PHR Spring 2015

Penn History Review Journal of Undergraduate Historians Volume 22, Issue 1 Spring 2015

Catherine A. Cleveland

on Israeli Identity and its Effect on Israeli-West German Relations

Saraf N. Ahmed

on the Education of Women within the International Humanist Movement

Dawn H. Androphy

on the U.S. Homophile Movement

Danielle R. Kerker

on Jewish Activism in Atlanta during the Civil Rights Movement

Jacob L. Wasserman

on the Battle of Canal Street and the Independence of Black Political Power

Penn History Review Journal of Undergraduate Historians Volume 22, Issue 1 Spring 2015

Editor-in-Chief Taylor A. Evensen 2016, Diplomatic History

Senior Editors Elizabeth Vaziri 2015, European History Annie Weis 2016, American History

Editorial Board Leila Ehsan 2015, Diplomatic History Jackson Kulas 2015, American History Kate Campbell 2016, Intellectual History Aaron Mandelbaum 2017, American History Gregory Olberding 2017, Economic History

Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Gregory Segal 2015, American History

ABOUT THE REVIEW Founded in 1991, the Penn History Review is a journal for undergraduate historical research. Published twice a year through the Department of History, the journal is a non-profit publication produced by and primarily for undergraduates. The editorial board of the Review is dedicated to publishing the most original and scholarly research submitted for our consideration. For more information about submissions, please contact us at phrsubmissions@gmail.com.

Funding for this magazine provided by the Department of History, University of Pennsylvania.

Cover image: “Queen Elizabeth I of England,” English School, via Wikimedia Commons, http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/ elizaclopton1.jpg (accessed April 28, 2015).

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permissions in writing. The authors and artists who submit their works to Penn History Review retain all rights to their work.

Copyright © 2015

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Penn History Review Volume 22, Issue 1 Spring 2015 Contents: Letter from the Editor........................................................6 “A Dignified and Final Reunion”: Felix E. Shinnar and the Development of Official Israeli-West German Relations from 1952-1965 Catherine A. Cleveland........................................................8 Before Liberation: Political Ideology and Self-Expression in the U.S. Homophile Movement, 1950-1965 Dawn H. Androphy...........................................................35 The Education of Women within the International Humanist Movement Saraf N. Ahmed.................................................................66 “The Implacable Surge of History”: Investigating Jewish Activism in Atlanta During the Civil Rights Movement Danielle R. Kerker.............................................................86 Big Trouble in the Big Easy: The Battle of Canal Street and the Independence of Black Political Power Jacob L. Wasserman, Yale University..................................110 Senior Honors Thesis Abstracts......................................140

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Letter from the Editor I am proud to present the newest issue of the Penn History Review.

Now in its twenty-fourth year, the Penn History Review has published some of the most original historical research written by undergraduates. In addition to the articles composed by undergraduates from the University of Pennsylvania, we have included the work of Jacob L. Wasserman, a junior at Yale University.

The editorial board received a record number of excellent works this year, and it was truly a pleasure to read and review the submissions. I would like to thank all of the authors of the articles who submitted essays to the board for review. The essays in this edition are not only exceptional examples of undergraduate writing and analysis, but also engage diverse topics, ranging from the social movements of the 1960s to the nature of female education in sixteenth century Europe.

The first piece in this issue is Penn senior Catherine A. Cleveland’s “A Dignified and Final Reunion”: Felix E. Shinnar and the Development of Official Israeli-West German Relations from 1952-1966. Cleveland skillfully portrays the intricacies of Israeli politics leading up to the unlikely establishment of official relations between Israel and West Germany in 1965. She focuses on the instrumental role of Felix E. Shinnar in shaping diplomatic affairs. Her work conveys the intricacies of the period and traces relations through the layers of Israeli personal, national, and international identity.

Before Liberation: Political Ideology and Self-Expression in the U.S. Homophile Movement, 1950-1965 by Dawn H. Androphy is the second article in this issue. Androphy paints a vivid portrait of the experience of the American homophile movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Her close examinations of the Mattachine Society, Daughters of Bilitis, and ONE Incorporated are incredibly fascinating and challenge existing perceptions of these organizations. Androphy argues that these groups represent the beginnings of articulating a new kind of personal, community-based gay and lesbian identity. In the process, she offers an important contribution to historical understanding of the postwar American homophile movement.

The third article is The Education of Women within the International Humanist Movement written by Saraf N. Ahmed. Her paper assesses the views of European humanists regarding female education in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She argues that while the humanist movement generally promoted female education, levels of support varied from cautious 6

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acceptance of female literacy to a belief in equal opportunity education.

Ahmed skillfully uses a wide range of primary sources, including letters and humanist publications.

“The Implacable Surge of History”: Investigating Jewish Activism in Atlanta During the Civil Rights Movement, written by Danielle R. Kerker, is the fourth article in this issue. Her paper examines the role of Jewish individuals and organizations during the Civil Rights Movement. Kerker argues that Jewish organizations and individuals contributed in meaningful ways to the fight for civil rights equality within the context of the Jim Crow South.

The final work is Jacob L. Wasserman’s Big Trouble in the Big Easy: The Battle of Canal Street and the Independence of Black Political Power. He analyzes the significance of the 1874 Battle of Canal Street in New Orleans. Wasserman focuses on the tensions between African Americans and white Republicans in the battle. In doing so, he offers an insightful interpretation of black political power in Reconstruction-era New Orleans.

This issue also includes the abstracts of the senior honors students completed in conjunction with the thesis honors program at the University of Pennsylvania. These abstracts are an interesting insight into the work completed by students in the honors program, and they reflect the university’s commitment to undergraduate research and the study of history.

I would like to thank all of the students who submitted their work to the Penn History Review. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the faculty members who encouraged their students to submit their work and those at other schools who circulated the call for submissions. Dr. Thomas Max Safely, the Undergraduate Chair of the History Department, and Dr. Yvonne Fabella, the Undergraduate Advisor of the History Department, have also been critical to the success of the publication, providing guidance and support throughout the semester.

Finally, I would like to personally acknowledge every member of the editorial board for their countless hours of collaboration on the editing process, layout, and design of this issue. In addition, the graduating editors - Elizabeth Vaziri, Jackson Kulas, and Editor-in-Chief emeritus Gregory Segal – have all been indispensable to the Penn History Review. I hope that the editorial board continues to serve as a method for undergraduate students to share their research and engage in scholarly discourse. Congratulations to all of the authors and editors of the Penn History Review.

Taylor A. Evensen Editor-in-Chief Penn History Review

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Konrad Adenauer (center) on his first visit to Israel in May 1966. Israeli officials including David Ben-Gurion (sitting, left) met together with Adenauer in Felix E. Shinnar’s house (center, above Adenauer)

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“A Dignified and Final Reunion”: Felix E. Shinnar and the Development of Official Israeli-West German Relations from 1952-1965 Catherine A. Cleveland The Second World War irrevocably reshaped the geopolitics of Europe and the Middle East. Of the states that rose from the rubble, the new states of West Germany and Israel faced similar challenges brought on by the war’s aftermath and yet this same war deeply separated them. In the early 1950s, less than a decade after the international community discovered the true horrors of the Holocaust, West German and Israeli politicians alike could hardly imagine a day when its specter would cease to present an insurmountable obstacle for foreign relations between the two countries. Yet West Germany’s reparations agreement, the Luxembourg Agreement, with Israel in 1952 led to contact between the two states, and this communication led to the governments’ recognition of their mutual interests. Israel and West Germany’s similar geopolitical goals during the Cold War coupled with the West German government’s willingness to atone provided several building blocks for the two governments to construct mutually beneficial, albeit secret, relations during the 1950s.

While the two states established ties in secret, a public display of friendship and mutual recognition between the two states was another issue entirely. From the two states’ first official contact in 1952 until mid-1965, one of the major foreign policy questions that occupied Israel was if, when and how West Germany would attempt to establish relations with Israel. Although top elements of the West German government, including the Chancellor, had privately informed the Israeli Penn History Review

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government that they would make an offer of official relations several times during the 1950s, the promised offer never materialized. This type of policy change required the support of the whole government, and for both the Bundestag (the West German legislative assembly) and many in West German Foreign Office, official relations with Israel remained impossible for the time being due to the offer’s chance of eroding West Germany’s relationship with Egypt. For many countries during the Cold War, West Germany included, Egypt was of particular strategic significance because it remained officially unaligned in the increasingly polarized Cold War world. For West Germany, continued relations with Egypt and Egypt’s lack of relations with East Germany served as an important strategic recognition in the West German government’s quest to delegitimize and ultimately absorb the East German state. Besides the West German government’s trepidation, the Israeli government had their own complicating demands. The Israeli state’s refusal to accept anything less than total diplomatic relations, coupled with its insistence that West Germany make the first step towards recognition, further reduced the potential avenues towards an official Israeli-West German relationship.1 Between Israeli politicians’ frustrations at West German inaction and West Germany’s own qualms about establishing closer ties with Israel, the likelihood of official relations emerging had seemed rather slim to contemporaries up until it suddenly occurred in March of 1965, and academics today still find the abrupt agreement problematic. To explain this unexpectedly positive outcome of unofficial discussions between West Germany and Israel, past academics have pointed to David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer’s personal commitments to the success of Jerusalem-Bonn relations as key to the relationship’s eventual emergence. Yet while these men’s dedication to reconciliation certainly served as a key element in the development of IsraeliWest German relations, these two leaders’ influence ended in 10

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1963. When both men resigned, chances of official relations between the two countries still seemed distant and unpredictable.

Instead, official relations began in 1965 under the tenure of Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, two men who had little special commitment to Israeli-West German relations beyond pragmatic benefit. These men presided over some of the rockiest years of diplomacy between West Germany and Israel, and at these points Eshkol especially expressed a grim outlook for Israeli-West German relations.

Instead, the success of the previous years and its continuation past the end of Adenauer and Ben-Gurion’s leadership must also be attributed to another politician. Felix E. Shinnar’s involvement with West German-Israeli unofficial relations from 1952 to 1965 meant that he exerted consistent influence on the development of West German-Israeli official relations. His exclusive focus on Israeli-West German relations left him with little other impact on Israeli policy as a whole and with comparably little focus in subsequent works on the period.

While scholars have used his memoirs Report of a Representative as a vital primary source for the time period, his unique influence has been constantly undervalued. Yet while it is impossible to place the credit for reconciliation between the two states entirely on the shoulders of one man, the diplomat Felix E. Shinnar was indeed instrumental in creating and moderating the vital pipeline between Israel and West Germany that he maintained in the face of unfavorable odds through his respect for both the Israeli state and his diplomatic posting.

Shinnar’s place in the history of Israeli-West German relations was one largely of his own making. Partially through his own willpower and interest, Shinnar became the co-head of the delegation that arranged the terms of the Luxembourg Agreement, then went onto head the delegation overseeing purchasing of reparations goods in West Germany.2 Shinnar’s role quickly shifted from economic attaché to Israel’s de-facto Penn History Review

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Ambassador to West Germany largely due to his measured, diplomatic style. By the time he resigned, Shinnar’s experience as ambassador to West Germany had spanned the majority of the Israeli state’s existence. During this time, he had tirelessly committed himself to the establishment of official relations between the two states despite the many obstacles of frustrated politicians, failed secret missions, and continued public outcry over the possibility of recognizing a state consisting of perpetrators of the Holocaust. Shinnar’s dedication stemmed from his own identity as a German-born Israeli struggling to reconcile his homeland with the monstrosity of the Holocaust.

Shinnar’s view of reconciliation between the two states as a microcosm of reconciliation between his two identities provided a powerful personal motivation that other politicians of the era lacked. Without this personal motivation, the enormity of the Holocaust and the thinly veiled enmity of Israelis towards the West German state may have overwhelmed relations at any number of points during Shinnar’s tenure.

Felix E. Shneebalg in Jerusalem, Felix E. Shinnar in Bonn Shinnar’s personal history had strongly prepared him to serve effectively as the only major line of communication on political, economic, and military issues between the Israeli and West German governments. When Shinnar became the head of Israel’s first official delegation to West Germany in 1952, he had already helped build several new businesses in Israel. He had also served within the government as a financial advisor to the fledgling Israeli state. Shinnar’s conciliatory nature also stood at odds with the more brash style of assertive politics popular among Israel’s top statesmen and opposition members alike.

In Shinnar’s memoirs and contemporary state documents, his writing style demonstrated a natural tact that carried through both his public and private correspondence. Besides Shinnar’s business and diplomatic experience, he also had rare cultural 12

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capital that allowed him to approach West German politicians and workers without the unequivocally negative views that characterized many Israelis’ visions of West Germans.

Born Felix Shneebalg, Shinnar spent his childhood in Stuttgart, a city located in the south of what would eventually become West Germany.3 A child in the last years of the German Empire and a young teen during the First World War, Shinnar had served as an attorney in Berlin before the rise of the Third Reich.

In 1934, under the pressure of Nazi Germany’s increasingly discriminatory laws, the German Shneebalg immigrated to British Mandated Palestine and Hebraized his name to Shinnar, as was the custom, and indeed expectation in the intensely zionist Yishuv.4 On his arrival in Palestine at the age of 25, Shinnar switched gears from attorney to financial consultant and worked various companies that would become key players in the new Israeli state, such as the Hebrew newspaper Ha’aretz and the future first banks of Israel.5 While his immigration had been prompted by antiSemitism in Germany rather than a strict dedication to Zionist ideals, by 1948 Shinnar had clearly developed a sense of patriotism and duty to the adopted country forming before his eyes. Shinnar joined the new Israeli government on its founding in 1948, intending to support the state’s first years but retire from public life as soon as the new economy stabilized. However, Shinnar was in general disinterested in the public sector and believed that he would retire as soon as he felt the Israeli state was standing on firm ground. That he remained in public service for more than a decade afterwards was therefore not due to an interest in the Israeli state in and of itself, rather it developed when he was offered a spot on a very specific committee of the state of Israel: the “Assertion of the Jewish People’s Material Claims Against Germany.” This was the committee that would begin to negotiate the terms of the Luxembourg Agreement with its West German counterparts, and which would ultimately Penn History Review

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become the Israeli claims commission in Bonn.6 The claims committee clearly had a personal meaning for Shinnar as a German-born Jew. Despite his general disinterest in politics, he not only accepted an offer to join the committee but also expected to head the delegation. However, the central Israeli government, then controlled by the Mapai party, instead appointed the Deputy Finance Minister and Mapai member David Horowitz to lead the delegation. Horowitz turned the position down due to own conflicting feelings on the issue of reparations.

For a second pick, the government again passed Shinnar over in favor of one Giora Josephtal. Like Shinnar, Josephtal was a German-born Israeli immigran who had originally from Nuremburg. What distinguished him from Shinnar was his long term Zionist activism in pre-war Germany. Until his immigration to Palestine in 1938, Josephtal served as the director of youth Aaliyah, or immigration to the Yishuv, which suggested a more fervent patriotism for the Israeli state than the inactive Shinnar.7 As director of the Jewish Agency’s finances, Josephtal also had considerable financial credentials and secure connections to the wider Jewish community.8 All these factors, along with his Mapai membership, seemed to suggest that he would be a head of the delegation squarely committed to representing the Israeli state’s interests during negotiations with West Germany.

When Shinnar recounted this episode that almost robbed him of his position in his memoirs, he highlighted Josephtal’s party connection to the state. Shinnar informed his readers that Josephtal was chosen exclusively because, unlike Josephtal, Shinnar himself belonged instead to the Liberal-Progressive party, or Mifgalah Progressvit. This party was a minor participant Mapai coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature, and its politics and makeup reveal more about Shinnar’s own views in the early 1950s. Mifgalah Progressvit was primarily made up of Western European immigrants, a large number of whom were German, and was ultimately one of the only parties besides Mapai that 14

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supported reparations from West Germany. 9 Unlike Josephtal, Shinnar’s political leanings were more closely related to those who came from a German cultural background than Mapai, the body that would ultimately attempt to navigate the establishment of relations with Israel. But for Shinnar, he presented his lack of appointment as a cosmetic issue of trusting one’s own party members. And Shinnar’s dedication to the project was such that he proceeded to challenge Josephtal’s appointment in his characteristically non-confrontational manner.10 Shinnar’s description of the politics behind the choice of the head of the delegation a decade after the fact further demonstrates an insight into his own understanding of Israeli politics and the subsequent world of foreign policy he would have to navigate as a diplomat. Instead of acknowledging or disavowing any legitimate credentials Josephtal had for leading the delegation, Shinnar focused on the political favoritism he saw as inherent in the choice while refraining from actually criticizing the Mapai government’s actions. Shinnar explained to the West German readers of his German memoirs that, “Ben Gurion…the initiator for the relations with the Federal Republic [of Germany], naturally had the indisputable right to know that his man was at the head of the delegation.”11 In this passage, Shinnar both flattered Ben-Gurion as one of the main architects of relations while subtly presenting to his reader the power of party politics within Israel. To rectify the situation, Shinnar met with Josephtal and convinced him to serve as a co-head of the delegation along with Shinnar. In this passage, Shinnar described Josephtal as readily agreeing. Though Josephtal’s motivations for this sharing of power are unclear, the two men’s actions during their tenures on the commission demonstrate that Shinnar was by far the more dedicated of the two. Shinnar’s position as co-head and his subsequent efforts paved the way for Shinnar to position himself at the de facto leader of one of the most controversial delegations in Israeli politics.

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had control of the tone and nuance of the German translation that Adenauer actually heard. Comparing the tone of Shinnar’s memoirs with extant letters from Ben-Gurion around the time, it appears that Shinnar presented a deeply softened version of Ben-Gurion’s originally gruff communication.21 Shinnar’s personal rapport with West German officials also made such “personal messages” particularly effective. In this case, Adenauer guaranteed Shinnar that the delivery of reparations would continue as normal, “in an answer as clear as it was complete, with no ifs or buts.”22 These informal political promises stemmed in some part from the personal rapport the two men developed during Shinnar’s period in office. During their unusually frequent personal meeting, Shinnar often describes the two men engaging in an amiable chat about current political events after discussing the Israeli state’s original message.23 These meetings between two men who had lived through the Weimar Republic, conducted in fluent German, often shaped questions of major political importance between Israel and West Germany. Shinnar more often than not returned with either personal promises from Adenauer or logical reasons to explain why a certain Israeli request would be impossible at the that time.

Ultimately, due to the limits of the West German chancellor, many of Adenauer’s promises remained unfulfilled, to the Israeli government’s increasing frustration. Adenauer’s inability to fulfill many of these promises suggests that Adenauer was led to promise Shinnar more than he could deliver during these têteà-têtes.

As the private relationship between the two states developed, Israel became bolder with its requests from West Germany. When West Germany could not deliver publicly on private agreements, Shinnar often spent quite a bit of time explaining to his superiors why their requests were logistically out of the question, often defending the West German politicians who the Mapai officials would criticize as flaky or 16

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ineffective. In one case, Ben-Gurion requested a loan from the West German government for developing the desert region of Negev in southern Israel. The talks over the logistics and obstacles surrounding a loan, which like most aspects of IsraeliWest German relations remained secret, lasted over a year. At one point, after Shinnar had failed to obtain a meeting with Adenauer to discuss the issue, Ben-Gurion sent an impatient letter to Shinnar thinly criticizing Adenauer’s apparent avoidance of the issue. “The foot-dragging is undermining [my] confidence in the promises of the old man [Adenauer]…I’m off to America on the 22nd of this month, and before the trip I need to know if the promise is executed or not.”24 Shinnar’s prompt response was characteristically diplomatic, and outlined the exact reasons for the delays in discussions. According to Shinnar, the delays were unavoidable, and his tone of appeasement illustrates his investment in convincing the Israeli government of the West German government’s sincerity.

The deferral of the meeting with Adenauer was related to the holidays and his travel to the United States, and these are genuine reasons that I don’t see as a cop-out.

The truth and my impressions are that Adenauer stayed true to his promise and looked for and found a way to achieve it despite great difficulties associated with the convincing of all those who needed to collaborate and the concerns arising from maintaining confidentiality.25 In addition to Shinnar’s clear defense of Adenauer’s motives and intentions towards Israel, the formality of the response in comparison to Ben-Gurion’s curt message demonstrates the seriousness with which Shinnar defended the character of West German officers when he felt that their sincerity was being unfairly challenged. Shinnar’s repsonse is also characteristic of his willingness to personally vouch for West German politicians, including the Chancellor, based Penn History Review

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on what Shinnar viewed as personal rapport. In particular, Shinnar’s relationship with Adenauer led him to present himself as an expert on the West German government’s motives, which often reassured his superiors back in Jerusalem. In contrast, the exchange between Shinnar and Ben-Gurion additionally highlights the limits of Ben-Gurion’s trust in Adenauer. These internal documents problematize academics’ exclusive emphasis on Adenauer and Ben-Gurion for explaining the advent of official relations between their two countries. Ben-Gurion’s tone in the day to day maintenance of relations with West Germany lacked the dedication and passion that he would later be praised for by both contemporaries and later academics, although it did appear at ctitical moments. Instead, Shinnar vouched for the good faith of all parties involved and this dedication smoothed over a rough patch between the two men.

Both Israeli and West German governments also recognized Shinnar’s position of power between Jerusalem and Bonn. Although there were no official embassies or ambassadors between the two states, both governments referred to Shinnar by the title “Ambassador,” even within official state documents.26 By the 1960s, Shinnar’s office issued visas, helped run a student exchange between Germany and Israel, and conducted a number of other diplomatic functions that resembled those of an embassy. Shinnar and his office demonstrated interest in a cultural as well as economic and diplomatic exchange between the two countries.27 In addition to Shinnar’s role as covert ambassador and personal messenger, Shinnar also played a more active role in guiding Israeli-West German relations. In 1961, Shinnar became one of the first politicians to suggest refocusing Israel’s foreign policy towards a better public relationship with West Germany. During the 1950s, Israel and West Germany worked out a mutually beneficial system of secret economic and military deals while still maintaining outward neutrality. At the time, 18

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Upon arrival at the talks, Shinnar quickly became the unofficial leader of the delegation through his ability to easily converse with the West German delegates.12 Shinnar’s success was in large part grounded in his ability to behave cordially with the West German delegation and properly navigate the nuances of German culture lost on non-Germans of the Israeli delegation.

Simple coincidences such as Shinnar’s friendly discovery of a high school classmate among the West German delegation stood in sharp contrast to the many Israeli politicians’ inability to respect delegates that they instinctively associated with the Nazi regime. 13 For some Israelis, this extended to being able to offer even the most basic of courtesies. During deliberations, Moshe Sharrett refused to shake the hand of Chancellor Adenauer, who had been an active opponent of the Nazi regime. This attitude from a senior Israeli government official and future Prime Minister serves as but one example of the wide gulf that generally separated Israelis politicians from the West German delegates. While Shinnar’s congeniality does not immediately seem exceptional, comparing his actions with contemporary norms demonstrates just how extraordinary his subsequent actions were, and how vital his commitment to reconciliation was to the success of Israeli-West German relations.14 The Israeli Mission in Köln Shinnar’s success in relating to the West German officials, which in turn led to major gains for Israel during the talks, did not go unnoticed. Once both governments ratified the Luxembourg Agreement, Israel needed to send a delegation to oversee the economic details of transferring the large annual sums of reparations to Israel. Although the Israeli central government had originally passed over Shinnar, he was their first choice to head the Israel Mission that would be stationed in Köln, West Germany, twenty miles outside the capital of Bonn, where Shinnar would stay for twelve years. As head of the mission from 1953-1965, Shinnar oversaw almost all major communications between the two Penn History Review

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governments at the highest level, ranging from military agreements and discussions over continued economic aid to the increasingly insistent Israeli demands for full diplomatic recognition.

For many staffed at the Israel mission, their sojourn in West Germany was of personal significance far beyond their diplomatic duties. The employees of the Israel mission consisted almost entirely of German-born Israelis. For them, living in Köln meant returning to a country left behind years ago, often just as the political climate began to become dangerous for them.15 Upon the delegates’ arrival in Köln, the language, food, and culture that they had grown up with and left returned. This would have been strikingly different from the political atmosphere of Israel despite the many German immigrants there, since expression of a diasporic culture, especially that of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, was socially stigmatized. Shinnar’s own memoirs never mention the fact that his arrival in West Germany was, for him, a return to his culture of origin. In fact, Shinnar wrote his memoirs less as a personal chronicle than an apparently objective account of the development of Israel’s relations with West Germany, where he so happened to serve as the main character for so long. Yet on a closer reading, signs emerge of an Israeli citizen desperately trying to reconcile his past with the realities of the Israeli state’s disavowal of anything German.

Shinnar’s private and public correspondence provide hints as to why he actively sought to control official relations between the two countries. These documents present evidence that Shinnar developed an internal association between Israel’s chances to reconcile with West Germany and a reconciliation between his own past and current personal identity. Nowhere was this more clear than during an interview with a German journalist at the end of Shinnar’s career, when Shinnar compared the success of Israeli-West German relations and his subsequent departure from Köln to his previous departure from Germany. “Just as my flight from Germany in early 1934 will stay unforgettable, so too will the 20

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memory of this dignified and final reunion with the Germany of today accompany me for the rest of my life.”16 While Shinnar did not go further in his comparison, the link between geopolitical shifts between the two countries and his own personal identity as a German immigrant to Israel clearly made an impression on the middle-aged diplomat. This connection in large part explains why Shinnar dedicated twelve years of his career to the issue of Bonn-Jerusalem relations.

Shinnar’s personal conceptions of West Germany also had a profound effect on how he conducted himself during these twelve years in office. Shinnar had a personal stake in the success of West German-Israeli relations that few other Israeli politicians shared. While his views were in the minority, he controlled all major communications between the two governments, which meant that his interest in having official relations develop often overshadowed the less conciliatory tones of both parties. In these scenarios, Shinnar was always clear to emphasize his unequivocal support of the Israeli state. In reality, his pragmatic and evenhanded presentation of Israeli interests to West German officials often ended up belying the harsher approaches that the Israeli internal government intended to use with West Germany. As the only major face of the Israeli government in West Germany, Shinnar was able to mitigate Israeli frustration at West Germany’s inability to promise tangible commitments and the animosity of the Israeli public towards any agreements with West Germany at all.

The issue of potential European-wide sanctions in the aftermath of the Sinai War presents an early example of Shinnar’s effect on West German-Israeli politics.17 After Israel’s offensive against Egypt in 1956, the United Nations Security Council began discussing the possibility of economic sanctions against Israel as punishment and deterrent for the offensive. Since West Germany had observer status in the United Nations, the Security Council’s talks had the potential to affect the Luxembourg Penn History Review

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Agreement’s reparations and cut off vital economic support for the Israeli state’s new infastructure. Because of the sanctions’ ability to affect the Israeli economy, the Mapai government sent Shinnar to ascertain what potential international sanctions of Israel meant for West German-Israeli relations and specifically the Luxembourg Agreement.

Despite the rather frantic concerns of the government expressed in internal documents, Shinnar later described the event in his characteristically flattering manner as merely a minor blip in confidence towards the goodwill of West German politicians. Moreover, Shinnar diverted the blame for any potential threat from the West German government and onto John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state. In his memoirs, Shinnar characterized the West German government as dedicated to reparations and in disagreement with the United States’ favorable views towards sanctions. Shinnar explained to his readers that, “Adenauer’s attitude towards the handling of the Suez question was …one of the few political questions on which he did not share the same viewpoint as his friend Dulles.”18 Shinnar additionally downplayed the Israeli government’s concern for their potential loss in aid as a governmental concern that UN sanctions could cause “a temporary interruption” to reparations.19 This instance also demonstrates Shinnar’s position of power within the context of West German-Israeli relations.

