1913: A Beginning More Modern Than Intended

Mar. 3, 2013 By Susan Barsy in History, Protest & Tradition Tags: 1910s, 1913, Alice Paul, electric lights, feminism, inaugurations, old photographs, parades, suffrage, voting rights, Washington DC, women, women's movement, Woodrow Wilson 8 Comments

A hundred years ago today, excitement gripped Washington, as crowds flooded the capital in anticipation of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration the next day.

Wilson’s swearing-in marked an unlooked-for turn in American politics. As an intellectual, a Democrat, and a Southerner, Wilson promised to introduce a national tone quite different than what the US under Taft, his Republican successor, had been used to hearing. It was a jubilant development for the Democrats, whose victory owed much to divisions within the Republican Party, which had split apart into conservative and progressive wings, aligned around Taft and Theodore Roosevelt respectively.

Wilson, who strove to present himself as a reformer and people’s champion, understood the value of publicity. Preparations for his inaugural were elaborate and included a kind of triumphal procession toward Washington beginning from his birthplace in Staunton, Virginia. Every aspect of the undertaking was heavily publicized, including the stringing of electric lights along Pennsylvania Avenue, which was breathtakingly modern at the time.

There was just one complication Wilson hadn’t given much thought to. His idea of political progress didn’t include the ladies, who he believed shouldn’t vote, lest they become “unsexed” and manly. So, for months, mainly beyond his consciousness, a feminine maelstrom of discontent had been brewing.

A young college graduate named Alice Paul and her fellow activists were intent on organizing a vast suffrage parade, to take place in the capital on March 3, the day before Wilson’s inauguration, stealing his thunder and symbolically following the same route to power as he.

After three months of frantic planning, Paul and her committee had raised $14,908.06 in funds (at a time when the average yearly wage was $621), mobilized thousands of like-minded women all over the country, and laid the groundwork for a parade with floats, delegations, and an allegorical pageant to be performed on the steps of the Treasury Building.

Women from all over donned protest garb and walked, rode, and sailed to take part in the great Woman Suffrage Parade. There were delegations from Europe, marchers from places like Chicago, Oklahoma, New York, and Ohio, and women from all walks of life. They bore colorful banners and distributed lavishly expensive programs trumpeting the day’s official proceedings.

In the hours before the commencement of the parade, the capital’s streets became choked with people, as skeptical men and more than 5,000 female demonstrators and their allies arrived.

Police were unprepared to deal with the dense masses of spectators and protestors. Authorities viewed the effort dismissively. They had not planned to clear the streets, imagining that the sidewalks would suffice for a ladies’ parade. The streetcars were still running, as pandemonium brewed.

Finally, the streets were cleared and the parade began. The suffragettes marched several blocks unimpeded, but gradually men began surging into the street, making it almost impossible for the women to pass. The mood turned ugly and openly insulting. Marchers struggled to get past the hecklers, their path reduced to a single file. The men were emboldened by the police, who refused to protect the marchers and instead joined in their humiliation. Helen Keller, who was among the marchers, found the experience profoundly enervating and exhausting. Nearly 100 of the marchers were hospitalized.

The chief of police, realizing too late how he had miscalculated, called on Secretary of War Harold Stimson to send out an infantry regiment to restore order and control the crowd. In the wake of the Congressional inquiries that followed, that police chief would lose his job.

Wilson’s arrival in town was barely noticed that day. His inauguration, though orderly, was eclipsed by the more truly electrifying Suffrage Parade. The bold strategies of Alice Paul and her sisters succeeded brilliantly, breathing new life into women’s quest for the vote, a goal they would finally achieve in 1920.

Images courtesy of the Library of Congress.

All About a Ball

Feb. 3, 2013 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 1880s, artifacts, ball gowns, Brownie, corsets, dress, First Ladies, inaugural balls, James A. Garfield, Kodak, Lucretia Garfield, National Building Musuem, old photographs, photography, social customs, Washington DC, women, women's history 2 Comments

As the day for James A. Garfield‘s inauguration rolled around, the decision was made to hold his inaugural ball in the newly constructed United States National Museum, which had not yet opened to the public.

The massive building, with its grand halls and balconies, seemed tailor-made to soothe a vexation the planning committee faced every four years: finding a venue large enough to accommodate five to ten thousand people. The nation’s past was strewn with disastrous stories of inaugural parties gone awry: rampaging crowds, looted furnishings, overcrowded chambers, guests forced to dance in their overcoats in unheated temporary buildings.

