paramount. Yet,
though this opposition paid special attention to the victim, it
did so in a way that reinforced her dependence and
vulnerability. The Earl of Winchilsea, for example, protested
the clause because he believed “that the punishment of death
for cases of violent assault and forcible rape was indispensable
for the protection of virtuous females.”128 All protests along this
line envisioned the role of Parliament as the protector of chaste
women’s interests and the watchman over devious men’s
126
58, cc 486-93.
127
House of Lords Debate, “Punishment of Death,” June 17, 1841, Hansard, vol.
58, cc 1152-60.
128
58, cc 486-93. Emphasis mine.
72
morality. Discussion of victims’ suffering was framed in this
context as well.
The debate on June 14 concluded with little progress.
The two sides seemed evenly split and the fundamental dispute
was nowhere near resolution. On June 17, the Marquess of
Normanby called for another reading of the bill. Rather than
employing statistics, which failed miserably during the last
debate, Normanby attempted to sway the Lords with an
anecdotal story about an 1837 rape trial. Three men were
indicted for rape; the evidence was heavily in the victim’s favor
and suggested strongly that the rape was quite violent. After
initial deliberation, the jury asked the judge whether there
would be an option for a “mitigating verdict” – not acquittal,
but also not death. The judge refused, and the jury returned a
verdict of ‘not guilty.’ Normanby concluded his story with a
strong assertion: “Every one feels that there must be something
decidedly wrong for men so clearly guilty of so black a crime
to be thrown back upon society altogether unpunished, by the
verdict of twelve disinterested men.”129 Normanby’s anecdote
seemed quite effective in front of an audience that appeared to
be particularly moved by the moral implications of removing
the death penalty as punishment for rape. Normanby may very
well have succeeded had it not been for a speech that
presumably supported his position yet single handedly
destroyed it.
Lord Denman, a judge in criminal cases, supported the
passage of the bill. However, his reasoning was entirely
different from Normanby’s. He argued that he had never seen a
jury acquit a defendant guilty of rape. Rather, he said, “he
knew by experience [that] rapes were seldom deliberately
committed. They were usually the result of some accidental
communication at a fair or junketing, where persons of
different sexes came together, and when at a late hour of the
night, some unfortunate female, whose imprudence had led her
into the company, became the victim of brutal and disgusting
129
58, cc 1152-60.
73
outrage.”130 The themes expressed in Denman’s statement are
the kind assumed to be the standard in nineteenth century
opinion. It spanned the gamut of the most repugnant rape
apologist tropes: blaming the victim’s “imprudence” and
calling the crime an “accident.” He argued that the death
penalty was not an appropriate punishment for rape because
rape was not necessarily a morally reprehensible crime.
The response to Denman was not supportive. This
mindset, this ideological treatment of rape, was not universally
accepted, and provided those who opposed the bill with ample
ammunition. Among many others, the Earl of Harwood was
offended at Denman’s remarks and his purported expertise on
the subject. “[We] ought neither to legislate on the opinion of
the judges, nor on the opinion of the juries,” Harwood said, “[I]
would never consent to see [rape] visited with any punishment
short of death.” Denman’s speech led to such feverish debate
that the scheduled vote on the bill had to be postponed. The
two camps were even more divided at the conclusion of the
June 17 debate than they had been three days earlier.
On the morning of June 18, the Lords seemed ready to
conclude this contentious debate. The Marquess of Normanby
called for a vote immediately: “one of the worst things their
Lordships could do,” he said, “was to enter into a discussion on
[this] amendment.”131 The Earl of Wicklow remained
unconvinced that Normanby had proven his case, but agreed
that further discussion would be unhelpful. The Lords voted.
The final count was 64-60, in favor of passage. Rape was no
longer a capital crime, a decision finalized by only four votes.
Voices, Then and Now
In her sample of London trials, Judith Travers found

that after 1841 the conviction rate for rape jumped from 18% to
51%. Like many, she interpreted the statistic as proof that the
130
58, cc 1152-60.
131
58, cc 1568-70.
74
elimination of the death penalty liberated juries from the moral
dilemma of sentencing a non-murderer to death.132 The
numbers strongly suggest that the removal of the death penalty
did yield or, at the very least, contribute to a rise in rape
convictions. Yet if by the middle of the nineteenth century,
Britons were beginning to approach capital punishment
differently, could it be possible that there had also been a
changing understanding of rape? In addition to the removal of
the death penalty, could the rise have been buoyed by
continued changes in procedure, prosecution and treatment of
rape, changes that had had their roots in the transformations
discussed thus far?
In addition to the transforming legal and judicial
attitudes towards rape that have been discussed, popular
opinion was beginning to alter as well. Increasingly, rape was
seen as an abhorrent crime and the number of contexts and
victims which elicited this reaction also continued to increase.
The kind of riotous response generally inspired by labor
disputes or controversial government actions could now be
seen in communities touched by rape. In the summer of 1846,
four young men convicted of rape were scheduled for a prison
transfer between Appleby and Milbank, a distance of several
hundred miles. The news of their transfer reached the villages
en route. “Numbers of men, women and children…had
collected together to show their disgust at the heinous conduct
of the prisoners.” At Barnard Castle, the crowd became so
aggressive that the prisoners required the assistance of the
police to disperse the mob. Rumors from Darlington suggested
that the mob was prepared to attack the prisoners mid transport.
The Times commented that there was “no doubt…that some
personal violence would have been used towards the prisoners”
had they not been protected by the police.133
132
Judith Travers, “Cultural Meanings and Representations of Violence Against
Women, London 1790-1895" (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony
Brook, 1997), 153. Martin Wiener makes similar points in Men of blood. The
introduction to the online database of the Proceedings of the Central Criminal
Court repeats the argument.
133
75
In addition to a changing social perception about
rapists, the definition of the rape victim continued to broaden
after 1841. Only four years after the Punishment of Death bill
passed, a new judicial precedent was set in R. v. Camplin that
extended protection to intoxicated women. The defendant,
William Camplin, gave a young girl copious amounts of
alcohol, rendering her extremely drunk, and proceeded to have
sex with her. His counsel argued that no rape had been
committed as the girl did not adequately demonstrate a
struggle. “To constitute rape there must be actual force used,
and actual resistance to that force,” he stated.134 This line of
reasoning, the lawyer continued, had been accepted in prior
cases.
The jury was not swayed and convicted Camplin. His
lawyer appealed to the higher court, which upheld the
conviction. In their opinion, the Judges interpreted the rape
statute to define the crime as “ravishing a woman ‘where she
did not consent’ and not ravishing against her will.”135 The
Camplin ruling determined that proving a lack of consent, in its
broader definition, superseded the need to prove physical
resistance. This is a remarkable ruling whose goal remains to
be fulfilled. Nevertheless, by redefining the rape statute, it
opened the door for more prosecutions pursued by women who
may have previously felt like they had no recourse.
These patterns of change continued throughout the
nineteenth century. Though they are sometimes obstructed
from historical view by the numerous cases, trials and rulings
that were dismissive of victims and of the crime, these legal
and judicial changes altered, however slowly, the way rape was
treated and understood. The transformations continued to
progress over time, culminating in the remarkable work of
feminist historians, activists and leaders such as Susan
Brownmiller and Anna Clark. Bringing their early origins to
light became especially important to me after a particular
moment in the early conceptual stages of this thesis.
134
R.v Camplin, 169 Eng. Rep. 163.
135
R.v Camplin, 169 Eng. Rep. 163.
76
A few weeks into my research, I came across a series
of articles in the Philadelphia Daily News about a 2007 rape
case. The victim, a prostitute, had posted an advertisement for
sexual services on the website Craigslist. She was contacted by
the defendant, and they agreed to meet at an address he
provided. The defendant claimed it was his house, but it was
really an abandoned parking lot. They set the terms of the
agreement: $150 for one hour of sex. He asked if she would
also sleep with his friend for more money, and she agreed.
Instead of a friend, three additional men arrived, wielding a
gun. The victim tried to leave, but the men raped her anyway,
until a fifth man arrived and helped her flee.
The case was brought before Municipal Judge Teresa
Carr Deni by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office. At the
preliminary hearing, Deni dropped all rape and assault charges
against the defendant. The victim “consented and didn’t get
paid,” Deni said. “I thought this was a robbery.” The defendant
was instead charged with “theft of services.” When she was
interviewed by the Daily News reporter several days later, Deni
said “Did she tell you she had another client before she went to
report it? I thought rape was a trauma. [A case like this]
minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really
raped.”136 The language was sensationally clear: since the
victim was a prostitute, the only problem with her being
assaulted by a group of men at gunpoint was that she was not
paid. This was not a “real rape.”
At the time I read this case, I was buried under a
mountain of scanned articles from The Times covering rape
cases from the nineteenth century. Save the date and perhaps
the mention of Craigslist, was this Philadelphia case really all
that different from the pile that surrounded me?137 I realized
136
Jill Porter, “Hooker raped and robbed – by the criminal justice system?” The
Philadelphia Daily News, October 12, 2007.
137
In an eerie moment, hours after I read about this case, I came across a trial
discussed in Anna Clark’s Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence that was strikingly
similar. In 1824, when a woman raped by three men in front of a crowd of 100
admitted on the stand that she had taken money from the men in the past and
drank with them earlier in the day, her case was dismissed. The Times commented
77
that, one hundred, two hundred years from now, a student, a
historian who came across this story could convincingly come
to the conclusion that that twenty first century America was a
backwards, misogynist society, hostile to rape victims and their
suffering.
It was a sobering realization. On one hand, Deni’s
ruling and her lack of remorse or sympathy was difficult for me
to accept. On the other, I knew that such a conclusion about our
society would have been unfair, unfair to those who spent their
careers counseling rape victims, who worked tirelessly to
prosecute rape cases, who founded grassroots outreach
programs spreading awareness about sexual violence. I dug
deeper into this case, looking for the evidence of outrage and
protest I was expecting.
The first evidence came in the form of Jill Porter, the
Daily News columnist who found this story and brought it to
national attention. She called the ruling “an insult [and] more
evidence of the skepticism and contempt most rape victims --
prostitutes or not -- confront when they seek justice in
court.”138 Porter was not the only protestor to come forward.
Rick DeSipio, the prosecutor on the case, made his outrage
known. “For a judge to make a judgment on a human being --
I've never seen that before,” he told Porter. He also made it
clear that he was planning to reinstate the charges immediately.
A week after Porter broke the story, a grassroots
movement that called themselves “Deny Deni” organized an
effort to unseat the judge in the upcoming retention election.
The story attracted attention from national blogs and
organizations, including the National Organization for Women,
and Women Organized Against Rape. The Philadelphia Bar
Association reported an influx of calls and emails from all over
that “this transaction, though clearly not warranting a conviction against the
prisoners, was attended with circumstances indicating a state of manners and
morals which we should scarcely have suspected to exist in any part of the
country.” The Times, August 30, 1824, quoted in Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s
Violence, 73.
138
Jill Porter, “Hooker raped and robbed – by the criminal justice system?” The
Philadelphia Daily News, October 12, 2007.
78
the country. Jane Leslie Dalton, the Chancellor of the Bar
Association issued a rare public statement blasting Deni’s
treatment of the case. "The victim has been brutalized twice in
this case: first by the assailants, and now by the court,” Dalton
wrote. “Judge Deni's belief that because the victim had
originally intended to have sex for money and decided not to
because she didn't get paid posits that a woman cannot change
her mind about having sex, or withdraw her consent to do so,
regardless of the circumstances. We cannot imagine any
circumstances more violent or coercive than being forced to
have sex with four men at gunpoint."139
The efforts to unseat Deni were unsuccessful; it is
nearly impossible to remove a judge in a retention election.
Nevertheless, the movement and the case’s notoriety made
some slight electoral difference. Deni received only 66%
endorsement from the voters, whereas her peers generally
received 75% or higher.140 More importantly, the outrage
extended beyond the Philadelphia community and inspired
reaction from people nationwide. There was more to this case
than just the ruling.
Like nineteenth century England, American society
still has many misconceptions and biases about women and
about rape. Quite frequently, these biases seem to be exactly
the same ones. Yet it would be misleading to think that these
injustices overwhelm the voices of those who protest for
change, who promote progress. The outrage over Deni’s ruling
seems to have little in common with the protests discussed in
this thesis as they are reflective of the many social and cultural
differences between the two time periods. They come from
women in positions of power, of authority, from women who
have the capacity to organize. Yet, they also come from men,
139
Jill Porter, “Move afoot to unseat judge in rape ruling,” The Philadelphia
Daily News, October 24, 2007. Jill Porter, “Phila. Bar rips judge who nixed rape
of hooker,” The Philadelphia Daily News, October 31, 2007.
140
"2007 Municipal Election, Tuesday, November 06, 2007, Judge of the
Municipal Court: Judicial Retention, 1st Judicial District (Philadelphia County)",
Pennsylvania Department of State: Elections Information (website). Accessed
March 30, 2009.
79
from prosecutors such as DeSipio and from the many men who
joined in the grassroots protests.
The nineteenth century protests are important in their
own way. They are complicated: they come from men in
positions of power, they are intrinsically linked to political and
social motivations, they are sometimes constrained by notions
of patriarchy. Yet these legal and judicial changes created a
national discussion about rape, a widespread urge to talk about
and consider how the legal and judicial system treated and
understood rape. As in modern America, injustices in
nineteenth century England were met with protesting voices.
To forget these voices would be a great disservice to the
process of change, both then and now.
“EVERY WOMAN A MIGHTY ANGELA DAVIS”
80
“Every Woman a Mighty Angela Davis”:
Representations of Race, Class and Gender in
the “Free Angela” Campaign
EMMA HULSE
I
n November 1970, Jane Pirotin of the Bronx wrote a
few lines to Angela Davis, mailing her note to the
New York Women’s House of Detention in
Greenwich Village. “Dear Miss Davis,” she wrote,
“Who are you?” “I don’t mean to be rude by asking this
question,” she continued, “but I’ve heard or read everybody’s
side but yours.”1
From her arrest on charges of kidnapping, murder and
conspiracy in October 1970 to her acquittal in June 1972,
Angela Davis’ case attracted national and international
attention and prompted widespread debate about her politics.
Inevitably, Jane Pirotin’s deceptively simple question re-
emerged, even if a simple answer did not. Davis was already a
controversial figure at the time of her arrest. A professor of
political philosophy and a member of the Communist Party,
Davis first gained notoriety when the University of California
Board of Regents demanded her dismissal, citing her
involvement with the radical left. She was also a key figure in
Black Power circles, and played a central role in organizing the
campaign to defend prisoners George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo
and John W. Clutchette, popularly known as the Soledad
Brothers. When Jackson’s younger brother Jonathan staged a
takeover of a California courtroom in August 1970, the guns he
used were traced to Davis. Branded a domestic terrorist and a
threat to “law and order,” Davis immediately went into hiding,
1
Jane Pirotin. Letter to Angela Davis. 7 November 1970. National Alliance
Against Racist and Political Repression (U.S.), Angela Davis Defense Committee
Collection. Box 1, File 1. Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture. New
York, New York.
81
and the FBI subsequently placed her on its Most Wanted List.
When she was finally arrested in New York on October 13,
President Nixon congratulated J. Edgar Hoover on national
television. If Pirotin had addressed her question to the general
public, many Americans would have identified Davis as a
common criminal.
Countering this claim required that Davis’ supporters
construct their own answer to the question: “Who is Angela
Davis?” But in defending her political identity, the leftists who
organized the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis
(NUCFAD) deployed traditional gender imagery. NUCFAD
presented Davis as both a socialist revolutionary sister who
symbolized the resistance of all oppressed peoples as well as
the possibility of a new social order and an ideal Black sister
and mother in an imagined Black nation. Other supporters
transformed Davis from a sister to a lover; in popular
imagination, her beauty symbolized a sublime politics of
struggle, associating the desire for freedom with the desire for
sex.
Ultimately, the campaign to defend Davis became a
discursive space in which debates about the nature of
oppression and the definition of political community
intersected. The Davis case occurred at a particularly
contentious moment in recent American history. The social
movements of the 1960s—including civil rights, Black Power,
the anti-war movement and radical labor—had begun to
disintegrate, while conservative politicians’ call for a return to
“law and order” prefigured the rise of the New Right. The
emergence of feminism had challenged male domination of
political, social and economic institutions, provoking debate
about the role of women in the movement. In defending
Davis, leftists then sought to unify the New Left and defend the
visions of political community that gave their struggle its
millennial sense of urgency. The rhetorical and visual
representations of Davis constructed by her campaign reveal
how Communists and Black radicals sought resolve the
“woman question,” building a movement that could realize the
promise of the 1960s.
82
“The Epitome of Black Revolutionary Womanhood”: The
Political Life of Angela Davis
In 1994, Davis recalled being photographed by

Philippe Halsman for the cover of her autobiography. “When I
entered the studio, […] the first question he asked was whether
we had brought the black leather jacket,” she wrote. “He
assumed, it turned out, that he was to re-create with his camera
a symbolic visual representation of Black militancy: leather
jacket (uniform of the Black Panther Party), Afro hairdo, and
raised fist.”2 Davis and her editor, Toni Morrison, had to
persuade the fashion photographer to take a different approach.
The final portrait shows Davis in profile, gazing resolutely past
the viewer into the distance. Although she proudly displays her
Afro and gold hoop earrings, Davis hardly resembles a
feminine Huey Newton. Rather, she is serious and reserved, a
pensive visionary who looks to the future with quiet
determination in place of revolutionary fervor. If Halsman’s
original vision reflects the mainstream perception of Davis as a
violent, radical revolutionary, the final photo perfectly reflects
her more complex understanding of her political identity.
Davis saw her political work as the concrete realization
of her philosophical and intellectual interests, which ranged
from contemporary French literature to Marxism to Kantian
ethics. Indeed, Davis was primarily a philosopher rather than
an activist. Born into a middle-class African-American family
in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis received a scholarship from
the American Friends Service Committee to attend the left-
leaning Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village.
Davis subsequently studied French Literature at Brandeis,
developing a serious interest in philosophy by her senior year.
After graduation, she pursued this interest at the Frankfurt
Institute in Germany.
Prior to her return from Germany, Davis was only
intermittently involved in radical political groups, including
Advance, a socialist youth organization that Davis joined while
2
Angela Davis. “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia.” Critical Inquiry
21 1 (Autumn 1994). p. 41.
83
at Elizabeth Irwin. But Davis writes in her autobiography that
the rising tide of Black militancy inspired her to return to the
United States in 1967. After Congress passed the Voting Rights
Act in 1965, the southern civil rights movement appeared to
lose momentum. Frustrated with the slow pace of progress,
young radical members of organizations like the Congress for
Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) found inspiration in a
tradition of Black militancy rooted in Southern communities
and forcefully articulated by leaders like Malcolm X and
Robert F. Williams. In June of 1966, controversial SNCC
chairman Stokely Carmichael participated in the Meredith
March, an event coordinated by Martin Luther King’s Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to protest the
shooting of James Meredith at the outset of his own “March
Against Fear.” After spending a night in jail following an
altercation with a police officer, Carmichael declared: “This is
the twenty-seventh time that I’ve been arrested. I ain’t going to
jail no more. The only way we gonna stop them white men
from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’
now is Black Power!”3 SNCC subsequently expelled its white
members. Later the same year, two young students named
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the revolutionary
nationalist Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland.
Newton and Seale were inspired by the model of the SNCC-
organized Lowndes County Alabama Freedom Organization,
which used a black panther as its symbol. The Panthers drew
upon the model of national liberation struggles in Africa and
the communist regimes in Cuba and China to construct a
critique of urban inequality. Black militancy was matched by
rising skepticism of non-violence in the anti-war movement.
Davis found Black Power’s emphasis on political
power, racial identity and self-defense compelling, and she
sought out radical activists in southern California. Enrolling at
the University of California, San Diego to finish her graduate
studies under Herbert Marcuse, Davis gradually became
3
Peniel Joseph. Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black
Power in America. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006). p.142.
84
involved in Black Power circles. Unsure of whether she was
ready to commit to the Communist Party, Davis instead joined
the Black Panther Party, a circle of young leftist intellectuals,
which later became the Los Angeles branch of the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.4 The new chapter of
SNCC organized against police violence, publishing pamphlets
and establishing a “liberation school” headed by Davis, which
provided training in community organizing skills as well as
workshops on such topics as anti-colonialism and Black
radicalism.
Davis writes in her autobiography that she eventually
became disillusioned with both the lack of discipline and the
pervasive violence in both revolutionary and cultural
nationalist groups, catalyzed in part by the FBI’s
COINTELPRO initiative. Davis was particularly frustrated
with leaders who criticized active women for their leadership,
describing such activism as a “matriarchal coup d’état” intent
on robbing black men “of their manhood.”5 The expulsion of
Communist Franklin Alexander from the L.A. SNCC hastened
her disillusionment. The organization subsequently collapsed,
and Davis, who had been deeply impressed by Franklin and his
wife, Kendra, joined the Che-Lumumba Club, a Black
Communist group, and the Communist Party shortly thereafter.
The Che-Lumumba Club continued to actively protest
police violence, the imprisonment of BPP leaders and unequal
prison conditions. In early 1970, the organization was asked to
participate in a meeting to discuss the case of the Soledad
Brothers - George Jackson, John Clutchette and Fleeta
Drumgo. Davis attended the meeting. Moved by the stories of
the three “brothers,” all Black prisoners who were accused of
4
This group was unaffiliated with the Oakland-based Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense. In fact, the Los Angeles BPP was forced to change its name after
members of Huey Newton’s party violently objected to the organization’s use of
the name. James Forman of SNCC brokered a compromise between the two
groups. Davis later worked in conjunction with the LA branch of the BPP, but she
was never a member.
5
Angela Davis. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. 2nd Edition. (New York:
International Publishers, 1988). p.181.
85
killing a guard, she agreed to serve on the defense committee.
As she fought to retain her job at UCLA, Davis became
increasingly involved in the campaign, speaking on behalf of
the Soledad Brothers at all her public appearances and
coordinating protests and rallies to support their cause. She
began to correspond with Jackson, with whom she discussed
the challenges of liberation and questions of revolutionary
duty. As they fell in love, Davis grew close to Jackson’s
family, particularly his seventeen-year-old brother, Jonathan.
On the morning of August 7, 1970, Jonathan entered a
courtroom in Marin County. A Black inmate from San Quentin,
where his brother was imprisoned, was on trial for the
attempted stabbing of a prison guard. Revealing a set of
concealed weapons, Jonathan took over the courtroom, arming
the prisoner and two other inmates serving as witnesses, and
taking the judge, district attorney, and three jurors hostage.
When he loaded the hostages into the van waiting outside, San
Quentin prison guards opened fire. Two of the prisoners, the
presiding judge, and Jonathan Jackson were killed in the
shootout that followed. Although most concluded that Jonathan
sought freedom for his brother, he made no demands before his
death nor did he name accomplices.
Although Davis was not present on August 7, four of
the guns Jonathan carried with him were registered in her
name. Three had been purchased in Los Angeles and were
stored in a facility owned by the Che-Lumumba Club. Davis
had purchased the fourth just days before the takeover, giving it
to Jonathan for safekeeping. Her defense would later argue that
Jonathan could have easily accessed the Che-Lumumba
storeroom, and that Davis had purchased the fourth gun after
receiving hate mail and death threats. Unquestionably, Davis
was a militant: she was committed to Black Power’s insistence
on the right of self-defense, and her political rhetoric frequently
drew upon the military language and imagery typically used by
radicals during the era. But Davis was also a careful political
strategist who had worked through established legal and
political channels to maintain her job at the University of
California, protest police violence in Los Angeles, and organize
86
the Soledad Brothers defense. Given that the campaign had
gained momentum in the summer of 1970 - the brothers’ legal
team had recently won a change of venue - it seems unlikely
that she would have supported or encouraged Jonathan’s
desperate plan. But the evidence was enough to draw the
attention of the state, and prosecutors charged her with
kidnapping, murder and conspiracy. Davis quickly went into
hiding.
After Davis’ arrest and extradition to California in
December 1970, a group of fellow communists led by Fania
Davis, Kendra and Franklin Alexander, Charlene Mitchell and
Bettina Aptheker, the daughter of Communist historian Herbert
Aptheker, organized a committee to coordinate her defense.
Over the course of the next two years, this small group led
fundraising efforts, conducted legal research, solicited support
and organized local chapters. Davis herself also contributed
significantly to the construction of the campaign and defense-,
meeting with her lawyers and advisers on a daily basis while in
prison. The legal team included attorneys experienced in the
defense of both communists and Black radicals, and they
consistently argued that Davis would never have been charged
if she were not a communist. Situating her within a long history
of prosecution of leftists, Davis’ supporters portrayed her as a
universal symbol of oppression and resistance. In the process,
Davis was transformed into a political icon: from a quiet
intellectual to a militant revolutionary, complete with black
leather jacket and raised fist.
“Brother and Sister Citizens”: Angela Davis as Revolutionary

Sister
Hundreds of messages of support are filed in the

records of the National United Committee to Free Angela
Davis (NUCFAD). Many are the work of schoolchildren from
East Germany. Others are form postcards printed with a white
rose, all mailed to Davis by French leftists. Some are in
Spanish, others in Italian. One especially common design is a
birthday card for Davis, printed in English. The illustration on
the front shows her in her prison cell, gazing out the window
87
and gripping the bars. Below her a mass of protestors are
assembled: they are white and black, bearing red banners that
match Davis’ dress. The prisoner smiles slightly, both hopeful
and determined. Inside, a W.E.B. Du Bois quote reminds the
reader that “the cost of liberty is less than the price of
repression.”6
Although the National United Committee to Free
Angela Davis (NUCFAD) was founded shortly after she was
arrested in New York, it was not until after the court rejected
her bail plea in June 1971 that the committee began to seriously
organize supporters. In a pamphlet published after Davis’
acquittal, campaign organizers Fania Davis and Franklin and
Kendra Alexander, radicals who were close to Davis both
personally and politically, recalled that the defeat forced them
to recognize that they were building “too narrow” a base of
support. Learning from the mistakes of defense campaigns for
other Black militants, particularly those of the Black Panther
Party, they took their case to organizations outside of Black
radical circles, including “conscientious church groups, peace
organizations, progressive professional organizations of
doctors, lawyers and teachers, women’s groups (and) fraternal
groups.”7 Peniel Joseph estimates that 200 local defense
committees in the United States and 67 international sections
were eventually formed.8 In the fall of 1971, the Angela Davis
Legal Defense Fund, under the leadership of actor Ossie Davis,
was established in New York to address the campaign’s
financial needs. Campaign organizers acknowledged that both
the leadership and membership of these groups did not
sympathize with Davis’ radical politics, but they sought their
support on the basis of “their serious concern for the rights and
6
Birthday Card sent to Angela Davis. National Alliance Against Racist and
Political Repression (U.S.) Angela Davis Defense Committee Collection. Box 1,
File 3, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York, New York.
7
National Committee to Free Angela Davis, Pamphlet. p. ix. Angela Davis Legal
Defense Collection. Box 5, File 3.
8
Power in America. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006) p. 274.
88
interests of brother and sister citizens,”9 hoping to build a larger
and more diverse mass movement.
The campaign’s appeal to a wider audience required
reframing Davis’ case in terms accessible to individuals from a
wide range of liberal and radical perspectives outside of Black
militant circles. Consistently arguing that the government’s
case was primarily political, campaign organizers emphasized
that Davis was a victim of “triple jeopardy,” targeted because
of her identity as an African-American, a Communist and a
woman. Her cause was relevant to more than just radicals or
prisoners. Rather, Davis was a symbol of the oppression of all
people of color, including Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, all
members of the New and Old Left, and all women. The
NUCFAD petition for her release on bail emphasizes the
diversity of her appeal:
We are Black and Brown; we are Red and White; we are farm
laborers, housewives and of the unemployed; we are students, artists
and professionals. We are of all religious faiths and of none; we hold
varied political beliefs; we are committed to no single political
persuasion. We are, however, of one mind in regard to Angela
Davis: We believe Angela Davis to be innocent of the charges of
kidnapping and murder. 10
Davis represented “the people,” but she was not unique. The
fight to free her then became a symbolic struggle for freedom
everywhere, hence the motto, “Free Angela, Free Ourselves.”
In this context, freedom had two distinct meanings. One was
Davis’ physical freedom, as well as her right to the legal
protection guaranteed to all American citizens. The other was
liberation: the end of all political and economic oppression.
The definition of “freedom” chosen by supporters tended to
reflect their particular “political persuasion.” Indeed, it was
precisely the elasticity of “triple jeopardy” that made it such a
powerful organizing tool.
Although the campaign never found a steady source of
funding, it succeeded in building a broad-based coalition of
9
Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour, p. ix.
10
National Committee to Free Angela Davis. “Freedom for Angela Davis.”
Angela Davis Legal Defense Collection. Box 4, File 12.
89
support, particularly within the larger African-American
community. Much of this support pre-dated the shift in
strategy. Non-militant civil rights leaders such as Ralph
Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
and Coretta Scott King issued statements just prior to the bail
hearing in June 1971, suggesting that the Angela Davis case
represented the continued need for reform to ensure that
African-Americans receive fair and equal treatment under the
law. Describing the trial as a political case, Abernathy
particularly noted the larger relevance of the bail issue for the
African-American community. “The granting of Miss Davis’
right to bail would be a symbolic step toward the needed
reform of the whole system of bail,” he wrote, “which in reality
is a system of ransom for the black and poor.” 11 Abernathy
downplayed Davis’ significance as an individual, describing
her as a “young black woman” instead of a “Black woman
Communist,” the standard set of descriptors used by the
campaign. Nor did he capitalize the word “black,” reflecting
his distance from Black radical circles. But his logic was clear:
to free Angela is to free all “black and poor” Americans.
Although King was careful to avoid commenting on
the facts of the case, repeatedly describing Davis as
“controversial” or “unpopular,” her statement more closely
reflects the campaign’s rhetoric of “triple jeopardy.” “Angela
Davis is Black, she is a woman militant and, finally, an
acknowledged Communist,” King wrote. “Prejudice is a reflex
in the face of these facts, but our laws are intended to protect
precisely against such prejudice.” 12 But King did not view the
Davis trial as evidence of intersecting forms of oppression.
Rather, she focused on the legal challenges facing Davis,
depicting them as the product of “triple bigotry.” Making
passing reference to “the agonizing inquisitions of the early
fifties,” she cautiously advanced the claim that Davis, like
other “unpopular” figures during the McCarthy era, had been
11
Dr. Ralph David Abernathy. “Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Statement.” 2 June 1971. Angela Davis Legal Defense Collection. Box 4, File 12.
12
Angela Davis. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (London:
Orbach and Chambers, 1972.) p. 258.
90
denied her “basic American rights” to freedom of speech and
due process. The use of the word “American” reflects the Civil
Rights Movement’s concern with extending full citizenship to
African-Americans. “If her Blackness, her womanhood and her
politics are being judged, and not the crime charged,” King
continued, “then all Americans will lose some of their liberties
along with her.” The integrity of citizenship, King suggested,
was under attack. Her statement then illustrates the flexibility
of the campaign’s rhetoric.
Given their membership in the Communist party, it is
not surprising that campaign organizers also sought to build a
basis of support in the labor movement. “We had (initially)
failed to appreciate the extent to which Angela’s prosecution
was a class prosecution,” they wrote. “We realized that any
kind of serious defense effort could not possibly be mounted
without well-organized working class support.”13 But the
challenge of constructing a diverse coalition to fight racism had
special significance within the labor movement, where
questions of race had a contentious history. In seeking union
support, NUCFAD members articulated a vision of a more
expansive and radical trade unionism. In a speech to the 20th
National Convention of the Communist Party, Charlene
Mitchell spoke on the importance of the campaign to the
working class, arguing “that masses of people, the working
class, Black and white, the liberation movements in our
country, all joined together, can reverse the present reactionary,
racist, repressive trend.”14 In Mitchell’s view, Davis’
imprisonment can be attributed to the fact that “she is a Black
woman and a Communist” who was attempting to organize
“the exploited and impoverished working masses” into “a
united movement for fundamental change.”15 Davis was not
just a symbol of repression; she was also a symbol of resistance
13
National Committee to Free Angela Davis, Pamphlet. p. X. Angela Davis Legal
Defense Collection. Box 5, File 3
14
Charlene Mitchell. “The Fight to Free Angela Davis: Its importance for the
working class.” February 1972. National Alliance Against Racist and Political
Repression (U.S.) Angela Davis Defense Committee Collection. Box, 3 File 5.
15
Ibid.
91
to “Nixon’s economic policies […] increased productivity,
mass unemployment, increased budgets for wars of imperialist
aggression abroad and more and more repression at home,” all
issues of concern to labor.
But Mitchell admitted that “the working class as a
whole has not seen the need to throw its organized weight into
support of a sister trade unionist,” attributing this failure to
racism. White communists, she argued, should work to convert
white workers to the cause of all political prisoners. It followed
that to fight for Angela Davis was not only to fight for the
rights of workers, but for a “united movement” within existing
unions and the creation of a broader class-based movement as
well. Mitchell suggested that Davis would be freed when this
more perfect union, the only force that could halt “designs on
the rights of all workers,” was achieved. Consequently, her
“freedom opens the door to the extension of (fundamental
human) rights to all who live in the United States.”
Unions with a tradition of radicalism supported this
vision of a new trade unionism. They issued statements of
support linking the repression of Black militancy with that of
militant labor. The International Longshoreman and
Warehousemen’s Union, an historical ally of the Communist
party and an active participant in the anti-war movement, was
one of the first unions to offer its support, declaring that “when
President Nixon […] and the big money press incite the legal
lynching of Angela Davis, experience and common sense tell
us to beware.” 16 “It could well be us ‘next time around,’” they
continued, concluding that “we defend ourselves by defending
Angela Davis.” In a pamphlet on “Labor’s Stake in the Fight to
Free Angela Davis,”17 the Chicago-based National
Coordinating Committee for Trade Union Action and
16
International Longshoreman and Warehousemen’s Union, 19th Biennial
Convention in Honolulu, Statement. Angela Davis Legal Defense Collection. Box
4, File 12.
17
National Coordinating Committee for Trade Union Action and Democracy.
“Labor’s Stake in the Fight to Free Angela Davis.” National Alliance Against
Racist and Political Oppression (U.S.), Angela Davis Defense Committee
Collection. Box 3, File 5
92
Democracy compared Davis to the Molly Maguires and the
Haymarket “Victims.” But the pamphlet’s authors also argued
that Davis’ case was not just a prominent example of
government repression; it was “proof positive” of the attempt
by government and business “to shore up the walls of racism
which the rank and file in the labor movement, and the
Freedom movement, are beginning to weaken.”
These radical unions agreed with Mitchell that unity
was necessary to mount an effective counterattack. Willie Fant,
Chairman of the Lordstown United Auto Workers, sent an open
letter to Davis that insisted labor must “educate and unite for a
common goal.”18 “We are brothers in an unpopular family,” he
wrote. “Our race is colorless, our creed is humanity, our
struggle is survival.” Depicting the diverse groups that
supported Davis as “brothers in an unpopular family” suggests
that the elastic rhetoric of “triple jeopardy” actually reflects a
clearly defined, if unstated, social vision. NUCFAD organizers
saw the campaign as an opportunity to unite the American left,
establishing the foundations of a powerful coalition for radical
change. In this radical family, there would be no more racism
or class tension. Davis symbolized the possibility of such a
society, resolving the apparent tensions between race, class and
gender in her academic and political work, ultimately finding
coherence in communism. In short, she was the ideal
“revolutionary sister.”
But “sisterhood” was understood to refer to the
universal experience of the oppressed rather than the particular
experiences of women. Despite the prominence of the
emerging women’s movement, feminism never became a
prominent theme in the campaign’s rhetoric. NUCFAD did
receive support from prominent feminist leaders. Gloria
Steinem served as a treasurer for an emergency fundraising
appeal in late 1971, and NOW president Aileen Hernandez,
herself a woman of color, issued a statement of support that
clearly drew upon “triple jeopardy” even before the failure of
the bail plea. “Angela Davis is a woman; she is Black; she has
18
Fant, Willie. Letter of Support for Angela Davis. Angela Davis Legal Defense
Collection. Box 4, File 12.
93
espoused an unpopular political cause,” Hernandez said,
reversing the usual order of descriptors in order to emphasize
Davis’ identity as a woman. Returning to the theme of civil
rights and citizenship, she connected the Angela Davis case
with NOW’s mission, asserting that “that equal rights under the
law must be guaranteed to every person, regardless of creed,
color or sex.” 19
Hernandez was an exception. The woman’s movement
did not unite behind Angela Davis, nor did the campaign
actively seek the support of feminists. In an oft repeated
anecdote, Frances Beal, the president of the Third World’s
Women’s Alliance, a Black feminist organization that emerged
out of SNCC, recalled interacting with NOW members at a
“Liberation Day” parade. TWWA members carried signs to
demonstrate their support for Davis. One NOW member
objected, insisting that “Davis has nothing to do with women’s
liberation.”20 Beal replied, “It has nothing to do with the kind
of liberation you’re talking about … but it has everything to do
with the kind of liberation we’re talking about.” Whether or not
this incident took place, it illustrates the schism in the feminist
movement between white feminists and radical feminists of
color, as well as the split between feminists and Black radicals,
who were critical of the women’s movement’s exclusive focus
on gender. Militants argued that women’s liberation could only
take place if racial and economic repression were addressed
first, insisting on unity between men and women within the
Black community. Even Davis, who later became a prominent
feminist scholar, was critical of feminism in the early 1970s. In
the 1988 introduction to a second edition of her autobiography,
Davis wrote that at the time she was “vehemently opposed to
the notion, developed within the young women’s liberation
movement, which […] equated things personal with things
political,” believing that it diminished the magnitude of the
oppression experienced by communities of color by equating it
19
San Francisco California Sun-Reporter “NOW Issues Statement of Support.”
January 30, 1971. Box 4, File 17. Angela Davis Legal Defense Collection.
20
Kimberley Springer. Living for Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations,
1968-1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). p. 89
94
with the challenges facing middle and upper-class white
women.
These divisions perhaps explain the failure of the
Angela Davis campaign to articulate a coherent critique of
sexism. Yet by the time the campaign was underway, an
independent Black feminist movement had emerged. In 1970
Beal authored an essay titled “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black
and Female,” arguing that Black women were victims of two
intersecting forms of oppression, sexism and racism. She later
expanded “double” to “triple jeopardy” to acknowledge the
legacy of colonialism. Beal concluded that Black women’s
experience was distinct from that of Black men. But although
the Davis defense echoed the notion of “triple jeopardy” in its
description of Davis as a “Black woman communist,” its
organizers emphasized that Davis’ case was important
precisely because she represented a universal rather than a
unique identity. Ultimately, in depicting Davis as a
“revolutionary sister,” the campaign denied the possibility of
sisterhood.
“Righteous Revolutionary Sisterhood”: Angela Davis as Black