Unable to communicate personally or through an official embassy, Ben-Gurion sent Shinnar with a “personal message… to clarify the situation.”20 This letter was one of many such “personal messages” that Shinnar would present overseas in the coming years, a means of communication between the two heads of state that stood in for a lack of face-to-face meetings. Though Shinnar did not dictate the contents of these personal messages, he was in charge of their translation from Hebrew to German.

Therefore, while Shinnar spoke in the words of Ben-Gurion, he

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many politicians considered this a win-win situation: both states could benefit from the relationship without triggering the ire of Egypt towards Bonn and of the Israeli public towards Jerusalem.

For Shinnar, this was not enough. During a conference at the main office of Israeli foreign office in 1961, Shinnar brought up that efforts to establish official relations, which Foreign Office began several years prior, had fallen by the wayside. He suggested that his office begin quiet attempts at establishing diplomatic relations.21 Diplomatic relations, reasoned Shinnar, were a means of countering a major fear of the Central Foreign Office: strengthened ties between West Germany and Egypt.

Israel’s efforts were all the more urgent since Egypt currently had the upper hand of official diplomatic relations with West Germany.21 After Shinnar’s suggestion, the Central Foreign Office of Jerusalem began instructing Shinnar to focus on this issue, and official relations with West Germany became a key goal of Israeli foreign policy.

By early 1962, West German politicians were willing to take further steps towards the process by establishing a West German consulate similar to the Israeli envoy in Köln.22 The Israeli government now fixed on achieving nothing less than unequivocal official relations with West Germany, both to help legitimize their own state and detract from support for Egypt. While the Israeli government still actively sought secret agreements with the West German government, any public recognition would need to be in the form of standard official diplomatic relations, as opposed to an interim status of semiofficial relations that the West German government favored.

Both Shinnar and the Central Foreign Office actively resisted an interim move, concerned that once partial relations were established, West Germany would never find a compelling reason to shift to full diplomatic status. And so in the early 1960s, Israel’s policy of pursuing official relations with West Germany closely followed Shinnar’s own vision of a full diplomatic relationship Penn History Review

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Felix E. Shinnar during his tenure as head of the Israeli delegation to Kรถln, November 17, 1959

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between the two states.

While Shinnar’s measured but insistent methods also characterized this phase in West German-Israeli relations, not everyone in the Israeli government appreciated Shinnar’s approach. Shinnar received several serious challenges to his leadership ability during his tenure as head of the Israeli delegation, and these obstacles highlight the overall climate of Israeli politics from which Shinnar diverged. The most direct challenge came from a letter from Yohanan Meroz to Foreign Minister Golda Meir, where he expressed serious reservations about the non-confronational nature of Shinnar’s diplomatic tactics. After a brief stint serving under Shinnar as deputy head of the Israeli delegation in the late 1950s, Meroz wrote to Meir in 1961, pushing her to take advantage of West Germany’s international insecurity during the Soviet Union’s building of the Berlin wall. In direct contrast to Shinnar’s conciliatory diplomacy, Meroz suggested that the Central Foreign Office orchestrate an “German-Israeli (Jewish) ‘crisis of confidence’ through public condemnation of Germany’s attitude… [since] they lied to us and cheated us for years.”23 Meroz’s interpretation of West German actions had little of the faith that Shinnar placed in the West German politicians with whom he worked, and indeed little faith in Shinnar himself. In a thinly veiled reference to Shinnar’s approach, Meroz informed Meir that he was “convinced that this path presents a better prospect than the path we have gone down thus far, the path of gentlemanly debate.”24 Despite this critique to the Foreign Minister, Meir’s directions to Shinnar did not noticeably change after Meroz’s letter. Issued a day after the letter, the Central Foreign Office presented basic guidelines to Shinnar with no suggestion that Shinnar change his approach.

However, the basic sentiment of frustration at West Germany’s inaction that had fueled Meroz’s suggestions carried over into the Central Foreign Office’s letter. It suggested that Shinnar express the government’s “deep disappointment” at the stagnation of Penn History Review

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progress on a variety of agreements between the two countries.25 Almost two years after Meroz’s letter, the Israel Mission’s efforts seemed to have lead to a breakthrough. On March 8, 1963, the West German government made its first official announcement indicating that it was willing and interested in discussing the potential of establishing official relations with Israel.26 However, this apparent success for Shinnar would quickly become muted in light of the Israeli-generated negative publicity appearing just weeks later. When Swiss police captured a Mossad agent threatening the daughter of a West German scientist working with the Egyptian military, the Israeli government had sought an international story that would shift public attention away from Israel’s extralegal activities on foreign soil. The Israeli government began to publicly decry the West German government’s inaction against the West German scientists in Egypt that Mossad had threatened. Israel’s defamation of the West German government also stemmed from the mistaken fear that these scientists were helping Egypt to develop chemical and nuclear missiles for use in an upcoming war against Israel.

Ironically, the Israeli central government’s public denouncement of the West German government’s inaction against their citizens reflected Meroz’s previously suggested model of “crisis of confidence” and reflected the more sceptical side of Israeli internal policies towards West Germany. Yet contrary to Meroz’s prediction, increasingly hostile Israeli public opinion targeted at West Germany pushed the potential for West German-Israeli relations further from realization.

Relations and Reconciliation After the West German scientists affair began, public reconciliation between Bonn and Jerusalem seemed less realistic then it had in years. By 1963, the two major statesmen most dedicated to developing normalized relations between Israel and West Germany had left their respective positions. In the last 26

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year, both Adenauer and Ben-Gurion had permanently resigned from their positions as heads of state. These two men, who served as father figures of their countries, had supported the Luxembourg Agreement and publicly defended it so that it could become a reality. The two men’s brief yet widely publicized meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York had secured a West German development loan for Israel and presented a public commitment to reconciliation. This meeting served as the only time heads of state between the two countries would meet in person until after 1965. With the loss of both Adenauer and Ben-Gurion, their personal desires for official relations between West Germany and Israel also lost political weight. Instead, the new heads of state, Levi Eshkol and Ludwig Erhard, presided over a rapid deterioration of Jerusalem-Bonn relations as the issue of the West German scientists dragged on with no clear solution for either country. Erhard’s promises to punish West German citizens working for the Egyptian military required legislative changes. As with other significant changes that Israel supported, the proposed law to cancel the passports of scientists who remained in Egypt became stuck in the Bundestag with little sign of resolution. This additional delay only exacerbated Israeli politicians’ existing frustrations with Bonn.

Shinnar’s letters to the Central Office carried an exceptionally placating tone during this period, reminding the Israeli ministers of the limits of German action without the agreement of Bundestag, which had considerably less interest in furthering West German-Israeli relations. He highlighted the difficulties of getting an entire legislation with all its opposing perspectives to support Israel’s admittedly controversial constitutional changes that would alter the very fabric of West German citizens’ rights. Moreover, between the Chancellor, Foreign Office, Defense Department, and the politicians in the Bundestag, any internal change Israel wished to support, achieved without their common use of back channels, would Penn History Review

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be significantly more time consuming. To back up his claims, Shinnar repeatedly reminded his colleagues of his years of personal experience on the matter, especially when conversation between domestic Israeli politicians became heated.27 In late 1964, what had become a brief period of reconciliation between the two countries through the tank deal ended up damaging Jerusalem-Bonn relations even further.28 After the deal’s collapse, the Israeli Central Foreign Office sent Bonn its ultimatum demanding all promised tanks and full diplomatic relations through Shinnar. Bonn refused, and so Shinnar returned to Israel as per his instructions from the Central Foreign Office. With Shinnar’s arrival in Jerusalem, Israeli-West German relations seemed ready to fall apart completely. Upon Shinnar’s return, Eshkol held a cabinet meeting to determine whether to break off private relations with West Germany entirely or continue to pursue a declaration of official relations.

During this meeting Shinnar served as the prime expert on what West Germany might do next and how Israel should respond.

While cabinet members discussed several suggestions, Shinnar’s view prevailed again, as he assured the cabinet members to listen to his expertise and continue to pursue official relations.28 The threat to break all contact with West Germany never materialized, and the Israeli government decided to make a final push towards complete official relations with West Germany.

Shinnar’s continued belief in the goodwill of the West German government during a low point in West GermanIsraeli relations finally produced the ultimate goal. From February to March 1965, West German-Egyptian relations quickly deteriorated, in large part due to the publicity of West Germany’s extensive secret contacts with Israel. The final break came with Egypt’s invitation to East German politician Walter Ulbrecht to visit Egypt on what was effectively, if not nominally, a state visit. This visit catalyzed the West German government to send a telegram requesting official diplomatic 28

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relations to a rather unsuspecting Israeli government.29 With the fate of relations with Egypt now considered a foregone conclusion, the Bundestag quickly passed through a resolution to extend complete diplomatic relations to Israel. Had the Israeli government decided to break off only a few months earlier, Shinnar’s devotion to Israeli-West German relations even in the face of potential frustrations might have very well collapsed.

Shinnar’s de facto monopoly on the tone of communication between the two countries and his domestic colleagues’ trust in his expertise helped him present the best of the West German government to Israeli politicians who expected the worst from former citizens of the Third Reich.

Days after receiving West Germany’s offer of official recognition, the Knesset passed a resolution to accept, although not without complaints from many of the opposition parties considering such an action dishonoring the memories of those murdered in the Holocaust.30 Many Israelis continued to see a West German ambassador as a representative of the Third Reich in the months following the agreement. Shinnar’s “dignified and final reunion” had stood in sharp contrast to Foreign Minister Golda Meir public assurance that “As far as I am concerned, there is one rule regarding the German people. Every German, whether in the East or the West, is guilty in my eyes.”31 Shinnar’s personal identification with West Germany, provided a counter to the Israeli national narrative of its place in the Holocaust, and created an alternate path for economic, military, and eventually diplomatic relations with West Germany that helped coach patience from the Israeli State, serving as a vital bridge between two similar but deeply divided countries. Without this singular devotion, discussions between the two states would have certainly been more fraught, potentially leading to a relationshipending dispute before 1965. Ultimately, Shinnar’s commitment to viewing official relations as a cathartic act of reconciliation would serve as the dominant tone for future public discourse Penn History Review

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from both Israeli and West German politicians as relations between the countries further strengthened in the late 1960s and 1970s. And when Adenauer came to visit Israel for the first time in 1966, the first Chancellor or former Chancellor of West Germany to do so, he and Ben-Gurion met again as private citizens at a gathering in Adenauer’s honor, surrounded by Israeli officials, and hosted in the house of Felix E. Shinnar.

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These demands represented a complicated web of historical considerations and contemporary political concerns that faced the Israeli government. The other sections of my thesis, of which this is a chapter, discussed the public pressures against Israeli relations with West Germany due to an Israeli national identification of West Germany with the Nazi state. The Israeli politicians were more concerned with international validation of the Israeli state over Arab claims, and so approached West German recognition with considerable urgency and little patience. Both perspectives often produced roadblocks to official relations and complicated the Bundestag’s (West German legislature) willingness to consider such a step.

2 The Luxembourg Agreement was a reparations agreement that stated West Germany would supply the 2014 equivalent of 7.45 billion dollars, primarily in West German goods and services, to the state of Israel. This agreement served as partial restitution for the immense loss of Jewish life and property during the reign of the Third Reich. The commission was initially in charge of managing these reparations, although it came to serve as an unofficial embassy between the two states.

3 Jay Howard Geller, Jews in post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 233.

4 The Yishuv is a contemporary term used to refer to the population of Jews in pre-Israeli Palestine, many of whom had immigrated before 1933 due to a Zionist dedication to creating a new Jewish state. Changing one’s name was a common step for Jewish immigrants both before and after the beginning of the Israeli state. This practice demonstrates the quick development of an Israeli national feeling even before the founding of an Israeli state. This patriotism shunned diasporic cultures and stigmatized Jews that clung to them rather than embrace the quickly developing Israeli national identity.

5 “Felix Shinnar Dead at 80,” Jewish Telegraph Agency, May 17, 1985. Accessed November 24, 2014. http://www.jta.org/1985/05/17/archive/felix-shinnardead-at-80.

6 “Geltendmachung der materiellen Ansprüche des jüdischen Volkes gegen Deutschland.“ Felix Shinnar, Bericht eines Beauftragten: Die deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen 1951-1966, (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1967), 20.

7 “Dr. Josephtal, Israel Minister, Dies of Heart Attack in Switzerland,” Jewish Telegraph Agency, August 23, 1962. Accessed November 24, 2014. http:// www.jta.org/1962/08/23/archive/dr-josephtal-israel-minister-dies-of-heartattack-in-switzerland.

8 Geller, Jews in post-Holocaust Germany, 233.

9 Most opposition parties, like the Israeli public writ large, saw reparations to Israel as bloodmoney and a demonstration of forgiveness fort he crimes of

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10 Shinnar, Bericht eines Beauftragten 33-4. The Liberal-Progressive party at the time of this event was still in the opposition in the Knesset during these discussions. However, the two parties were by no means on severely antagonistic terms demonstrated by the fact that the Pogressive-Liberal party would join the coalition government months later when a new government coalition was created on December 24, 1952 11 “Ben Gurion, dem hit zugehörigen Regierungsschef und Initiator für die Verhandlungen mit der Bundesrepublik, hatte natürlich das unbestreitbare Recht, ihren Mann an der Spitze der Delegation zu wissen” Ibid.

12 Geller, Jews in post-Holocaust Germany, 233.

13 Ibid.

14 P. G. “German Reparations to Israel: The 1952 Treaty and Its Effects,” The World Today 10 (1954): 268. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40392739.

15 It is important to note that the staff of the Israeli Mission consisted of German Jews that had primarily immigrated, like Shinnar, in the early stages of the Third Reich from 1933-1939. While these staffers may have lost friends and family in the Holocaust, they were not themselves Holocaust survivors in a direct sense.

16 Original: Wie mir meine Auswanderung aus Deutschland im Frühjahr 1934 unvergeßlich geblieben ist, so wird mich die Erinnerung an diese würdige und endgültige Wiederbegegnung mit dem Deutschland von heute für den Rest meines Lebens begleiten.” Werner Höfer, „Abschied beim Neubeginn: Israels Boschalter Felix Shinnar hat seine Mission erfüllt,“ Zeit May 21, 1965.

Accessed November 14, 2014. http://www.zeit.de/1965/21/abschied-beimneubeginn/seite-4.

17 The Sinai War began in 1956 when the Egyptian president Gamal Abd alNasser nationalized the internationally vital Suez canal, which had previously belonged to a joint English-French company. In response, Israeli forces entered the Sinai Peninsula in what the Israeli leaders considered a preemptive defensive strike, with British and French forces following two days later. Other European countries and America considered this offensive an act of unprompted aggression from all three parties, and at several points discussed, but never implemented, official sanctions.

18 “Die Einstellung Adenauers zur Behandlung der Suez-Frage durch Nasser kennend - es war eine der wenigen politischen fragen, in der er mit seinem Freund Dulles nicht gleicher Ansicht war“, Shinnar, Bericht eines Beauftragten, 75.

19 “einer zeitweisen Unterbrechung der Durchführung für gering.” Ibid.

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“persönliches Schreiben… die Situation zu erklären, die einen solchen Schritt objektiv weder zuließ noch rechtfertigte.” Ibid.

21 Mordechai Shalev to Chaim Yahil, February 10, 1961, ISA/RG130.23/ MFA/3319/4.

22 Leo Savir to West European Division, April 15, 1962 ISA/RG130.23/ MFA/3399/12.

23 Yohanan Meroz to Golda Meir and Chaim Yahil, August 30, 1961, ISA/ RG130.02/MFA4316/5.

24 Ibid.

25 “akhzavato ha-amokah”. Basic Guidelines to Felix E. Shinnar on Germany’s Position on Israel’s Association with Common Market, August 31, 1961, ISA/ RG130.23/MFA/3309/15.

26 Announcement, Official Spokesman of the German Government, March 8, 1963, ISA/RG130.23/MFA/3399/3.

27 Stenographer’s Notes, Cabinet Meeting ISA/HG/16217/3.

28 With the backing of the United States government, the Israeli government had pressured Erhard into secretly giving 200 M-48 tanks to Israel in early 1964. West Germany had previously supported their claims of neutrality towards Egypt by pointing to their lack of military trade with Israel, and so this tank deal went against their publicly stated foreign policy. By fall 1964, this trade had become international news, and rapidly eroded West Germany’s relationship with Egypt. West Germany’s attempts to repair their relationship with Egypt came at the expense of privately promised agreements with Israel, which in turn alienated the Israeli government.

29 Shimon Peres to Levi Eshkol, March 13, 1965, ISA/RG130.02/ MFA/4329/3.

30 The public distrust and hatred of West Germany as inheritor of the Third Reich channeled into opposition parties’ rhetoric in 1965 in much the same way as it had in 1952 during discussions of the Luxembourg agreement. However, during both periods Mapai had enough power to pass these decisions through the legislature regardless. See Netanel Lorch, ed. Major Knesset Debates, 1948-1981, trans. Dorthea Vanson-Shefer, Vols. 3-4. (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993), 1345.

31 Ian S. Lustick, “Negotiating Truth: The Holocaust, Lehavdil, and al-Nakba” Journal of International Affairs 60 (2006): 54.

Images: Page 8: “Shinnar’s House,” Wikimedia Commons, http://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-P092350,_Israel,_

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Page 24: “Bundesarchiv,� via Wikimedia Commons. http://archives.gov.il/ArchiveGov/gallery/gallery12/pic07.htm April 30, 2015).

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Before Liberation:

Political Ideology and Self-Expression in the U.S. Homophile Movement, 1950-1965

Dawn H. Androphy The American homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s marks a turning point in the development of homosexuality as a minority identity and, ultimately, a civil rights movement for gay men and lesbians to be recognized as equal under the law. For the first time ever, groups of individuals were meeting regularly, producing publications, and engaging with the general public while openly identifying as homosexuals (or, depending on the person, as homophiles, gay men, gay women, or lesbians). Though it would be hyperbolic and historically inaccurate to say that no gay and lesbian community existed before the American homophile movement, there is nevertheless something unique about the homophiles and the degree of formality with which they organized and raised awareness.

Only a few hundred people were actively engaged in groups such as the Mattachine Society, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), and ONE, Incorporated, but several thousand individuals in total read their publications. More importantly, perhaps, these groups and their activities gained coverage in the mainstream press, garnering a great deal of publicity for this new type of burgeoning homosexual community. By 1964, over a decade after the first major homophile organizations were founded, the topic of homosexuality became the subject of a lengthy feature article in LIFE, one of the nation’s most popular magazines: Homosexuality shears across the spectrum of American life—the professions, the arts, business and labor. It always has. But today, especially in big cities, homosexuals are discarding their furtive ways and openly admitting, Penn History Review

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A sampling of three early issues of the Mattachine Review. While it is estimated that the publication’s circulation only reached about 2,500, the magazine is estimated to have reached many more individuals as many subscribers likely shared issues of the magazine with their friends. Within the pages of the magazine, homophile leaders articulated the beginnings of a gay identity and politics.

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even flaunting their own deviation.1 This infamous article was a shock to both the heterosexual Americans reading it and to the homophile movement that saw itself being prominently discussed in a mainstream publication (even if rather unfavorably). The article discussed supposedly recent controversial developments such as the fact that “homosexuals [had] their own drinking places, their special assignation streets, even their own organizations.”2 Finally, what LIFE considered to be perhaps the most concerning aspect of growing homosexual visibility in the postwar era was that, “for every obvious homosexual, there [were] probably nine nearly impossible to detect.”3 In a time of Cold War paranoia about Communists living secretly among the population, concerns about homosexuality being dangerously entrenched in society took on a similar language.

The American homophile movement of the 1950s and 60s has been the subject of much scrutiny and appraisal alike. Its chronology and goals are difficult to define, especially because the homophile movement encompassed a variety of influential groups. Further, some groups took on a different character across different chapters and cities. This splintering and fragmentation within the movement only increased over time as more groups and chapters were created. One could even argue that groups similar to the homophiles emerged even earlier than the 1950s. In 1945, for example, the Veterans Benevolent Association was formed in New York City by several honorably discharged gay men who organized dances and parties that attracted up to around five hundred homosexual attendees.4 On the west coast, the Knights of the Clock in Los Angeles gathered in the late 1940s as an organization for “interracially involved homosexuals and their families to meet, enjoy themselves, and discuss mutual problems.”5 Finally, in 1947, lesbians in Los Angeles created Penn History Review

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a magazine called Vice Versa and published nine issues that reached a very small audience.6 Despite the existence of earlier organizations, one can assign the year 1950 as a starting date of sorts for the homophile movement. This year marks the formation of the Mattachine Foundation, whose creation sparked the emergence of similar groups over the next several years. Mattachine arguably had a more political and identity-based set of goals than its predecessors and was by far the most organized, with a constitution, board of trustees, and written mission statement. Some homophile groups such as the Janus Society of Philadelphia gained traction in their own cities over the years, but few groups were able to achieve a national following.

By the mid-1960s, a gradual shift in ideology occurred within Mattachine and groups like it. Though this shift created a foundation for the gay liberation movement, gay liberationists also used the homophile movement as a symbol of bourgeois assimilationism against which to rebel.

The homophiles were a movement of people who contemplated their sexuality not just through the lens of personal identity, but also as an identity that impacted their political ideology, expression and citizenship. The homophile movement at once recognized that they were a distinct group with unique disadvantages while also aspiring towards assimilating into society at large, just as many religious and ethnic groups had. Sometimes, the tools used by the homophile movement to educate themselves and others about their identity derived from the very medical institutions that had pathologized them for decades or the institution of the middle class American family that erased them. However, homophiles used whatever tools they could to be seen as ordinary citizens who happened to be attracted to the same sex. The homophile movement was a reflection on what exactly it meant to be a homosexual in America, as well as a movement that, through 38

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education of themselves and the general public, sought for homosexuals to have a visible place in American society as citizens and valuable contributors to society.

When studying the homophile movement of the 1950s and1960s, one might expect to uncover a revolutionary grouping of organizations that functioned as active political cells, impeded by the political context of the time. In actuality, much of the historical scholarship about the homophile movement seems to view it from within the context of the subsequent attacks against it by the gay liberation movement: after seeing homophile organizations unfairly spurned by their successors, some historians have sought to valorize LGBTQ elders and place the works of homophile organizations on a pedestal; meanwhile, others have dismissed these groups’ impact completely. These tendencies suggest that the deeply personal nature of gay history has prevented many from objectively assessing the value, goals, achievements, and downfalls of the homophile movement. My work seeks to challenge perceptions of homophile organizations as either valiant pioneers or abject failures, focusing specifically on the Mattachine Society. Instead, I argue that Mattachine’s goals, ideology, identity, and interaction with readers of its publications represent the start of a new kind of gay and lesbian identity that set the ideological foundation of the contemporary LGBT rights movement. Using a combination of papers intended for members of Mattachine, as well as publications and materials intended for public consumption, this analysis captures the objectives and goals of Mattachine organizers, as well as the image they collectively created from their public podium.

As historian George Chauncey argues, communities of homosexually active people certainly existed before the homophile movement. In his book Gay New York, Chauncey states that “gay male society was a highly visible part of Penn History Review

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the urban sexual underworld”7 in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, recounting a flourishing culture of effeminate men who called themselves “fairies” and had sex with men. While fairy culture was empowering for some, however, “it also alienated many others who were repelled by the fairy’s flamboyant style and his loss of manly status.”8 For these men, their sexual identity was based upon their attraction to men, not their supposed status as an invert. As a result, the time period during the first third of the twentieth century “marked the growing differentiation and isolation of sexuality from gender in middle-class American culture.”9 These individuals asserted that one could identify as having samesex desires without performing womanly gender roles, and by the 1910s and 1920s, referred to themselves as “homosexual” or “queer”10 instead of “fairy” or “faggot.” While “ordinary” working-class men had previously engaged in sexual relations as an “aggressor” with fairies without much consideration, the emerging identities of middle-class homosexuals who didn’t tie their identity sexuality to womanhood challenged this set of assumptions. Once same-sex desire didn’t necessarily mean relinquishing one’s status as a man, middle-class men were forced “to consider the possibility of a sexual element in their relations with other men.”11 Thus, men identified themselves as heterosexual in order to be placed in direct contrast with the behavior of supposed sexual deviants.

In many ways, these middle class men who identified their same-sex desires as unrelated to an inverted gender identity were the direct predecessors of the homophiles.

Men who didn’t identify with fairy culture or heterosexuality increasingly clung to a medical model of homosexuality that emerged in the late nineteenth century Europe as part of a broader scientific focus on sexual desire. The two main purveyors of this model were James Kiernan and Richard Von Kraft-Ebbing. Kiernan described heterosexuals as being outside 40

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the norm for their intense sexual attraction to the opposite sex and viewed heterosexuals as displaying “double deviance”12 because of their desire for sex outside of procreation. In contrast, Krafft-Ebing’s version of “hetero-sexual” more closely resembled the normative identity we know today. Finally, Sigmund Freud theorized that heterosexuality was “maturity,” in contrast to the “fixated” and “immature” homosexuality.13 By the twentieth century, “in the name of Freud and popular psychology, heterosexuality would be proclaimed throughout the land as, simply perfection,”14 and sexuality had become increasingly viewed within a medical context. However, once individuals began socializing with one another on the basis of a shared homosexual identity, the concept of sexual attraction began to expand beyond just a medical definition.

In Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, John D’Emilio writes that the homophiles were the first to identify homosexuals as a group of people with a solid identity they could define themselves as, not just people with similar patterns of sexual attraction or personal problems.15 Further, he argues that “the conditions for a homosexual and lesbian identity to emerge” were a result of industrial capitalism that led flocks of young people to move to cities,16 as well as the general cultural shift that occurred after World War II. After the war, a gay subculture emerged when veterans who had discovered their sexual identity while serving in the military returned to the United States and moved to urban areas. For the first time, bars exclusively for gay people opened, which “fostered an identity that was both public and collective,”17 as opposed to more discreet gathering places of the past. D’Emilio theorizes that the greater visibility of gay people allowed, in some ways, for more targeted discrimination of gay men and lesbians as a group. He also argues that discrimination brought homosexuals together by “hasten[ing] the articulation of a homosexual identity and spread[ing] the knowledge that they existed in large Penn History Review

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numbers.”18 Thus, the homophile movement emerged as an organized effort to create a place in postwar American society for homosexuality and was essential in developing a concept of homosexuality as a personal identity.

The first homophile group was Mattachine, whose founders viewed homosexuals as a minority unaware of their minority status and in need of a unifying and supportive organization.19 Of the homophile groups, the Mattachine Society is easily the best known in popular culture and the most studied by academic historians. Originally founded as the Mattachine Foundation in November 1950, when five men met at former Communist organizer Harry Hay’s home in Los Angeles,20 they named themselves after a French medieval and renaissance group called the Mattachines.21 They were attracted to this name, in part, because the medieval Mattachines wore masks and were performers of sorts. Moreover, the founders of the group created a mythology around their namesake that they believed reflected the character of their organization: “They lived and moved in circles of the nobility. They dared to speak the truth in the face of stern authority, regardless of the consequences. And they were men of wisdom.”22 This depiction of the Mattachines fits well with the group’s perception of itself as an “invisible minority” that was unrecognizable to most but nonetheless was “living and moving amid all people and all cultures of the world.”23 A few years later, the group dissolved and re-imagined itself as the more democratic and less exclusive Mattachine Society in 1953.24 While the Mattachine were well-known for hosting small discussion groups and events in the few (typically large) cities that had chapters, they made perhaps their greatest impact through their monthly publication The Mattachine Review that reached hundreds of subscribers in every corner of the country. In the pages of the Review, editors and oftenpseudonymous contributors wrote about identity, social science, 42

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and the political implications of the homophile movement.

