Peer-reviewed by undergraduates for undergraduates
Celebrating rigorous studies in diverse fields of historical inquiry
Based out of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY
Secondary Title
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Kathryn Biedermann
LAYOUT CZAR
Eric B. Cortés-Kopp
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
SENIOR EDITOR
Emma Tomlins Brian Seiter
PEER EDITORS
Elizabeth Atherton
Brooks Bradford
Carter Myers-Brown
Isabella Roselli
Quinn Brown Philip A. Chivily Erick Christian
Nick Fluty Liam Garcia-Quish Karen Hansen
Theodore Karavolas Timothy Murray Katie Rao
Emma Reilly Maddie Schink Casimir Zablotski
It is my pleasure to introduce our second issue! This issue marks our second year as a publication and my final issue as editor-in-chief. I am grateful to the history majors that make putting this publication together possible, and I would like to especially thank Eric Cortés-Kopp for all of his efforts in launching this publication and ensuring its future longevity. They have been integral to the team and this publication would not exist without them!
Again, we strove to publish a diverse range of content, criss-crossing geographies and time periods to provide critical windows into the past. We also opened up submissions to schools outside of Hamilton College and are proud to publish the work of two students from Scripps College and Kenyon College.
This issue begins in South Africa in the 1950s with photojournalism of apartheid and ends in settler-colonial California with the experiences of indigenous women in the San Francisco Bay Area, with stops in between covering identities of blackness in the early twentieth century in the sport of boxing, American chain gangs, English national identity and the FIFA World Cup of 1966, Russian Orthodox churches in America, and a radical communal society in Revolutionary America.
Thank you for reading and for supporting the Hamilton Historical.
Kindly,
Kathryn Editor-in-Chief, 2020-2022
Drum magazine is remembered as a revolutionary publication that transformed media representations of Black communites in apartheid South Africa, depicting Africans with culture and agency rather than just as victims of apartheid. Drum enabled Africans to become journalists in an industry that had been previously closed off to them, producing some of the most famous Black South African photographers. Although not created with political intent, Drum’s founders quickly realized that catering to Black audiences and depicting Black life in South Africa in the 1950s would be meaningless without addressing the realites of the National Party’s apartheid regime. Drum played a pivotal role in apartheid media coverage, exposing injustices faced by the Black population as well as covering events in the resistance movement. The magazine’s first story that gained widespread attention was an undercover piece exposing unethical working conditions on Bethal farms, setting the precedent of Drum as a publication that was unafraid to take a stance and speak for the African people. This was no easy feat under the strict censorship of the apartheid regime. Journalists often placed themselves in dangerous situations to investigate stories. Henry Nxumalo, for example, once got himself arrested to write the March 1954 exposé “Mr. Drum Goes to Jail.”1 Drum played a pivotal role in apartheid media coverage, exposing injustices faced by the Black population as well as covering events in the resistance movement.
Photography was an essential part of Drum, as the magazine was catered to a largely illiterate audience and inspired by the growing industry of photojournalism in post-war Europe and the United States. Jürgen Schadeberg led photography at Drum and trained several African staff members to become legendary photographers, such as Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane. Drum photographs utilized the international visual language of humanist photography to focus the narrative of
apartheid on the indiviuals it was impacting. This photographic style was a result of Western media influencing Drum, but also occurred because many Drum journalists and photographers needed their work to appeal to international audiences so they could sell their stories to British publications and make a livable wage. The magazine’s Sophiatown coverage also revealed how Drum used the capability of photographs to change in meaning depending on their audience to critique apartheid without becoming a target for government censorship.
Drum’s coverage of Bethal farms in 1952 and of the Sophiatown Removals in 1955 were examples of how the magazine utilized humanist photography to evoke sympathy for the African population without flattening them into victims, representing the persistence of their culture and communities even in the face of destruction.
Drum magazine was first published as The African Drum - a Magazine of Africa, for Africa in March 1951, the third year of South Africa’s Apartheid regime. Apartheid lasted from 1948 to 1994 and was a system of legislation that segregated and discriminated against non-white groups in South Africa. To suppress dissent, the National Party passed several laws that censored the press. The Bantu Administration act, which had been passed prior to apartheid in 1927, included Proclamation 400, which allows for the arrest of journalists who ‘subvert the authority of the state’ by publishing anything about poor conditions in the country.2 Notably, in 1950, a year before the magazine’s first publication, the Suppression of Communism Act was passed. The act defined communism very generally, including any activity promoting disorder or systemic change in South Africa’s industries, society, politics, or economy as well as the encouragement of white/nonwhite hostilities.3 In addition to banning individuals, the act allowed the State Presi-
1 Anthony Sampson, Drum: A Venture Into the New Africa (London: Collins, 1956), 194. 2 Sage Journals Staff, “South Africa’s Censorship Laws,” Sage Publications Inc, Vol. 4, Issue 2 (June 1, 1975), 38. 3 Britannica Editors, “Banning: South African Law,” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 1, 2017.dent to suppress any media publication they claimed to be communist.4
It was in this context of censorship and a white-dominated press that The African Drum, soon renamed Drum, was created. The paper was founded by British South African Jim Bailey and South African retired cricketer Robert Crisp, who were soon joined by Anthony Sampson, a newly graduated Englishman who moved to South Africa for his position at Drum. At first, the magazine did not sell, and Jim Bailey lost money monthly in publishing it. Henry Nxumalo, who would be later remembered as “Mr. Drum,” soon joined the staff as assistant editor, becoming the first Black African member of the staff.5 Nxumalo took Bailey, Crisp, and Sampson to African homes and clubs to hear their perspectives on Drum, indicating the magazine’s early intent to appeal to African audiences. As Job Rathebe, an African undertaker and boxing promoter, told the group, the main problem with Drum was that it was “what white men want Africans to be, not what they are.”6 Rathebe critiqued Drum’s ‘Know Yourselves’ section on tribal history - “we all know ourselves quite well enough… what we want, you see, is a paper which belongs to us… We want it to be our Drum, not a white man’s Drum.”7
To further appeal to African audiences, Drum hired an African editorial board. Crisp was replaced by Sampson as the magazine’s editor. As Sampson put it, this board was “to compensate for” the founding staff’s “whiteness.”8 Sampson aimed directly for an African audience that was not the European-educated elite by moving the magazine away from a dry European syntax to capture “the vigour of African speech.” This round of hires included Joe Rathbe, Dan “Sport” Twala, Dr. Alfred Xuma (former president of the African National Congress), Andy Anderson, Todd Matshikiza, and Arthur Maimane.9 Jürgen Schadeberg, a German photographer, was hired to ‘penetrate’ into African life and capture the realities of townships.
The issue of Drum that first brought it to wider public notice featured its exposé on Bethal, Bethal To-day, published on Drum’s first anniversary in March 1952. After hearing horror stories of the working conditions in Bethal, Drum sent Nxumalo undercover as a labourer to investigate the conditions of African farm workers and the farm’s recruiting methods. Bethal used a contract system that exploited Africans and forced them to work in unsafe conditions without government protection, or else be subjected to extensive punishment
4 Sage Journals Staff, “South Africa’s Censorship Laws,” 38.
5 Sampson, Drum: A Venture Into the New Africa, 17.
6 Ibid. 21.
7 Ibid, 21.
8 Ibid., 24.
9 Ibid., 24.
for breaking their contracts. Drum published an exposé attacking the Bethal farms and the contract system.10 Nxumalo conducted interviews with African workers that allowed them to share their stories of unsafe working conditions, flogging, and torture.
Schadeberg’s photographs accompanied Nxumalo’s exposé, showing Bethal compounds and farm laborers. (Figures 1, 2) The story featured a photograph of an African recruit signing a contract in the Johannesburg Pass Office, where Nxumalo, and Schadeburg following him, had gone undercover as a recruit to re-
10 Ibid., 42.
veal the corruption of the contract system.11 The Bethal story reached a wide audience and received backlash from Hans Strijdom, the Prime Minister of South Africa at the time. It also received some support, such as from the Rand Daily Mail.12 The story led to Senator Ballinger speaking on the labor issue in parliament on behalf of the Africans, and Hendrik Verword, the Minister of Na
the magazine more personable, and was praised for his bravery going undercover to speak up for the greater African public.18 Thus began Mr. Drum’s series of exposés on labor conditions in South Africa, and with it, Drum’s rapid growth in circulation among African readers.19 By 1953, Drum’s circulation in South Africa had reached 60,000.20 Drum had also received international recognition. In December of 1952, Time magazine noted that at “5¢ Life-size monthly, Drum has in less than three years become the leading spokesman for South Africa’s 9,000,000 Negro and coloured population.”21 The magazine’s growth required more staff, and Bailey and Sampson aimed to hire only Africans.22 Drum became its own world, an environment in which Africans had a professional, creative platform on which to collaborate (Figure 3).
tive Affairs, appointing a committee to report on working conditions in Bethal.13 The Institute of Race Relations also corroborated Drum’s account of Bethal, and the article spread knowledge among the public about the dangers of signing unknown contracts.14 Among Bethalians, Drum was being called ‘the emancipating magazine.’15 The intention of the founding staff of Drum was not to create a “narrow paper of protest.”16 However, as Sampson wrote, “without exposing the scandals of such importance to our readers’ lives, the paper would be incomplete and meaningless.”17 Nxumalo’s undercover experiences were shared under the pseudonym “Mr. Drum”, who became an important figure in establishing African readers’ trust in the publication. Mr. Drum made
11 Ibid., 47.
12 Ibid., 48.
13 Ibid., 48.
14 Ibid., 50.
15 Ibid., 49.
16 Ibid., 52.
17 Ibid., 52.
Drum is remembered as a revolutionary publication, which was true in the context of apartheid South Africa. Drum’s coverage of South African events was important in maintaining the culture and dignity of South Africans in the midst of apartheid. However, to achieve this goal, Drum utilized the pre-existing, conventional visual language of photojournalism that was developing in post-war Europe and the United States. The magazine initially adopted these aesthetic, humanistic elements for two reasons. Firstly, after Jim Bailey took over Drum in 1951, he thought that it would be more profitable to model the magazine on Life magazine, which dominated American markets at the time. Jürgen Schadeberg recalls that, at their first meeting together, Bailey told him, “‘I want Drum to become the Life magazine of Africa, and to do that it’s got to have images that work. Don’t forget that most of our market has difficulty reading.’”23 Sampson and Bailey were intent on creating an African newspaper ‘empire,’ inspired by William Randolph Hearst’s success in American magazines and newspapers.24 Secondly, the financial situation at Drum in the early 1950s forced its journalists and photographers to sell stories and images to British publications to earn a livable wage. Throughout his time at Drum, Schadeberg also took photographs for other newspapers to make ends meet. Sampson, too, was making most of his money from articles he sold to the London Observer. 25 The pay for the Black staff was even worse, despite the insistance of its founders that the Drum office was its ‘own world’ untouched by apart
18 Ibid., 51.
19 Ibid., 52.
20 Ibid., 53.
21 Time Staff, “The Press: South African Drumbeats,” Time, December 15 1952.
22 Sampson, 56.
23 Jürgen Schadeberg, The Way I See It: A Memoir (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2017), 142.
24 Schadeberg, The Way I See It: A Memoir, 142.
25 Ibid., 151.
heid.
Regardless of how much of Drum’s humanist photography was initially inspired by economic incentives, the magazine’s focus on people remained a priority in both its written stories and visual imagery.26 Drum photography utilized portraiture to emphasize the humanity of Africans and spread awareness of the atrocities of apartheid, as seen in the magazine’s coverage of the destruction of Sophiatown. Sophiatown was a multiracial and socially active suburban township, and one of the oldest black areas in Johannesburg. It was deemed a ‘slum’ by the National Party Government.27 For the African public, it held great emotional and cultural significance, and it was home to one of the largest groups of organized African National Congress members.28 In 1951, the National Party announced plans to forcibly relocate the residents of several Black townships, including Sophiatown, to create a whites only area.29 Drum used photography to counter the National Party narrative of Sophiatown. African photographer Bob Gosani’s 1954 “Love Story” features a Black man and woman embracing underneath an apartheid sign that reads ‘native bus stop’ (Figure 4). “Love Story” forces the viewer to confront the realities of apartheid, as represented by the sign, and the humanity and culture of the Africans that persist despite it. Gosani is emphasizing the humanity and dignity of the couple rather than representing them as victims. The couple is well-dressed in European-style clothes, perhaps on their way to one of the 20 churches in the area that was set to be relocated. Drum published photographs such as this to portray Sophiatown’s rich culture and to counter the narrow view of the township
26 Nadya Bair, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market, (California: University of California Press, July 2020).
27 Lodge, Tom, “The Destruction of Sophiatown.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 19, no. 1 (1981), 111.
28 Lodge, Tom, “The Destruction of Sophiatown.”, 111.
29 Ibid, 122.
as a ‘slum’.30
The focus on people and the use of humanitarian portraiture to give a voice to the South African public continued in Drum’s coverage of the forced removals in Sophiatown. The eviction was scheduled to take place on February 12, 1955 and the African National Congress planned to resist the removals. They intended to release their plan for protest on the day of the removal. However, the National Party banned all public meetings around Johannesburg on the 8th and unexpectedly began the removals the next day.31 Thus, there was no organized resistance when the 80 lorries and 2,000 armed police arrived to relocate the Sophiatown residents to their new homes in Meadowland.32
Schadeberg’s photographic coverage of events focused primarily on individuals, rather than on the demolition of buildings, to create empathy for the residents. In his historic image featuring the popular slogan of resistance, “We Won’t Move”, three men, again in Western-style suits and hats, play what appears to be a game of Morabaraba(Figure 5).33 Morabaraba is known as one of oldest African war strategy games, involving trying to capture the stones, that symbolize “cows,” of one’s opponent.34 Like Gosani’s “Love Story”, this is an image of apartheid, but primarily shows how South African people maintain their culture and dignity despite the oppressive regime.
The photograph “We Won’t Move” was published in a February 1955 issue of Drum titled “What Will Happen to the Western Areas?”, referring to the West-
30 Ibid.,111.
31 Ibid,129.
32 Ibid. 129.
ern Areas of Johannesburg targeted by the evictions.35 This article published ANC statements in opposition to the removals and an interview with Elias Moretsele, the president of the Transvaal’s branch of the ANC.36 The article quoted the ANC: “‘The African people have rejected the removal scheme as a brutal and wicked plot to rob the African people of freehold rights and to resettle them in specified areas in tribal groups… If the Nationalists implement the removal scheme an extremely dangerous and explosive situation will arise.’”37 Moretsele was quoted speaking on behalf of the African population, explaining the grievances of property owners and tenants being relocated to the Meadowlands. He added: “‘People simply don’t want to be herded into camps like locations: it’s against a man’s dignity.” By publishing these statements, Drum actively contradicted the National Party narrative of slum clearance.
Despite its reputation as being the most unfiltered Black perspective on apartheid in South African media, Drum had financial interests in avoiding closure under censorship laws. “What Will Happen to the Western Areas?”, for example, did not make any political statements and did not otherwise call for action beyond the quotations from the ANC official statements and Moretsele’s interview. The “We Won’t Move” photograph, accompanying Drum’s story on the Sophiatown removals, was the main way in which the article encouraged resistance. “We won’t move” was one of the popular slogans of resistance to the Sophiatown evictions, and by publishing this image in the 1955 story Drum gave the Sophiatown residents a measure of control over the narrative about their relocations. This statement, emblazoned across the top of the article, immediately undermined the National party narrative that the relocation of Sophiatown residents to the Meadowlands was in their best interest.
Choosing graffiti as the main representation of the Sophiatown removals was also a symbolic act of resistance. Even after the last residents had been forcibly removed from their homes, their graffiti message, “We Won’t Move,” remained. The legacy of Sophiatown could not be demolished, and Drum chose an image of hope and fortitude to memorialize the Western Areas rather than displaying the failure of the ANC to face down the regime. As John Beaver Marks, president of the ANC, noted in 1955: “‘The slogan ‘we will not move’ laid itself open to a literal interpretation that people will physically resist removal. Yet again and again Congress leaders
35 Nicol has conflicting dates on when this article/image was published (February 1955 or February 1956), but the article was written in anticipation of the Sophiatown removals that happened in February 1955, so I believe it only makes sense to have been published in that same year.
36 Mike Nicol, A Good-Looking Corpse (Great Britain: Tortuga Publishing Limited, 1991), 229.
37 Mike Nicol, A Good-Looking Corpse, 228.
called for restraint and non-violence...Those on whom resistance depended were in doubt as to what exactly they were expected to do.”38 Benson Dyantyi, writing in Drum’s ode to Sophiatown four years later, referred to the graffiti as a reminder of this failure. “The signs that say ‘We Won’t Move’ stand as a mockery to people who thought they could defend their beloved homes.”39 In contrast, Schadeberg’s inclusion of men playing Morabaraba in front of the graffiti arguably emphasizes the resilience of the African people and their culture. The images published in “What Will Happen to the Western Areas?” revealed how Drum used the subjective nature of photographs to appeal to the African and international anti-apartheid movement without being silenced by the government. The “We Won’t Move” photograph is an example of how one image can have multivalent significance. Drum’s African readers would recognize Morabaraba as a game of strategy, and understand the photograph as an image of resistance. International audiences would not recognize the cultural context of the game, but would see this photograph as evidence of the inhumanity of the apartheid government and be outraged by it. The apartheid government discounted this photograph within the context of the article, which they did not view as a threat because it did not make any calls for resistance outside of the careful ANC quotations. The apartheid government also likely felt they were justified in the Sophiatown removals, and consequently did not recognize the image as the condemnation it was to an international audience.
Drum published a final photographic feature on Sophiatown in November 1959, entitled “Last Days of Sophiatown: Big machines and men with picks are beating down the last walls of Sof’town. Take a last look and say goodbye.”40 This feature, written by Benson Dyantyi, was an ode to the old Sophiatown. Dyantyi wrote of the violence and the gangs of Sophiatown, honoring specific community members by name, as well as the “respectable citizens” such as Dr. Xuma and J.R.Rathbe, both of whom had worked for Drum. 41 Notably, Dr. Xuma had served as president of the African National Congress from December 1940 to March 1950, so Dyantyi’s choice to use him as an example of the greatness of Sophiatown was politically poignant. While Dyantyi did not glamorize Sophiatown, he used language with clear emotional intent, referring to Sophiatown as a “she” who was being
38 Lodge, 130.
39 Benson Dyantyi, “Last Days of Sophiatown,” Drum Magazine, November 1959. https://www.baha.co.za/galleries/sophiatown.
40 Nicol, 234.
41 Bailey African History Archives, “Sophiatown”, BAHA.com, accessed November 2021.
“murdered” to evoke an intense reaction from his audience.42 The photographs in “Last Days of Sophiatown”, like Dyantyi’s prose, emphasize the humanity in Sophiatown and the community that is being demolished. Both the text and images of this feature gave faces and names to the displaced residents rather than lumping them together as a collective unit of anonymous victims. However, even Dyantyi’s emotional prose about Sophiatown, follows Drum’s careful example not to directly indict the Apartheid state, or call for any form of resistance. Notably, there was no mention of the national government. For example, Dyantyi wrote of Sophiatown: “she is being murdered.”43 Dyanti utilized the passive voice to focus on Sophiatown, rather than the implied subject that is carrying out the murder, the government. As Mike Nicols wrote of Drum investigative reporting, “the story is dry… But then behind it lays another story.”44 Drum spoke to the African people and encouraged resistance while being acutely aware of the eye of the censor.