Sister
Among the messages of support stowed in the

NUCFAD archive is a piece of red paper, folded in half and
printed with a portrait of Davis. The subject faces the viewer,
her large eyes and full lips accentuated by the curving black
lines of the print. The artist has chosen to emphasize her Afro,
rendered in dense curlicues, and her tunic, printed with
African-inspired motifs. The viewer is reminded that Davis is
not simply a beautiful woman, she is also an African woman.
Upon opening the card, one is presented with a quote from
Davis herself: “As a black woman I feel an urgent need to find
radical solutions”21.
21
Card sent to Angela Davis. National Alliance Against Racist and Political
Oppression (U.S.), Angela Davis Defense Committee Collection. Box 1, File 3.
Italics added for emphasis.
95
As this portrait suggests, not all of Davis’ supporters
would have agreed with Willie Fant’s assertion that radicals
became “colorless” in the struggle for survival. For Black
radicals, Angela was not just a universal symbol of resistance
to monolithic capitalist repression. Her case was also
representative of a specifically racial history of oppression and
resistance. “Angela is a symbol of what that ruling class would
do to all Blacks if the chance presented itself,” wrote Howard
Moore, Davis’ attorney. “The use of Angela as a symbol – a
sort of latter day Harriet Tubman leading her people through
the ideological thicket of bourgeois democracy- is a
manifestation of the long struggle in the United States between
Black-led progressive forces and white-led forces of reaction.”
22
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black radicals saw

signs of “white reaction” in the prosecution of prominent Black
Power leaders, including Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, Ericka
Huggins, Bobby Seale and the Soledad Brothers. They pointed
to these cases as proof that the law was not a force for justice,
but rather a tool used to silence those who threatened the social
order. They correctly surmised that law enforcement,
particularly the FBI’s COINTELPRO initiative, sought to
destroy Black Power organizations, creating mistrust and
isolating leaders through a campaign of counterintelligence.
The result was a sense of siege within Black radical circles.
The political character of the prosecution’s charge that Davis
had participated in a violent conspiracy to free the Soledad
Brothers reinforced the sense that she was the next victim of a
dominant culture set on dismantling the achievements of the
Black Liberation Movement.
The Black Scholar, a radical journal published in
Oakland, was quick to make the connection after Davis’ arrest.
In a statement of support originally published in November
1970, the editors described Davis as a “a fugitive from
injustice, from a vicious and systematic campaign to crush her
spirit, her blackness.”23 The editors also linked her case with
22
Angela Davis. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. pp. 203-4.
23
Ibid p. 250.
96
the plight of the African-American community. “The wintry
forces of oppression,” they continued, “have gathered for
systematic attack against the Black liberation movement-
against campus, community and vanguard.”24 In another
statement of support, the New York-based Black Women for
the Freedom of Angela Davis extended this narrative of
repression “back over 300 years to the first African brought to
these shores. From the Constitution and the slave codes to the
Rap Brown conspiracy statutes,” they continue, “the law has
often been used to enslave, not protect us.” 25 Angela, Ericka,
George and Huey were not just imprisoned: they were
enslaved. This rhetoric locates the Angela Davis case firmly
within a Black militant discourse, departing from the vision of
a “colorless” alliance of all oppressed peoples articulated by
Willie Fant and Charlene Mitchell.
Given that many of its leaders were also involved in
the Soledad Brothers campaign, it is perhaps unsurprising that
NUCFAD connected Davis’ case with the plight of Black
political prisoners and the African-American community. If
They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, a collection
of writings edited by Bettina Aptheker and Davis, illustrates the
extent to which even the Communist campaign organizers drew
from Black militant thinking about repression, political
prisoners and the prison system itself. In fact, Aptheker wrote
in her memoir that members of the committee emphasized this
line of argument over the objection of Communist Party
leadership, who wanted to disassociate Davis from the Soledad
Brothers.26 Although intended as an organizing tool for
NUCFAD, the selections focused on the cases of other political
prisoners and discussed issues connected with prison reform
and rebellion at some length. Davis appeared as the author of
two of these essays, but as an editor allotted limited space for
24
Ibid p. 251.
25
Black Women for the Freedom of Angela Davis. Statement in Support of
Angela Davis. 28 May 1971. Angela Davis Legal Defense Collection. Box 4, File
17.
26
Bettina Aptheker. Intimate Politics: How I grew up red, fought for free speech,
and became a feminist rebel. (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006.) pp. 245-248.
97
essays concerned exclusively with her case and campaign.
Davis and Aptheker repeatedly reminded the reader that Angela
was politically significant not because of her individual
accomplishments but rather because she represented the
challenges facing all prison inmates, especially people of color.
But Angela, George, Ericka and Huey were not simply
victims of government repression. Rather, If They Come in the
Morning emphasizes that they are also symbols of resistance,
both within prisons and in the Black community. Such a
depiction follows logically from the claim that these cases were
political rather than criminal. But the seemingly slight shift in
emphasis linked the liberation of Davis with the liberation of
the wider African-American community. In an essay describing
the campaign, Fania Davis and Franklin and Kendra Alexander,
coordinators of NUCFAD, wrote that the stories of prisoners
were “a part of the history of the power of a people who have
resisted so long that resistance is a way of life.”27 By rewriting
the history of government repression of Black radicals as a
“history of the power of a people,” the leaders of the campaign
suggested that resistance was not simply a struggle against
oppression. It was also the first stage in the struggle for a racial
revolution. The Black Scholar’s statement of support, reprinted
in the collection, echoes this assertion. Referring to its claim
that the prosecution of Davis reflected the “systematic attack”
of the “wintry forces of oppression […] against campus,
community and vanguard,” the editors suggested that Davis
was a metaphor for all three. “When we support her,” they
continued, “we support ourselves. Her struggle is our struggle,
and her victory shall be our victory.” 28 Although this quote
echoes the motto “Free Angela, Free Ourselves,” used by all
supporters of the Davis campaign, the possessive pronoun in
this statement refers not to the “colorless” oppressed masses
but rather specifically to the Black community.
In this militant narrative of the case, Davis remained a
“sister” to all oppressed peoples, but as a member of the
African-American campus, community and vanguard, she was
27
Angela Davis. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. p. 243.
28
Ibid p. 251.
98
primarily a Black sister. Davis herself emphasized the primacy
of her racial identity. In an interview published in Muhammad
Speaks, she explained that her Communist beliefs flowed from
her commitment to her community. “Before anything else,” she
said, “I am a Black woman. I dedicated my life to the struggle
for the liberation of Black people - my enslaved, imprisoned
people.”29 Davis also insisted that she not be viewed as an
exceptional figure, that her struggle not be “individualized.”30
In her autobiography, published after her acquittal, Davis
devoted great attention to the status of the African-American
community in Birmingham, where she grew up. “I had always
thought it was fortuitous that I was among those who had
escaped the worst,” she writes. “One small twist of fate and I
might have drowned in the muck of poverty and disease and
illiteracy […] That is why I never felt I had the right to look
upon myself as being different from my sisters and brothers
who did all the suffering, for all of us.”31 Davis’ use of the
word “sister” emphasizes the shared historical experience of
oppression in communities of color.
Davis also defined “sisterhood” as shared struggle for
freedom. In her autobiography, she frequently compared
women like her grandmother and mother to historical “sisters,”
such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, who also sought
to liberate an “enslaved” people. Indeed, Davis herself was
frequently linked with these figures. In a speech given in Cuba
in 1971, Joseph North described her as “a black woman,
beautiful and brilliant and brave, rising in 1970 in the tradition
of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, a tribute to her
people.” 32 These comparisons suggested that certain elements
of the Black female experience, namely oppression and
resistance, were universal. Embedded within this depiction of
29
National United Committee to Free Angela Davis. Reprint of interview from
Muhammad Speaks. National Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression
(U.S.), Angela Davis Defense Committee Collection. Box 3, File 5.
30
Angela Davis. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. p. 28.
31
Ibid p. 293.
32
North, Joseph. Speech in Defense of Angela Davis. Angela Davis Legal
Defense Collection. Box 4, File 17.
99
Black womanhood was an understanding of the African
American community as a nation: a transcendent unity defined
by equality between freedmen and slaves, men and the woman.
Like the union leaders who sought a more expansive and
inclusive trade unionism, Black radicals sought to make this
imaginary community a political reality. Defending Sister
Angela was simply the first step.
“Mother of Inspiration”: Angela Davis as Revolutionary

Mother
Although supporters sent Davis hundreds of cards bearing

her image, others purchased greeting cards or used standard
stationary to convey their messages. One of the most unusual
was printed by the Black Panther Party’s Ministry of Culture.
The card bears the image of a woman holding her child. The
figures are not recognizable. The kerchief that veils the
woman’s hair obscures her face, while her son buries his head
in her shoulder, hiding every feature but his close-cut curls.
But a reminder of violent struggle infuses this apparently
innocent scene of maternal care and protection with
revolutionary meaning. The child’s arm is draped over his
mother’s shoulder: in his hand he holds a tiny toy gun. A
Vietnamese proverb, “We will fight from one generation to the
next,” marks the child as a future soldier in the struggle for
liberation.33 In turn, the mother is recast as a surrogate for
revolution.
Angela Davis was not always portrayed as Harriet
Tubman or Sojourner Truth. Despite the egalitarian character
of the Black nation envisioned by radicals, gendered
conceptions of the social order shaped their understanding of
the role of women in the revolution. In an essay that
distinguishes between three currents in African-American
thought – inclusionist (integrationist), autonomist (separatist)
and transformationalist – Leith Mullings describes the
patriarchal assumptions embedded within ideologies of Black
33
Card sent to Angela Davis. National Alliance Against Racist and Political
100
liberation. Both the inclusionist and autonomist traditions “seek
gender privileges within the dominant paradigm: to claim for
African American men the privileges of manhood and to seek
for African American women the protections of patriarchy
denied to them by the dominant culture.”34 “The final product
of both strategic visions,” she later concludes, “is a patriarchal
model of gender roles in which masculinity is defined by the
dependence of women.”35 In contrast, the transformative model
seeks to remake the “dominant paradigm,” linking the creation
of a more just society with the abolition of patriarchy. Mullings
names Davis as a central figure in the transformative tradition.
But the vision of social change articulated by the Davis
campaign cannot be easily categorized. Although its insistence
on liberation for all oppressed peoples was certainly
transformative, its understanding of the African American
community as a transcendent unity bore the imprint of
autonomist traditions. Moreover, the liberation of the black
man frequently served as a metaphor for both the manumission
of Angela Davis and that of the wider African American
community. In “Toward the United Front,” an essay published
in If They Come in the Morning, George Jackson explicitly
linked the attempt to build a broad coalition in defense of
political prisoners with the reassertion of Black masculinity.
Jackson praised the “new unitarian and progressive current in
the movement, centering around political prisoners,” arguing
that it represented “a “search” for that something in common, a
conscious reaching for the relevant, the entente, and in our case
especially the reconcilable.”36 This “search” for something in
common reflected the campaign’s attempt to unify African-
Americans, workers and women. “At the end of this massive
collective struggle,” he continued, “we will uncover our new
man, he is a creation of the process, the future, he will be better
equipped to wage the real struggle, the permanent struggle after
34
Leith Mullings. On Our Own Terms: Race, Class and Gender in the Lives of
African American Women. (New York: Routledge, 1997). p. 137.
35
Ibid p. 149.
36
Angela Davis. If They Come in the Morning. p.160.
101
the revolution- the one for new relationships between man.”37
Jackson named “the factory and union agitator,” “the campus
activist” and the lumpen-proletarian intellectuals as the groups
that must be united to bring this “new man” into existence,
neglecting to explicitly identify women as necessary
contributors to the struggle.
Such rhetoric was not unique to the Angela Davis
campaign. Both the Black Liberation Movement and the New
Left imagined liberation as the realization of repressed
masculinity. From Ossie Davis’ eulogy for Malcolm X, to
images of an armed and assertive Huey Newton, to Bob
Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” an obsession with the creation
of the “new man” defined the radical movements of the late
1960s and early 1970s. But this vision of a “new man” who
makes “new relationships” did not correspond to a vision of a
“new woman.” Rather, the liberation of Black women was
defined solely in relation to that of Black men. Women were
expected to contribute as mothers, lovers, wives and sisters,
providing the support and inspiration Black men needed to
continue the struggle. Power imbalances between male and
female members were most obvious in cultural nationalist
organizations such as Maulana Karenga’s US. Karenga, who
called for African-Americans to reject European-American
culture and return to “African” cultural principles, posited a
model of “complementary” relationships in which “a man has
to be a leader” and the woman submits, embracing her duty “to
inspire her man, educate their children and participate in social
development.”38 Eldridge Cleaver, BPP member and author of
Soul of Ice, went so far as to claim that creating the “new man”
required violently reasserting control over the female body. By
the early 1970s, the BPP had embraced rhetorical sexual
equality, but sexual harassment and abuse was rampant
amongst both membership and leadership. Most importantly,
the “new man” remained the paradigm for revolutionary
37
Ibid p.165.
38
Tracye Matthews, “'No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution
Is': Gender and the Politics of the Black Panther Party 1966-1971.” The Black
Panther Party Reconsidered. (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998). p. 272.
102
leadership: female party leaders like Elaine Brown recalled
consciously projecting an image of masculine militancy to
secure their authority. Ultimately, the “Unitarian logic” of
Black radicalism was a “patriarchal logic.”
The nature of Black motherhood was one of the most
contentious debates within radical Black circles. This debate
had its origins in the 1965 Moynihan Report, which depicted
the Black family as a “deviant” matriarchal unit and “the
principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or
antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to
perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.”39 Ironically,
while Black radicals rejected Moynihan’s integrationist
paradigm, they accepted his logic when it came to family
relations. Black matriarchs, they argued, prevented the
realization of the “new man” - and hence the new Black nation
- by “feminizing” their sons. In a letter to Davis published in
Soledad Brother, which was released shortly after her arrest,
George Jackson articulated this claim:
When generalizing about black women I could never include you in any
of it that is not complimentary. But my mother at one time tried to make
a coward of me, she did the same with Jon. … I am reasonably certain
that I can draw from every black male in this country some comments
to substantiate that his mother, the black female, attempted to aid his
survival by discouraging his violence or by turning it inward. The
blacks of slave society, U.S.A., have always been a matriarchal sub-
society. The implication is clear, black mama is going to have to put a
sword in that brother’s hand and stop that “Be a good boy” shit.
Channel his spirit instead of break it, or help to break it I should say.40
Jackson’s statements apparently frustrated Davis, because he

was forced to clarify them in another letter. “I was leading up
to the obvious fact that black women in this country are far
more aggressive than black males.”41 “By default,” he
concluded, “she dominates the black subculture, and her son
must be the catalyst in any great changes that go down in this
39
Leith Mullings. On Our Own Terms: Race, Class and Gender in the Lives of
African American Women. p. 117.
40
George Jackson. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. (New
York: Bantam Books, 1970). p. 217.
41
Ibid p. 229.
103
country.”42 Jackson believed that “if the black mother wants
her revenge” against her oppressors, she had to teach her sons
to fight, channeling her aggressive instincts into her son. But
the son, not the mother, needed to take responsibility for
enacting this revenge. Consequently, Jackson suggested that
the enslavement of the African-American community would
only end when the Black man asserted himself over mother and
slave master, dismantling both the African-American
“matriarchal sub-society” and the wider “slave society, U.S.A.”
While many Black women vehemently denied the
claim that Black mothers perpetuated the oppression of the
African-American community, they still defined their political
significance in terms of their relationship with Black men. The
organizers of the Angela Davis campaign were no exception.
“A Call to Black Women of Every Religious and Political
Persuasion,” a statement reprinted in If They Come in the
Morning, appeals to Black women to support Angela Davis in
the name of the Black family. “We must unite for the sake of
our children and our men,” the statement reads. “They are
subtly being separated and divided from us by the double-
edged sword of a white myth called “Black Matriarchy.”43 This
call for unity echoes Jackson’s description of the need for a
“Unitarian and progressive current” in the movement. Black
women’s love for the Black nation was the “something in
common” that allowed for “entente.” Citing Sojourner Truth
and Harriet Tubman as inspiration, the writers continued:
“Motherhood must mean more than giving birth to a child, and
sisterhood more than being born into a relationship. We all
share a common destiny and will no longer allow the
destruction of our labor … the Black family.”44 Motherhood
and sisterhood were not just personal relationships: they
provided a model for political organization. Although equating
the Black family with the African-American community
established a clearly defined political role for women, it also
denied their subjectivity as independent political actors. One’s
42
Ibid pp. 229-230.
43
Angela Davis. If They Come in the Morning. p. 256.
44
Ibid p. 257.
104
own liberation could only be achieved by acting through a
Black man—whether son, brother, lover or husband.
Despite the egalitarian character of the new social
order envisioned by NUCFAD organizers, such rhetoric
ultimately reinforced the patriarchal undercurrents of Black
liberation. In this context, the asexual, “sisterly” love which
unified oppressed peoples in struggle could be interpreted as
the love of a mother for her children or a wife for her husband.
In her history of the case, Bettina Aptheker suggested that
Davis’ intellectual and political work while in prison, which
included an essay on the myth of Black matriarchy, was “born
of her love for George,” but “became an expression of
Angela’s love for all Black men and women and children.”45
“Angela interwove the individual and social realms into an
extraordinary dialectical arrangement,” Aptheker continued.
“Through it she simultaneously displayed and reinforced the
courage and passion and will of a people acquired over
centuries of struggle.”46 Locating the origins of Davis’ dialectic
in love, Aptheker suggested that her work was almost a
maternal act. Like the faceless woman on the greeting card,
Davis was a surrogate for revolution, creating knowledge out of
love as one bears a child, struggling from “one generation to
the next.”
“Natural Women”: Angela Davis as Revolutionary Lover
“The photograph that I have of you is not adequate,”

Jackson wrote Davis in May 1970. “Give Frances several color
enlargements for me.”47 He moved on to explain his anger and
frustration, noting how it might be channeled into radical
action. “Do you sense how drunk this photograph has made
me?”48 he added.
45
Bettina Aptheker. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. (New York:
International Publishers, 1975). p. 80.
46
Ibid p. 80.
47
George Jackson. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. p.
230.
48
Ibid p. 231.
105
Jackson was not the first to comment on Davis’ beauty.
Tall and slim with light-skin and delicate features, Davis was
striking. The artists who painted her tended to emphasize her
full lips and large eyes. Her distinctive Afro was frequently
rendered as a kind of halo, depicting Angela as a saint or
martyr. But in the popular imagination, Davis was most
frequently envisioned not as saint, sister or mother, but rather
as lover.
In Black liberationist rhetoric, the “revolutionary
mother” was necessary but not sufficient for the realization of
the “new man.” A “revolutionary lover” was also required to
provide inspiration and support. In a 1972 special issue of
Ebony, titled “The Black Male,” psychologist Price Cobbs
defined the politics of liberation in sexual terms:
The black man who is liberated needs a black woman, for only with
her can he know that he is whole. … He is beyond concern about
who can outperform whom in bed. His performance now spreads to
the world. He knows that, in finding a great source of energy, he has
discovered a brain to go along with his testes. Both he wants to share
as frequently as possible. … He need only let the black woman
know that now she can rest. He is strong and further armed with her
strength, he will not wilt when the battle gets rough.49
This passage was directly preceded by a highly sexualized

description of Aretha Franklin in concert: she spreads her
“restless legs,” “straining against a tight dress,”50 as she belts
out the Black Power anthem “Natural Woman.” “Black men in
the crowd are tingling with feeling,” he continued, “and for
some there is the deep ecstasy of knowing just who are the
natural women.”51
Cobbs suggested a kind of sexual dialectic that served
as a model for a political dialectic. The Black man actualized
his masculinity in the bedroom, channeling this source of
energy into his own development. Unlike Eldridge Cleaver’s
depiction of intercourse as a violent assertion of masculine
power, Cobbs envisioned intercourse as an expression of unity
49
Price M. Cobbs. “The Liberated Black Man.” Ebony (August 1972). pp. 177-8
50
Ibid p. 176.
51
Ibid.
106
both between men and women within the African-American
community. The black woman, a true “natural woman,”
understood both the experience of oppression and the need for
freedom, and served her lover with passion and pleasure. Sex
was not an act of conquest but rather a gesture of consent.
“Armed with her strength,” he sought to actualize his
masculinity in the political world. The Black woman then knew
“that now she can rest,” surrendering completely to the
protective power of her husband.
Although Black radicals like George Jackson would
not have restricted the political role of women to the bedroom,
they also envisioned “natural women” who served as the
inspiration and motivation for revolution. “Brilliant and
beautiful and brave,” Angela Davis was seen as the ideal
revolutionary lover. This motif had its origins in Soledad
Brother, which included a series of letters from Jackson to
Davis. Jackson reversed Cobbs’ dialectic, associating sexual
fulfillment with the revolution. He described a recurring dream
in which a circle of prisoners kicked and pummeled an Uncle
Sam figure. “But the high point, the climax,” he wrote, is “a tall
slim African woman, firelight, and the beautiful dance of
death.”52 This African woman was clearly Davis; Jackson noted
that she did not become part of his dream until “some time last
year,” perhaps foreshadowing his encounter with her. In
Jackson’s vision, both the woman and the revolution have
elements of the sublime: they are desired, dangerous and
unattainable.
This association can be attributed in part to Jackson’s
imprisonment; consummation of his love for Davis was
literally impossible without revolution. But Jackson also
believed that women inspired revolutionary activity. He would
have agreed with Cobbs that as both mother and lover, Black
women should provide support and encouragement for men.
“You’ve got it all, African woman,” he wrote Davis. “If you
don’t ask me for my left arm, my right eye, both eyes, I’ll be
very disappointed. You’re the most powerful stimulus I could
52
George Jackson. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. p.
228.
107
have.”53 Furthermore, Black men had to prove their masculinity
by defending the bodies of Black women from white men. He
fantasized about providing Davis’ body with such protection:
“If it were my job to guard your body (for the party) from ten
armed pigs,” he wrote, “there would be eleven people hurting
but you wouldn’t be one of them.”54 Revolution, then, was a
process of reconstructing gender roles, as Black women were
feminized and Black men became progressively more
masculine.
These images reappear in other letters written to Davis.
Her physical beauty is a constant theme. Kareem, a prisoner in
New York, opened his letter by addressing Davis as “My Black
Queen! Mother of Inspiration!” 55 Like Jackson, he noted that
he had her “Black beautiful picture before (him).” “I’ve got to
confess,” he continued, “this understanding that the revolution
of freedom is foremost and my highest goal when I think of
your embellishable (sic) beauty and big Afro- and the pretty
gap between your teeth.” Again, Davis became a symbol of the
sublime; her beauty and sexuality served as both a symbol of
and impetus for revolution : “If one hair upon your beautiful,
radiant exotic body be touched, Babylon will pay costly.” If all
Black women could similarly inspire Black men, and if Black
men were capable of defending them, the revolution would
become inevitable: “If every woman was a Mighty Angela
Davis and Every Man a Victorious and Fearless Jonathan
Jackson, Babylon would fall and crumble at that moment!” At
the conclusion of this dialectic of inspiration and protection,
men and women would be liberated lovers. Although other
letters are not as sexually charged, they employ similar
imagery, praising Davis as “the epitome of Black
Revolutionary Womanhood.” 56
53
Ibid p. 231.
54
Ibid p. 217.
55
Kareem. Letter to Angela Davis. 11 April 1971. Angela Davis Legal Defense
56
April Adams. Letter to Angela Davis. 1 December 1970. National Alliance
Against Racist and Political Oppression (U.S.), Angela Davis Defense Committee
108
Ironically, when the prosecution abandoned its claim
that Davis conspired with Jonathan because of her political
interest in the Soledad Brothers, it built a new case using Davis
and Jackson’s correspondence. Davis’ motive was passion, not
politics. The prosecution argued that Davis was not driven by a
desire to free all political prisoners, but rather by her desire for
Jackson. Responding to this claim, Davis’ defense team
accused the prosecution of sexist logic. In her opening
statement, Davis told the jury that the prosecutor “would like to
take advantage of the fact that I am a woman, for in this society
women are supposed to act only in accordance with the dictates
of their emotions and passions.”57
The prosecution’s case depended on a misreading of
many of Davis’ letters, but it highlighted the ambiguity of the
role of women within the Black Liberation Movement. Davis
herself was not always clear about the distinction between love
and politics. One quote cited by the prosecution describes the
connection between Davis’ love for Jackson and her sense of
political mission: “Man, I have gotten into a lot of trouble but I
don’t give a damn. I love you. I love my people. […] If I am
serious about my love for you, about Black people, I should be
ready to go all the way. I am.”58 Like Cobbs and Jackson,
Davis located the origins of political dialectic in the love
between a man and a woman, suggesting that her commitment
to politics flowed from this source of inspiration.
But Davis herself did not agree with Cobbs or Jackson
that playing the role of the “revolutionary lover” confined her
political activity to the bedroom. Rather, many of Davis’ letters
to Jackson that were later used by the prosecution articulate a
clearly defined vision of the experiences of Black women and
their place within the Black Liberation Movement. Criticizing
both the myth of Black matriarchy and the patriarchal
underpinnings of Black nationalism, Davis wrote that “for the
Black female, the solution is not to become less aggressive nor
57
Angela Davis. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. p. 363.
58
National United Committee to Free Angela Davis. “Frame-Up: Trial Bulletin of
NUCFAD.” 21 April 1972. National Alliance Against Racist and Political
109
to lay down the gun, but to learn how to set the sights correctly,
aim accurately, squeeze rather than jerk and not be overcome
by the damage.”59 Davis accepted the dialectic proposed by
Jackson, but insisted that it applied to women as well.
“Liberation is a dialectical movement,” she wrote. “The Black
man cannot free himself as a Black man unless the Black
woman can liberate herself from all this muck- and it works the
other way around.”60 In Davis’ rewriting of the gender
ideology of Black liberation, patriarchy had to be destroyed
along with capitalism and racism. Women should not be
reduced to a source of photographic inspiration for men.
Rather, they should be inspired to fight, “to set the sights
correctly.”
Angela Davis: Revolutionary Woman
In his narrative history of Black Power, Peniel Joseph

characterizes the Angela Davis case as a climactic moment in
the Black Freedom movement, writing that Davis’ trial
“represented the denouement of a series of climactic political
struggles that briefly united Black Panthers, hard-core
prisoners, liberal intellectuals, and left-wing radicals into a
coalition that dreamed of justice for political prisoners.”61 But
the diverse organizations and individuals who expressed their
support for Angela Davis dreamed very different dreams. Even
if Davis herself hoped that activities organized in her defense
could be transformed into a protest against the racial
inequalities of the criminal justice system, the campaign’s
representations of Davis as a leftist “sister,” a Black “mother,”
and a revolutionary “lover” evoked the millenialism of the New
Left. The rhetoric of the “Free Angela” campaign resonated
with the divergent visions of the late 1960s, visions of
“colorless” radical families and a transcendent Black nation, of
59
Angela Davis. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. pp. 373-4.
60
Ibid.
61
Power in America. p. 275.
110
militant resistance to imperialist domination and full
citizenship in a rejuvenated American democracy. While these
visions possessed the power to inspire, they would prove
difficult to translate into concrete political action or an
enduring leftist coalition.
Division over the role of women was one of the
tensions apparent in the campaign’s representations of Angela
Davis. By the early 1970s, women had begun to publicly
question their lack of power within political organizations. The
feminist movement gained momentum even as the movements
of the 1960s were forced to retreat, and in 1970, activists
formed the first Black feminist organization, the Third World
Women’s Alliance. Yet the TWWA was only peripherally
involved in the campaign, and prominent Black activists,
including Davis herself, openly distrusted predominately white
feminist organizations. While NUCFAD carefully cultivated
relationships with Black Power groups and labor unions, they
did not actively recruit supporters from the ranks of Women’s
Liberation. As Davis herself admitted, in the campaign’s
matrix of “triple jeopardy,” sex mattered less than race and
class. Yet as this paper has shown, the language of gender
figured prominently in the campaigns’ rhetoric, from George
Jackson’s call for a “new man,” to the campaign’s attempt to
rally Black women to defend the Black family in “A Call to
Black Women of Every Political Persuasion,” to the prisoner
Kareem’s vision of a nation in which every Black woman
would be a revolutionary lover, a “mighty Angela Davis.”
These representations of Davis were more than rhetoric: they
were integral to the new visions of social order—of radical
political “family” and racial nationhood—articulated by the
social movements of the late 1960s. Sister, mother, and lover,
Angela Davis could never be simply a Black Woman: her
identity remained imprisoned within existing conceptions of
gender.
Interestingly, Davis’ subsequent career seems to
represent an attempt to make sense of these contradictions,
constructing a political identity that takes gender into account.
After her acquittal, Davis went on to a successful career in
111
academia, where she has written extensively about the
intersection between race, gender and class. In her writings,
Davis describes the particular historical experience of Black
women, noting the special conditions of oppression that
defined their identity as sexual subjects and status as wives,
mothers and workers. But although Davis suggests that
knowledge of this history is essential, she argues that it must be
fundamentally transformed. Black women, like Black men,
must liberate themselves, remaking American society as they
move from the individual to the general, the particular to the
universal. It is unclear how exactly the contradictions between
race and gender, class and citizenship might be resolved, but
Davis herself has clearly moved beyond the discursive spaces
marked by the Communist party and the Black Liberation
Movement, seeking instead a form of political community that
can resolve the dichotomy between difference and equality.
THE CRITIC IN QUESTION
112
The Critic in Question: Eduard Hanslick
and Viennese Musical Identity
ROY KIMMEY
On the day when she had first laid the piano