In a world devoid of positive representations of gay men, The Mattachine Review served as an essential lifeline for many gay men. The diversity of readers’ openness about their sexuality is reflected in The Mattachine Review’s Summer 1955 issue: while the circulation numbers for this issue are unclear, The Mattachine Review had an approximate circulation of 2,200,25 with each copy likely being shared amongst many readers. Over time, D’Emilio theorizes, magazines such as the Review “created common language and ultimately identity” nationwide for the burgeoning gay and lesbian communities.26 The Mattachine Society and other homophile groups were not, however, as radical as one might assume.

Mattachine’s goal was to “demonstrate that homosexuals were solid citizens”27 through education efforts, and they pushed aside any ideas of militant mobilization or fundamentally changing societal views about sexual orientation.28 According to D’Emilio, people didn’t want to join anything tinged with radicalism during the 1950s, and the cultural and political conditions needed to change for “a gay emancipation movement to grow and become strong.”29 In an organization where the desire for respectability was paramount and there existed a justified fear of government retribution, any potential for mass mobilization was impossible. Most members of homophile organizations were fearful of associating themselves with a radical cause, particularly in the early years of the movement, even though some homophile leaders were in fact associated with leftist causes. Mattachine Society members, for example, were too nervous to even drop off event fliers at bookstores,30 and the Daughters of Bilitis established many barriers to entry for new members due to fear of infiltration from outside forces.

Though valid, these concerns nonetheless prevented the groups from ever attaining more than a small number Penn History Review

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of core members—as D’Emilio points out, “the hard-core activists who ran the organizations remained leaders without many followers.”31 Arguably, in order for gay liberation to eventually gain momentum, the trepidation of the homophile movement was a necessary first step. Homophile activists were not prepared to truly rebel against societal structures, as they had not yet concretely articulated their own minority identity. D’Emilio concedes, “for the most part homophile activists remained curiously detached from the rebellions that were rocking the nation.”32 For the homophiles, however, simply being in communication with one another and building homosexual communities was an act that radically challenged the societal conventions of the time.

This respectability-based focus is illustrated in an article entitled “Homosexuality…Is It a Handicap or a Talent?” by Luther Allen (likely a pseudonym). Given his audience, Allen’s ultimate goal in writing his column was to empower gay men to see themselves as equal to heterosexuals through philosophical, political, and moral arguments. Allen begins the column with the provocative statement that “inversion is a talent,”33 but clarifies that seeing people as beautiful is also a “talent.”34 Allen additionally concedes that the medical model of homosexuality is somewhat beneficial in that homosexuality is no longer seen as a sin. As historian John D’Emilio argues, many homophiles embraced the medical model because, “in contrast to immorality and crime, illness elicited compassion…”35 However, Allen diverges by arguing with a psychologist who stated that homosexuals don’t have a “moral defect,” but are “emotionally crippled.”36 He outright rejects this viewpoint, even though “on the one hand it sounded plausible enough and it was at least a far more tolerant view than most.”37 In Allen’s eyes, people with this viewpoint are simply following the human instinct of believing that their way is better. Allen doesn’t vilify this instinct, but asserts that “it is only when the 44

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heterosexual assumes that what is happiest and best for him would be happiest and best for everyone else that fault-finding is justified.”38 Allen makes the argument that homosexuals and heterosexuals are not only equal, but also that “sexual love may possess just as profound a meaning for the homosexual as for the heterosexual couple.”39 Further, Allen believes that to argue that heterosexuals are superior simply because they can procreate “degrades human sexuality to the level of the stud farm.”40 Ultimately, Allen criticizes the concept that any sexual orientation is superior and encourages readers to recognize that there are sinful and respectable people amongst heterosexuals and homosexuals alike: “Let’s not exaggerate the virtues of either sex world…”41 In this way, Allen at once asserts the equality of homosexuals while also differentiating between gay men whom he would consider respectable and those whom he would consider immoral. Allen certainly believes that there exists a better class of people who practice appropriate sexuality, but he argues that moral homosexuals should be included in this group.

Finally, Allen employs emotional appeals to convince readers of homosexuality’s normalcy. Allen states that, quite simply, “It just plain makes me happy to see a good-looking guy.”42 He uses the strategy of focusing on love, encouraging readers to see the love between two men or two women as a beautiful thing: “each kind of love represents a union of one human being with another.”43 While this is certainly a true statement, Allen’s argument strategically centers on love instead of lust. He does not argue that same-sex and opposite-sex sexual relations are equivalent, but rather focuses on the more respectable values of love and romance. By using this kind of language, Allen strategically places himself and homosexuals within the framework of romantic love that proliferated mass media and intimate relationships. Historian Christina Simmons Penn History Review

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describes the ways in which the standard of “companionate” marriage for middle class heterosexual couples proliferated in the 1920s through 1940s by way of marriage manuals that promised equality in “general respect and decision making” through a married couple’s healthy romantic and sex life.44 This “revisionist” definition of marriage placed romantic and sexual love at the forefront as opposed to more practical economic bases of marriage.45 Allen essentially places forth an even more idealized depiction of homosexual love that erases sexual attraction in favor of the more palatable romantic love.

We can see Allen’s essay as preaching to the choir in that it was written in a magazine for gay men and women. However, this essay’s persuasive tone indicates that he is attempting to convince the gay men and women reading this essay of their equal value and providing them with a set of arguments to affirm their identity to themselves and others. Though Allen’s argument that homosexuals and heterosexuals are equal is somewhat radical for the time, he still adheres to middle-class values through his focus on loving monogamous relationships and respectability. Allen sees homosexuals and heterosexuals as each having the gift of “love,” but he certainly doesn’t see all homosexual relationships as being equal under the evaluation of the homophile movement’s emphasis on middle class respectability. This piece is meant to empower gay men, but only the “respectable” kind.

This emphasis on respectability additionally appears in the publicity materials and internal memos of the Mattachine Society. During the 1950s, the Mattachine Society of New York produced a series of pamphlets, presumably to publicize the group’s existence and project a positive image of the group.

One pamphlet featured a cover with a drawing of two neatly dressed white men with conservative haircuts and ties along with the caption: “Serving all needs of all homosexuals.”46 The content of the pamphlets, however, sends another message 46

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entirely. In another pamphlet, the cover depicted a sad sketch of a man’s face in black and white with the caption: “How Can I Ever Face the World?”47 The inside of the pamphlet included a section entitled “What Does New York Mattachine Do?” wherein the author listed the services that this chapter provided. After listing several services and describing them in detail, the section concluded with: Above all, Mattachine is a voice of hope for many millions of homosexuals who are not under psychiatric care or in any kind of penal or corrective institution.

Mattachine is the most reliable source of accurate information for newsmen, researchers, journalists, public officials, and others. Mattachine has become a word of encouragement to the better adjusted, less sensational, and more useful homosexual who not only makes valuable contributions to society, but is a decent law-abiding citizen.48 This statement is disturbing for a variety of reasons in that it clearly demonstrates that Mattachine was only an organization for homosexuals it deemed worthy or even capable of receiving help. This pamphlet clarifies that Mattachine has no interest in helping homosexuals “under psychiatric care or in any kind of penal or corrective institution,” feels these individuals to be beyond repair or some combination of the two. Mattachine did not claim to be a resource for the most impoverished or the most vulnerable members of the homosexual community, but for the “better adjusted, less sensational, and more useful” individuals who happened to be homosexual.

The Mattachine Review itself hinted at these sorts of conformist values, but the limited scope of the organization was conveyed more bluntly in other materials. In newsletters and pamphlets created by local chapters, we see a more direct message about Mattachine’s views on citizenship and Penn History Review

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assimilation. In a 1957 newsletter to the Mattachine community in San Francisco, the organization instructed members to behave themselves in order to achieve “self-acceptance”: It is a fact that all persons who are interested in our organization, members and non-members alike, should make it their responsibility to adopt a code of behavior which will be highly acceptable to himself and to society as a whole. Through true self-acceptance a great new vista opens for all individuals. Not only will you as an individuals (sic) like yourselves better, but you will find that you will fit into the patterns of society with greater ease and be recognized as a fellow human being and not as someone set apart. It is believed that through subscribing to the above Preamble and Pledge each and everyone will find a fuller and better life, the true meaning of fellowship, and a better understanding of man.49 Here, we see that Mattachine cited “respectable” behavior as a key influence as to whether or not a homosexual could be “recognized as a fellow human” and live a “fuller and better life” as a protected citizen under the law. Mattachine wanted their members to earn respectability by abiding by a “code of behavior” that would be more easily accepted by a postwar society focused on conformity. The goal was, as another pamphlet detailed, for the “homosexual minority” to one day be able to “live a well-oriented, socially productive life, with pride and without fear,” as well as to “develop its own standards of ethics and conventions suitable to its needs and in conformity with the best interests of society.”50 Perhaps the end goal was for the homosexual community to create its own “standards” for behavior, but in the meantime, Mattachine’s goal was most certainly to conform to ideas of white middle class citizenship as much as possible.

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Members of the Mattachine Society were encouraged to educate themselves about their own sexual identities by attending discussion groups that were organized locally by each chapter. The attendance at these meetings, typically ranging between ten and twenty people, was scarce, but seems to have been a lifeline for those who did regularly attend.51 In a pamphlet advertising discussion groups entitled “Think for Yourself,” attending discussion groups was framed as the best way to better oneself and become the model citizen that the Mattachine Society so wanted its members to be: This is an invitation… To learn to think for yourself with greater understanding and discernment, to learn to discuss your ideas with greater ease, to learn to evaluate the opinions of others. This is an invitation to take part in the Mattachine Society discussion program. These groups are open to all adults, free of charge. There are no requirements other than a willingness to learn.52 At a time when the psychiatric profession was hostile to homosexuals and in fact considered homosexuality to be a mental disorder, these spaces were perhaps the only ones available for Mattachine members to discuss their identity and come to terms with it. These groups seem to have been just as much about learning what it meant to be homosexual as they were an opportunity for members to discuss their homosexual identity and how this identity impacted their lives. In a 1951 discussion group on the topic of “sense of value,” Mattachine members in the Los Angeles area reflected on what it meant to be a valued member of society as well as a homosexual.53 A written summary of the discussion shows that those present were concerned with how they could contribute to society while existing outside the family structure. They felt that being homosexual made it more difficult for them to develop an “adequate sense of value” due to their lack of responsibility Penn History Review

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as the head of a household. The meeting notes show that the group concluded that the “heterosexual has a basic private responsibility… the family, which necessitates an adequate sense of values. The homosexual has no such ‘natural’ pattern in which to fall.”54 To be a gay man or woman during this time was to be excluded, in many ways, from the primary foundation of society by not being able to start a nuclear family of their own. As historian Heather Murray writes, “The postwar period honored and dramatized the nuclear, and presumably heterosexual, family. The family would come to take on a therapeutic function of sorts…”55 Further, the idea of the “middle-class companionate or affectionate family” became even more valued after it had been disrupted during the Great Depression and World War II.56 For gay Americans coming of age as young adults in this time, the act of negotiating their private sexual life with their role in the modern intimate family structure was a unique challenge.57 We see more of the members’ anxieties about their place in society in other discussions. In a follow-up to the aforementioned discussion, this time on “Social Directions of the Homosexual,”58 the same discussion group wondered whether homosexuals were destined to be alone because they were homosexuals. The group came to the conclusion that, indeed, being a homosexual may just mean that most of them would end up alone. The report of the meetings stated the following observation that the group agreed upon: “Homosexuals are ‘lone wolves’ through fear. In society, as it now stands, they congratulate themselves for not being caught as have their less fortunate brothers, and understandably retreat more within themselves.”59 Mattachine therefore provided a confidential space for gay men and some lesbians to discuss their identity in what the organization deemed to be a productive and useful way. Instead of members exploring their 50

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sexuality by, say, engaging in sexual relations in a public park, Mattachine wanted its members to explore their homosexual identities through education and private discussion.

In addition to promoting respectable behavior amongst their members, the Mattachine Society also claimed to have been founded “for the purpose of carrying out a constructive program of social action for social change toward sexual equality for all people.”60 By “social action,” however, they did not mean that they were going to mobilize protests reminiscent of the concurrent African American Civil Rights Movement.

Their “evolutionary” approach was to focus on education and “steadfastly” advance “knowledge about homosexuality and [call] for an understanding of the people affected by it.”61 Essentially, Mattachine argued that “prejudice and discrimination are rooted in ignorance.”62 Therefore, in the eyes of the Mattachine Society, the only way to end the general population’s ignorance, and therefore prejudice, was to educate them about what homosexuality was and why it was not an inherent danger to society. Even the San Francisco Legislative Committee believed that education was paramount, “if existing discriminatory legislation [were] to be eventually repealed.”63 In the opinion of the Education Committee, the Mattachine Review was the “educational voice of the national organization and the most important vehicle the Society has of its own at the present time for reaching the public through the written word.”64 Mattachine prided itself on not delving into “sensationalism,” and stated in the very first issue of the Mattachine Review that they were to offer something to their homosexual readers that no publication had offered before: “an intelligent and rational approach.”65 By this, the Mattachine meant that they would offer an approach to homosexuality, or “sex deviance” as they often called it, that was rooted in the emerging field of social science. In fact, social scientists, psychologists, and other individuals with advanced degrees who Penn History Review

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were not they openly gay wrote a large number of articles in the Review. This aspect of Mattachine’s brand is clearly represented on the cover with the tagline “Casting a spotlight on Human Sex Problems- For THINKING Adults,” which appeared on early issues of the magazine. By presenting the Mattachine brand as the rational alternative to homophobia, the implication was that those who didn’t understand homosexuality could be cured of their ignorance by the Mattachine’s educational materials.

This trend of Mattachine lauding social scientists is perhaps best evidenced in their treatment of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. The magazine idolized Kinsey, in particular, for normalizing same-sex behavior in his work. On the occasion of his death, they dedicated the entire August 1956 issue to him and wrote: “Every man and woman in the world lost a good friend on August 25 when Alfred C. Kinsey died in a Bloomington, Ind., hospital after a brief illness.”66 This relationship makes sense, given that, according to historian Sarah Igo, Kinsey “distinguished his project by dismissing most prior sex studies as either moralistic or unscientific, to his mind equally damning terms.”67 Kinsey propelled himself forward as a public intellectual on the basis of the trend in midcentury America towards objective research in the social sciences. In his research, Kinsey aimed to uncover what constituted “normal” and “ordinary” American sexual behavior, finding high rates of “homosexual, premarital, and extramarital sex” among these “ordinary” citizens.68 To a member of the Mattachine Society, a respected professor who released studies demonstrating the normality of homosexual behavior would have been highly revered.

Further, we see social scientists and the medical profession directing the actual agenda of the Mattachine Society. Numerous articles were written on the topic of whether or not homosexuality was normal, indicative of 52

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neuroses, or even if it was a distinct medical category at all. This obsession on the part of Mattachine with defining homosexuality in relation to sexual deviancy and mental illness stemmed from a desire for respect from the medical and sociological establishment. In one issue, the Review recounts an event held by the San Francisco chapter wherein a psychiatrist, Blanche Baker, MD, preached self-acceptance as a priority above social change for the group.69 The very fact that a presumably heterosexual psychiatrist was brought in to speak to a group of homosexual members of the Mattachine Society about how they should approach their advocacy indicates the degree to which the views of people with advanced degrees were especially revered in the homophile community.

Similarly, Review contributor Dr. Albert Ellis is another case in which a heterosexual person with an advanced degree was viewed as an equal or even better source on “sexual deviancy” than actual homosexuals. Ellis, an influential psychotherapist credited as one of the forefathers of cognitive behavioral therapy,70 became a regular columnist for the Review and wrote about his views on treating homosexuality through therapy in an article entitled “On the Cure of Homosexuality.”71 He essentially argued that homosexuality could be cured on many occasions and suggested that individuals who are “exclusively homosexual” were not psychologically healthy.

In one excerpt, Ellis asserts that homosexuality/inversion is directly tied to psychological dysfunction: In the course of psychotherapy, the homosexual individual may also be helped to accept his homosexuality without the enormous amounts of guilt and anxiety that usually accompany inversion. But if an exclusive homosexual is only enabled, through psychotherapy, to accept his homosexuality, and if he is not in any way released from the neurotic fixations, phobias, Penn History Review

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obsessions, and/or compulsions which are forcing him to be exclusively homosexual, then very little real therapy has been accomplished, and he is still as basically neurotic as when he first came for treatment.72 Shortly after the conclusion of this article, the Review teases that Ellis has an upcoming article on gay conversion therapy: “This article is no sermon, but it tells factually what has been done by others. You may not agree with it, but don’t miss reading what Dr. Ellis has to say!”73 This seems to indicate that Mattachine understood that Ellis’ articles might be controversial amongst readers. In fact, this second article refers to patients with “severe homosexual problems”74 whom Ellis had treated.

He later concludes that “exclusive homosexuality is certainly not constitutional, innate, or inherited. It is an acquired, or socially learned, pattern of behavior which can definitely be changed and often in a surprisingly short period of time, if the individual is willing to work at an active psychotherapy process.”75 These phrasings and opinions would have undoubtedly struck a nerve with members and readers of the magazine striving to assert their normality. On a variety of occasions, the Mattachine Society refers to the goal of “better adjustment to life” or greater personal fulfillment for gay men and women, but does not appear to claim that homosexuals could change their sexual orientation. However, the very fact that the Review published an entire series of articles by a man who in many respects disagreed with the ideology of the Mattachine Society’s members speaks volumes: it was more important to Mattachine that a psychologist desired to use their magazine as an outlet than whether his views aligned with their own. In order to fulfill their mission of being a magazine for the “thinking” person, perhaps they felt it necessarily to present different opinions on 54

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a subject just as an academic journal might.

In a similar instance, the Review reproduced an editorial by the physician Dr. Harry Benjamin, who emerged in the U.S. medical community as the “leading medical authority on transsexuality in the 1950s.”76 The editorial, entitled “On the Cause of Homosexuality,” touched on the concept of “homosexual conduct” as a symptom of a disease rather than an identity: The words ‘homosexuality’ and ‘homosexuals’ are unfortunate terms. They apply an unjustified stamp of finality and exclusiveness. They also seem to imply a common cause which does not exist. If we could speak of homosexual behavior and homosexual inclinations (and people with such inclinations), we would be fairer and on more scientific ground. The individual cases of homosexual conduct are as varied as those of a mental depression or a headache. Therefore homosexual conduct is a symptom. It is a variation from the so-called “normal.”77 Benjamin’s assertion that “homosexuality” and “homosexuals” don’t exist, but are only labels placed on individuals who participate in chronic “symptoms” of “homosexual conduct” is against what the Mattachine Society stood for as an organization. There may have been internal debates as to the normality of homosexuality and homosexual behavior, but one of the primary purposes of the Review was to create a publication that would establish a distinct identity for homosexuals as a minority group, not simply a group of people who engaged in similar sexual behaviors. As the Missions and Purposes of the organization state, Mattachine was built “to unify” homosexuals because homosexuals would only be truly successful once they were “consciously part of a large unified whole” and had a feeling of “belonging” to a group of people like themselves.78 From this we can gather that Penn History Review

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Mattachine viewed homosexuals as a distinct group of people striving towards inclusion into American society as a minority group, a philosophy in direct opposition to Benjamin’s own.

Perhaps Benjamin’s column was included for his assertion that homosexuality is “most certainly…neither a disease nor a crime,”79 but his assertion that such an identity doesn’t exist should surely have outweighed that single sentiment.

In other cases, however, the highlighted heterosexual voices in the social sciences espoused views that better aligned with the mission of the Mattachine Society. In a 1959 issue of the Review, the cover and a few articles in the magazine were dedicated to Drs. Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, a married couple who worked together on psychological research. The cover story on the couple referred to them as “advocates of sex education and freedom.”80 Later in the article, the Review wrote, “The Kronhausens believe that we live in a hypocritical society which says one thing and does another, and sends its scapegoat victims to the penitentiary.”81 While the Kronhausens’ book did not directly relate to homosexuality, the fact that they used their platform as Ph.D.s to defend the rights of people to express themselves sexually would have appealed to the Mattachine Society as an example of intellectually credible people arguing for sexual expression. Similarly, a column by Dr. Walter C. Alvarez, M.D., entitled, “Scientific Approach is Needed” greatly reflected the Mattachine ideal of using science and objectivity while assessing homosexuality. Alvarez argues that the new guard of psychiatrists would bring a new age for homosexual patients: “Naturally, there is little hope of changing the mental processes of the older psychiatrists, they are too firmly set in their ways; and so, our hope must be in the young men of the present generation. If they will accept only ideas for which there is scientific proof we will get somewhere.”82 It was a very radical stance for a physician in 1959 to assert that only doctors who don’t rely on scientific proof would reject homosexuality.

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For the Review, a doctor who would publish this kind of statement with his real name attached would have been a coup.

In a similar instance, a heterosexual psychotherapist named Alice La Vere addressed a Mattachine Society San Francisco forum and the Review published her remarks, including statements such as, “It has been my experience of the past 22 years counseling people in general with emotional disturbances that the prevalence of mental illness is found among heterosexuals equal to that among homosexuals.”83 It would have been one thing to have a homosexual therapist speak to the group, but the article made a point of bringing up that La Vere had a husband, likely to bolster her supposed objectivity.

Ultimately, Mattachine wanted to present La Vere’s views to their readership with the understanding that she was not simply a homosexual asserting her own normality, but an objective heterosexual making an assessment based on experience that, “the homosexual differs from all society in only one way—his or her choice of love object.”84 This interest in scientific research manifested itself in the Mattachine Society’s research committee, which aimed to connect researchers with Mattachine members in order to encourage more research on the subject of homosexuality.

In the first issue of the Review, Mattachine indeed lauded itself for having helped psychologists at USC find lesbians to use as interview subjects for a research study, although the content and motives of this study were not disclosed.85 In the same issue, Mattachine wrote about a research paper by Evelyn Hooker, Ph.D., a researcher in UCLA’s Psychology Department, that they had assisted with.86 Mattachine assembled seventy-four men for a rigorous study in the summer of 1953. They were given a variety of tests to assess their personalities, including the Chicago inventory of beliefs, an exam that places people into one of three personality types.87 Mattachine asserted that the resulting article demonstrates Penn History Review

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that “homosexuals vary widely in personality structure, and do not constitute a distinct group. Homosexuality is not a distinct clinical entity.”88 While this is arguably a slight departure from Mattachine’s goal of unifying homosexuals under a minority identity, Mattachine did not want homosexuality to be portrayed as a mental illness. Because of the prevailing belief in the psychiatric community that homosexuality was a disease that needed to be cured, Mattachine was forced to tow the line between identifying as a minority group striving for greater understanding of their identity as a community and also not allowing their identity to be pathologized.

While these sorts of psychological studies, in retrospect, seem to be immaterial to more important issues such as state violence and discrimination against gay men and lesbians, they were of deep importance to Mattachine at the time for a reason. Arguments based on psychology were a key weapon against arguments for gay rights at the time. Therefore, in the eyes of Mattachine, the only way to counteract misconceptions about the psychological health of gay men and lesbians was to respond with their own “scientific” evidence pointing towards their sanity and normality. As the Mattachine Society stated in an Education Department Handbook espousing their emphasis on education: It takes courage to venture onto this new frontier, and to spearhead an unpopular cause which is subject to all kinds of misunderstanding and condemnation. It takes devotion which transcends fear, immunity to what other people may think, and a faith based upon history which shows that small groups of persistent individuals have always been the pioneers for societal change and the champions for human welfare.89 What the Mattachine Society was doing at the time was establishing a “new frontier” where, for the first time, 58

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homosexuality was not a mental disorder that could be cured, but a distinct identity. In order to achieve this goal, Mattachine used the only methods that they could think of: behave in a way that they felt would persuade mainstream society of their normality and educate as many people as possible about their agenda.

The Mattachine Society’s objectives began to change in the 1960s as a more “militant” wing of the homophile movement began to emerge. According to D’Emilio, homophile organizations in the 1960s operated under “an altered social context” because of increased visibility for homosexuals in the media (even if most of it was negative).90 He additionally emphasizes the generational divide that occurred in the 1960s amongst homophile activists: “The decisive break with the accommodationist spirit of the 1950s opened important options for the homophile cause. The militants’ rejection of the medical model, their assertion of equality, their uncompromising insistence that gays deserved recognition as a persecuted minority, and their defense of homosexuality as a viable way of living loosened the grip of prevailing norms on the self-conception of lesbians and homosexuals and suggested the contours of a new, positive gay identity.”91 It was with this turning point that the homophile model for advocacy and activism became less and less relevant to those who wished to improve the lives of gay men and lesbians.

The homophile movement was very brief in the context of the history of gay men and women in America. The movement was at its peak for about a decade from the early 1950s through the mid 1960s, and yet it is difficult to point to any tangible accomplishments that were made by these groups.

They didn’t lobby for any significant laws, they didn’t mobilize thousands of active members, and the vast majority of people in the past and present have never heard of them. However, Penn History Review

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I would argue that, without the homophile movement, there would not have been a gay liberation movement or radical queer activism. Further, the current landscape of LGBTQ activism would not look the same without the precedent set by the Mattachine Society and its peers.

At its core, the homophile movement was about being recognized as a citizen of American democracy, a productive contributor to society and, thus, a person worthy of respect from peers. Homophiles did not want to dismantle oppressive structures in society, but rather assimilate homosexuals into middle-class, heteronormative structures. Essentially, the gay men and women who conformed to what American society expected of upstanding citizens (with the exception of their homosexuality) aspired to have the homosexual part of their identity viewed as a neutral characteristic. The goal was to move towards this utopian vision of life for homosexuals through a two-fold educational system in which gay men and women were educated as a group, and the rest of society was also exposed to educational material about homosexuality. Homophile leaders were quick to identify themselves as minorities but over time became more comfortable with viewing homosexuality as a group identity.

Viewing these groups from a contemporary perspective can make one with a more radical or even liberal ideology about sexuality and gender expression uncomfortable. Though empowering to those who could more easily accommodate societal expectations of conformity, the homophile movement was irrelevant and deeply harmful to the most marginalized gender and sexual minorities. Gender-nonconforming and transgender people were given no voice, the mentally ill were maligned and erased for the convenience of maintaining the image of the movement, and men dominated the leadership and membership in organizations that were not exclusively for women. In many ways, the homophile movement was so afraid 60

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of straying from societal conventions that they were unable to reach the people who most needed help and resources.

Critics of the homophile movement vilified their goal of assimilation, while later champions of the homophile movement begged us to view homophiles as the glass ceiling breakers who set the stage for today’s great advancements in rights for gay men and lesbians. It would seem that the latter camp has largely been the most successful in steering the direction of the mainstream LGBTQ movement today. While in theory the mainstream LGBTQ movement should focus its efforts on helping all the letters in the acronym, the movement as it stands remains largely a white, middle class movement for gay men and sometimes for women. Meanwhile, reports show that up to 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ92 and that people of color and transgender women comprised almost 90 percent and 75 percent of anti-LGBTQ homicides in 2013, respectively.93 This gap between the demography of the LGBTQ community and the direction of the mainstream movement’s resources raises serious questions regarding just how different the contemporary LGBTQ movement is from the homophile movement. As it stands, the rhetoric of the current LGBTQ movement is much more similar to the goals of the homophile movement than most people are willing to admit.

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U.S. Homophile Movement Paul Welch, “Homosexuality in America,” LIFE Magazine, June 26,1964, Box 7, Folder 4, “Homosexuality in America [page 66] June 26, 1964,” NonLGBT magazine cover story collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 32.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 34.

8 Ibid, 99.

9 Ibid, 100.

10 Ibid, 101.

11 Ibid, 125.

12 Jonathan Ned Katz, “The Invention of Heterosexuality,” in Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, ed. Kathy Peiss (Cengage/Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 352.