The photographs in “Last Days of Sophiatown” were intended to evoke an emotional response against the Sophiatown evictions. Many of the photographs were portraits of children, meant to encourage empathy for the Sophiatown residents. In Figures 6 and 7, three children appear to be playing on the rusted body of a car. The little boy is climbing on top of the metal piece, peering curiously over the edge as though on a playground. He is completely barefoot, which may be representative of his lower class status and also adds to the articulated danger of the scene. The little girl in the foreground has her cheek resting on the rusted car piece, her face contorted in an open-mouthed expression of distress. She is wearing shoes and is properly clothed, as is the little girl in the back left of the photograph. The girl is also missing her right ring finger. Figure 8 appears to be a slightly different angle of the same shot, judging by the positioning of the little girl and the boy’s foot in the top right part of the frame. This shot is dramatically lit, highlighting the girl’s somber expression. Photographing children to evoke sympathy for a group of people is another example of Drum utilizing visual conventions of photojournalism. Humanitarian communication often “portray[s] children as the quintessential embodiment of human suffering.”45 Children are viewed as unequivocally sympathetic figures, used to represent innocence and humanity. These photographs would have been interpreted by Black South Africans and international audiences as deeply sympathetic and a call for resistance
against the government.
While Drum photographs fit into the international visual language of humanist photography, the context of the photographs is what makes them revolutionary. Drum gave Africans the skills and resources to tell their own stories, in a time when opportunities to learn and practice journalism were not open to them and Black voices were being actively oppressed by the government.46 Several of the greatest South African photographers were a result of Jürgen Schadeberg’s mentorship at Drum, such as Ernest Cole, Bob Gosani, Alf Kumalo and Peter Magubane.47 Photographing the realities of apartheid was a rebellious act in itself. Drum photographers and journalists faced threats of bans and imprisonment, constantly risking their own lives and freedom to expose the atrocities of apartheid.
The journalism accomplished by Drum in the 1950s and the opportunities it granted young Africans to enter into the journalism industry were revolutionary in the context of apartheid South Africa. Drum utilized conventions of humanist photography to preserve the humanity and autonomy of African communities amidst a period of unprecedented oppression. Despite its messy inner workings, the magazine successfully became a platform for the culture and grievances of Black South Africans. The magazine’s stories consistently included first hand perspectives from local South Africans. Drum also reached and resonated with international communities, circulating Africa and creating connections with British publications that allowed for stories and photographs of the realities of apartheid to be shared globally. The magazine’s coverage of the Sophiatown removals is just one example of how Drum used photography to make statements indicting the apartheid government while escaping the censor. Photography allowed Drum to preserve and share the community and culture of Sophiatown, countering the National party’s narrative and exposing the inhumanity of the removals to a larger audience. The archives of Drum photography, collected by Jim Bailey with assistance from Jürgen Schadeberg, now provide visual documentation of the experiences of Black South Africans under apartheid. Drum photographs fit visually into the field of humanitarian photojournalism that it was created for, but the context of the risks Drum staff undertook to take and publish these images is what made the magazine legendary.
46 Peter Magubane, Magubane’s South Africa (New York: Random House Inc., 1978) 3.
47 Holland Cotter, “Capturing Apartheid’s Daily Indignity,” The New York Times, Published September 11 2014, Accessed December 2021. nytimes. com/2014/09/12/arts/design/what-ernest-coles-hidden-camera-revealed.html.
Meant to fund French author and anthropologist Marcel Grauile’s expedition to East Africa, a match was organized between Panama Al Brown and Roger Símende at the Cirque d’Hiver on April 15, 1931.1 Intellectuals such as Georges-Henri Rivíere, Paul Rivet, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Grauile sat in the front row. The stage, or spectacle, was finally set. Ten rounds of three minutes each to determine the winner. Before the bell, Al Brown addressed the crowd. “I am boxing,” he said, “to contribute to the success of the expedition and to increase the knowledge about and understanding of Africa.”2 Roaring applause followed. His opponent, Roger Símende, remarked, “I am boxing because I like the sport and also to earn money for my family.”3 Silence followed, and an uneasy tension filled the arena. The crowd braced with anticipation as these two fighters prepared themselves for battle. Brown’s biographer, Eduard Arroyo, recorded that the fight itself was “brief and indecisive.”4 At the end of the second round, Brown sent Símende to the canvas with a left-right-left combination. The third round barely lasted thirty seconds, as Símenda, still hurt, stumbled and could not get back up. In the midst of a roaring, chanting crowd, the referee declared Brown the winner via KO.5
The nature of the Panama Al Brown and Roger Símende boxing match encompasses a broader historiography of sports and race beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. Collective fears about the rising power of non-whites were often expressed through gendered metaphors of the body. As a result, competitive sports appeared to offer the perfect arena within which to disseminate the defensive physical stance of the white
1 Bennetta Jules-Rosette, “Introduction” and “An Uneasy Collaboration: The Dialogue between French Anthropology and Black Paris,” In Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape, 28.
2 Benetta Jules-Rosette, “Introduction” and “An Uneasy Collaboration,” 28.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 29.
5 Ibid., 27.
man’s burden. More recently, scholars have researched how the transnational sporting industry of boxing encapsulated the growing struggles over the racial and imperial order. At its core, boxing involved unscripted, visceral hand to hand combat between two individuals who embodied race and nationhood in the eyes of their fans. Armed with no weapons except leather padding on their fists, boxers fought to outlast one another for the amusement, admiration, and admonishment of the public. The spectacle of boxing was a space of heightened white surveillance, where the black prizefighter was subverted of their identity and characterized by their physicality against the white man.
The 1938 rematch between black heavyweight G.I. Joe Louis and the German champion Max Schmeling elucidates the boxing spectacle as a space of heightened white surveillance. David Margolick researched this highly publicized heavyweight fight and illustrated how this spectacle reflected notions of nationhood and struggles over the racial order. Margolick sifted through newspapers detailing the lead-up to the Madison Square Garden event, one of which remarked: “Louis represents democracy in its purest form: the Negro boy who would be permitted to become a world champion without regard for race, creed, or color. Schmeling represents a country which does not recognize this idea and ideal.”6 Joe Louis had the chance to represent the ‘freedom’ of the United States and defeat the man endorsed by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. On the contrary, Schmelling had the chance to prove Aryan superiority, embedded in the Nazi regime. This boxing bout, elevated to a global spectacle, therefore implicated both the future of race relations and the prestige of two powerful nations. Margolick contended, however, that Joe Louis’s purported identity in the boxing spectacle was riddled with contradictions and tensions. While Louis’s beatdown of Max Schmelling illustrated the resistance and superiority of
6 David Margolick, Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (New York, 2005): 7.American values over Nazi fascism, it likewise signified the emergence of the black race in the modern world, an uncomfortable thought for white Americans and Nazis alike. As he pummeled Schmelling’s body and face, writers and broadcasters began characterizing his black physicality and thus marked his black identity with racist tropes. For example, Hype Igoe of the Journal-American commented on the match: “‘I felt the punch!’ So terrifying was the sound–‘half human, half animal’–that some fans reached instinctively for their hates, as if Louis was about to come for them too.”7 Joe Louis was lauded as an American hero in his victory over Schmelling, but this image was largely still a façade. Racist tropes continued to mark his presence as he fought under white surveillance and analysis.
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff expanded on the tensions of G.I. Joe Louis’s constructed identity through an analysis of media propagated by the War Department leading up to the 1938 rematch. Sklaroff contended that media such as posters, magazines, movies, and boxing exhibitions throughout American military bases were essential to the War Department’s careful construction of G.I. Joe Louis, which would reduce wartime tensions between black and white Americans without “press[ing] for structural change” or “alarming white Americans.”8 Sklaroff examined the “God’s side” poster, which was not only one of the most famous images of a black man in World War II, but also a “rare depiction of a black man in an aggressive pose.”9 At the time, the few posters featuring black soldiers stressed racial harmony and sacrifice, therefore downplaying suggestions of racial militancy. As an “established” war hero, then, G.I. Joe Louis transcended the “acceptable imagery of black men.”10 Representing a soldier prepared for combat–one of the strongest symbols of American masculinity–Louis was able to subvert embedded racial ideologies.11 In propagating this image to hundreds of cities, the government blurred the color line by featuring Joe Louis as detached from racial politics. Paradoxically, this visual detachment of G.I. Joe from racial politics indicated one of the War Department’s most politically suggestive stances. The “God’s Side” poster underpinned Sklaroff’s broader argument: although state officials manufactured portrayals of black inclusion in contradiction to the realities of American discrimination, they could not always control the meanings these symbols conveyed.
Charlene Regester accentuated Skarloff’s argument that manufactured portrayals of blackness could
7 Ibid., 298.
8 Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, “Constructing G.I. Joe Louis: Cultural Solutions to the ‘Negro Problem’ during World War II,” Journal of American History, 959.
9 Ibid., 980.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
not be completely controlled by the producer through her research on the early twentieth century transformation of the black prizefighter in cinema. Regester utilized scholar Chris Holmlund’s argument that “blackness was already coded in terms of spectacle,” contending that the combination of the violent, combative nature of boxing and the savage, primitive tropes of black men reinforced the efficacy of African-American prizefighters as actors because their bodies became objects of both danger and desire.12 Yet while these African-American prizefighters served as marketable commodities for the profit of the movie industry, their presence often resonated within the identities of the black American community. Regester detailed G.I. Joe’s involvement in multiple films, such as The Spirit of Youth (1938), arguing that the white press and public reception of these spectacles differed from those of black Americans. While critics believed Louis, “as an actor, lacked sex appeal,” the black spectators identified with Louis, as he “battered a train of white opponents on screen…[who] were symbols of the white privilege and power that had been denied to blacks in the real world of the 1930s.”13 Regester concluded that cinema manufactured a spectacle of boxing beyond the sport which transformed the black prizefighter into figments of Hollywood’s imagination as objects of desire, danger, and derision. Regester therefore contended that black male spectators who gazed at black prizefighters could identify with the symbolic power these athletes possessed to combat the racism projected upon them as black males.
Sklaroff and Regester’s research illuminated how G.I. Joe Louis’s carefully manufactured figure unintentionally became a symbol of promise for black Americans. Unlike some white people, “who viewed the fights in the context of Louis’s rise to boxing stardom, many black individuals saw themselves and their futures in [G.I. Joe].”14 Although Louis and his manufactured symbol did not directly address discrimination or segregation, he still represented hope and pride in the communities of black Americans hoping to rise from their oppression. His figure likewise alluded to a global diaspora of black prizefighters whose racial identities were created and subverted in these heavily monitored white spectacles of boxing.
Another one of these boxers whose racial identity was manufactured by white spectators was the Senegalese boxer Battling Siki. The French media’s characterization of Siki’s boxing abilities, particularly in his match against the white Frenchman Georges Carpentier,
12 Charlene Regester, 2003, “From the Gridiron and the Boxing Ring to the Cinema Screen: The African-American Athlete in Pre-1950 Cinema,” Culture, Sport, Society 6 (2/3): 270-271.
13 Ibid., 282.
14 Ibid., 970.
illustrated the tensions of Siki’s ontology: an inversion and perversion of the natural man, and an abstraction of the colonial Other. The press labeled Siki as the “dark child-savage of the jungle.”15 Carpentier, the “idol of France, with his dazzling white skin,” was expected to “[turn] Siki from a swaggering figure into a badly scared coloured boy.”16 Louis Golding described Siki’s style as “big, strong, and ugly, there was a terrific power in those long, pendulous arms of his which could be unleashed with devastating effect when he was roused. Skill and science were beyond the scope of his limited intelligence, but many a slogger has risen to the heights of the game.”17 Vergani likewise recounted that Siki’s aggression illustrated “the primeval savagery of his race, dormant since the dark and distant centuries.”18 Although Siki rose to brief prominence in France after defeating Georges Carpentier, the manner in which he was described and marked illustrates a clear subversion of his identity in the surveilled spectacle of boxing. His very popularity hinged on his performance of the masculine aesthetics of black primitivism, and he accentuated his exotic physicality and sexuality to entertain white Parisian fans. As the ‘dark child-savage of the jungle,’ then, Siki acted as a proxy for the French to clarify their own knowledge of empire, imperialism, and colonialism.
Siki was one of many black prizefighters who inspired French sports enthusiasts to publicly reflect on their own conceptions of race, manhood, and the positioning of Western empire in the modern world. Theresa Runstedtler specifically examined the exploits of African American boxers in France during the early 1900s as a window into the transnational struggle over the terms of race and modernity. Runstedtler focused on the experiences of famed black American heavyweights such as Sam McVea, Joe Jeannette, and world champion Jack Johnson who ventured across the ocean for economic mobility and personal freedom. Public speculations of these heavyweights took the form of boxing exhibitions, posters, and newspapers, which elevated boxing as a spectacle in which the black prizefighter was analyzed and objectified. Rundstedtler argued that while these black heavyweights were stripped of their identity in order to satisfy French fascinations, they likewise articulated their own definitions of the New Negro and critiqued the backwardness of white supremacy.
The heavyweight trilogy between Sam McVea and Joe Jeannette illuminated the consumption of blackness as a means to regenerate white French-hood, and the French imperial nation. Parisian spectators seemed
15 Gerald Early, 1988, “Battling Siki: The Boxer as Natural Man,” The Massachusetts Review, No. 3: 457.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 455.
18 Ibid., 458.
to “revel in the African American competitors’ imagined brutality to their own effete and effeminate modernity.”19 Caricatures of the two fighters leading up to their first match emphasized that they possessed an unrivaled, animalistic strength. One cartoon reduced them both to white eyes and lips against a black background, and others feature the same markers of savagery, including, “dragging knuckles, exaggerated lips, jutting jawbones, and overhanging foreheads.”20 Moreover, one popular French cartoonist depicted McVea as a menacing gorilla. Parisian intellectuals and spectators emphasized their blackness in order to construct the spectacle between the two prizefighters: a test of blackness against blackness, which sportswriters promised would “be more gruesome than any other fight in the capital.”21 Runstedtler argued that Parisian reactions to the fight exposed racist, simian assumptions about the viciousness of African combat. The first fight, ending by a decision rather than a knockout, caused outrage by French spectators who felt robbed of their dramatic, exotic expectations. McVea and Jeannette were both removed of their humanity, and seen as objects showcasing the limits and extremities of blackness–masculine strength, endurance, and aggression–for the fascination and entertainment of the Parisian gaze.
The second McVea-Jeannette fight evinced the vehemence of these racist assumptions and characterizations undermining the Parisian ‘celebration’ of black prizefighters. To ensure a definitive result, the fight promoters arranged a “match au finish,” for a purse of 30,000 francs. Guaranteed to test the limits of black physicality, “the fight could only end in knockout or submission, rather than by referee’s decision.”22 Evidently, McVea and Jeannette delivered, treating the audience with an action-packed match which continued for forty-nine rounds until a “battered” McVea threw in the towel.23 French sportswriter Georges Dupuy remarked, “the rematch...was not only the most beautiful we have ever seen in France but perhaps the most terrible and the most savage in the history of boxing throughout the world.”24 Despite McVea and Jeannette both being marked by signifiers of blackness in the build-up to both fights, the French press accentuated Jeannette’s biraciality after his victory in order to display the triumph of “white civilization” over “black savagery.” For example, Dunoyer de Segonzac declared, “I admired Joe Jeannette, the ‘yellow’ black, a learned boxer, more scientific than
20 Ibid., 66.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 67.
23 Ibid., 68.
24 Ibid.
his pure black brothers.”25 Another Parisian sportswriter had juxtaposed Jeanette, the “Greek athlete,” with McVea, “the eldest son of a grand barbarian king.”26 French writer Tristan Bernard argued that McVea’s submission had exemplified the “lack of perseverance in the [black] race,” as McVea’s inability to go in for the kill stemmed from “a certain timidity” and the “habit of subservience also characteristic of African people.”27 The deliberate interpretations of McVea and Jeannette’s blackness, evinced by anthropological critiques and analysis, bolstered the notion that the black man–regardless of his physical superiority–still needed the guidance of white civilization. Therefore, the amazing physical feats of African American prizefighters in these constructed spectacles supported the French mission civilisatrice
African American pugilists still managed to use the French public’s cultural embrace of black masculinity to launch a transnational critique of the white man’s burden, regardless of the inherent dehumanization by the French in these boxing spectacles. Their special access to the foreign press and to performance venues enabled them to forward their own protests of the racial and imperial status quo.28 For example, the French sporting weekly La vie au grand air (Life in the Great Outdoors) provided its first installment of Jack Johnson’s life story in January 1911, titled, “Ma vie et mes combats” (“My Life and Battles”), which continued for five months.29 Johnson’s memoirs exemplified that his transnational career and working-class origins enabled him to develop a particular critique of Western modernity.30 His narrative criticized white American negrophobia while alluding to the global contours of white supremacy through his transatlantic experience. Moreover, Johnson refashioned the negative legacy of black slavery into a story of triumph. Thus, Johnson’s detailing of his ancestral history legitimized black history and questioned justifications for the white man’s burden. Even though he attained the financial trappings of sport success and celebrity status, he continued to identify with the urban culture of the black proletariat. His experiences spoke explicitly to the challenges of working class African Americans, casting them as agents in the fight against the color line.31 Runstedtler affirmed Johnson’s memoirs as a quintessential text of African American exile and protest, where he defined not only his own identity, but also the identities of the transnational black diaspora.
In applying Runstedtler’s research to the work done by other scholars, one can explicitly see the emerging counterculture of blackness in the very spaces where black prizefighters were subverted of their identities. As the historian Davarian Baldwin argued, black boxers ‘became ironic positions of strength in the creation of New Negro consciousness’ not only in the United States but across the African diaspora. In particular, black sporting participation ‘exalted personality, sexuality, and the physical exterior as the expression of new race consciousness,’ one that was decidedly masculine, militant, and anti-bourgeois.32
Furthermore, one can see how this emerging counterculture not only forced white reflection of the global color line, but also exposed the diminishing power of white nations and empires. Despite the state’s effort to commodify G.I. Joe Louis as a black American patriot, they could not control the fluidity of his symbolism. In some ways, Louis was reconciling the double consciousness W.E.B Du Bois had described: the tension of possessing both black and American identity.33 His elevation to the global spectacle of boxing exposed the inconsistency of blackness and Americanness, and the legitimacy of black ancestry in the United States. While this construction was an effort to propagate particular notions of blackness, it was likewise public affirmation that black people could not be ignored as American citizens. Fighting for the United States as a black American, then, Louis’s symbol of black patriotism urged some white Americans to question the orthodoxy of white nationalism.