The planning committee went wild preparing the still-vacant museum for the president’s gala. They ordered up three-thousand gas lights, a temporary wooden floor, illuminated garlands, patriotic bunting, placards sporting the monograms of the new president and vice president, and a vast “Lady America” statue to transform the building. (Wooden chairs in the photographs give an idea of the interior’s scale.) Vast quantities of refreshments, including 15,000 “assorted cakes,” awaited the inevitable hour when dancers got hungry.

Yet, in the end, these lifeless photographs scarcely satisfy our curiosity. For what about the ball itself? Specifically, what about the ladies? What were they wearing? Here we run smack up against the bouncers of photography’s limitations, Gilded Age customs, and social mores.

Sadly, Americans couldn’t snap candids of themselves as they stepped out for the ball on that historic night. The Brownie camera that would make amateur photography possible was twenty years in the offing. Only by going to a studio photographer arrayed in her ball dress could a woman who went to the ball retain a souvenir of what she looked like that night. Few such photographs are likely to exist (but let me know if they do!).

♦ ♦ ♦

Thank heaven for the internet, which helps dress up a scene so otherwise naked! The foundation of every Gilded Age look was the corset, which molded women’s bodies into an idealized form. It created the hour-glass shape, the essential female silhouette in those days. Ladies attending Garfield’s ball wore either a corset or an evening dress reinforced inside with whalebone stays.

Dresses donned over the corset were complicated. This evening dress was characteristic, with its curvacious form-fitting bodice, cinched-in waist, and eye-catching skirt culminating in a bustle and train. While rigidly sculpted and richly decorated, dresses were relentlessly columnar, emphasizing the figure’s verticality. The torso of the dress was elongated, thanks to a cut of bodice called the Cuirass, which (echoing the corset) extended smoothly beyond the waist and over the hips. Keyhole and “V” necklines were popular then.

Even day-time skirts dripped with pleats, folds, and elaborate drapery, accentuating the hips and creating a coveted multi-layer look. “Tie-back skirts,” though considered scandalous, were all the rage, the skirt being pulled back across the front of the body, supposedly accentuating a woman’s legs.

Evening dresses were made of silk, sometimes heavily textured, and covered with beadwork and ribbon to make them shine. Textile makers produced vibrant colors with the help of synthetic dyes. The surface of the dress was further built up with lace, ruffles, and ruching. Some dresses had heavy tassels of the kind now seen only on fancy furniture and curtains. The backs of dresses, too, were elaborate and bulky. To see how these elements could combine, check out this gorgeous cream silk gown, designed by Frederick Worth, the leading couturier of the time.

♦ ♦ ♦

Such are the fashions depicted in the most lifelike extant depiction of Garfield’s ball, created when Frank Leslie’s Illustrated magazine dispatched several “special artists” to capture the scene on the night of March 4, 1881.

The resulting composite illustration includes recognizable portraits of many public figures, with the bearded president, at center, flanked by his son and daughter, and Lucretia Garfield, the new First Lady, hanging on an ambassador’s arm. (Elsewhere, politicians and military men like Carl Schurz, William T. Sherman, John Logan, James G Blaine, and Roscoe Conkling pepper the crowd.)

Five or six ladies appear at the forefront, the artists painstakingly rendering their dresses, hair-styles, fans, jewelry, and bouquets. We see Lucretia Garfield in her high-necked pale lavender gown, for instance, while the younger women wear dresses that are more revealing, with low-cut necklines and negligible sleeves. Yet what joy could they have had in dancing, in such long heavy dresses, and such tight strict corsets?

Looking at this drawing, I am most struck with its subjects’ unknowing. Little could they know that in just a few months, Garfield’s life would be taken, or that in a few decades, the constraints on women’s fashions and movements would be melting away. That soon a woman could vote for the president, or against him, as may be, or pick up a Brownie camera and take a picture of her day.

Images: Photographs of US National Museum courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution via the Commons on Flickr; corset from this source; engraving courtesy of the Library of Congress.

RELATED ARTICLES:
Inaugural Day in Washington, The Old Print Gallery.com.