arrangements from Tristan und Isolde on his music stand
and begged him to play it for her, he had leapt to his feet
after twenty-five measures and, exhibiting every sign of
utmost disgust, began to pace back and forth between the
bay window and the piano. “I won't play this
madam...This is not music, please believe me—and I've
always presumed to know a little something about music.
It is pure chaos! It is demagoguery, blasphemy and
madness!”1
O
ne evening in late November 1862, in the
Vienna home of the amateur musician Dr.
Joseph Standthartner, a relatively unknown
composer by the name of Richard Wagner read
aloud the poetic libretto from his opera in progress, Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Among the attendees was the
music critic Eduard Hanslick, whose presence, in contrast to
the many enthusiastic Wagner supporters in the audience, has
become a matter of historical controversy and musical lore. In
the second prose draft of the libretto, written in October of the
previous year, Wagner had made a striking alteration to the of
dramatis personæ, the name “Sixtus Beckmesser” had been
crossed out and replaced by “Veit Hanslich.” In Wagner’s
drama Beckmesser represents musical conservatism, and is
cruelly lampooned through the opera; in the Third Act he
1
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, trans. John Wood
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 488.
113
attempts to win the hand of the beautiful (and distinctly
Teutonic) Eva, but fails miserably.2
Whether or not Wagner read the libretto aloud with this
change is unclear. In his autobiography he insisted that he did,
but the romanticized narrative of that work draws such claims
into question.3 Hanslick’s 1868 review of the Munich première
of the opera, while overwhelmingly negative, does not suggest
a particular enmity toward the composer (or his libretto), and
thus seems to contradict Wagner’s claim.4
Who was this Eduard “Viet” Hanslick and why did
Wagner—who had by this time already amassed a long list of
enemies—direct so personal an insult towards him? The
question is much more complicated than one of biography;
indeed, in the case of Hanslick, biographical detail confounds
the historian’s attempt to construct a coherent narrative of the
life and importance of this 19th century music critic. In a way
that is almost characteristically Viennese, Hanslick is an
amalgam of contradictions—Jew and Catholic, Bohemian and
Austrian, musical conservative and progressive. At the same
time, politically motivated historians have, not unlike Wagner,
highlighted particular aspects of this multi-faceted identity in
their own attempts to evaluate Hanslick’s contributions to
music. By placing Hanslick at the center of Viennese musical
life, each historian has simultaneously made claims about the
importance (or lack thereof) of Viennese music. Understanding
2
For a more complete synopsis, history, and analysis of Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg, see Robert M. Rayner, Wagner and Die Meistersinger, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1940).
3
Henry Pleasants III, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900 (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), xxii, and Stewart Spencer, Wagner
Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 137. Wagner’s account of the
story can be found in Richard Wagner, My Life, ed. Mary Whittall, trans. Andrew
Gay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 703–704.
4
Hanslick reserves praise for the theatrical elements of Wagner’s Die
Meistersinger, particularly the Third Act: “Als theatralische Vorstellung sind Die
Meistersinger eine Sehenswürdigkeit.” (“As a theatrical creation Die
Meistersinger is an object of interest.”). Eduard Hanslick, “Richard Wagner: Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” Gesammelte Musikkritiken, Reinhard Ermen and
Peter Wapnewski, eds. (Basel: Bärenreiter Kassel, 1989), 77–89.
114
the musical legacy of either the critic or city thus necessitates
both a reevaluation of Hanslick’s own writings and of the
historical literature written on him.5
In looking back to Wagner’s reading of Meistersinger,
one can infer that as Wagner considered him a great threat,
Hanslick must have occupied a central place in German-
speaking musical life. The incident further illustrates just how
personal the conflict between critic and composer had become.
Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the
Musikerstreit—“Musicians’ Struggle”—between the Leipzig-
based Zukunftsmusiker (“Musicians of the Future”) lead by
Richard Wagner and the Vienna-based musical reactionary
Johannes Brahms broke the German-speaking world into
divided cultural camps, both of which claimed the mantle of
Ludwig van Beethoven.
The term Zukunftsmusik, a label for the musical school
of Richard Wagner, was first used in 1854 by Professor
Leopold Arnold Zellner, the General Secretary of the
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (“Society of Musical Friends”),
and a musician and enthusiast of the new style.6 The term
would quickly find parlance amongst both critics of Wagner
and his supporters, the latter of whom were most prominently
represented by the Hungarian-born, Weimar-based composer
and theorist Franz Liszt. By the latter half of the 1850s,
Zukunftsmusik had taken a decidedly pejorative connotation,
used frequently by the critic and editor Ludwig Bischoff in his
Niederrhein Musikzeitung.7 The term is drawn from Wagner's
5
The past year has witnessed an increased academic interest in Eduard Hanslick.
On June 24-25, 2009, the first international conference on Eduard Hanslick took
place at University College Dublin. Hosted by the University College Dublin
School of Music in association with the School of Music and Sonic Arts of
Queen’s University Belfast, the conference explored the work and legacy of
Hanslick.
6
Zellner was a vocal advocate of the music of Weimar-based composer Franz
Liszt, who would become one of the central figures of Zukunftsmusik. See Ben
Arnold, The Liszt Companion (West Port, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002),
344.
7
Barry Millington, Wagner (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1992), 236.
115
1849 essay “The Artwork of the Future,” wherein the composer
calls on the Volk—a community of people who are united in a
common desire or want—to cast off the “philistine”
entertainments of Grand Opera and oratorio, and to succumb to
their desire for “true art.”8 This “true art” is creatively
synthetic—it employs the painter, poet, architect, and musician
to create a total artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Wagner's aesthetic vision was born in part out of the
writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. But
the way he understood these texts was shaped by a highly
personal interpretation of the works of Ludwig van Beethoven.
As understood by Wagner, Beethoven's inclusion of choruses
and soloists in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony
posed a fundamental break from the symphonic form, and
signaled the death of “absolute” instrumental music. In the
absence of traditional and conventional forms, musical progress
demanded dramatic shape. Amongst the adherents of the
Zukunftsmusik, this demand would find a variety of
expressions, from the Symphonic Poems of Liszt (and later,
Richard Strauss), to Anton Bruckner's planned Te Deum finale
of his Ninth Symphony.9 For Wagner, drama was conferred
through the use of the human voice. As he wrote, “But still
another advance [through the Ninth Symphony] is to be seen in
the path by which Beethoven attained the decisively important
ennoblement of melody; that is, the new significance which
vocal music attained in its relations to purely instrumental
music.”10
Opposing the musical hegemony of the Weimar and
Leipzig Zukunftsmusiker was Johannes Brahms in Vienna.
Throughout his life, Brahms maintained a fervent distaste for
Liszt—as both a composer and a celebrity—and it was through
this antagonism that Brahms found himself at odds with
8
Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future, and Other Works, trans. W.
Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 151.
9
An obvious homage to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; Bruckner died before the
completion of his final symphony.
10
Richard Wagner, Beethoven, trans. Albert R. Parsons (Indianapolis: Benham
Brothers, 1873), 100.
116
Wagner. Because he rejected the “Music of the Future” while
looking back to traditional musical forms, Brahms was attacked
by musical “progressives” as coldly academic, even as they
acknowledged his compositional genius. As the musicologist
Michael Musgrave asserts, “To the growing cleavage between
the proponents of a ‘progressive’ philosophy of the relation of
the arts to those who resisted the devaluation of traditional
forms already focused on the Leipzig school before his
appearance, Brahms came to be the inevitable symbol for the
conservative camp; deeply interested in the past [and]
suspicious of verbalizations in music...”11 As with Wagner,
Beethoven provided Brahms with a wellspring of inspiration—
but for Brahms, that inspiration was motivic and structural,
rather than theoretical or philosophic. The thematic structuring
of the Fourth Movement of Brahms's Symphony No. 1 is so
evocative of his predecessor's style that when asked by a friend
if Beethoven's last symphony was his model, Brahms famously
responded that “any ass” could see that it was.12 A few
contemporary critics went so far as to declare the work
“Beethoven's Tenth”, a comment that roused Brahms's ire.
The stakes of the Musikerstreit were higher than
prestige. The conflict between the Zukunftsmusiker and
Johannes Brahms was ultimately rooted in a question of
musical heritage: would the German-speaking musical capital
remain in its traditional home of Vienna, or could it find a new
home within the emerging German Reich? Vienna had a strong
claim to the title. Its musical roster included nearly all figures
central to the development of what would become known as the
“German romantic style,” namely Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven,
and Schubert.13 It is perhaps not surprising that the greatest
Viennese composer of the 1860s and 1870s to come out of this
11
Michael Musgrave, The Music of Brahms (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994), 1.
12
Ibid., p. 134.
13
The musicologist Carl Dahlhaus suggests the existence of a single Classical-
Romantic compositional style centered in Vienna. For a discussion of this topic,
see: Carl Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber: Laaber-
Verlag, 1988).
117
tradition—Brahms—was musically conservative, acting as the
protector of traditional musical forms. What is surprising is that
Brahms was born in Hamburg, and was culturally Lutheran—
an outsider in the devoutly Catholic Vienna.14 Against Vienna's
historically musical prominence, it is understandable why a
composer from Saxony would try to define himself as a
“Musician of the Future.” And yet, there can be no future
without some kind of past.
Although composers—Wagner in particular—
attempted to prove their historical link to the “First Viennese
School” through polemic, the true literary mediator of the
conflict was the music critic, and none stood higher in the 19th
century musical world than the Viennese feuilleton writer,
Eduard Hanslick. For most of his professional life, Hanslick
was an avowed supporter of Brahms. Hanslick's sharp-witted
ripostes to Liszt and Wagner made him as controversial a
writer as he was popular. But however divisive Hanslick may
have been while alive, it was after his death that he rose to the
position of archetype—a figure interpreted and reinterpreted by
historians and musicologists alike, a metonym for fin-de-siècle
Vienna.
Before the onset of the Second World War, Hanslick
became a proxy for attacks on Brahms’s supporters.
Conversely, in post-War Europe, those who criticized Wagner
utilized Hanslick as a historical standard-bearer against the
Dionysian, populist Bayreuth-centered culture that dominated
the German-speaking world. In this historical binary—Hanslick
as persecutor versus Hanslick as hero—every aspect of the
critic’s life took on a semiotic character. His education, cultural
profile, religious background, and of course, his writings
demand continuous evaluation, shaped by new trends in
historical musicology. To one historian, Hanslick’s love of
14
Brahms’s religious beliefs are the topic of considerable debate. David Beller-
McKenna suggests that while raised Lutheran, Brahms was essentially non-
practicing in his later life. Yet, elements of his religious upbringing shape many
of his compositions, particularly the motets and Ein deutsches Requiem, which
both employ text from the Lutheran Bible. David Beller-McKenna, Brahms and
the German Spirit (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
118
waltzes indicated a proclivity toward the lowbrow and
philistine, a decidedly “Viennese” and “un-Germanic
disposition,” recorded in the “French” literary style of the
feuilleton.15 To the next, this same love of waltzes represented
Hanslick’s taste for well-written orchestral music, and
illustrated his assimilation into the musical society of the
German-speaking world.16 If Hanslick indeed serves as an
archetype of Vienna, the reevaluation of the critic is per se a
reevaluation of the city. By placing the cultural binary
surrounding Hanslick into dialogue, it is possible to evaluate
perceptions of Viennese musical identity—and Vienna as
whole—in historical musicology.
Hanslick proves to be a fascinating example of the
fluidity of identity in mid-century Vienna. He was born in
Prague on September 11, 1825, to a Catholic father who was
“an enthusiastic philosopher and musician of Bohemian
peasant stock.”17 His family’s comfortable, middle-class life
was owed to the wealth of his mother, the daughter of a well-
to-do Viennese Jewish merchant family. Hanslick had a content
and pleasant childhood (much at odds with the Sturm und
Drang that characterized the adolescence of the musicians with
whom he chiefly took issue: Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner,
and Strauss), and “the harmonious circumstances of his
emotional and intellectual growth may well have contributed to
the development of a rationalistic point of view at odds with
the romantic spirit of the time.”18 Although musically
conservative, Hanslick’s tastes did not extend beyond the
music of his generation. Just as the music of some Baroque
composers—particularly Heinrich Schütz and J. S. Bach—were
finding performances again in concert halls, Hanslick favored
Schumann and Brahms. His musical preferences were so
singularly modern that he once confessed that “he would rather
15
This kind of criticism is made most directly in the writings of Max Graf. See:
Max Graf, Composer and Critic (New York: W.W. Norton, 1946).
16
It is in response to critics like Graf that Pleasants III writes Vienna’s Golden
Years of Music: 1850–1900.
17
Henry Pleasants III, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900, p. 1.
18
Ibid.
119
see the complete works of Heinrich Schütz destroyed than
Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, the complete works of
Palestrina than Mendelssohn’s, all the concertos and sonatas of
Bach than the quartets of Schumann and Brahms, and all of
Gluck than Don Giovanni, Fidelio, or Der Freischütz.”19 Thus,
Hanslick favored music which drew on earlier musical styles,
even if did not enjoy the sources themselves.
Hanslick’s education was thoroughly Bohemian,
influenced by the emergent nationalistic idioms of Czech art,
music, and literature. Even so, the Prague artistic scene was
remarkably conservative; when the “programmatic” composer
Hector Berlioz performed in the city in 1846, his music proved
so controversial that debates raged in coffee houses across the
city as to whether his works could be considered music at all.20
At the age of 18, Hanslick was sent to the prominent Czech
composer and pedagogue Jan Tomásek for instruction on the
piano, centered on a curriculum of theory, harmony,
counterpoint, fugue, instrumentation, and experimental
composition. After a particularly rigorous four-year period of
instruction (Tomásek required the young Hanslick to memorize
a full Baroque work—often a Bach prelude and fugue—
weekly), Hanslick was faced with the difficult decision of
whether or not to pursue a career as a musician. Although
encouraged to do so by both Tomásek and his father, Hanslick
was in many ways too much a man of convention for the
concert hall. The most attractive calling for a 19th century
Viennese intellectual was law; abandoning music, he enrolled
that year in the University of Prague.
His time at the University was as musically productive
as it was academic. Independently, Hanslick devoted himself to
a rigorous study of musical history and aesthetics. He also
became acquainted with Robert Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift
19
Ibid., p. 2. It is interesting to note that while Brahms was considered a musical
conservative, Hanslick nevertheless regarded him as “modern.”
20
Geoffrey Payzant, Eduard Hanslick and Hector Berlioz in Prague: A
Documentary Narrative (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1991). Payzant
suggests that Hanslick’s formalistic understanding of music could be traced to his
encounters with Berlioz in 1846.
120
für Musik. Printed in Leipzig, the Neue Zeitschrift brought
Hanslick news of Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Berlioz. His first
commissions as music critic also came at this time. Rudolf
Glaser, publisher of the intellectual journal Ost und West,
offered Hanslick the position of music critic (upon the
recommendation of a mutual friend). Dominating the Prague
musical scene was Friedrich Kittl, a young and ambitious
conductor and director of the Conservatory of Music. Hanslick
was so moved by Kittl’s performance of Schumann’s Das
Paradeis und die Peri that he wrote a long article on the work
for Ost und West. The review reached Schumann, who invited
Hanslick to visit him in Dresden.
In 1846, while traveling to Dresden at Schumann’s
request, Hanslick made the acquaintance of Wagner. After
seeing a performance of Tannhäuser, he immediately became a
supporter of the composer, stating in one of his earliest musical
reviews that “If there is anyone among contemporary German
composers from whom we can expect something distinguished
in the field of serious grand opera, it is [Wagner]. Richard
Wagner is, I am convinced, the greatest dramatic talent among
all contemporary composers.”21 Upon returning from Dresden,
Hanslick took up residency in Vienna, the city that would
become his life-long home.22
Hanslick arrived in Vienna just two years before the
March Revolution. The transformation of the city’s culture
after 1848 is a topic he reflected on late in his life:
It has always been a valuable memory to me to have experienced the
last years of pre-March Vienna. How trivial was public musical life
at the end of the thirties and in the early forties! Sumptuous and
trivial alike, it vacillated between dull sentimentality and scintillant
wit…Musical life was dominated by Italian opera, virtuosity, and the
waltz. I would be the last to underestimate the talent of [Johann
Strauss I and Joseph Franz Karl Lanner23]…but it can readily be
understood that this sweetly intoxicating three-quarter time, to which
heads as well as feet were abandoned, combined with Italian opera
21
Eduard Hanslick, “Tannhäuser,” in Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–
1900, ed. Henry Pleasants III, 23.
22
Ibid., 4–6.
23
Strauss I and Lanner are often credited as the founders of Viennese dance
music.
121
and the cult of virtuosity, rendered listeners steadily less capable of
intellectual effort.24
Hanslick here characterizes Vienna as a city suffused

with decadent imperial and Italian entertainments. This would
change with the March Revolution; although it was ultimately a
failure, the Revolution’s influence upon the cultural of life of
Vienna was perceptible. While Austria would not extend
suffrage to all men until 1907, three years after Hanslick’s
death, Hanslick believed that the history of concert life in
Vienna paralleled the trajectory of political order in the empire:
“a gradual yet unstoppable evolution from absolute rule by
monarchical authorities to the ‘democratization’ of society,
politics, and artistic and musical life.”25 Viennese culture
moved away from the artistic luxuries of the epic, virtuosic
transcriptions of Liszt, and in their place came to embrace the
“thoughtful” formalistic virtuosity of Bach, Scarlatti and
Handel. Organizationally, the post-March period observed a
rise in musical foundations such as the Gesellschaft der
Musikfreunde, led by specialist musicians rather than “the
philistine representatives of ‘organized dilettantism’ who had
constituted the ‘ruling power in the vormärzliche concert
life.’”26
Throughout the forties and fifties, Hanslick dedicated
himself to both the practice of law and his musical writings. In
1852, he was transferred in the public’s service from the
Ministry of Finance to the University Department of the
Ministry of Education. This move granted Hanslick ample time
to pursue music criticism, and he began publishing twice
weekly in the feuilleton of Die Presse in 1855. In 1856, after
the publication of his treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On
24
Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben von Eduard Hanslick: Band I (Berlin:
Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Litteratur, 1894), 120–160 in Ibid., 7.
25
Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping
Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 54.
26
Eduard Hanslick, Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien (Vienna: Willhelm
Braumüller, 1869, p. 384), in ibid.,
56.
122
the Musically Beautiful), Hanslick was granted a lectureship at
the University of Vienna, a position he would hold for nearly
forty years.
Further aesthetic study led him to a revision of his
previous theories on Wagnerian opera, particularly after
discussion with his friend and amateur musician, Professor
Theodor Billroth. Billroth was a close disciple of Brahms—
almost all of Brahms’s chamber works received their premières
privately in the sitting room of Billroth’s apartment. By 1858,
Hanslick’s review of Lohengrin demonstrated the critic’s
contempt for Wagner’s compositional style, going so far as to
say that it had not progressed beyond Beethoven: “Is there in
the whole of Lohengrin a single number which quickens the
listener’s heartbeat as does the trio or the quartet in prison
[from Fidelio]? Has Wagner, with his declamatory apparatus,
ever awakened the pulse of life as Beethoven did with his
purely musical materials?”27 Despite dispatching the artistic
forces of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Hanslick argued that Wagner
failed to progress past Beethoven’s orchestral music—an
unmistakable rejection of Zukunftsmusik. Wagner was enraged
by this betrayal. In the 1869 reprint of his notorious essay “On
Judaism in Music,” Wagner included an addendum that
attacked “Hanslick’s gracefully hidden Jewish origins,” and
further denounced all Jewish influences on Germanic musical
output.28 Hanslick’s personal journals indicate that he was
unconcerned with Wagner’s attacks.29 The battle lines had
already been drawn. For the next thirty years, Vienna would
find a no more vocal advocate of Brahms than Hanslick.
A review of Hanslick’s biography illustrates the
conflicting labels that can all be rightly applied to him: Jew and
Catholic, Czech and German, Praguer and Viennese, public
servant and intellectual. These oppositional identities have
permitted historians throughout the past century to present
27
Eduard Hanslick, “Lohengrin,” in Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–
1900, ed. Henry Pleasants III, 57.
28
Milton E. Brener, Richard Wagner and the Jews (Jefferson, North Carolina:
McFarland and Co., 2006), 95.
29
Henry Pleasants III, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900, xxii.
123
Hanslick as an archetype of Vienna, a city defined by its
multiethnic and multicultural character. The extent to which
Hanslick represents Viennese diversity is illustrated through an
evaluation of three identity spectra, proposed by Michael
Steinberg in his essay, “Jewish Identity and Intellectuality in
Fin-de-Siècle Austria: Suggestions for a Historical
Discourse.”30 The first spectrum is a religious one—ranging
from the most integrated religious group (Catholicism) to the
least (Judaism).31 By virtue of his father’s religious
background, Hanslick enjoyed the full benefits of the Viennese
Catholic identity, and held governmental positions and
employment usually designated exclusively for the non-Jewish.
His friends included anti-Semites such as Dr. Theodor
Billroth.32 The second spectrum is that between the progressive
and the conservative. Wagner had situated himself as the
“Musician of the Future” and his polemics reveal an
intellectual support of populist politics in the Volk. Conversely,
to support Brahms was to retreat into the past—an acceptance
of formalism and conservative politics. Hanslick traversed this
spectrum through his lifetime. He observed Vienna moving
through this spectrum too, albeit in the opposite direction;
Wagner gained greater support in the imperial capital as the
politics of the city moved in a democratized direction. The
third spectrum is of cultural identity. Although Hanslick may
have been born in Bohemia, historians have cast him as the
30
Michael P. Steinberg, “Jewish Identity and Intellectuality in Fin-de-Siècle
Austria: Suggestions for a Historical Discourse,” New German Critique, No. 43,
Special Issue on Austria (1988): 3–33.
31
Steinberg fails to address the position in this spectrum of Viennese Muslims,
who would most certainly be the least integrated in terms of religion. The
historian Steven Beller would argue that Jews were actually so dominant in the
artistic life of Vienna that to label them as “less integrated” is misleading. For a
full discussion of this topic, see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
32
In the early 1870s, Dr. Theodor Billroth published a volume on the instruction
of medicine at the Viennese Medical School, in which he openly challenges the
University for accepting Hungarian and Galician Jews. See Dennis Klein, Jewish
Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), 50.
124
model (or stereotypical) Viennese, in its own way, suggesting
the centrality of incorporation and assimilation to Vienna’s
character. Historians have juxtaposed these various spectra in
order to construct an image of Hanslick, and thus describe fin-
de-siècle Vienna and its position within the German-speaking
musical world. And yet, despite this attention to identity, few
have evaluated Hanslick’s criticism on its own merits. An
examination of such material helps illuminate his aesthetics and
personal preferences, and provides a basis for the assessment of
historiographic models of the critic and his city.
–––
The musical-politics of his criticism aside, Hanslick

remains an important figure in musicology if only for his
contribution to the establishment of music criticism as a literary
field. His writings demonstrate a radical transformation in the
understanding of musical thought and aesthetics. Their popular
circulation and readership pushed this discourse beyond the
walls of academia. The musicologist Kevin Karnes echoes the
late 19th century philosopher Robert Zimmermann who
described Hanslick’s seminal On the Musically Beautiful
(1854) as “Epoch-making.”33 Karnes writes that the work was
“the first such book to suggest that neither the language nor the
arguments of metaphysics can account for music’s meaning
and beauty. In the century and a half that has followed its
publication, the arguments advanced in Hanslick’s book have
been widely regarded as constituting the writer’s definitive
contribution to the discipline.”34 His analytical method
eschewed the ekphrastic, emotive prose-style popular in his day
and aspired to a degree of scientific rigor, which he believed
had already found a footing in the criticism of the visual and
literary arts. That On the Musically Beautiful even suggests a
33
Robert Zimmerman, Eduard Hanslick: Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (Leipzig:
Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft I, 1885), p. 251 in Kevin C. Karnes,
Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical
Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008), 21.
34
Ibid.
125
methodological approach indicates the extent to which
Hanslick was breaking from previous aesthetic modes,
principally, the 19th century notion of beauty as an inherent
justifying purpose. By proposing a critical judgment to music,
he evoked Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790),
which argued that the experience of beauty was purposive, and
yet without definite purpose.35 In other words, music should
affect the listener as though it has meaning, even if one cannot
be rationally found.
Hanslick drew a distinction between emotion and
perception, and introduced sensory awareness as a means by
which music can be understood. Physiology forms a part of this
analysis, but his goal is not to delineate a wholly physical
means of understanding. Hanslick contended that music does
indeed arouse “feelings” but posited that it is where these
“feelings” come from that is aesthetically relevant: “from
particular patterns within the music and not by some alchemy
directly from the soul of the composer.”36 As he stated, “The
greatest obstacle to a scientific development of musical
aesthetics has been the undue prominence given to the action of
music on our feelings. The more violent this action is, the
louder is it praised as evidence of musical beauty.”37 Karnes
suggests that Hanslick’s desire for an empirical evaluation is
related to the 19th century rise of the chemist, physicist,
physician, and biologist and the comparative decline of the
philosopher.38 While although the term Wissenschaft is
understood to include the humanistic disciplines, “anybody
stressing the word Wissenschaft in the second half of the
nineteenth century wishes to underline the link between the
humanities and the exact sciences and to draw attention to the
35
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner
Press, 1951), xvii.
36
Source Readings in Music History, William Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler,
eds. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 120.
37
Edward Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music: A Contribution to the Revisal of
Musical Æsthetics, trans. Gustav Cohen (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 123.
38
Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History, 9.
126
application of the scientific method, however loosely defined,
to the fields of philosophy and history.”39
To read Hanslick’s criticism reveals not only a greater
attention to the “science” of the literary form, but also a
heightened awareness of the social environment in which the
music existed. The musicologist Marc Weiner focuses upon
this aspect of musical literature in his Undertones of
Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social Sphere in the
Modern German Narrative, and suggests a means by which the
reader can understand such writings through semiotic
discourse: “Music, of course, has always operated within a
socially determined semiotic system, and the associative
configurations in which it was perceived…were always
representative of given historical moments.”40 The question to
the historian, then, is how music functions as code for
sociopolitical pressures. Weiner suggests that “in discussing the
status of music as a social sign [one area of consideration is]
the development of a discourse on music in such nonmusical,
verbal genres as music criticism, æsthetic debates, and popular
literature, that operates as a secondary code reflecting the social
function of the art.”41 Criticism constitutes itself through
explicit linkages to such social functions. For example,
although the organist Herr Pfühl may declare Wagner’s music
blasphemous, demagogue-like, or mad in Thomas Mann’s
Buddenbrooks, there is nothing intrinsic about the music to
suggest this. Rather, the author is drawing upon cultural
suppositions about both the organist and Wagner—suppositions
that the critic semiotically links to the music.
Thus, from the perspective of structuralism, music may
act as a signifier, but the critic must elucidate that which is
signified. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on art in The Savage
39
Music in European Thought, 1851–1912, ed. Bojan Bujic, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988),
305.
40
Marc A. Weiner, Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social
Sphere in the Modern German Narrative (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of
Nebraska Press, 1993), 6–7.
41
Ibid., 7.
127
Mind help clarify this. “Art lies half-way between scientific
knowledge and mythical or magical thought. It is common
knowledge that the artist is both something of a scientist [by
creating means and results through events and experiments]
and of a bricoleur [by building up structures of meaning by
fitting together events].”42 That is to say, it is unclear if the
artist acts as an interlocutor through the work—Lévi-Strauss
contends that this can only be accomplished partially.43 In
music, Weiner suggests that the critic completes the relation of
the signified to the signifier; this is the process of bricolage.
Although Hanslick may have contended that his model of
criticism represented a “scientific” study, in the language of
semiotics he rather acts as bricoleur.44
What musical-social associations, then, was Hanslick
advancing? Hanslick’s critique of Die Meistersinger provides a
useful example of how the language of criticism can signify
cultural meaning. Commenting on the finale of the Second Act,
Hanslick wrote that “Nothing, nothing at all, is discernible of
subtle musical disposition; one hears nothing but brutal
shouting and screaming.”45 Hanslick was describing the
onstage conflict that breaks out amongst the mastersingers. He
framed the event as a riot by signifying particular violence in
the action; what transpires is not music, but rather shouting and
screaming. By the time Hanslick published his review of Die
Meistersinger, it had almost become customary for critics of
Wagner to describe one of his onstage scenes as a riot. Such
language is particularly charged because Wagner had been
42
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966), 22.
43
Ibid., 29.
44
Ironically, Wagner, as composer-polemicist, would function as “scientist” in
the structuralist model. His essays prepared an intellectual landscape for his
premières, thus facilitating his role as interlocutor for his own work. And as his
polemics suggest, his intent is to manipulate the event of musical drama to
achieve a result—the emancipation of the Volk-mind. Hanslick inadvertently
touches upon this by referring to Die Meistersinger as a “musical experiment.”
See Eduard Hanslick, “Die Meistersinger,” Vienna’s Golden Years of Music:
1850–1900, ed. Henry Pleasants III, 130.
45
Ibid., 121.
128
faced with actual riots in his audiences. In 1861, when Wagner
arrived in Paris with his new production of Tannhäuser, the
third performance of the work was crippled with uproars in the
audience, some lasting as long as fifteen minutes.46 Hanslick’s
characterization of Wagner’s staging as a riot suggests that a
madness is acting out diegetically—a madness that the
contemporary reader knew could find its way into the audience,
or even into the Viennese streets, as it had little over a decade
earlier, in 1848. The root of this madness is the formlessness of
the musical drama, which places the listener under a drug-like
spell. “[Die Meistersinger] consists of the intentional
dissolution of every fixed form into shapeless, sensually
intoxicating resonance; the replacement of independent,
articulate melody by vague melodization. One may confidently
use Wagner’s dry technical expression, ‘infinite melody,’ since
everyone knows by now what is meant.”47 This theme would
find repetition in the writings of many fin-de-siècle modernist
writers, such as Ferdinand von Saar’s Geschichte eines Wiener
Kindes (“Tale of a Viennese Child”), which depicts the
adulterous behavior of the protagonist Else, a young woman
too easily influenced by the perilous music of Richard
Wagner.48
Since Hanslick’s death, the task of semiotically linking
Wagner’s music, Hanslick’s criticism, and the socio-political
pressures of the fin-de-siècle has belonged to the musicologist
and the historian. Throughout the last century, musicologists
and historians have manipulated the complexities of Hanslick’s
identity in order to advance polemical claims about the
Viennese musical legacy. When the pro-Wagnerite faction rose
to the cultural majority in the first third of the 20th century,
musicologists such as Max Graf attacked Hanslick as a critic
engrossed in the leisurely lifestyle of Vienna, and dismissed his
46
Barry Millington, Wagner, 281.
47
Ibid., 127.
48
Marc A. Weiner, Undertones of Insurrection, 13.
129
criticism as overly concerned with the sensuous and facile.49
Hanslick’s cultural identity was of particular interest to Graf,
who misleadingly labeled him “Slavic by birth.”50 Drawing
upon the cultural stereotype of the morose Slav, Graf expressed
surprise at how thoroughly Hanslick was integrated in “the
careless, pleasure-seeking, brilliant, and elegant society of
Vienna…”51 Graf contended that Hanslick’s criticism was
similarly integrated with popular opinions of Vienna, arguing
that he was “the type of critic who is the reader’s
mouthpiece.”52 Ignoring Hanslick’s contributions to a new
understanding of musical aesthetics, Graf countered that
Hanslick’s literary output was popular with his Viennese
readership because it echoed their tastes exactly. Such a
description is wholly at odds with Hanslick’s own descriptions
of his position in the Viennese musical scene. Rather than the
mouthpiece of the masses, he felt himself fighting against his
Neue Freie Presse readership: “The consciousness of being in
the minority embitters the most honest soul and sharpens the
vocabulary. I readily confess that in my case this may have
happened…”53
It can be difficult to discern where Graf’s description
of Hanslick ended and his description of Vienna began. The
extent to which Graf held Hanslick as the archetype of the city
is remarkable—“he and he alone was the real representative of
the taste of Viennese society.”54 The intent of his criticism was
49
In many ways, such attacks were part of a larger German-nationalist criticism
of Austria, best captured by a quote from Otto van Bismark’s 1859 speech
advocating Prussian involvement against the empire in the Second War of Italian
Independence: “…the Slavic-Romanian half-breed state on the Danube, whoring
with pope and emperor…” See James J. Sheehan, German History: 1770–1866
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 865.
50
Max Graf, Composer and Critic, 246.
51
Ibid., 246–247.
52
Ibid., 242.
53
Eduard Hanslick, Aus Meinem Leben in Vienna’s Golden Years of Music:
1850-1900, xx. Graf’s analysis of Brahms in Vienna inadvertently supports this
claim.
54
130
clear: to eliminate Vienna’s claim as the German-speaking
musical capital by linking the city with non-Germanic music
forms—specifically, Italian opera—and the lowbrow waltz; he
dismissed Brahms on similar grounds. Graf’s Vienna wholly
lacked the heritage of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, or Schubert.
Graf suggested that the composer had little effect on the
musical landscape of the city, asserting that “he was the typical
Protestant from northern Germany, attracted by the
sensuousness and ease of Vienna, like a serious man falling in
love with a light-minded and perpetually smiling
woman…when Brahms produced his earliest works there, the
Viennese public would have none of their dark and passionate
romanticism.”55 Vienna was thus divorced from the true
Germanic musical and cultural identity. To Graf, Vienna’s
predilection for légèreté and ease bore more in common with
Paris or Venice than Leipzig or Dresden.
The most unsettling aspect of Graf’s history is the
degree to which anti-Semitic imagery permeates his physical
descriptions of the critic. Graf, Hanslick’s one-time pupil,
described the critic in this fashion:
Beside the reading desk was an old upright piano, on which
Hanslick used to play examples to illustrate his lectures, with short,
round fingers in a somewhat old-fashioned way. He was already an
old man—short, with a bent back and white hair and pointed beard.
With a sharp nose under bushy eyebrows, he looked like an elderly
hawk. I was disappointed when he spread his manuscript on the desk
and began to read it in a feminine, falsetto voice, without looking
up.56
The stereotype of the nebbish, feminized Jew is one that Graf

seemed to evoke directly: Hanslick himself lacked the
masculine German-ness necessary to understand Wagner, and
actively suppressed this in his readers and pupils. Graf
cynically described Hanslick’s writings as “twelve volumes, in
which his intelligence, charm, clarity, and wit are persevered,
55
Ibid., 247.
56
Ibid., 244–245.
131
like drugs and poisons, in cut-glass vessels on the shelves of a
pharmacy.”57
Graf’s anti-Semitism seems paradoxical—he himself
was a Jew who fled Nazi oppression, immigrating to the United
States in 1938. Building upon Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna, the historian William McGrath suggests that Jewish
anti-Semitism in late 19th century Vienna was related to the
failures of liberalism in the previous generation. Focusing upon
the predominately Jewish intellectual “Pernerstorfer Circle,”
named after the socialist delegation leader in the lower house of
the Reichsrat, Engelbert Pernerstorfer, McGrath argues that
this younger generation “felt the urge to break with the
bourgeois world and, to resuscitate a culture that had lost its
vitality.”58 For some, this “revolt against society, parents and
school swelled into a revolt against the bourgeois age.”59
Because of the close relationship between Jews and liberalism
in the 1850s and 1860s, young Viennese Jews of the 1870s
turned to völkisch popular politics as an alternate means of
assimilation. A significant part of Austrian völkisch politics
was an anti-Semitic outlook, one that many young Jews
adopted with particular fervor. As McGrath summarizes,
“Whether or not they were in some sense trying to prove the
authenticity of their own Germanness in this way remains
difficult to say, but certainly many of their criticisms of liberal
failures seem to reflect the longing for a community and
acceptance appropriate to their Jewish assimilationist
background.”60 Steven Beller’s Vienna and the Jews, 1867—
1938 places musicians like Max Graf within an entire trend of
assimilationist Jews who turned to Wagner as a means of
proving their German identities. “Guido Adler [a central figure
in the Pernerstorfer Circle] was one of the first Viennese
57
58
McGrath is citing the German-born, Jewish-American historian George Mosse
(1918-1999). William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 5.
59
George Mosse, “The Influence of the Völkisch Idea on German Jewry,” Studies
of the Leo Baeck Institute (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1967), 84–86.
60
William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria, 6.
132
Wagnerians and a founder of the Akademischer Wagnerverein.
The first composer in Vienna to emulate Wagner was a Jew,
Karl Goldmark.”61 To this list, one could easily add Max Graf.
William McGrath contributes to a second analytical
model of Hanslick, shaped by the post-Second World War
decline of Wagner and the subsequent rise of Arnold
Schönberg’s “Second Viennese School” into critical awareness
and musicological acceptance. Historians of this camp depict a
very different Hanslick—one who prefigured Friedrich
Nietzsche’s attacks on the Dionysian collapse of late Wagner
into “chaos in place of rhythm,” music written to impress on
“the masses! the immature! the used up! the morbid! the idiots!
the Wagnerians!”62 Volkisch populism found support amongst
Wagner’s audiences and the composer grew in popularity as
liberalism collapsed in 1870s Vienna. The result was a populist
politics in a “new key,” embodied in the virulently anti-Semitic
politicians Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Karl Lueger.
Perhaps the musicologist could identify this new key as “A
minor,” the starting key of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the
musical drama that would solidify his dominance of the
Germanic operatic stage.63 In this narrative, Hanslick assumes
the role of Apollonian hero, favoring the “academic” and
“rational” Brahms and fighting against the Wagnerian cult, one
that took on a religious character as Wagner himself espoused a
new pan-Germanic spirituality unifying “Schopenhauerian
philosophy, musical theory, and Christian mysticism.”64
Following World War II, the music of Viennese
serialist composer Arnold Schönberg and his “Second Vienesse
School”—comprised of Alban Berg and Anton Webern—found
new and accepting audiences amongst musicians and
musicologists centered at the University of Darmstadt.
61
Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938, 157.
62
Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner in The Works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, Vol. XI, trans. Thomas Common (London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd.,
1896), 68–69.
63
Carl E. Schorske, “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Triptych,” in Fin-de-
siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 116–180.
64
William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria, 89.
133
Interestingly, Schönberg’s aesthetic awakening parallels that of
Hanslick. Initially a devout Wagnerian, Schönberg’s study of
the works of Johannes Brahms led the composer to completely
reevaluate his compositional language. Eschewing the
harmonic pallet of Wagner and Richard Strauss, Schönberg
embraced a theoretically new atonal musical idiom, rooted in
the formalist structures and contrapuntal syntax of Brahms.65
Through his defense of Brahms, Hanslick’s criticism formed
part of the intellectual link from Beethoven to Brahms to
Schönberg.
This is countered by a third analysis of Hanslick, related to a
late-1970s and 1980s interest in the Jewish intellectual
community of fin-de-siècle Vienna. As Peter Gay argued in his
Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in
Modernist Culture, Hanslick may have lived in the imperial
lands for his entire life, but his identity was distinctly un-
Austrian. A champion of the Protestant Brahms, Hanslick’s
readership and influence was as great in Berlin as it was in
Vienna. He thus contributed as much to the shaping of a
Germanic musical identity as he did to an Austrian or Viennese
one. His military allegiances often fell with the Prussians, even
when rivaling Austria. He welcomed the victories of the
Prussian Army in 1870–1871, “as though he came from a
Junker house.”66 Furthermore, his associations with noted anti-
Semites such as Professor Billroth suggest an un-Jewish
character. Indeed, there is no evidence to show that Hanslick
was ever a practicing Jew.
Gay contends that Hanslick does not represent the
conservative antithesis to Wagner’s Zukunftsmusik, but rather a
member of an opposing modernist aesthetic school. Hanslick’s
modernism differed from Wagner in that he still accepted a
place for formal structures, and rejected a complete sensual
65
For a look at Schönberg’s academic treatment of Brahms’s music, see Arnold
Schönberg, “Brahms the Progressive,” Style and Idea: Selected Writings of
Arnold Schönberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), pp. 398–441.
66
Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978), 12–13.
134
collapse into irrational harmonic language. As Gay states,
“Form—this is the meaning of Vom Musikalish-Schönen and
the uncounted articles that accompany Hanslick’s treatise like
so many grace notes—form has pleasures and, indeed,
profundities of its own.”67 If Hanslick is seen today as a
musical conservative, it is Wagner’s doing. By portraying
Hanslick as Beckmesser, the critic has fallen into his current
musicological caricature.
–––
Despite more contemporary attempts to evaluate