Looking at Siki’s triumph through the lens of Runstedtler’s research, then, one can see this match as a metaphor for the unravelling of white imperial control. Although Siki’s triumph over Georges Carpentier piqued French admiration and fascination, his performance nonetheless exposed underlying Parisian and global concerns about the growing powers of black Americans and African colonial subjects. One French columnist warned against showing the Siki-Carpentier fight in the colonies. Additionally, a columnist for the Literary Digest dubbed Siki “a dark cloud on the horizon,” declaring, “the prestige of the white race, in danger now as never before in recent history... is threatened by the victory of ‘Battling Siki.’”34 Siki’s defeat of Carpentier even led French officials to oppose the proposals allowing black soldiers to serve as officers in white French regiments.
The white reaction to Siki’s win over Carpentier foreshadowed the attempts by France, the UK, and the
32 Ibid., 62.
United States to completely ban him from boxing. His flamboyant lifestyle and relations with white women, afforded by his performance in the boxing ring, set off a chain reaction of white efforts to undermine him. Effectively embittered by Carpentier’s fall, French boxing officials saw their chance to stop the Senegalese fighter after he was caught in a minor tussle with boxer Maurice Prunier’s manager, Fernand Cuny. The French Boxing Federation (FBB) slapped Siki with a nine-month suspension and stripped him of his French light heavyweight title.35 To make matters worse, exaggerated tales of Siki’s allegedly criminal ways flooded the French press, as Parisian journalists accused him of, “selling drugs in Montmartre and fraternizing with an underage French girl.”36 Siki’s ban extended to other countries, with the British Home Office, the New York State Boxing Commission, and Italian boxing clubs soon prohibiting Siki from fighting on their soil.
However, in the very spectacle in which Siki was objectified, degraded, and eventually repudiated, Siki emerged as a transnational symbol of nonwhite resistance. The Senegalese parliamentarian Blaise Diagne brought Siki’s case in front of his white colleagues in the French Chamber of Deputies.37 Diagne declared, “These men who are as French as you are, though they are of different color, have a right to the same justice as you,” and cautioned his fellow deputies about the “danger of giving the impression that France had two unequal forms of justice–one for white Frenchmen, and one for colored subjects.”38 Among black Americans, Siki’s struggles also sparked protests and conversations about racial prejudice. As one black reporter exclaimed, “Siki stirred up no racial feeling when he fought with shot and shell against the Boche [German soldiers] when England’s back was against the wall.”39 Marcus Garvey likewise took issue with Siki’s plight, arguing that his predicament validated the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s (UNIA) international platform: “We have always held to the opinion that there was absolutely no difference between the Englishman and the Frenchman and the American when it comes to the race.”40 Claude McKay similarly took issue with Siki’s treatment and critiqued the conservative nationalist agenda of the black bourgeoisie in the United States and France. “The black intelligentsia of America looks upon France as the foremost cultured nation of the world,” McKay noted, “the single great country where all citizens enjoy equal rights before the law, without re-
35 Ibid., 247.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 249.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 250.
spect to race or skin color.”41 McKay maintained that the white backlash against black prizefighters such as Siki was ultimately about the need to maintain a compliant black workforce. In situating Runstedtler’s work with the story of Battling Siki, one can see the emergence of black counterculture stemming from the spectacle of boxing, albeit a heavily white monitored space. Furthermore, this black counterculture recognized the treatment of Siki by the French, British, and the United States, thereby exposing the extent of imperial control and the myths of racial toleration.
Runstedtler’s research likewise exposes the imperial undercurrents behind the East African expedition’s boxing spectacle. Al Brown and Roger Símende essentially participated in a primitive ritual, one which glorified exoticism and dramatized blackness for the purpose of financial gain. Not only did these black men have to fight for their place in the ring, but they were also viewed as anthropological specimens. This expedition thus provided useful justifications for the exclusion of people of color from mainstream politics and society, as “fitness” for citizenship became rooted in a muscular, white, male ideal.42 The accepted ideal remained that of the “superior” white male body, even if this racial fiction could not always be sustained in the ring.43 The boxing spectacle, particularly with Brown vs. Símende, therefore, functioned as an example of justifying colonial control. Without rules and restrictions, the black man would become too unruly and powerful to command. Brown and Símende, uprooted from their identities, were thus passive objects in the advancement of the white French mission civilisatrice, and representative of the white fear of unraveling imperial control.
While not explicitly “political,” black boxers embodied a New Negro masculinity which emerged from the spectacle of the boxing ring and radically critiqued white supremacy and exposed the continuous atrocities of imperial control. Joe Louis, although constructed as an apolitical figure of black nationalism, became highly politicized by Americans as he blurred the color line. His defeat over Schmelling, and by extension the ideologies of the Third Reich, prompted white Americans to question the orthodoxy of white supremacy while likewise garnering the hope and support of the black American community. Battling Siki, while marked with racist tropes in the ring and faced with corrupt expulsion from the sport, became a symbol of transnational black resistance in the United States and colonial Africa after beating the Frenchman Georges Culvier. Joe Jeanette and Sam McVea exposed the extent of the French
41 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
fascination with the brutality of the black body. After enduring the fights for the appraisal of French fans, they quickly discovered the limits of French racial tolerance. Although their physical performance of “primitive black manhood” made them international celebrities, they refused to allow this limited version of blackness to define them.44 Instead, Sam McVea, Joe Jeanette, and many other black prizefighters used their ambivalent position to forward an explicit critique of the global color line. Even as white officials tried eradicating the black global vision inspired by boxing’s rebel sojourners, the vision had already influenced the ideas of activists throughout the black diaspora. A black counterculture, one which peaked during the New Negro movement, manifested in the white-supremacist boxing spectacles showcasing the brutal fighting abilities of black prizefighters. Regardless of how these black prizefighters were characterized by the white press, or unsuccessfully controlled by the War Department, their highly publicized travels assisted in the New Negro’s fight with the global color line.
In June 1912, penal reformer E. Stagg Whitin published “Convicts and Road Building” in an issue of the periodical Southern Good Roads. In this article, Whitin wrote of the “good roads movement,” and how it had become identified as “the movement to take the prisoner out of the cell, the prison factory and the mine to work him in the fresh air and sunshine.” This so-called good roads movement advocated “that bad men on bad roads make good roads,” and consequently that “good roads make good men.”1 Within a few sentences, Whitin captured the fundamental idea that drove much of the South to use convict labor on public roads. Around the turn of the twentieth century, this use of convict labor produced sprawling state highways. The driving force behind this application of convict labor was the Good Roads Movement, which marketed convict roadwork not only as an efficient means of public development, but also as a humanitarian penal reform. The impact of the Good Roads Movement, however, was not penal rehabilitation, but rather the successful rallying of enough social and political capital to stimulate public development. As a so-called progressive movement, it did not overcome the cruelty and abuse of the southern penal system, focusing more on development rather than reform. The movement’s penal reforms perpetuated a state of subservience among African Americans in a post-bellum nation, becoming a functional replacement for slavery in the modern age. Before the Good Roads Movement, however, prisoners worked under the convict leasing system.
Under this system, state governments leased out prisoners to private employers as workers, who labored under the supervision of armed prison guards. In exchange, state governments received hundreds of thousands of dollars from private contractors leasing convicts. Convict leasing appealed to southern states
most impacted by the Civil War. The war decimated many southern prisons, and with no money to erect new penitentiaries, leasing was an attractive option.2 Furthermore, to the state and society, convict leasing was convenient. It transferred responsibility for thousands of prisoners from the state to private entities. Leasing generated millions in revenue for state and local coffers, funded public infrastructure like roads and bridges, and lowered taxes for the average citizen.3
Leasing also worked as a system of racial domination and control in a post-slavery society. A number of trends developed during the age of convict leasing: longer sentences translated into a larger convict population, the number of people sentenced rose drastically, and prisoners became almost entirely black. Convict leasing even incorporated elements of slavery. Convicts leased in Alabama and Texas, for example, were classified by their level of labor, such as “full,” medium,” and “dead” laborers. Slaves were classified under a similar system. However, unlike slavery, convict leasing offered no proprietary protection.4 Reports of poor food, abysmal sanitation, brutal labor, and inhumane punishment defined life on the chain gang. In 1920, black convicts working on a North Carolina chain gang wrote to the governor that they were “beat up like dogs” and that their overseers “work us hard and half feed us [and] beat us with shovel and stick.” In North Carolina’s Johnston County, Wiley Woodard, a black convict, wrote to the state’s commissioner of public welfare. Woodward said that although he had “made a mistake” on the job, it did “not call for the management of this camp to treat me and my race as dogs,” and that his camp kept convicts “at the point of a gun and threats of [the] lash.” A critic of North Carolina’s chain gangs wrote to the governor stating that although
1 E. Stagg Whitin, “Convicts and Road Building,” Southern Good Roads, June 1912, 16, https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/p249901coll37/ id/13775. 2 Christopher Adamson, “Punishment after Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865-1890,” in Social Systems 30, no. 5 (June 1983): 556. 3 David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 57. 4 Matthew J. Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” The Journal of Negro History 63, no. 4 (October 1978): 343-345.“the State may be getting some good roads out of this system,” the chain gang must be abolished as it “savors too much of slavery times.”5 Like slaves, convicts labored under inhumane conditions and received brutal punishment. Unlike slaves, however, convicts were cheap and plentiful.
They were also lucrative. In his 1880 book The State of Prisons and of Child-Saving Institutions in the Civilized World, prison reform advocate Enoch Cobb Wines reported that — for states without convict leasing — roughly half of penal administration costs were paid by prison-generated income. Taxpayers paid the rest.6 In comparison, states with convict leasing generated more than three-times worth of income over costs. Convict leasing also provided businessmen with the labor to build railroads, chop timber, and amass profits. Convict leasing allowed states to maintain control over emancipated African Americans and was a significant source of wealth to businessmen and politicians. For half a century, these two mutually reinforcing factors fended off multiple attempts to abolish the system.7
Convict leasing in the South faded towards the end of the nineteenth century. The railroad boom transitioned into a period of consolidation in the North, and not expansion in the South. This eliminated the need for a large convict labor source to work the railroads. The depression of 1893 further hampered the viability of convict labor in major business ventures. The price of leased convicts also rose drastically. In 1907, for example, a lessee in Georgia paid roughly $100 per year in upkeep, in addition to the price as stated in the leasing contract. The total cost came out to be roughly $670 every year, or two dollars every day. This was similar to the price of free labor.8 The rising costs of leased convict labor was caused by the rising prices of key commodities. Between 1890 and 1910, the Wholesale Price Index for goods produced by convict leasing like farm products and building materials rose from 50.4 to 74.8, and 46.8 to 55.3, respectively.9 The value of convict-leased labor would have increased in accordance with the rising costs of its produced commodities. Furthermore, the legalization of subleasing after 1899 likely exposed the system to forces of the free market. This increased the pressure
to pay costs close to the going rate for free labor.10
As convict leasing struggled to turn a profit, there was a growing appreciation for the cost-effectiveness of “chain gangs.” A brutal form of forced labor, chain gangs — composed of mostly African American convicts — were constantly chained together while working, eating, and sleeping.11 Southerners valued chain gangs more at the same time that convict leasing fell out of favor with businessmen. The abolition of leasing left a vacuum to fill, and chain gangs offered an attractive replacement. The South again filled a vacuum originally left by the abolition of slavery — first with convict leasing, then with chain gangs.12 A key difference, however, was the ideological force driving chain gangs. Coming from the abolition of convict leasing — and during the Progressive Movement — chain gangs were conceived as a reform that demonstrated penal humanitarianism, but also economic modernization.
The American Progressive Movement was multifaceted. Activists ranging from suffragettes fighting for the right to vote to trustbusters wanting to regulate monopoly and competition all fell under the banner of American progressivism. The movement was tied together by a belief in using state power to enact social, political, and economic change. This opposed conservatives, who tended to discredit using state power, for example, on behalf of workers, small business, and the poor. Conservatives instead preached a philosophy of Social Darwinism, asserting that people were subject to the same laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Therefore, they believed in survival of the fittest for society. In short, social darwinism. Progressives, comparatively, committed themselves to generalized political action untethered to any single cause, driven by a robust sense of morality, and the belief that human effort could make positive change.13 “Anyone who has a serious appreciation of the immensely complex problems of our present-day life,” wrote noted progressive Theodore Roosevelt in a 1901 edition of McClure’s magazine, “and of those kinds of benevolent effort which...we group under the name of philanthropy, must realize the infinite diversity there is in the field of social work.”14 Roosevelt further elaborated that “no hard-and-fast rule can be laid down as to
5 Convicts to Governor, March 7, 1920; Wiley Woodard to Kate Burr Johnson, August 10, 1925; Urban A Woodbury to Governor Bickett, February 8, 1920, in “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: ‘The Negro Convict is a Slave,’ by Alex Lichtenstein. Journal of Southern History 59, no. 1 (February 1993): 92.
6 Enoch C. Wines, The State of Prisons and of Child-Saving Institutions in the Civilized World (Cambridge: University PressL: John Wilson & Son, 1880), 94.
7 Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” 339.
8 Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” 348.
9 U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (September 1975), 200.
10 In regard to convict leasing, subleasing was when a leaseholder gave their lease to another party with the permission of the original holder. Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” 352.
11 Jaron Browne, “Rooted in Slavery: Prison Labor Exploitation,” Race, Poverty & the Environment 17, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 79-80.
12 Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” 349.
13 Glen Gendzel, “What the Progressives Had in Common,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10, no. 3 (July 2011): 331-334.
14 Theodore Roosevelt, “Reform Through Social Work,” in McClure’s Magazine, March 1901, 448.
the way in which such work must be done.”15 To create change and reform society, Progressives wanted to wield state power in the name of the public good, and not just what was good for big, private business.16
In the South, progressivism behaved differently. Southern progressivism exalted business. The coming of Southern progressivism was heralded by a few changes in the social landscape that took place by the end of the nineteenth century. This included the rise of industrialization, urbanization, and the growth of a new middle class made up of business organizations and other professional groups. This diversified the South’s economy, and induced a new spirit of commercialism that exalted business like never before. The people and institutions with influence and authority shifted from the countryside to towns and cities. This urban environment produced a new middle class of merchants, bankers, lawyers, technicians, and others.17 These professionals came together in trade associations, bankers’ groups, and chambers of commerce. Apart from elevating standards within their professions, these groups also turned towards collective action in the name of reform, and — in the case of race relations — control. These ideas of reform and control were firmly rooted in regional progress. Accordingly, Southern progressivism expressed itself in the desire for economic development and rehabilitation of the region. These desires were encapsulated in the “New South” creed, a vision for regional development that deemed economic progress capable of resolving the South’s socio-economic distress.18 This vision for a New South, however, would lead Southern progressives to provide African Americans with a modernized version of paternalism — referring to the infringement on the rights and personal autonomy of an individual under the guise of benevolence — and racial control in a post-emancipation society.19
Progress in the South largely meant improved schools and churches, real estate, and booming industry.20 Southern psychologist Lyle H. Lanier commented that this idea of business progressivism was reinforced by a barrage of “newspapers, magazines, radios, billboards, and other agencies for controlling public opinion,” and that it did not take much to learn “that progress
usually turns out to mean business.”21 This ideology of business progressivism asserted that prosperity could be achieved through spending and development. This desire for growth led to popular crusades in education, public health, the treatment of criminals, and good roads.22 In the South, North Carolina led this movement for business progressivism. During this period, North Carolina developed the leading southern state university, expanded its education and public health services, and embarked on the most ambitious highway expansion program in the region. By 1928, the North Carolina State Highway Commission had spent more than $150 million dollars on a state road system of over seven thousand miles. The state ended the decade eleventh in the nation in terms of total mileage of surfaced roads.23 This expansion of state roads originated with the “Good Roads Movement,” a wave of southern business progressivism that, in the words of Georgia governor Joseph Brown, meant “the closer binding of the common interests of the farmer and the merchant” towards the common goal of an expanded highway system.24 Around the twentieth-century, there was much to gain with good roads. The creation of the first American gas-powered automobile in 1893 promised significant revenue to those with roads. Gasoline and automobile taxes became a source of income to states.25 By 1928, for example, revenue from gasoline and automobile taxes had covered the costs of North Carolina’s $150 million dollar highway expenditures.26 Before southern states like North Carolina could achieve such a lucrative highway system, they needed a robust source of labor. Conscripted labor would not suffice.
Until the 1890s, every U.S. state used an American ad aptation of the corvée — a French word referring to a system of temporary unpaid labor — to supply workers for public infrastructure, and especially roads. Appearing as “road duty” in law books, the corvée system functioned as a tax of labor, not money.27 In 1883, North Carolina legislated that overseers supervising roadwork “shall have power to call out all the hands” they required, and that these conscripted free laborers would “be liable to all the penalties and punishments
21 Lyle H. Lanier, “A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, ed. Louis Decimus Rubin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 123.
22 Tindall, A History of the South, 225.
15 Ibid., 454.
16 Gendzel, “What the Progressives Had in Common,” 333.
17 Grantham, “The Contours of Southern Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86, no. 5 (December 1981): 1036.
18 Ibid., 1037-1038.
19 Ibid., 1048.
20 George B. Tindall, A History of the South, vol. 10, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 223.
23 Ibid., 226-227.
24 Henry B. Varner, “Good Roads Notes Gathered Here and There,” Southern Good Roads, March 1910, 17, https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/ p249901coll37/id/13802.