13 Ibid, 354.

14 Ibid.

15 D’Emilio, 9.

16 Ibid, 11.

17 Ibid, 32.

18 Ibid, 52.

19 Ibid, 65.

20 Ibid, 9.

21 “Mattachine Society TODAY 1955 Edition,” Box 1, Folder 57, “Pamphlets circa 1953-1971,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

22 Ibid.

23 Carl B. Harding, “Education Handbook,” Box 1, Folder 65, “Education Department Education Handbook circa 1954-1959,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

24 James T. Sears, Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation (Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, 2006), 173.

25 D’Emilio, 110.

26 D’Emilio, 113.

27 D’Emilio, 87.

1

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U.S. Homophile Movement Ibid, 90.

Ibid, 91.

30 Ibid, 125.

31 Ibid, 204.

32 Ibid, 224.

33 Luther Allen, “Homosexuality… is it a handicap or a talent?” in Mattachine Review January 1955-December 1956, Vol. 1-2 of Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature, edited by Jonathan Katz, 6-10 (New York: Arno Press, 1975), originally published in The Mattachine Review, Fourth Issue, July-August 1955, 6.

34 Allen, 6.

35 D’Emilio, 18.

36 Allen, 7.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid, 8.

39 Ibid, 10.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid, 8.

43 Ibid, 10.

44 Christina Simmons, “Sexual Advice for Modern Women,” in Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 179.

45 Ibid.

46 “Serving all needs of all homosexuals,” Box 5, Folder 20, “New York Mattachine Pamphlets and Flyers,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

47 “How Can I Ever Face the World?” Box 5, Folder 20, “New York Mattachine Pamphlets and Flyers,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

48 Ibid.

49 “San Francisco Area Council Mattachine Newsletter, 48th Issue,” May 1957, Box 17, Folder 7, “San Francisco Mattachine Newsletter 1953-19632 of 2,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

50 “Whether You Like It or Not,” Box 1, Folder 13, “Pamphlets and Flyers circa 1953,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

51 Assorted Meeting Reports, Box 4, Folder 23, “Alpha Chapter 105 Meeting Minutes and Reports,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

28 29

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U.S. Homophile Movement “Think for Yourself,“ Box 1, Folder 55, “Think For Yourself- Undated,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

53 Steve, “Sense of Value,” September 6, 1951, Box 1, Folder 11, “Discussion Groups circa 1951-1953,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

54 Ibid.

55 Heather Murray, Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), xii.

56 Ibid, 3.

57 Ibid, 39-40.

58 Harry, “Social Directions of the Homosexual,” October 4, 1951, Box 1, Folder 11, “Discussion Groups circa 1951-1953,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

59 Ibid.

60 Carl B. Harding, “Education Handbook.”

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 John J. MacArthur, “Legislative Policy of the Mattachine Society Inc.,” August 1953, Box 1, Folder 72, “Legislative Committee Policy of the Mattachine Society Toward Legislation,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

64 Carl B. Harding, “Education Handbook.”

65 Albert Ellis, “On the Cure of Homosexuality,” in Mattachine Review, January-February 1955, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 2.

66 “Kinsey,” in Mattachine Review, September 1956, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 12.

67 Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 194.

68 Ibid, 192.

69 Blanche Baker in Mattachine Review, May-June 1955, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 36.

70 Michael T. Kaufman, “Albert Ellis, 93, Influential Psychotherapist, Dies,” New York Times, July 25, 2007, Web, Accessed December 17, 2014.

71 Ellis, “On the Cure of Homosexuality,” 6-9.

72 Ibid, 9.

73 Ibid.

74 Albert Ellis, “The Use of Psychotherapy with Homosexuals,” in Mattachine Review, February 1956, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History 52

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U.S. Homophile Movement and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 14.

75 Ibid, 15-6.

76 Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008), 40.

77 Harry Benjamin, “The Use of Psychotherapy with Homosexuals,” in Mattachine Review, August 1957, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 30.

78 “Missions and Purposes.”

79 Benjamin, “The Use of Psychotherapy with Homosexuals,” 30.

80 “Personality Profile of Our Cover Subjects: Drs. Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen Authors of a New Book Just Off the Press… Pornography and the Law,” in Mattachine Review, October 1959, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 13.

81 Ibid, 15.

82 Walter C. Alvarez, “Scientific Approach is Needed,” in Mattachine Review, September 1959, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 11.

83 Alice La Vere, “Let’s Face Psychotherapy,” in Mattachine Review, February 1957, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 35.

84 Ibid, 36.

85 “Inverts Are NOT a Distinct Personality Type,” in Mattachine Review, September 1959, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 16.

86 Ibid, 20-21.

87 Ibid, 20.

88 Ibid, 21.

89 Carl B. Harding, “Education Handbook.”

90 D’Emilio, 148.

91 Ibid, 174.

92 “Serving Our Youth: Findings from a National Survey of Services Providers Working with LGBT Youth Who Are Homeless or At Risk of Becoming Homeless,” The Williams Institute of UCLA Law School, July 2012, Web, accessed December 18, 2014.

93 “2013 National Report on Hate Violence Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and HIV-Affected Communities Released Today,” National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, May 29, 2014, Web, accessed December 18, 2014.

Images: Page 35: The Mattachine Review [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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The Education of Women within the International Humanist Movement Saraf N. Ahmed

The institution of the patriarchy has been alive and well in Western European cultures for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Nevertheless, the fight for women’s equality and visibility historically was hardly a novelty, even in Reformation-era Europe. Despite the persistence of illiteracy, particularly amongst women, throughout England until the mid-nineteenth century, the emergence of the humanist movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave rise to the idea that the female mind was more capable of learning than had previously been accepted or even considered. Dozens of prominent intellectuals and political figures of the era, including Thomas More, Erasmus, and Agrippa von Nettesheim, advocated for the equal — if not, in some cases, the superior — intellectual abilities of the “fairer sex”. Nevertheless, not all advocates for the education of women were created equal in the late Tudor and early Stuart eras.. For the most part, contemporary European philosophers and scholars were proponents of female literacy, and often the education of women beyond simple reading and writing. English authors of various works, in conjunction with those authors of dedications and introductions to books and translated works from the rest of the continent, indicate a growing awareness of a gradually widening female audience, placing the humanist education of Englishwomen within a larger international context. However, it is also important to examine the increasing English affinity for women’s education within the context of both girls’ education at the most basic level, as well as the larger Western European humanist movement towards female learnedness. Despite the

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gradual burgeoning support for the diversification of women’s education in this age, one observes a rather noticeable difference between the prescription and practice of these same ideals, as well as a recurring theme of “de-feminization”.

When taking into account the literature of the period, it becomes evident that the willingness to educate women on a similar (if not equal) level as men is especially popular amongst many humanist thinkers— though often with caveats. This is especially true when the reader branches out beyond England and to the continent. Just shy of the turn of the seventeenth century, Italian author Giovanni Michele Bruto observes in his 1598 work, The necessarie, fit, and conuenient education of a yong gentlewoman, that effeminate fathers, who being more delicate and effeminate [. . .] than to procure the welfare of their children, as soone as their young daughters learned to reade [. . .] have given them certaine amorous and impudent songs to learne by heart.1 In the same manual, he continues that the “wise matron shal rather read unto her, or cause her to read divers examples of virtuous gentlewomen [. . .] as well out of the holy scriptures, as other histories.”2 In this particular instance, Bruto does not necessarily demonize women’s education; in fact, he happily espouses the growing girl’s reading of scripture and the stories of such powerful female characters as Claudia, Portia, Lucretia, and Octavia. Rather, he rejects feminine expression in and of itself while upholding the merits of masculinity, especially through his condemnation of “effeminate” fathers. He further argues this point by warning against women reading “any thing that may induce her mind [. . .] to become more feeble and effeminate.”3 Bruto is essentially advocating a de-feminization of the woman and, by extension, her fellow man. It is not necessarily the woman herself who is portrayed as weak or less worthy, or the man himself as superior, but the act of exuding Penn History Review

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effeminacy as opposed to masculinity. In fact, this is not even so much a masculinization so much as a humanization. The idea of education for the sake of learning — rather than serving as a precursor to a life in the church — was a relatively new one, and one that only began truly surfacing with the onset of the humanist era, and one that needed to first take hold in the male consciousness before establishing itself as a possibility for women and girls as well.

However, Bruto tempers his embrasure of (limited) women’s education with the qualification that intelligent women cannot be the norm. Bruto also notes that several extremely learned women may read the Christian and classical poets, “yet [the reader] must not understand that I would permit the same unto my daughter.”4. By acknowledging and even tentatively admiring the existence of such educated women, Bruto throws in his lot with the humanist education advocates. However, he reveals with this one sentence that what he preaches is differs from his practice. Thus Bruto allows for and tolerates the existence of the well-educated woman, but more as an anomaly or a wonder than a desired norm. While the introductory epistle to the English translation of this guide is addressed to a woman, the dedication expresses hope that all women will heed the contents, “always fearing, that to your great dishonor you stay not behind, and you shall from day to day advance your selfe.”

5 As such, Bruto both expresses a desire to improve women’s minds while also distinguishing what he considers acceptable versus unacceptable education for women.

Furthermore, Bruto is not the only Italian diplomat to display such a stark contrast of ideology regarding women’s education. In his famous 1528 guide, The courtyer of Count Baldassare, Italian humanist author and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione urges the gentlewoman to be well versed in easy and witty conversation. In addition to being “well born and of a good house”6 and “learned”7 he also exalts the “many vertues

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of the minde I recken [that] be as necessary for a woman, as for a man.” 8 However, Castiglione later admits his firm belief that women without beauty are all but worthless.9 In this vein, both Italians Bruto and Castiglione retain similar humanist views on the education of women — believing in their right to learn, but with several reservations.

The French humanist philosophers similarly explored and pushed the boundaries of what was then considered the “ideal” woman. British writer Anthony Gibson’s 1599 A woman’s woorth, defended against all the men in the world is in fact translated from an anonymous French source, lending a sense of the flow of exchange of ideas between the English and French on a woman’s role in the academic realm. As a precursor to his translation, he writes an intriguing dedication individually addressing several women in Queen Elizabeth’s court: “To the worthy Ladyes and virtuous Maydes of Honor, to her royal Majesty” as well as the “Honorable Ladies, and Gentlewomen of England.”10 This introduction is the key example of an author’s growing awareness of the existence of a female audience — and not a female audience composed exclusively of the educated royalty, but one that stemmed from the greater population of England as a whole.11 In addition, Pierre de la Primaudaye, the French author of the 1586 treatise The French academie, similarly encourages women to spend their spare time away from household and wifely duties by engaging in the study of “morall sentences of auncient Sages and good men.”12 Although the treatise exalts the husband as the primary teacher, de la Primaudaye clearly encourages a humanist education of women, including the philosophies and works of scholars and philosophers as well as biblical study.

Gibson’s translation of the French work, A woman’s woorth, reveals the extent to which there existed an English audience for French — and thereby other European — works, and by extension, how the humanist push towards women’s education was felt on a international scale. A woman’s woorth and Penn History Review

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The French academie are only the first amongst several examples of the French humanist movement’s support of female literacy and education. French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote two separate dedications to his 1603 The essayes or morall, politike and millitarie discourses. The first is dedicated to six noble ladies, and the second solely to Queen Anne.13 The collection was translated into Italian by Giovanni Florio, indicating once more that many authors anticipated an international audience. De Montaigne, however, was one of a small but growing number of male authors who gradually became aware of and capitalized on the existence of a female audience. Nevertheless, skeptics remained, along with those who, despite advocating general learning for women, simultaneously harbored reservations towards what was appropriate fare for both education and the actual mental capacity of women to comprehend and absorb knowledge.

One intriguing example of this lies in French author Jacques DuBoscq’s 1639 The Compleat Woman, a treatise-guide to social and intellectual training for women. However, the preface to the guide observes that it is simply written “for Women and not Philosophers.”14 By setting up a contrast between women and scholarly thinkers in this manner, he immediately establishes an almost paternal authority in the writing of the guide — for in DuBoscq’s eyes, women are simpler creatures. Nevertheless, Duboscq at the very least embraces the training of women and girls as clear and effective communicators.

It should be noted that at this time in the Englishspeaking world, the French language was considered fashionablea quintessential marker of an educated individual, namely an educated woman. Aware of the British preoccupation with French high culture, especially within the court circles, Frenchman Pierre Erondelle authored The French garden in 1605, a work specifically written to assist English ladies in learning conversational French.

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on the level of education young women should be permitted to attain. In his introduction, he writes that the purpose of this guide is “to furnish English ladyes [. . .] with such conference and familiar talk (which is wanting in other books)”15 . The fact that Erondelle openly acknowledges that this work is one of very few, if not the first, of its kind indicates that he believed in the advancement and cultural education of women. In addition, Erondelle’s work is addressed not to women of his own country, but to the women of England, thereby displaying a second, more implicit acknowledgement of French “superiority,” as well as the international nature of the increasingly greater move towards the education of females beyond simple literacy. Erondelle recognizes the Francophilia found amongst Englishwomen , but more importantly establishes that ladies are capable of studying and learning multiple languages- a pursuit that should be encouraged amongst those women wishing to be considered more educated, worldly, and attractive within the aristocracy.

Moreover, the act of a French author writing a book with a specifically English audience in mind, in addition to the vast array of translations in other European languages, is yet another significant indicator of the international nature of the humanist women’s education movement. This act serves as a multinational oculus through which to view the growing intellectual support of increased education and literacy amongst women, placing what is often viewed as a primarily English trend within a greater international context.

Learning French, however, was not limited to the royal courts. It was an art form embraced by gentlemen and gentlewomen alike. Education in the French language started early, almost as soon as the children in question had learned to read and write in English. Furthermore, gender discrimination in French education often was not manifested, particularly in the early stages. One intriguing example of this is Jean Le Roux’s 1543 L’instruction des enfants, or An Instruction for children. This particular Penn History Review

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Third Volume of Essais (1588)

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work is a schoolbook written in both English and French by a French schoolmaster. Le Roux does not address boys and girls separately, or encourage female children to pursue a different sort of education than their male counterparts. Instead, he refers to a gender-neutral child, providing godly admonitions, instructions, and preaching religiousness and humbleness before God to all genders. In fact, Le Roux titles the preface as “An Introduction to brynge up children”, and subsequently opens with the mandate that “When the chylde is coming to discretion” — meaning old enough to grasp more abstract concepts — “hy/she ought to knowe what God is.” 16 The first chapter begins with “Here is a good boke to learn to speke Frech.”17 One very intriguing aspect of Le Roux’s guide is that it is not a translation of a French text, but contains English and French text side-by-side, line-by-line.

This work is not a translation, but rather a guide intended for native English speakers (children) to learn French. The side-byside, English-upon-French structure of the book harkens back to the idea that humanism and the call for greater (and in some cases, as demonstrated by this work, equal) education of women was a movement international in its scope. It also speaks to the existence of a lively and open English audience for French works and ideas. Reflected in Le Roux’s instruction manual for children is a glimpse into the beginnings of a cross-cultural movement towards increasing women’s literacy and basic education.

The opening page of An Instruction for Chidren sports an illustration of an “Englysheman” opposite a drawing of a “Frencheman.”18 Englishman is depicted wearing a fierce facial expression, holding a body-length bow and arrow, donned in fashionable clothing, standing on invisible ground, and surrounded by vegetation. The Frenchman, distinguished by his shorter stature, and fashionble French-style clothing, carries only a stick as a weapon, standing on solid ground with two nearby plants, and a rather more amiable, if somewhat bemused, expression. Interestingly, the Frenchman’s face appears Penn History Review

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androgynous, even slightly effeminate. This, combined with the lack of a “proper” weapon, may immediately and subconsciously categorize the learning of the French language as a somewhat feminine undertaking, Le Roux thus acknowledges the English perception of French as a sophisticated yet flowery language more associated with noble ladies. Nevertheless, the reader must note that Le Roux still utilized men rather than women in his drawings, allowing the language to remain perfectly appropriate for males, thereby dovetailing with his schoolbook’s overall purpose: the simultaneous biblical and French education of both English boys and girls. It is, however, important to note that he never directly addresses the child, but discusses the child much like a schoolteacher talking to the parent whose responsibility it is to raise a child and see to its religious and secular education.

Englishwomen were encouraged to achieve accomplishment beyond the French language. The reading of French literature in the native language was also supported with some measure of enthusiasm.19 However, encouragement of a multilingual and multinational education for women tended to waver beyond the acquisition of French, particularly regarding the Classical languages. Surprisingly, the primary reason for this was not simply sexism or an overt desire to keep women from learning, but instead because Classical languages, as co-opted by the Church, held associations with Catholicism as outlawed by the English during the seventeenth century. As Puritanism became more and more widespread, the idea of a Classically trained individual became somewhat distasteful.20 As Puritans believed in simplicity of worship, the idea of reading Christian doctrine in Classical languages would have carried a connotation of excess and diverting the focus on taking the Lord’s message to heart.

While French and Italian humanists were some of the most prolific non-English writers, there remained a variety of international philosophers, scholars, and prominent political 74

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figures, both inside and outside the influence of the English sphere of influence and awareness, who supported with varying degree, the advancement of women’s education and empowerment. Nevertheless, it is extremely important to keep in mind that none of these men as yet endorsed political autonomy amongst women.21 One famous example of this is the Spanish scholar Juan Luis Vives, most well-known for his 1529 book The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual. In his work, Vives demonstrates his cautious support of a full system of education for women, including both scholarly learning as well as strict instruction in household and wifely duties.22 Intriguingly, Vives dedicates his work to Queen Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish princess and first wife to Henry VIII; in doing so, Vives both acknowledges the famously intelligent English queen and his homeland, while simultaneously recognizing that his book is not simply written about women, but is addressed to and read by them as well. In his third chapter titled “On Her Early Training”, Vives enthusiastically endorses instruction in reading and writing for women and girls. He urges that they “begin by learning things that contribute to the cultivation of the mind,” although with the caveat that they also practice literacy in relation to “the care and management of the home.”23 This qualification, though small, points to the contemporary difficulty of even the most progressive humanist thinkers to divorce the notion of “woman” from domesticity.

On the other hand, Vives advises parents to not allow their daughters to grow soft. He writes that “treat[ing] children with such delicacy [. . .] is very harmful [. . .] But this is especially harmful for the girl, for she is held back to a great degree solely by fear.24” Once again, the historian notices a recurrence of the theme found in Bruto’s The necessarie, fit, and conuenient education of a yong gentlewoman, sixty-nine years in advance: the author is not necessarily decrying the female gender itself, but rather effeminacy and the expression of feminine traits. Once more, Penn History Review

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the author is not concerned so much with “de-feminization” or “masculinization” of the young girls in question, but with their mental improvement and education within a humanist context. Even so, despite his relative progressivism, he remains conservative to a certain degree. In his earlier second chapter entitled “On the Later Years of Childhood”, Vives advocates that the adolescent girl spend her spare time “with girls of her own age in the presence of her mother or nurse or a good woman of mature years who will direct those pastimes and the pleasures of the mind and direct them to goodness and virtue,”25 and for the parents to “let everything [in the girls’ environment] be chaste and pure.”26 Notwithstanding, it is important to bear in mind that Vives, while born and raised in Valencia, spent much of his life in the Southern Netherlands, even coming under the academic influence of his friend Erasmus — a similarly progressive yet cautious scholar in the arena of the education of women.27 In this vein, Erasmus also emerges in this study as a preeminent force in the humanist movement towards the gradual opening of academic education to women and girls. He is famously known for being much more progressive, sometimes shockingly so, than the vast majority of his contemporaries, although one would never deign to label him a feminist, even by contemporary standards. However, Erasmus is representative of the increasingly popular notion that “women [. . .] were just as much God’s people and had has much to gain from reading God’s word, but their different social positions conditioned them to different degrees of literacy.”28 In his dialogue from his 1524 Colloquies, Erasmus presents multiple exchanges between stock characters meant to represent and illustrate certain ideas. One such dialogue is constructed between a hedonistic abbot, Antronius, and a learned, married young woman named Magdalia. The pair argue over Magdalia’s library, and the validity of the logic based on her claim that women should be equally as educated as men: 76

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Magdalia: Isn’t it a wife’s business to manage the household and rear the children?

Antronius: It is.

Magdalia: Do you think she can manage so big a job without wisdom?

Antronius: I suppose not.29 Further along, Magdalia takes issue with the social imposition limiting women to only French as their second language, rather than the Classical tongues, challenging, And you think it unsuitable for me to know Latin in order to converse daily with authors so numerous, so eloquent, so learned, so wise; with counsellors so faithful?

Antronius: Books ruin women’s wits – which are none too plentiful anyway.

Magdalia: How plentiful yours are, I don’t know. Assuredly

Erasmus

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I prefer to spend mine, however slight, on profitable studies.”0 Despite Erasmus’s obvious progressivism and support of equal education, it is important to keep in mind that Magdalia’s sharp wit and Antronius’s blatant foolishness were constructed more for shock value than necessarily as actual exemplars to follow.

The Dutch were far from claiming the title as the only Germanic people to acknowledge and support the nurturing of the intellectual capabilities of young girls and women. Noted German writer, theologian, and alchemist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, most well-known for his 1529 treatise Female pre-eminence, or, The dignity and excellency of that sex above the male, exalts not simply the equal intellect and abilities of young women, but also their superiority over men. While Nettesheim’s views are most certainly the extreme exception rather than the norm, they are reflective of the slowly increasing, though by no means yet widespread, belief that women were just as capable of attaining and retaining knowledge in the same manner as men.

Nettesheim opinionates that “the Woman [is] possess’d of no less excellent Faculties of Mind, Reason, and Speech, than the Man,31” He believes that females are “more eloquent of Speech, than Men and their Tongues more apt [. . .] to cloath their thoughts in Language and express their sentiments.32” As such, Nettesheim not only contributes his defense and support of women’s capabilities to attain and absorb knowledge, but asserts his belief that they may even be more superior in the realm of language and communication than their male counterparts.

In addition, the translator to Ovidius’s Ovids heroicall epistles, Wye Saltonstall, addresses “Ladies and Gentlewomen” in the introduction to his translation.33 He writes: since this booke of Ovids, which most Gentlemen would reade before in Latine, is for your sakes come forth in English, it doth at first addresse itself a Suiter, to wooe 78

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your acceptance [. . .] and afterward have the lines thereof in reading sweetened by the odour of your breath.34 Here the reader once again stumbles across a bifurcated, somewhat conflicting message addressed towards women. In directing his introduction at only ladies and gentlewomen, Saltonstall affords them a level of respect and autonomy separate from the realm of men. However, he deems it necessary to translate the work rather than encourage women’s Classical learning which would require they read and interpret the original for themselves.

Thus, Saltonstall indirectly retains male authority through his own translation of Ovid’s work. Nonetheless, while it is easy to interpret his offering of the English translation rather than the original Latin prescribed for their male counterparts as a means of control, Saltonstall instead portrays his translation as almost a necessity — a gift to women in order to allow them to read and appreciate Ovid without the additional struggle of having to learn Latin. Saltonstall personifies his translation as a suitor seeking the ladies’ hand, depicting their reading of the lines as an honor of which the “suitor” is unworthy.

It is important to explore the English prescription versus practice of women’s education, particularly both separate from and within the context of its Western European counterparts. In theory, women were sent mixed messages. Prominent politician Sir Thomas More,who famously educated his own daughter, despite never appearing any more radical than any other English humanist, writes in Utopia that in this perfect world, while still submissive to their husbands, women can become priests and are trained in the military arts.35 Despite slowly but surely increasing literacy and further education beyond simple reading and writing, it was often entrusted to male guidance or by utilizing curricula constructed by men. Many of the marriage guides were addressed, if to anyone at all, to men.36 Nevertheless, there remain various other reasons that led both men and women to advocate for Penn History Review

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female literacy and education, particularly in England. English writing-master Martin Billingsley (1591-1622) greatly encouraged universal literacy, particularly because it would result in improved communication and letter-writing for all, as well as better-run households in the husband’s absence.37 The seventeenth century also witnessed the rise of dictionaries specifically authored with a female audience in mind; Robert Cawdrey’s 1604 A table alphabeticall, the first ever monolingual English dictionary printed, — (though essentially nothing more than a list of synonyms for over 2500 “obscure” words), was written especially “for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or other unskillful persons,” and dedicated “To the right honourable, Worshipfull, vertuous, and godlie Ladies, the Lady Hastings, the Lady Dudley, the Lady Mountague, the Ladie Wingfield, and the Lady Leigh.”38 English lexicographer Henry Cockeram’s 1623 The English dictionarie was similarly compiled with a female audience in mind, as evidenced in its dedication. Cockeram writes, I might insist upon the general use of this worke, especially for Ladies and Gentlewomen, Clarkes, Merchants, young Schollers, Strangers, Travellers, and all such as desire to know the plenty of the English.39 In fact, the 1623 edition of the work is prefaced with the note that the dictionary is in fact “An Interpreter of Hard English Words: Enabling as well Ladies and Gentlewomen, young Schollers, [. . .] to the understanding of the more difficult Authors already printed in our Language, and the more speedy attaining of an elegant perfection of the English tongue, both in reading, speaking, and writing.”40 By addressing not just women but scholars, travelers, and other potentially interested parties in the introductions to his works, Cockeram does not condescend towards women, but instead places them upon the same level ground as the men in these numerous other professions.

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Dictionaries were far from the only educational and instructional texts created with women in mind. John Murrell’s 1617 A daily exercise for ladies and gentlewomen is a household manual and cookbook explicitly dedicated “To all Ladies and Gentlewomen, and Others Whatsoever”.41 Robert Hayman’s translation of John Owen’s Certaine epigrams is a compendium of epigrams translated from Old English dedicated as follows: To the Far Admired, Admirablly Faire, vertuous, and witty Beauties of England”, and begins: “It was faire, vertuous, wittie, for your sake, / That I this harder taske did undertake. / I grieved, such wit was out of your command, / Lock’d in a tongue you did not understand. / To doe your service, not my selfe to please, / Did I at first adventure upon these.42 This dedication clearly indicates that Hayman set upon the translation of this work in order to make it more accessible to women; he thus performs a small service to literate women, providing a resource formerly available to only men.. Indeed, the early seventeenth century saw the rise of “several popular books aimed specifically at a female audience.”43 In 1613, English soldier and prolific author Barnabe Rich (1540-1617) wrote and published a dissertation entitled The excellency of good women, in which he notes that the “Infallible markes of a virtuous woman [. . .] are these, she must have modesty, bashfullnes, silence, etc.”— all standard expectations for a grown woman’s proper behavior.44 However, the text itself is dedicated to “The Numberles Number of Honorable Ladies [. . .] worthy of womankind.”45 Once again, the author addresses a work solely to women, thereby acknowledging their ability and right to undergo learning and study. The reader sees this once more in Rich’s next publication in 1614, The honestie of this age, dedicated “Too all those Readers that are well disposed [. . .]

Good men, and Vertuous women.”46 Here the author blatantly Penn History Review

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recognizes his female readers in conjunction with his established male audience. In one instance in his book, however, Rich offhandedly observes that, “The blush of a womans [sic] face is an approbation of a chast and an honest mind.”47 In this sense, it is clear that a woman’s “honesty” in relation to her worth is tied specifically to her modesty and all physical manifestations thereof. Similarly, Sir Thomas Elyot writes in his 1545 The Defence of Good Women that while women often in “perilles are timerous, more delicate than men”48 and often cause “errours and perpetual contencion,”49 they, upon “beyng wel and vertuously brought up, do not onely with men participate in reason, but som also in fidelitie and constancie be equall unto them.”50 Thus the reader notes a belief in the innate abilities of women to become “like” men — once again, less feminine, more masculine, and consequently more “humanist”.