Hanslick as a modernist—particularly, by Peter Gay—the
shadow of Wagner’s “Viet Hanslich” still looms large. Efforts
made by historians and musicologists over the past century to
understand the music critic have been uniformly problematic.
This is ultimately the result of intellectual strategy—indeed, the
goal seems less to unravel Hanslick than to utilize the critic as
an archetype of the fin-de-siècle Viennese bourgeoisie.
Furthermore, as Hanslick’s criticism acts as a polemic
regarding the dangers of Wagner’s music, it is unsurprising that
both his contemporaries (namely, Wagner) and modern
biographers deal with him polemically. As a result, the
biographies the historian encounters are impossibly varied and
inconsistent. As he embodies a union of so many distinct
elements of the complex social and cultural fabric of fin-de-
siècle Vienna, he will remain a compelling case study for the
historian and musicologist—ready for reevaluation.
67
Ibid., 276-277.
“WE WANT YOU TO SEE US LIVE OVER THE LIFE OF HIAWATHA IN HIS OWN
COUNTRY”
135
“We want you to see us live over the life of
Hiawatha in his own country”: The
Performance of Nativeness in the Garden
River Ojibwa’s Hiawatha Pageant
JULIA RENAUD
A
framed birch bark panel measuring roughly 14” x
24” reclines against a bookshelf in Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s study. [Figure 1] In a
room dedicated to the intellectual pursuits of a
great poet, filled with marble busts, and dedicated to the
intellectual pursuits of a great poet, the object appears rough
and unfinished. Dead lichen and moss creep across the panel’s
surface; a seam down the center repaired by conservators adds
to its wild demeanor. Yet the a frame and glass that enclose the
panel place it within the conventions of Western art. Although
the panel’s text and artwork seem exotic, linguistic and visual
information has been made intelligible for a Euro-American
audience.
According to the Longfellow House’s museum
catalogue record, this object from 1900 served as an “invitation
to the Longfellow family to visit the Ojibwas at Lake Huron.”1
The text emblazoned into the panel translates as follows:
Ladies: We loved your father. The memory of our people will
never die as long as your father’s song lives, and that will live
forever. Will you and your husbands and Miss Longfellow
come and see us and stay in our royal wigwam on an island in
Hiawatha’s playground, in the land of the Ojibways? We want
you to see us live over again the life of Hiawatha in his own
1
Longfellow Catalogue No. 6132.
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136
country. Kabaoosa. Wabunosa. Boston, Onahbaunegises, The
month of crusts on the snow.2
Investigation reveals these twenty-four lines of cursive to

be in Ojibwe, an Algonquin language with 50,000 speakers
legible in both the English alphabet and the Cree syllabary
with of 50,000 speakers.3 To the right of the text sits a
subtly painted portrait of a man. His feathered headdress
marks him as an exoticized other, but the classic bust
framing of of the portrait image is reminiscent ofborrows
from heroic Western portraiture. The artist’s signature and
date, “Francis West, 1900,” establishes the artist as Euro-
American, while the labels under the medallion, which read
“Kabaoosa” and “Ojibway,” identify establish the subject
of the portrait as native.
In an operation common to North American native
souvenir art, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the
invitation visually performs nativeness within Euro-American
conventions. As historian Ruth Phillips commentsargues, the
viability of native art commodities was contingent upon “their
success in conveying recognizable—and acceptable—concepts
of difference,” a production that required artists to “reimagine
themselves in terms of the conventions of Indianness current
among the consumer group, an exercise that profoundly
destabilized traditional indigenous concepts of identity.”45
Native producers placed these trademarks of nativeness within
Euro-American visual culture for stylistic and economic
reasons: “Appropriations of European concepts and
styles…signaled to members of the dominant culture the
2
“ ‘Hiawatha’-An Aboriginal Drama played by Ojibwa for Longfellow’s
Descendants,” The Minneapolis Journal September 29, 1900.
3
Native Languages of the Americas, “Native Languages of the Americas: Ojibwe
(Ojibway, Anishinaabemowin, Chippewa, Ojibwa),” Native Languages of the
Americas, http://www.native-languages.org/ojibwe.htm.
4
Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art
from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Hong Kong: University of Washington Press,
1998), 9.
5
Ibid, 104.
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137
makers’ creative and competent participation in the new
economic order of consumer-driven industrial production, and
therefore their ability to conform to the conditions of
modernity.”6 From the mid nineteenth century onward, this
production of a seemingly authentic native culture for a Euro-
American audience extended far beyond the souvenir trade.
The Mmilitary conquest and forced assimilation of natives
coupled with the fragmentation, urbanization, and alienation of
modern American society sparked a mass turn-of-the-century
cultural quest for “primitive” native authenticity.7
Paradoxically, to be accepted as “authentic,” natives often had
to shape their cultural productions to Euro-American
conventions. To be fulfilling, such encounters with nativeness
had to occur within the parameters of the expected exotic;
actual engagement with the reality of native tribes would reveal
pervasive poverty, cultural decimation, political
disenfranchisement, and mass marginalization. The invitation
sent to the Longfellow family exemplifies efforts to satisfy
popular demand for a particular vision of native culture.
The birch bark invitation arrived at Craigie House in
the midst of this mass cultural search for native authenticity.8
TAs the author of The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Longfellow,
had passed away eighteen years earlier., George Kabaoosa (the
pictured man pictured) and Albert Wabunosa, both members of
the Garden River Ojibwa tribe, sent the invitation to
Longfellow’shis adult daughters Alice, Edith, and Anne
Allegra. In the text, the tribal leaders invited the women and
their families to visit “Hiawatha’s playground, in the land of
the Ojibways,” as well as to “live over the life of Hiawatha in
his own country.” However straightforward this invitation may
seem, this last phrase presents a riddle. By living over the
lifere-living Hiawatha’s life, would the Ojibwa be
presentingdemonstrate traditional native culture,? Longfellow’s
6
Ibid, 11.
7
Phillip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
8
Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press,
2004), ix.
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138
conception of traditional native culture? Or a pageant that –
like the birch bark invitation – would depict a form of native
culture framed by the conventions of contemporary Euro-
American contemporary culture?
Encouraged and underwritten by an enterprising
Canadian Pacific Railway official, the Garden River Ojibwa
tribe likely agreed to perform Longfellow’s version of their
cultural heritage for both motives likely political and financial
motives. This performance extended offstagebeyond the stage;
and , where the tribe appeared both exotic and familiar by
inviteding the party to exotic yet familiar events such as a
church service conducted in Ojibwa. Demonstrating their
fascination with the performed primitive, the Longfellow party
“played Indian” themselves by accepting adoption into the
tribe. For the Garden River Ojibwa, these performances
represented a careful navigation of the competing advantages
of autonomy and assimilation as well as political survival and
economic livelihood. For the Longfellow party, they provided a
seemingly authentic antidote to the demands of modern life.
While the birch bark invitation once beckoned the Longfellow
family to Canada, it now beckons its audience into a
fascinating and complex chapter in the history of performing
nativeness.
–––
In her Introduction to the 1901 Riverside edition of The

Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow’s eldest daughter, Alice,
recounts the invitation’s arrival and her subsequent visit to
Desbarats, Ontario. According to Alice, Kabaoosa and
Wabunosa originally visited Boston as part of an exhibit on
Indian life in the 1900 Sportsmen’s Show.9 The Ojibwa chief
Bukwujjinini was to accompany the tribe, but died a day before
their departure. As Alice recounts, Bukwujjinini apparently
hoped to visit the Longfellows at Craigie House: “One of the
9
Alice Longfellow, “A Visit to Hiawatha’s People,” The Song of Hiawatha
(Boston: The Riverside Literature Series, 1901), vi.
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139
inducements he had to take the journey was the hope of visiting
the home of the writer who had cared enough for the legends of
his people to turn them into poetry.”10 From Alice’s
perspective, Longfellow had canonized an Ojibwa legend with
The Song of Hiawatha, and the invitation was an expression of
thanks tribe wished to express thanks to the family of the
Ojibwa’sits cultural conservator.
However, Alice attributes the idea of the Hiawatha
pageant to “the Canadian gentleman who arranged the
expedition,” a nonchalant but captivating reference to a third
party.11
Rather than representing the attempt of a naïve tribe to
connect with a heroIndeed, the invitation more accurately
represents the efforts of one L.O. Armstrong, head of the
Canadian Pacific Railway’s colonization department, to
popularize railroad and ethnographic tourism in Canada.12 The
Longfellow family’s trip to “Hiawatha’s playground” and the
subsequent performance of the Hiawatha pageant would serve
as invaluable publicity for the Canadian Pacific Railway, which
at the time functioned as the chief organ of national cultural
tourism.13 The Garden River Ojibwa agreed to participate in the
endeavor, exemplifying their stancecontinuing a strategy of
selective assimilation and (are they really altering their culture?
Maybe political or commercial performance would be better)
cultural alteration cultural performancein order to preserve
tribal sovereignty. The tribe also likely had financial
motivations; the tourist trade would no doubt prove profitable.
By inviting the Longfellow family to visit “Hiawatha’s
playground,” L.O. Armstrong and the Garden River Ojibwa
entered into a partnership to popularize travel to Canada. (I
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Descendants.”
13
E. J. Hart, “See This World Before the Next: Tourism and the CPR,” The CPR
West: The Iron Road and the Making of a Nation (Vancouver: Douglas &
McIntrye, 1984), 151.
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140
think this sentence was redundant) While it might be true that
“Kabaoosa had heard the poem of ‘Hiawatha’ read by his
Sunday-school teacher in his youth,” Alice Longfellow’s
assessment of the situation did not acknowledge the
tremendous financial and legal power that “the Canadian
gentleman” wielded, and the unique negotiations of the Garden
River Ojibwa.14
Contemporary newspaper accounts describe L. O.
Armstrong as “a professional explorer,” “a much traveled
ethnologist,” and “a friend of the Ojibway tribe.”15 TWhile
these complementary epithets may be accurate, but he was also
an official of the Canadian Pacific Railway, or more
specifically, the head of the CPR Colonization Department.16
Completed in 1885, the government funded and administrated
Canadian Pacific Railway fueled Canadian settlement,
industrialization, and development. Historian Hugh Dempsey
attributes to the CPR the “introduction of masses of immigrants
from Europe…the movement of goods to distant markets; the
creation of railway town sites, some of which grew to become
important cities, and the development of petroleum, coal,
lumber and other natural resources.”17
The railroad also influenced the tenuous and
sometimes combative relations between native tribes and the
Canadian government. Like contemporary United States policy,
late-nineteenth-century Canadian legislation focused on the
dissolution of the tribal system and the immediate assimilation
of natives into Euro-Canadian culture, a purpose explicitly
articulated stated by Prime Minister John Macdonald in 1887:
“‘The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the
tribal system and assimilate the Amerindian people in all
14
Longfellow, vi.
15
William E. Brigham, “ ‘Hiawatha’ in Ojibway,” Boston Evening Transcript,
July 19, 1900.; “ ‘Hiawatha’-An Aboriginal Drama played by Ojibwa for
Longfellow’s Descendants.”
16
Ibid.
17
Hugh Dempsey, “Introduction,” The CPR West: The Iron Road and the Making
of a Nation (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntrye, 1984), 8.
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respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily
as they are fit to change.’”18 The Canadian Pacific Railway
represented a subtle and pervasive aspect of this tribal
dissolution and assimilation, as its effects on population and the
environment caused the slow destruction of native resources.
Among other grievances with governmental policy, natives
were frustrated by the influx of tourists and sportsmen, whose
“carelessly tended campfires often set the forest ablaze, while
the mere presence of the hunters further decimated and
frightened the game.”19 Most threatening were the European
settlers who “regarded the Indians sometimes with fear,
sometimes with derision.”20 The railroad also sparked prairie
fires, divided buffalo herds, and killed wayward horses,
severely injuring the ecology and economy of native reserves.21
The fact that the organizers of the Métis Rebellion of 1885, a
massive native uprising in the Northwest Territories, discussed
destroying railroad tracks and were “overjoyed when rumor
reached them that the tracks had been torn up by southern
tribes” indicates the intense hostility some native tribes felt
toward the CPR.22
While the Christianized Garden River Ojibwa
experienced a comparatively peaceful relationship with the
Canadian government and the CPR did not directly interact
with the CPR, their tribal history of political engagement and
intercultural negotiation debunks challenges Alice’s conception
of Buhkwujjinini and Kabaoosa as mere ardent admirers of The
Song of Hiawatha. The tribe was well aware of the dual
advantages of assimilating to Euro-American culture and
performing their ownwn native culture long before the arrival
of the Longfellow family. Throughout the nineteenth century,
18
Olive Patricia Dickason, A Concise History of Canada’s First Nations (Canada:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 159.
19
CITATION
20
Dempsey, “The Fearsome Fire Wagon,” The CPR West: The Iron Road and the
Making of a Nation (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntrye, 1984), 63, 64.
21
Ibid., 63.
22
Ibid., 65.
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the Ojibwa selectively conformed to Canadian political and
cultural pressures to retain some tribal autonomy, and political
power they forcefully negotiated with the Canadian
government for political power..
The Garden River Ojibwa had been involved in tribal
trade networks for at least four millennia and continued to
participate as European settlers integrated into the system.23 In
the first recorded interaction between the tribe and the
Canadian government, Chief Shingwaukonce and a band of
warriors led the British charge at the Battle of Queenston
Heights during the War of 1812. In thanks for their service, the
tribe, and was ere awarded a medal from the British
government for their service.24 The leaders also fought for their
own land, sovereignty, and rights from the government; the
official tribal history mentions Chief Shingwaukonce’s failed
plans to develop an Ojibwa homeland near Sault Ste. Marie.25
These tensions intensified with the discovery of mineral
deposits north of Lake Superior in 1846. When requests for
their share of the profits met with no results, the Ojibwa
“moved to close the Quebec and Lake Superior Mining
Company operation at Mica Bay by force” in 1849, an effort
quelled by federal troops.26 The next year marked Chief
Shingwaukonce’s signing of the Robinson Treaty, which fixed
the boundaries of the Garden River Ojibwa’s ‘reserve’ (a parcel
of land considerably smaller than earlier tribal lands) and gave
the tribe full hunting and fishing rights as well as annuities.27
While this completed the Garden River Ojibwa’s
formal negotiations with the Canadian government before the
turn of the century, the Christianized tribe continued to
negotiate their native identity in more subtle ways. Their
conversion to Christianity must have aided them politically,
23
Phillips, 22-23.
24
Garden River First Nation, “History,” Keteguanseebee Garden River First
Nation, http://www.gardenriver.org/about/history.htm.
25
Ibid.
26
Dickason, 157.
27
Ibid.
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although later placed them in apparent need of cultural
restoration. IIn 1n 1870 Chief Buhkwujjinini went on a
fundraising trip to England with the Reverend Edward Wilson,
putting on his tribal costume before speeches to help raise
money for the reserve’s Methodist ir Methodist mission.28 As
Ruth Phillips notes, Buhkwujjinini and Wilson “carefully
orchestrated the chief’s appearance in order to walk the narrow
line between a comforting sameness and a titillating otherness,”
a parallel to “the combination of exotic materials with familiar
forms and ornamental designs that characterized the bark
objects” they sold and eventually sent to the Longfellow
family.29 As of 1870, the tribe knew that performing their
nativeness would prove profitable. Accounts of
Buhkwujjinini’s successor Kabaoosa depict a tribal leader able
to translate native culture into Euro-American terms. One
article claims he been educated as a preacher, while another
discusses his fluency in French, English and Ojibwa.30
Ironically, by the turn of the century Euro-Americans perceived
the need for yet another form of missionary work with the
Garden River Ojibwa: the restoration of their “authentic” native
culture. Their conversion to Christianity must have aided them
politically, although later placed them in apparent need of
cultural restoration.
One of these “cultural missionaries,L” L. O. Armstrong
dwas one of these cultural “missionaries,” but he did not seek
onlymerely seek the preservation of tribal tradition. harnessed
the Garden River Ojibwa’s unique capacity for cultural
negotiation to meet a contemporary Euro-American desire for
encounter with the primitive. For Armstrong, marketing the
Garden River Ojibwa as a Canadian cultural tourism attraction
(beginning with their performance of Ojibwa life at the 1900
Sportsmen’s Show) capitalized upon a contemporary Euro-
American desire for an encounter with the primitive a
28
Phillips, 36.
29
Ibid., 177-8.
30
Descendants.”
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predominant trend. As historian Phillip Deloria comments,
turn-of-the-century Americans desired an encounter with the
anti-modern to define modernity: “To be modern, one acted out
a heuristic encounter with the primitive. Indian Others,
constructed firmly outside American society and temporality,
represented this break not only historically, but also racially,
socially, and developmentally.”31 The turn of the century also
marked an increase in native participation in their own
presentation, an empowering dynamic with the potential for
victimization: “The fact that native people turned to playing
Indian—miming Indianness back at Americans in order to
redefine it—indicates how little cultural capital Indian people
possessed at the time. Such exercises were fraught not only
with ambiguity, but danger.”32 By agreeing to perform their
supposed heritage, the Garden River Ojibwa exposed
themselves to potential cultural disenfranchisement as well as
potential financial gain. By 1900, the Canadian government
needed tourists, the Garden River Ojibwa were willing to
perform their nativeness, and the Longfellow family wished to
experience the “authentic” Song of Hiawatha.
–––
During their twelve-day trip, the twelve-person

Longfellow party witnessed performances of nativeness by the
Garden River Ojibwa both on and offstage. Instead of offering
an obviously explicitly fictionalized play to their visitors, L.O.
Armstrong and the Garden River Ojibwa declared their
Hiawatha pageant to be a ritual re-enactment. This language
promised unproblematic access to a mythic historic past for the
purpose of its authentic resurrection in the present; like
Christian Passion Plays, the Hiawatha pageant would represent
a mythohistoric event invested with religious significance.
This tone matched the key of Longfellow’s original
poem, which depicted a past colored by the mythology of the
31
Deloria, 105.
32
Ibid, 125.
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doomed noble savage and the natural inevitability of European
Christian domination. An evocation of and rumination on
native religion and culture, Longfellow’s epic tells of the pre-
Columbian Hiawatha, son of the West Wind. Over the course
of the poem, Hiawatha becomes a master hunter, warrior, and
healer; conquers his immortal father; woos, marries, and then
mourns the beautiful Minnehaha; and invents written language.
The peaceful arrival of a Christian missionary, “the Black-
Robe chief, the Pale-face,” signals the end of Hiawatha’s (and
the native peoples’) era; accepting the domination of European
Christian civilization, Hiawatha sails into the sunset in the
final, elegiac image of the poem.
However, Longfellow’sThis original Hiawatha story

did not stem solely from the Ojibwa tribe, but rather was an
amalgamation of different native myths and European epics.
The Longfellow biographer Charles C. Calhoun attributes the
story of Hiawatha to sources as diverse as the Finnish epic the
Kalevala, the writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft on the
legends of the Great Lakes tribes, and the paintings of George
Catlin, which primarily documented Plains Indian tribes.33 As
historian Alan Trachtenberg commentsargues, Longfellow did
not use any actual native legends or interviews for his poem,
but rather used proto-ethnographic research, and relied solely
on Schoolcraft’s dictionary for Ojibwa-Algonquin words.34
Although Schoolcraft primarily wrote about the legends of the
Ojibwa tribe, the name Hiawatha itself came from the Iroquois,
replacing the Ojibwa Manabozho due to his qualm with “ ‘that
awkward zh.’”35
Longfellow was not the only Euro-American author of
the Garden River Ojibwa’s pageant; L.O. Armstrong served as
the chief dramatic adaptor of the poem. Yet because he styled
himself as a cultural anthropologist and restorer, Armstrong
33
Ibid., 204-206.
34
Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans,
1880-1930 (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2004), 62.
35
Calhoun, 64.
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146
asserted the essential authenticity of the performance.
Ironically, the very elements of Christianization and
Europeanization that enabled the Ojibwa’s comparatively
successful relations with the Canadian government and
unthreatening demeanor to the Longfellow party rendered them
in supposed need of cultural restoration. After visiting the
Smithsonian ethnographic archives in Washington D.C.,
Armstrong returned with “drawings, photographs, and object-
lessons” to recreate historical Ojibwa costume.36 In his article
for the Evening Transcript, William Brigham bemoans the
Ojibwa’s supposed loss of their native decorative artistry and
depicts Armstrong’s introduction of these earlier modes of
costume as an act of assistance: “Their general appearance was
far removed from that of the gorgeous personages of their tribal
history and the Longfellow epic…he [Armstrong] succeeded
completely in restoring to his band of Ojibways their forgotten
skill in the art of porcupine quill and bead embroidery.”37 In a
telling turn of phrase, Brigham conflates the depictions of
“tribal history and the Longfellow epic,” suggesting that
Longfellow’s ahistorical mythology perfectly encapsulated a
millennia of intercontinental trade and hundreds of years of
colonial contact. Ojibwa tribal costume, a symbol of native
independence and tradition that had most likely been forgone
due to governmental pressures, needed to be resurrected in
controlled form for performance.
The result of this research and supposed restoration? A
stereotypical Indian costume replete with buckskins, feathers,
and war paint.38 In theatrical photographic portraits that
illustrate Alice’s introduction, the actors portraying Hiawatha,
Minnehaha, and Old Nokomis displayed these costumes,
providing a visualization of the merging of “tribal history and
the Longfellow epic.” [Figures 2, 3, 4] This fusion informed
every aspect of the performance; the photograph of Hiawatha
perfectly matches the portrait of Kabaoosa on the invitation.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
Lovering.
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147
The costumes adhered to Euro-American stereotypes of
nativeness and affirmed the successful containment of
potentially threatening native culture. When asked whether the
performers appeared “hideous” in their costumes, Alice
describes their appearance as simultaneously “civilized,” or
assimilated, and “savage,” or authentic: “They appeared just as
they are. Indians, but civilized Indians, with few traces of the
savage hovering about them.” To Alice, the Ojibwa were
clearly “playing Indian,” and therefore fit within the bounds of
accepted Euro-American convention. Because the costumes
explicitly performed what Alice deems “the romance of the
redskin,” she could accept the exoticism of the native
appearance as authentic, but also could recognize it as distinct
from the Christianized reality of the Ojibwa tribe. 39
According to a Boston Evening Transcript article, “It is
believed unanimously by the Indian actors and actresses that
these [songs and dances] have been handed down from ancient
times without change,” a statement that purported the sense of
a historical reenactment rather than a theatrical production.40
While no effort was made to disguise L.O. Armstrong’s
authorship (he placed his name prominently in the distributed
program), contemporary newspaper accounts assert the
authenticity of the music and dancing. Armstrong accentuated
accentuated this perception in his adaptation”authenticity” by
structuring the pageant as a series of non-verbal scenes (a style
of theater associated with mystic ritual and dance rather than
high culture): the smoking of the peace pipe, Nokomis singing
a lullaby to Hiawatha, Nokomis teaching Hiawatha how to
shoot, Hiawatha’s visit to the arrow-maker after his defeat of
the West WindMudjekeewis, the e return of Hiawatha to the
land of the Dakotas, the wedding dance, the caribou dance, the
gambling dance, the missionary’s arrival, and finally,
Hiawatha’s departure.41 The press claimed that the Garden
39
Ibid.
40
July 19, 1900.
41
Longfellow, vii-ix.
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148
River Ojibwa presented these scenes as their traditional culture.
According to a Boston Evening Transcript article, “It is
believed unanimously by the Indian actors and actresses that
these [songs and dances] have been handed down from ancient
times without change,” a statement that purported the sense of
a historical reenactment rather than a theatrical production.42
In an interview with the Boston Sunday Journal, Alice
Longfellow stated that “‘there were 75 actors in the drama, but
of these the greater number took no prominent part,’” also
mentioning the performers’ amateurish initial bashfulness in an
instance of pejorative racism: “‘The Indians were rather shy at
first…But once the play was started…they entered into the
action with a heartiness and enthusiasm which was good to
see.’”43 As Trachtenberg comments and the historical record
reflects, “Newspaper commentary constructed the performance
as that of Indians putting on their ancient fading selves in both
historical and mythical pageantry, enacting the return of
Hiawatha in his perpetual act of departing ‘for America’s
sake.’” This performance was often likened to a Christian
Passion Play.44
Ironically, the very elements of Christianization and
Europeanization that enabled the Ojibwa’s comparatively
successful relations with the Canadian government and
unthreatening demeanor to the Longfellow party rendered them
in supposed need of cultural restoration. After visiting the
Smithsonian ethnographic archives in Washington D.C.,
Armstrong returned with “drawings, photographs, and object-
lessons” to recreate historical Ojibwa costume.45 In his article
for the Evening Transcript, William Brigham bemoans the
Ojibwa’s supposed loss of their native decorative artistry, and
depicts Armstrong’s introduction of these earlier modes of
42
July 19, 1900.
43
Frank W. Lovering, “How the Ojibways Played Hiawatha For Us,” Boston
Sunday Journal, September 23, 1900.
44
Trachtenberg, 95.
45
Ibid.
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149
costume as an act of assistance: “Their general appearance was
far removed from that of the gorgeous personages of their tribal
history and the Longfellow epic…he [Armstrong] succeeded
completely in restoring to his band of Ojibways their forgotten
skill in the art of porcupine quill and bead embroidery.”46 In a
telling turn of phrase, Brigham conflates the depictions of
“tribal history and the Longfellow epic,” suggesting that
Longfellow’s ahistorical mythology perfectly encapsulated a
millennia of intercontinental trade and hundreds of years of
colonial contact. Ojibwa tribal costume, a symbol of native
independence and tradition that had most likely been forgone
due to governmental pressures, needed to be resurrected in
controlled form for performance.
In the interview, Alice describes the result of this
transformation—a stereotypical Indian costume replete with
buckskins, feathers, and war paint.47 In theatrical photographic
portraits that illustrate Alice’s introduction, the actors
portraying Hiawatha, Minnehaha, and Old Nokomis displayed
these costumes, providing a visualization of the merging of
“tribal history and the Longfellow epic.” [Figures 2, 3, 4] The
fact that the This fusion informed every aspect of the
performance; visual rhetoric of Hiawatha perfectly matches the
portrait of Kabaoosa on the invitation reveals the merging of
the mythic and the contemporary.
Because Tthe costumes adhered to Euro-American
stereotypes of nativeness and, they affirmed the successful
containment of potentially threatening native culture. When
asked whether the performers appeared “hideous” in their
costumes, Alice describes their appearance as simultaneously
“civilized,” or assimilated, and “savage,” or authentic: “They
appeared just as they are. Indians, but civilized Indians, with
few traces of the savage hovering about them.” To Alice, the
Ojibwa were clearly “playing Indian,” and therefore fit within
the bounds of accepted Euro-American convention. Because
the costumes explicitly performed what Alice deems “the
46
Ibid.
47
Lovering.
COUNTRY”
150
romance of the redskin,” she could accept the exoticism of the
native appearance as authentic, but also could recognize it as
distinct from the Christianized reality of the Ojibwa tribe. 48
TTo maintain the illusion of an this unthreatening and
but authentic encounter, the Garden River Ojibwa continued to
perform this trope of the civilized savage offstage. Written
descriptions of the Longfellow party’s visit to the Islands of
Desbarats are rife with instances of the Ojibwa acting out
“authentic” practices. After disembarking from their private
CPR car at the mining town of Desbarats, the party was met by
members of the tribe “in full costume,” suggesting continuity
between the mythical figures depicted by the Hiawatha pageant
and the people currently living on the Ojibwa reserve. The tribe
transported the visitors to their dwellings via “sailboat and
canoes,” modern modes of transportation that signaled a
simultaneous regression in time. Throughout the visit, the tribe
dressed in buckskin, rowed in canoes, and sang and danced.
However, tribe members simultaneouslyalso
demonstrated ways in which they had adopted Euro-Christian
culture, reassuring their visitors to their status as “civilized
savages.” Throughout the visit, the tribe dressed in buckskin,
rowed in canoes, and sang and danced. However, they also
participated in Christian worship and displayed medals from
the British government. This disjunction between displays of
the primitive and the modern reflected an actual cultural
intermingling; the tribe had retained their own customs as well
as had integrated new ones. Yet the management of these
potentially conflicting aspects during the trip indicates the
thoughtful construction of a comfortingly anti-modern
experience for the Longfellow party.
Written descriptions of the Longfellow party’s visit to
the Islands of Desbarats are rife with instances of the Ojibwa
exhibiting stereotypical behavior. They simultaneously
demonstrated ways in which they had adopted Euro-Christian
culture, reassuring their visitors to their status as “civilized
savages.” After disembarking from their private CPR car at the
48
Ibid.
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mining town of Desbarats, the party was met by members of
the tribe “in full costume,” suggesting continuity between the
mythical figures depicted in the Hiawatha pageant and the
individuals currently living on the Ojibwa reserve.49 The tribe
transported the visitors to their dwellings via “sailboat and
canoes,” non-modern modes of transportation that signaled a
simultaneous regression in time.50
Photographs from this journey demonstrate reassuring
reminders of the context of modernity, alleviating any concerns
about entering a primitive and terrifying landscape. An image
captioned “Mr. Gregory, Albert Wabunosa and George
Kabaoosa going to Longfellow Island” depicts the two Ojibwa
men wearing Western-style, fashionable hats to accompany
their “full costume”’; another photograph of Tom Kabaoosa
rowing Richard Henry Dana contains the same sartorial
combination. [Figures 5 and 6] These photographs reveal that
while the Ojibwa wore enough native clothing to mark them as
authentic inhabitants of an exotic culture, they also wore
signifiers of modernity such as the bowler hat. This
performance of the primitive in the context of the modern
characterized the activities undertaken by the Ojibwa and the
Longfellow party throughout the trip. After the performance of
the pageant on Saturday, the Ojibwa invited the party to a
Christian service on Sunday, officiated by an English
clergyman in the Ojibwa language (the same priest that played
the missionary in the pageant.)51 Like the buckskin outfit
topped with a bowler hat, this service offered the Longfellow
party an authentic, exotic experience (hearing Ojibwa) in a
non-threatening context (a Christian service.) In keeping with
this mode of unofficial performance, and in an explicit
imitation of the last lines of Hiawatha, the tribe bade the party
farewell with a traditional song and dance.52Photographs from
this journey demonstrate reassuring reminders of the context of
49
Longfellow, vii.
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid., x.
52
Ibid., xii.
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152
modernity to , alleviateing any concerns about entering a
primitive and terrifying landscape. An image captioned “Mr.
Gregory, Albert Wabunosa and George Kabaoosa going to
Longfellow Island” depicts the two Ojibwa men wearing
Western-style, fashionable hats to accompany their “full
costume”’; another photograph of Tom Kabaoosa rowing
Richard Henry Dana contains the same sartorial combination.
[Figures 5 and 6] These photographs reveal that while Tthe
Ojibwa in these photographs wore enough native clothing to
mark them as authentic inhabitants of an exotic culture, but
they also wore signifiers of modernity such as the bowler hat.
This performance of the primitive in the context of the
modern characterized the activities undertaken by the Ojibwa
and the Longfellow party throughout the trip. After the
performance of the pageant on Saturday, the Ojibwa invited the
party to a Christian service on Sunday, officiated by an English
clergyman in the Ojibwa language (the same priest that played
the missionary in the pageant.)53 Like the buckskin outfit
topped with a bowler hat, this service offered the Longfellow
party an authentic, exotic experience (hearing Ojibwa) in a
non-threatening context (a Christian service.) In keeping with
this mode of unofficial performance, and in an explicit
imitation of the last lines of Hiawatha, the tribe bade the party
farewell with a traditional song and dance.54 This disjunction
between displays of the primitive and the modern reflected an
actual cultural intermingling; the tribe had retained their own
customs as well as had integrated new ones.
The seemingly smooth integration between the
performance of nativeness and the signifiers of modernity
modernity sometimes elucidate thconcealed thee complex and
difficult status of the tribenatives. After the church service, an
elder displayed the medal of honor given to the tribe by King
George, explaining that he did so according to a commandment
to always “wear [it] when with persons of distinction.”55 But
53
Ibid., x.
54
Ibid., xii.
55
Ibid.
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153
Tthe elder’s remarks, as transcribed by Alice Longfellow,
temper this sign of deference to the Longfellow family and the
Canadian/British government. But TtThe medal apparently also
functioned as “a pledge that their [the Ojibwa] rights should be
respected,” a false promise hinted atrevealed when the elder
commented promise that the elder revealed to be false by
commenting, “ ‘I do not think Indians always happy.’”56
Instead of lauding the benevolent authority of colonial rule
within tribal culture, he the elder voiced the betrayal felt by
many native tribes. The medal was a token of a reneged
promise instead of a symbol of the alliance between the Garden
River Ojibwa and the Canadian government. The fact that this
man, a personage of great power and respect in the tribe, wore
modern European formalwear visually reinforces this sense of
the colonial government’s penetration into the supposedly
sacred sphere of the native. [Figure 7] By all accounts, the
Garden River Ojibwa successfully repressed most native
dissatisfaction with modern Western culture. This speech
served as one of very few reminders of the tension between the
Garden River Ojibwa and the Canadian government.
Candid shots of the visit also reveal otherthe jarring
disjunctions that occurred as the Ojibwa negotiated theirduring
negotiations of nativeness in the presence of the Longfellow
party. In one particularly striking image, the boy playing the
young Hiawatha, Edward, faces the camera in a headdress and
a Western suit, an outfit that signals both authenticity and
assimilation. [Figure 8] His mother, Mrs. Obtosuay, stands
behind him as his physical inverse, facing away from the
penetrating eye of the camera. Her Western costume
accentuates her formal placement as her son's shadow; she
wears a full-length dress, apron, and hat. While Edward serves
as the public face of the native (smiling, male, dressed as a
non-threatening other), Mrs. Obtosuay indicates suggests that a
truly authentic depiction of the Garden River Ojibwa would
indicate their forced subjugation and integration into the
modern Western world. A photograph of the pageant’s tribal
56
Ibid.
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154
spectators offers as a stark counterpoint to the posed
photographs of the Hiawatha performers. [Figure 9] Five
Ojibwa women and girls clothed in Western dresses, hats, and
aprons watch the pageant, demonstrating thatserving as a
reminder that the performance reinforced Euro-American
conceptions of native authenticity to natives themselvesthe
pageant reinforced conceptions of native identity to tribal
members as well as to the Longfellows. . The woman in the
foreground returns the camera’s gaze, demonstrating that the
Garden River Ojibwa observed their Euro-American visitors
with the same attention that they received. The woman in the
foreground returns the camera’s gaze, revealing the dialogic
nature of the exchange. The Ojibwa were not subjects of a
faux-ethnographic study, but rather were ambivalently
complicit in the production of their identity.
As the written accounts and photographic record
reveal, the Longfellow party engaged in their own “Indian
play,” dressing up in stereotypical Indian costumes and peeping
out of tepees. In perhaps the greatest demonstration of this
cross-cultural performative exchange, the Ojibwa adopted five
members of the Longfellow party into the tribe, bestowing
upon them Ojibwa names and birch bark certificates. This
ceremonial adoption suggested that the very identity of
nativeness could be simply assumed. By visiting the Islands of
the Blessed, the Longfellow party attempted to access an
authentic American identity through the performance of
nativeness.
A photograph of Francis West, the Boston artist who
aided L.O. Armstrong and painted the portrait of George
Kabaoosa, resides sits next to the photograph of Edward and
Mrs. Obtosuay. In the image, West stands bare-chested and
buckskin-clad on the edge of the lake, sporting a feather
headdress atop his painted face and body. [Figure 10] His left
arm jabs the sky in a theatrical posture of masculine strength,
while his right hand holds a weapon. The caption, “Mr. West as
Indian Warrior,” encapsulates this conception of native
masculinity as rough, virile and combative, the inverse of what
Woodcraft Indian founder Ernest Thompson Seton deemed the
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155
condition of the modern male: “ ‘Flat-chested cigarette
smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality.’”57 In another
photograph, Mr. Eastman ‘makes up’ a Miss Barroughs in a
native female costume by darkening her skin. [Figure 11]
BeyondApart from recording the expected stereotypical
‘squaw’ dress and headdress that Miss Barroughs wears, the
image captures the gaze of Mrs. Kabaoosa resting upon this
scene. The fact that Mrs. Kabaoosa wears the long dress and
apron of contemporary Western fashion indicates suggests the
invidious theatricality of Miss Barroughs’ appropriation of
nativeness. Regardless of ethnicity, to be authentically native
required donning a costume not typically worn by natives.
The only example of a Longfellow “playing Indian” in
the photographic record is an image of Anne Allegra and her
three daughters peeping out of a tepee. [Figure 12] Yet the
Longfellows engaged in a more profound instance of Indian
play by undergoing adoption into the Garden River Ojibwa
tribe. By ceremonially becoming Ojibwa, Alice, Edith, Anne
Allegra, and the two Dana boys were supposedly invested with
an authentic native identity, the culmination of the process of
“playing Indian.” According to an account in the Minneapolis
Journal, Kabaoosa himself conducted the induction ceremony,
“a most impressive rite…handed down among the Ojibways for
generations.” 58 As part of the ceremony, each individual
received an Ojibwa name, danced in the center of the tribal
circle, and then was introduced to the members of the tribe.
Each inductee then received a birch bark adoption certificate,
much like the invitation in appearance. [Figure 13] Like the
invitation and the adoption ceremony, the certificates
demonstrated adherence to native and Western convention:
their material (birch bark) and language (Ojibwa) signaled
nativeness, but their alphabet (Phoenician) and purpose (to
affirm the authenticity of Ojibwa adoption) signified for a
Euro-American context. Although Alice Longfellow claimed
57
Deloria, 107.
58
Descendants.”
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156
the adoption ceremony to be a surprise, she apparently prepared
remarks in Ojibwa, indicating her own appropriation of a native
identity. Longfellow then gave a portrait of her father to the
tribe, which they received in the manner of a deity: “Raising it
aloft, [they] swore to cherish and care for it and to entertain
only feelings of devotion to the descendants of the man whose
picture they had received.” 59 Like the medal, the picture
functioned as an icon of Western influence on the Garden River
Ojibwa and a promise of a sustained relationship. It also
obscured the inequality that defined the terms of the exchange.
The Ojibwa had no expectation that the Longfellows would
live on the reserve as natives after their induction, but rather
bestowed their identity as a token of authenticity: to be
integrated into a modern Euro-American selfhood. Rather than
signifying an ethnic and historical heritage with its attendant
difficulties, the adoption ceremony rendered identity as a
Garden River Ojibwa identity as a Garden River Ojibwa was
rendered purely symbolic and ceremonial, a mask of nativeness
to be to be manipulated within a modern context.
According to an account in the Minneapolis Journal,
Kabaoosa himself conducted the induction ceremony, “a most
impressive rite…handed down among the Ojibways for
generations.” 60 As part of the ceremony, each individual
received an Ojibwa name, danced in the center of the tribal
circle, and then was introduced to the members of the tribe.
Each inductee then received a birch bark adoption certificate,
much like the invitation in appearance. [Figure 13] Like the
invitation and the adoption ceremony, the certificates
demonstrated adherence to native and Western convention:
their material (birch bark) and language (Ojibwa) signaled
nativeness, but their alphabet (Phoenician) and purpose (to
affirm the authenticity of Ojibwa adoption) signified for a
Euro-American context. Although Alice Longfellow claimed
the adoption ceremony to be a surprise, she apparently prepared
59
“Indians in ‘Hiawatha.’” New York Tribune September 12, 1900.
60
Descendants.”
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157
remarks in Ojibwa, indicating her own appropriation of a native
identity. Longfellow then gave a portrait of her father to the
tribe, which they received in the manner of a deity: “Raising it
aloft, [they] swore to cherish and care for it and to entertain
only feelings of devotion to the descendants of the man whose
picture they had received.” 61 Like the medal, the picture
functioned as an icon of Western influence on the Garden River
Ojibwa and a promise of a sustained relationship.
–––
The Longfellow party ultimately stayed with the