25 Peter Wallenstein, Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 16.
26 Tindall, A History of the South, 226-227.
27 Wallenstein, Blue Laws and Black Codes, 22.
now imposed by law for failure to perform road duty.”28 State judiciaries rejected claims that “road duty” was involuntary servitude. They asserted that statute labor was simply another public duty, like serving on a jury.29 But this conscription service, while cheap, often resulted in poorly built roads. Speaking to the North Carolina Good Roads Convention in 1902, William R. Cox, a former Confederate general, decried this “antebellum style of working the public highways” for being as ineffective as “were the old militia ‘musters’ to the development of actual soldiers.”30 A massive expansion of state highways required a more reliable labor force. In 1887, North Carolina law books listed an act “to provide for the working of certain convicts upon the public roads of the State.” Under this act, convicts whose sentences were imprisonment in county jails or the state penitentiary could be sentenced to “hard labor upon the public roads” by county judges.31 Cox declared that there was legislation “in our State which already enables us to use convict labor,” and that he believed “it should be more widely used than it is at the present time.”32
The 1887 law came as a result of growing calls to replace the South’s old system of conscripting free men to work the roads. In 1901, geologist Joseph A. Holmes published “Road Building with Convict Labor in the Southern States,” a study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Holmes reported on chain gang practices throughout the South and suggested that they exerted a positive influence on convicts. Holmes wrote that a prisoner who “has injured a community through the commision of crime” should be made to “benefit the community which he has injured.” He said that “the belief prevails that perhaps the best way in which a criminal can benefit the community he has injured is in helping to improve its public highways.”33 But Homes’ report stood out for its suggestion that “this out-of-door work not only improves the physical health of the convicts” but that also their work on the roads “improved their general character and prepared them for better citizenship.”34 Holmes declared that chain gangs would improve not just society, but also convicts as well. Rather
28 North Carolina General Assembly, Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1883 (Raleigh, 1883), 190.
29 Wallenstein, Blue Laws and Black Codes, 22.
30 William R. Cox, “Good Roads and their Relation to Country Life,” in Proceedings of the North Carolina Good Roads Convention, ed. J.A. Holmes (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903), 36.
31 North Carolina General Assembly, Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1883 (Raleigh, 1887), 354-355.
32 William R. Cox, “Good Roads,” 36.
33 J.A. Holmes, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Road Building with Convict Labor in the Southern States, (1901), 319.
34 Ibid., 326.
than continue this campaign for chain gangs, however, Holmes accepted a position at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis to direct its mines and metallurgy department. This humanitarian conception of chain gangs would be further pitched as progressive reform by Holmes’ colleague, mineralogist and northern progressive Joseph Hyde Pratt.35 As an automobile owner and real estate investor, Pratt saw value in a grand state highway system. To construct such a system, Pratt needed capital, civil engineers, and more labor than could be provided by the counties’ supply of convicts. Pratt’s plan required state support and control of all major road construction. To garner such support, Pratt drew on Holmes’ assertion that roadwork helped convicts rehabilitate themselves, and he began the campaign for “good roads and good men.”36
Pratt did not invent the concept of using convict labor on roads. He rather emphasized that convict road crews could be a method of penal reform. This idea grew in popularity. In 1907, penal reformer Charles R. Henderson published a report describing outdoor penal reforms in England, Australia, and Switzerland. Henderson stated that outdoor work — like farming and canal building — was “excellent for the health of the prisoners” because nature itself kept “the atmosphere free from all contagion” and germs.37 In 1908, periodical editor Samuel Barrows published an article entitled “Convict Road Building,” which described the experiences of eighty convicts working on Colorado highway. Barrows stated that the number of escapes had dropped, indicating that “as soon as this outdoor life, living in tents, had improved their physical and mental condition, the desire to escape almost entirely disappeared.”38
To take advantage of the popularity of outdoor penal labor, Pratt embarked on a campaign to market the chain gang as a vehicle of penal rehabilitation. He went on the speaking circuit, presenting papers and delivering presentations throughout the South. He presented a paper on convict labor for roadwork before the national Good Roads Association conference in St. Louis, Missouri, and at the Southern Commercial Congress in Atlanta, Georgia in 1910 and 1911, respectively. Pratt then spoke about the benefits of state control over public roads at the National Good Roads Congress two months later in Birmingham, Alabama. Then, at the sixty-third annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., Pratt delivered a
36 Ibid.,133.
presentation titled “Convict Labor in Highway Construction.” In this address, Pratt gave the moral and economic rationale for “good roads and good men.”39
Pratt stated two principles, that a convict should “compensate society for his crime,” and that a convict should “be in better condition physically and morally at the end of his sentence” before returning to society. He advocated for rehabilitation through labor that benefited communities, and questioned what labor “will be for the best interest of the state and the convict himself” in order for all to benefit. Pratt refuted the idea that any convict labor “that is in direct competition with free labor,” citing the potential for conflict. He rejected methods like convict leasing on the grounds that “the work is largely in the interest of individuals and private corporations.”40 He asserted that a convict can best be employed “in the construction of public roads,” which are “a public necessity” and belong “to all the people of the state.” According to Pratt, the roads produced by convict labor “ [do] not have to be disposed of in competition with products made by free labor.”41 He compared road work to other industries, like manufacturing, where convict labor works in competition with free labor. Pratt declared that “friction has been caused, and still exists, between the private operators of coal mines and the state,” a reference to the mine worker protests of the early 1890s. Pratt asserted that public roads were an alternative that benefited the state, communities, and — through a “healthful occupation” — the convict.42
Pratt praised outdoor work “where the air is pure” and there is “plenty of good drinking water.” He stated that in such conditions “the health of the convict who is employed in road construction and living in the convict camps is better than that of those in any other form of work.”43 Pratt also introduced the idea of an “honor system when the convicts are employed in working public roads.” He believed that very few convicts “are entirely devoid of a sense of honor,” and that the state should “try to bring out and develop this spark of honor” to achieve greater success on the roads. Pratt concluded his presentation with calls to give “a certain per diem” to convicts for their work, and to “commute so many days per month” that convicts worked as a reward for good behavior.44 He reiterated his points in an editorial published in the October 1910 edition of Southern Good Roads, writing that it “is necessary to consider the moral and physical health of the prisoner while he is paying
39 Ireland, “Prison Reform,” 140.
40 Joseph Hyde Pratt, “Convict Labor in Highway Construction,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 46 (1913): 79.
41 Pratt, “Convict Labor in Highway Construction,” 80.
42 Ibid., 81.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 87.
his debt to society.” Pratt further wrote that by using convict labor to build public roads, “the greatest good of the greatest number is being accomplished and without causing any feeling of competition with free labor.”45 In the chain gang, Pratt found an efficient method of road construction that could be marketed as a progressive and healthy alternative to previous penal systems. However, reality never matched Pratt’s marketing material. Reports of inhumane treatment and abuse smeared his shiny pitch for penal labor. In 1915, W.O. Saunders — editor of North Carolina’s The Independent newspaper — published an exposé detailing the abuse of convicts working on North Carolina’s chain gangs. Saunders reported on a judge who visited a convict camp in Pasquotank County. At night, convicts were “chained to their bunks and chained together by a master chain,” prohibited from rising at night for any reason at all. Those who complained “were chained with an iron collar at night, the collar being fastened to their necks and padlocked.” The judge discovered that “barbarous devices were employed to shackle [convicts] so they could not run.” This included iron bands that “cut into their flesh, making running sores that never healed because the iron bands were never removed.” The guards received “two or more shipments of liquor every week,” and drunkenly abused prisoners. The judge condemned the Pasquotank chain gang as “a little man-made hell,” and pledged to “send no prisoner to the Pasquotank chain gang” until it rehabilitated itself. Saunders commented that such chain gangs “all over North Carolina are quite as bad as the chain gang in Pasquotank.” He further stated that similar abuses “have been reported in the newspapers month after month.”46
As the public grew aware of abuse, Pratt’s “good roads and good men” movement faded around 1915. The expansion of roads continued, but Pratt abandoned his argument that chain gangs were a reform. He could not, however, abandon chain gangs as a labor source. Abolishing chain gangs would cripple road expansion. Pratt instead focused his attention on improving the chain gang system through legislation. In 1917, Pratt framed a law for “the treatment, handling, and work of prisoners.”47 This law directed prisoner labor “not to exceed ten (10) hours of each day” and put all convicts into three classes. These classes utilized Pratt’s aforementioned honor system and sentence commutation. Convicts in the first class would “be known as honor men,” grouped together in “honor camps.” These “honor men”
would work without guard supervision, not be chained at night, and would not wear a striped jumpsuit. Convicts assigned to the second class would work under guards, but they would not wear chains while at work. Convicts of the third class would wear stripes, work under armed guards, chained during the day and at night. Both first and second class convicts could commute their sentences “eight days out of every four weeks” and “six days out of every four weeks,” respectively. Third class convicts, however, “shall not be allowed any commutation of their time.” Furthermore, all camps were to meet sanitation standards set by the state board of health, and nobody “addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors shall be employed” within the penal system.48
Despite applying these regulations to all county and municipal chain gangs, this law specified no means of enforcement.49 As Frank Tannenbaum wrote in his 1924 exposé Darker Phases of the South, each county penal department had “its own system and [provided] its own management.”50 County officials had control over county convict camps, with no real pressure to follow the rules. By the Great Depression, the North Carolina state prison system fell under the jurisdiction of the state highway department. Despite achieving Pratt’s original goal of state control over convict labor, brutality and racism continued to define the southern penal system.51 Southern good roads advocates directed convict labor onto roads by appealing to the tenets of Southern progressivism. By offering chain gangs as a replacement for convict leasing, good roads advocates provided an alternative that was efficient. Furthermore, the financial incentives of an improved highway system presented itself as a major method of regional development. But the good roads movement also satisfied the modernization of racial control inherent to Southern progressivism. Southern progressives supported the abolition of convict leasing because it correlated with their racial agenda for African Americans. Progressives considered the overt brutality and oppression of convict leasing to undermine its validity as punishment.52 They believed that progress depended on establishing the protection — and more specifically, control — of African Americans. As a result, Southern progressives used the replacement of convict leasing with chain gangs to take further control of African Americans. The chain gang therefore manifested as a southern progressive reform of state-sponsored pater-
48 North Carolina General Assembly, Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1917 (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1917), 593-598.
49 Ireland, “Prison Reform,” 153.
50 Frank Tannenbaum, “Chapter III: Southern Prisons,” in Darker Phases of the South (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), 82.
51 Ireland, “Prison Reform,” 155.
52 Alex Lichtenstein, “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South,” Journal of Southern History (February 1993): 90.
nalism and racial control comparable to that of antebellum slavery.53
This relationship between Southern progressivism and racial paternalism was expressed by Georgia legislator Hooper Alexander in a speech to the Southern Sociological Congress in 1913. Hooper declared that domestic slavery was a required reform. He asserted that the “slave trade had imposed evils on the [American] colonies,” and that the government was left with the duty of managing it. The establishment of domestic slavery, Hooper argued, “was an expedient for discharching that duty by contract.”54 In short, Hooper stated that slavery was simply the privatization of the state’s duty of racial control, and that slaveowners taking on this duty were compensated with slave labor. After emancipation, convict leasing took on this duty before giving it to chain gangs. Southern progressives and good roads advocates accordingly used the chain gang to modernize the state’s control of African Americans.55
The Good Roads Movement pitched chain gangs as a humanitarian and economical replacement for convict leasing. To many white southerners, however, the movement’s real value was its ability to mobilize the social and political capital required for public development. Between 1920 and 1929, the amount of funding allocated to southern roads rose by 157 percent. The South’s roughly 69,000 miles of surfaced roads in 1914 skyrocketed to over 120,000 miles in 1921. By 1930, the South had over 200,000 miles of surfaced roads.56 Despite these successes, the Good Roads Movement did not resolve the cruelty of the South’s penal systems. Pratt’s advocacy of a penal system that improved the lives of black convicts likely clashed with Southerners who upheld the racial control of the chain gang.57 This suggests that the replacement of the private convict lease for the public chain gang merely adapted slavery for another time. In his article “The Spirit of Convict Road Building,” E. Stagg Whitin declared that “the convict on the road is the slave of the State.”58 Pratt’s movement did not achieve a rehabilitating penal system, but rather gathered the resources necessary to deploy convicts in roadwork. For many southerners, the expansion of quality roads was all that mattered. Put into practice, the Good Roads Movement served the interests of a society more interested in good roads than good men.
53 Ibid., 91.
54 Alexander Hooper, “The Convict Lease and the System of Contract Labor—Their Place In History,” in The South Mobilizing for Social Service, ed. James E. McCulloch (Nashville: Southern Sociological Congress, 1913), 165.
55 Lichtenstein, “Good Roads,” 92.
56 Tindall, A History of the South, 257.
57 Ireland, “Prison Reform,” 156.
58 E. Stagg Whitin, “The Spirit of Convict Road Building,” Southern Good Roads, December, 1912, 13,https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/ p249901coll37/id/13769.
On July 30, 1966, England defeated West Germany 4-2 in a thrilling extra time match at Wembley Stadium, winning their first and only FIFA World Cup. England overcame improbable odds on their road to victory, narrowly beating Argentina and Portugal in the quarter-final and semi-final, respectively. Members of the 1966 team emerged from the match as national heroes. English midfielder Martin Peters broke a match-long tie with a goal in the 78th minute, seemingly winning the World Cup for England. West Germany’s Wolfgang Weber, however, leveled the score in the 89th minute to send the match into extra time. Scoring arguably one of the most controversial goals in football history, Geoff Hurst’s shot hit the crossbar and bounced down onto the goal line to give England a 3-2 lead. Hurst later scored his second goal of extra time to secure the 4-2 victory for England.
No photograph captures the essence of this victory more than John Varley’s color photograph of English captain Bobby Moore sitting on the shoulders of his teammates as he hoists the Jules Rimet Trophy into the air. (Figure 1) The jubilant facial expressions of Moore and his teammates convey the triumph of an entire nation in the face of the exceptional victory. This iconic image of Moore is ingrained in English popular memory, evoking a sense of nostalgia for a former glory that has since eluded the English national team.
This essay will examine how Varley’s photograph of the triumphant Moore and his teammates, in dialogue with broader photography of the 1966 World Cup tournament, was interpreted in its own time and how the celebrated photograph became a replicated commodity of nostalgia. Firstly, this essay will focus on the present-day valorization of Moore. In agreement with Geoffrey Batchen’s argument, I reject historiographies that restrict discussion of the photograph to a singular, physical object, as I examine the effects of the continued dissemination of photographs as images with which viewers have a changing relationship over a span
of time.1 The British public’s understanding of Varley’s photograph of Moore evolved as the photograph became more reproducible; thus, remembrance tied to the photograph was subject to change from its original reception in 1966.
The next section will then delve into the photography of England’s broader World Cup journey within the print media. Following James Ryan’s methodology of photography as a “complex cultural process,” it is necessary to strip Varley’s photograph of its privilege and to situate it in “broader discourses.”2 I will also borrow from Ryan the term “imaginative geography,” which I define as the construction of complex and contradictory images of nations other than England.3 The photography of the English team and other national teams, such as
Figure 1: John Varley, photographer. “The Boys of ‘66.” Photograph. London: 1966. From Varley Media: John Varley Signature Collection. 1 Geoffrey Batchen, Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (Sydney: NAMU & Power Publications, 2018), 6. 2 James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 19. 3 Ryan, Picturing Empire, 25-6. See also Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Pantheon Books, 1978).West Germany, Argentina, and Portugal, defined English identity in an international context.
Liz Crolley and David Hand’s study Football, Europe and the Press explores how the European print media constructed national identities through football writing. They find that print media discourse on football perpetuates the consensus that national identity is unique and can be reduced to a limited set of typical characteristics.4 This study, unlike Crolley and Hand’s work, will analyze not only magazine spreads and newspaper commentaries, but also how photography within these mediums constructed national typologies based on each team’s playing styles. My research framework also aligns with Michael Silk’s argument that corporate influences fueled the cultural production of nostalgia for 1966. He posits that the pedagogic, political, and ideological process of remembering 1966 questions the place of the past in the present, challenging who is entitled to speak and produce this past.5 This essay will conclude with an evaluation of the legacy of Varley’s photography from 1966 and argue that the nostalgia surrounding the iconic photograph of Moore will remain strong in the coming years.
To understand the contemporary interpretation of this now iconic photograph, it is necessary to establish Moore’s current standing in English popular memory. Ken Jones’s 1993 obituary for Moore in The Independent demonstrates labels Moore a “national hero” who transcended the sports realm, famous not only for his skill but also for a “combative kind of integrity.”6 Jones depicts Moore as representative of an entire nation. Further, the Daily Mirror’s tribute to Moore expresses strong nationalist sentiment by describing Moore as an ambassador for England and invokes the power of collective memory. The tabloid proclaims: Bobby Moore was a great footballer and a true gentleman. He was as much an ambassador for his country off the pitch as he was a supreme artist on it. His death is a loss not just to football but to Britain. For he represented a past which the nation desperately needs to recover. Bobby symbolised the greatest triumph of this country’s national sport. But he was the ultimate symbol of an age where there was true pride in pulling on an England shirt. There will never be another Bobby Moore. And that is as great a tragedy as
his death.7
Conflating Britishness with Englishness, the eulogizer reminisces on the time in which Moore and his teammates played for the true pride of England, implying that current footballers lack this patriotism. The myth of English national identity is situated in the past and is compared to the decaying, present state.8 Given that there will never be another Bobby Moore, England paradoxi-
4 Liz Crolley and David Hand, Football, Europe, and the Press (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), 159.
5 Michael Silk et al., “The corporate constitution of national culture: the mythopoeia of 1966,” Continuum 28, no. 5 (August 2014): 722.
6 Ken Jones, “Obituary: Bobby Moore,” The Independent, 25 February 1993, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-bobby-moore-1475166. html.
cally cannot replicate the ideals embodied by Moore. Commemorations of the Bobby Moore photograph have extended beyond the print media to include public exhibits such as statues. Sculptor Philip Jackson’s The Champions: The World Cup Sculpture was unveiled in April 2003 at West Ham United’s Boleyn Ground site, ten years after Moore’s death. (Figure 2) The exhibit displays the iconic image of Moore and the Jules Rimet Trophy into the air as he is sitting on the shoulders of teammates Martin Peters, Geoff Hurst, and Ray Wilson. Peters and Hurst smile, facing towards where Varley would have photographed them. Wilson’s facial features remain stoic. Jackson, however, employed an “artistic license,” as his sculpture of Wilson omits the strain on his face.9 In Varley’s photograph, Wilson bears the major
7 Alastair McQueen, Gordon
Tina Weaver, and Nic North, “Bobby Moore: Hero Who Won the World Cup,” Daily Mirror, 25 Feb 1993, 2, The British Newspaper Archive, accessed 5 December 2021.
8 has Critcher, “England and the World Cup: World Cup willies, English football and the myth of 1966,” in Hosts and Champions: Soccer cultures, national identities and the USA World Cup, ed. John Sudgen and Alan Tomlinson (Hampshire, England, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1994), 84-5.
9 BBC News, “World Cup tribute unveiled,” 23 December 2003, http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/2982419.stm.
-ty of Moore’s weight, a physically exhausting task; thus, Jackson’s sculpture ignores the physicality of the match that preceded Moore’s celebration. Jackson’s alteration of this celebratory moment manipulates public understanding of the match by aligning it with public memory.