The humanist movement throughout the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a rise in male support of a notion that had lain dormant for centuries in most of the Western world: that women were perhaps capable of similar, if not equal, levels of literacy and education as achieved by men. While humanist support of women’s education retained various similarities across the board, there existed varied levels of enthusiasm ranging from cautious acceptance of female literacy through a push for equal opportunity education. In this vein, the works of multinational European political, scholarly, and popular figures serve as a window through which to view a vastly English movement towards approaching women’s education within a greater international context, including a recurring theme of “de-feminization.” The relating of various dedications and introductions, essays, treatises, and myriad other publications intertwined the diverse international — and multigender — audiences that existed for them.

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2 Ibid.

3 Ibid, D6.

4 Ibid, F2.

5 Ibid, A6.

6 Baldassare Castiglione, The Tudor Translations, trans. Thomas Hoby, vol. 23 of The courtier of Count Baldassare Castilio divided into foure booke, (London: W. Seres, 1528), 215.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid, 216.

9 Ibid, 223.

10 Anthony Gibson, A woman’s woorth, defended against all the men in the world, (London: John Wolfe, 1599), i.

11 David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 128 12 Pierre de la Primaudaye. The French academie. trans. T. Bowes, (London: Printed for Thomas Adams by John Legat, 1618), 213.

13 De Montaigne, Michel, The essayes or morall, politike and militarie discourses, trans. Val Sims, (London: Val. Sims for Edward Blount, 1603), i.

14 DuBoscq, Jacques, The Compleat Woman, trans. N.N. (London: Thomas Harper and Richard Hodgkinson), 1639, i.

15 Pierre Erondelle, The French garden: for English ladyes and gentlewomen to walke in, trans. E. Allde, (London: For E. White, 1605), ii.

16 Jean Le Roux, An Instruction for children; L’instruction des enfans, (London, 1543.

Early English Books Online. Web. 13 Feb. 2014, i.

17 Ibid, 34.

18 Ibid, 33.

19 Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 14751640. (Kingsport: Kingsport Press, 1982), 138.

20 Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy, eds. Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 157.

21 Suzanne W. Hull, Women According To Men: The World of Tudor-Stuart Women, (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1996), 76.

22 Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, trans. Rycharde Hyrd, (London: T. Berthelet, 1529), 2.

23 Ibid., 58.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid, 55.

26 Ibid, 56.

1

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Women in the Humanist Movement Charles Fantazzi, ed., A Companion to Juan Luis Vives, (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2008), 6.

28 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 188.

29 Desiderius Erasmus. “The Abbot and the Learned Lady.� in Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, ed. Alexander Dalzell et al., (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 176.

30 Ibid.

31 Henrich Cornelius Agrippa Von Nettesheim, Female pre-eminence, or, The dignity and excellency of that sex above the male, trans. H.C. (London: T.R. and M.D., 1529), 20.

32 Ibid, 28.

33 Publius Ovidius Naso, Ovid Heroic Epistles, Wye Saltonstall, ed. and trans., (London:1638), i.

34 Ibid.

35 Bradshaw and Duffy, Humanism, Reform and the Reformation, 206; Thomas More. Utopia, trans. Clarence H. Miller, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 76.

36 Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient, 50.

37 Bradshaw and Duffy, Humanism, Reform, and the Reformation, 42; Hull, Women According to Men, 141-142.

38 Robert Cawdrey. A table alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English words, (London: J.R. for Edmund Weaver, 1604), 1-2.

39 Henry Cockeram. The English dictionarie, (London: Nathanial Butter, 1623), 2.

40 Cockeram, The English dictionarie 1.

41 John Murrell, A daily exercise for ladies and gentlewomen, (London: T. Snodham for Widow Helme, 1617), i.

42 John Owen, Certaine epigrams, trans. Robert Hayman, (Bristols-Hope: Roger Mitchell, 1628), i.

43 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 128.

44 Barnabe Rich, The Excellency of Good Women: The Honour and Estimation that Belongeth Vnto Them. The Infallible Markes Whereby to Know Them. (Vinetree: Thomas Dawson, 1613), 2.

45 Ibid.

46 Barnabe Rich, The honestie of this age, (London: T. Dawson, 1614), 1.

47 Ibid, 27.

48 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Defence of Good Women, (London, 1545), 28.

49 Ibid, 33.

50 Ibid, 59-60.

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Women in the Humanist Movement Images: Page 72: Hans Holbein the Younger, “Erasmus,” painting, Web Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Desiderius_Erasmus#/media/File:Holbein-erasmus.jpg (accessed April 28, 2015).

Page 77: Michel de Montaigne, “The Third Volume of the Essais,” 1588, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_ Montaigne#/media/File:Essais_Titelblatt_(1588).png (accessed April 30, 2015).

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“The implacable Surge of History”: Investigating Jewish Activism in Atlanta During the Civil Rights Movement Danielle R. Kerker

The 1958 bombing of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple, commonly referred to as the Temple, stands as the starkest memory of the Civil Rights Movement for many Jewish Atlantans. The bombing not only reveals much about the Civil Rights South, but also the fragility of the Jewish community within it. Even in a cosmopolitan city such as Atlanta, deemed “the City Too Busy to Hate,” Jews were not safe from anti-Semitism. Moreover, the activism of the Temple’s rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, before, during, and after the bombing displays the influence of Jewish contributions to civil rights progress in Atlanta. As a result, the Temple bombing illuminates how perceptions of the Civil Rights Movement within the Atlanta Jewish community determined concrete action and, in turn, how Jewish involvement shaped the changing tides of history In Atlanta.

Clive Webb, in Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights, presents one of the few regional studies of how the relationship among southern Jews, northern Jews, and African Americans unfolded below the Mason-Dixon line throughout the Civil Rights Movement. He explains that southern Jews were torn between their sympathy toward the African-American struggle and their own vulnerability in the face of persistent anti-Semitism.1 Some Jews who may have been in favor of civil rights equality “feared that making strong statements in favor of integration would mean personal economic ruin and ostracism.”2 Apparent inaction and passivity, Webb argues, resulted from fear, not prejudice, as a product of social and economic uncertainty.

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Jim Crow, Webb maintains that the racial hierarchy of the region precluded massive resistance. Consequently, historians note the lack of unified activism within southern Jewish communities during the Civil Rights Movement, especially when compared to national Jewish efforts.3 The story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Jewish South, however, is more complex than it initially appears.

Activism prospered, even in the wake of fear-instilling events such as the bombing of a Temple. In his sermon following the bombing, Rabbi Rothschild proclaimed that although the bomb was intended “to strike terror in the hearts of men,” namely those of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, it instead lit “a new courage and a new hope” within both the Jewish community and the greater Atlanta area.4 Janice Rothschild Blumberg, Rabbi Rothschild’s wife, recalled that the Temple bombing served as “a shock treatment” that “released long-buried thoughts” for Jews and non-Jews on the topic of desegregation in Atlanta.5 To comprehend both the target and the aftermath, it is vital to understand Rabbi Rothschild’s civil rights activism. Analyzing Rothschild’s career and his High Holiday sermons in particular paint a richer picture of Atlanta Jewish experiences during the Civil Rights Movement within the larger arc of American Jewish history.

Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild: An Atlanta Jewish Activist Southern rabbis found themselves in a difficult position during the Civil Rights Movement. Many supported racial equality, yet as leaders of congregations and representatives of communities, they recognized that immersing themselves in the civil rights struggle risked intensifying anti-Semitic sentiment.

For example, segregationists often asserted that Jews worked to undermine Jim Crow and pointed to Jewish activism to warn the public of Jewish desegregation conspiracies. Rabbi Rothschild’s advocacy of civil rights threatened to unravel the Penn History Review

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work southern Jews had done to place themselves on the white side of the racial line. M. William Breman, an active member of the Atlanta Jewish community, recalls that Rothschild was “not the most beloved by everybody” because he spoke out for racial equality during a period when “Atlanta was not accepting.”6 As early as Rosh Hashanah of 1947, Rothschild annually discussed civil rights injustices in his High Holiday sermons, taking a much more direct stance with regard to addressing inequality than his predecessor.7 Rothschild’s outspoken civil rights rhetoric brought such attention to his congregation that many believed the bombing target was chosen because of him.8 Rothschild’s forthrightness was not well received among many of his congregants and disturbed many of his rabbinical colleagues throughout the South, some of whom made their feelings known by writing to him directly.9 Breman described him as “a man who couldn’t care what other people thought about what he said…Lots of times it wasn’t what people wanted to hear.”10 Moreover, Rothschild’s advocacy strained his relations with the Temple’s board members. In 1954, for example, the board refused to accept his proposal to establish a Social Action Committee among congregants.11 Despite these layers of disapproval, Rothschild’s work in Atlanta demonstrates the power of an individual to sway thought and influence action during the Civil Rights Movement.

In the fall of 1946, Rothschild began his tenure as rabbi at the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple. Although he had already spent ten years leading a congregation in Pittsburgh, PA, the 35-year-old was still perceived as a young newcomer with little rabbinical experience.12 His predecessor, Rabbi Emeritus Dr. David Marx, continued to influence leadership of the Temple after having “ruled with an iron will for 52 years.”13 Consequently, it took considerable time for the congregation to look to Rothschild, who was vastly different from his predecessor, as its spiritual leader.14 Dr. Marx was a “rather extreme reform Rabbi” who aspired to diminish outward religious differences 88

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between his congregants and Christian Atlanta.15 He preferred the title of “Doctor” instead of “Rabbi,” eliminated Hebrew from services, and added Sunday morning services.16 As Janice Rothschild Blumberg put it, Dr. Marx worked “to turn his Jews into Americans” while Rothschild’s “[mission] was ‘to turn his Americans into Jews.’”17 In an article for the Southern Israelite in August 1963, entitled “No Place to Hide,” Rothschild addressed the duality of being both an American and a Jew, criticizing what some perceived as its divisive nature. He wrote, “does the Southern Jew really want to establish a dichotomy between his patriotism and his religion…for what is he saying? That there are two separate compartments of his life.”18 In contrast to Dr. Marx, Rothschild hoped to bridge this divide by melding these distinct identities, strengthening his community behind a shared religious experience.

Rothschild was not immediately attuned to the delicate balancing act southern Jews had mastered in the racially regulated South. He moved to Atlanta in adulthood as a Northern “Yankee” who did not view segregation as a natural way of life.19 Blumberg remembers that Rothschild experienced “culture shock” when initially confronted with Atlanta’s racial segregation and the customs of southern Jews.20 More specifically, Rothschild struggled against the “‘don’t dare speak out’ syndrome of Southern Jewry.”21 In the aforementioned 1963 letter in the Southern Israelite, he wrote about his frustration with Jews who “contrived illogical and inconsistent excuses for their failure to become actively involved” in struggle for civil rights.22 Nonetheless, Rothschild remained undeterred in his advocacy, continuing to work toward integration both on and off the pulpit.

As a gradualist, Rothschild believed he could foster support for and acceptance of integration by consistently appealing to his congregations consciences.23 He played an active role advocating equality, justice, and intergroup relations in Atlanta communal life on the Southern Regional Council (SRC), Penn History Review

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the Georgia Council of Human Relations, and the Greater Atlanta Council on Human Relations.24 He also aided the creation of the Community Relations Commission, which addressed inadequate housing issues, serving as the organization’s Vice Chairman below Reverend Samuel Williams, his African-American friend, who led as Chairman.25 In addition to his community involvement, Rothschild internalized the idea that religious leaders should espouse morality before their congregants and “effect a change in our own hearts and thereby seek to change the hearts of all men.”26 Rothschild’s High Holiday sermons not only embody his approach to activism throughout his career, but also depict the relationship between southern Jews and Jim Crow, as perceived in Atlanta by a highly visible and prominent voice.

Rothschild’s High Holiday sermons are noteworthy for a number reasons. First and foremost, they took place during Jewish holidays that mark periods of reflection and atonement at the onset of the Jewish New Year. Rothschild seized this opportunity to stress the moral impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement, referencing religious themes of brotherhood and recounting stories of prejudice in Jewish history. These services coincided with the beginning of the school year, which proved timely during the desegregation crisis. Additionally, attendance at High Holiday services always exceeded that of other holidays, allowing Rothschild to reach a larger audience. Most importantly, Rothschild’s sermons reveal his “courage to proclaim his belief publicly long before it became expedient or even physically safe to do so in a Southern city.”27 After only one year on the Temple’s pulpit, Rothschild stressed ownership and accountability in the realm of justice.

As it was not yet fashionable to discuss the topic of civil rights, congregants most likely did not expect sermons about racial equality.28 On October 13, 1948, he delivered a Yom Kippur sermon entitled “The Greater Sin,” in which he asserted that resolving southern problems was the responsibility of southern citizens. “Unless decent people take up the burden,” he 90

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stressed, “the South faces a return to the most primitive kind of bigotry and race hatred. Let us, then, be among those who are willing to do something.”29 Although the post-World War II economy brought affluence to the Atlanta Jewish community, in 1948 Rothschild recognized that his congregational members nonetheless lacked confidence in their status as white citizens in the South.30 He preached, “there’s nothing wrong with this desire to safeguard our position in the community, only the emphasis is misplaced…if we want our non-Jewish friends to respect us, then we must first respect ourselves.”31 Rothschild urged his members to stop worrying about how they were perceived, demonstrating that he recognized southern Jewish concerns merely a year into his residency in Atlanta. In spreading civil rights rhetoric, Rothschild called upon Jews to unite behind their heritage to improve existing circumstances.

The majority of Rothschild’s High Holiday sermons situated theological points in the context of contemporary events.

On October 7, 1954, Rothschild offered a Yom Kippur sermon entitled “The Challenge of a Dream” that stressed religious morality. In the South, Rothschild conceded, Jews faced both prejudices and indoctrination into the status quo. He asked, “We still have our own problems of security and acceptance. Shall we endanger our own safety by becoming involved in this larger struggle?” He answered his own question by saying, “Certainly, the problem is not a Jewish problem. But it is a religious one.”

Espousing the belief that all men are created equal, Rothschild called upon religious themes to preach equality.32 Furthermore, he discounted the assertion that politics did not belong on the pulpit, arguing that civil rights and morality were intertwined.33 He dedicated full sermons to the political issues of the day, both national and international, addressing such topics as the Little Rock desegregation crisis and the nuclear arms race.34 Rothschild never took a pessimistic stance when addressing current events, instead choosing to focus on the progress that could be achieved by following peaceful and orderly strategies of resistance.

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It is important to note that Rothschild well understood that many of his congregants held attitudes that “had been deeply ingrained from birth and therefore could not be easily altered.”35 He freely acknowledged before his congregation, “Generations of indoctrination must be erased from the heart and mind of man.”36 For example, Breman admitted that his upbringing in the Deep South made it challenging for him to adopt a pro-civil rights viewpoint. He remembers that repeated assertions by his friends and his wife slowly altered his racial views.37 In addition, Rothschild astutely perceived southern disdain for northern interference during the Civil Rights Movement. He stated after the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision of 1954, “no one outside the South can fully appreciate the cataclysmic changes- emotionally and spiritually- that the implementation of the decision will require.”38 In his relentless fight to encourage his community to take a stand in the Civil Rights Movement, Rothschild simultaneously retained sensitivity to southern Jewish concerns. Moreover, he communicated the difficult situations faced by his southern friends to northern audiences. At Temple Israel in Boston in April 1962, he delivered a speech, “Social Upheaval and Personal Peace,” in which he proclaimed: I have watched the South writhe in its agony- and decent Southerners writhe in theirs. For what the law now requires of them has shattered the very foundations of their lives. It has disturbed the comfortable pattern of their existence. It has destroyed their inner peace.39 This speech, and many others like it, reveals that Rothschild understood that the Civil Rights Movement greatly affected his southern brethren. It not only disrupted society at large, but also “the very foundations of their lives” and “the comfortable pattern of their existence.” The movement not only questioned the functioning of Jim Crow, but also “their inner peace.”

Rothschild’s tact implies that he was not simply a northerner who traveled south to upset the relationship between Jews and their 92

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present society. Instead, he was fully aware of the tension his sermons and his activism generated among the Jewish community during such a tense period of history and thoughtfully crafted his messages.

Nonetheless, Rothschild insisted that any unease or discomfort on the part of Atlanta’s Jews did not absolve them from their duty to right societal wrongs.40 In addressing the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Rothschild proclaimed, “no amount of double talk can excuse the individual white man from treating the Negro as an equal and accepting him as a partner in the life of our society.”41 He continuously discredited any excuses individuals could give against upholding Supreme Court decisions. Blumberg believes that Rothschild got away with his “daring action” of outspoken civil rights rhetoric for so long because he “had not waited until the racial issue heated up to begin talking about it.” Instead, Rothschild acculturated his congregation to hearing about civil rights issues from the beginning of his tenure.42 However, in the fall of 1958, white supremacists bombed the Temple in an attempt to intimidate Rabbi Rothschild into silence and instill fear in his reform congregation.43 In the early hours of Sunday morning, October 12th, 1958, before the opening of Hebrew school, forty sticks of dynamite blew up the most prominent synagogue in Atlanta. By attacking the Temple during the desegregation crisis, a period when Rothschild increasingly publicized his support for integration, white supremacists proved that Jewish fear of civil rights advocacy was not unfounded.44 Wayne Chester, a worker at the United Press International, reported that he received a telephone call from a man who introduced himself as “General Gordon of the Confederate Underground” that very same morning. General Gordon proclaimed, “We bombed a Temple in Atlanta. This is the last empty building in Atlanta that we will bomb...Negros and Jews are hereby declared Aliens.”45 Both General Gordon and the bombing itself reminded Atlanta’s Jewish community that Penn History Review

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their skin color did not guarantee them entry into mainstream life in Atlanta. However, instead of deepening collective fear and insecurity, the bombing demonstrated to the Temple’s congressional members that Atlanta stood beside them, united in opposition to such violence.

The bombing of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple in Atlanta was not a unique event. In a 1958 study, the ADL documented over forty anti-Semitic organizations across the South, whether White Citizens Councils, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), or other extremist groups.46 According to ADL records, following Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, there were “93 bombings or attempted bombings in the South. Of these, seven were directed at Jewish institutions or houses of worship.”47 Among the targeted cities were Charlotte, Nashville, Jacksonville, and Birmingham.48 In Jackson, Mississippi, Beth Israel Congregation’s Rabbi Dr. Perry E. Nussbaum wrote an editorial entitled “(Dis)honor Roll” in which he compared the burning of synagogues and books in Hitler’s Germany to the dynamiting of synagogues across the South during the desegregation crisis.49 However, as bombing threats grew more common amidst heightened racial tension, the Temple bombing in Atlanta stood out for the proactive measures taken both nationally and locally in its wake.

The bomb inflicted an estimated $100,000 worth of damage on the building, yet its reverberations across the Atlanta Jewish community penetrated much deeper.50 The bombing forced members of the community to step back and reassess the progress it had made in the years since the lynching Leo Frank, a member of the Temple. On April 29, 1913, Frank was accused of murdering Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old employee at his pencil factory. Evidence against him hung on the testimony of Jim Conley, a black janitor who supposedly helped carry Phagan’s body to the coal cellar. While sitting in jail, Frank was kidnapped by the “Knights of Mary Phagan” and hanged from an oak tree close to Phagan’s birthplace in Marietta, Georgia.51 This period 94

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of heightened anti-Semitism left scars on the collective memory of Atlanta Jews and served as a harsh reminder that, despite their “whiteness,” Jews were no safer from white supremacy than African Americans.

The Frank trial highlights the social dislocation in Atlanta wrought by industrialization and urbanization as the city emerged as the capital of the “New South” at the turn of the twentieth century. Southerners who envisioned factories as a new plantation system among whites that functioned through a social balance between the upper and lower classes viewed Frank, the owner of the National Pencil Factory and a northerner, as a “lascivious capitalist come South to upset the delicate balance that southern whites and African Americans had achieved in the post-Civil War era.”52 Prevalent stereotypes of African Americans, Jews, and northerners demonstrate why the black/white dichotomy between Frank and Conley was overshadowed during the case by the conflict between southerners and the “Yankees,” “carpetbaggers,” and capitalists who threatened the status quo.53 Although Frank symbolized the northern “Jewish industrialist” during a transitional period in Atlanta, the Jewish community focused on Frank’s hanging based on the word of a black man and the trial’s accompanying anti-Semitism.54 Similarly, many historians have analyzed the lynching culture to highlight regional socio-economic sources of violence as a means of controlling and targeting members of minority groups.

Mary Phagan allegedly stood for the purity of southern white womanhood tarnished by a member of an inferior race. After the lynching, Atlanta Jews understood that minimal religious associations did not protect a Jew from falling victim to white supremacy. Leo Samuel Elpan, a Jewish lawyer in Atlanta, explained in the late 1970s that the lynching “broke down most all of the barriers between the orthodox and the reform Jews.

They found out that there was no such thing as one being better than the other.”55 Congregants of the Temple reacted similarly to the bombing, which initially communicated that even a reform Penn History Review

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Leo Frank in 1910. He was hanged by a lynch mob in Marietta, Georgia in 1915. He attempted to publicize his story in the hopes of overturning his conviction for killing Mary Phagan.

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Temple attended by relatively integrated Jews was not as secure as they formerly thought from white supremacist violence.56 While the Frank lynching preceded the Civil Rights Movement by several decades, its impact on the collective memory of southern Jews lingered throughout the Civil Rights era. Rabbi Newton J. Friedman of Temple Emanuel in Beaumont, Texas wrote to Rothschild on October 12, 1958, “The news of the bombing…will go down in Atlanta’s history along with the Leo Frank Lynching.”57 Looking back in 1993, Blumberg wrote that Frank’s lynching “left longtime Temple members with a paralyzing fear of Gentile disapproval.”58 However, the immediate reactions of leaders and communities, both local and national, to the Temple bombing “reassured those Jews who had experienced the horror of the Leo Frank case and the events it triggered that this incident would not cause another such wave of anti-Semitism.”59 The Temple bombing ignited a widespread uproar in the South and across the Untied States. William Schwartz, Jr., the President of the Temple, and Rabbi Rothschild were joined at the bomb site on the morning of October 12th by Mayor William B. Hartsfield, who had heard of the bombing over the radio on his way to church and immediately rerouted his driver to 1589 Peachtree Street, the site of the Temple. Standing before journalists, TV crewmen, and photographers, Hartsfield voiced his shock both at the act itself and its occurrence in Atlanta, a city that had “prided itself in becoming a beacon of tolerance and racial and religious decency in the South.” He went as far as to declare the violence an “out-of-town gang operation” and called upon the South to stand up against such acts of destruction.60 Hartsfield’s spontaneous reaction set the precedent for an “overwhelming show of support from all segments of the general community.”61 Reporters, editors, ministers, politicians, and business leaders all echoed the Mayor’s sentiments. Even Marvin Griffin, Georgia’s segregationist Governor, declared the bombing Penn History Review

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“deplorable.”62 Ralph McGill, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, published an article the next day entitled “A Church, A School…” that condemned the bombing and was widely read throughout Atlanta. McGill blamed a lack of authoritative strength on the part of national and city leaders for this act of lawlessness, as inaction in the face of hatred “[opened] the gates to all those who wish to take law into their own hands.”63 Admonishing those who passively watched prejudice wreak havoc, he wrote, “When the wolves of hate are loosened on one people, then no one is safe.”64 McGill’s powerful response was recognized across the country and eventually earned him a Pulitzer Prize the following year. The Jewish community particularly appreciated his reaction.

Samuel Lubin, the director of the AJC’s Atlanta branch, thanked McGill for his response to the Temple bombing and his work “in the Southland at this critical hour of its existence.”65 McGill’s writing, along with similar quick and strong declarations by other Atlanta media outlets, undoubtedly contributed to the general sentiment of shock and repulsion.

The Temple was overwhelmed by gestures of kindness and sympathy from diverse communities across Atlanta, the nation, and the globe. Bible Belt southerners condemned “the desecration of a house of worship” as “an abomination” and offered support and comfort to the shaken congregation.66 Southerners, Rothschild observed, were a “deeply religious folk” and Atlanta “was a city of churches” that respected Judaism as the root of Christianity.67 The First Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, for example, volunteered substitute facilities for worship and Sunday school classes. Ministers and rabbis wrote Rothschild from over thirty states and from Canada. Some carried an undertone of fear, making it clear that many religious leaders wondered if a future attack would strike them next.68 Moreover, a large number of businesses offered monetary and physical aid in addition to condolences.69 Although damage was covered by insurance, generous contributions were continuously mailed to Rothschild and the Temple.70 These various responses to the 98

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bombing lessened the Jewish community’s fears for safety.71 In a letter to Rothschild, McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc. described the bombing as a “tragedy that befell your congregation and the city of Atlanta alike,” alluding to a citywide feeling of shame while signaling to the Atlanta Jewish community that they were not alone.72 Generosity and support did not go unappreciated

by Rothschild and the congregants, as a plaque was installed in dedication to those, both known and anonymous, who helped rebuild “Friendship Hall” when the Temple’s restoration project was completed in May 1960.73 President Eisenhower’s response to the Temple bombing is a testament to the national attention the event garnered.

Upon hearing about the bombing, Eisenhower ordered an FBI investigation to aid local police efforts.74 He wrote to Mayor Hartsfield applauding his “swift and efficient efforts” after the “wanton” bombing.75 Moreover, he acknowledged that Hartsfield’s “forceful and unequivocal denunciation” not only preserved Atlanta’s reputation as the “City too Busy to Hate,” but also “set an example for the entire nation.”76 Eisenhower’s response contributed to the distinctiveness of the bombing, as he did not react similarly to previous acts of violence across the South. On October 13, 1958, the New York Post published an article entitled “Ike and the Southern Terrorists” congratulating Eisenhower for his actions but decreeing them overdue, as “perhaps the country might have been spared much of this present nightmare if he had been able to find his voice- and his FBI reports- when the explosions began many months ago.”77 Whether Eisenhower’s call to arms was a cause or effect of the national and local responses, he greatly aided the national coverage of the Temple bombing and the investigation of the perpetrators.

One hundred Atlanta police officers under Chief Herbert Jenkins were given high priority to work with FBI agents to investigate the bombing. Additionally, over seventyfive city detectives and Georgia’s Bureau of Investigation agents Penn History Review

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contributed to the effort.78 Although five men members of hate groups were arrested, only George Bright stood trial.79 A native of New York, Bright belonged to a group called the Columbians, a neo-Nazi organization rooted in Atlanta. Atlanta news outlets omitted Bright’s six and a half hour anti-Semitic rant and other anti-Jewish testimonies from public news, perhaps in an effort to begin quelling tensions.80 In the end, lawyers were able to demonstrate only that Bright was anti-Semitic, not that he had committed the crime.81 The “shock and revulsion of all America” following the verdict proved to southern Jews that the bombers were not representative of the majority, but were instead “a cancer to be cut out of the body politic and left to die,” as described by Rabbi Rothschild in his sermon following the bombing.82 Although the investigations and trials yielded negligible results, change was underway. The bombing brought civil rights questions into the public arena and made them pertinent to everyday life for Jewish Atlantans, ensuring that the question of integration was not solely discussed in legislative meetings and in newspaper articles. Moreover, the Temple’s congregants felt more secure in the greater Atlanta community, recognizing that their best interests may lie in action instead of silence.83 Although Rothschild feared that congregants would not show up for services the Friday following the bombing, “over 900 of the 1,000 Temple members came” and overcrowded the rubblefilled space.84 Even after a disappointing trial, Rothschild assured his community that they were neither alone nor vulnerable.85 Rothschild’s sermon following the Temple bombing, “And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” a reference to Ezekiel 34:28, embodied the way in which he used his position on the pulpit to advocate for a stronger Jewish contribution toward “a vision of universal brotherhood and a world of peace.”86 He delegitimized the Jewish concern surrounding “personal security” when he said, “now we have discovered at long last what can happen when men are afraid to speak and when they 100

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allow the shadow of cowardice to creep into their souls.” Now, he argued, the Jews carried a responsibility to shatter the silence, to lift “the curtain of fear,” and to “achieve peace and tranquility for all humanity.”87 This last phrase, “all of humanity,” demonstrated how Rothschild spoke to the theory of the unitary character of prejudice, which viewed anti-Semitism and white supremacy as interlocking issues. Since a fully democratic American society would lead to Jewish security, a commitment to civil rights should be a Jewish priority.88 This was the position taken by national Jewish organizations advocating for Jewish rights as part of a broader program for civil rights, and indeed this larger message can be traced throughout Rothschild’s sermon, especially when he said, “one building dedicated to the worship of our Heavenly Father stood in ruins.”89 Rothschild referred to the Temple as “one building,” not our building, implying “one of many.”90 He told the congregation that the support the Temple received “[was] addressed to us, but their words bring comfort and hope to all whose hearts have been gnawed by fear and whose souls were corroded by doubt.”91 Rothschild relayed to his congregation that discrimination in Atlanta was not solely a Jewish problem, but one which affected society at large.