Garden River Ojibwa for twelve days, experiencing a
purportedly authentic venture into the same wilderness their
relative had canonized in the American imagination.62 George
Kabaoosa and Alice Longfellow continued their
correspondence after the visit, exchanging letters and
Christmas gifts; a January 1901 letter reveals that the
Longfellows sent prints of some photographs to the tribe..
Apparently, the pageant Minnehaha placed the photograph of
her in costume “where everybody can see it.”63 In a letter from
November 10, 1900, Kabaoosa declared his pride in witnessing
“the rebirth of the old Indian life,” a continuation of the
merging of historical native culture and Longfellow’s poem.64
A January 1901 letter reveals that the Longfellows sent prints
of some photographs to the tribe, reinforcing their
wholehearted adoption of the Hiawatha pageant as an authentic
expression of culture. Apparently, the pageant Minnehaha
placed the photograph of her in costume “where everybody can
see it.”65 Kabaoosa also mentioned in the November letter that
61
“Indians in ‘Hiawatha.’” New York Tribune September 12, 1900.
62
Longfellow, vii.
63
George Kabaoosa to Alice Longfellow, January 1901, Alice Longfellow Papers,
Longfellow House Archives, Longfellow House, Cambridge, MA.
64
George Kabaoosa to Alice Longfellow, 10 November 1900, Alice Longfellow
Papers, Longfellow House Archives, Longfellow House, Cambridge, MA.
65
George Kabaoosa to Alice Longfellow, January 1901, Alice Longfellow Papers,
Longfellow House Archives, Longfellow House, Cambridge, MA.
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158
the tribe planned to repeat their performance to include “other
scenes of Indian life,” and that another Canadian tribe
expressed interest in the pageant.
With help from L.O. Armstrong, Kabaoosa and the
Garden River Ojibwa decided to marketed the Hiawatha
pageant to a larger audience. The incredible success and
eventual commercialization of the Garden River Ojibwa
Hiawatha pageant indicates the great turn-of-the-century
interest in performances of nativeness, a dynamic expressed in
popular entertainment such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.
The Hiawatha pageant transformed into a cultural
phenomenon: “[It] was performed more than fifty times in
1902, sixty-two the following year…its three hundredth
performance occurred in 1903 when the production went on the
road.”66 The composer Frederick R. Burton added a musical
score purportedly based in part on traditional Ojibwa melodies,
and Euro-American performers were eventually incorporated
into the show to sing the more traditional Western parts.
According to Trachtenberg, the Hiawatha pageant also enjoyed
success in print media, aided by the development of half-tone
reproductions and mass printing technology.67
The birch bark invitation not only sparked the
Longfellow family’s visit to Desbarats, Ontario, but also led to
a production that exemplified the complexity of contemporary
ideas about nativeness. The development and popularity of the
Hiawatha pageant represents the growth of cultural tourism and
governmentally supported corporate capitalism in the late
nineteenth century, as well as the pressures on natives to
simultaneously abandon and perform destroy their cultural
heritagere and perform i. By watching living dioramas and
traveling to natural sites to camp, study nature, perform faux-
ethnographies, and “play Indian” themselves, Canadians and
Americans could purportedly access a an ahistorical primitive
culture and obtain “authenticity and natural purity.”68 The
66
Trachtenberg, 92.
67
CITATION
68
Deloria, 103.
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159
invitation’s visual rhetoric characterizes the interaction that it
inspired, the on-and offstage performances its text references,
and the greater cultural phenomenon out of which it arose. It
currently performs its nativeness quietly in Longfellow’s study,
encapsulating for visitors the history of “playing Indian” in
turn-of-the-century America.
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160
Appendix
Courtesy National Park Service,
Longfell ow National Historic Site.
Figure 1: The birch bark invitation (Longfellow House)

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161
Figure 2: Kabaoosa
as Hiawatha
(“Introduction,” The Song of Hiawatha)

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162
Figure 3: Old Nokomis with the Little Hiawatha (“Introduction,” The

Song of Hiawatha)
Figure 4: Minnehaha and Hiawatha (“Introduction,” The Song of

Hiawatha)
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163
Figure 5: The party departing for Longfellow Island (Longfellow

House Archives)
Figure 6: Tom Kabaoosa and Richard Henry Dana (Longfellow House

Archives)
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164
Figure 7: Tribal elder with medal (Longfellow House Archives)
Figure 8: Edward and Mrs. Obtosuay (Longfellow House Archives)

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165
Figure 9 : “A bit of the audience” (Longfellow House Archives)
Figure 10: “Mr. West as Indian Warrior” (Longfellow House

Archives)
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166
Figure 11: “Mr. Eastman ‘making up’ Miss Barroughs” (Longfellow

House Archive)
Figure 12: Anne Allegra Longfellow Thorp and daughters in tepee

(Longfellow House Archives)
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167
Figure 13 : Birch bark adoption certificate (Longfellow House

Archives
168
Mobility in the Windy City: Race, Class and
Identity among Mexican Immigrants in Pre-
Depression Chicago
DANIEL MORALES
I
n the years before the Great Depression, tens of
thousands of Mexicans made their way to the Windy
City. Lured by the city’s industries, they came by
railroad and settled in several distinct neighborhoods
on Chicago’s industrial South Side. The experience of this first
generation of Mexican immigrants to Chicago is the focus of
this paper, which seeks to find a place for Mexicans in
Chicago’s pre-Depression social and economic environment.
The Mexicans who came to Chicago before the
Depression offer a unique instance in the history of
immigration, class, and race in American history. Beginning in
the late 1910s and continuing until the end of the 1920s, when
Chicago’s Mexican population reached 20,000 from about
4,000, this migration offers an important case study of the
creation of new immigrant communities in urban centers.
Nearly all the Mexicans in Chicago during this period were
born in Mexico, and for the most part lacked a second or third
generation. Mexicans had long been a presence in the
American Southwest, yet this was the first large Mexican
population to emerge outside of former Mexican territory.
Unlike most of the Southwest or even the rest of the Midwest,
Chicago was a distinctly urban environment where society was
shaped by constant movement, communication with strangers,
extreme density, the dominance of clocks and absolute time,
factories and machines, and the constant flow of the business
cycle. Chicago’s South Side itself was dominated by massive
heavy industries to an extent cities in the Southwest were not,
each of these industries creating particular patterns of life for
its workers. Chicago in the 1920s is the most significant
example of Mexicans moving into the same urban space as
169
European immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century.
All of these conditions make the founding of a Mexican
Chicago distinct from the experiences of other Latino or
European immigrant groups during the same period.
The Windy City that Mexicans stepped into was a peculiar
example of migrants’ relations to American notions of race and
class. The city was a city of migrants from the rural Midwest,
the South, Europe and Mexico. Chicago had more fluid notions
of hierarchy and race than did the United States as a whole, but
also a large social divide between white and black Chicagoans
that grew as the early twentieth century wore on.1 This presents
a unique challenge for historians trying to make sense of
Mexican immigration to Chicago during this time.2 This
immigration story does not fit within the dominant paradigms
of immigration scholarship and points to places where they
may require further research. Most work on 1920s and1930s
immigration is based on the experience of European
immigrants with the assumption that they would eventually
assimilate; as such it tends to focus on how immigrants in the
industrialized North became Americans while leaving out
Mexican immigrants who experienced a different trajectory.
Most work on Mexicans during this time period is focused on
the Southwest, with its long-established social, economic and
1
In 1900 Chicago had 1.7 million people, of which less than 2% were African
American. This period featured much less hostility between African Americans
and neighbors than was exhibited decades later. Tensions and hostility against
African Americans rose as they came to the city after 1900 in large numbers,
reaching a boiling point in the summer of 1919 where a race riot erupted for three
days. During this period, the “new” European Immigrants from Southern Europe
followed earlier patterns of assimilation and sought to categorize themselves as
“White” in American society even as hostility to them increased. These
immigrants, dominating the neighborhoods that African Americans moved into,
used race as the social marker to separate themselves and claim social entry into
the American polity. St. Clair Drake & Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis, A
Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1945), Ch 4; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners,
and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); David R.
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. (Verso, 2003)
2
Gabriela F. Arredondo, “What! The Mexicans, Americans? Race and Ethnicity,
Mexicans in Chicago, 1916-1939” (PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 1999).
170
migratory patterns, leaving out an analysis of Chicago. All of
these works take racial dynamics as constants and leave out
situations when such dynamics were still nascent, as in
Chicago. The small corpus of work on Mexicans in Chicago
has tended to look upon the Mexicans in the 1920s through the
lens of their subsequent history, and as such has concerned
itself with the question of how the Mexican communities in the
1920s became the ones of today. Historians have tended to
write the histories of immigrant groups as histories of
institutions and specific geographic communities. Their
analysis is based on the histories of their work places, their
unions, their safety nets, their social organizations, their
churches, their schools, shops, and neighborhoods. These
arguments have been predicated on the assumption that
changes in individuals can be seen in changes among their
institutions, leading historians to miss a critical part of the
immigrant experience. Mexican immigrants’ experiences in the
1920s were as much shaped by mobility as they were by
staying in a particular place. Without following individuals
over time one misses this critical component and cannot fully
explain immigration in the early twentieth century. It is helpful
to think about a changing population of individuals whose lives
were lived in communities yet whose fates were not tied to
specific geographic neighborhoods and institutions. Movement
back and forth between the city and Mexico was a major force
in the lives of these Mexican immigrants and calls into question
the idea of creating history based on stationary institutions.
This mobility is integral to understanding the experiences
of the Mexican immigrants who came to Chicago in the two
decades before the Depression. These immigrants varied almost
as much from each other as they did from other groups. They
exhibited variation in class, location, gender, racial and ethnic
identity, and ultimately location in Chicago’s socioeconomic
space. These fluid, interconnected characteristics have made it
difficult to identify a single Mexican experience in Chicago
during this time. Historians’ focus on community groups has
led to a search for a racialized experience in the 1920s
characteristic of what was found in a later period that would be
171
both more homogeneous and have race as the dominant
socioeconomic determinant. Instead, this study seeks to
recreate the diversity of experience tracking individuals. Using
a random sample group of 931 individuals taken from the 1920
Census, this study follows these individuals in and out of the
Windy City as they tried to create lives inside and outside of
the United States. The study tracks economic and social
changes over ten years in the sample in order to write a history
based on people rather than localities. Changes in the physical
makeup and location of Chicago’s Mexican neighborhood are
also documented using tract data and tied to the social changes
the sample population experienced. As far as was possible the
reports of the 1920 and 1930 Census for Chicago and the 1934
City Census were used in order to create a control group. While
focusing on economic and spatial mobility, the study also gives
a glimpse into a social and even racial mobility not documented
before. The result is what one historian calls “striations”, the
ability to see almost infinite variation within what was once
thought to be a single layer.3 Mobility rather than consistency is
the defining characteristic of Mexican Chicago in the 1920s, a
population without a defined socioeconomic location where
individuals could influence their social place if economic
circumstances allowed.
Instead of identifying either internally or by external
pressure with any particular community, many Mexicans
moved between social and racial groups in 1920s Chicago,
looking for ways forward in a foreign land. Mexican
immigrants to Chicago in the 1920s came to a city that was still
creating the social structures that would govern the city in the
future. The distinct Mexican-American identity that would later
form among Mexicans in Chicago did not exist. They did not
have a place in the racial divide between black and white
Americans that was forming in the city, nor were they strictly
thought of as a separate group within the city. Their patterns of
life were determined by their occupations, their residential
locations, their family, and most importantly, class patterns. In
3
Gabriela F. Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation 1916-
1939 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), Ch. 4
172
all of these categories, Mexican immigrants did not fit into one
place or pattern. Instead each category proved to be both fluid
and interdependent. Class more than any other category
determined not only the economic but the social fortunes of
Mexicans who came to Chicago. Differing patterns of
acculturation among Mexicans were more dependent on class
than on race in pre-Depression Chicago.
Map 1
173
Map 24
The Sample
In order to properly asses Mexican immigrants in

1920s Chicago, I needed to study the lives of individual
Mexicans. Since a great deal of their experience was simple
movement in and out of the city, studying the community as a
whole through institutions rather than its individual members
would be incomplete. Keeping the study within the purview of
4These maps show the Mexican population as percent and as a dot map. The
different communities are clearly identifiable and so is the still mixed Black Belt
of 1920. [Information from the University of Wisconsin Census Track Data for
1920]
174
Chicago, which was often simply a stop in the long journey of
circular migration, would also be incomplete. Taking a sample
of a single period of time would not be helpful either as my
inquiry deals with the ways people adjust to new situations
over time. Occupational, residential, class, racial, and family
patterns among Mexican immigrants were needed in order to
understand their place within Chicago’s society. The study I
undertook was a study of individuals and their families which
allowed me to get information which could not be gathered
though studies of institutions and communities. In 2002, the
1930 individual census results became public, which created
the ability to track specific individuals over the 1920s. I used
the Censuses of 1920 and 1930 to create a sample of Mexican
immigrants and follow them over time.
In order to create a good sample I needed a relatively
random sample and also one that was reasonably easy to track.
Women were difficult to track since their names tended to
change with marriage and the Census itself places a preference
on heads of family. As women only made up a fourth of the
Mexican immigrant population in Chicago in this decade, the
chances that the absence of single women head of households
would radically change the sample results were minimal.
Mexican-Americans born in America were also difficult to
track since there existed no specific census category for
Mexican and the population tended to hide within the larger
‘white’ population in the U.S. Census. A similar study by Paul
Taylor in 1920 however showed that the US-born Mexican
population in Chicago in 1928 was minimal with almost all
Mexicans coming from Mexico, even if indirectly.5 In order to
create a random sample no distinctions were made among the
available base pool, which consisted of every Mexican-born
male in Cook County in 1920. The alphabet was divided in
half, with A-L in one half and M-Z in the other, which gave
two halves of comparable size. Concerns have been raised over
the possible bias of one half of the alphabet over the other. This
could be a possible problem as a large number of Spanish
5
Paul S Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States vol II (University of
California Press: Berkeley, 1932), Ch 1.
175
surnames are taken from geographic locations or from titles,
some even heraldry (Caballero or Hidalgo for example) and
could lead to a predominance of one type of occupation and
class over another. While this is a concern, I have found little
evidence that predominance in names in certain classes
continued in Mexico and the U.S. into the 20th century, though
this is a consideration one should take into account.6 The first
half was randomly selected, and a total sample was created by
adding each of these individuals with their families (if any
existed). The sample came out to 521 male heads of household,
who make up the main population studied, and their families
for a total of 931 individuals.7 This sample group was followed
through the 1930 Census.8
In order to compliment the sample population and to
compare it with other groups, U.S. Census tract data was also
used. This data allowed me to create maps of Mexicans’ spatial
locations within the city and to compare their residential
location to that of the major immigrant and racial groups that
lived in close proximity to the Mexican immigrants. The
reports of the 1920 and 1930 Censuses were used to create a
reference group against which to match the Sample
population.9 Not all criteria examined were found in both
6
Fernando González del Campo Román, APELLIDOS Y MIGRACIONES
INTERNAS EN LA ESPAÑA CRISTIANA DE LA RECONQUISTA (Tus Apellidos
2003-2005, at http://www.tusapellidos.com/surnames.htm)
7
This also gives a since of how small the community in 1920 was despite its
growth before 1920, it is estimated that the actual Mexican population of the city
was closer to 3,000 than the 1310 found by the Census. This is still small
compared to Chicago’s largest ethnic groups, the Polish at 137,000, the Germans
at 112,000 and the Russians at 107,000. Ernest W. Burgess and Charles
Newcomb, Edit, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1920 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1931), pg 21.
8
Scanned versions of the paper census are available at: Heritage Quest,
http://www.heritagequestonline.com/prod/genealogy/index for the 1920 Census.
The 1930 scanned census is available at Ancestry, http://www.ancestry.com/ and
Census tract data was available on GIS form at the University of Wisconsin.
9
Ernest W. Burgess and Charles Newcomb, Edit, Census Data of the City of
Chicago 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931); Ernest W. Burgess
and Charles Newcomb, Edit, Census Data of the City of Chicago 1930 (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1933). These reports can be found in the Municipal
176
Censuses, meaning that direct comparisons were not always
possible. Attempts were made to recreate some of the relevant
census data from reports of related materials with some
success. Groups examined for the control data included, but
were not limited to Native Whites, European-White
Immigrants, and African-Americans living in Chicago in 1920
and 1930. The Chicago Census of 1934 also proved a source
for information for the control group and was used to augment
the data from the 1930 Census.10 All of the information
gathered from the sample population, Chicago Census and
control was compared to the statistical data gathered by Paul
Taylor in 1928 in order to look for outliers and look at
complimentary questions that could not be answered using the
Census.11
Sample Population 1920
By 1920, Chicago was home to many industries but

three in particular stood out: railroads, meat packing and steel.
Together with Gary Indiana and East Chicago, Chicago became
the largest center for these industries. These industries
accounted for the bulk of the manufacturing jobs in the city,
most of which were manned by immigrant labor. Each of these
industries hired tens of thousands of workers in Chicago and
made up the three industries which actively recruited Mexicans
Library of the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. (the 1930 report copy has
a hand written note from Charles Newcomb to Hugh Young of the Chicago
planning commission on its cover, and a forward by Edith Abbot with useful
demographic information) While the reports were edited by the same people they
did not focus on the same things. The 1920 report had a wealth of information on
industries and the costs of housing and living in the city; the 1930 report on the
other hand was unique in its focus on the community area of Chicago with
information available for each one but less on the city as a whole. Unfortunately
neither of these could be used to their potential because many of these figures
simply did not exist for the sample population.
10
Charles S. Newcomb and Richard O. Lang, Edit, Census Data of the City of
Chicago, 1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1934) found at the
Municipal Library at The Harold Washington Library in Chicago
11
California Press: Berkeley, 1932)
177
in the years after World War I. Each industry had a
corresponding neighborhood in Chicago where most of their
non-black workers lived. This meant that when Mexicans came
to Chicago to work for one of these industries, they would
likely settle in its accompanying neighborhood. The largest
concentrations of Mexican residency in Chicago were in
precisely these areas (see Maps 2 & 4).
The big three (railroads, meat packing and steel)
disproportionately show up on the 1920 census as the main
employers of Mexicans in Chicago. The numbers below show
that the big three make up a little less than half of all the
industries where Mexicans were working during the 1920s, but
employed an influence much greater than their simple majority.
They determined where Mexicans lived, and usually made up
the entry industries for new immigrants. These companies’
employees made up the backbone of their communities,
earning more than employees of other industries and supporting
many other workers through spending in everything from food
to entertainment. The big three industries were followed by
hotel, packing, and auto industries in importance to Mexican
Chicago (Table 1).
Table 1: Largest Industries Employing Mexican Immigrants in 192012

Railroads 122 Telephone/Elect 7
ric
Stock Yards 60 Office 7
Steel Mills 28 Private 6
Employer
Packing 20 Candy Industry 5
Hotel 18 Church 5
“Factory” 15 “Rand House” 5
12Ernest W. Burgess and Charles Newcomb, Edit, Census Data of the City of
Chicago 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). Herein referred to
1920 Census.
178
Auto Industry 13 Unknown 24
Industry
Restaurant 11 Other Industry 95
Education/ 11 Other 60
City
Music/Theate 9
r
Railroads started to employ Mexican laborers in the

Southwest in the early 1900s and carried the practice north as
time went on. It was not surprising that railroads hired more
than twice the number of Mexican workers as the next largest
industry (Table 1). Railroads acted as a gateway industry for
Mexicans before they moved on to other types of work13. The
benefits of free transport with the agreement that they would
work for at least six months and cheap shelter (box cars) made
it especially attractive to single young men who made up the
bulk of railroad workers. A large number of Mexicans were
observed living in boxcars alongside other railroad workers,
though with one exception these tended to be men-only
housing conditions.14 Many of the railroad workers stayed
temporarily in Chicago or moved on to other industries as soon
as they could; the vast majority are not found in later censuses.
The occupations that these Mexican immigrants took
on arrival in Chicago were similar to those other low-skilled
industrial workers took. Taking categories from two previous
studies of immigrant occupational mobility I divided workers
into five general categories: unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled,
white collar, and professional.15 Not surprisingly, the largest
13
Zaragosa Vargas, "Armies in the Fields and Factories: The Mexican Working
Classes in the Midwest in the 1920s," Mexican Studies-Estudios Mexicanos 7
(1991): 47-71. Jorge Hernandez Fujigaki, “Mexican Steelworkers and the United
Steelworkers of America in the Midwest : The Inland Steel Experience 1936-
1976” (PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 1991).
14
Anita Jones, “Conditions surrounding Mexicans in Chicago” (MA Thesis,
University of Chicago, 1928)
15
Joseph P. Ferrie, Yankeys Now Immigrants in the Antebellum United States
1840-1860 (Oxford University Press, 1999) And. Thomas Kessner, The Golden
179
group in the sample were unskilled workers at 56%, followed
by semi-skilled at 14%, skilled at 14%; together blue collar
workers made up about 84% of the type of work Mexicans in
Chicago performed. White collar workers made up 7%,
Professionals made up 3% and Other made up 5% respectively.
Within each group I placed a variety of occupations depending
on the type of work a person would do. Laborers, helpers, and
“hands” were placed into the unskilled category, while machine
operators, waiters, cutters etc. were placed in the semi-skilled
category. Electricians, butchers, carpenters, etc. were placed in
the skilled category. Clerks, teachers, government workers, etc.
were placed in the white collar category. Doctors, engineers,
lawyers, business owners were placed in the professional
category. Table 2 below breaks down the results along job
description and the other along skill type.
Table 2: Skill Type Compared to Other Factors in the Mexican

Sample Population in 1920. (1920 Census)
Unskille Semi- Skilled White- Profession
d Skilled Collar al
Total 292 75 74 35 17
size
Avg 29.6 28.0 31.2 29.2 30.4
Age
Family 1.96 1.93 2.2 2.3 2.2
size
Time 4.4 7 9.4 8 10.25
in US.
In yrs
Due to the fact that the purpose of immigration to

Chicago was to work, it is not surprising that migrants have the
greatest workforce participation rates. Chicago’s workforce
numbered 1,231, 434 people in 1920 and social group was an
important factor in determining a person’s position within this
Door : Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)
180
workforce.16 European Immigrants, African Americans and
Mexican immigrants had substantially higher workforce
participation among men than native-born whites. This
difference in participation rates hides a significant difference in
the participation of women in the workforce among these
groups. European immigrants have the lowest rate of women’s
participation, lower than that of native whites; an African-
American woman in Chicago is more than twice as likely to
work outside the home as a white women (see Table 3). The
numbers for Mexicans are unavailable though it is unlikely to
affect the overall participation numbers substantially due to the
imbalanced sex ratio. In 1920, women from Mexico made up
less than a quarter of the Mexican community in Chicago. This
was very different from other groups in Chicago where women
made up at least half the population. The next closest group to
having such an imbalance was European immigrants, but even
there the imbalance was 115 men to 100 women (see Table 4).
These imbalances in sex ratios encouraged unusual marriage
trends in the Mexican population.
Table 3: Workforce Participation Rates among four Chicago Groups in

1920 Population in Percentage (1920 Census)
Native- European- African- Mexican
White Immigrant American
Men 79.3 91.5 90.6 91.2
Women 32.0 20.2 44.0 ------------
Total 55.7 58.8 67.9 91.2
Table 4: Ratios among Different Groups in the 1920 Population of

Chicago (1920 Census)
Native- European African Mexican
Ratio 100:100. 115:100 104:100 316:100
16
Chicago 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), pg 5
181
Men to 4
Women
Compared to the rest of Chicago, the Mexican sample

population was young, male, and based in industrial labor.
About 42% of all workers were unskilled laborers, which was
more than ten times larger than the next largest category. The
top four spots however make up the largest categories in their
respective skill type: laborer for unskilled, mechanic for
skilled, clerk for white-collar, and section-laborer for semi-
skilled. When matched against the older, more experienced,
and more white-collar workforce of the city as a whole, the
difference becomes apparent. The Mexican immigrant
population in 1920 was dominated by young unskilled workers
brought over by the heavy industries to secure a stable labor
force, as seen in the large number of laborers in the sample.
Table 5 and Table 6 below show a breakdown of the specific
job descriptions of the sample population and the city of
Chicago as a whole.
Table 5: Job Descriptions for Mexican Immigrants in 1920 (1920

census)
Laborer 224 House-cleaner 8
Mechanic 20 Butcher 7
Clerk 14 Unknown 13
Section- 11 Other 159
Laborer
Waiter 10 Unemployed 46
painter 9
Table 6: Job Descriptions for the City of Chicago in 1920 (1920

Census)
Laborer 79,000 Chauffer 17,000
Clerk 70,000 Tailor 17,000
182
Retail Dealer 41,000 Shoemaker 16,000
Salesman 40,000 Stockyard17 16,000
Mechanic 36,000
Age did not matter much in determining what type of

job a person had in 1920. The Mexican population was
relatively young throughout the entire sample, though small
changes did show up by skill type (Table 2). Skill and job type
also did not have a major effect on family size, with more
highly skilled workers only having marginally larger families
than those on the lower end of the scale. The single largest
difference among Mexican immigrants that predicted the type
of work a person did was the time spent in America. Unskilled
workers on average had spent less than half as much time in
America as the skilled workers, so that time spent in the United
States was correlated with what type of work a person did
(Table 2). There did appear to be a glass ceiling of sorts. Those
who started as manual laborers did not seem to become white-
collar workers. The white collar work force was dominated by
young men, sometimes with parents who were professionals
and had come to America at a young age. A laborer could
become a craftsman but probably not a clerk or manager; a
similar trend shows up among the small second generation in
1930 (Table 12).
That in 1920 Chicago’s Mexican population was single
was clear enough; over half of the census sample consisted of
single men. A single Mexican woman in immigrant Chicago
was a rare thing indeed. Among immigrants, a women over 15
was twice as likely to be married than a man the same age.18
The Mexican marriage rate was far lower than comparable
17
No description of job was provided.
18
183
groups; European immigrant marriage rates were almost twice
as high (see Table #7). When one considers the number of men
that did not have wives with them, the proportion increases to
almost two thirds. These men were generally young, but not
overwhelmingly young, most were in their twenties and early
thirties, with a sprinkle of older and younger men. This
community was young for another reason: the vast majority
had come to the US less than 7 years before. The average
Mexican immigrant in 1920 was 23 and nine months old, had
arrived sometime in 1915, and was not married. Compare that
to European immigrants, who were in general older, 40.5%
came before 1900 and 45.4% between 1900 and 1913.19 The
fact that European immigrants arrived earlier did not have too
much of an impact on their average age which was only a few
years older than the average age of Mexicans; the average
European was 26 years old.20
Table 7: Marriage rates in Chicago among Different Groups in 1920

(population over 15yrs old) (1920 Census)
Native European African- Mexican
Marriag 58% 70% 59% 34%-47%
e%
About half of all those who married had a Mexican

wife. If one includes those who did not bring their wives to the
U.S., the proportion jumps to 62%. This however also means
that about 40% of Mexican men married outside of their own
ethnic group (Table 8). Mexicans lived in neighborhoods where
they were minorities, at most only made up 6% of any given
census tract in 1920(see Map 1). Their neighborhoods were
19
20
Chicago 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931) pg 8 A direct
comparison was not available, but could be discerned from the size of each
cohort.
184
dominated by European ethnic groups even in the tracts with
the largest Mexican populations (see Map 2). Mexicans could
marry those outside of their own group, depending on
circumstances. Mexicans married both African Americans and
American-born or European-born whites, but not in equal
numbers. Far more Mexicans married white women than black
women, signaling that Mexicans had begun to subscribe to
American notions of race and class hierarchy. Not all Mexicans
were the same regarding marriage; rather a hierarchal pattern
based on skill type was seen in the sample. Unskilled Mexicans
in 1920 were almost five times more likely to be married to a
Mexican than to someone non-Mexican. The opposite was true
for white-collar Mexicans who astoundingly, only had one case
of marrying a Mexican woman, and no cases of marrying an
African American woman; if they married, they married white
women (Table 8). Class seems at least for those with more
skills to have played a much larger role than race when
choosing a spouse.
Table 8: Marriage Trends among Chicago’s Mexican Immigrants in