In 2007, Jackson won a commission for The Bobby Moore Sculpture to honor the construction of the new Wembley Stadium. (Figure 3) The statue overlooks spectators as they enter the stadium. On the plinth, an inscription reads:
IMMACULATE FOOTBALLER. IMPERIAL DEFENDER. IMMORTAL HERO OF 1966. FIRST ENGLISHMAN TO RAISE THE WORLD CUP ALOFT. FAVOURITE SON OF LONDON’S EAST END. FINEST LEGEND OF WEST HAM UNITED. NATIONAL TREASURE. MASTER OF WEMBLEY. LORD OF THE GAME. CAPTAIN EXTRAORDINARY. GENTLEMAN OF ALL TIME.10
Moore became a defender of the Empire, exemplary of English gentility. The statue immortalizes Moore as the sole hero of the 1966 victory. Whereas in Varley’s photograph Moore sits on the shoulders of his teammates, here he stands above a smaller composite of his teammates.
This feature of the plinth forces the viewer to question whether or not the Moore of Jackson’s sculpture is the Moore of 1966.11
England remembers Bobby Moore for his heroism on the field as a footballer and as an ambassador of the imperial project. His character is synonymous with that of an English gentleman of a past age, unable to be reproduced in the present, demonstrated through the English press’ eulogization of Moore’s death through English nationalistic sentiments, as well as public scupltures. The dissemination of Moore’s obituaries in the press and the location of Jackson’s statues at football stadiums enable the broader English community to consume this conception of Moore, transforming Moore and the 1966 World Cup victory into a nostalgic abstraction.
It is within this context that Varley’s photograph of Moore can be properly situated. At the time of the World Cup, Varley was based in Leeds and under contract with the Daily Mirror. His contract allowed him to take a sabbatical every four years to photograph every FIFA World Cup from 1966 to 1982. Evidence suggests that Varley was equipped with the most advanced camera technology of the time, using a Pentax camera and Kodak Ektachrome color transparency film to take his pictures.12 Photojournalists of the 1960s typically used a long lens camera with a 35mm aspect ratio and motor-drive attachments.13 Varley was one of few photojournalists to take color photographs. Varley used color film during the final because he knew it would be a momentous event and wanted his photographs to stand out.14 To shoot his photograph of Moore, Varley had to leap from the stands as a spectator and into the press pen without any credentials.15 At first glance of the photograph, the viewer is drawn to the aesthetics of England’s deep red uniforms. Moore is the focus of the photograph with his teammates admiring him from below. To the left, however, is teammate Nobby Stiles waving to the crowd, baring a toothless smile. Nobby’s teeth indicate his working-class background, which was shared by a majority of his English teammates. Varley’s photograph offers a glimpse into the industrial, working-class roots of English football.
The press’ commentary on and photography of the World Cup portrayed England as a team that lacked in-
11 John Hughson, England and the 1966 World Cup: A cultural history (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 183.
12 James Varley, email correspondence with son of John Varley, 16 November 2021.
13Lisa Tickner, London’s New Scene: Art and Culture in the 1960s (London: Yale University Press, 2020), 185.
14 James Varley, email correspondence with son of John Varley, 16 November 2021.
15 James Brown, “Football: Shooting Stars,” The Independent, 6 August 1999, accessed 5 December 2021, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/football-shooting-stars-1111131.html.
dividual flair, but one that excelled in teamwork and worked well in a defensive system. British sporting magazine The Field’s article “Under the spell of the World Cup” attributes England’s success to the “system which acknowledged and overcame our [England’s] limitations of skill and imagination,” culminating into a defensive football scheme.16 (Figure 4) This system required discipline, as England lacked the offensive prowess of other teams. The English team’s approach believed that tactical planning and determination could beat greater technical skill, emulating England’s austerity measures during the Second World War, which valued individual sacrifice for the common good.17 The photograph of George Cohen and Gordon Banks’s efforts to prevent Wolfgang Weber’s equalizer embodies this mentality. Their exaggerated
The Field’s commentary on the playing styles of England’s opponents generalized each team’s national characteristics. The Germans showed “the same virtues that England had, but with greater individual skill.”18 Argentina’s playing style and character, however, represented the opposite of England’s. While Argentina was the “cleverest side, with magic in their footwork,” their “[i]mmaturity” cost them the tournament.19 The article refers to Argentinian allegations that FIFA, the FA, and the British government manipulated the tournament to the advantage of England and other European teams.20 This commentary is juxtaposed with a photograph of Bobby Moore shaking hands with the Portuguese captain before England’s semi-final match. This cordial handshake is an expression of sportsmanship, a value characterized as uniquely European in The Field’s commentary. Most English people’s first visual encounter with these teams was through illustrated periodicals such as The Field. For these viewers, football photographs and commentaries communicated a seemingly indexical fidelity about the characteristics of a nations’ peoples. The press thus had ample opportunity to construct national typologies of competing teams, reflecting and reinforcing English viewers’ conceptions of the other nations.
The press also employed imagery from the Second World War to signal that England had regained her status on the international stage through the World Cup. To celebrate England’s victory against West Germany, American football writer Tex Maule headlined his Sports Illustrated photographic essay by exclaiming “It Was Like V-E Day Revisited.”21 (Figure 5) Dominating the cover page is a photograph of German defenders frantically attempting to stop Geoff Hurst scoring his controversial goal near the end of the match. Football journalists tend to employ military metaphors to simplify the physical, adversarial nature of sports.22
Maule describes the patriotism felt by the audience after the match: “Grown men wept… The Royal Marine Band tootled ecstatically under a canopy of waving Union Jack” and fans uncharacteristically “flooded out onto the pitch.”23 This celebration belies the typical reserved English national character. An accompanying photograph of Bobby Moore raising the Jules Rimet Trophy captures the gravitas of the moment. While the photograph focuses on Moore and his teammates celebrating, it is hard to
movements demonstrate a willingness to put their bodies on the line for the sake of the team. England’s playing style represented an English national identity that relied on collective action within a cohesive unit.
16 J. A., “Under the spell of the World Cup,” The Field, 11 August 1966: 315, ProQuest British Periodicals, accessed December 5, 2021.
17 John Clarke and Chas Critcher, “1966 and All That: England’s World Cup victory,” in Off the Ball: The Football World Cup, ed. Alan Tomlinson and Garry Whannel (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 117.
18 J.A., “Under the spell of the World Cup,” 315.
19 Ibid., 315.
20 Alex G. Gillett and Kevin D. Tennent, “‘Filip’ or flop? Managing public relations and the Latin American reaction to the 1966 FIFA World Cup,” Soccer & Society 20, no. 7 (October 2019): 927.
21 Tex Maule, “It Was Like V-E Day Revisited,” Sports Illustrated, 8 August 1966: 14-5, Sports Illustrated Vault, accessed 5 December 2021.
22 Crolley and Hand, Football, Europe, and the Press, 6.
23 Maule, “It Was Like V-E Day Revisited,” 17.
ignore the mass of spectators in the stands. The glimmer of the trophy draws the attention of the entire stadium, showcasing the heroism of the team. Festivities were not restricted to Wembley Stadium. Maule writes of “crowds in Piccadilly Circus and all across London” chanting “‘England, England’” into the night.24 The continuation of celebrations beyond Wembley and into London signifies the entire nation’s participation in recognizing England’s championship status. The World Cup victory enabled the nation to enjoy a return to international leadership and triumph.
LIFE’s coverage of the World Cup focuses on match play throughout the tournament rather than eulogizing England’s victory. The cover page introduces the World Cup Final with a color photograph of an airborne German footballer heading the ball away from an English player. The German appears to be the main subject of the photograph, as his face is visible while the English player is facing away from the camera. Next to the main photograph is a smaller image of England fans celebrating their victory in London’s Trafalgar Square. The positioning and sizing of these photographs encourages the viewer to glance at the German footballer before noticing the fans celebrating. The viewer does not encounter the iconic Moore photograph until the end of the essay. Whereas the other photographs are in color, the Moore photograph is in black and white. The photograph is cropped significantly, showing only Moore hoisting the trophy. LIFE further undermines the significance of Moore to the English viewer, positioning him next to a much larger advertisement for an electric shaver. This lack of attention to Moore and England’s victory reflects the editorial politics of LIFE, which emphasize that America should influence global culture, politics, and economics.25
The action shots taken by LIFE capture the fast-paced, physical nature of football, while The photographs of the semi-final between England and Argentina confirm the national stereotypes presented in The Field. One photograph focuses on the legs of an Argentinian footballer dribbling the ball, indicative of the technical skill that Argentinians possess. The photograph of Alan Ball celebrating Geoff Hurst’s goal against Argentina, however, depicts an Argentinian player sulking in the background. This composition highlights the immature temperament of Argentians mentioned in The Field article. One unique aspect of the LIFE essay is their photography of “the painful casualties” of football.26 (Figure 6) Photographs of an injured German and Russian footbaler
24 Ibid., 17.
25 Nadya Bair, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 73.
26 Miguel Acoca, “A Flying Finale for Soccer’s World Cup,” LIFE, 26 August 1966: 86-7, Google, accessed 5 December 2021.
are contrasted with England’s Jack Charlton initiating a tackle, with his cleat directly facing the camera lens. This juxtaposition portrays England as a team willing to endure the physicality of the game. LIFE attributes this toughness to bravery, as shown in the “British wall that held.”27 This photographic spread portrays the bravery and heroism of English players that blocked a German freekick. The wall symbolizes the collective nature of England’s style of play, with each player risking their body to defend their goal. Whereas The Field and Sports Illustrated rely on commentary and photography to narrate the World Cup, LIFE opts to limit the use of text, instead positioning images in sequences to tell well-rounded stories.28
Press coverage of the World Cup inculcated myths of national character that are rooted in politico-diplomatic and socio-economic objective realities.29
To visualize the legacy of the newfound respect for England in 1966, one must look no farther than John Varley’s photography from the 1970 FIFA World Cup in Mex
-ico. While Varley’s 1966 photograph of Moore is iconic in England, Varley was internationally renowned for his photograph of Bobby Moore and the legendary Brazilian footballer Pelé in 1970. (Figure 7) Moore and Pelé are pictured in a shirtless embrace after Brazil’s 1-0 victory in the group stage. The photograph speaks to Varley’s awareness as a photographer. After the match, Varley followed Moore, hoping that he would encounter Pelé as well. Fellow photographers can be seen in the background changing their film, unaware of the moment unfolding before them. The composition is intimate; the two players are the focus of the photograph, smiling in each other’s presence as they release from their embrace. Moore holds Pelé’s canary jersey in his free hand, indicating that the two exchanged jerseys. The act of exchanging jerseys is the highest expression of sportsmanship and symbolizes a mutual respect between two players, a recognition of one’s prowess on the field and character off the field.
The English viewer, however, most likely interpreted Varley’s photograph of Moore and Pelé from an Anglo-centric perspective. Gordon Banks recalls that Pelé proposed to exchange jerseys with Moore. Banks believes that the “victor saw fit to lavish praise on the vanquished” because of Moore’s outstanding performance.30 Against the backdrop of Varley’s photography of the 1966 World Cup, this exchange of jerseys signified more than sportsmanship; it represented an act of international diplomacy. Racial dynamics do not decisively matter within the English interpretation of Varley’s photograph. Pelé, a black footballer, approached Moore, who is white, for the exchange. Instead, the contemporary English viewer understands the embrace between Moore and Pelé as an affirmation of England’s international respect and leadership that resulted from her 1966 World Cup victory.
England, however, is farther than ever from the photograph of Moore and Pelé, let alone Varley’s 1966 photograph. Regular hope and disappointment have defined the past thirty years of English football. England lost in heartbreaking fashion to West Germany twice, missing penalty kicks in both the 1990 World Cup and the 1996 UEFA European Championship. England even failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup. More recently, Englishmen reacted with despair to England’s loss to Croatia in the 2018 World Cup semi-finals. Phil McNulty of the BBC laments: “England had history in their hands and a first World Cup final since 1966 in their sights… only to let it all slip away and so leave this historic city [Moscow] with familiar feelings of despair and disap30
pointment.”31
While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when Varley’s photograph of Moore became nostalgic, it is reasonable to suggest that the 1970 World Cup signaled the beginning of this transition. The public commemoration of Moore’s role in the World Cup victory provides further points of departure from how photography of the 1966 World Cup was understood at the time of England’s victory. The reception and memory of 1966 World Cup photography shifted from a vehicle to express a cohesive national identity to a valorization of a victory that was seemingly inevitable.
31 The Week, “It’s not coming home: reaction to England’s World Cup heartbreak,” 12 July 2018, accessed 5 December 2021, https://www.theweek. co.uk/2018-world-cup/94981/its-not-coming-home-reaction-to-englands-worldcup-heartbreak.
The differences between the Holy Virgin Cathedral in California and the St. Matthew Orthodox Church in Maryland would be evident to any visitor. Holy Virgin is immediately identifiable as Russian Orthodox; the church’s architect modeled its five large domes on the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin. To the contrary, if ‘Orthodox’ were not in St. Matthew’s name, it would be difficult to identify the church’s denomination from the outside; it is a brick-constructed church with no religious imagery besides a single cross. On the inside, both churches present clear cultural identifications through their iconography. Holy Virgin places its Russian heritage in a central position; icons of St. John of Kronstadt, Xenia of St. Petersburg, and several other Russian imperial-era saints adorn the church. The church also presents an icon of Tsar Nicolas II. The icons within St. Matthew do not portray Russian saints, but a keen observer will notice that many follow the fourteenth-century Novgorodian style. Furthermore, the services at Holy Virgin and St. Matthew are markedly different. Sunday masses at Holy Virgin are two hours long, given primarily in Church Slavonic, and filled with men in dress pants and women in head coverings. At St. Matthew, English is the language of mass, and the service length and dress code are comparatively lax.1 Holy Virgin belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), and St. Matthew is a part of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). Looking at these churches alone, many would not know that the two church communities both originated from the same Orthodox Church. How then did these two church communities come to be so different from one another?
The OCA and the ROCOR are characterized by
distinct histories and self-perceptions.2 Orthodox Christians arrived in what would become the United States in the 18th century when several Russian missionaries traveled to Alaska. These clerics and their successors spread across the United States and established a church community that would become the Orthodox Church in America. The OCA began as a multi-ethnic immigrant church, composed of people who willingly came to the United States to spread their faith. The ROCOR first arrived in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Civil War (1917-1921), when many Russian refugees fled Bolshevik rule. The aftermath of World War II brought yet more Russian refugees to the United States, where they operated a church hostile to the Soviet Union. The ROCOR began as a refugee church, composed of people whom the Soviet Union had forced out of their homeland and who sought to maintain their religious traditions.
Immigrants saw the United States as a permanent home and sought to establish an Orthodoxy that could accommodate the unique multiethnic character of that new home. Refugees saw the United States as a temporary refuge and sought to maintain their religious heritage intact until they could bring it back to Russia, much like the wider Russian émigré intellectual movement sought to do.3 This paper seeks to analyze the historical development and self-identification of these two churches. It will argue that the OCA is an immigrant church and that the ROCOR is a refugee church, a difference that has
2 Over the course of this paper, I will use ‘Orthodox Church in America’ (OCA) to refer to the church established by Russian monks in Alaska all the way towards the modern incarnation and ‘Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia’ (ROCOR) to refer to the church established by refugee clerics following the Russian Civil War. These organizations have gone by other names. The OCA only held that name officially after 1970, and beforehand would have been called the ‘Metropolia’ or ‘Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America’. The ROCOR is more often called the ‘Russian Orthodox Church Abroad,’ or ROCA. I have stuck to the OCA and the ROCOR to allow an audience unacquainted with the two churches to more easily follow their history. Be aware that these groups were not always or exclusively referred to with the names used.
3 Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 47–49.
1 Nicholas E. Denysenko, Theology and Form: Contemporary Orthodox Architecture in America (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 73–138.led to the two organizations’ historical disputes, dissimilar practices, and current standings.
Prior to the February Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) was the state religion of the Russian Empire, to both the church’s detriment and benefit. From the early eighteenth century onward, the state incorporated the ROC into its autocracy through the appointment of laymen to administrate within the church and seize church land. The ROC therefore depended on the tsarist government for administration and finance. This was a mixed blessing for the church. Its position came with powerful privileges over the other religious communities of the empire but required the church to accommodate the tsarist autocracy.4 This collusion between the ROC and the autocracy inspired anticlericalism in much of the Russian populace, further weakening the church. The state’s subjugation of it also deprived it of the means to operate without state support. The deposition of the tsar in 1917 left the ROC politically impotent due to its lack of previous independent action and the public perception of it as a part of the tsarist regime.5 As the émigré theologian Nikolai Berdyaev put it, the ROC would suffer for its “adaptation of Christianity to the ruling powers.”6
The ROCOR began as some clerics evacuated Russia, sailing to Constantinople to escape the Bolsheviks while the ROC Patriarch Tikhon remained in Moscow. After ROCOR clerics fled Russia, they grew more distant from the Moscow Patriarchate. Following a short stay in Constantinople, the majority of ROCOR clerics moved to Yugoslavia in 1921 on the invitation of the Serbian Patriarch, establishing themselves in Sremski Karlovci. While there, they found favorable treatment from the Serbian Patriarchate and Russophilic government; Yugoslavia would remain their base of operations until
World War II.7 The ROCOR considered itself the spiritual leader of Russians outside of the Soviet Union and appointed Metropolitan Eulogius as head of the Western European Churches in November 1921. This decision was later approved by Patriarch Tikhon which, according to the ROCOR, constituted a recognition of their authority by the Moscow Patriarchate.
Believing that Christianity and communism could not coexist and that monarchy would be the natural government after Bolshevik rule, the ROCOR adopted a declaration calling for the restoration of “a lawful Orthodox tsar of the house of Romanov.”8 Their hostility to the Bolsheviks only increased with time. In March 1922, the ROCOR called upon the émigré community to stop sending food aid to the starving Russian people in the hopes that famine would undermine Bolshevik authority. Soon afterwards, Patriarch Tikhon of the ROC called for the dissolution of ROCOR’s administration, which it conceded to. Immediately afterwards, the ROCOR established the Synod of Bishops, a spiritual body nearly identical to their earlier organization.9 This maneuvering was a mainstay in the ROCOR’s early interactions with the Moscow Patriarchate. While relations between the two deteriorated, the effects of the Russian Civil War brought about the near collapse of the Orthodox Church in America.
The OCA, which had gained many more parishes since it began in Alaska in the late eighteenth century, faced administrative collapse, religious schism, and ethnic separatism in the aftermath of the February Revolution, shaking the church to its core. Following the February Revolution, OCA leader Archbishop Evdokim, traveled to Moscow for the All-Russian Congress of Clergy and Laity, but he would never return to his diocese in America after the October Revolution. One of the Bolsheviks’ initial thrusts against the ROC was their support for the Renovationists, a state-sponsored schism within the ROC which sought radical administrative and liturgical changes alongside accommodation to the Soviet regime. Archbishop Evdokim joined the Renovationists and deprived the OCA of effective leadership at a crit-
4 Some of the privileges included being the state religion of the empire, holding the exclusive right to proselytize, receiving immense state financial support, and, until 1905, maintaining the right to punish apostates. But, the state also obligated the church to assist in conscription, report seditious confessions, and act as the tsar’s mouthpiece to the populace.