Looking In on Lincoln’s Inaugurations

Jan. 17, 2013 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 1860s, Alexander Gardner, Civil War, domes, equality, freedom, inaugurations, Lincoln, old photographs, ordinary people, photography, political customs, the Union, US Capitol, US presidents, wars, Washington DC 2 Comments

How fortunate we are that Lincoln’s presidency came just after the development of photography! Of course, by the time he first took office in 1861, certain photographic processes, notably daguerreotypes, had been around for decades. But only around mid-century did photography develop into a versatile, practical, and widely circulating medium. As a consequence, whereas photographs of Lincoln’s predecessors in the White House are scarce, Lincoln and his political contemporaries had their pictures taken many, many times. Some even became shrewd retailers of their mechanically reproduced selves.

The result, from the point of view of the present, is an opening-wide of the window onto history. Whereas details of James Buchanan‘s 1857 inauguration come down to us mainly through artistic and verbal description (there is this one blurry photograph), good photographs documenting both of Lincoln’s inaugurals survive. From 1861, for instance, there are several fine distant views of Lincoln taking the oath of office, though none of them is close enough for us to make out his great defeated rival, Senator Stephen A Douglas, who, according to historical testimony, is said to have been looking on from a seat nearby.

These photographs remind us of the immature, precarious state of the Union at the time. The great addition of the new Capitol dome was incomplete, and, even as Lincoln moved to forward to assume his elected office, the elements that made up the nation were breaking apart. Prior to March 4, 1861, when this picture was taken, seven pro-slavery states had seceded, and afterward, four more southern states would depart. On April 12th, with the firing on Fort Sumter, the nation would descend into a state of war.

The crowd gathered for the swearing-in knew that they were witnessing a momentous scene. The crowd was thick; most had furled their umbrellas; men, straining for the best possible view, mounted light poles and trees. Motionless, they strained to hear the unamplified proceedings, the camera preserving the style of their hats and clothing. Two men turn to face the camera, cannily.

The succeeding years saw a widening use of open-air photography, so that we know with some immediacy the Civil War’s corpse-strewn scenes. Photographers like Alexander Gardner (by then working for Mathew Brady) tirelessly trailed the armies, unflinchingly recording the realities of camps, hospitals, and battle-fields. By the time of Lincoln’s second inaugural, in 1865, the war was in its final months, slaves had been liberated, and the nation had become accustomed to seeing itself through the lens of photography.

This wonderful photograph by Gardner captures the look of that later crowd. Here, the people themselves, not the government nor the army, nor their most powerful representatives, are recognized as camera-worthy, as they gather on an inauguration day that is once again wet and muddy. Great coats and banners billow in the breeze, as knots of spectators stand about, chatting or strolling as they please. In time, they part to make way for the inaugural parade, in which Union regiments of both races proudly march.

Is it my imagination, or is there a touch of jubilation here, missing from the earlier proceedings? Though the war had yet to end, the prospects for the Confederacy were dwindling sharply, and Americans who had fought to keep the nation together knew that their victory was sure.

Bare-headed, Lincoln reads his message of reconciliation to a crowd radiating around him like magnetic filings, the dais overflowing with dignitaries. A miscellaneous crowd of watchers stands beneath him, studying the crowd while listening. It is a homely scene with little pageantry, suited to a federal republic that, though riddled with conflict, has endured trials to grow in confidence and power. Outside the frame, the Capitol dome has been completed, and stands triumphantly capped with the Statue of Freedom.

All images from the collections of the Library of Congress.
Click on the images for more information and larger views.

A Glimpse of Another Christmas

Dec. 13, 2012 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 1900s, Christmas, E.B. Thompson, holidays, markets, old photographs, photographers, photography, shopping, stereographs, Theodore Roosevelt, Washington DC 4 Comments

E.B. Thompson was a successful photographer active in Washington DC in the early decades of the 20th century. Thompson, who was probably born around the time of the Civil War, gained prominence around the same time as Theodore Roosevelt; indeed, the Rough Rider may have been Thompson’s chief patron. Readers may recall reading this post about Thompson’s 1899 photograph of the coffins of American war dead awaiting burial at Arlington Cemetery.

Besides documenting the political scene, Thompson created and preserved many other pictures—photographs and stereographs—of everyday life in the District and other subjects of local and personal appeal. Among them was this picture of a turn-of-the-century open-air market, taken around Christmastime, as you can see.