1920 (1920 Census)
Sing Marri Marrie Married to Marrie
le es d to White d to
with Mexica American/Euro African
absen n/ pean Americ
t Mexica an
spous n-
e Americ
an
Unskilled 170 30 70 13 7
Semi- 41 6 10 9 4
skilled
Skilled 34 5 11 17 7
White- 17 1 1 13 0
Collar
Professio 7 0 3 7 0
nal
185
Whom one married also seems to have played a role in
which racial category one was listed under. The 1920 census
put all Mexicans officially under the category of white, so a
separation of white from Mexican could not be made. However
when looking at the “black” and “mulatto” categories, a
different story appears. Fifty-one people of the sample group
were counted as mulattos, but without a clear trend. People
who were married to African Americans had a much greater
chance of being counted as mulatto than a Mexican married to
a Mexican. However a large amount of Mexicans married to
Mexicans and single Mexicans were counted as mulatto, with
no discernable pattern. The ‘Black’ category was far clearer.
All but three of the Mexicans counted as black were married to
an African American. Those who married African Americans
seemed to have put down ‘black’ or ‘mulatto’ as their racial
category (Table 9). Mexican males that were married to
African American women tended to hold service jobs
traditionally reserved for African Americans such as porters,
janitors, and waiters. A surprisingly large number of Mexicans
lived in the Black Belt of Chicago, which can be attributed to
several factors. A number of Mexican men ‘assimilated’ into
the African-American community by marrying African
American women. The Black Belt itself in 1920 was not yet as
strongly identified with African Americans as it would become
later; many other European ethnic groups were found in those
blocks, and at least some Mexicans seemed to have moved into
it on their own.21 This suggests a certain amount of assimilation
occurred among Mexican men married to African American
women, whereby they took on characteristics such as housing,
occupations, and race categories that were more similar to
African Americans than to other Mexicans.22
21
This can be seen in the way the census assigned race to Mexicans in the Black
belt but not for those outside the black belt. While there were often tensions
between African-Americans and young Mexican men they were not as
pronounced as among Mexicans and European immigrants- especially the Polish.
22
One cannot dismiss the possibility that there were a significant amount of
Mexicans from African origin in the sample, this requires further study.
186
Table 9: Answers to 1920 Census Question of Race among Mexican
Immigrants in 1920 (1920 Census)
White Single Single Married Married Othe
(Mexican ‘Black’ ‘Mulatto ‘Black’ ‘Mulatto’ r
) ’
446 3 31 13 21 7
For the most part Mexican immigrants in Chicago in

the 1920s did not live in traditional single family housing.
Instead, they lived with other migrants in multi-family units.
Census takers commonly found fifteen men in a single housing
unit or to find that most of the people in a building were
boarders and not formally renting their living space. Most of
the young boarders lived together rather than being scattered
around the neighborhood, although it was not uncommon for
them to live with European immigrants.23 Aside from those that
lived in apartments there was a substantial population that was
living in railroad boxcars. These people were found along the
south branch of the Chicago River and in South Chicago (see
Map 2). While most of the Mexicans who lived in these train
cars were single there were also some families living in them; a
finding consistent with those of sociological researchers from
the University of Chicago at the time.24 Overall, the young
single men who came to Chicago during this time found
housing where it was closest to their work and wherever it was
available. Working for railroads often meant living in train cars
without adequate heating, ventilation, or sewage disposal
systems, though railroad companies often provided toilet and
washing facilities. For those working nearer to Chicago’s
center this meant that they lived with other men in crowded
housing in other immigrant neighborhoods. It is likely that
23
A direct comparison in rates of boarders could not be made with European
immigrants and African Americans because the census reports measured different
criteria that negated the difference between apartments and houses; the definition
of a housing unit was also unclear.
24
University of Chicago, 1928), Ch. 5.
187
many of these men were sending a large part of their earning
home or were preparing to leave the area.
Mexican families fared better than singles. While
accounting for only a third of the men found in 1920 they
doubled the size of the sample. The average family had three
individuals, a father, a mother and a young child, although
some households had upwards of ten. Most families rented
apartments, while more prosperous families rented or owned
homes. The largest clusters of immigrants tended to live in the
Near West Side, in the Back of the Yards and in South Chicago
(see Map 2). Families tended to live in areas similar to the
areas young men lived in, but tended to rent their own housing
rather than live with other families or boarders.
188
Map 3
189
Map 425
Sample Population 1930
The ability to measure the economic and residential

mobility of immigrants is critical in understanding their
experience. Yet tracking occupational mobility and spatial
mobility has always been hard, especially for a group that more
often than not did not report their entrance at the border. The
southern border of the United States was not a top priority for
most of this time period and even after the creation of the first
border patrol in 1924, enforcement remained spotty at best26.
25
By 1930 the Mexican communities in Chicago had grown in the Near West, the
Back of the Yards and the Lake Calumet area. Mexicans in the near west side had
also spilled over form Italian neighborhoods into African American
neighborhoods. Also notice the now homogeneous and very dense black belt.
[Information from the University of Wisconsin Census Track Data for 1930]
26
Mai M.Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern
America (Princeton University Press, 2005).
190
While not being included in the 1924 quotas, Mexicans were
subject to fees, literacy tests, and other restrictions at the border
after 1917, which were intended to serve as deterrents to legal
migration. Train companies would often pay the fares of
workers who promised to work for the railroad in Chicago,
though many simply left upon arrival to the Windy City.27
Previous scholarship on the issue of occupational
mobility has shown that even after decades in the U.S. only
about a third were able to move up in job categories.28 Scholars
argue that most social mobility happened in the first years after
arrival, usually when they do not show up on census or other
records, while others point out that spatial mobility, looking for
better opportunities by moving, was a potential source of
upward mobility that did not show up in location studies.29 To
some extent all of these things were true of my sample
population.
Most of the 521 adult male Mexicans and the 931
individuals who were enumerated in Chicago in my 1920
Census sample were not found in the 1930 census. Only about
one in five were positively identified again as living
somewhere in the United States in 1930.30 Even for a city with
a large transient population this number is high. In total, I was
able to find 101 male heads of households from the 1920
samples and a total of 270 people.31 I believe a substantial
27
Juan R. Garcia, Mexicans in the Midwest 1900-1932 (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1996) Ch 1-2.
28
These are usually of small towns, and they don’t track changes within
categories such as from cook to chef.
29
Joseph P. Ferrie, Yankeys Now Immigrants in the Antebellum United States
1840-1860 (Oxford University Press, 1999) Ch 5.
30
This is partially due to archival mistakes at Ancestry, where names are often
misspelled or miss-translated so that even the names are there, it is hard to find
them in the electronic name database. Example: Brava Cresencio (Heritage)
showed up as Ozava Cresenon and Brava Crenatis, these were fortunate enough
to be close enough to the actual spelling for me to look at the paper scan, often
they are not.
31
The total number of Mexicans in Chicago in 1930 is 19,362, a major increase
though still trailing African Americans at 233,903, followed by Polish at 149,622,
Germans at 111,366, and Russians fell to 78,462. Ernest W. Burgess and Charles
191
number were simply lost due to inaccurate census data
gathering, either in 1920 or in 1930. Most had moved out of
the city and even more out of the country in those ten years.
The Census was taken before the deportation campaigns of the
1930s so it was not likely that they were deported so much as
left voluntarily. These figures are far higher than European
immigrant groups, through Native Whites and African
Americans showed high transient rates as well but for different
reasons. White flight had shown up to some extent by 1930 for
native whites, while the massive migration of African
Americans into and out of the city increased in speed up until
the Depression. The Mexicans who came to Chicago in the
1920s were mostly a mobile population, even the ones with
families; they often moved from place to place in search of a
job (see table 9).
Table 9: Transient Rate among Different Groups in Chicago in 1930

in Percentage (1920 Census)
Native- European African Mexican
Estimate, 30-40% 20-35% 40% 80% +
moved
out of
City
The numbers for mobility were striking. Of the sample

population who were found again about half were no longer in
the Cook County area. Most had moved, though on average
they stayed in the Midwest, even as some moved as far as
California and Texas. Families were disproportionably
represented among those who were found and many former
boarders were among those who created families. Those who
were still in the city tended to be higher up the wage scale,
rented their homes, and had families.
of Chicago, 1933) pg X-XIII.
192
The big three industries of meat packing, steel and
railroads were still the big three in 1930, but by a much smaller
margin; they only made up thirty of the 101 males found, while
teachers and artists make up a disproportionate amount of those
found again. The largest job description in 1920 was laborer,
but had fallen to a little over 30% of the work force from the
42% of 1920. This was expected as workers either moved up
the chain of skills or dropped out of the sample (those with less
skill in 1920 were more likely to not be found in 1930). This
contrasted sharply with the stability of the teacher population,
which remained almost exactly the same as in 1920, which
contributed to a rise in the percentage of the white collar
population (Table 10).
Table 10: Largest Industries Employing Mexican Immigrants

in 1930 (1920 Census)
Railroads 20 Music/ 7
Theater
Stockyards 4 Own Business 5
Steel Mills 7 Office 7
Education 5 Other 46
Table 11: Job Descriptions for Mexican Immigrants in 1930 (1920

Census)
Laborer 33 Painter 4
Salesman 6 Other 48
Teacher 5
Owner/ Exec 5
Table 12: Breakdown of Skill Type Compared to Other Factors in the

Mexican Sample Population in 1930 (1920 Census)
Unskille Semi- Skilled White- Profession
d Skilled Collar al
Total 39 15 17 19 9
size
Avg 36.6 36.58 46 35.3 43.3
Age
193
Family 5.16 4 3.78 3.93 3.83
size
Time 16.24 17 22.58 18.7 26.2
in US.
In yrs
Table 13: Sex Ratios among Different Groups in the 1930 Population
of Chicago (1920 Census)
Ratio 98:100 116:100 97:100 125:100
Men to
Women
Table 14: Marriage Rates in Chicago among Different Groups and

Sample in 1930 (population over 15 yrs old plus sample group)32
Marriage 52% 55% 65% 62%
rate
Mexican immigrant occupational categories in 1930

were: 39% unskilled, 15% semi-skilled, 17% skilled, 19%
white collar, 9% professional, and 2% other (Table 12).
Laborers make up the largest category but the next three largest
were white collar occupations. This suggests that the largest
residential mobility occurred in blue-collar occupations while
some occupations such as teachers proved very stable (Table
11).33 A large number of the single men who worked unskilled
32 Newcomb and Richard O. Lang, Census Data of the City of Chicago, 1934
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1934)
33
Unfortunately accurate figures on jobs could not be recreated for the 1930
census for non-Mexican groups due to a change in the way employment figures
were presented between the 1920 and 1930 reports.
194
jobs were not found in the 1930 census. While some of this
was simple loss or error, it also suggests that many of these
immigrants moved back to Mexico after saving enough money
in the industrial occupations. Some blue collar workers moved
up in skill category, while others in the 1930 results were
already in higher skill categories. The biggest jump however
was in the proportion of white collar workers. While these may
range from door-to-door salesmen to managers, most tended to
be on the lower-paying end of the scale. It does not appear that
the high number of white collar workers was due to upward
mobility, but rather non-random sample selection. Almost all of
the white collar workers in 1930 were white collar in 1920,
meaning that these people above all others tended to stay in the
city. There were a handful of individuals who had moved up
but not a significant number. It seems instead that the more
skilled workers simply outlived others in the city.
The flight of the unskilled single workers had a
profound change on the makeup of this study’s sample
families. The imbalance in the sex ratio in the sample group
became much less pronounced and the marriage rates in the
sample population doubled. Overall the sample population
along with the rest of the Mexican immigrant population of
Chicago began to look a lot more like other immigrant groups
rather than the outlier. Skilled and professional workers were
the oldest and most experienced groups, both with over 20
years in the US on average (Table 12).34 White collar workers
were relatively young, which supports the notion that there was
a glass ceiling for blue collar workers. White collar workers
might become professionals and unskilled workers might
become skilled workers, but there seems to have been little
crossover into each other’s category; the blue and white collar
worker separation remained strong in the census sample.
34
The City of Chicago in general became much older in these ten years. The
demography charts became more of a ‘tree’ than a pyramid. The bulge started at
20years of age rather than at 10 and peaked at 44-50 years of age rather than the
25-30 of 1930. The population under 10 dropped from 10.08% to 7.56%. Ernest
W. Burgess and Charles Newcomb, Edit, Census Data of the City of Chicago
1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1933)
195
When it comes to the issue of race, ‘White’ families
became dominant in the 1930 sample with the largest change
coming from the ‘Married unskilled/married to Mexican’ group
which had accounted for the bulk of marriages (Table 15).
Sample self-selection was also at work in this case. Rather than
a change in who people married among the Mexican
immigrants, most of the changes in the results were due to a
dropping out of unskilled workers. That not a single person
reported an absent spouse, leads one to conclude that those who
left families in Mexico intending to return either did actually
return or eventually brought their families to the US.
Table 15: Marriage Trends among Chicago’s Mexican Immigrants in

1930 (1920 Census)
Sin Marr Married to Married to Marrie
gle ied Mexican/Me American/Eu d to
with xican- ropean Africa
abse American n-
nt Ameri
Spou can
se
Unskille 13 0 12 4 2
d
Semi- 6 0 4 5 1
Skilled
Skilled 2 0 5 7 1
White 3 0 1 9 0
Collar
Professi 0 0 2 7 0
onal
Other 15 0 2 1 0
For the 1930 census, the Census Bureau added new

categories for race, replacing ‘Mulatto/Black’ with ‘Negro’ and
for the first time separating Mexicans from ‘White’ by making
a separate ‘race’ of Mexican. For the most part people
identified themselves as Mexican in 1930 with several
exceptions. All four of the Mexicans married to African
196
Americans identified themselves as African American and
many of the white collar Mexicans married to ‘whites’
identified themselves as ‘white’ and not Mexican (Table 16).
Table 16: Answers to 1920 Census Question of Race among Mexican

Immigrants in 1930 (1920 Census)
‘Mexican’ ‘White’ Negro
83 13 4
The families of Mexican immigrants in 1930 were

considerably larger than those in 1920, which was expected.
Just as importantly, many of those family members were ten
years older. In 1920 just about all the family members were too
young to be part of the work force, which made it difficult to
look at the second generation. That was not so with the 1930
sample, where a small but telling number of young men and
women had entered the work force. The 1930 Census provides
insight into how these men and women began their careers;
which was an important factor in how that second generation
did in the future. For the most part, they entered into the same
occupational level as their parents, though often below what
their parent’s had achieved. So that for the most part, blue
collar workers begot blue collar workers and white collar
workers begot white collar workers. That general pattern,
however, did not apply to the children of highly skilled blue
collar works who were found in both blue and white collar
occupations. These young men and women worked in every
field except Professional, which no young adult had reached.
Skilled Mexicans seem in some instances to have been able to
give their children a boost at the start of their careers which
was not seen in unskilled or semi-skilled Mexicans (Table 17).
Table 17: Second Generation Mexican Skill Level at Start of Career in

1930 (1920 Census)
Unskille Semi- Skille White- Profession
d Skilled d Collar al (Child)
(Child) (Child) (Child (Child)
)
197
Unskilled 5 1 0 1 0
(Parent)
Semi- 2 0 0 0 0
Skilled
(Parent)
Skilled 3 1 4 4 0
(Parent)
White- 0 0 1 4 0
Collar
(Parent)
Profession 0 1 0 5 0
al (Parent)
The immigrants who came to call Chicago home did

more than just work and move; they created families, joined
organizations, and tried to make their lives better. One of the
ways this was expressed was through their relations with the
groups around them. Often this expression resulted in tensions
over anything from Catholicism to courtship.35 In 1920 only
one cluster of Mexican immigrants was in a Polish
neighborhood. By 1930 however Mexican immigrants and
Polish immigrants shared the same space in almost every
neighborhood with a Mexican presence (See Map 4). This
resulted in clashes which took on an air of masculine contest as
both populations were full of young men who competed for the
women of the neighborhoods36. By 1930 the Mexican districts
had grown quite large with the Near West side showing the
most growth and the Back of the Yards and South Chicago
areas also showing substantial growth (see Maps 3 & 4).37
Some neighborhoods were as much as 30% Mexican, though
the majority of Mexicans lived in areas where they made up
less than 15% of the population (see Map 3). Along the Near
West side Mexicans and African American shared a few
35
36
ibid
37
Map 2 also seems to show a substantial number on the far west side, but that is
actually 30 lowly Mexicans living in a train depot.
198
blocks, with the Mexican community spilling over into the
Italian neighborhoods.38 The density of some neighborhoods
drastically changed. While Mexicans often lived with boarders
and families doubled up, the rate of double families in a single
unit was only about 10% in their neighborhoods compared to
more than 34% in the Black Belt. Only the Near West Side had
anything approaching the density found in African American
neighborhoods.39 Also noticeable was the tendency of
Mexicans to live on the Italian and Irish sides of the train tracks
outside the Black Belt, which by this time had become almost
completely African American as well as much denser than the
rest of the city (see Map 4).40
Immigration and Chicago
The wave of European immigrants that came to

Chicago in the years after the Civil War settled in a different
manner than those of previous generations. Before the Civil
War a large number of the immigrants who arrived on US
shores took up farming and became small landowners.41 The
ideal of small towns and yeoman farmers continued to hold
sway in American thinking, even after massive industrialization
of the second half of the 19th century. Contemporaries in the
1920s argued that “ignorance of opportunities elsewhere
and…lack of occupational skills” led to immigrants’ settlement
in industrial cities while failing to notice that it was the
38
It is also possible Mexicans were attracted by the presence of an African
American Catholic church in the area.
39
In Addition to map see Ernest W. Burgess and Charles Newcomb, Edit, Census
Data of the City of Chicago 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1933) pg 680-
682; Charles S. Newcomb and Richard O. Lang, Census Data of the City of
Chicago, 1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1934)
40
In a sad reminder of forced density, the most expensive rental rates at over $67
a month, in the city were found not only on the Gold Coat and Hyde park, but
along the southern section of the Black Belt, often the battle ground between
white and black families attempting to move in. Ernest W. Burgess and Charles
of Chicago, 1933)
41
Joseph P. Ferrie, Yankeys Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum United States
1840-1860 (Oxford University Press, 1999).
199
“demand for low-paid unskilled labor that attracted most of the
‘new immigrants’ to industrial and commercial employment in
urban centers”.42 Immigrant settlement in cities was not an
incidental result of this new wave of immigration, rather the
driving force of this immigration were the cities themselves. As
cities industrialized in the later 19th century they made greater
and greater demands on the countryside and caused massive
migrations in the industrial world.43
No city better illustrated this massive economic shift
away from agriculture and towards industrial mechanism
greater than Chicago. Set at the western edge of the urbanized
northeast of the United States and the industrial western world
in general, strategically located in the center of the North
American continent with potential water access to New York
and New Orleans, Chicago was uniquely situated to take
advantage of the opening of the western United States.44
Chicago grew from 29,963 people in 1850 to 1,698,575 in 1900
and 3,375,329 by 1930.45 Chicago’s growth was tied to its
ability to industrialize agriculture in a way not done before; its
largest industries were all tied to agriculture one way or
another. Lumber, meat processing, railroads, machine-making,
steel, grain, and catalogue retail were industries built to connect
goods and services from the rural west to the urban east. The
vast network of railroads used to connect the various parts of
the country pointed toward Chicago which would greatly aid in
bringing people to the city. Originally bringing European
immigrants from the east, the network of railroads soon began
to shift the migratory patterns of African Americans and
Mexicans towards the Windy City as well.
42
David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: a Geography of Change in Nineteenth-
Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
43
Jose C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), introduction.
44
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W.
Norton & Company, 1991)
45
200
The years before and after World War I not only
featured new immigrants and the rise of racial restrictions, it
also featured one of the more significant changes to the South
Side of Chicago: the rise of African American Chicagoans as a
major force in the city. The city experienced a massive influx
of African Americans, mostly from the South that in a few
years saw the expansion of the Black Belt south to 60th street.
Beginning around the turn of the century, African Americans
from the south began to migrate to the north, especially
Chicago. They relied on personal networks to create a circular
flow of information that drove migration northward. This
migration grew even more after 1914 because of the impact of
the war on the labor market which cut off the supply of
European workers at the same time that it raised demand and
took two million people out of the labor pool.46 African
Americans in Chicago lived and worked in close proximity to
their European neighbors even as they lived increasingly
separate lives. By the time of the Depression African
Americans had created almost a different city from that of
whites, creating what came to be known as Black Metropolis47.
Life in the city, especially after the riot of 1919, became
defined by which side of the color line one stood. Everything
from beaches to jobs to politics became divided by color.
While Chicago was still forming the class and racial
divides that would later dominate the city’s history, Mexican
immigrants began to arrive in large numbers. Mexicans came in
large part through concerted efforts by several large industries
to recruit them as an alternative form of labor. Steel and
railroad companies hired them from Mexico, Texas, or
Midwestern beet fields in arrangements that often paid for
transportation and even housing in Chicago.48 Because of the
46
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great
Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 14
47
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life
in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1993)
48
Zaragosa Vargas, "Armies in the Fields and Factories: The Mexican Working
Classes in the Midwest in the 1920s," Mexican Studies-Estudios Mexicanos 7
201
race riot and steel strike in 1919, companies sought a labor
force that would both be outside normal white labor yet not
incite the problems the hiring of African Americans brought
from unions. Surveys found that many companies preferred
Mexican over African-American labor, and over time there was
considerable “replacement of Negros by Mexicans”.49
Eventually these migratory patterns became self sustaining as
more and more Mexicans ventured to the Windy City in search
of opportunity.50 As the Mexican population in Chicago grew
from about four-thousand in 1920 to twenty-thousand by 1930,
they began to form communities and neighborhoods.
Lack of Social Place for Mexicans in Chicago’s Society before

the Depression
A great deal of thinking about the past is skewed by

hindsight, obscuring the thoughts and intentions of people who
have no knowledge of the future or how their actions will
influence those around them. The same is true when seeking to
explain the place of Mexicans in 1920s Chicago. To a
significant extent, the pre-Depression Mexicans in Chicago did
not fit the patterns of Mexicans in other parts of the U.S. or the
Mexicans in the post-war period, not to mention the Mexicans
in the 1930s.
Those who have examined the founding of Mexican
communities in Chicago have looked mainly for the ways those
communities would become the ones of the 1950s. This focus
obscures how the communities in the 1920s were different.
Mainly, historians have argued that despite their efforts to
become American, Mexicans encountered increasing hostility.
For example, in South Chicago and the Near West Side,
(1991): 47-71. Jorge Hernandez Fujigaki, “Mexican Steelworkers and the United
Steelworkers of America in the Midwest : The Inland Steel Experience 1936-
1976” (PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 1991).
49
California Press: Berkeley, 1932), 48
50
University of Chicago, 1928)
202
Mexican immigrants lived alongside the Polish, and while
Polish unionism sought to emphasize cooperation with other
groups, on the streets they sought conflict with Mexicans.51
While Mexican immigrants and their sports clubs shared
community parks alongside other ethnic groups, little such
cooperation existed with the Polish who Mexicans fought even
for use of public bathing areas.52 Women in particular became a
source of conflict as Mexican men courted the women of the
neighborhood, which more often than not meant women of a
different ethnicity. This caused conflict, which often became
physical violence between Mexican and Polish men53. While
this conflict in working class neighborhoods is undeniable, my
study suggests that there were multiple forms of a acculturation
experienced by different Mexicans that ranged not only from
rich to poor but from black to white.
Individual Mexicans were not as tied to the concepts of
group fate as one would think. Individual Mexicans instead
tended to assimilate with the groups they lived around due to
their class status. The largest commonality in the Census was
the remarkably high mobility rate. The individuals moved from
one place to another in search of opportunity, with little regard
for national boundaries. Most of the people observed in 1920
were not even inside the U.S. ten years later; presumably most
went back to Mexico. Of those who stayed, about half were no
longer inside Chicago but scattered throughout the U.S., in
steel mills in Pittsburg, ranches in California, or restaurants in
Missouri. Of those who stayed in Chicago none lived in their
former residence, and many had moved to surrounding cities.
Conversations about immigrant communities must take into
account this constant flow of people.
51
Dominic A Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the
South Side, 1880-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1991) & Gabriela F.
Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation 1916-1939 (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008)
52
Michael D. Innis-Jimenez, “Organizing for Fun: Recreation and Community
Formation in the Mexican Community of South Chicago in the 1920’s and
1930’s,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 98 (2005): 144-161.
53
203
The census study only showed modest occupational
mobility among individuals, as most of the group gains were
actually changes in the composition of the sample. Those with
unskilled and semi-skilled occupations tended to leave more
often. However, the 1920 and 1930 census shows that those
who stayed in the US the longest tended to rise to the skilled
worker category. Just as important was second generation
mobility, as the 1930 census shows a number of children of
skilled workers moving into the white collar category. While
Mexicans could be stuck at a low level occupation
permanently, Mexicans often voted with their feet and walked
out when they were paid less than other workers, were denied
promotions, given worse duties, or even when told to stop
smoking.54 The high mobility rates seen in my sample should
not be seen as impeding success, but rather as demonstrating
the empowerment of individuals choosing to make a new life.
Mobility in work and location as a means of changing one’s
employment situation became an important component of life
for Mexican immigrants in this era.
The Mexican immigrants in the 1920s did not live in
their own distinct neighborhoods; no Census tract had above
6% Mexicans in 1920 and none above 30% in 1930, while most
hovered in the single digits. This had a profound effect on their
social relations. Historians of Mexican Chicago often note the
competition for women between Mexicans and European
immigrants; the data show this was real.55 About 40% of all the
men who had wives in the 1920 and 1930 Census had
European-born or European-parented wives. Many of these
Mexicans seem to have chosen to identify as white. In 1920
and especially in 1930 (when a separate category for Mexican
was added to ‘race’) a large number of the Mexicans married to
‘white’ wives chose white instead of Mexican for their racial
54
California Press: Berkeley, 1932), Ch 2-3.
55
University of Chicago, 1928); Gabriela F. Arredondo, “What! The Mexicans,
Americans? Race and Ethnicity, Mexicans in Chicago, 1916-1939” (PhD Diss.,
University of Chicago, 1999).
204
category; some even lied about their place of birth and placed a
U.S. state instead of Mexico. The same thing was observed
with regards to African Americans. Mexican men who married
African American women were counted as Black by census
takers, were employed in occupations that predominantly hired
African Americans, and lived in African American
neighborhoods. How Mexican immigrants in the 1920s fit into
Chicago’s society can be understood as the interaction of a
variety of factors. Mexicans who had higher skill levels tended
to assimilate into ‘white’ European culture while those with
lower skill levels tended to remain ‘Mexican’. Those who
stayed in the city tended to assimilate more into ‘white’
Chicago than those who left, who were mainly unskilled
Mexicans with Mexican wives.56
This points to a cultural divide between higher skilled
Mexicans and lower skilled Mexicans where class was a major
factor in predicting stability and ‘whiteness’. Occupations,
industries, skill level, spouses, housing locations were all
interdependent variables that cannot be understood as separate
from each other. The trends found in the Census study point
towards an identity that was not as solid as a single experience,
an identity that was not yet fixed in the public eye. A great
many of the individuals in the sample seem to have lived not in
a fixed community but instead be part of many as they move
from place to place, or even from color to color in the 1920s.
Mobility in spatial terms, occupational terms, even in
identification terms was seen throughout the sample
population. Being part of a spatial community in a city with
clearly defined boarders and strong ethnic identity were the
norm in Chicago. Such was not the case for Chicago’s
Mexicans in the 1920s, where ethnically based communities
with stable institutions lived side by side with individuals who
went in and out of these communities figuratively and literally.
56
If those who dominated the Mexican communities after 1920’s were those who
had been there the longest then that would point to the stable family’s Louise Ano
Nuevo Kerr found in the early 1940’s as she sought the origins of the 1960’s
Chicano community. Louise Ano Nuevo Kerr, “The Chicano Experience in
Chicago: 1920 to 1970” (PhD. Diss., 1976)
205
Mexicans moved around as individuals, groups and families,
seeking to better their own lives. Mexicans could still define
themselves and move between social categories in the 1920s
even as they lived in a world that was increasingly racializing
Mexicans. The lines in 1920s Chicago were not as defined as
they would become even a few years later. Yet this fluidity was
always measured by a reality of skills and class.
Pre-Depression Mexicans in Chicago
Geographic mobility has long been an American

tradition, stretching back to colonial days. The idea that one
could move within the country as a way to get ahead is as
American as immigration, itself a form of mobility. There was
a tradition of thought among progressives in the 1920s that
mobility was not necessarily possible for immigrants in post-
Civil War industrial America. They paint a portrait of inner-
city traps, ghettos and barrios where people linger until saved
by outside forces. This was a popular notion during the 1920s
and later influenced the policies of the New Dealers. Social
reformers at the time argued that neighborhoods needed good
influences, such as education, sports, and other civic programs
that required connections to community. In this spirit,
professional ‘Americanizers’ went into Chicago’s
neighborhoods, creating settlement houses, programs, schools
and endless activities. However, these reformers often felt
frustrated that these “connections were often disrupted by
population turnover and selective suburbanization”. In their
attempt to uplift these communities, progressives were shocked
when individuals moved out and communities did not change
over time. What they failed to notice was that “this mobility
was for many residents a source of emancipation from the
narrow confines of a locality”.57
While some historians have argued that it was the
wealthy who could afford to move, the evidence for the pre-
57
499. David Ward, “Social reform, Social Surveys, and the Discovery of the
Modern city” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (1990):
491-503
206
Depression industrial era clearly points in the other direction.
For many, moving was a way to escape poverty. The
immigrants who came to the U.S. clearly had this in mind, as
did the African Americans who moved north during this
period.58 However, life in the industrialized north would be
very different for blacks and whites. Immigrants would
continue in the early 20th century to do what they did in the
19th: build their claims of belonging upon the notion of
‘whiteness’, a concept which continued to evolve as new ideas
and peoples were folded into it. European immigrants created
their identities and claims in opposition to those of African
Americans, and in so doing not only increased racial hostility
but helped build much of the racial ideology that would
continue to plague the US for decades to come. African-
Americans, separated in Chicago from mainstream institutions,
built their own economic, political, and cultural structures in
the Black Metropolis of the South Side while fighting for an
equal place in society.59
As white Americans came into contact with peoples
from around the world, they redefined whiteness. They sought
to exclude those who were not considered part of the national
polity, be they Chinese, Filipino or Indian.60 The new
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who could not
be denied their ‘whiteness’ could more easily assimilate. This
did not stop the theories of race and nationality that prevailed
in the early 20th century and excluded many Europeans from
the U.S. in 1924 on arguments that they were somehow
genetically different. Despite their claims of ‘whiteness’ legally
and socially, which included strict hostility to African
Americans and adherence to the color line; in Chicago at least,
the new southern European immigrants were not themselves
seen as fully American by mainstream society until at least the
58
It was not the poorest Europeans who moved, but those with enough money to
make the voyage.
59
St. Clair Drake & Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis, A Study of Negro Life
in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945)
60
Mae M Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern
America (Princeton University Press, 2005).
207
Second World War. The events of depression and war, and
their economic and political effects, led to the social
incorporation of European immigrants.61
Mexican immigrants thus came to Chicago during a
period of intense racial tension. Unlike the Mexicans in the
southwest, those moving to Chicago in the 1920s had no
precedents of social norms built over decades of contact. They
walked into the racial minefield of a balkanized Chicago where
racial hostility led to a massive race riot in 1919 that left
dozens dead, including two Mexicans mistaken for African
Americans.62 Mexicans in 1920s Chicago came with their own
notions of race and identity, notions still being created in
revolutionary Mexico where mestizaje would become a catch-
all racial framework hiding vast inequality.
Within this city they worked in dozens of industries,
though mostly in the big three heavy industries of steel,
meatpacking, and railroads. They created institutions, churches,
sports teams, social organizations, and safety-net organizations.
They lived in four distinct neighborhoods, mostly alongside
other European immigrants, with whom they shared schools,
banks, stores, and streets.63 They intermingled and married.
Mexicans were on both sides of work conflicts, they walked
out when strikes occurred just as frequently as they sought jobs
as strike breakers.64 Increasingly they got into conflicts with
their neighbors, as Europeans sought to place more and more
restrictions on the Mexicans and Mexicans fought back, often
with violence. While never as segregated as African
Americans, they eventually came to be seen as not-white and
not-American. As hostility increased, especially as the
61
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago 1919-
1939 (University Press: Cambridge, 1990)
62
1939 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008)
63
The Italian State Bank seems to have been a favorite due to language
similarities, and the Atlas State bank because of its affordable fee’s for
remittances. Anita Jones, “Conditions surrounding Mexicans in Chicago” (MA
Thesis, University of Chicago, 1928), 74-75.
64
California Press: Berkeley, 1932)
208
Depression wore on, Mexicans in Chicago seemed to have
turned inward and separated themselves further from
mainstream society but not in the way they would in the 1950s,
where much larger migration into the city allowed for a strong
nationalist culture to develop. Rather than creating a Mexican-
American identity, they instead created a nationalist identity
based on ‘mexicanidad’-in Mexico.65
Census numbers cannot tell if the Mexicans in the
sample had a collective sense of Mexican-American,
‘Mexicanidad”, Latino, Hispanic, or any other kind of racial
identity, or if the majority of Chicagoans around them had a
collective sense of whiteness that excluded Mexican
immigrants. They can give us insights into how a sample of
931 men and women coped with life in the Windy City. Along
with accounts and interviews by other researchers, census data
presents a picture of Mexican immigrants whose choices and
opportunities were largely prescribed according to class
categories rather than racial ones.
While geographic, social, and even racial fluidity were
possible for many Mexican immigrants to Chicago, class
exerted a unique force that proved difficult to overcome. Few
Mexican immigrants moved between the world of white and
blue collar work, even if some mobility was possible within a
particular class. A great majority of these immigrants worked
within the blue-collar sector. They acted in similar ways,
creating organizations, churches, and institutions while
following similar career, marriage, housing, and mobility paths.
This identity may or may not be acknowledged by the
Mexicans themselves, but it is one that proved far more stable
and long-lasting in my sample than other factors. However,
increasing racial tensions after the beginning of the Depression
would come to upset Mexicans’ class-based identity as they
increasingly came under attack.
The situation for Mexican immigrants in 1920s
Chicago should not be confused with that of the immigrants
that would come at a later time. By the mid-1930s most of
65
209
Chicago’s original immigrants in the 1920s had left. The
normal turnover seen in the 1920s was increased in the 1930’s
as deportation and repatriation drives along with the
Depression decimated Chicago’s Mexican population which
continued to drop until the early 1940s (see Map 5). The
Depression led to widespread resentment of those seen as non-
Americans. This manifested itself not only in deportation
drives but also in a racializing of Chicago’s Mexicans, leading
to a much greater hostility than anything seen in the 1920s66. In
the post-World War II era new generations of Mexican
immigrants would come to Chicago and establish much
stronger and more stable communities.67 These new
communities would be established in the same physical place
as those in the 1920s but their social and racial patterns could
trace their origins more to the social turmoil of the 1930s and
1940s than the more fluid structures of the 1920s.
For most of the Mexican immigrants who came to
Chicago in the 1920s, life there was short. They came looking
for jobs and a better life and moved whenever new
opportunities emerged elsewhere. At the same time, in 1920s
Chicago, Mexicans could and did move between social and
racial groups ranging from African American to self-identified
white American. This pattern was most influenced by the class
to which each belonged. It seems, therefore, that class most
fundamentally influenced a host of other facets of life,
including marriage partners, job types, etc. Moreover, my
study suggests that in examining group identity formation, we
cannot so easily distinguish between notions of race and class.
For Mexican immigrants to Chicago, the two concepts were in
fact intertwined and interdependent.
66
67
Louise Ano Nuevo Kerr, “The Chicano Experience in Chicago: 1920 to 1970”
(PhD. Diss., 1976)
210
Map 568
68
By 1940 the Mexican communities in Chicago had become much smaller as the
Depression and the resulting hostility to Mexican immigrants drove deportation
drives by hostile authorities, hostile citizen’s groups (and repatriation drives by
some Mexicans themselves) led many Mexican immigrants to return to Mexico.
This lead to a situation where by the end of the war, most of Chicago’s Mexican
population was solidly middle class and more inclined to identify themselves as
Americans and live in a single place than previous immigrants. This also proved
short lived as an influx of Braceros due to the war again changed the composition
of the communities and started a flow of Mexican immigration to Chicago that
continues till this day. The University of Wisconsin Census Track Data for 1940
The Science of Climate Change: Historical
Analysis of a Public Problem
ELIAV BITAN
Introduction
In 1853 Herman Melville toured the Galapagos Islands.