5 Philip Walters, “The Russian Orthodox Church,” in Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Pedro Ramet, (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1988), 62–63; Dimitry Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917-1982, vol. 1 (Crestwood, N.Y: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 19–25; Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 10.
6 Nikolaĭ Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (New York: Macmillan Co, 1948), 10.
7 Oxana Antic, “The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad,” in Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Pedro Ramet (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1988), 137; Gernot Seide, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia from Its Beginning to the Present, ed. Samuel Nedelsky and Isaac Lambertsen, trans. Jacqueline Xenia Endres-Nenchin and Isaac Lambertsen (Weisbaden: Otto Harrasowitz, 2012), 18; Jelena Mizinski Milovanovic, “Russian Emigre Artists in Serbia (1920-1950),” in Russian Émigré Culture: Conservatism or Evolution?, ed. Christoph Flamm, Henry Keazor, and Roland Marti (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 105.
8 Paul F. Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920-1941, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 115; Seide, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, 14, 19, 21.
9 Seide, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, 21, 26; Pospielovsky, The Russian Church, vol. 1, 118; Walters, “The Russian Orthodox Church,” 70.
ical moment.10 The crisis was only made worse when many OCA clerics, under pressure from the sudden lack of leadership and Russian state funding, undertook drastic and unpopular measures to fund their churches. Their actions pushed many disgruntled parishes into the Renovationist camp.11 This further harmed the OCA’s financial situation, as many Renovationists successfully argued that their movement was the rightful owner of OCA church property in several parishes before American courts.12 The arrival of White Russian refugees to the United States, who were generally more loyal to the ROCOR than the OCA, further complicated matters. 13 As the authority crisis continued throughout the next 20 years, ethnic groups within the OCA began to sever their connections to the church, subjecting themselves to other Patriarchates or creating their own hierarchies.14 The Bulgarians broke away in 1922, as did the Romanians in 1923, the Ukrainians and Arabs in 1924, the Serbs in 1926, and the Carpatho-Rusyns in 1938.15 The only communities where the majority remained were those of the Russians and Aleutians. During this crisis, the OCA appointed Platon Rozhdestvensky as Metropolitan of America and Canada at the Third All-American Council in 1922. Afterwards, at the 1924 Fourth All-American Council, the OCA declared provisional autonomy from the Moscow Patriarchate.16 With this, the OCA could rein in the disorder. The OCA had survived the crisis, but with the losses it endured, it could no longer claim to represent all Orthodox believers in America. As Archbishop Aftimios, a member of the OCA, remarked, “the unity of Orthodoxy in America, regardless of nationality or language, was forgotten.”17
While the ROCOR and the OCA settled into the post-October Revolution order, the Bolsheviks assailed the ROC within Russia, resulting in church concessions to Bolshevik authority. Almost immediately upon their assumption of power, the Bolsheviks attempted to break the ROC as an organization. From November 1917 through February 1918, Bolshevik authorities ended state subsidization of religious bodies, stripped
10 Pospielovsky, The Russian Church, vol. 2, 282.
11 Michael A. Meerson, “The Orthodox Church in America,” in Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Pedro Ramet (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1988), 124.
12 Correspondence between Reverent Nicholas Metropolsky and Bausman, Oldman, and Eggerman, Archbishop Apollinarii Koshevoi Papers, Box no. 2, Folder 2.23, Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY.
13 Pospielovsky, The Russian Church (vol. 2), 292.
14 Constance J. Tarasar, Orthodox America, 1794-1976: Development of the Orthodox Church in America (Syosset, N.Y.: Orthodox Church in America, Dept. of History and Archives, 1975), 188.
15 Tarasar, 189–94.
16 Pospielovsky, The Russian Church (vol. 2), 283; Meerson, “The Orthodox Church in America,” 124.
17 Mark Stokoe, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794-1994 (Syosset, NY: Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995), 60.
the church of its lands, and denied the church the right to own real estate. In March, they ordered the opening of all reliquaries, revealing the decomposition of relics, which they transferred to museums to ensure the “complete liquidation of the cult of corpses and mummies.”18 The Bolsheviks sent thousands of resistors to prison camps or internal exile. They also gave state support to schisms within the ROC, such as the Renovationists, through propaganda and by turning over many churches to them.19 Most notably, they made use of what Dimitry Pospielovsky termed ‘imprisonment-leapfrog,’ wherein they continually arrested church officials until the replacements became pliable. For example, Soviet intelligence services arrested Patriarch Tikhon in 1922, then arrested his locum tenens in 1925, leaving Metropolitan Sergii, a repentant Renovationist, as the main authority of the ROC, whom the Soviets then imprisoned.20 To prevent the execution of imprisoned bishops, maintain a modicum of church authority and win his freedom, Sergii made concessions to the Bolsheviks, culminating in his 1927 Declaration of Loyalty. This declaration, among other things, blamed anti-Soviet sentiment within the church for its persecution and demanded that clerics outside Russia profess political loyalty to the Soviet Union.21 Unfortunately for Sergii, this declaration failed to halt the Soviet persecution of the church; all that it did was alienate the émigré community.
The Declaration of Loyalty hit the church at a time of disunity, but the ROCOR and the OCA still managed to reestablish cooperation. Before 1926, the Synod of Bishops was the coordinating body of Russian churches outside of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Baltic states. But, in 1926, Metropolitan Platon of the OCA and Metropolitan Eulogius withdrew from the Synod over disputes regarding the extent of the Synod’s authority.22 The émigré church was now divided. All bishops within the OCA stood with Platon’s decision, except for Bishop Apollinari of San Francisco, who broke with the OCA and subordinated himself to the ROCOR.23 Then came Sergii’s 1927 Declaration, which further divided the church community. The ROCOR took a strong position against the declaration: they argued that because Metropolitan Peter, Sergii’s predecessor, was still alive and because Sergii was two steps removed from the Patriarch who he claimed to represent, his position of authority was illegitimate and his declaration was uncanonical.24 Metro-
18 Pospielovsky, The Russian Church (vol. 1), 31, 39.
19 Ibid, 47–55.
20 Ibid, 52–66.
21 Ibid, 67, 108–10.
22 Stokoe, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794-1994, 66.
23 Seide, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, 38.
24 Ibid, 353; Antic, “The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad,” 138.
politan Platon went against Sergii’s demand for loyalty to the Soviet Union because he considered it a betrayal of the United States. In response to this, the Moscow Patriarchate issued an interdict against Platon, and sent over a bishop to form an exarchate over North America.25 During this clash, the ROCOR and the OCA banned concelebration with one another, followed by the Synod of Bishops deposing the “schismatic” Metropolitan Platon, an act which the OCA ignored.26 After a few years, cooler heads prevailed. Metropolitan Theophilus Pashkovsky, who succeeded Metropolitan Platon, pursued a friendlier approach to the ROCOR, and the two churches were able to reconcile from 1936 to 1946, when the Moscow Patriarchate reentered the world stage following World War II.
The resurgence of the Moscow Patriarchate following the Second World War shifted the position of the OCA and the ROCOR. Conscription, college education, and other wartime measures uprooted OCA parishioners from their communities and inspired many to seek further integration into American society.27 Additionally, the American alliance with the Soviet Union coupled with the restoration of the Patriarchate gave many within the OCA laity a belief that the Soviet Union was changing for the better. These optimistic laypeople flew red flags at their churches and looked forward to the opportunity to reconcile the OCA to the Moscow Patriarchate.28
The ROCOR took a different path. From 1933 to 1945, the ROCOR engaged in a relationship with the Nazi regime in which they received control over German dioceses, a new cathedral, and permission to minister to POWs.29 It is worth noting that although many ROCOR members were deeply anti-Semitic, the leadership believed that “the fascist program is in contradiction with the Russian Orthodox national idea.”30 Additionally, neither the ROCOR nor German authorities trusted one another. Though not allies, the ROCOR took advantage of the Nazi regime.31 As the war advanced, so too did the Red Army, forcing the ROCOR to abandon its holdings in the Balkans and eastern Europe, which were then turned over to the Moscow Patriarchate. The Synod of
25 Pospielovsky, The Russian Church (vol. 2), 289; Meerson, “The Orthodox Church in America,” 127.
26 Act #2 of the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, Archbishop Apollinarii Koshevoi Papers, Box no. 3, Folder 3.2, Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY.
27 Tarasar, Orthodox America, 1794-1976, 230.
28 Psarev, Interview with Dr. Andrei Psarev, pt. 14:50.
29 Pospielovsky, The Russian Church (vol. 1), 222–23; Antic, “The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad,” 139.
30 Michael Shkarovskyy, “The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and the Holocaust,” Blog, ROCOR Studies (blog), December 7, 2019, https://www. rocorstudies.org/2019/12/07/the-russian-orthodox-church-outside-of-russia-andthe-holocaust/.
31 Seide, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, 66–68; Shkarovskyy, “ROCOR and the Holocaust.”
Bishops relocated to American-occupied Munich and administered a church in shambles. The Soviet advance into eastern Europe severed the ROCOR’s connection to its people and property there, and now it would have to compete with the resurgent Moscow Patriarchate for leadership within the émigré community.
In the aftermath of World War II, ROCOR leadership migrated to the United States, establishing it as the organization’s new center. Before the war, a small ROCOR-affiliated community already existed in the United States, based in San Francisco. The American ROCOR at this point was tiny relative to the OCA, too poor to replace the “badly used” vestments of its clergy, and even unable to buy an ideal gravestone for Archbishop Apollinari, who had led the community from 1927 to 1933.32 This second wave of Russian refugees bolstered the American ROCOR. They were diverse, including POWs who refused to return to the Soviet Union, Russian Civil War refugees who had spent the last two decades in the Balkans, and other displaced people. These second wave refugees preferred ROCOR parishes to those of the OCA. This was due to the ROCOR’s strong stance against the Soviet Union, its identification with Russian culture and nationalism, and that many of the refugees had already been a part of ROCOR parishes while in Europe.33
In 1946, the OCA severed its relationship with the ROCOR and began attempts to reconcile with the Moscow Patriarchate through negotiation. These negotiations made the OCA unacceptable to many second-wave refugees, who joined the ROCOR instead. Despite the large cost that the OCA endured to secure the negotiations, they came to nothing due to the OCA’s demand for de facto autocephaly, and the Moscow Patriarchate’s demand for repentance on the part of the American ‘schismatics.’34 Worse yet, several OCA churches broke ranks after the negotiations, joining the Moscow Patriarchate’s exarchate. As the American branch grew into the largest of the ROCOR communities, with over 200,000 refugee adherents arriving in the United States by 1954, the Synod of Bishops followed suit and relocated to their current seat: New York City.35
32 Zachary Setarchuk’s Analysis of Archbishop Apollinarii’s Property, Archbishop Apollinarii Koshevoi Papers, Box no. 1, Folder 1.11, Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY; Correspondence between Archbishop Vitaly and Joseph F. Finkelstein, Archbishop Apollinarii Koshevoi Papers, Box no. 1, Folder 1.11, Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY; Correspondence between Archbishop Vitaly and Neary Memorials Inc., Archbishop Apollinarii Koshevoi Papers, Box no. 1, Folder 1.14, Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY.
33 Pospielovsky, The Russian Church (vol. 2), 271; Seide, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, 86–87.
34 Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1984, 2:271; Psarev, Interview with Dr. Andrei Psarev, pt. 13:30, 35:00; Seide, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, 87.
35 Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1984, 2:257–71; Antic, “The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad,” 139; Seide, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, 103.
Both the OCA and the ROCOR believed that they held authority over the other. The OCA viewed itself as the canonical church of the United States which ought to hold authority over the ROCOR parishes within the country, while the ROCOR viewed itself as the legitimate heir of the Russian Orthodox Church which ought to hold authority over all Russian parishes abroad.36 From here, the two churches walked different paths, one ending in autocephaly, the other in reunion. These paths were expressed by the churches’ language, reforms, demographics, canonization, and relationship to wider American society.
While the OCA identified with the United States and American society, the ROCOR oftentimes viewed American culture as a threat. The OCA conceived of themselves as culturally American; they believed that their ‘Americanness’ made them distinct from other Orthodox communities around the world and sought to bring Orthodox elements to American society at large. The organization adapted the American Protestant ‘Sunday School’ model for the religious instruction of their children, sought to bring Americans into their church through conversion, and expressed a patriotic American self-identification.37
The ROCOR keeps a more distant relationship with American society. It has always expressed civic loyalty and even gratitude towards the “fair and noble country” that they lived in.38 Metropolitan Anastasy, the ROCOR hierarch, explained in 1945 that the ROCOR did not seek spiritual separation from the ROC: “[we] do not view [our]selves as being outside the fold of the Russian Orthodox Church.[…] [God] destined us to remain as the free part of the Russian Church. It is our duty to guard this freedom until such a time when we shall return to the Mother Church that precious pledge entrusted to us by her.”39 But, for many ROCOR adherents, America was and is not a home, but a temporary and spiritually-dangerous refuge. In the 1930’s, Archbishop Apollinarii expressed fear that his flock would “succumb to the lure and the empty glamor of the towns and cities” and lose
their religious identity.40 American society provided an escape from Soviet persecution, but threatened to strip away Russian Orthodox identity. To solve this problem, Apollinari attempted to purchase arable land in Florida so that his community could establish a Russian pre-Revolutionary social order on the fringes of American society.41 Tension between ‘Americanization’ and the maintenance of Russian cultural heritage continues to this day, and is an issue that ROCOR leadership will grapple with for the foreseeable future.42
The OCA’s grant of autocephaly was the culmination of five decades of independent operation. The path towards autocephaly began at the Fourth All-American Council in 1924, where the OCA declared itself to be a “temporary self-governing church.”43 Although all understood this status to be provisional in nature, it allowed the OCA to act with something similar to autocephaly. They appointed their own hierarchy without external oversight, pursued independent relationships with other churches such as the Moscow Patriarchate and the ROCOR, and changed their administration to accommodate the unique position of their church.44 By 1970, the OCA had grown accustomed to their de facto-autocephaly. As they understood it, their church was in a unique situation within the Orthodox world and this sort of self-governance was the only way to administrate that uniqueness. By the Thirteenth All-American Council in 1967, most of the church’s community voted to change the church’s name to the ‘Orthodox Church in America,’ a proposal that church leaders vetoed because they considered it premature.45 In 1970, as Cold War tensions cooled during détente, the measure seemed more reasonable. The OCA, under pressure from the Ecumenical Patriarch who demanded the church reestablish its relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate, and from its own church community who demanded a less ‘temporary’ status for their church, opened negotiations with the Moscow Patriarchate to decide what the relationship between the two ought to be. The Moscow Patriarchate, for its part, recognized that it had no way to bring the OCA to heel, and a long and painful series of negotiations ensued. By the end, both sides had agreed on the Tomos of Autocephaly, which granted the ‘Ortho-
40 Correspondence between Archbishop Apollinarii and Southern Farms Consolidated, Archbishop Apollinarii Koshevoi Papers, Box no. 2, Folder 2.10, Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY.
36 Seide, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, 110, 362. 37 Stokoe, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794-1994, 81–83; Tarasar, Orthodox America, 1794-1976, 233–35.
38 Correspondence between Archbishop Apollinarii and ‘Beloved’, Archbishop Apollinarii Koshevoi Papers, Box no. 2, Folder 2.10, Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY; Psarev, Interview with Dr. Andrei Psarev, pt. 1:21:00.
39 M. Rodzianko, The Truth about the Russian Church Abroad: The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, trans. Michael P. Hilko (Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1975), 47–48.
41 Correspondence between Archbishop Apollinarii and ‘Beloved’ + Correspondence between Boris N. Bekkarevtsch and Lock Davidson, Archbishop Apollinarii Koshevoi Papers, Box no. 2, Folder 2.10, Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY.
42 Psarev, Interview with Dr. Andrei Psarev, pt. 1:21:00.
43 Tarasar, Orthodox America, 1794-1976, 185.
44 Psarev, Interview with Dr. Andrei Psarev, pt. 37:00.
45 Stokoe, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794-1994, 96; Tarasar, Orthodox America, 1794-1976, 259.
dox Church in America’ autocephaly and reestablished eucharistic communion between the two churches.46 The OCA had received legal backing for the status that it had acted with for the last 46 years. But the ROCOR viewed this autocephaly as coming from the Soviet-controlled Moscow Patriarchate, and began to view the OCA as “aligned with the Patriarch of Moscow.”47 They did not initially recognize the OCA’s autocephaly as the relationship between the ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate remained tense.
Only the fall of the Soviet Union and the exhaustion of all other efforts brought the ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate back together. In 1992, the ROCOR established the ‘Free Russian Church,’ a ROCOR-aligned church community in Russia that would receive its members from Moscow Patriarchate defectors. However, although the ROCOR considered itself fundamentally Russian, those within Russia disagreed. They saw both the ROCOR and the Free Russian Church as American, not Russian; nearly all remained loyal to the ‘enslaved’ church rather than submit to the refugees’ authority. This failure forced ROCOR clerics to reconsider their approach; they realized that they would not be able to meaningfully compete with the Patriarchate in Russia.48 If the ROCOR wanted communion with Russia, it could only come from the Moscow Patriarchate. Over the next fifteen years, changes within the Russian Federation made such reconciliation more acceptable to the ROCOR. As the ROCOR said in a joint statement with the OCA in 2010: “the deep and extensive changes in Russia with the renewal of church life, the restoration of thousands of churches and monasteries, [and] the freedom to bear public witness to the Gospel in Russian society” opened the door for negotiations between the ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate.49 The two churches met in 2007, joining their visions together. The ROCOR accepted that the Moscow Patriarchate, despite its former submission to the Soviet state, would be the Mother Church. The Moscow Patriarchate accepted “that the independent mission of the Russian Church Abroad during the communist period was justified.”50 Both sides acknowledged
46 Tarasar, Orthodox America, 1794-1976, 263–64; Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1984, 2:299; Meerson, “The Orthodox Church in America,” 132; Bishop Tikhon et al., “OCA Holy Synod of Bishops Blesses Joint Statement of OCA, ROCOR Commissions,” Orthodox Church in America, December 14, 2010, https://www.oca.org/news/archived/oca-holy-synod-of-bishops-blesses-joint-statement-of-oca-rocor-commissions.
47 Controversy Mars Religious Holiday, Bishop Daniel Alexandrow Papers, Box no. 5, Folder 5.12, Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY.