Evidence internal to the photograph (such as the clothing and shutter speed) suggests it was taken no earlier than 1905. Prints of the original image were then colorized for sale. The color does a lot to draw us back into that earlier time.

Image: from this source.

War Dead

Jul. 15, 2012 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: Arlington National Cemetery, E.B. Thompson, Gilded Age, imperialism, old photographs, photographers, Spanish-American War, US military, war, Washington DC, William McKinley 16 Comments

On April 6, 1899, Washington DC photographer E. B. Thompson rode out to the cemetery at Arlington, where the remains of several hundred officers and soldiers were about to be buried. The men had died in the late war with Spain, a brief affair that both began and ended the previous year, bringing the US control of Spain’s former island possessions—Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—and the independence of Cuba.

The coffins represented a fraction of the 3,000 Americans who died, felled not so much by their adversaries as by tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever.

Now, belatedly, they were to be buried. The coffins lay suspended over long trenches dug in a new section of the cemetery. Many of the remains were unidentified, so coffins of the known dead were carefully positioned at the ends of the rows that would be most visible during the ceremony. Thompson positioned himself near the presidential viewing stand and took this picture. It is an image as raw as the landscape itself, the kind of grim tribute to the fallen that we hardly ever see. It was colorized later.

A crowd of some 15,000 people, along with President McKinley and other dignitaries, gathered for the funeral rites. A newspaper in New Brunswick, Canada, carried a full account of the proceedings. The work of burying the coffins began after the crowd dissipated, a tough, tedious job that took several days.

Image: E.B. Thompson photograph, “Interment at Arlington National Cemetery,” 1899.
Courtesy DC Public Library Commons, from this source.

A Decision We’ll All Feel

Mar. 28, 2012 By Susan Barsy in Governing Tags: Affordable Care Act, citizenship, health care, political engagement, protest, US Supreme Court, Washington DC 2 Comments

Today, for a third day, the Supreme Court will continue to hear arguments regarding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Crowds pack the courtroom; protesters swirl around outside; and those of us farther away are hearing same-day audio broadcasts of the proceedings, a rarity. If nothing else, this event shows how knit together we’ve become as a nation. As a capital, Washington DC used to be mocked as a place out of sight and far from the minds of the people; today it’s at the center of things, a nucleus of discourse and controversy.

The case is a landmark in another way. There’s a lot of hype about it, and passions are keen on all sides. Everyone understands something momentous is happening. Unlike many Supreme Court decisions, which concern distinct subsets of people—union workers, say, or pregnant women, or juveniles in prison—, this one will affect all Americans directly. Perhaps that’s what gives the proceedings a different feel. Will we end up with a single integrated health-care system that acknowledges and includes us all, or will we continue with the old balkanized system that denies the fact that we are connected through it already? Because, one way or another, we do already pay for the care that the uninsured need, and bear the indirect costs of their being ill, if you are inclined to monetize issues that way.

To strike down this complex and undoubtedly imperfect legislation would be undoing change that is happening already; more to the point, it would re-affirm Americans’ separatist tendencies: our determination to go it alone no matter what the costs or consequences. On the other hand, should the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act be affirmed, we will find ourselves on a new road together, engaged in a massive and complex experiment whose likely outcomes are truly unknown.

MLK: Memorial and Man

Jan. 17, 2012 By Susan Barsy in Protest & Tradition Tags: citizenship, civil rights, holidays, memorials, MLK, National Mall, protest, sculpture, Washington DC 2 Comments

It’s fun to imagine what our departed greats would think of the posthumous images we erect in their memory. Some of those enshrined on the National Mall in DC would be startled or surprised to find how we see them. Lincoln, famous in his own time for telling naughty stories too risqué to be repeated in polite society, would be amused to find himself so completely ennobled and now comfortably ensconced in the best society. Jefferson, a great lover of the Enlightenment, would probably like his memorial’s Neo-classical trappings, but would he like being stuck inside forever that way? He seems too cut off from Nature, there in his rotunda, which could scarcely please a man who so loved to garden.

And what about the new kid on the block, Martin Luther King, Jr.? He’s probably more than a little bit miffed, and I don’t blame him. His new statue is ugly, and he deserves better than to be remembered as a stern colossus cordoned off alone, with nothing but two marble icebergs for company. I can hardly imagine a memorial duller or more inapt. Here was a great artistic opportunity, and one bungled badly.