He observed a paucity of rainfall, which he attributed to the lack
of plant life on the islands. In his published journals, he recorded
experiences and not formal tables. The sole exception was his
listing of natural creatures:
Men..............none
Ant-eaters........unknown
Man-haters........unknown
Lizards............ 500,000
Snakes...........500,000
Spiders............10,000,000
Salamanders.........unknown
Devils...............do.
Making a clean total of............ 11,000,000

exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, ant-eaters, man-haters, and
salamanders.468
Melville's table mocked the use of quantitative tables in the

natural sciences. Aimed specifically at Charles Darwin, its
message was intended for all who would describe personal
experiences of the natural world in abstract numbers.
Unfortunately for Melville, late 19th century science adopted
exactly these methods of numerical tabulation, and used them to
overturn his notion of plant life causing rainfall.
This paper will show that until the late 19th century,
researchers, government administrators, and laypeople feared that
deforestation would decrease rainfall. This consensus emerged
from the work of gentleman naturalists writing popular travel
narratives describing their personal observations. These authors
described their impression that plants, through their release of
moisture to the air, were an important cause of rainfall. Mid-19th
century scientists drew on the work of these early natural
historians to justify their inclusion in newly developed state
bureaucracies and institutions. As professional state employees,
scientists begin using the quantitative methods mocked by
Melville.
Melville’s critique, and those of his peers, was not limited

to numerical tables themselves. The kind of researchers who
would deploy these tables was also at issue. This paper’s analysis
of scientific texts suggests that these new scientific methods and
roles not only produced new scientific claims, but also a new kind
of scientist, a person with new habits of mind and ethical
standards. Habits of elaborately and accessibly recounting
personal experience gave way to precisely and obscurely
analyzing numerical data tables collected by others” Ethics of
468 Melville in Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History

and the Ecological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1994,
132.
spiritual involvement with the natural world gave way to the
dispassionate evaluation of natural phenomena. The specific case
of plants and rainfall is just part of a larger exploration into
changing notions of truth in the late 19th century.
The history of how people have determined standards for

truth was named historical epistemology by either Ian Hacking or
Lorrain Daston (neither wants credit). The historians engaged in
this work, notably Arnold Davidson, Phillip Kitcher, and Mario
Biagoli, are concerned with how knowledge was acquired, and
how it became accepted as 'true' knowledge. This exploration in
the specific area of the sciences has been particularly fruitful.
Two key practitioners, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, have
suggested that in the history of science, 'epistemic virtues'. are
key to understanding what was labeled as truth. In the late 19th
century, people were understood as having desires and
preconceptions that would misunderstand or misconstrue sensory
input. This meant that the virtue of self-control would be
necessary to understand sensory input and produce information
that could be validated as truthful. The increased use of numerical
tables in the late 19th century fits within this analysis, as scientists
sought ways to present data unaltered by any subjective
interference.469
The increased use of numerical tables can also be

understood within historical literature on 'modernization'. This
literature shows that government-funded science dominated the
end of the 19th century, and that government support encouraged
natural scientists to produce knowledge that would enable the
state to manage nature in an orderly, rational, ''modern' (as above)
way across the world.470 Scientists justified their places in rationalized state
469 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books,
2007), 37-45.
470 There is a rich literature on this relationship. For an overview: Richard Drayton,
Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the
World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 170-220. Ravi S. Rajan,
bureaucracies by the numerical qualities of their work.471
This paper seeks to
synthesize an epistemic analysis of the scientific method with
accounts of the way late 19th century science was rationalized and
integrated into government institutions. I hope to suggest that by
analyzing the cultural and political uses and meanings of
scientific method, historians can incorporate work on scientists' integration
into the state with analyses of changes in scientific norms and values.
The specific example of this paper is the challenge

Melville and Darwin addressed themselves to: rainfall and plant
life. In this case, changes in climatologists’ and botanists' roles in
the state and society required the development of new scientific
methods; these methods, in turn, allowed for a different
understanding of plant life and climate. Changes of climatologists
and botanists are indicative of broader trends in late 19th century
science. Scientists were no longer gentleman amateurs, but rather
professional government bureaucrats. This transformation of
scientific role produced changes in method, as scientists used
tables of numerical data rather than personal observations to
conduct their research. Scientists turned to meteorological data on
barometric pressure to explain rainfall patterns, instead of plant
data. Despite beginning from the same scientific questions as
their gentleman-naturalist predecessors, professional scientists
came to different conclusions. For example, in 1888 Henry
Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800-1950

(Oxford Historical Monographs). (New York: Oxford University Press, USA,
2006). To put a fine point on it: Frank M. Turner, “Practicing Science: An
Introduction” In Victorian Science in Context Ed. by Bernard Lightman
(Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1997), 286. For a discussion of the
global reach involved in these practices: Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism:
Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of
Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
Bruce J. Hunt, “Doing Science in a Global Empire: Cable Telegraphy and
Electrical Physics in Victorian Britain” in Victorian Science in Context. ed.
Bernard Lightman, (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1997), 290.
471 Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996).
Gannett, leader the newly formed U.S. Geological Survey, used
numerical tables of rainfall data to demonstrate a lack of a
correlation between rainfall and forests. In the 1890s, British
imperial scientist Henry Blanford used numerical tables to
discover correlations between rainfall and barometric pressure,
rather than using personal observations to find forests producing
rainfall. New kinds of scientific method associated with different
social roles imply the emergence of a new kind of person doing
science in the late 19th century. The scientist of the early 19th
century was interested in personal knowledge and experience, and
connected these experiences with a sense of divine order in the
world. By the end of the century, the new scientific self intended
to dispassionately analyze accumulated data. The writings of full-time
professional scientists like Gannett, filled with numerical tables and quantitative methods, were hard for
general audiences to understand. These works also deliberately excluded the moral and ethical claims
of earlier scientific work. The work of late 19th-century popularizers both brought scientific claims to a
wider audience, and suggested the implicit ethics of the late 19th century scientific self. The lessons
they sought to teach uneducated readers were exactly the ethics professional scientists were expected to
hold. Popularizers tried to inculcate the values of the new scientific self by, for example, encouraging
readers to begin constructing their own tables of numerical measurements.
While the
material is as specific as rainfall and plants, what is at stake is
what gets to count as truth, and who gets to make truth.
The Natural Historians' Consensus
Until the late 19th century, natural historians thought

trees caused rain. The scholarly consensus was that deforestation
caused decreased rainfall and the drying, or dessication, of the
landscape.472 Claims of trees causing rainfall date to the Ancient
Greeks, but the modern European scientific literature on this
relationship begins with Stephen Hales' Vegetable Staticks,
published in 1727. Later in the century, and through the first half
472 See Clarence J.Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture
in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) 49, 130, and 270 for Greek and
Medieval concerns about deforestation causing climate change.
of the 19th century, an international community of natural
historians drew on Hales' work to support their personal
observations of landscapes dessicated by deforestation.
Hales, a member of a prominent Kentish family, was

educated at Cambridge, and a member of the Royal Society of
London. Hales' clerical status in the Anglican church funded his
scientific research, and informed his research agenda. Hales
experiments' were meant to understand “the wonderful and secret
operations of nature.”473 Like other gentleman naturalists of the
18th century, Hales' interest in plant function was part of an
investigation meant to reveal God's wisdom in designing the
universe. Hales saw the pursuit of greater understanding of nature
as instrumental to realization of a divine order.
Vegetable Staticks recorded Hales' experiments on

circulation of fluids in plants and animals. Hales narrated these
experiments in the first person, listing his actions and the
measurements he took, along with how he recorded his
measurements. He presented only two tables of results. The
second, a “diary of perspiration,” listed the quantities of water
released by one plant each day for fifteen days. Hales included in
his table a qualitative description of the weather and the
temperature reading he took on “my Themom.”474 This
experiment illustrates Hales' deeply personal methods of
observation. He experimented on one plant at a time, and
recorded his personal experience of the conditions of the
experiment. The table included his experience of the weather (hot
or very hot, in June) and the temperature recorded on his
thermometer, which was specifically identified as such. Hales'
experiment demonstrated that the plant released water to the
473 Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (London: Scientific Book Guild, 1961),
x.
474 ibid, 12.

atmosphere, drawing a connection between plant life and
atmospheric humidity.
Increased humidity had been linked with rainfall in the

European tradition since the 1600s.475 Hales' research enabled
him to construct a chain of causation between plants, humidity,
and rainfall. He shared this insight with a fellow gentleman and
graduate of Cambridge, Soame Jenyns, Member of Parliament for
Cambridge and one of the Lord's Commissioners for Trade and
Plantations. Jenyns used his office to advocate for the creation the
Main Ridge Reserve in Tobago in 1776. This reserve may be the
first instance of environmental conservation for the sake of
conservation. It was set aside by the Governor of Tobago,
William Young, in 1776. He protected these 10,000 acres “for the
purpose of attracting frequent Showers of Rain upon which the
Fertility of Lands in these Climates doth entirely depend.”476 Hales'
role as a gentleman enabled him to use his scientific conclusions to effectively advocate for the
protection of forest land.
Gentleman naturalists in the later 18th century and early

19th century continued Hales' concerns about mankind's ability to
alter nature. These naturalists, including Americans George Perkins Marsh and
Franklin Benjamin Hough, corresponded to share their results and methods.
While their
works referenced each other, they existed primarily to recount
personal travels.477 Their research was based on traveling, rather
than experience in one location, but they shared Hales' method of
presenting personal observations in their work. They also shared
475 W.E. Knowles, A History of the Theories of Rain (Middleton, US:

Franklin Watts,) 1966.
476 "The Origin of the Tobago Forest Reserve." environment Tobago.

www.scsoft.de/et/et2.nsf/KAP2View/68DD733B5A94E00BC1256329007777A1?O
penDocument (accessed November 18, 2008) Grove, Richard. Ecology, Climate and
Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400-1940. (Canberra:
White Horse Press, 1997), pg.
477 Rajan, Modernizing Nature, 27.

Hales' conclusion about the impact of deforestation on rainfall
and climate. European gentleman naturalists were consistently
concerned with human capability to make “catastrophic changes
in nature.”478
The most famous of these naturalists in the late 18th

century was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-
1788), whose 35-volume Natural History (1749-1788) was “read
by every educated person in Europe.”479 These Europeans read
Buffon's claim in his Epoque de la nature of 1778 that “the loss
of trees in western Europe” was a cause of the milder
temperatures and decreased rainfall characteristic of the climate.
480
Buffon's view that deforestation decreased rainfall probably
began with the work that first interested him in biology: his
translation of Stephen Hales' Vegetable Staticks.481 Hales'
personal experiences in the laboratory served the same function
as Buffon's experiences of dry, barren lands in Quebec, Cayenne, and the
Guineas.482
Natural historians of the next generation shared B

uffon's understanding of
The most prominent naturalist of these was
deforestation and climate change.483
Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859). Like Buffon, Humboldt published accounts of his personal
travels and argued he had observed the desiccating effects of deforestation. He explained his method
in the preface to Aspects of Nature, in Different Lands and

Different Climates: With Scientific Elucidations. Humboldt wrote
479 Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and
Inheritance (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 330
480 Spary, Utopia's Garden, 133.
481 ibid, 132.
483 ibid, 23.

that his writings “took their origin in the presence of natural
scenes of grandeur or of beauty.”484 The grandeur and beauty of
nature was central to Humboldt's scientific project. Like Hales,
Humboldt and natural historians presented their personal
experiences to demonstrate the “unbounded riches of Nature.”
While Humboldt made fewer religious claims than Hales, he
encouraged readers to feel a unity with nature by emphasizing
universal interconnections in works like Cosmos.
In order to preserve his readers' sense of nature's unity, Humboldt presented his accounts
as a series of unique “images,” rather than a list of experiences. Instead of listing numbers or names,
Humboldt described entire experiences, intermingling personal sensations, instrument readings, scenic
vistas, and emotions. He tried to avoid an “accumulation” of dull details in the readers' mind. Instead,
Humboldt sought to maintain “the repose and the unity of impression which should belong to the
picture.”485 This unity of impression is similar to that which Hales' experiments each
produced,
standing alone as a personal encounter with the natural world. Hales and Humboldt used their scientific
method to encourage readers to experience nature's beautiful harmony.
Eighteenth and early 19th century naturalists like Hales and Humboldt used personal
proximity as support for the veracity of their claims about nature. To accept Humboldt's work as true,
18th century readers had in his perceptual
to place “trust in his moral integrity, and trust
accuracy.”486 The in part from their
common perception of these men's moral integrity derived
social status as gentleman amateurs. Researching climate or forests was an activity these men engaged
in for its inherent beauty and pleasure. This “enlightened hobby” was not work for a reward, but rather
484 Alexander Von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature, in Different Lands and

Different Climates: With Scientific Elucidations (Philadelphia: Lea And Blanchard,
1850), tr. Sabine vi.
485 Humboldt, Aspects of Nature, viii.
486 Dorinda Outram, On Being Perseus: New Knowledge, Dislocation, and

Enlightenment Exploration, In Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David
Livingstone, Charles Withers (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999.), pg
a vocation whose costs were borne by “happy amateurs ”487 a that enabled natural historians
, status
to be reliable sources about nature's beautiful interconnections. 488
A crucial aspect of nature's harmony that these natural historians' work

presented
was the relationship between forests and rainfall. Humboldt, in his Aspects of Nature, in Different
Lands and Different Climates, wrote that “by felling trees which cover the tops and sides of mountains,
men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations—the want of fuel and the
scarcity of water.”489 As the most successful author of his generation
, Humboldt's views were known
to many late 18th and early 19th century readers.490
Newspapers also presented his
scientific work well into the 19th century. For example, in
August, 1863 both the Glasgow Daily Herald and the Caledonian
Mercury published the same account of the “master fact” that
“man can, to a certain extent, make rain.” The papers taught their
readers that “the rainfall of a district can be altered by tree-felling
or tree planting.” The quantity of rain moisture caught and
retained by a single tree was described as “astonishing.” As for a
the rain produced by a forest, “he would be a wonderful
487 Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the
"Improvement" of the World. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 178.
Nicholas Rupke reminds us that Humboldt wrote Cosmos over twenty years in Paris
as an independently wealthy scholar. Cf Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A
Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe; Volume 2 (Foundations of
Natural History). (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) tr. E.C.
Otte, Introduction Nicolaas A. Rupke viii.
488 Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the
"Improvement" of the World. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 178.
Nicholas Rupke reminds us that Humboldt wrote Cosmos over twenty years in Paris
as an independently wealthy scholar. Cf Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A
Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe; Volume 2 (Foundations of
Natural History). (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) tr. E.C.
Otte, Introduction Nicolaas A. Rupke viii.
489 Cleghorn, Report of the British Association Committee, 78.
490 Humboldt, Cosmos, vii-xxiii for a discussion of Humboldt's popularity.

calculator who could estimate it.”491 In the absence of effective
methods for calculating rainfall produced by trees, the article cites
Humboldt's travel accounts as evidence. These newspaper
articles, published four years after Humboldt's death, drew on his
work to demonstrate the importance of forests, due to their power
to make rain. Scientists in the 1850s and 1860s used these same
arguments to justify their inclusion in state bureaucracies.
The Use of Forests: The Development of Economic Botany
Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn was a leader of the mid-

19th century movement to incorporate forestry science into state
bureaucracies. Trained as a surgeon, Cleghorn served at Madras
General Hospital in India in the 1840s. From 1848 to 1852, he
worked in London to advocate for the creation of forestry
departments to better manage the natural forest resources of the
British Empire.492 In 1850 Cleghorn secured a grant to finance a
year-long literature survey "on the whole problem of tropical
deforestation" from the British Association for the Advancement
of Science. 493 In 1851, he presented his work at the Great
Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, also known as
the Crystal Palace exhibition, the first of the late 19th and early
20th-century World's Fairs. In 1852, Cleghorn presented his paper,
491 The Glasgow Daily Herald. August 4, 1863, "Man as a Rainmaker." Gale, 19th
Century British Library Newspapers (accessed October 10, 2008) Issue 7353.
Atheneaum. "Man's Ability to Make Rain." The Caledonian Mercury, August 1,
1863. Gale, 19th Century British Library Newspapers (accessed October 10,
2008). Issue 23111.
492 Edward Percy Stebbing, The Forests of India. (London: J. Lane, 1922.) A
modern biography is sorely lacking. cf. Pallavi Dass, "Hugh Cleghorn and Forest
Conservancy in India" Environment and History 11 (2005): 55-82. For
correspondence see J.D. Hooker, to Charles Darwin, Kew, 19 May 1864, Letter 4501
Darwin Correspondence Project,
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-4501.html#mark-
4501.f4.

“The Probable Effects in an Economical and Physical Point of
View of the Destruction of Tropical Forests,” to the British
Association.
Cleghorn opened the report by admitting “
a deficiency of exact, or
experimental information” on the effects of deforestation. In the
absence of precise information, he acknowledged his reliance on
“evidence which admits of a considerable variety of
interpretation.” Nonetheless Cleghorn clearly stated that forests'
production of rainfall was their most important benefit. He began
the report by referencing Humboldt as “the most eminent
authority who has discussed the question.”494 Cleghorn presented
the writing of a well-traveled expert, the “most eminent
authority” on forests, as well as the natural world in general, to
legitimate his research. He cited Humboldt's Aspects of Nature, in
Different Lands and Different Climates, saying that “by felling
trees which cover the tops and sides of mountains, men in every
climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations—the
want of fuel and the scarcity of water.”495
Cleghorn used Humboldt's words as proof that trees

produce rainfall and did not question this causal relation in the
remainder of his report. Cleghorn's long citation of Humboldt
included Humboldt's justification for his claim, beginning with
Hales' insight that “Plants exhale fluid from their leaves...” and
then moving to the impact of this expiration. The report claimed
plants are responsible for “maintaining a suitable portion of
humidity in the air.” It continued to explain that plants produce
humidity not just by attracting and condensing already extant
moisture but also “by means of their roots, pumping it up from a
very considerable depth, and raising into the atmosphere.” In the
report, Humboldt also described plants' ability to “attract and
condense the moisture suspended in the air,” as well as drawing it
495 Humbdolt in Cleghorn, Report of the British Association Committee, 78.

from the ground. Cleghorn claimed that this “keeps the ground
below moist and cool” as well as surrounding trees with “an
atmosphere, constantly cold and moist.”496
While Cleghorn's purposes were different from those of

Humboldt, he generally adopted the German's scientific method.
Cleghorn's report presented letters from officials such as surgeons
and superintendents as evidence in his appendix. For example, he
cited the British surgeon Cullen, who claimed, “There cannot
perhaps be a more beautiful illustration of the effect of mountain
chains in arresting and condensing the vapor, than the generally
luxuriant forests which clothe the eastern as well as the western
ghauts [sic].”497 The Ghats are Indian mountains in the western
parts of the Indian provinces of Mysore, Wynaad, and Coorg. As
in the case of Hales and the Tobago Forest Reserve, scientists
argued for the protection of forests on mountains in order to
produce rainfall for the surrounding areas.
Like Hales, Cleghorn drew on a tradition of scientific

concern over deforestation to impact political decisions. Cleghorn
tried to suggest policy for the British government. He prescribed
forest clearing where it was necessary to clear land for agriculture
and human habitation, but not in situations where forestry might
jeopardize the water source for humans or their agriculture. While
Humboldt supported man's use of nature for economic purposes,
he did not devote his work to advising effective means for this
use. Cleghorn used Humboldt's science to make arguments for
both conservation and land use based on the economic needs of
the state. He also advised that this be managed by government
appointed and funded scientists. This management role was an
important extension of the role of the state supported by mid-19th
496 Humboldt in Cleghorn, Report of the British Association Committee, 78.

century scientists. 498 This expansion of the state differed from
Humboldt and Hales' methods of influencing government policy
from outside institutional structures.
Cleghorn's argument for the expansion of the state was

rooted in his discussion of the financial benefit of forests. In his
one departure from Humboldt's narrative style, Cleghorn
presented an “accumulation” of facts about the sales of forest
trees. He recorded a table of teak timber exports from 1840 to
1848, listing each year and the tonnage of trees harvested. His
second table is a statement of revenue from the sale of forest
products, which lists the same years and the number of rupees
earned. Cleghorn's lists of amounts of money earned and weight
of timber harvested accumulated evidence of the value of forest
products to the British Empire. In this section Cleghorn's method
and motivation differed from Humboldt’s, despite making the
same point about the use of forests.
Cleghorn made his point well. His advocacy in the early

1850s was key to the establishment of Forest Departments in
India, and in 1855 he organized the Madras Forest Department. In
1856 he became Conservator of Forests in the Madras Presidency.
Described as one of three “leading lights of Indian forestry in the
second half of the century”, Cleghorn retired to his native
Scotland in 1869.499 As a natural historian who successfully
became part of the government, Cleghorn blurred “the distinction
between the government of society and the government of
nature.”500 The work of Cleghorn and others like him produced
an integration of science and governance in the late 19th century.
498 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical

Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Studies in
Environment and History). (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 451.

Convinced of the economic value of forests, the late 19th
century British Empire adopted the research agenda of 'scientific
forestry' .Scientific forestry was a quantitative method of forest
management developed in continental Europe in the first half of
the century. Foresters trained at in French and German schools
staffed the new Forestry Bureaus of the British Empire. Their
textbooks and training taught them how to use numerical tables to
calculate the quantity of wood in forests they understood as rain-
makers.501 The forester's scientific expertise was meant to
evaluate the value of a forest to enable a state to manage this
resource carefully.
Scientific foresters used mathematical tables to

understand forests. These carefully constructed and compiled
tables of tree size and age meant "the forest itself would not even
have to be seen; it could be 'read' accurately from the tables and
maps in the forester's office."502 Foresters in the second half of the
19th century used numerical tables instead of personal
observation to study the natural world. The advocacy of scientists
like Cleghorn led to the creation of institutions like the British
Empire's Forestry Bureaus and the U.S. Meteorological Survey
between 1850 and 1900.
The Kew Botanical Gardens was integrated into the

British government in the 1850s and 1860s, even though it had
been founded in 1759. Kew was the center of a network of
botanical institutions stretching across the British Empire,
institutions focused on the effective management and use of
forests and forest resources. Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911)
501 The most widely used textbook was William Schlich, Manual of Forestry
(London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1896), 29-40, are about forests' impacts on
climate. Cf Schlich, Manual of Forestry, 1906, which alludes to this impact only to
dismiss it as beyond the concerns of the forester.
502 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 15.
was superintendent of Kew Botanical Garden from 1865-1885.
Throughout this time Hooker was also a member of the “X-
Club,” a monthly dining club of nine prominent British scientists.
The X-Club is known for advocating Darwinism and a form of
Anglican Christianity that could accommodate natural selection.
Fewer historians have considered the X-Club's deep investment in
the economic use of forests and their concern with the
relationship between climate and plants. They led an international
group of scientists in researching the ways plants might be
transplanted around the world to spread their benefits. This
research agenda, called 'economic botany' furthered the interests
of both the state and professional scientists.
Economic botany was fundamental to the X-Club's goal

of reforming the Royal Society of London and other professional
groups to “promote the status and influence of science.”503 By
integrating their research with the economic needs of the state, X-
Club members and other late 19th century scientists found
material and political support. As director of the Botanic Gardens
at Kew, Hooker transformed Kew into a key branch of the British
Colonial Office.504 Hooker raised money to support the garden by
justifying his work with “economic purpose" and argued for
government funding by allying the garden with growing forces of
international trade.505
Kew's goal of being economically useful was achieved by

the establishment of “an archive of plant raw materials” for
Britain's merchants and manufacturers. 506 This archive stored and
distributed plants that had economic value. Called the Museum of
503 Drayton, Nature's Government, 178.
504 ibid.
505 ibid.
506 ibid.
Economic Botany, it was supported by the British Admiralty,
which instructed Naval Officers in 1847 to send botanical
discoveries of “utility to man” to the Museum.507 One such
discovery was gutta percha.
Gutta percha sap from Singapore was discussed as a

valuable product in Cleghorn's 1851 report. It was crucial to the
development of the international economy in the late 19th century
but has been overlooked in histories of the development of the
market economy and the British Empire.508 The gutta percha
plants from Kew's Museum of Economic Botany enabled the
construction of the new mines, textile mills, and telegraph cables
crucial to the late 19th century economy. Their sap produced a
flexible, resilient latex material, discovered in the early 1840s,
and quickly put to use to cover the floors and printing rollers of
textile mills, and line the speaking tubes of coal mines. The
Prussian Werner von Siemens used gutta percha to insulate
telegraph cables. The tremendous value of the gutta percha trade
was not lost on the subjects of the British Empire, as an
“organized body of gum-hunters” ravaged Indian and Southeast
Asian forests like “a cloud of locusts.”509 Cleghorn's report
described the impact of the gutta percha trade through description
of its harvesting. He also used tables to present the revenues
derived from the produce, and the dramatic increase in extraction
of gutta percha from Indian forests.510 Cleghorn's table included
the revenues of gutta-percha sold in England, but without
comprehensive data, he could not provide a specific description
of where gutta percha came from. Instead, his vague descriptions
507 ibid, 192.
508 ibid, 193.
509 Cleghorn, Report to the British Association, 100.
510 ibid, 100.

of natives harvesting 'like locusts' suggests an unquantified and
unsustainable use of the resource.
Scientists at Kew and throughout the world set out to

quantify and sustain useful plants like gutta percha by quantifying
and tabulating them across the empire.511 This example is just one
case of the “convenient overlaps” between the ambitions of
scientists and commercial and government interests in the
1850s.512 These overlaps grew out of scientists’, companies’, and
governments’ shared desire to understand plants' specific local
climates. Gathering this information required “many small
outposts at the frontier” to discover “techniques best suited to
local soils and climate.”513
These frontier outposts were first developed in the United

States, where local stations of measurement were established
across the country. The establishments of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture and a far-flung network of land grant colleges in 1862
led an international trend toward establishing local stations of
measurement.514 In these local stations, government-employed
bureaucrats and their instruments continuously gathered data and
tabulated it. While a complete history of state surveillance of
nature is beyond the scope of this paper, a snapshot of the rapid
development of United States Meteorological Stations will
indicate the transformation in the second half of the 19th century.
511 The 'Cinchona Scheme' of the 1870s and 1880s was another excellent
example of such an attempt. Cinchona, a South American tree, produces the
malaria cure Quinine, and Dutch, French and British colonial powers sought to
increase the tree in the Eastern Hemisphere to aid exploration and settlement of
Africa. Cf. Drayton, Nature's Government, 209.
512 Drayton, Nature's Government, 204.
513 ibid, 209.
514 ibid 209.

Military post hospitals were the only source of United
States weather data in 1828. The map below shows their
distribution across the landscape.515 These hospitals did not
record information about entire regions of the country, like the
Ohio River valley. Even within a region, a single station might be
an aberration. Without more data, claims comparing regions were
impossible.
The situation 30 years later was dramatically different, as

the U.S. Patent Office and Smithsonian Institution (created in
1846) joined the military in publishing weather information from
Illustration 2: Image Courtesy of NOAA. Stars indicate weather stations 1858.
515 Tom Ross, "MAPS DEPICTING THE DISTRIBUTION OF STATIONS."

Illustration
National 1: Image
Climatic Courtesy
Data of NOAA. Stars indicate weather stations, 1828.
Center.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/onlinedata/forts/maps.html (accessed April
11, 2009).
stations across the United States. The map below shows United
States' national weather stations in 1858. 516
By 1858 the federal government had covered the country

with numerous stations. Even the sparsely populated northern
Midwest had a handful of stations. No longer merely the task of
the military, measurement was part of the agenda of research
institutions like the Smithsonian Institution. The map predates the
creation of land-grant colleges in 1862 and the establishment of
the American Museum of Natural History and Federal Geologic
Survey in 1869, three institutions that added to this network of
observation.
These stations of measurement produced data that could

be tabulated and relayed to scientists. For example, economic
botanists trying to spread gutta percha could consult tables of
global rainfall to assess where rainfall patterns were most similar
to the plants' native Singapore, and then choose to grow gutta
percha in that area. Another plant tabulated by Cleghorn was teak.
Scientific foresters could maximize the yield of their teak forests
by selectively cutting and planting based on tables of data about
pounds of timber production and rates of timber growth.
Late 19th century scientists managed the economic

resources of their forests with tables of observations made at
state-run research stations. They continued to investigate the
same questions of the relationship between plants and climates,
and the economic use of forests. But scientific methods had
changed dramatically, as scientists no longer traveled to gather
personal observations, but rather used tables of numerical data
collected by others. The accumulation of measurements as
indistinguishable numbers in tables hid the identity of observers.
516 Tom Ross, "MAPS DEPICTING THE DISTRIBUTION OF STATIONS."

National Climatic Data Center.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/onlinedata/forts/maps.html (accessed April
11, 2009).
The development of new state institutions committed to collecting
information and using it for economic development enabled this
change in method. These exact institutions had been the result of
arguments based on personal observation in the natural history of
the first half of the century. As scientists found work in new
institutions of measurement and mathematical analysis, their
social role shifted from gentleman naturalists to professional
bureaucrats. These changes in scientific method, the social role of
scientists, and their relation to the state produced a dramatic
change in the persona of the scientist, and resistance to this new
science of numerical tables suggests more about the nature of the
new scientific self.
Resisting Tables
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a gentleman naturalist

like Humboldt and Buffon. Like earlier natural historians, Darwin
was a popular writer who shared his travel narratives and personal
experiences with a general audience. At the end of Origin of
Species, Darwin claimed, “There is grandeur in this view of life,”
beauty in the divine production of “endless forms most beautiful
and most wonderful.”517 Darwin claimed these endless forms
were bound into a whole by common evolutionary history.
Darwin's visions of unity and beauty in nature are similar to
earlier arguments made by Humboldt and others. Like earlier
natural historians, Darwin's voyage of discovery was made
possible by his social status as a gentleman.
John Stevens Henslow, a friend of the Darwin family,

convinced the captain of the H.M.S. Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, to
bring 32-year-old Darwin on the ship's survey of South America.
Henslow wrote Darwin that he'd secured Darwin's position on the
Beagle “not on the supposition of your being a finished
517 Darwin, Origin of Species, 307.

Naturalist,” but “more as a companion than a mere collector.”518
Darwin's background made him suited to accompany Capitan
Fitzroy, who “would not take any one however good a Naturalist
who was not recommended to him likewise as a gentleman.”519
Darwin's voyage on the Beagle was more contingent on his social
status than his scientific qualification.
Darwin claimed to be self-consciously following

Humboldt's example, writing, “My whole course of life is due to
having read and re-read as a youth,” Humboldt's personal
narratives of 1799 to 1804.520 However, Darwin's use of tables
and quantification was part of the development of new scientific
methods and a new kind of scientist. He used these tables in his
Journal Of Researches, about his trip on the Beagle to the
Galapagos Islands, published in 1839 and quickly popularized.
Like the tables Cleghorn used in his 1851 report, Darwin's
Journal of Researches included lists of the different numbers of
species he observed on various Galapagos Islands. His table had
rows for each of the four islands, and five columns for the
different kind of species' sums he'd calculated: total species;
species observed that also exist outside the Galapagos; species
unique to the Galapagos; species found on more than one
Galapagos Island; and species unique to a particular island.
Darwin's table of twenty values sought to make visible to his
readers the diversity and uniqueness of the Galapagos’ species.
Darwin used his table to point out, for example, “the truly
wonderful fact, that in James Island, of the thirty eight
518 J.S. Henslow, to Charles Darwin, Cambridge, 24 August 1831, Letter 105
Darwin Correspondence Project,
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-105.html, emphasis
original.
519 ibid.
520 Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the
Ecological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1994, 132.
Galopageian [sic.] plants, or those found in no other part of the
world, thirty are exclusively confined to this one island.”521
The wonder of these plants' specificity of location was

lost on one prominent reader of this travel narrative, the
American writer Herman Melville (1819-1891). Melville, like
Darwin, visited the Galapagos Islands, but came home from the
experience with a different understanding of the islands and
different claims about how one ought to understand them.
Darwin's Journal was in the library of Melville's boat home from
the Galapagos, and he later purchased his own copy.522 Melville
quoted the text in his novel Moby Dick, and parodied Darwin's
use of numerical tables in Las Encantadas, a series of short
stories published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854.
In one story of his time on the Galapagos, Melville

pretended to proffer his own table of Galapagos species.
Melville's table had two columns, one for types, the other for
quantity. Each row is a different sort of creature and its
population. The table claimed to give “the population of
Albermarle... in round numbers... according to the most reliable
estimates made on the spot.”523 Melville's mocking table,
presented in the introduction listed no men, unknown numbers of
ant-eaters and man-haters, and an “incomputable host of fiends...
and salamanders.”524
Melville's “unknown” quantities and “clean total” mock

the possibility of accurate numerical data. Mark Dunphy, a
521 Mark Dunphy, "Melville's Turning of the Darwininan Table in the 'The
Encantadas'" Melville Society Extracts 79 (1989), 14.
522 Edward J. Larson, Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the

Galapagos Islands, (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 8.
523 Worster, The Wealth of Nature, 132.
524 Worster, The Wealth of Nature, 132.

literary scholar, interpreted Melville's as arguing "the scientific
method of quantitative analysis for purposes of investigating the
nature of the world is absurd since the ultimate nature of the
world is finally 'unknown.'"525 Dunphy's analysis moves directly
from Melville's epistemological claim about numerical tables to
Melville's understanding of 'the ultimate nature of the world.'
Dunphy is right that the vigor of Melville's critique is more than a
quibble over scientific method. Melville's mockery of statistical
method was part of a broader late 19th century critique of a new
kind of science and scientist. Supporters of the personal narrative
accounts of previous naturalists resisted both quantitative method
and the people who supported it.
Alfred de Foville, a 19th century French economist and

statistician, complained in 1885 that in the theater, “as soon as a
statistician comes on the stage, everyone prepares to laugh.”526
People laughed not only at statistics, but the representation of the
statistician. Scientific societies joined theaters and popular
magazines in criticizing statistical knowledge. In France, the
Committee of the Academie des Sciences expressed concern over
“the mathematical manipulation of numbers gathered by others”
in 1876.527 Numerical tables removed the expert researcher,
which troubled readers of late 19th century science. Without a
scientist with direct knowledge of a measured quality, accurate
analysis seemed impossible. The new numerical data seemed to
lend itself to misinterpretation in a way personal experience had
not.528
525 Dunphy in Larson, Evolution's Workshop, 9.
526 Porter, Trust in Numbers, 83.
527 ibid, 79.
528 ibid, 81.