48 Psarev, Interview with Dr. Andrei Psarev, pt. 55:00.
49 Bishop Tikhon et al., “Joint Statement of OCA and ROCOR.”
50 Psarev, “Looking Toward Unity.”
one another as legitimate parts of the Russian church and gave up on their demands of repentance.51 The ROCOR would now operate as a part of the wider Moscow Patriarchate, although it maintained its hierarchy and autonomy within it.52 Although the majority of the ROCOR community accepted this reconciliation, it remains divisive. Some parishes, particularly those of South America, refused to reconcile with the Moscow Patriarchate and severed ties to the ROCOR. This division is a deep trauma within the ROCOR today, as many respected ROCOR clerics, such as Archimandrite Veniamin, one of the church’s oldest clergymen, are among those who left.53 Although reconciliation has generally benefited the ROCOR, it came at the high price of division within their community.
In the present day, the OCA and the ROCOR have reconciled, and both groups try to navigate their new positions within the Orthodox world and the United States. Both the OCA and the ROCOR will continue to find their place within the United States and the wider Orthodox community over the coming years. The OCA and the ROCOR have different perceptions of themselves as churches, and this forms the cornerstone of their disagreements. The OCA is an immigrant church which originated with clerics who willingly came to Alaska to spread their faith. The ROCOR is a refugee church which originated in clerics who were forced out of their homeland and sought to preserve their faith intact while abroad. This fundamental difference between the two churches explains their divergences from one another. The OCA believes that its goal is to spread and maintain the Orthodox faith within the United States, so their faith is accessible to Americans and non-Russian Orthodox alike through the English language and other reforms. A goal of the ROCOR clergy is to maintain the Russian Orthodox heritage while in the United States, so they prioritize traditional ritual practice, as is evident in their use of Church Slavonic. The OCA has always viewed the United States as a permanent home, whereas ROCOR sees Russia as the organization’s true homeland. Conflict between these two bodies was inevitable given their different goals and self-perceptions, but the churches have come to a sense of cooperation.
An understanding of the difference and conflict between the OCA and the ROCOR grants insight into Orthodoxy, as well as the experiences of refugees in the United States as a whole. Orthodoxy in the United States has grown at a rapid pace throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. In 1903, there were only about 50,000 Orthodox believers in the United States. That number grew to around two million by 2013 and is still on the
51 Psarev, Interview with Dr. Andrei Psarev, pt. 2:30, 58:30.
52 Psarev, pt. 1:00:30.
53 Psarev, pt. 1:03:30, 1:07:00.
rise.54 This Orthodox community in the United States goes beyond just the OCA and the ROCOR, including over 20 separate churches, such as the Greek Archdiocese of America, the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.55 Knowledge of the history of the ROCOR and the OCA grants a better ability to understand and relate to this diverse community because many of the same problems that affected the OCA and the ROCOR have affected much of the American Orthodox community as a whole. In the same way that the Russian Civil War and Second World War brought new Russian refugees to the United States, so to has the Cypriot crisis of 1974, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990’s brought Orthodox peoples of other ethnicities to the United States. In the same way that affairs in Russia caused division and conflict within the Russian religious community in the United States, other American Orthodox communities such as the Greek Archdiocese of America have seen harsh divisions due to affairs back in their home countries.56 These problems are not uniquely related to Orthodox communities; all refugee populations in the United States have to struggle with their relationship towards their country of origin and how they connect with it on a religious and cultural level.
56 Stokoe, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794-1994, 61–62.
In November 1791, the male members of the Society of Universal Friends—one of many radical religious groups that arose in Revolutionary America—met in Jerusalem, near Seneca Lake, to elect Richard Smith, Isaac Nichols, Abel Botsford, Jonathan Dains, and John Briggs as trustees, empowering them “to do, act, and transact, every matter and thing,” on behalf of the community.1 This event—recorded for posterity in the Act of Incorporation—restricted participation based on gender. While apparently conventional for Revolutionary America, it obscures the radical nature of the Society of Universal Friends and its leader, the Public Universal Friend: a gender-neutral preacher formerly known as Jemima Wilkinson (1752-1819).
In sharp contrast to the aforementioned meeting, the sect’s members often disregarded societal gender roles and The Friend seemingly refused the restrictive settler-colonial gender binary of Revolutionary America altogether. Initially raised as a young woman under the name of Jemima Wilkinson, waking from a serious fever in 1776, Wilkinson announced themselves to now be the Public Universal Friend, ordered by God to proselytize.2 As the newly independent United States underwent dramatic societal and religious upheaval, the Friend led the small but devoted Society of Universal Friends, traveled widely to spread their message, and founded the town of Jerusalem near Seneca Lake.3 They also endured legal disputes over land rights, participated in the displacement of the Haudenosaunee nations from their ancestral lands, and withstood recurring accusations of fraud.4 This essay examines the life of the Public Universal Friend through Leah Devun and Zeb Tortorici’s lens
1 “Act of Incorporation for Universal Friends,” from Hamilton College “Home Notes,” “Communal Societies Collection New Acquisitions,” American Communal Societies Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2015): 111. See Figure 1.
2 Paul B. Moyer, The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015), 3.
3 Ibid 3-4.
4 Ibid, 121.
of trans*historicities. Rather than seeking to assign an ahistorical “transgender” identity to the Friend, this essay analyses others’ understanding of their identity over time, while “interrogat[ing] the nature of evidence” and the necessity or possibility of determining “facts.”5 Examining how the identity of one defiant individual—and how others understood that identity—allows scholars to understand society’s expectations in colonial America for gender and how those expectations for behavior and identity contribute to today’s society as well as our understanding of factuality.
Pronouns’ gendered natures are complicated when describing a historical person whose identity is not static. While Jemima Wilkinson can be accurately described as a young woman, the Public Universal Friend’s gender identity is more complex and largely unknowable, given the lack of a definitive personal answer and the shifts in language usage over two centuries. As such, this essay retains quoted authors’ chosen pronouns when necessary but otherwise uses the gender-neutral “they” for the Friend. Not only does this simply acknowledge not knowing an individual’s gender, but it implies the Friend’s deliberate presentation of gender ambiguity.
Contemporary critics of the Public Universal Friend—whom they nearly universally referred to as Jemima Wilkinson—considered their public behavior “improper” but only some commentators considered their actions actively fraudulent.6 Reporting on a meeting with the Friend, one writer claimed in 1787 to have “remarked [directly] to her, on the impropriety of her dress and appearance,” telling “her it was so much like the dress and appearance of a man,” that it was “very improper.”7 Evident from the use of female pronouns
5 Leah Devun and Zeb Tortorici, “Trans, Time, and History” Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (November 2018): 523, DOI 10.1215/23289252-7090003. 6 The Freeman’s Journal, March 28, 1787, quoted in Moyer, The Public Universal Friend, 92. 7 Moyer, The Public Universal Friend, 92.and criticism for masculinity, this writer considered the Friend to be Jemima Wilkinson: an upstart young woman, publicly defying the gender norms the anonymous author sought to impose on her. Beyond mere accusations of “impropriety,” others alleged Wilkinson knowingly and deliberately defrauded others. In his deeply critical 1844 biography, David Hudson describes the Friend as a “canting hypocrite … [seeking] to gratify the most sordid and insatiable avarice … [and] maturing new plans of imposture and fraud.”8 Hudson argues that Wilkinson falsely claimed religious backing and perhaps masculinity for a personal financial benefit at others’ expense, lying through spectacle to credulous believers. For Hudson, another’s identity is a matter of biology reality that he believes he knows. Hudson was not alone in assuming he knew who the Friend really was, nor are these assumptions of another’s identity or reality unique to the historical case of the Friend.
Explicit criticism disappeared from scholarly writing as historians re-examined Jemima Wilkinson as a religious leader through the upheaval of the Revolutionary decades and further colonial expansion into New York. In the first definitive “modern” biography of the Friend, Pioneer Prophetess, Herbert A. Wisbey Jr. described Jemima Wilkinson as—above all—an exceptional woman. He argued that “few women of the colonial period of American history have matched her accomplishments.”9 Wisbey notes that Wilkinson’s choice of clothing “emphasized her masculine appearance” and attempted spiritual authority, with a similar dress to “the regular clergy in the pulpit.”10 While Wilkinson may have dressed as a man, Wisbey describes the physical attributes he considered more relevant to gender identity: Wilkinson was “about medium height for a woman” with a visibly “fine [feminine] figure” described contemporarily as “well made.”11 Thus, the Public Universal Friend was fundamentally and unchangeably female. However, Wisbey avoids explicitly condemning their leadership as fraudulent, but implicitly denies the Society of Universal Friends’ beliefs. While questions of religious belief are difficult for historians to parse, Wisbey dismisses not only any religious beliefs that Wilkinson had become the Public Universal Friend through spiritual intervention but the mere opportunity for an individual to define themselves. According to Wisbey, Jemima Wilkinson was raised as a girl and thus factually continued to be a woman, given the evidence of her physical body, rather
than their choices of dress. The supposed evidence of a physical body overriding any personal choice or public identity in community rejects the possibility of fluidity and assumes a sense of certainty that the study of history can rarely if ever fine, let alone in the innermost thoughts of an individual. Nonetheless, Wisbey’s definition of Wilkinson as female is of a woman who defied the gender roles enforced in early nineteenth-century America.
Even among avowed members of the Society of Universal Friends, there is ambiguity whether Jemima Wilkson defied the gender roles for women or the Friend defied the gender binary altogether. Some members write of an explicitly female Jemima Wilkinson leading them through “her public discourses and private conversations.”12 However, Paul B. Moyer in The Public Universal Friend, argues others considered “the Friend … very much as “he” [in their] private correspondence and public pronouncements.”13 This apparent contradiction appears in the criticism of Abner Brownell (a disillusioned former member of the Society), who saw the Friend’s behavior “as inverting proper gender roles.”14 Brownell criticized the Friend’s participation in roles from both sides of the colonial gender binary, whether discussing homemaking with the women or agriculture with the men.15 Scott Larson argues that “the society of followers used genderless language for the Friend” and even Wisbey suggests that Wilkinson’s followers “always [referred to] the friend,” rather than use gendered third-person pronouns.16 Moreover, female members of the Society defied the gender roles colonial society would seek to impose. Some wielded “spiritual authority,” enjoyed “full [personal] economic independence,” or became the Society’s “primary business agents,” in part by “eschewing marriage and motherhood.”17 Recognizing that the Society did not require maleness of its leaders allows further possibilities for the Friend’s followers’ beliefs: if the Friend need not be a man, potentially gender-neutral male pronouns or descriptors need not be assumed to indicate maleness.
The connection between religious leadership and male identity is more apparent in Paul B. Moyer’s The Public Universal Friend. To define Jemima Wilkinson’s identity as “some sort of transgendered” is more than just anachronistic for Moyer but fundamentally
12 Ibid, 182.
13 Moyer, The Public Universal Friend, 100.
14 Ibid, 102.
15 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
16 Scott Larson, “”Indescribable Being”: Theological Performances of Genderlessness in the Society of the Publick Universal Friend, 1776–1819,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (2014): 584, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24474871; Wisbey, Pioneer Prophetess, 25.
17 Moyer, The Public Universal Friend, 156-57, 200.
inaccurate: “there is no hint that she … ever thought of herself as anything but a woman before she became the Friend.”18However, he explains the Society of Universal Friends’ understanding that “Jemima Wilkinson had been transformed into a heaven-sent masculine spirit.”19 While Moyer argues that “the Friend was not simply a male figure” and presented an “intermediate gender that defies easy attempts at classification,” Moyer’s use of he/him pronouns for the Friend assigns a primarily male identity to the Public Universal Friend, as Moyer argues the Society of Universal Friends did.20 In this assignment, Moyer defines a factuality of the Friend’s identity, rather than remaining in the ambiguity. While the use of male pronouns or adjectives in English could convey gender neutrality in previous centuries (such as the Friend’s frequent invocation of “all Mankind” in sermons and speeches, which presumably included the female half of the world’s population), this is no longer
true.21 Moyer assigns a masculine identity to the Friend with male pronouns, in contrast to female pronouns for Jemima Wilkinson.22 This contradicts Larson’s argument that the Friend’s followers deliberately used gender-neutral language, but the larger question for Moyer is that of gender roles—particularly during the period of societal upheaval and female religious authority—rather than gender identity.23
While the gender identity the Friend envisioned for themselves during their life, or which—if any—of the many identities now named in twenty-first-century discourse would be preferable to them is unknowable for historians, the Public Universal Friend and their followers display a rejection of gender norms in Revolutionary America and historians’ attempt to grapple with complex issues of gender. Moreover, the Friend in their “open disavowal of gender and concomitant performance of multiple gender signifiers” rejected not only society’s prescriptions for their behavior and appearance but gender as envisioned by the European Christian settler-colonial binary altogether.24 Instead, they focused on protecting their community of followers and spreading their spiritual beliefs.
18 Ibid, 8. This argument as to the nature of modern transgender identity assumes that the identity requires an individual to have always identified as a gender other than that assigned at birth. This is not necessarily true of individuals’ stories or shared understandings of the identity today.
19 Ibid, 9.
20 Ibid; Larson, “Indescribable Being,” 584.
22 Ibid.
The ideal relationship between citizen and government was infused with and strengthened by the idea of consensual marriages. Regulating the normativity of marriage was part of the U.S. government’s agenda to “civilize” and colonize Indigenous peoples, disrupting and reconstituting Native communities and their gender norms. At the same time, in California, the state government, enabled by federal inaction, was engaging in a genocide against Native peoples in a way that particularly targeted Native women. By committing sexual violence against Native women, white men in California, and the democratic systems that enabled them, ideologically and materially excluded Native women from the possibility of inclusion in the state. Excluding Native women from respectable marriages that would be governmentally recognized as well as continually disrupting the relationships Native women had with Native men constructed a perception of Native peoples as fundamentally incapable of being United States citizens. Thus, these actions perpetuated colonialism and permitted genocide. This strengthened the power of the settler government and further marginalized Native peoples in California.
Prior to European arrival and colonization, many communities occupied what is now known as the San Francisco Bay Area, speaking dialects of as many as five distinct languages.1 These communities are collectively called the Ohlone people. Ohlone is a more modern term that refers to all the descendants of the people that lived in the Bay Area and down the coast through Monterey.2 One of the largest Indigenous groups in the Bay Area today is the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, which added “Muwekma” (meaning “the People” in the Tamien and Chochenyo languages) to distin-
1 Quincy D. Newell, “‘The Indians Generally Love Their Wives and Children’: Native American Marriage and Sexual Practices in Missions San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San José,” Catholic Historical Review 91, no. 1 (January 2005): 61.
2 Les Field et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement: A Perspective from the Muwekma Costanoan/Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area,” California History 71, no. 3 (September 1992): 414; Alisha Marie Ragland, “Resisting Erasure: The History, Heritage, and Legacy of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area,” (Master’s thesis, San José State University, 2018), 70.
guish themselves from other Ohlone bands.3 The Muwekma Ohlone are the descendants of the Verona Band of Ohlone, which were once a federally recognized tribe.4 During Spanish colonization, three missions were established in the Bay Area and continued to operate under the Mexican government. Russian settlers moved down from Canada to north of the Bay Area, and Anglo-American traders and businessmen arrived in Alta California every year with more frequency. After the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), California quickly became flooded by Anglo-Americans as the Gold Rush attracted prospectors and other settlers. The Bay Area, though not a mining area itself, was a hub in the state. Despite now being one of the most populated regions of California, studies on Native women in the Bay Area during early California statehood are not plentiful. This article seeks to compile some of the information based on my interest as a person who grew up in the Bay Area, and investigate the process of genocide in the region. Archives and documentation generally reflect contemporary European and Anglo-American perspectives towards Indigenous peoples or excluded them all together. As the new territory was being shaped by the government, documentation changed, further complicating archival sources on Indigenous populations. For example, San Mateo County, where I live, did not exist yet for the 1852 state census, and in the 1860 United States census, there were only 52 “civilized Indians” in this new county.5 There were only 381 “civilized Indians” in San Francisco, Santa Clara, Alameda, and San Mateo counties total, with the most in Santa Clara, followed by Alameda.6 The arrival of the U.S. in California, then, was after major demographic collapse and change. The Ohlone people, following population loss in the missions, moved or adapted. For safety, many Indigenous peoples blended
3 Field et al., 414.
4 Ragland, “Resisting Erasure,” 23, 73.
5 J.D. B. DeBow, Statistical Review of the United States (Washington, 1854), 394; Joseph G. Kennedy, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1864), 27, 596. 6 Kennedy, Population of the US, 27. The East Bay seems to be a geographic focus in current Indigenous revitalization movements.into Mexican communities, making any record keeping and perhaps cultural transmission more difficult, even if it enabled survival. As such, in this paper I strive to balance the archival violence and my own positionality as a person still benefiting from settler colonialism to illuminate some of the history of this still very vibrant region.
After surviving through the Spanish and Mexican mission periods, Indigenous Californians were again targeted by discriminatory laws, dehumanizing legislation, and campaigns for genocide once the U.S. gained control in 1848. The Muwekma Ohlone survived in what Les Field, Alan Leventhal, Dolores Sanchez, and Rosemary Cambra describe as “The Ranchería Period (1860-1914).”7 As Hispanic socio-cultural practices declined and Anglo-Americans consolidated their power, Native peoples faced “economic degradation” and were pushed out of the U.S. labor landscape.8 However, Rancherias, or Native settlements, became sites of safe “withdrawal into hinterlands” for a time, and several of them emerged as sites of Indigenous revitalization.9 The most prominent rancheria was at Alisal in the East Bay (present-day Pleasanton). The Alisal rancheria “constitutes the first post-conquest Indian revitalization in the Bay Area” where many dance rituals were revived, and Field, Leventhal, Sanchez, and Cambra state that this “strongly implies that other arts and kinds of knowledge, about ceremonial regalia, songs, sacred language, and crafts also experienced a resurgence.”10 Beyond the Bay Area Indigenous peoples, Field et al. write that the “available evidence depicts a constant ebb and flow of people, of surviving Indians from all over the Bay Area and central California moving into and out of Alisal.”11 Thus, while early U.S. California was “often openly hostile” to Indigenous peoples, the Muwekma Ohlone revitalized and maintained their community through their rancherías. 12 It was a regional hub for indigenous life.