Rothschild embedded religious language in his sermon, yet the usual pleas for civil rights activism characterized the majority of his speech. He relayed that the events of October 12th provided many lessons with regard to law, morality, and responsibility. He urged, “This must be a land ruled by law and not by men” because disregard for the law was fostering a society of “anarchy,” “violence,” and bids for “personal power.”92 Although his words were race-neutral, these statements extended beyond the bombing and underlined the law’s failure to protect African-American citizens. Moreover, he argued, this law should be “the moral law” based in religious ideals that espouse, “all men are brothers…we must love our neighbors as ourselves.”93 To choose this path meant to choose the path of democracy and Penn History Review

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justice.94 Furthermore, Rothschild emphasized responsibility, asking, “For who is to blame for the wave of violence that has swept across our land?”95 Echoing McGill’s article, Rothschild argued that the guilty ones were not solely those politicians who fueled a culture of political hostility or the perpetrators who planned attacks. The responsibility was shared even with “those good and decent people who choose to remain silent in such a time.”96 Rothschild addressed these issues before his congregation in the hopes that the bomb would pierce the silence of a community that quietly stood by as lawlessness enveloped the nation.97 His message demonstrated the same activist oratory that characterized the majority of his sermons, despite the fact that such activism may have positioned the Temple as an attractive bombing target.

In discussing civil rights issues on the pulpit, Rothschild countered the assumption that rabbis in the South did not advocate for civil rights. He wrote, “the impression seems to be that the majority of ministers and rabbis in the South solved the dilemma by keeping silent. I am not so sure. At least, I did not.

And I am convinced that many of my colleagues likewise spoke out.”98 Perhaps the minimal reactions among congregants in the South to the preaching of these ministers and rabbis spurred impressions of nominal institutional and rabbinical activism.99 Given the bold nature of Rothschild’s sermons for their time, it is clear why his congregants were apprehensive of his undisguised civil rights advocacy. Nonetheless, Rothschild recognized the potential results that his leadership could bring about through civil rights discussions and educational programs at the Temple.

Rothschild’s ability to speak publically about civil rights confirmed for him, “it is possible to open men’s minds and change their hearts after all.”100 Following the bombing of Birmingham’s 116th street Baptist Church in 1963, which killed four girls in Sunday school merely five years after the Temple bombing, Temple members donated $3500 to help restore the building.

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These donations were sent with letters, “many of them from children, [which] testified to the results of Rothschild’s advocacy among his own congregation.”101 After his passing in the winter of 1973, a CBS special aired on January 2, 1974 remembering him as someone who “helped awaken the conscience of the community” through a “happy combination of intellect, wit, wisdom, and sheer will.”102 Coretta Scott King, the father and mother of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Maynard Jackson, the first African American elected as Mayor of Atlanta, were among those who attended his memorial, serving as a testament to his accomplishments during the civil rights struggle.103 Rabbi Rothschild’s work, while controversial, confirmed the ability of Jewish activists to stand up before others and touch a large audience. While Rothschild is among one of the best-known Jewish activists in Atlanta during the Civil Rights Movement, he was by no means alone. A plethora of Jewish men and women fought for civil rights equality, both on a large and small scale. Jewish business leaders became social leaders, implementing policies and practices that benefited their AfricanAmerican customers. Moreover, individuals forged friendships that bridged religious and racial divides. Despite the racial prejudice and anti-Semitism that permeated the Deep, Atlanta Jews took stances that supported civil rights equality.

The case study of Atlanta presents a unique view of southern Jewish activism. As demonstrated by the Temple bombing, Atlanta leadership responded proactively to civil rights events. Shirley Brickman, a Jewish Atlantan, underlines Atlanta’s particularities by expounding, “We were not Montgomery. We were not Selma. We were Atlanta.”104 As the 1960s advanced, preoccupations with preserving Atlanta’s peaceful veneer and protecting economic growth proved to be persuasive factors for both Jews and Gentiles in complying with national civil rights laws. These collective efforts gradually mitigated Jewish fears for safety and prompted Jewish individuals and organizations to act in support of the African-American cause.

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Although southern Jews might not have publically supported integration in large numbers or marched with placards, they should not be characterized as passive bystanders in the arc of civil rights history. Upon closer inspection, a particular brand of activism emerged among Atlanta Jewish communities.

Whether acting alone, together, or in cooperation with African Americans, Atlanta Jews worked within the context of their racially prejudiced environment to influence change. For some Jews, such as Rabbi Rothschild, activism manifested in targeted civil rights oratory, while for others, activism occurred out of the public eye. Analyzing this particular chapter of the Civil Rights Movement reminds us that even during a time and place where inaction frequently prevailed over activism, Jewish individuals and organizations proactively engaged with the changing tides of history.

1

Fight Against Fear, xiv.

Box 4, Folder 6, MSS 59, The Temple Records, 1853-1989, “A Temple is Bombed: Atlanta, 1958” by Arnold Shankman, p. 2, 1969, Emory University, The Cuba Family Archives for Southern History, The Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, 1440 Spring Street NW, Atlanta, Georgia 30309.

3 Fight Against Fear, 219.

4 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 1.

5 Janice Rothschild Blumberg, As But A Day: To a Hundred and Twenty, 18671987, Atlanta, GA: Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, 1987, p. 107. Janice Rothschild remarried after Jacob Rothschild’s passing, taking on the name Janice Rothschild Blumberg.

6 M. William Breman, January 7 and January 28, 1990, OCH10095, p. 2324, from the Herbert and Esther Taylor Oral History Collection, The Cuba Family Archives for Southern History, The Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, 1440 Spring Street NW, Atlanta, Georgia 30309.

7 The Jewish High Holidays usually take place in September or October of the calendar year and include Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Box 1, MSS 238, File 25, Janice Rothschild Papers, “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” p. 4, The Cuba 2

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8 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 13.

9 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 13.

10 Breman, 24.

11 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 8.

12 As But A Day, 95-97.

13 As But A Day, 95-98. “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 2.

14 As But A Day, 95-97.

15 Breman, 7.

16 Traditionally, synagogues and Temples provided mainly Saturday Sabbath services. Adding Sunday morning services meant that Temple congregants could attend services when their Christian friends attended Church. As But A Day, 59.

17 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 4.

18 Janice Rothschild Blumberg, One Voice: Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild and the Troubled South (Macon: Mercer UP, 1985), 149.

19 Fight Against Fear, 172.

20 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 2-3.

21 As But A Day, 95-97.

22 One Voice, 149.

23 Fight Against Fear, 181.

24 Fight Against Fear, 182. “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 years After,” 3.

25 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 41.

26 “A statement on the Segregation-Integration Issue,” 2-3.

27 One Voice, Forward.

28 “Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild’s Sermons on Civil Rights, 1948-1968,” Dr. Chyet, History 302, Alvin M. Sugarman, May 26, 1969, Rothschild Papers, p.

2, Series 4, Box 19, Folder 8, MSS 637, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

29 Yom Kippur Sermon, October 13, 1948, 4-5, “Sermons from a Southern Pulpit,” 1948-1958, Series 3, Box 11, Folder 1, MSS 637, p. 1-2, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

30 “Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild’s Sermons on Civil Rights, 1948-1968,” 1.

31 “Sermons from a Southern Pulpit,” Yom Kippur Sermon, October 13, 1948, 7.

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“Sermons from a Southern Pulpit,” 1948-1958, Series 3, Box 11, Folder 1, MSS 637, p. 3, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

33 “Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild’s Sermons on Civil Rights, 1948-1968,” 6.

34 “Sermons from a Southern Pulpit,” 1-2.

35 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 6.

36 One Voice, 61.

37 Breman, 25.

38 One Voice, 61.

39 “Social Upheaval and Personal Peace” Delivered at Temple Israel, Boston, Mass., at the Annual Joshua Loth Liebman Sabbath. April 6, 1962, p. 3, in “Sermons from a Southern Pulpit,” 1959-1964, Series 3, Box 11, Folder 2, MSS 637, p. 1-2, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

40 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 7.

41 One Voice, 179.

42 One Voice, 57.

43 Fight Against Fear, 182-189.

44 Box 4, Folder 8, MSS 59, The Temple Records, 1853-1989, “Continuing Education,” Elmo Ellis, 1978, The Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History, The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, 1440 Spring Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30309.

45 Arnold Shankman, “American Jewish Archives,” in A Temple is Bombed- Atlanta, 1958 (1971), 131-132.

46 Arnold Forster, ADL Bulletin, October 1958, Vol. 15, No. 8, THE SOUTH: New Field for an Old Game: The Professional Anti-Semite is Capitalizing on the Anguish of the South’s Dilemma, 1.

47 Forster, 8.

48 “The Bombings in the South,” December 15, 1958, 1, The American Jewish Committee Community Affairs Department, Rothschild Papers, Series 4, Box 19, MSS 637, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

49 Letter to Rothschild on October 13, 1958, Rothschild Papers, Series 2, Box 3, Folder 11, MSS 873, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

50 “A Temple is Bombed: Atlanta, 1958,” 11. New Georgia Encyclopedia. (Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press, 2004). According to Dollar Times (HBrotheres: 2007-2012), today, the damage would be worth

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51 Clive Webb, Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 17.

52 Jeffrey Melnick, Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 7. Although Frank was born in Texas and married into a prominent Atlanta family, the Selig family, he spent the majority of his life in Brooklyn and was educated at Cornell. See Melnick, page 34 for reference.

53 Fight Against Fear, 18.

54 Brundage, 91.

55 Leon Samuel Eplan, February 11 1976, OCH10095, pp. 46, the Herbert and Esther Taylor Oral History Collection, Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History at the Breman Museum, Atlanta, GA. 56 Melisa Fay Green. The Temple Bombing. (MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 245.

In a letter to Rabbi Rothschild after the bombing, Rabbi Bertram Klausner, of B’nai El Temple in St. Louis, went as far as to call the congregation members the “flesh of Atlanta’s flesh and the blood of Atlanta’s blood.” Congregants of the Temple, particularly, had a reputation for being a strong presence in the larger Atlanta community. Letter to Rothschild on October 13, 1958, Rothschild Papers, Emory University.

57 Letter to Rothschild on October 12, 1958, Rothschild Papers, Emory University.

58 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 5.

59 One Voice, 82.

60 Greene, 241.

61 One Voice, 82.

62 Ellis, “Continuing Education,” 7.

63 South East Area (Atlanta), RG 347.4.25-.26/953-1968, Box 2, Ralph McGill 1957-62, Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

64 South East Area (Atlanta), RG 347.4.25-.26/953-1968, Box 2, Ralph McGill 1957-62, Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

65 South East Area (Atlanta), Ralph McGill 1957-62, YIVO. 66 One Voice, 83.

67 One Voice, 83.

68 Letter to Rothschild on October 13, 1958, Rothschild Papers, Emory Uni-

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Jewish Activism in Atlanta versity 69 Letter to Rothschild on October 13, 1958, Rothschild Papers, Emory University.

70 One Voice, 83.

71 Fight Against Fear, 63.

72 Letter to Rothschild on October 13, 1958, Rothschild Papers, Emory University.

73 As But A Day, 111-112.

74 Greene, 246.

75 Ellis, “Continuing Education,” 7.

76 Ellis, “Continuing Education,” 7.

77 Newspaper Clippings from October 13, 1958, Rothschild Papers, Series 4, Box 18, Folder 2, MSS 637, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

78 “New Georgia Encyclopedia: Temple Bombing.” New Georgia Encyclopedia.

(Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press, 2004).

79 The men belonged to groups such as the National States Rights Party and the Kings of the White Camilla. Forster, 5. One Voice, 106-107.

80 ADL Bulletin, February 1959, Vol. 16, No. 2, THE TRIAL OF GEORGE M. BRIGHT: “He hates Jews. The Atlanta Temple was bombed. And that’s all,” 7.

81 THE TRIAL OF GEORGE M. BRIGHT, 7.

82 Rothschild,“…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 3-4.

83 Letter to Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, from Lipsan (Albert Vorspan and Rabbi Eugene J. Lipman, directors), subject “Atlanta Dynamiting and Other Urgent Matters,” October 13, 1958, Rothschild Papers, Series 2, Box 3, Folder 11, MSS 873, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

84 Article by Eleanor Ringel from The Atlanta Constitution on October 12, 1978, “Bomb of Hate Backfired at the Temple,” Rothschild Papers, Series 4, Box 19, MSS 637, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

85 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 1.

86 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 4.

87 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 3.

88 Svonkin, 18.

89 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 4.

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Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 4.

Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 3-4.

92 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 2.

93 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 2.

94 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 2.

95 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 2.

96 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 3.

97 Rothschild, “…And None Shall Make Them Afraid,” 1.

98 “Sermons from a Southern Pulpit,” 1-2, written sometime between 1958 and 1973.

99 This topic will be addressed in the next chapter, when investigating the North/South dichotomy and the role of national Jewish organizations.

100 “Sermons from a Southern Pulpit,” 1-2.

101 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 4.

102 CBS Segment on January 2, 1974, p. 1, Paul Dhields, TV 5 Newscene, Condolences: Special, Series 6, Box 21, Folder 4, MSS 637, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

103 “Jacob M. Rothschild- His Legacy 20 Years After,” 44.

104 Brickman, 10.

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Images: Page 96: “Leo Frank,” photograph, 1910, Wikimedia Commons, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leo_Frank_%281884-1915%29.jpg#filelinks (accessed April 30, 2015).

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Big Trouble in the Big Easy: The Battle of Canal Street and the Independence of Black Political Power Jacob L. Wasserman Yale University

The carnage of the Civil War arrived in the streets of New Orleans just over a decade late. While in 1862, the city had surrendered fairly peaceably to the Union Navy, unresolved tensions had threatened the fragile peace ever since.1 On September 14, 1874, the political divisions of the postbellum city took shape in two opposing battle lines. On one side, a newly organized force, directed by their leader to uphold “the rights of the colored as well as of the white race,” awaited further orders.2 Facing them, a ragtag militia, commanded by one of the highestranking former Confederate generals, arrayed itself along the downtown waterfront. With a sudden volley, the two armies launched into a combat which would soon claim far more lives than the Civil-War capture of New Orleans itself.3 While the extent of the bloodshed may have shocked New Orleanians, the clash seemingly pitted the same elements that had been fighting since secession against one another.

However, the smoke of battle obscured the truth about the combatants. The troops whose commander broadcast protection of both races were actually members of the Crescent City White League, the foremost of New Orleans’ Redeemer organizations opposed to Reconstruction and black rights.

Meanwhile, the force under ex-Confederate James Longstreet was the integrated Metropolitan Police, the militia propping up Louisiana’s Reconstruction government. Far from affirming the narrative of a cleanly divided social landscape, the events of 110

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Battle of Canal Street

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September 1874 broke from that pattern altogether. Indeed, over the course of the two days of rioting, the White Leaguers did not kill a single civilian African American, and in the aftermath, black leaders blamed corrupt Republican officials almost as strongly as the erstwhile Democratic usurpers.4 To be sure, racial animus and partisan rivalry played large, definitive roles in what came to be known as the Battle of Canal Street or the Battle of Liberty Place. Nevertheless, while it pitted one army against another, the clash demonstrates that, in fact, three factions contested the course of Reconstruction in Louisiana: white Redeemers, white Republicans, and the black community. Often lumped together with the white supporters of Reconstruction (dubbed “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags”), New Orleans’ African Americans actually possessed independent political and social power—a fact recognized by both blacks and whites. During and after the battle, as the ascendant White League made overtures to blacks, tensions within the blackRepublican coalition all but broke it apart. If such an alliance could not hold together in the face of an existential threat like the White League, the Battle of Canal Street thus epitomized the broader problems of white-led Reconstruction across the South. Although the Redeemers may have lost the battle itself, a thorough examination of the causes, course, and consequences of the clash reveals the cracks that would eventually break Reconstruction for good across the South.

Histories of Reconstruction have given the black community little agency of its own until relatively recent scholarship. Historians of the so-called “Dunning School,” dominant up to the mid-twentieth century, presented a narrative of incurably corrupt carpetbaggers manipulating puerile blacks to get vengeance on the South, as exemplified in Louisiana by authors like Ella Lonn and Stuart Landry. During the Civil Rights Movement, however, a set of revisionist historians, like black author John Hope Franklin, recast the previously understood 112

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heroes and villains, vindicating the good intentions of white Republicans during Reconstruction.5 Still, blacks remained allies, never truly leaders, in this “unfinished revolution.”6 More recent scholarship, on the other hand, has placed black activism and selfdetermination at the center of the story, as typified by the works of Eric Foner and Steven Hahn. In Louisiana, post-revisionists like James Hogue and Justin Nystrom have used political-science and socio-cultural lenses, respectively, to complicate the state’s Reconstruction.7 Little scholarship has explicitly focused on tensions between blacks and white Republicans, and no works study how such tensions played out at the Battle of Canal Street. Indeed, historians continue to debate the basic terms of engagement between blacks and whites in postbellum Southern society: authors like James Blassingame and Howard Rabinowitz have respectively argued for and against C. Vann Woodward’s image of a surprisingly integrated pre-Jim-Crow South.8 In this evershifting historiographical landscape, a space for independent black political power has opened. While the Battle of Canal Street may have been just one riot in one somewhat atypical Southern city, a look at black self-assertion in the months and years surrounding the clash offers an effective way of further unlocking this rediscovered story. ~~~ The New Orleans of the 1870’s was a racial, social, and political kaleidoscope. Over the course of Reconstruction, the city’s diverse communities each blended and separated in evervarying coalitions. Typifying these swirling complexities, an 1875 Harper’s Weekly piece on the city’s integrated schools summed up New Orleans’ idiosyncrasies. Only in New Orleans, among all cities in the South, were schools even close to fully integrated.

Moreover, only in New Orleans had a mob set on expelling black girls from primary schools have been bested by parental and administrative opposition, as Harper’s related. Most tellingly, Penn History Review

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Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, like other Northern publications, covered the Battle of Canal Street with “outrage,” but missed the nuance of its racial politics.

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only in New Orleans, with its heritage of racial mixing, would the mob’s captain have accidentally accused a White League leader’s daughter of being black. From integration in public spaces to fracturing in racial identity to success in black officeseeking, New Orleans offered a unique setting for the nuances of Reconstruction to play out.9 Only by looking through the lens of the city’s social environment does the Battle of Canal Street begin to make sense.

The roots of New Orleans’ political and racial makeup trace back to its founding. Colonized by the French and then held by the Spanish, Americans, and Confederates, the city retained a distinctive culture apart from both the rest of the South and the rest of the nation. In southern Louisiana, French, Caribbean, and African influences created a thriving Creole community of largely mixed-race freemen whose social mobility, racial ambiguity, and, in some cases, antebellum slave-ownership threatened the core tenets of white supremacy. Alongside these self-styled gens de colour libre lived generally poorer ex-slaves from across the South, who lacked the longstanding civil society of the Creoles. The city’s white population was perhaps even more divided. White Creoles, whites from the rest of the South, Northerners, and European immigrants—all divided among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews—uneasily co-existed in New Orleans. Down to its very demographics, the South’s largest port and most cosmopolitan city complicates a binary narrative of Reconstruction.10 Although the black community was fragmented, it nevertheless managed to achieve incredible successes in the postbellum years. While New Orleans did not, of course, represent a perfectly integrated or egalitarian society, few other locales in the South could rival the Crescent City in terms of the social position of African Americans. For instance, as Harper’s Weekly noted, New Orleans desegregated from one third to one half of its public schools eighty years before Brown v.

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Board. Streetcars, opera houses, churches, and sports leagues all experienced piecemeal integration after an 1869 state law forbade discrimination in public places.11 These steps forward, often taken in the face of fierce opposition, were achieved through black political and legal maneuvers. For example, the Louisianian, the city’s foremost black newspaper, lauded the success of civil rights lawsuits at forcing integration after one instance when the courts fined a local confectionery for denying a black woman a soda.12 On the other hand, when implementation of school integration began to flounder in 1877, the Louisianian did not attack Redeemers, but rather blamed white Republican officials for being “base hypocrites…not in sympathy with the people whose cause they pretend to espouse.”13 Instead, black-only ward organizations and social clubs formed to drive societal change themselves.

While many antidiscrimination lawsuits and statutes failed to have sustained impact, the success blacks did enjoy came about primarily through self-driven political action.14 Buttressing these societal reforms, blacks wielded immense electoral power, both through the ballot box and the influence of black elected officials. The most storied of these leaders, P.B.S. Pinchback, became famous for his effective yet Machiavellian dealings, routinely rigging votes and switching sides.15 Indeed, while Northern papers reported white political corruption, the New Orleans Times asked of Pinchback and his allies, “Have they not served their country by plundering the tax payers [too]?”16 Ironically demonstrating blacks’ equality in both the good and the bad, Pinchback earned enough respect in the Louisiana black community that a black baseball team even named themselves “the Pinchbacks.”17 During the Election of 1872, Pinchback’s political acumen was on full display. Four years earlier, a charismatic, twenty-six-year-old carpetbagger named Henry Clay Warmoth won the governorship under a new state constitution. But after 116

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The storied Louisiana politician P.B.S. Pinchback, leader among the New Orleans Creole community and America’s first black governor

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a term’s worth of corruption and backroom deals, the 1872 race divided the state into five factions. The Customs House Ring, a Republican political machine led by President Grant’s brother-in-law, opposed Warmoth’s Liberal Republicans, who backed Horace Greeley for president. Meanwhile, Democrats divided between hardliners and the Reform Party, a business coalition who tried to make overtures to black voters. As a result, Pinchback’s group of black legislators held the balance of power.18 Emphatically rejecting the Reform Party’s outreach, the Pinchback-owned Louisianian pointedly noted that “colored men are good to support a candidate, but not good enough to travel on the same steamboat.”19 Also bucking Warmoth for his lukewarm civil rights stance, Pinchback joined the Customs House Ring in running the white Vermont carpetbagger William Pitt Kellogg against a Fusionist alliance of the other three factions. Both sides committed massive electoral fraud, and then both claimed victory. Amidst the chaos, Pinchback organized New Orleans blacks to contest the results and then managed to impeach the lame-duck Warmoth and elevate himself to become the nation’s first black governor. Though he served only a few weeks in the early winter of 1873, Pinchback quelled a militia mutiny, restored order, and not long after, peacefully handed the government over to Kellogg, his elected successor.20 In the process, he demonstrated that all sides recognized the power of the black vote and the influence of black leaders.

These successes, however, proved short-lived. First, the legislature elected Pinchback to the U.S. Senate, but, much to the black community’s consternation, the Senate refused to seat him. Meanwhile, John McEnery and D.B. Penn, the DemocraticFusionist ticket for governor and lieutenant governor, established a rival state government blocks from Kellogg’s in downtown New Orleans, at that time the state capital. While the Grant administration recognized Kellogg as the rightful governor, it refused use troops to stop McEnery and Penn’s shadow 118

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legislature from meeting.21 In the face of all this turmoil, white business leaders and Creole elites of New Orleans proposed a joint plan in mid1873 to share power and throw out the demagogues of both parties. Seeking economic stability and good government above all else, a number of insurance executives, railroad barons, and ex-generals such as P.G.T. Beauregard collaborated with a likeminded group of Creole newspaper publishers and politicians to draft a statement of principles, including racial equality in voting and public accommodations. However, strong white backlash from outside New Orleans, black distrust among non-elites, and black leaders’ requirement that recognition of their rights precede any electoral alliance doomed the already unrealistic plan. While commerce and class interests played a larger role than racial goodwill, this so-called Unification Movement again showed that blacks held power independent of—and potentially severable from—white Republicans.22 But with the failure and rapid disappearance of this last attempt at compromise, Democrats, white Republicans, and blacks all began to mobilize for a fight. ~~~ On July 1, 1874, The Daily Picayune, New Orleans’ premier conservative paper, announced the formation of the Crescent City White League. An organization of mostly Confederate veterans and their younger brothers, the White Leaguers ranged socioeconomically from middle-class shopkeepers to city elites and included Edward White, who years later joined the majority Plessy v. Ferguson opinion as a Supreme Court justice.23 As Kellogg later dryly testified before Congress, the League included “some of the best men in the city, unexceptional in their private relation except that they were outside the law.”24 Incorporated into a somewhat decentralized network of state White Leagues, the Crescent City branch recognized Penn History Review

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in its very platform that blacks possessed a significant— and dangerous—amount of power, independent of the carpetbaggers. Among a series of causes for outrage, the platform lists blacks’ “incessant demands for offices…[and] the development in their conventions of a spirit of proscription against…even honorable Republicans.”25 Along these lines, the League published an inflammatory leaflet asking, “SonS of LouiSiana, are You SLaveS?”26 To the League’s white audience, blacks posed such a political threat that they could conceivably turn the tables to enslave whites. In statements geared at a broader readership, Leaguers softened their language, but the recognition of black political mobilization remained. “For years,” noted one announcement, “the negroes have been organized in the interest of their own race”; as such, the White League, down to its very name, was purportedly just a response to these alleged black leagues.27 In fact, the Picayune trumpeted Black League plans for a huge riot the day before it announced the White League’s formation; The League testified before Congress that it was reacting to comparable black groups.28 The Crescent City White League based its existence upon the public assertion that blacks were an electoral and social force, in and of themselves.

White Leaguers responded to the rising tide of black political incorporation. As the Louisianian printed frequent reminders to register to vote, the Picayune noted with dismay that the pace of black registration had doubled that of whites in certain wards. Locales where blacks organized most became the sites of the greatest White League violence.29 For instance, a White League official in the exceptionally violent parish of Caddo noted not only that the three-fourths-black electorate sent “big, burly, black negro[es]” to the state house, but also that they seemed to hold the upper hand over the white Republican representative “sandwiched between them.”30 The Crescent City White Leaguers shared these observations. Written twenty years later, White Leaguer H.A. Haugh’s reminiscence of the Battle 120

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of Canal Street rages against the city’s all-black clubs and the “mongrel crew” that held up the Kellogg government.31 While much of this rhetoric may be exaggerated for political effect, it nevertheless reveals at least a kernel of recognition among the White Leaguers that blacks were approaching near equal political footing with white Republicans.

While firmly denouncing the White League, prominent blacks used their newfound strength to criticize white Republicans almost as harshly. In an anti-White League editorial a week before the riot, the Louisianian decried the fact that “Reconstruction, though accomplishing a great good…[has] mixed it with such a base alloy of selfishness.”32 Even though the paper’s motto was “Republican at all times, and under all circumstances,” Pinchback himself chastised national Republicans in a speech in Cincinnati, saying they lacked confidence in the abilities of Southern blacks and only timidly pursued civil rights. He also suggested that not every black alliance with ex-slaveholders was counterproductive.