Darwin's persona as a gentleman naturalist lent credibility
to his interpretation of the data, even as his Journal of Researches
combined a report of a unique experience with the new method of
quantitative tables. In Darwin's work quantitative tables coexisted
with older ideas about scientific methods. This unstable mixing
of notions about how to produce and reproduce knowledge about
the natural world suggests a deep division in mid-19th century
thought.
After Darwin, scientists writing on the issues of rainfall

and forestry management were generally no longer independent
gentleman, but government-employed bureaucrats. The
professional bureaucrats introduced the massive use of tables into
climate science, destroying the earlier belief that forests caused
rainfall, and producing a sense of an international climate system.
Like the tables in Darwin's 1839 Journal, his discussion of
climate in his 1869 Origin of Species displayed the transition of
mid-19th century science. In his Journal Darwin's method hinted
at general changes in scientific method, and in his Origin of
Species Darwin displayed subtle changes in the beliefs of natural
historians about the relationship between forests and rainfall.
Despite his stated debt to Humboldt, perhaps the most prominent
advocate of a link between rainfall and forests, Darwin's most
prized work did not acknowledge that relationship. Darwin
discussed climate as a “check to increase” on plant species in
Chapter 3, and a “cause of variation” among species in Chapter 5.
In both instances the degree of humidity was cited as a cause of
particular kinds and quantities of plant life, rather than a product
of plant life.529 While this omission is far from a repudiation of
Humboldt, it marks the start of an intellectual trend away from
adherence to the orthodoxy of trees causing rainfall.
Tables of Rain: The Development of Global Climatology
529 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection,

(New York: Dover Publications, 2006).
The first scientific challenge to the orthodoxy of forests
producing rainfall was published in the journal of the Royal
Geographic Society in 1869 by George Bidie. Like Cleghorn,
Bidie was trained as a surgeon, and like Cleghorn, he served the
British Empire in Madras. His paper dealt with the forests on the
mountains of the Ghats, in the western part of the province of
Coorg, territory discussed in Cleghorn's report. Bidie came to
very different conclusions from Cleghorn. Bidie described warm,
moist air blowing into Coorg and “coming in contact with the
colder hills” which produced a “decrease in density... as the
current rolls up the mountain side.”530 Bidie argued that wind
blowing up a mountain range, as it gains in elevation, will
decrease in pressure. He identified this process as “the chief cause
of the precipitation” in the region.
Since the 18th century scientists have known that a

decrease in pressure can produce a decrease in temperature,
decreasing the amount of water vapor air can hold. As air rose the
side of a mountain and cooled, Bidie suggested that decreased
pressure caused air to release its water vapor as rain. This
mechanism for the production of rain in Bidie's 1869 report
contrasts with the claims of scientists like Cleghorn and
Humboldt. Bidie argued that “under such circumstances it can be
of little consequence, as regards the rain-fall, whether the
mountain slopes are bare or clothed with dense forest...”531 Based
on this analysis of the rainfall in Coorg, Bidie describes “the
forests that grow on these high-lands as a consequence, and not
the cause, of the rain.”532 Bidie's attribution of causal power to
530 George Bidie, "Effects of Forest Destruction in Coorg" Journal of the

Royal Geographical Society of London 39 (1869): 78, JSTOR:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1798545.
531 Bidie, "Effects of Forest Destruction" 78.
532 ibid, 79.

climate rather than plants defied the traditions of natural history
to that point.
Bidie's paper, like earlier works of natural history, was

based largely on his personal experiences and observations, and
lacked tables or numerical arguments. Unlike Humboldt or
Darwin, Bidie was uncomfortable with this lack of data. He stated
his wish for “reliable observations”533 of the rainfall for the last
fifteen years. Bidie did not advance an argument on the basis of
expert knowledge. Unlike Humboldt, he did not present a
scientific claim based on his own experience. Rather he hoped
that new weather stations' gauges would enable an accumulation
of observations to prove his hypothesis. Bidie's desire for
numerical tables of data suggested a change in scientific method
associated with a change in persona. Despite his paper's use of
early 19th century methods, Bidie represented himself as
someone interested in numerical tables of data.
Unlike in Coorg, numerical tables of rainfall data were

available in the United States due to the massive increase in
government-funded stations of measurement.534 Henry Gannett
marshaled this data in the late 19th century to understand the
relationship between forests and rainfall. Like Cleghorn, Gannett
had advocated for the inclusion of scientists in state
bureaucracies. Gannett lobbied for the consolidation of several
private cartography firms into a single Federal Geologic Survey
in 1869.535 He was appointed Geographer of the United States
Geological Survey's Census in 1880, and in 1883 became Chief
Geographer of the United States Geological Survey. Known as “a
533 ibid.
534 As discussed on pp 18-19
535 Jery Penry, "Henry Gannett" The American Surveyor

Magazine - Land Surveying and Mapping Online.
http://www.amerisurv.com/content/view/4519/ (accessed March 8, 2009).
statistician by nature,” he mainly published his work in the
bulletins of the Geologic Survey, but was also a frequent
contributor to other scientific publications.536 A member of the
Royal Geographic Society, there is reason to believe he was
familiar with the work of Bidie on the meteorological and
vegetative qualities of mountains in India, which had been
published in the Royal Geographic Society's journal.
Unlike Bidie, Gannett was able to muster considerable

levels of 'reliable evidence' to test the “supposed phenomenon” of
decreased rainfall due to deforestation.537 He published his
results in the journal Science on January 6, 1888. Gannett
acknowledged that it was “generally believed” that “the culture of
forests induces an increase in rainfall,” but he attacked this belief
as having never been “satisfactorily explained.”538 Instead, “the
only tangible support for the theory appears to consist in a few
observations of rainfall in limited areas in central Europe.”
Gannett disposed of the natural historical tradition as not
“tangible.” Instead of travel accounts, Gannett wanted theories to
be “established or disproved by the facts.”539 Gannett used
numerical tables as his facts. Unlike Humboldt or Hales, he did
not seek to present the unique beauty of nature. Rather, he used
the “accumulation” feared by Humboldt to measure nature.
Unlike the previous literature's qualitative descriptions of

rainfall, Gannett used tables to present the “ample records of the
rainfall during those periods.”540 In order to obtain reliable
536 ibid
537 Henry Gannett, "Do Forests Influence Rainfall?" Science 11.257 (1888): 3
538 Gannett, "Do Forests Influence Rainfall?", 4.
539 ibid, 5.
540 For previous literature cf. Buffon, Humboldt and Darwin. For scientific
papers, cf. Cleghorn, “Report to the British Association”, or James Fox Wilson,
results, he combined “a large number of observations scattered
over many years and over the greatest possible variety of
stations.” Gannett claimed that the reliability of his data depended
on its production in many different stations, scattered across the
landscape. Unlike earlier naturalists, who relied on specific, local,
experiences for their authority, Gannett and late 19th century
climatologists justified their arguments by using data they had not
themselves collected. They cited inclusion of all data as an act
which would ensure the truth of their claims. Gannett’s numerical
tables were filled with evidence of phenomena he had not
personally observed, and no data was discarded. This was an
argument for the reliability of his tables. The method removed the
presence of a “unique, interested, located individual” from the
process of data collecting.541 That individual had to be prevented
from selecting “stations and years of observations as to obtain any
pre-arranged result.”542 Gannett's paper, and others in the late
19th century, sought to eliminate the “interested individual”
through its structure and choice of sources.
The passive voice in Gannett’s paper obscured the role of

researchers who compiled his data. He wrote about “twenty four
stations at which extended series of rainfall measurements have
been made in the Plains region.” While this language obscured
the observer, it emphasized the number of stations. He continued
to emphasize this point, listing twelve more stations in Ohio, and
eighteen in southern New England. In each region he enumerated
the shortest and longest series of numbers, and added the time
span of each series, to get a “total years” figure. However, the
different numbers of series in each region, and overlapping dates
of the series, meant that the sum of years was not a meaningful
"Water Supply in the Basin of the River Orange," Journal of the Royal Geographical
Society of London 35 (1865): 106-129.

measure of time. Instead, Gannett seemed to be summing his the
lengths of his series to produce a value that would indicate the
total number of data points he had. Rather than anything to do
with time-series, Gannett’s sum was focused on demonstrating an
accumulation of numbers.
This accumulation filled the second page of Gannett’s

two-page article. He presented tables listing each station, the
number of years each station’s data covered, the sum of the first
half and second half of its data sets, and the difference between
the halves. He divided each series into two equal parts, and
summed “the total rainfall of each half.” By summing the halves
in each region and comparing them, Gannett claimed to be
approximating the shift in aggregate rainfall in each region over
the time period of his data. He observed that the total rainfall of
the second half of the series did not vary as one would expect
based on changes in forest cover in each region.
Gannett's tables made evident the lack of a quantitative

correlation between his rainfall data and forest cover in each
region. Unlike previous arguments which focused on providing
mechanisms for causation, the statistical methods of Gannett’s
paper only allowed it to assess the presence of correlations.543 The
work of Cleghorn and Bidie, immediately preceding Gannett’s,
both suggested means for producing particular natural effects.
Cleghorn argued that plants produce rainfall, and Bidie suggested
that rainfall produces plants. Gannett did not use his numerical
tables to make an argument about the nature of the relationship
between rainfall and plants, but rather to claim there was no
correlation between the two. Regions with increasing forest had
decreasing rainfall in some cases, and increasing rainfall in
others. Gannett applied these correlations to specifically
economic use. He wrote that “it seems idle to discuss further the
influence of forests on rainfall” as “from the economic point of
543 The critique of numerical tables as suggesting correlation rather than

causation follows Adorno in Porter, Trust in Numbers, 19.
view... it is evidently too slight to be of the least practical
importance.” Like the scientific foresters seeking a “use for
forests,” Gannett's research was based on using numerical tables
for economic ends.
Gannet's attempt to understand the economic implications

of forests was part of his own integration into a governing
bureaucracy. Widespread weather-station data was not a
possibility for the natural historians who established first made
claims about deforestation causing decreased rainfall. The
proliferation of U.S. weather stations, and the information they
provided, were a necessary condition of possibility for Gannett's
study, a condition only met in the later years of the 19th century.
Gannett needed to muster this massive body of quantitative facts
to justify his argument, because he knew his argument was “at
variance with the popular idea” that rainfall was produced by
plant life.544 Despite being at odds with the popular idea, Gannett was able to be far more
assertive than Bidie due to his large data set and his application of quantitative arguments. Based on his
data, Gannett suggested that “in this case an effect has been mistaken for a cause.”545
The
numerical tables in his paper made Gannett’s claims seem
reasonable. He drew on the numerical data of government
research stations to advance his claims about rainfall while
government research stations drew on Gannett's work as a
justification for their funding. Government funding for those
stations could be assured due to their utility in producing
economically important science.
The integration of scientific research methods with

government systems enabled a new scientific self obsessed with
collecting data. Gannett's 1906 paper on the impacts of
temperature and rainfall on forests seemed to revel in the sheer
amount of numbers his government post gave him. He explained
that the Weather Bureau’s officers have given him “not only all
545 ibid.
printed data concerning temperature and rain-fall, but all
manuscript material in their possession.”546 In possession of these
documents, Gannett had access to “probably one thousand
meteorological stations scattered over the Rocky Mountain and
Pacific Coast States. After discarding all stations in which the
rainfall series is less than five years, I have the records of a little
over four hundred stations.”547 Proud of his data, Gannett
combined these rainfall numbers with land classification maps of
the Forest Bureau to show the relationship between temperature
and forest type. “The figures for rainfall and temperature at all of
the stations obtained were platted upon Land Office maps of the
several States, and the outlines of timber sketched upon the same
maps or upon different maps.”548 Gannett combined weather
station data with maps of the United States to understand the
relationship between climate and plants.
Where he lacked data, Gannett attributed the failure to

“the imperfections of our knowledge-- imperfections which will
be remedied by more extended and better-directed
549
observation.” He defined observations as standardized,
numerical values, collected at many different locations
continuously over a long period of time. Gannett enforced this
definition of observation in his role as director of the United
States Geologic Survey. In 1897 he led a project to document the
forest reserves of the United States, and in 1901 managed a
546 Henry Gannett,Certain Relations of Rainfall and Temperature to Tree

Growth, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society Vol 38 No 7, 1906.
547 ibid.
548 Henry Gannett,Certain Relations of Rainfall and Temperature to Tree

Growth, Bulletin of the American Geogrphical Society Vol 38 No 7.
549 ibid.
survey of the major rivers of the United States.550 As a leader of
state-funded projects to document natural resources with
quantitative data, Gannett led the creation of a bureaucratic
system to record data about the natural world.
The numerical data that Gannett collected, along with

others like him in government bureaucracies around the world,
enabled new scientific conclusions. Tables had proven effective
for managing natural resources like gutta-percha, and would now
enable a new conception of a global climate system.
Henry Blanford's research led to an understanding of

worldwide relationships between climate patterns. Blanford's data
was accumulated by the bureaucracy Cleghorn had worked to
establish. He used this data to argue that forests influenced
rainfall. Data he collected was published by Dietrich Brandis, the
Inspector General of Indian Forests in the January, 1888 Indian
Forester. This evidence indicated that the presence of trees in
some Indian meteorological stations increased annual rainfall by
an average of 6.2 inches. Brandis suggested this data proved
forestry's potential to render “incalculable” advantages through
increased rainfall.551
Unfortunately, this data was literally incalculable
, and further review of the
data led Blanford to alert Indian Forester that it could not be
trusted. Blanford's correspondence with the Chief Commissioner
of the Central Provinces indicated that three different kinds of
gauges had been in circulation, and while they had been
standardized in 1883, the “statistics which had been previously
550 Jery Penry, "Henry Gannett" The American Surveyor

Magazine - Land Surveying and Mapping Online.
http://www.amerisurv.com/content/view/4519/ (accessed March 8, 2009).
551 Dietrich Brandis, "The Influence of Forests on Rainfall" The Indian

Forester 14 (1888), 10-20,
http://books.google.com/books?id=XgFEAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA500&vq=rainfall
&lr=&source=gbs_search_s#PPA20,M1.
collected would form an unsafe basis for generalizations.”552 In
order to engage in the quantitative debate over rainfall and
forests, Blanford had to present not only numerical evidence, but
evidence gathered in a consistent fashion across times and places.
After Blanford wrote them a letter i
n 1889, Indian Forester reported that “the
figures used by Mr. Blanford are now proven to be
untrustworthy.”553 The journal lamented this failure, because had
his results “been accepted as true, they would have established
most conclusively that the extension of forests had been
accompanied by a marked increase in the average rainfall of the
forest districts, and that these changes stood probably in the
relation of cause and effect.”554 Here the editors distinguished
between the power of the data to prove a correlation, and the
possibility of that correlation indicating a causal relationship. The
data would have established a correlation between forests and
rainfall, and this probably would have indicated a causation of
plants causing rain.
In the absence of reliable rainfall information before

1883, claims about Indian rainfall could not stand. Blanford did
not even try to use his personal experiences to overcome a lack of
standardized numerical data. While Melville had ridiculed the
impossible dream of perfect data, the late 19th century was
largely successful in producing standardizing instruments and
observational systems in order to produce useful tables and
comparisons between readings.555 The work Blanford did to
552 ibid, 39.
553 E.E. Fernandez, "Notes, Queries and Extracts" The Indian Forester 15
(1889), 39,
http://books.google.com/books?id=sgFEAAAAIAAJ&printsec=titlepage#PRA1
-PA39,M1.
554 E.E. Fernandez, "Notes, Queries and Extracts", 39.
555 Simon Schaffer, Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A

Manufactury of Ohms, In The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagoli, (New
York: Routledge, 1999), 479-482.
standardize his Indian measurements was part of a broader
movement to standardize data internationally.556 One instance of
this project was the “creation in 1871 of the first real bureau of
standards, the Physikalische-Technische Reichsanstalt in
Berlin.”557 In the specific case of weather, the First International
Meteorological Congress in Vienna in 1873 led to the acceptance
of scientific standards by 1900. Observatories around the world
could combine and compare their work “almost immediately by
means of telegraph.”558 Weather maps, including air pressure
data, were an early product of this international scientific
community.
This ideal of comparing readings across time and space

enabled scientists to develop a conception of a global climate in
the 1880s and 1890s. This scientific practice had combined with
natural events to enable a new way of understanding climate
systems. The Calcutta cyclone of 1864, according to Blanford's
obituary, was a disaster which “naturally aroused the attention of
the Indian Government and the public generally to the necessity
of systematic meteorological observations.”559 The word
“naturally” meant “in due course” or “inevitably.” Later readers
can consider its double meaning. In this context naturally may
mean “through the agency of nature,” or “by a cause of nature.”
The 1864 cyclone killed over 60,000, and caused the British
colonial government to create the Bengal Meteorological
Department. In 1875, after ten years at the helm of this
department, Henry Blanford began centralizing the Indian
Meteorological departments, to create a unified Indian
556 Shafer, Late Victorian Metrology In The Science Studies Reader, 485.
558 ibid.
559 "Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased."Proceedings of the Royal

Society 54 (1893): xii-xix. In JSTOR[database online]. (accessed April 12, 2009).
Meteorological Office. Blanford was its first leader, the
Meteorological Reporter to the Government of India.
This role placed him on the front lines of British response

to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation of 1876, perhaps the most
powerful in 500 years.560 It caused the drought of 1876-1879, a
catastrophe of “planetary magnitude” killing tens of millions of
people in Egypt, China, and India, with drought and famine also
reported in “Java, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Korea, Brazil,
southern Africa and the Mahgreb.”561 The international scope of
the problems was reported in scientific publications such as
Nature, and prompted investigation by the British colonial
government. Until this moment, “No one had… suspected that
synchronous extreme weather was possible” on such a global
scale.562 While scientists had previously been concerned with
rainfall, late 19th century anxieties about planetary drought were
uniquely enabled by “the creation of a rudimentary international
weather reporting network.”563 Blanford drew on this network to
explain the global famine.
In 1889, after the retraction of his paper claiming forests

caused rainfall, Henry Blanford requested air pressure reports
from across the British Empire. Blanford's counterpart in New
South Whales, Charles Todd, while compiling this data, observed
the coincidence of drought and high air pressure in 1877 and
1888 in India and Australia.564 Blanford built on Todd's
560 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: W W Norton & Co
Inc, 2002), 14.
561 ibid, 6.
562 ibid,, 6.
563 ibid, 12.
564 Richard H. Grove, El Nino: History and Crisis (Melbourne: The White
Horse Press, 2000), 318.
conclusion, analyzing data to suggest that during the drought of
1876-1879 “the condition of excessive pressure prevailed over
not only the Indo-Malayan region and Eastern Australia, but also
the greater part if not the whole of Asia, probably the whole of
Australia, and the South Indian Ocean.”565 The international
network of stations producing numerical tables made
international relations between climatic elements like rainfall and
barometric pressure visible to government administrators.
To understand Blanford and Todd's interest in high

barometric pressure during the famine, we must return to Bidie's
earlier argument against trees causing rainfall. Bidie pointed out
the decrease in barometric pressure caused by wind blowing up
the side of a mountain produced rainfall and thus, vegetation.
The opposite condition of high barometric pressure would be
associated with higher temperatures and less rainfall. Blanford's
own research and publications assessed this relation as a possible
replacement for his failed theory of plant life causing rainfall. He
published work drawing on international data to analyze the
relationships between rainfall, temperature, and pressure. 566
Blanford applied his studies of the correlation between barometric
pressure and rainfall to the data he gathered on the famine.
Based on the international data series he organized,

Blanford wrote that “between Russia and Western Siberia on the
one hand, and the Indo-Malayan region (perhaps including the
Chinese region) on the other, there is a reciprocating and cyclical
565 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 217.
566 Henry Blanford, On the relations of the diurnal barometric maxima to

certain critical conditions of temperature, cloud and rainfall, Proceedings of the
Royal Society of London Vol 44 (1888). Blanford assessed the production of the
necessary conditions for rain by the daily fluctuation of the barometric pressure. He
showed that just as wind blowing up a mountain decreases barometric pressure and
temperature, causing rainfall, daily temperature deceases at sunset have similar
effects. Blanford's report drew on data from Prague to Melbourne, and including
“the tropical stations Bombay, Calcutta, and Batavia.”
oscillation of atmospheric pressure.”567 Blanford suggested a
cycle of air pressure change moving from Western Siberia to
Southeast Asia. This oscillation was his explanation for the cyclic
droughts experienced on the Indian subcontinent.
Tables of barometric pressure in the late 19th century

benefited from international standardization and the development
of barometric measurement. The perception of the barometer as a
device that did not involve any human interference enabled
barometric readings to fit within late 19th century ideals of
scientific method. For this reason, the tables of numerical values
presented by Blanford and Todd in the late 19th century did not
face the opposition Darwin’s work had in the middle of the
century. Melville had argued that computing total numbers of
species, and their proper categorization, was impossible. While
species’ definitions were debated throughout the late 19th
century, barometric pressure was understood as a stable,
repeatable measurement.568 A note in the Daily News of London from 1890
d
emonstrated popular understanding of the instrument. In the News' summary of the
proceedings of the Royal Society, “a harm-less looking apparatus (the barometer),” was described as
measuring thunderstorms, “and not only measured, but self-recorded.” 569 The barometer removed
concern about 'reliable observers' by placing the power of direct observation into a machine, which
produced the data itself.
No unreliable researcher produced this data, but
rather an 'objective' observer with no biases or interests. The barometer
therefore produced readings easily accumulated in numerical tables, and compared across the world.
This data was drawn directly into the for the global mechanism
late 19th century “search
responsible for synchronized drought across the tropics and parts of the extra-tropics.”570
568 For conflict over definitions of bird species Darwin analyzed to

demonstrate natural selection, see Mark Barrow,. A Passion for Birds, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 74-102. For general concerns on nomenclaure see
Ritvo In Victorian Science in Context, 336-337.
569 The Daily News Thursday May 15, 1890

Barometric pressure was an important explanation for global rainfall cycles in the late 19th
century. The competing position, advanced in the publications of the Royal Society of London from
1870-1890, was that rainfall periodicity was produced by changes in the sun and moon.571 This
research correlated sun spots and moon phases with tables of global rainfall patterns.
- Despite
of the debate shared a
disagreement between these two positions, both sides
belief in the periodicity of rainfall, and used n the appropriate cyclical
umerical tables to reveal
cause of this pattern. The debate between those who used the sun and moon as explanatory factors for
rainfall patterns and those who used barometric readings centered on which set of data best matched
rainfall data. Instead of debating which mechanism was most likely to physically cause rainfall, by the
end of the century, “most meteorologists sought statistical patterns rather than physical or dynamic
insights to protect the weather.”572 These statistical patterns were analyzed by government-employed
bureaucrats, seeking to maximize economic values for the state.
Rather than extolling the virtues of personal experience in nature, these late 19th century
scientists embodied a different set of virtues. Their analysis of statistical tables suggested disinterest
and removal from what they were studying, and they excluded any mention of religious subjects from
their work. The vast differences in the scientific methods and social roles of these later scientists
developed out of different notions of who the scientific self ought to be. The habits of dispassionate,
quantitative analysis and personal detachment dominated the personas of late 19th century
climatologists. These qualities of mind and habits of behavior were intertwined with changes in method
that produced a science of global climate.
Popularizers and the Ethical Claims of Climate Science
571 For sun-spots and rainfall see, for example, C. Meldrum, "On a Periodicity of
Rainfall in Connexion with the Sun-Spot Periodicity."Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London 21 (1872): 297-308. and a presentation of further quantitative
data to support it, J.H.N. Hennessy, "Note on the Periodicity of
Rainfall.."Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 23 (1874): 253-300. For
lunar patterns and rainfall see; J.H.N. Hennessy, "On a supposed Connexion
between the Amount of Rainfall and the Changes of the Moon."Proceedings of
the Royal Society of London 18 (1867), Jstor.
572 Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and
the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993),
4.
Late-19th century scientific literature was not riveting reading. Professional scientists like
X-Club Founder and President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Thomas
Henry Huxley pursued “highly specialized research” involving complicated numerical tables, which
precluded popular understanding.573 While specialization excluded many from scientific works, the
new possibility of a career in science was only made possible by bringing new groups into contact with
the products of the science. As previously shown, early 19th century naturalists had justified their
professional employment by claiming that governments and states would benefit economically. Their
work also sought to improve the moral and religious qualities of their readers. While science became
more specialized and inaccessible, these conceptions of its benefits did not change. Late 19th century
science, no less than early 19th century natural history, sought to make itself useful to a broad
public.574 While the technical scientific literature excluded moral claims, the scientists who produced
it embodied values of objective remove and dispassionate analysis. The popularizing work that brought
late 19th century science to a broader reading public explicitly supported the morality that professional
scientists embodied. These texts used science to inculcate late 19th century religious values.575
Popular science texts presented these values through some of the same literary techniques
as earlier scientists. Like Humboldt and Darwin, late 19th century popularizers “explicitly embodied
science in a narrative form.” 576
These works contrasted with the technical
analyses of climate science in scientific journals. Many authors of
technical works self-consciously published for two separate
audiences. For example, a review in Nature of a work on moon phases by G.D.
Darwin commends him for laying “aside the technicalities” and revealing his subject to “the wide
public who cannot understand mathematical processes.”577 The late 19th century bifurcated
’s
audience was often addressed, as in the case of Huxley, or G.D. Darwin, by a single scientist, who
wrote both popular narratives and mathematical analyses.
573 Bernard Lightman, “The Voices of Nature”: Popularizing Victorian

Science, In Victorian Science in Context ed. Bernard Lightman, 187.
574 ibid.
575 ibid.
576 ibid, 192.
577 W.E.P. "The Tides Popularly and Properly Treated" (Nature 59 1899), 219
http://www.nature.com/nature/
In other cases, popular science was produced by
specialists who wrote exclusively for non-technical audiences.
These writers were often women, and their work was aimed at
young people and women, two audiences defined as 'uneducated'
in the late 19th century. One female popular scientist was Anna
Botsford Comstock (1854-1930), whose Handbook of Nature
Study was published to provide teachers with nature study
lessons. It was widely used by primary school teachers through
the early twentieth century to bring students into direct contact
with nature, and encourage them to learn from their own sensory
impressions. Comstock meant to translate the technical language
of her husband's research as a scientist at Cornell into language
young people and their female teachers might understand.
In her work she presented the values of late 19th century

scientific method. Comstock's textbook extolled the value of
accumulating data, and gave students the opportunity to fill in a
numerical table. Her text explained that the discoveries of the
barometer and thermometer made “possible the collection of data,
upon which all meteorological investigations are based.”578 Her
section on climate concluded with another device that made late
19th and early 20th century meteorological investigations
possible. Students were provided a table with column headers
prepared already to record their own numerical measurements.
These numerical methods were integrated with particular
scientific results.
The methods extolled in Comstock's Handbook of Nature

Study were precisely the ones that had produced late 19th century
global climate science. The Handbook made this relationship
clear by claiming that data collection was the work “upon which
all meteorological investigations are based.”579 Meteorological
578 Anna Botsford Comstock, Handbook of Nature Study (New York:

Comstock Publishing, 1996), 781
579 Anna Botsford Comstock, Handbook of Nature Study (New York:

Comstock Publishing, 1996), 781
investigations like those of Blanford, based on quantitative data,
described a global system of air pressure and climate. Comstock
presented the science of air pressure measurements across
hemispheres, developed from internationally standardized
numerical data.580
Comstock's descriptions were intended to educate a

general audience, like the writings of Humboldt and Darwin. She
wrote simply and directly, intending to explain global climate
science to young people. Like Humboldt and Darwin, Comstock
intended for her readers to draw lessons about how to experience
the natural world. While Humboldt and Darwin encouraged
personal experience to understand climate, Comstock encouraged
filling in an empty table of meteorological data. Her work
enabled the reader to take on the role of a bureaucratic scientist
by filling in tables of observations.
Comstock's Handbook suggested the ethical expectations of the late 19th century scientist.
She encouraged young people to study nature, and to understand climate through filling numerical
tables. She hoped nature study would produce a “serene peace and hopeful faith” due to a realization
that one is a “working unit of this wonderful universe.”581 Unlike Humboldt or Darwin, she did not
allude to the grandeur of nature, nor to a Creator. Instead, Comstock encouraged her readers to develop
serenity as a result of realizing that one is a working unit” of the universe. Comstock drew on the
tradition of finding value in nature to suggest that students ought to find a serene peace
feeling of
and faith.582
The values Comstock expected to inculcate a late 19th century

are those of
professional, expected to serenely examine data rather than actively travel the world like earlier natural
historians. While the natural historians shared with Comstock and the professional scientists a sense of
being part of nature, the specific way Comstock suggested her students integrate with the natural world
580 ibid.
581 ibid, 2.
582 For other instances of female popularizers teaching faith, see Bernard
Lightman, “The Voices of Nature”: Popularizing Victorian Science, In Victorian
Science in Context ed. Bernard Lightman, 191.
was unique to her historical moment. She hoped students would come to a sense of themselves as
useful components of the natural wo ld. She did not encourage episodic moments of oneness, but rather
r
a continual relationship of efficacy.
The late 19th century scientific self was no longer one independently traveling around the
world to gather personal experience. Rather, scientists like Blanford used data from around the globe to
become “working units” within institutional contexts. Blanford's use of numerical tables gathered from
around the world to understand a phenomenon crucial to the state (in this case, weather) was a project
which integrated his social and professional roles, scientific methods, and his qualities and habits of
mind. Blanford's production of “valuable work” in his career was made possible by his qualities as a
“patient and vigorous worker.”583
These particular relations between

Blanford's roles, methods, and
persona were historically underdetermined and contingent.584
They did not have to occur the way they did, and changes in their
relations do not tend towards the ahistorical goal of 'true' science.
In the late 19th century climate scientists obscured a connection
between plant life and climate due. This occurred through the
introduction of quantitative tabular methods and the fission of
natural history into separate fields assessing the use of forests and
the causes of rainfall. I have presented the conditions that made
these scientific developments possible, without suggesting that
one factor caused this scientific change.
By analyzing the way “scientific ideas are embedded in

material culture” this account has attempted an interdisciplinary
assessment of transformation in the 19th century.585 Disputes over
the relationship between plants and climate involved, in addition
to evidence and argument, issues of “who was doing the disputing
583 "Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased."Proceedings of the Royal

Society 54 (1893): xii-xix. In JSTOR[database online]. (accessed April 12, 2009).
584 Bruce J. Hunt, “Doing Science in a Global Empire: Cable Telegraphy and
Electrical Physics in Victorian Britain” in Victorian Science in Context. ed. Bernard
Lightman, (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1997), 290.
585 Lightman, Victorian Science in Context, 7.

and where."586 The late 19th century change in scientific
understandings of plants and rainfall relied on scientists' using
new kinds of evidence made possible by their new social and
professional roles.
The traveling naturalist's exploration relied on his elite

status, and popular audiences accepted his accounts due to his
status as a credible gentleman. Darwin exemplified this
relationship between social standing and scientific research.
Similarly, government bureaucrats were only able to produce
their tabular science due to their position within state institutions.
These positions lent their work the authority and power of his
employer. Henry Blanford's employment at the IMO made
possible his research and results.
This account integrates histories of professionalization of

science in the late 19th century and histories of epistemological
change in scientific method in the same time period. For the
specific case of climate science, the professionalization of the
scientist, and the accompanying development of numeric,
standardized, bureaucratic methods, inculcated new qualities of
character in the scientist. Over time, gentleman naturalists and
their methods of personal experience of nature developed the
personal qualities of dispassionate engagement. Similarly, late
19th century bureaucrats' methods of numerical tabulation
produced personal characteristics of objective remove. This
analysis suggests a way to integrate histories of people's
professional roles with histories of scientific methods and
epistemologies. Applying this broad context to the history of
science enables scholars to suggest why historical actors found
certain kinds of evidence and argument credible, and how they
shaped that evidence into claims about the world.587
586 Cooter and Pumphrey, Seperate Spheres and Public Spaces, 254
587 This integration of the persona of the researcher with the kind and content
of knowledge produced, follows Foucault's discussion of 'inquiry' and 'surveillance'
The integration of scientists' lived practices into the
historical record is important in order to understand the
historically contingent conditions of knowledge production. In
this specific history, natural historians of the 1850s drew on
concerns about human-caused climate change to justify their
inclusion in new state institutions. Ironically, their argument that
deforestation led to climate change was precisely the claim
eliminated by the new methods they developed as professional
bureaucratic scientists. Neither scientists nor state administrators in the mid-19th century
intended or anticipated this dramatic change in the claims of their science, despite their advocacy of
developments in scientific methods and roles. L
ike Carlo Ginzburg's narrative of
changing implications of Corinthians 3:6, this tale of “unintended
consequences” suggests the indeterminacy of ideas' historical
trajectories.588 It also suggests the ways that experiences often analyzed 'outside' science,
including professional and social roles, are mediated by scientists' methods to impact scientific results.
Reconnecting the scientists' experience of life with scientific production enables an accurate
understanding of the conditions of possibility for particular scientific claims, and a richer understanding
of what those claims mean.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, climate scientists are once again at the
forefront of public concern. In international media scandals, United Nations conferences, and global
demonstrations, our heating planet challenges existing political, economic, and intellectual systems.
The science of global climate systems, including air pressure, temperature, and of course rainfall, is
based on incredibly extensive data tables, and has become far too large for individuals to understand.
Scientists therefore construct elaborate models to assess our current behaviors’ future impact on
climate. Climate analysis and forecasting of future climates is conducted through massive international
collaborative computerized models. Analysis of contemporary climate science is another project, but
in 'Truth and Juridical Forms'. While Foucault's historical claims may be untenable,
his integration of the history of the identity of the knower and that which can be
known is theoretically useful. cf. Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume III. (New York: New Press, 2001), 79
588 Carlo Ginzburg, "'Letter Kills: On Some Implications of 2 Corinthians

3:6'," (Heyman Center Spring Events, Heyman Center and Columbia University
History Department, New York, March 5, 2009.)
this historical method may offer a starting point for dealing with scientific issues of planetary
significance.

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Volume 2 · Issue 1

Allon Brann, Editor & Chair

The Columbia Undergraduate Journal of History is a biannual publication released

Printed by Jack Rabbit Press: 272 N. Broadway / Tooele, Utah 84074,

Layout by Nishant Batsha

Lectures by the Recipients of the

EMMA HULSE: "Every Woman a Mighty Angela Davis:

ANDREW TILLETT-SAKS: "Civil Rights on the Market: Support

ESTER MURDUKHAYEVA: "Precedents, Protests, and Politics:

Herbert Aptheker, a Brooklyn native, earned both his

ANDREW TILLETT-SAKS: Civil Rights on the Market: Support and Opposition

ESTER MURDUKHAYEVA: Precedents, Protests and Politics: Changes in the

EMMA CURRAN HULSE: “Every Woman a Mighty Angela Davis”:

ROY KIMMEY: The Critic in Question: Eduard Hanslick and Viennese

ELIAV BITAN: The Science of Climate Change: Historical Analysis of a

EMMA CURRAN HULSE graduated from Columbia in May of 2009, Magna

JULIA RENAUD graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in

ROY KIMMEY is a 2009 graduate of Harvard College, with a degree in the

DANIEL MORALES is from Azusa California, and studies issues of

ELIAV BITAN graduated from Columbia University in 2009. A resident of

Framing the Debate: The Import of Title II

The Fetters of Discrimination: Support for Title II

Private Property and Individual Liberty: Opposition to Title II

Opposition to the public accommodations bill in the

The Senate hearings on public accommodations challenge

Remnants of the Past

When the jury returned with an acquittal, Justice Bayley

Chapter One: Precedents

The eighteenth century English criminal justice system

Q. Did you cry out?

These stories, among many others, are consummate

In June 1822, James Mackintosh’s parliamentary

Fundamentally, Peel believed that crime was above all

Other judges used the nebulous distinction between

There is a little known postscript to the story of

Voices, Then and Now

In her sample of London trials, Judith Travers found

In 1994, Davis recalled being photographed by

“Brother and Sister Citizens”: Angela Davis as Revolutionary

Hundreds of messages of support are filed in the

“Righteous Revolutionary Sisterhood”: Angela Davis as Black

Among the messages of support stowed in the

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black radicals saw

“Mother of Inspiration”: Angela Davis as Revolutionary

Although supporters sent Davis hundreds of cards bearing

Jackson’s statements apparently frustrated Davis, because he

“Natural Women”: Angela Davis as Revolutionary Lover

“The photograph that I have of you is not adequate,”

This passage was directly preceded by a highly sexualized

Angela Davis: Revolutionary Woman

In his narrative history of Black Power, Peniel Joseph

On the day when she had first laid the piano

Hanslick here characterizes Vienna as a city suffused

The musical-politics of his criticism aside, Hanslick

The stereotype of the nebbish, feminized Jew is one that Graf

Despite more contemporary attempts to evaluate

Investigation reveals these twenty-four lines of cursive to

In her Introduction to the 1901 Riverside edition of The

During their twelve-day trip, the twelve-person

However, Longfellow’sThis original Hiawatha story

The Longfellow party ultimately stayed with the

Figure 1: The birch bark invitation (Longfellow House)

(“Introduction,” The Song of Hiawatha)