King’s was a congregate life. His struggle, his aims, his achievements can only be appreciated by comprehending them in relation to a larger society. He was nothing if not part of a collective, a figure who, because of his gifts and his particular conceptualization of the problem of black Americans, became the symbol and voice of a larger brotherhood, the leader of a larger tribe of suffering humankind.

He became great by giving voice to, and raising up, a great part of our society, and his labors, no matter how refracted by his own personality, were memorable and laudable because of his relation to other, more ordinary, Americans. The photographs of King that stick in my mind are all teeming with crowds, with phalanxes and teams: King addressing the millions during the March on Washington; King marching with Ralph Abernathy, Stokely Carmichael, and others who were the civil rights movement’s first generation of strategists and leaders; King walking arm in arm with his wife Coretta or a friend. Even the famous image of King taken during his imprisonment in the Birmingham jail takes its significance from the fact that he had been temporarily ripped from his proper place as a leader of a movement and a people. King’s invariable impulse was to place himself before, to be seen by, and to connect with masses of American people.

Not only was King essentially a creature of his race, a champion who gave voice to, and would not let us forget, the deplorable position of blacks within American society, but his too-brief life was almost inconceivably kinetic and dramatic, particularly during what would prove to be in his last years, between about 1963 and 1968, when he had really just reached maturity. During these years, King worked, and spoke, and moved, incessantly. In retrospect, his life appears to have been one long succession of sit-ins, bus rides, marches, interviews, mass meetings, huddles, parades, and rallies. He was the leader of a movement, and that movement moved. King moved hearts, but, more crucially, he moved millions of ordinary American citizens to act, and, in so doing, he achieved what few American leaders have ever accomplished as brilliantly. Whatever their accomplishments, neither Lincoln, nor Jefferson, nor Washington ever led a popular movement of the sort that Martin Luther King helped will into being. While these other leaders attained greatness while occupying positions at the top of America’s social and political hierarchies, King was a great dissident, leading an outsider movement that was amorphous and purely voluntary. In that sense, his greatness came solely from his relationship to other people.

The crowded, kinetic character of King’s life is precisely what his new memorial fails to capture or even acknowledge. King’s very death was public and dramatic, occurring at the center of a homely crowd scene; it, too, is occluded. King as depicted on the Mall appears isolated, mute, static, even uncaring, yet this King couldn’t be farther from the passionate, embracing, vibrant, and, above all, articulate character whose words and deeds are impressed on our memories.

It’s unfortunate that King’s life and place in history have been immortalized in a way that separates King out and partakes of the “great man” theory of history. The pressure to figure King in a style resembling that of the great whites he would join on the Mall must have been considerable. Yet a representation truer to the significant chapters in King’s struggles for civil rights and referring in some way to the larger social and political context in which he labored would have been preferable. King did not emerge, inexplicably, out of nowhere, like some force of nature: his identity as an activist and intellectual was inextricable from the major traditions and figures that influenced and inspired him. King’s hard-won pre-eminence as a civil rights leader derived from his ability to frame arguments about racial justice in terms of democratic principles and Christian precepts that most Americans, regardless of race, understood and revered. He was also deeply influenced by the example and ideas of the great Indian pacifist, Mahatma Gandhi, whom King traveled to meet early in life, and from whom he adopted the key principle of non-violent resistance.

King’s contributions to American life do not hinge solely or even principally on his steadfast determination, as his sculptor has argued; many blacks of that time were similarly determined. King’s great contribution lay in bringing together a rich complex of ideas through which his people’s disruptive yet urgent crusade for equality could be legitimated and realized. “Why We Can’t Wait” was one of his famous titles.

Choosing to depict King’s situation and achievements in a more explicit way would have been risky as well as more artistically demanding. King’s importance cannot be understood without acknowledging the perdurance in America of race hatred, any more than his success can be explained without reference to religious faith, including that of non-Christian spirituality. The modern era furnishes many instances of memorials—from David’s Death of Marat to the Vietnam Memorial—that are at once simple, truthful, and moving. Had the creators of the King Memorial harkened to such examples, they might have arrived as a more fitting and less sanitized tribute to one of our greatest modern men.

Susan Barsy

Tag Archives: Washington DC