33 Myths about the untrustworthiness of Southern whites were “calculated to alarm the colored voters,” he asserted, but any black who tried to make overtures, “if not utterly destroyed, would find his influence…greatly impaired.34 Meanwhile, even Kellogg’s own lieutenant governor, Pinchback’s Creole rival C.C. Antoine, told a reporter that a majority of state voters would prefer Pinchback to Kellogg. To be sure, other black politicians, like T.T. Allain, took pains to establish that no independent “Black Man’s Party” existed or was planned.35 Nevertheless, instead of uniting in the face of the greatest threat so far to Republican government, the party began to splinter along racial lines.

By September 13, 1874, the Big Easy sat uneasy. Over the preceding week, the Metropolitan Police, Kellogg’s militia, had begun finding and seizing arms from suspected White League plotters.36 Commanded by former Union officer Algernon Badger and former Confederate general James Longstreet, the Metropolitan Police contained both black and white regiments, Penn History Review

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all of whom were put on alert. The day before, the steamer Mississippi docked with a shipment of arms likely for the League. Necessary to keep order over a wide area, the region’s Federal troops were encamped almost four hundred miles away in Mississippi, leaving the Metropolitan Police on its own to form a perimeter around the levee dock.37 Seemingly spontaneously, handbills began appearing around the city, calling for a closing of all stores and a mass meeting to protest the usurping Kellogg government. Unbeknownst to the Reconstruction commanders, a coup to install the Democratic shadow legislature had been planned days before by Crescent City White League commander Frederick Ogden and Democratic Lieutenant-Governor-claimant D.B. Penn. As rumors flew, regiments of White Leaguers took up arms and prepared to meet at designated safe-houses.38 September 14th dawned like any other day in New Orleans.

In the morning, the streets filled with women shopping. By happenstance, soon-to-be-enemies Badger and Penn exchanged friendly greetings on the streetcar.39 However, by eleven o’clock in the morning crowds of angry men had gathered on Canal Street at the foot of a statue of Henry Clay. Unlike the man sculpted above them, the assemblage was in no mood to compromise.

Chanting “Hang Kellogg!,” the crowd roared its assent when a committee was sent to demand the governor’s abdication, only to be denied a meeting. Ominously, the core of the White League’s regiments and military leadership remained absent from the rally, out of sight of the Metropolitan Police. From this position, the Democratic ticket defeated in 1872 proclaimed themselves now in power. Since McEnery, the Democratic claimant to the governorship, was then out of state—likely warned to avoid the riot—his running-mate Penn declared himself governor.

In coordination, White Leaguers seized City Hall and cut the telegraph hub there, incapacitating the Metropolitans’ response.40 Even amidst this flurry of activity, the League leadership took pains to show that racial animus played no role 122

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in the coup. In the proclamation “To the Colored People of the State of Louisiana,” Penn wrote, “In the grand movement now on foot against the enormities of the rule of the Kellogg usurpation, rest assured no harm is meant towards you.…The rights of the colored as well as of the white race we are determined to uphold and defend.”41 Statements from League orator R.H. Marr and Mayor Louis Wiltz echoed these sentiments.42 These words, of course, did not reflect a genuine desire for racial harmony. Yet they were not a mere formality either, especially compared to the triumphantly racist rhetoric of Redeemers elsewhere. The most racially complex battle of Reconstruction was about to begin.

The Metropolitans tried their best to regain control of the city. At first, the militia confronted the mobs at the statue of Clay, but Badger and Longstreet soon realized the true threat came from the White League force advancing toward the arms aboard the Mississippi. Establishing a defensive line, the Metropolitans fired the day’s first volley, at White Leaguers hidden behind cotton bales nearby. Outgunned but better trained, the Leaguers charged the Metropolitans, who broke and ran after General Badger fell critically wounded. Amidst mass desertions spurred by promises of amnesty, the Metropolitan Police dissolved into the chaos, as Longstreet tried to rally them before falling from his horse. By the next morning, White Leaguers had taken control of the statehouse, arsenal, and police station, leaving Kellogg to flee to the federally-protected customs house. On the 15th, the League staged an inauguration for Penn, as White League branches across the state began to depose their own local officials. After 1,500 White Leaguers had fought almost 1,000 members of the Metropolitan Police—leaving at least twentyseven dead and over one hundred wounded—an odd sense of normalcy set in over New Orleans.43 Instead of inciting violence, the Picayune tactically chose to propagandize that the city’s black residents appeared around town “in a very satisfied mood.”44 “So ends the Kellogg regime,” the paper concluded.45 Penn History Review

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President Grant did not share the Picayune’s matter of fact outlook: Kellogg’s Reconstruction government would not deposed under his watch. Despite cautions from the Northern press and a personal telegram from Penn, Grant ordered General William Emory’s troops to restore order in New Orleans and to reinstate the ousted regime. Coincidentally arriving to assume the governorship on the same train as Emory, John McEnery recognized the futility of further resistance, surrendering the government to military governor John Brooke on the 17th.46 The White League government vanished so fast that the New Orleans Times ran the headline “Presto!!” the next day.47 Still, Kellogg, who soon resumed the governorship, faced the difficult challenge of reconstituting the Metropolitan Police and governing a hostile populace which had proved more powerful than he. While the status quo had been restored, state conservatives had won a significant moral victory. “Putting aside the first feeling of chagrin over the culmination of our movement,” the Picayune opined, “…we find the Louisiana case, in its present stage, full of hopeful significance.”48 For now, the conflict in the streets was over. In the press and in popular perception, however, battles over race, politics, and power had just begun. ~~~ For Northern papers, the events of September 14th raised key questions over the viability of the carpetbaggers’ government, the legality of the Redeemers’ coup, and the appropriateness of Grant’s response.49 Largely glossed over or simplified in Northern press accounts, the racial terms of the battle became a point of contention which Southerners on all sides scrambled to define. For their part, the Democrats continued to stress not only that they treated blacks well, but also that blacks should prefer their rule to white Republicans’. In near-daily editorials, the Picayune stated that Governor Penn would “risk his own life and that of all his friends” for African Americans, that they 124

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returned his loyalty with “an enthusiasm which they have never manifested for any Radical white chief,” and that Southern whites “are, and have always been, [blacks’] best friends.”50 Alongside the editorials, reports of blacks celebrating the coup and congratulating Penn in person appeared frequently in the Picayune.51 Nystrom argues that, like the proclamations during the battle, these pieces were aimed at eliciting Northern support and averting Grant’s retribution.52 However, this explanation overlooks the actions that accompanied the words. For one thing, not a single civilian black was killed or injured during the chaos of the battle or the two days of White League control.53 Moreover, of all the state Republican officials, the White League kept only one in office: black state treasurer Antoine Dubuclet.54 Leaving a Republican in charge of state finances and enforcing enough discipline to prevent any black civilian causalities represent more than mere symbolic acts for a Northern audience.

Of course, the League did not act out of any genuine feeling of goodwill towards blacks. As if to prove as much, the Picayune raised the threat of an “Africanized” state on the same page as a racially accommodating editorial!55 Rather, the League recognized the independent political power of the black community and sought at least its assent, if not necessarily its support. Democrats quickly developed a strategy of cleaving blacks from white Republicans in the wake of the battle. They charged that Kellogg, of all people, had been trying to remove Dubuclet due to his race and that Penn would keep him in office.

Responding to a piece in the Louisianian, the editors of the Picayune asserted that carpetbaggers represented their common enemy.56 And while the Picayune readily suggested that “white men caught in the act of instigating riot should at once be…shot down like the dogs and brutes they are,” they openly encouraged the black community to choose independent leaders of its own, whom they would “be glad to encourage and protect.”57 Penn History Review

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While very different from the League’s earlier opposition to black organization, this new racial outreach reflected the same underlying recognition of black political power and a desire to make use of it.

On the surface, responses from the black community evinced nothing but outrage at the White League. P.B.S. Pinchback characterized Leaguers as “fire-eating, murderous desperadoes [with] hot-headed, short-sighted leaders.”58 However, in that same speech in Indianapolis, Pinchback offered a telling explanation of the League’s actions: “It is not the negro they hate, nor do they murder him because he is a negro.…It is the Republican [P]arty they hate, and the colored men are butchered because they are Republicans.”59 Conservative whites, he argued, attacked his people only because of their political power and how they aligned it.

This belief that the League placed politics above prejudice led some black leaders to moderate their stance toward the League. For example, the Louisianian suggested that the lack of black civilian casualties in the battle bolstered the League’s credibility.60 “The fact that no colored men were molested on Monday or Tuesday, except those engaged in the fight,” wrote the Louisianian, “…has done much to disabuse our people of the idea that whites intended an indiscriminate murder of them if they had the power.”61 Going further, the Louisianian often responded to League criticisms by pivoting to complain about white Republicans. Attacked for rapaciously seeking all state offices for blacks, the editors replied that blacks actually held very few positions—principally because of carpetbagger schemes against them. Blacks’ alliance with white Republicans, Pinchback and others made clear, stemmed only from mutual necessity for survival, not because the latter treated the former particularly well.62 In a sign of how little blacks trusted white Republicans in the wake of the riot, the Louisianian leveled the accusation that the League “embrace[d] within its ranks even many who 126

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heretofore pretended identity with Republicans.”63 While the White League remained the principle enemy, the Battle of Canal Street revealed how weak the black-carpetbagger alliance had become by late September 1874.

Debates over the conduct of the black Metropolitan policemen drove the wedge deeper between white and black Republicans. After the battle, rumors circulated that the black regiments had fled their white brethren at the first volley. The police generals, seeking a scapegoat, court-marshalled two black officers for “disobedience of orders” and “neglect of duty.”64 Affronted, black leaders furiously denied the allegations. Major Thomas Chester, a prominent black attorney, retorted that if anyone had shown cowardice in battle, it was Kellogg, who ran to the safety of the customs house at the first opportunity.65 Many blacks took offense at criticisms of the Metropolitan Police as attacks on their people’s manhood. “In a word, the black citizen from now on needs to be regarded as a man,” wrote the Louisianian. “…He will permit no more the dictation of superserviceable advisors who by reason of assumed party affiliation play the leaders.”66 If white Republicans impugned black manhood, blacks threatened to abide by their leadership no longer. Taking advantage of this schism, Penn staked out a crafty middle ground, claiming to the New York Herald that the black Metropolitans withheld their fire not out of cowardice, but out of dislike for Kellogg. Blacks and white Republicans could not stay united even after a bloody battle, and the White League noticed.67 Amid this tension, white Republicans ineffectually tried to reunite their party. Carpetbagger leaders—many former army officers who never returned North from their commands— stressed the shared destiny of black and white Republicans. These two groups, General Hugh Campbell analogized, sat together on one side of a delicately balanced scale. Speaking to a black Republican club, Kellogg reiterated the same themes, reminding Penn History Review

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his audience that they owed their freedom to the Republican Party. However, white Republicans’ actions did not live up to their words. A week after the battle, Kellogg met with Penn, McEnery, and other Leaguers to try to work out a compromise.68 The proposed agreement would have replaced the two black members of the powerful board in charge of tallying elections with white conservatives. The Louisianian fiercely denounced the plan, which soon fell apart.69 Kellogg then fired a black police commissioner without explanation, causing the newspaper to remark that if there was perhaps a satisfactory reason, “Gov. Kellogg’s acts towards his colored [constituents] gave us no good cause for the supposition.”70 Finally, Republicans in Jefferson Parish threatened to endorse a white challenger for Pinchback’s still-unresolved Senate seat, though the Louisianian assured its readers that they could outvote such a challenge. Fed up with white Republicans, the Louisianian incredibly joined the Picayune in endorsing a proposed joint slate of blacks and conservative whites against the carpetbaggers in Terrebonne Parish.71 Only weeks after white Republican power had proven so fragile, the black political community proceeded to undermine it further.

By October, tensions had only increased. Turning against other blacks, Pinchback’s Louisianian savaged those “sycophantic tools of the administration, who have been put into petty offices as a reward for their dirty work and treachery to their race.”72 Similarly, a committee of sixteen black leaders, including Pinchback and court-marshalled Metropolitan Emile Detiege, issued a powerful statement. While the authors began with assurances of their loyalty to the GOP, they spelled out their complaints in consciously racial terms: “The Republican [P] arty in this state, since [R]econstruction, has been manipulated and controlled by men as much bleached in complexion and politics as the most rampant [W]hite [L]eaguer.”73 Kellogg’s regime depended upon black support, they noted, yet its 128

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corruption embarrassed them and its mistreatment of blacks angered them. Even black officeholders under Kellogg received harsh criticism. As the November election neared, the schism turned violent in West Feliciana Parish, where a black candidate faced a white Republican amidst assassination attempts and rioting. The election itself, again wracked with fraud, ended with Democrats taking a national majority in the House and making major but uncertain gains in the state legislature.74 The Louisianian, however, saw the results positively, concluding, “the colored race…can no longer be used by designing, selfish and unscrupulous white demagogues.”75 But in April, state Republican leadership agreed to the Wheeler Compromise, in which they acknowledged a majority-Democratic state house in return for Democratic acceptance of Kellogg’s legitimacy. As a result, almost a third of black state representatives were kicked out of their seats.76 The same blocs who had fought side by side in September now attacked each other both politically and militarily, to the White League’s benefit.

Reconstruction in Louisiana lasted two and a half more years after the Battle of Canal Street, but its downfall began in the streets of New Orleans that September day. From that point onward, the biracial coalition supporting Reconstruction could not be repaired. After the battle, no black units joined the state militia, while after an extensive congressional investigation, no White Leaguer was ever prosecuted.77 And when the next election approached in 1876, the Democrats adapted from the lessons they had learned at the battle. The party nominated Francis Nicholls, a patrician heretofore uninvolved in politics, who sought out black endorsements and who may have won a small portion of the black vote, according to historian Joe Gray Taylor.78 Meanwhile, Pinchback and other black leaders only halfheartedly campaigned for their nominee, Stephen Packard.

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established a full parallel government, complete with courts and tax collection, instead of trying another coup. All the while, he publically urged racial toleration and avoided violence. The lame-duck Grant had neither the desire nor the political capital to intervene, while Hayes was willing to make an implicit deal with Nicholls to ensure his own election to the presidency. Even Pinchback sided with Nicholls as federal troops withdrew from the South. Thus, the schisms which opened at the Battle of Canal Street eventually contributed to the downfall of Reconstruction nationally.79 Despite the apparent “redeeming” of Louisiana in 1877, black political power remained. For decades, reformists and hardliners (or Bourbon Democrats, as they came to be known) actively vied for the black vote, a key swing constituency. In fact, twenty-six parishes had more black registrants than whites even in 1896. Despite an 1879 constitution allowing for segregation, the thorough establishment of blacks in the public sphere stalled Jim Crow for many more years. Blacks rode integrated streetcars until 1902 and maintained informal integration in many other arenas until the late 1880’s. Sixteen blacks even sat in the state legislature during the debate over the law that later sparked the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Only in 1898 did the state disenfranchise black voters, over twenty years after White Leaguers poured down Canal Street.80 By then, the Redeemers may have completed what they started the morning of September 14th, but their task took so long because the autonomous power of blacks did not collapse even when Reconstruction did. ~~~ Achieving white supremacy in New Orleans was a process of trial and error. Eventually, racial conservatives came to realize that supremacy required monolithic support, or else blacks would hold the balance of power between rival whites.

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presented white supremacy with one of its greatest threats—and thus met with some of its most severe backlash. However, the need for undivided white support had to be learned.81 In the turbulent times after the Civil War, when the whole social and economic structure of half the nation had been upended, forces on all sides had little certainty of what strategies to take or what direction to go.

Thus, to gloss over White League outreach to blacks— however insincere and politically motivated it may have been— is to impart a false teleology to the past. Similarly, discounting black critiques of white Republicans as short-sighted and self-destructive ignores the genuine sources of distrust and dissatisfaction engendered by carpetbagger betrayals. Thus, reducing Reconstruction to a dualistic game of heroes and villains, as historians of the era long did, neither fits with events like the Battle of Canal Street nor offers much guidance for current and future racial encounters. As long as blacks have had white allies, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to the present, tensions over differing goals have threatened their tenuous coalitions.82 The Battle of Canal Street demonstrates that even after fighting side by side in a deadly clash of arms, such an alliance was far from unbreakable.

In 1882, the Redeemer government of New Orleans erected a monument on the site of the battle. On it, the names of the White League dead were prominently engraved. Yet only in 1932, after the black organization of the previous century had finally been marginalized, did the obelisk gain an inscription lauding those who “recognized white supremacy and gave us our state.”83 Since then, city leaders added another plaque disavowing the monument’s supremacist sentiments, but controversy still rages. Members of today’s reinvigorated black community have tried to remove or even vandalize the obelisk, while David Duke has led KKK rallies on the site. Even within the last few decades, the fight has not been two-sided: historical preservationists and James Madison

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The original inscription on the controversial monument to the Battle of Canal Street

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moderate whites have sought to repurpose the monument to honor all participants in the battle, but leave it standing.84 Though the record of the battle is literally etched in stone, the legacy of black political power may chisel it into a new form.

Judith Kelleher Schafer, “Civil War and Reconstruction in Louisiana,” in Louisiana: A History, ed. Bennett H. Wall and John C. Rodrigue, 6th ed. (West Sussex, UK: Wiley, 2014), 202-3.

2.

D.B. Penn, “To the Colored People of the State of Louisiana,” Sept. 14, 1874, in A Handbook of Politics for 1876: Being a Record of Important Political Action, National and State, from July 15 1874 to July 15, 1876, by Edward McPherson.

7th ed. (Washington: Solomons & Chapman, 1876), 24.

3 James K. Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2006), 136, 143.

4 “Caution,” Weekly Louisianian (New Orleans) (hereafter Louisianian), Sept.

26, 1874, 2; H.A. Haugh to John R. Ficklen, May 9, 1894, Folder 22, Box 1, John Wesley Blassingame Papers, MS 737, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT (hereafter Blassingame Papers), 1, 3-4; Hogue, Uncivil War, 66; Stuart Omer Landry, The Battle of Liberty Place: The Overthrow of Carpet-Bag Rule in New Orleans—September 14, 1874 (New Orleans, Pelican, 1955), 1, 57; and “The Slanders against Our People and Cause,” Daily Picayune (hereafter Picayune), Sept. 19, 1874, 4. All subsequent cited material from the Blassingame Papers is from Box 1.

5 LaWanda Cox, “From Emancipation to Segregation: National Policy and Southern Blacks,” in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbottom, ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1987), 199-253; John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: After the Civil War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), 129; Landry, Battle of Liberty Place, 1-4; Ella Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana after 1868 (New York, Putnam, 1918), iii-1, 525; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York: Knopf, 1970), vii-23; and Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984), 150.

6 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 1st ed., New American Nation Series, ed. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. 1

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Big Trouble in the Big Easy Morris (New York: Harper, 1988), v.

7 Ibid., xix-xxviii; Cox, “From Emancipation to Segregation,” 199-253; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 1-10; Hogue, Uncivil War, 1-13; and Justin A. Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010), 1-5.

8 John Wesley Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973), xv-xvi; Cox, “From Emancipation to Segregation,” 199-253; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “Continuity and Change: Southern Urban Development, 1860-1900,” in The City in Southern History: The Growth of Urban Civilization in the South, ed. Blaine A. Brownell and David R. Goldfield, (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1977), 100-1; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865-1890,” Journal of American History 63, no. 2 (Sept. 1976): 325-350; and C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), v-xvii, 3-10.

9 Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 154-6; Eugene Lawrence, “Color in the New Orleans Schools,” Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 13, 1875, 147-8; Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War, 159; and Dale Somers, “Black and White in New Orleans: A Study in Urban Race Relations: 1865-1900,” in New Orleans and Urban Louisiana, Part B, 1860 to World War I, ed. Samuel C. Shepherd, Jr., The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History, ed. Glenn R. Conrad, vol. XIV (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, Univ. of Louisiana, Lafayette, 2005), 305-8.

10 Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 154-6; “The Feast of Tisri…,” New Orleans Times (hereafter Times), Sept. 13, 1874, 1; Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, preface to Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1992), xi; Hogue, Uncivil War, 4, 25-6; Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850-1900,” in Creole New Orleans, 201-3; Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War, 141-2, 159; and Somers, “Black and White,” 306-7.

11 Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 112-122, 180-201; “Civil Rights in the Churches,” Louisianian, Apr. 25, 1874, 2-3; [“Gen. T. Morris Chester and Mr. Belden”], Louisianian, Apr. 3, 1875, 2; Lawrence, “Color in the New Orleans Schools,” 147-8; and Somers, “Black and White,” 308-14.

12 "Civil Rights in the Churches,” 2-3 and [“Chester and Belden”], 2.

13 “White and Colored Schools,” Louisianian, Oct. 6, 1877, 2.

14 Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 147 and Somers, “Black and White,” 30910.

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Big Trouble in the Big Easy For an example of how Dunning School historians have treated Pinchback, see Landry, Battle of Liberty Place, 13: “Among the colorful (no pun intended) personalities of the Reconstruction era in Louisiana was Pickney Benton Pinchback…”

16 “The New York Tribune Is Becoming Sarcastic”], Times, Sept. 13, 1874, 4.

17 Somers, “Black and White,” 315 18 Hogue, Uncivil War, 28-63, 78, 91-5; Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War, 120-8, 138; and Provisional State Central Committee, “Address of the Provisional State Central Committee of the Reform Party to the People of Louisiana,” c. 1872, Folder 11, Blassingame Papers.

19 “Democratic Hypocracy,” Louisianian, Feb. 29, 1872, 2.

20 “Governor Pinchback,” Louisianian, Dec. 14, 1872, 2; Hogue, Uncivil War, 8, 77-8, 95-100, 116; “Important Notice,” Louisianian, Nov. 16, 1872, 2; “The Legislature,” Louisianian, Dec. 14, 1872, 1; Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana, 206-15; Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War, 130-3, 137-9; and Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-77 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ.

Press, 1974), 241.

21 U.S. Grant, “By the President of the United States of America. A Proclamation.,” May 22, 1873, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. James D. Richardson, vol. VII (Washington: Bureau of National Literature, 1902); Hogue, Uncivil War, 100-6; and “Hon. P.B.S. Pinchback— Louisiana,” Louisianian, Sept. 12, 1874, 1; Wm. Murrell et al. to W.P. Kellogg, n.d., Folder 16, Blassingame Papers.

22 Hogue, Uncivil War, 118-9; Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War, 151-4; Somers, “Black and White,” 315-6; and T. Harry Williams, “The Louisiana Unification Movement of 1873,” Journal of Southern History 11, no. 3 (Aug. 1945): 349-69.

23 “Civil War and Revolution,” Louisianian, Sept. 19, 1874, 2; “Crescent City Club: Its Complete Reorganization as a White League,” Picayune, Jul. 1, 1874, 1; Hogue, Uncivil War, 128-31; Landry, Battle of Liberty Place, 67, 233; and Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War, 162, 183-5.

24 Condition of the South (hearing before the Select Comm. on the Condition of the South) 43rd Cong., 2nd Sess. 201 (1875) (statement of William P. Kellogg, Governor of Louisiana).

25 Crescent City White League, “Platform of the Crescent City White League of New Orleans,” leaflet, c. Jul. 1, 1874, Folder 6, Blassingame Papers.

26 “Sons of Louisiana, Are You Slaves?,” leaflet, n.d., Folder 22, Blassingame Papers.

27 “To the White People of the Parish of Iberia, Louisiana,” Louisiana Sugar Bowl, Jul. 19, 1874, quoted in Landry, Battle of Liberty Place, 54.

28 “A Black League…,” Picayune, Jun. 30, 1874, 1; “Crescent City Club”; and 15

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Big Trouble in the Big Easy George F. Hoar, “Condition of the South,” H.R. Rep. No. 101 at 9 (1875).

29 “Register! Register!,” Louisianian, Oct. 3, 1874, 2; “Town Talk,” Picayune, Sept. 13, 1874, 1; and Gilles Vandal, “The Policy of Violence in Caddo Parish, 1865-1884,” Louisiana History 32, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 160-1.

30 N.C. Blanchard to Jno. R. Ficklen, Feb. 9, 1903, Folder 22, Blassingame Papers, 1, 3.

31 Haugh to Ficklen, May 9, 1894, 1, 3-4.

32 “Plain Talk,” Louisianian¸ Sept. 12, 1874, 2.

33 “Our Exchanges,” Louisianian, Sept. 5, 1874, 2; and “Senator Pinchback at Cincinnati,” Louisianian, Sept. 12, 1874, 2.

34 “Senator Pinchback at Cincinnati.”

35 T.T. Allain, “Oration Delivered by T.T. Allain at the Court House in West Baton Rouge, La.,” booklet, Jun. 13, 1874 (Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge Republican Office, 1874), Folder 13, Blassingame Papers, 1-7 and Hogue, Uncivil War, 94.

36 “Apples of Discord,” Times, Sept. 12, 1874, 2; “The Arms Seizure: A Times Reporter Interviews Gov. Kellogg on the Subject. His Views in Regard to the Law and the Facts,” Times, Sept. 14, 1874, 1; “More Arms Seized.…,” Picayune, Sept. 11, 1874, 1; and “The Sinews of War…,” Times, Sept. 11, 1874, 1.

37 “The Conflict,” Times, Sept. 15, 1874, 8; Hogue, Uncivil War, 67-8; 11623, 131-2; “An Interview with a Notable Personage: Major Thos. Chester on the Louisiana Situation and the Third Term,” Picayune, Sept. 22, 1874, 2; and “Troublous Times.…,” Times, Sept. 15, 1874, 1; 38 “Civil War and Revolution”; Haugh to Ficklen, May 9, 1894, 6; “A Meeting of the People,” Picayune, Sept. 13, 1874, 4; M. Musson et al., “Citizens of New Orleans!,” Picayune, Sept. 13, 1874, 4; “Revolution History,” Times, Sept. 23, 1874, 1; and “Troublous Times.….”

39 Landry, Battle of Liberty Place, 156.

40 “Civil War and Revolution”; “The Deadly Issue.…,” Times, Sept. 15, 1874, 1, 8; “Mass Meeting…,” Picayune, Sept. 15, 1874, 1; S.B. Packard to George H. Williams, telegram, Sept. 14, 1874, in Handbook of Politics, 22; D.B. Penn, “To the People of Louisiana,” Sept. 14, 1874, in Handbook of Politics, 24; and “Troublous Times.….”

41 Penn, “To the Colored People.”

42 Moderation,” Picayune, Sept. 16, 1874, 2.

43 “Affairs at Shreveport: Kellogg Declared Dead, Troops or No Troops,” Times, Sept. 16, 1874, 1; “Civil War and Revolution”; “The Conflict”; “The Deadly Issue”; “Finished.…,” Picayune, Sept. 16, 1874, 1; Haugh to Ficklen, May 9, 1894, 7-8; Hogue, Uncivil War, 136-8; Landry, Battle of Liberty Place, 99; “Louisiana Parishes: Kelloggites Walked out of Office—General Rejoicing,” Picayune, Sept. 17, 1874, 1; “The New Era.…,” Times, Sept. 16, 1874, 2;

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Big Trouble in the Big Easy Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War, 171-4, 296; “Re-Inauguration.…,” Picayune, Sept. 16, 1874, 1; “Shreveport.…,” Picayune, Sept. 15, 1874, 8; “[A Shreveport Dispatch],” Picayune, Sept. 16, 1874, 4; “The Situation.: Sentimental Journey among the Public Buildings and Points of Interest.…,” Picayune, Sept.

16, 1874, 1; “The Situation.: The Day after the Fight.…,” Times, Sept. 16, 1874, 1; and “War.…,” Picayune, Sept. 15, 1874, 1.

44 “Re-Inauguration.….”

45 “Finished.….”