Another group of people native to the San Francisco Bay Area is the Ramaytush Ohlone, who lived and live on the Peninsula (roughly San Francisco and San Mateo counties). This grouping encompasses various communities who spoke the Ramaytush dialect of San Francisco Bay Costanoan, including the Chiguan who lived where I
currently live.13 “Ramaytush” means “people of the west” in Chochenyo.14 The founders of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, a non-profit for their community, contend that there is only one known lineage from which all current Ramaytush peoples are descended. This lineage is from Leandra Ventura Ramos, whose ancestry included the Timigtac village head of the Aramai tribe (in present-day Pacifica).15 A report by Randall Milliken, Laurence H. Shoup, and Beverly R. Ortiz for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area provides more information about early statehood on the Peninsula. This report addresses the whole Peninsula and includes archival records about the many Indigenous peoples who intermarried with groups all around Central California. The report states that, like in the East Bay, there were a few hubs of Indigenous residence and work on the Peninsula. After the secularization of the Mexican missions, some Native people stayed in Mission Dolores, although as San Francisco was a booming city, it eventually came to have a more pan-Californian Indian character rather than an Ohlone population.16 The other hub was Rancho San Mateo, about 20 miles south of the mission. The community there worked with the neighboring land-owning Sanchez family and “continued to cultivate the land at San Mateo … after the American takeover of California.”17 However, in 1848 the wealthy Anglo-American businessmen William Howard and Henry Mellus bought the property from Cayetano Arenas, the secretary of former Governor Pico. Around 1851, Howard forced the ex-mission Indians to leave the land, which “was a clear example of the new North American residents’ disregard for native people.”18 As Anglo-Americans bought up more land and dominated the economy, imposing “a new economic and class system,” Indigenous peoples had fewer and fewer places to retreat.19 To the numerous white people entering California, “any landless brown people who spoke Spanish were Mexicans,” and so, the ex-mission Ohlone peoples were rendered invisible.20 This assimilation allowed some of them to survive and the Ramaytush
13 Jonathan Cordero, “Who are the original peoples of San Francisco and of the San Francisco Peninsula?,” About, Ramaytush Ohlone, accessed May 13, 2021, https://www.ramaytush.com/original-peoples-of-san-francisco.html; Randall Milliken, Laurence H. Shoup, and Beverly R. Ortiz, “Ohlone/Costanoan Indians of the San Francisco Peninsula and their Neighbors, Yesterday and Today,” National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, San Francisco, June 2009, https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=hornbeck_ind_1, 87.
14 Cordero, “Who are the original peoples?,” https://www.ramaytush.com/ original-peoples-of-san-francisco.html. Interestingly, there are very few academic sources that I could find about these peoples specifically, probably because of their small population.
7 Field, et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement,” 424.
8 Alan Leventhal et al, “The Ohlone: Back from Extinction,” in The Ohlone Past and Present: Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region, ed. Lowell John Bean (Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press, 1994), 308-9.
9 Ibid.
10 Field, et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement,” 425.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 427.
15 “The Ramaytush Ohlone,” About, Ramaytush Ohlone, accessed May 13, 2021, https://www.ramaytush.com/ramaytush-ohlone.html.
16 Milliken, Shoup, and Ortiz, “Ohlone/Costanoan Indians,” 188-9.
17 Ibid., 184.
18 Ibid., 185.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 187.
Ohlone still live on the Peninsula.
At the founding of the United States, marriage was seen as a critical piece of the political structure of the state. As Nancy Cott asserts, the founders of the U.S. viewed marriage as a part of republican government: “as a voluntary union based on consent, marriage paralleled the new government. This thinking propelled the analogy between the two forms of consensual union into the republican nation’s self-understanding and identity.”21 Thus, marriage both confirmed the values of the new republic and instilled those same values into the home. The home was an important site of state-building too, since “marriages and the families following from them brought a predictable order to society.”22 Patricia Hill Collins describes how families are fundamental sites for the constructions of hierarchies. The U.S./Western normative family, she argues, “is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born into it.”23 In this state-recognized unit, the families “socialize their members into an appropriate set of ‘family values’ that simultaneously reinforce the hierarchy within the assumed unity of interests symbolized by the family and lay the foundation for many social hierarchies.”24 Marriage functioned to create social and political order and became a building block of the new nation. Heterosexual, monogamous marriage, as conceived by the early United States, was so naturalized that to live otherwise was to be deviant, and so U.S. colonization necessarily included forcing groups of Indigenous peoples into that same form of marriage. Native groups had many ways of organizing romantic and sexual relationships, as well as gender and domesticity, but these ways were seldom compatible with white settler colonialism. Cott states, “For if monogamy founded the social and political order, then groups practicing other marital systems on American soil might threaten the polity’s soundness.”25 If proper marriages were foundational to the state, then the state had to compel everyone to adhere to them, both for political security and for the security of cultural self-conceptions. While these values also affected white people, they were particularly destructive to Native peoples. To force Native people to conform to the U.S. model, Cott explains that “the removal of Indians from their traditional location by violence or by treaty was usually accompanied by the government’s offer of individual property and U.S. citizenship to heads of household who were willing to forgo tribal affiliations.”26
21 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 10.
22 Ibid., 18.
23 Patricia Hill Collins, “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation,” Hypatia 13, no. 3 (1998): 63.
24 Ibid., 64.
25 Cott, Public Vows, 25.
26 Ibid., 27.
Thus, to possibly maintain some kind of sovereignty and control over their lives, Native people accepted land at the cost of a forced change to the organziation of their community. The household was changed, as only “heads of household” could receive land, and those heads were “expected to be male.”27 Traditional gender roles were disrupted and then reconstructed in the colonial pattern.28 To U.S. state-builders, then, civilizing meant controlling Native sexuality and gender organization just as much as it was about instituting white values of property.
In the Bay Area, one of the more diverse areas, some of this so-called civilizing work had already been done by Spanish and Mexican missionaries. Through her analysis of mission records, Quincy D. Newell describes some of the pre-colonial marriage patterns. By examining the three Bay Area missions—Missions San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Jose—with more recent anthropological data, she contends that “what the missionaries saw as the sexual immorality of Catholic Indians, the Central Californians themselves likely interpreted as legitimate sexual behavior.”29 Central Californian Natives highly valued marriage; there “Societies organized around kinship … used marriage as a primary means of creating kinship bonds.”30 These bonds were diplomatic and economic in nature.31 Thus, marriage was deeply important to the organization of communities and would not change easily, even in missions. Field, Levanthal, Sanchez, and Cambra state that “inter-marriage [between Central Californian groups] and strong relations of kinship continued in the setting of the mission, albeit under circumstances Indian peoples found harsh and alien.”32 Newell describes that the persistence of gift giving, the complaints of priests about the prevalence of polygyny, and the high rate of “fornication” outside mission-recognized marriages could indicate continued precolonial practices. She asserts, “absent specific evidence to the contrary, the most logical assumption is that deeply ingrained cultural practices” persisted and that “many of the Native Americans’ marriage and sexual practices corresponded to traditional norms.”33 Marriage for many Indigenous peoples in the San Francisco Bay Area was different from the European priests’ norms, but was important to societal functioning and like-
27 Ibid.
28 See Maria Lugones for a thorough and nuanced review of how the colonial/ modern gender system is constituting and constitutive of coloniality
29 Newell, “Native American Marriage and Sexual Practices,” 61.
30 Central California is not how all scholars refer to the San Francisco Bay Area, which today is popularly considered part of Northern California. However, in several of the works I am using, this region is referred to as Central California (including both Monterey and inland) and as west-central California. This also differentiates it from further north in California, which did not have missions and thus has a different history of Anglo-American and Native relations.; Ibid., 65.
31 Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 172.
32 Field et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement,” 424.
33 Newell, “Native American Marriage and Sexual Practices,” 70, 81.
ly persisted into and beyond the mission period. After the Mexican-American War, however, the relationship between European, or Anglo-American, men and Native women, and Native populations in general, changed profoundly.
The U.S. government’s harmful relationship with Native peoples in California during early statehood was compounded by the centuries-long presence of the Spanish and then Mexicans. The Gold Rush only complicated an already difficult political situation. The federal government was far from the events in California. Part of the California government’s solution to white demands for land for mining, ranching, or other uses was to exterminate Native peoples on that land, viewing them as inhuman savages. Brendan C. Lindsay argues that the state government and the white population carried out a conscious and deliberate genocide against the Indigenous peoples of California. Albert Hurtado concurs with Lindsay that “the state of California exerted a great deal of autonomous control over Indian affairs.”34 Hurtado notes that the federal government failed to ratify any treaties with Native Californians, and this, along with other federal shortcomings, meant that “at points of state and federal friction, Indian problems were resolved in favor of the state … The majority of Indians had to survive outside reservations and beyond the reach of any shadow of federal protection.”35 While federal protection did not guarantee security, Native peoples were formally under federal authority and the government presumably had responsibilities to Native peoples as sovereign nations at the time of California statehood. State control rather than federal was a threat because the state government directly responded to warped perceptions of democracy; the constituents of state representatives demanded that officials, especially the governor, uphold the rights of white citizens, not Native peoples. Lindsay argues that “individual Americans possessed of notions of democracy, ultra-individualism, and the pioneer spirit wanted to engage democracy to bring about their collective will to eliminate Native Americans as obstacles to landholding and general conceptions of wealth and security.”36 In the face of the (white) democratic will for genocide, Natives in the Bay Area had to move or adapt. Mark Hylkema, California State Parks archeologist and Cultural Resources Programs supervisor for the Santa Cruz district, stated that the Native people who had been part of the missions in the Bay Area had become “invisible” and were lumped into Hispanic society, surviving the targeted genocide.37 Pilulaw Khus, a Chumash elder and spiritual leader, suggests that this strategy, found throughout formerly Mexican California, was purposeful: “Later, when
34 Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 29.
35 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 148.
36 Lindsay, Murder State, 22.
37 Peninsula Open Space Trust – POST, “Indigenous History in the Bay Area, Part 1: Overview - Mark Hylkema and POST,” June 12, 2020, YouTube video, 00:52:13-00:52:41, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp-mGJJ9yLs.
the Americans came, the Native people realized that if they called themselves ‘Mexican’ they could do a little bit better than if they called themselves ‘Indian.’ At least there wasn’t a bounty on their heads.”38 In areas with prominent Hispanic communities, ex-mission Indigenous peoples could work and maintain families, which Milliken, Shoup, and Ortiz explain “gave them access to western ways, including education and cultural knowledge that made it possible to ‘pass’ as white, thereby gaining the privileges of citizenship and the economic, educational, and cultural advancement that white Californians enjoyed.”39 Native people moved and adapted, but that largely depended on them hiding their indigeneity. The state still killed many Native peoples and directly or purposefully deprived them of their ability to survive. As such, the state built its legitimacy on violence against Indigenous peoples. The strength of the state rested on its ability to exterminate Native peoples.
Life for Native people in Gold Rush and early statehood California was incredibly dangerous and difficult. Facing a dramatic increase in the Anglo-American population and the appropriation and environmental devastation of land, Native people were vulnerable to the whims of white settlers. Native women were particularly targeted. This was especially acute because of women’s significant position within Native communities. Field, Levanthal, Sanchez, and Cambra write that “[e]vidence suggests that the Ohlone heritage at Alisal was passed most strongly through the female line.” This might have continued pre-contact Ohlone traditions, since what the authors call mayen, the “strong, independent female leaders,” were also mentioned in early Spanish sources. Women were critical to the persistence of Native peoples in the Bay Area, so their selection by white men was devastating. In Rosalía Vallejo’s testimonio about the Bear Flag rebellion of 1846 in Sonoma, she recalls, “one of my servants was a young Indian girl who was about seventeen years old. I swear that John C. Frémont ordered me to send that girl to the officers’ barracks many times. However, by resorting to tricks, I was able to save that poor girl from falling into the hands of that lawless band of thugs who had imprisoned my husband.”40 Vallejo highlights the sexual predation of Native women by U.S. soldiers, while not expressing the same fear for herself, a Californiana
38 Yolanda Broyles-González and Pilulaw Khus, Earth Wisdom: A California Chumash Woman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 65, quoted in Erika Pérez, Colonial Intimacies: Interethnic Kinship, Sexuality, and Marriage in Southern California, 1769-1885, (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 219. Bounty is meant here literally. See Lindsay chapter 5, “Democratic Death Squads of Northern California.”
39 Milliken, Shoup, and Ortiz, “Ohlone/Costanoan Indians,” 180.
40 Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815-1848 (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2006), 29.
woman.41 This would become a pattern of U.S. occupation. Albert L. Hurtado argues “All Indians were at risk during the tumultuous 1850s, but women’s chances for survival were measurably worse than men’s. Brutal assaults, deadly diseases, and general privation killed women and left their communities’ reproductive potential in doubt.”42 Many Native women were raped by white men, without consequence for the perpetrators, and the kidnapping and rape of women was one of the most common causes of retaliatory attacks from Native people.43
Deviating from the Spanish and Mexican California practice of having “reciprocal dependent relationships” between Hispanic landowners and ex-mission communities as laborers and with ritual god-parentage, Anglo-Americans generally colonized by creating “almost impermeable boundaries between white settlements and native populations, or simply removed native peoples from areas reserved for white settlement.”44 This geographic and mental distinction meant that Anglo-American men did not consider Native women as life partners, but rather as sexually open women who “offered their favors to white men.”45 Few white men officially married Native women even if they did form longer relationships with them, and Hurtado comments that “most probably thought of their liaisons with Indians as an expedient that would not be needed once there were enough white women in the state.”46 Anglo-American racial and sexual values at the time opposed miscegenation. White men, then, usually did not consider Native women as legitimate partners. This devaluation of and subsequent violence against Native women was intimately tied to white men’s sense of entitlement to California.
The sexual violence Native women experienced in California during its early years of statehood was an expression of the claim white men made on California and their exclusion of Native people. As Hurtado describes, many white people settling California “believed that Indians were their enemies and that the country had to be wrested from them by every available means,” despite the rarity of actual unprovoked aggression from Native peoples.47 One expression of that determination for dominance was sexual violence, and so rape “may be fused with racial, class,
religious, or national chauvinism,”48 thus supporting “the conquest of California Indians.”49 Hurtado concludes, “Indian women became objects through which violent men could express deep anxieties inherent in the frontier experience.”50 Being patriotic, in this sense, involved violating Native women to show their right to be in the new state. Sexual violence was also a form of aggression that disrupted and disrespected Native community. As well as emotional and physical trauma, sexually tranmitted disease, and decreasing birth rates, the sexual violence was in itself a denial of Native peoples’ ability to become part of the U.S. state (whether or not they wanted to).51 White men’s treatment of Native women showed that even if Native people conformed to U.S. ideals of heteronormative, monogamous marriage in their own communities, they still were not fit to be citizens of the state. Kidnapping, rape, and killing or indenturing whole communities hardly represent valuing the family. Women, in this view, would always be sexual objects to exploit and men savages to kill or make laborers. The refusal to intermarry, furthermore, compounded and complicated this exclusion from U.S. society. For example, Lindsay describes the hated “squaw men”: “these were single men who kept Native American women or girls in their homes, and were believed to be engaged in either forced or consensual sexual relations with them.”52 Other white people saw these likely forced, if possibly consensual, unions as contagious “Indian savagery” that degraded white men.53 One newspaper warned these men to desist or be viewed and acted upon “as nothing better than Indians themselves.”54 Lindsay argues that this action would be murder. However, Hurtado describes that some men did seek a formal relationship with Native women, and explains that even so far from accepted norms, “the few men who established long-term relationships with Indians honored the monogamous, nuclear family model. In that sense, they conformed to accepted standards of sexual behavior.”55 Similarly, archeologist Robert Heizer describes in his research examples of acceptable unions. A Fresno County article from 1858 stated that “Indian women … have been married to white men in numerous instances … They are said to make excellent wives; are neat, and tidy, and industrious, and soon learn to discharge domestic duties properly and
41 She does express concern for thievery and comments that, “The women did not dare go out for a walk unless escorted by their husbands or their brothers,” Ibid. This difference could also be a product of class, of the predation on a servant versus the wife of an elite local politician, but Vallejo’s own emphasis on the girl’s race likely indicates the intersectionality of race and class and the resulting sexual vulnerability.
42 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 188.
43 Lindsay, Murder State, 206. See also 219. Hurtado, Indian Survival, 182.
44 Milliken, Shoup, and Ortic, “Ohlone/Costanoan Indians,” 177; Leventhal et al., “Ohlone: Back from Extinction,” 309; 307.
45 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 172.
46 Ibid., 175 & 178.
47 Ibid., 185.
49 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 186.
50 Ibid.
51 Lindsay, Murder State, 221-22.
52 Ibid., 297.
53 Ibid.
54 Red Bluff Beacon, May 26, 1858, quoted in Lindsay, Murder State, 298.
55 Hurtado, Indian Survival, 178.
creditably.”56 This demonstrates that Native women could adapt to white ideals of matrimony and become part of that fundamental unit of society in the way the republic demanded. The violent disapprobation that faced interracial couples and the small number of formal unions reveals that white people did not want Native people to join their society. Sexual violence was a rejection of the humanity of Native women. Violence against women, therefore, contibruted to cementing white power in California during its earliest days as a state, demonstrating the white colonizers’ beliefs that Native women, and communities more generally, were incapable of integration into white settler society.
As United States settlers flooded into California, occupying it at a scale much larger than before, the treatment of Native peoples was different than in other areas of the U.S. Instead of using marriage to regulate and assimilate Native sexuality to American models, it was now a tool of exclusion. By largely refusing to marry Native women, white men rendered them unable to be incorporated into the state. All the privileges of citizens and married couples were denied to Native peoples. The persistent sexual violence further cemented Native peoples as less than human to U.S. Californians, and so genocide could continue unobstructed. In the face of this, Indigenous peoples adapted, hid, and resisted. While marriage to white men following white ideals of sexuality was the most legitimate in the eyes of the state, white men did not solely control the practice. Field, Levanthal, Sanchez, and Cambra describe the period after rancherías as “The Families Period (1914 to the Present). In this time, “Ohlone existence passed out of the public eye and into the private domain” and families “adopted a quiet and discrete profile.”57 Adapting Hispanic culture for survival and moving the practice of their heritage to the private sphere allowed the Ohlone to maintain their communities on their own terms and avoid genocidal lawmakers. Women continued as important cultural bearers and community was maintained through family ties. A Muwekma member commented on her mother’s role in her identity formation and cultural awareness: “We always knew; our mother told us,’ recalled Julia Lopez, council member of the Muwekma tribe. ‘She used to say to us ‘you are Ohlone Indians.’” In the Families Period, Field, Levanthal, Sanchez, and Cambra state: “it seems that it was enough during those years to spend time with the members of the extended family, to feel the warmth and security of the ingathering at Christmas, or at weddings, births, and funerals, and quietly to know about and share their identity.”58 These Ohlone women chose marriage and family not to constitute a state, but to protect their own freedom and well-being. Their success is proven, both for the Muwekma and other Ohlone peoples: “The time of
silence is over, and the second revitalization of the Muwekma Ohlone families is moving forcefully.”59
57 Field et al., “A Contemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Movement,” 427. 58 Ibid., 429.