46 “Arrival of Gen. Emory,” Picayune, Sept. 17, 1874, 4; “Arrival of Gov. McEnery,” Picayune, Sept. 17, 1874, 4; “Exodus.…,” Picayune, Sept. 18, 1874, 1; “The Federal Troops.: There Are Now Nine Companies in the City—Arrival of Gen. Emory Last Night,” Times, Sept. 17, 1874, 1; “Governor M’Enery.: He Reached the City Last Night—And Was Welcomed by a Great Number of People to whom He Made a Speech,” Times, Sept. 17, 1874, 1; U.S. Grant, “By the President of the United States of America. A Proclamation.,” Sept.

15, 1874, in Compilation of the Messages; Hogue, Uncivil War, 133, 144-6; John Kendall, History of New Orleans (Chicago: Lewis, 1922), 372-5; “The Louisiana Insurrection,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 1874; D.B. Penn to U.S. Grant, telegram, Sept. 14, 1874, in Handbook of Politics, 25; “The Police.…,” Times, Sept. 20, 1874, 1; and “Presto!!…,” Times, Sept. 18, 1874, 1.

47 “Presto!!….”

48 “The Louisiana Case,” Picayune, Sept. 18, 1874, 4.

49 For a small sample, see Landry, Battle of Liberty Place, 170-5; “The Louisiana Outrages,” Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 10, 1874, 842; or “Press Opinions.: The Louisiana Coup d’Etat.,” Picayune, Sept. 23, 1874, 2.

50 “Gov. Penn and the Colored People,” Picayune, Sept. 16, 1874, 4; “Proclamation of the Acting Governor,” Picayune, Sept. 15, 1874, 4; and “Organization of the Police.,” Picayune, Sept. 16, 1874, 1.

51 “Gov. Penn and the Colored People”; “The People’s Movement and the People’s Representative.,” Picayune, Sept. 16, 1874, 4; and “Louisiana Case.”

52 Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War, 171.

53 While Nystrom has found one case of a black trolleyman shot by unknown assailants (174), both blacks and whites at the time agreed that no black civilians had been killed or injured by the White League. See “Caution”; Haugh to Ficklen, May 9, 1894, 5; and “Slanders against Our People.”

54 “Slanders against Our People.”

55 “The Revolution.: Its Vindication.,” Picayune, Sept. 16, 1874, 4.

56 “Slanders against Our People” and “Town Talk,” Picayune, Sept. 20, 1874, 1.

57 “To Be Attended to at Once,” Picayune, Sept. 17, 1874, 4.

58 “Unvarnished Truth,” Louisianian, Sept. 26, 1874, 1.

59 Ibid.

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Ibid.

62 “Address of the Committee of Seventy.,” Louisianian, Sept. 26, 1874, 2 and “Unvarnished Truth.”

63 “Civil War and Revolution.”

64 Henry Street, “General Orders, No. 27,” in Annual Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Louisiana for the Year Ending December 31, 1874, by Adjutant General’s Office, State of Louisiana (New Orleans: Republican Office, 1875).

65 Ibid., 56-8; “The Colored Metropolitans,” Louisianian, Sept. 19, 1874, 2; Hogue, Uncivil War, 138; “Interview with a Notable Personage”; “Register!

Register!”; and Henry Street, “General Orders, No. 26,” in Annual Report, 56.

66 “Our Difficulties and Their Solution,” Louisianian, Sept. 19, 1874, 2.

67 “Gov. Penn and the Colored People” and D.B. Penn, “The Victor,” New York Herald, Sept. 16, 1874, 5.

68 Hugh J. Campbell, “The White League Conspiracy against Free Government,” speech transcript, Jan. 11, 1875, Folder 15, Blassingame Papers, 1; “Non-Compromise.…,” Times, Sept. 22, 1874, 1; “The Sixth Ward Radical Republican Club…,” Louisianian, Oct. 10, 1874, 2; and “That Conference and Its Agreement.,” Louisianian, Oct. 3, 1874, 2.

69 “Non-Compromise.…” and “That Conference and Its Agreement.”

70 “Yet Another.,” Louisianian, Sept. 26, 1874, 3.

71 “Compromise.,” Picayune, Sept. 24, 1874, 8; “Our Exchanges,” Louisianian, Sept. 19, 1874, 2; “Terrebonne Compromise.,” Louisianian, Oct. 3, 1874, 2; “The Terrebonne Plan.,” Picayune, Sept. 25, 1874, 1.

72 “Significant.,” Louisianian, Oct. 10, 1874, 2.

73 Felix C. Antoine, et al., “An Address of Colored Men to the People.,” in “Extra Louisianian!” supplement, Louisianian, Oct. 3, 1874.

74 Ibid.; “Bayou Sara Affair….,” Picayune, Sept. 24, 1874, 1; “The Gair-Weber War.,” Picayune, Oct. 20, 1874, 1; Hogue, Uncivil War, 138, 147; Street, “General Orders, No. 26,” 56.

75 “The State Election,” Louisianian, Nov. 7, 1874, 2.

76 Hogue, Uncivil War, 154-7 and “Sowing the Wind.,” Louisianian, Apr. 17, 1875.

77 Hogue, Uncivil War, 138 and Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War, 177.

78 Francis T. Nicholls, “An Autobiography of Francis T. Nicholls, 1834-1881,” ed. Barnes F. Lathrop, Louisiana Historical Quarterly 17, no. 2 (April 1934): 257 and Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 482-505.

79 Hogue, Uncivil War, 161-76; “In the Convention,” Louisianian, Jun. 14, 1879, 1; Landry, Battle of Liberty Place, 192; Logsdon and Bell, “Americanization of Black New Orleans” 251-3; and Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 482-505.

80 Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 188060 61

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Big Trouble in the Big Easy 1896 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969), 20; Somers, “Black and White,” 316; and Woodward, Strange Career, 54, 85.

81 David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), xi-xvi, xxi-3; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, conversation with author, New Haven, CT, Dec. 4, 2014 and Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), 118-23, 188-9.

82 Chappell, Inside Agitators, xi-xvi, xxi-3; Gilmore, conversation; and Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 118-23, 188-9.

83 Judith K. Schafer, “The Battle of Liberty Place: A Matter of Historical Perception,” Louisiana Cultural Vistas 5, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 17.

84 Ibid. and Chris Cook, “An Unwanted Monument: The Controversial Liberty Place Obelisk,” Lagniappe and Other Essentials: Notes on New Orleans History (blog), November 17, 2012.

Images: Page 111: "Battle of Liberty Place," photograph, 1874, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, via Wikimedia Commons, https://upload.wikimedia. org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Battle_of_Liberty_Place_Leslies_ Illustrated_Newspaper.jpg (accessed April 30, 2015).

Page 114:"Louisiana and the rule of terror," photograph, 1874, Harper's Weekly, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b03489 (accessed April 28, 2015).

Page 117: “Gov. Pinchback,” photograph, 1870-1880, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/0/08/Battle_of_Liberty_Place_Leslies_Illustrated_Newspaper. jpg (accessed April 30, 2015).

Page 132: Dorothea Lange, “Battle of Liberty Place Monument,” photograph, July 1946, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, https://upload. wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/One_side_of_the_monument_ erected_to_race_prejudice_New_Orleans_Louisiana_1936.jpg (accessed April 30, 2015).

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Senior Honors Thesis Abstracts The Last Jihad: How Language Trumped Religion in the Late Ottoman Empire Anwar Akrouk At the turn of the last century, the Ottoman Empire was in its final throes. While World War I was the final blow to the empire, anticipation over the Empire’s “death” caused decline to begin around one hundred and fifty years prior to its fall. The Ottoman Empire was one of the most diverse empires of its time. By the early twentieth century, an Arab national sentiment, encompassing several religious groups and inclusive of individuals of non-Arab heritage was beginning to take hold. The emergence of nationalist sentiment was common within the Ottoman Empire as different ethnicities gradually became nationally self-aware. While most scholars locate the origins of Arab national sentiment in Greater Syria, and Damascus in particular, it had strong ties with other parts of the Arabic-speaking world, in particular Egypt, which had officially been part of the Ottoman Empire until 1882, when it was occupied by the United Kingdom.Various Arabic cultural and linguistic movements preceded the Arabist movement.

Arabs experienced an “awakening” during the nineteenth century, which had launched these other movements. However, unlike the preceding movements, the Arabist movement, as an alternative to Ottomanism and to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), came to represent a significant minority of the population and was the precursor to the anti-colonialist and Arab nationalist movements of the 1920s-1940s. By the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, this Arabist nationalist feeling, which was called Arabism, was the prevailing political ideology within Greater Syria, although only ten years prior it was firmly in the minority. The Arabist ideology that prevailed was a cornerstone of the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria (19181920). This new monarchy seemed to recognize the complexities 140

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of various identities that it had inherited from the Ottoman Empire. I postulate that Arabism was able to prevail because the religious bonds that had kept the primarily Sunni Muslim Arabs in the Greater Syria region loyal to the Ottoman Sultan, or to use his religious title, Caliph, were slowly being overshadowed by their linguistic and cultural affinity with their fellow Arabs and Arabic-speaking citizens due to the actions of the CUP. Arabism was an inclusive nationalist movement based on language rather than ethnicity and thus had a diverse and religious makeup in its ranks. World War I (1914-1918) was the watershed moment for the Arabist movement; when the Arab population heard the Caliph’s call for a “Jihad” against the Triple Entente, the call was received with apathy, if not anger, due to Arab disdain for the CUP’s policies. The Arab Revolt of 1916 ended four centuries of Turkish rule over Arab areas. Since, strictly speaking, in Islamic Law only the Caliph can call a Jihad, WWI was the “last Jihad.”

“Before Liberation: Political Ideology and Self-Expression in the U.S. Homophile Movement, 1950-1965” Dawn Androphy The American homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s marks a turning point in the development of homosexuality as a minority identity and, ultimately, into a civil rights movement for gay men and lesbians to be recognized as equal under the law. For the first time ever, groups of individuals were meeting regularly, producing publications, and engaging with the general public while openly identifying as homosexuals (or, depending on the person, as homophiles, gay men, gay women, or lesbians). There were certainly gay and lesbian communities before the American homophile movement, but there is something very unique about the homophiles and the degree of formality with which they organized and raised awareness. The homophile groups were astoundingly small organizations and historians have varying opinions about their impact, either completely dismissing or valorizing the homophile movement. Perhaps the personal nature Penn History Review

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of gay history has prevented many from objectively assessing the value, goals, achievements, and downfalls of the homophile movement. By examining the Mattachine Society, Daughters of Bilitis, and ONE Incorporated, I would like to challenge the perceptions of these groups as either valiant pioneers or abject failures and instead argue that their goals, ideology, identity, and interaction with readers of their publications represent the beginnings of articulating a new kind of personal, communitybased gay and lesbian identity. The homophile movement was essential in order to develop a concept of homosexuality as a personal identity, then as basis for community identity, and ultimately a political identity that manifested itself in subsequent LGBT rights movements. This movement manifested itself as an organized effort to create a place in postwar American society for homosexuality through public education and intentional assimilation into the conformist social mores of the 1950s and 1960s.

Identity in Crisis: Israeli Identity and its Effect on IsraeliWest German Relations, 1952-1965 Catherine Cleveland This thesis examines the unlikely establishment of official relations between Israel and West Germany in 1965. While academics had previously examined only through a strictly political methodology, I explore the Israeli politics leading up to this event through the layers of Israeli personal, national, and international identity. These subjective narratives strongly influenced concrete Israeli political actions towards West Germany between 1952 and 1965. In the first chapter, I explore the government-directed development of an Israeli national identity among the Israeli public. This identity had a close but conflicted association with the Jewish Diaspora, which in turn prompted the Israeli public to view the West German government as a continuation of the Third Reich. The Israeli public’s animosity often pushed Israeli politicians into publicly aggressive stances against the West 142

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German state, naturally worsening chances at mutual diplomatic recognition. The second chapter examines the motives driving the Israeli government’s radically different private actions towards West Germany. Specifically, it presents the Israeli national government’s concern for its international validity in the midst of the Cold War and the geopolitical tensions within the Middle East. This concern caused Israeli foreign policy to push towards closer diplomatic and military relations with West Germany. However, this concern also prompted crises of trust when the West German government refused to sacrifice diplomatic relations with Egypt. In light of these many tensions that threatened to push Israel away from relations with West Germany, the final chapter highlights the previously overlooked role of the Israeli diplomat Felix E. Shinnar in paving the way for official Israeli-West German relations. These are viewed through his private motivations for securing official Israeli-West German relations that developed because of Shinnar’s status as a German Jewish immigrant to Israel. By examining these three different methods of conceptualizing relations with West Germany, many of the seemingly contradictory aspects of Israeli foreign policy towards West Germany become clearly attached to the competing motives that existed in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s.

The Enemy Within: Domestic Anti-Communism and the Attack on the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, 1946-1954 Jessie Goldman This thesis investigates how the anti-communist tide that swept across the United States in the immediate post-World War II period affected the strength of trade unionism and in particular the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). In the 1930s, communists and other radicals played instrumental roles in organizing and leading some of the nation’s largest and most militant industrial unions, including UE. With Penn History Review

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the dawning Cold War though, many in the United States feared a communist takeover vis-à-vis leftist-led unions. While most historians have focused on the federal attack on unions, this thesis instead focuses on how a handful of men within the union capitalized on the anti-communist sentiment in order to regain power within the union. Using Philadelphia Local-107 as a case study, this thesis demonstrates that ongoing fights between leftist and anti-communist labor leaders limited union leaders’ ability to bargain with employers and improve wages and working conditions of their members. The research methods utilized include analysis of government and union publications as well as local memos, bulletins, and correspondence that trace the widening rift within UE over the issue of communism.

Ultimately, while the federal government lay the foundation, anti-communist labor leaders’ willingness to attack their leftist counterparts, and in many instances former allies, proved destructive to the size, strength, and spirit of UE and American trade unionism.

The Marijuana Dialogue: Narratives from Prohibition Ideology and the Philosophy of Legalization Jelani Hayes If the purpose of history is not repentance, then it serves to inform but not to instruct. Policy, uninspired in this sense, will serve to reform but not to repair. The thesis explores whether Colorado’s Amendment 64, which legalized the recreational use, production, and sale of marijuana in 2012, was instructed by history—to understand the extent to which it is repairing the wounds inflicted by the criminalization of marijuana. It juxtaposes the impact of that historic piece of legislation against contemporary narratives in favor of legalization—collectively comprising the philosophy of legalization—and those, in turn, against historical narratives promoting the criminalization of narcotics in the United States—or the ideology of criminalization.

In doing so, this thesis aims to contribute to the discourse on 144

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whether legalizing marijuana, in the manner that our nation’s states are proceeding in, sufficiently addresses the foremost issues legalization advocates have attributed to criminalization.

This thesis traces the history of our nation’s roughly century and half old drug war, beginning with its first recreational drug prohibitory law—San Francisco’s 1875 ordinance against owning or visiting opium dens—and concluding with the legalization of marijuana in Colorado in 2012. By critiquing major themes and narratives along the way, it finds that those Americans who have been historically most harmed by criminalization, namely racial minorities and socioeconomically lower class citizens, are not the same Americans who benefit most from legalization.

As it is currently being pursued, legalization is not transferring institutional power from the oppressors to the oppressed, and therefore, its impact, in terms or remedying historical ills, is severely limited.

“The Implacable Surge of History”: Investigating Jewish Activism in Atlanta During the Civil Rights Movement Danielle Kerker Existing works on southern Jewry illustrate that most southern Jews were concerned with self-preservation during the Civil Rights Movement. Compared to national Jewish organizations that took assertive stances in the fight for civil rights, Jewish individuals and organizations in the South often hesitated to challenge the status quo, fearful of disturbing their placement on white side of the black/white color divide. Previously, many historians have untangled perceptions of southern Jewish detachment from civil rights issues to explain how individuals and communities were torn between their sympathy towards the African-American plight and Jewish vulnerability during a period of heightened racial tension. However, there is a need for a more thorough examination of southern Jews in the context of the Civil Rights Movement to uncover fully the extent to which the desire for safety precluded civil rights activism in the Deep South. By Penn History Review

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digging deeper into the multifaceted landscape of Jewish actions and reactions in Atlanta during the Civil Rights Movement, this project aims to explore the forms of activism southern Jews chose, the circumstances that shaped those decisions, and the underlying goals behind them. Analysis suggests that, although their story is less known, Jewish organizations and individuals in Atlanta found ways to contribute to the fight for civil rights equality within the context of the Jim Crow South.

“He too has the right to be educated”: Inclusion and Identity in Ecuador’s Indigenous Movement, 1927-2009 Abigail Koffler In Ecuador, a nation with a large and diverse indigenous population not always seen in demographic data, the question of education is at once political and revolutionary. In the 1930s, Indigenous activists on rural estates learned tactics from communist and socialist unions and set up many schools in regional groups.

A generation of activists, led by Dolores Cacuengo, made tremendous strides, working alongside urban activists. In 1988, the Ministry of Education officially assumed responsibility for Indigenous education under coalition pressure but has failed to capture the nuances of the nation’s indigenous communities and their expectations for education. Meanwhile, the Indigenous groups have mobilized into a political party, Pachakutik that hopes to redefine Ecuadorian nationality against centuries of structural oppression. They are waging vital fights for resources and respect, with modern day activism centered on issues of the environment and representation. This thesis aims to show the complexity and adaptability of the indigenous movement, with sections on distinctions between small indigenous groups, the importance of an indigenous publishing house and a detailed report on the charged concept of education.

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Feminist Tax Advocacy: Campaigning for Economic Equality in the Reagan Era Jackson Kulas My thesis examines the efforts of a coalition of women’s organizations and sympathetic legislators to enact substantive equality for women in the tax code in the period 1981-1986. These actors, to whom I refer collectively as ‘feminist tax advocates,’ sought to redress many imbalances in a tax code that had been created in earlier decades with traditional gender roles in mind, and which consequently penalized families with working wives or single mothers. Their advocacy, while often successful, was met with the conservative gender politics and supply-side stances of the Reagan Administration. As I argue in my first chapter, this coalition turned to tax policy as an instrument for enacting social change largely because the austere fiscal climate of the Reagan Administration left them few avenues for employing more traditional welfare state programs. Instead, they introduced new “tax expenditures”—credits and deductions used for social welfare purposes—in successive tax legislation, beginning with the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, as discussed in chapter 2. Starting in that year, feminist tax advocates also pushed for an omnibus package called the Economic Equality Act; chapter 3 shows that many of the tax provisions included in the bill met with success, but usually those that conformed to the Administration’s conservative vision of gender norms. Chapter 4 examines the landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986, demonstrating the successes that feminist tax advocates had in marshalling the rhetoric of ‘fairness to families,’ while attentive to the limited legislative successes that they achieved because of fiscal concerns.

“Their Atrophied Minds”: The Hydra’s Perpetuation of Ergotherapy and Inter-patient Tensions in Craiglockhart Hydropathic Kimby Rosenthal Hydra, the patient-run literary magazine printed from 1917 Penn History Review

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to 1918, was unique within the trench literature genre for its management by shellshock patients being treated in the war psychiatric hospital, Craiglockhart Hydropathic. Psychiatrist Cpt. A.J. Brock viewed the literary project as a means by which to promote ergotherapy, his treatment for shellshock and neurasthenia which emphasized constant participation in physical and mental activity in order to stimulate the mind and distract from war trauma. Because the production of the magazine required an energy not as likely to be found among the less functional patients, its content – particularly its exhaustive descriptions of ergotherapeutic sporting activities available to but not always taken advantage of by patients – quickly revealed inter-patient tensions between the more and less functional, as well as the former group’s attempts to disassociate its members from the less participatory and more mentally ill. Staff members’ interest in expanding their magazine beyond the readership and context of Craiglockhart reflected a discomfort and dissatisfaction with their hospital audience. Continuous coverage by the staff of ergotherapeutic organizations within the hospital and the negative judgment of those uninvolved demonstrated a commitment to institutionalized psycho-medical conceptions of the healthy self and unhealthy other. Moreover, editorial preoccupation with discharged patients, those patients’ previous involvement in activities that the staff officially supported, and the staff ’s treatment of their departure as a misfortune for both parties indicate the extent of the influence of treatment regimens on the social interactions between soldiers. Lastly, physicians’ and patient-writers’ use of participation in physical activity as a gauge of mental vigor in the construction of an exclusive, masculine identity reflected a conflation of mind and body foreshadowing later psychological debates on embodiment and “the hard problem.”

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“Going to the Dogs”: Groton School Adapts to the Postwar Era Edoardo Saravalle This thesis examines the evolution and adaptation of Groton School, an elite New England boarding school, from the admission of its first students from diverse social backgrounds in the late 1940s to its move toward co-education in 1975. During this time, the school evolved in two dimensions. First, the school changed the social make-up of its student body, diversifying by class, race and gender. The process included Groton becoming one of the first of its peers to accept black students and falling on the later side in accepting women in the mid-1970s. Tied to this social change, but also progressing independently, was the school’s evolution in a moral dimension. During the decades studied, the school’s ethos changed from that of a small tight-knit centripetal community into a more open entity far more similar to its competitor boarding schools. It was in this arena—defining what Groton should be—that many of the more pitched battles of the 1960s were fought, defining the relationships between students, faculty and alumni. Throughout, the school dealt with outside political and social influences that eventually reshaped the institution. Thus, while school adapted to its new social make-up, the changes in the institution’s ethos brought on a “New Groton.”

McCarthyism in the City of Brotherly Love: The House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the Teachers Union of Philadelphia Gregory Segal While the prevailing image of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) focuses on its practice of bringing witnesses to Washington, D.C. for questioning, it also had the power to conduct hearings outside of the nation’s capital. Nevertheless, works that focus on HUAC’s visits to the city or state level are quite rare. This project seeks to gain a greater understanding of Penn History Review

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HUAC by studying its local hearings for their full depth. This thesis uses HUAC’s visit to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in November 1953 as a case study. Over three days of hearings, HUAC called up over twenty Philadelphia schoolteachers to testify, all of whom were affiliated with one of the city’s teachers’ unions, the Teachers Union of Philadelphia.

Every single one of these teachers was later dismissed by the city’s Board of Education. Equipped with recently opened HUAC papers from the National Archives, as well as documents from the Temple University Urban Archives, the Philadelphia City Archives, and online databases, this project studies the hearings in unprecedented depth.

Several themes are advanced throughout the thesis. I argue that HUAC tapped into existing anti-Communist activity in Philadelphia; its visit was a continuation of local trends rather than a rupture. However, while such a perspective is a very “bottom up” approach, I also assert that the Committee’s visit served as a catalyst for activity on the local stage, rapidly intensifying anxieties regarding Communism in the educational system and accelerating steps to remove it. By laying out the preparations of HUAC and the Teachers Union, I demonstrate that the hearings appear to be greatly performative. The evolving response of the Teachers Union to HUAC’s visit is also discussed. As a whole, this thesis illuminates the causes and consequences of McCarthyism’s visit to the City of Brotherly Love in November 1953.

Doctors without Borders: The Interconfessional and Intercultural Fluidity of Royal Physicians in the Crusades Rebecca Shifera This thesis examines the role of royal physicians in the first three Crusades, spanning from the 11th to the 13th centuries, as they crossed religious and cultural borders of the monarchs they served.

Although the Crusades portrayed an outer façade about the clash of Muslim and Christian faiths, there is evidence to show that contemporary populations lived and trusted one another and lived more or less harmoniously, depending on the period, as exemplified by royal physicians of the time. In fact, these series of wars were not so much a clash of Western Christians fighting Eastern Muslims as 150

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much as it was Socio-economically different Christians against socio-economically different Muslims, Christians and Jews. The promise of salvation and redemption from earthly sins certainly fueled the push for crusading as well as the demonization of the distant eastern other. Although death brought salvation and glory, the rulers on both sides meant to stay alive and preserve as much of their armies as safe as possible. While professing the horrid nature of the “other”, monarchs from both sides subjected their health in the hands of members, that is to say the doctors, of the opposing force’s faith. Using primary sources discussing monarchs’ correspondence or recorded conversations with physicians who practiced another faith, along with secondary literature discussing the vast amount of exchange occurring in the realm of medicine between the East and the West, as well as living circumstances, we found that the chasm between the two cultures was not as wide as we are led to believe.

Instead, we found evidence of alliances amongst rulers of opposing faiths, whenever an economic or politically expedient deal was reached. Furthermore, all physicians in the Crusader States as well as Middle East areas controlled by Muslims had to undergo the same certification in order to practice medicine in their respective towns. In addition, the feelings of trust from a monarch to his physician could further translate into more benevolent treatment for the marginalized group he represented.

The fluidity with which physicians glided through the ranks of society says something about the tolerance levels underlying the intercontinental tensions of the time of the crusades.

The Fourth Piece of the Puzzle: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War in the Far East Rebecca Sokolow This thesis analyzes President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s role in conducting the war in the Far East during World War II. There is a large amount of existing literature that dissects the interactions among Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, and Penn History Review

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accounts for the struggles and disagreements that occurred in their relationship both with regard to wartime decisions and decisions about the postwar. There also exists scholarship on China as the United States’ third ally. There is a severe lack, however, of comprehensive literature connecting Roosevelt and his postwar vision to the decisions that he made regarding how to run the China Theater. This thesis seeks to illuminate as much as possible Roosevelt’s decision-making process and motivations through a careful study of his diplomatic memoranda, and those of officials in close contact with the president. It argues that Roosevelt’s strong belief in the necessity of a postwar alliance among the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China, greatly influenced his wartime strategy. The interaction between military realities and Roosevelt’s attempts to personally build such a postwar alliance shaped the circumstances within which he had to work. One should not underestimate the difficult and complex nature of the decisions Roosevelt had to make while fighting a two-front war. This thesis attempts to uncover these complexities and determine both the positive and negative consequences of decisions made. It concludes that, though Roosevelt set himself an impossible task in trying to create a lasting alliance among four nations with vastly different postwar aims, his insistence upon doing so was essential in holding the Allies together for long enough to defeat both the Japanese and the Germans, and his postwar plans had a lasting global influence.

Breaking “The Stranglehold of Inertia”: Community Controlled Schooling from Arizona to Harlem Frances Starn “Breaking ‘The Stranglehold of Inertia’: Community Controlled Schooling from Arizona to Harlem” is an honors thesis investigating two experimental community controlled schools founded in 1966. The first, the Rough Rock Demonstration School in Rough Rock, Arizona, became the first bilingual, bicultural 152

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Navajo school, centered upon the idea that Navajo students should be taught to celebrate, rather than hide, their roots in Native American tradition. The second, Intermediate School 201 (I.S. 201), was promised to parents frustrated with the lack of integration in the ten years post-Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka Kansas to be one of the best schools in the city, but instead was another segregated school governed by a top-heavy bureaucracy. I.S. 201 opened its doors to protests by minority parents demanding control of their children’s education that would span almost three years. Drawing on archival documents from both schools and theory surrounding community control, this thesis explores the similarities and differences between curriculum, advocacy, and the internal and external governing structures of these two schools in order to grasp how community control was conceptualized and implemented in different cultural contexts. Through this exploration, this thesis attempts to build a better understanding of how local control of schools can and should be implemented in the future.

“Wel wot men that a woman hath no myght”: Rape, the Westminster Statutes, and the Class-Based Commodification of the Female Body in Late Medieval England Elizabeth Vaziri Packed within the widespread legal reforms of the Westminster Statutes of 1275 and 1285, chapters pertaining to the rape and ravishment of women irrevocably implicated the understanding and prosecution of sexual assault. Instances of abduction, elopement, theft, and adultery came under the legal definition of ravishment. Previously, laws and cases regarding ravishment primarily referred to the crime of rape, frequently denoted within the record by the Latin word, raptus. This shift was motivated by the anxieties of the landed elite who feared the socio-economic impact of the growing number of ward thefts and abductions (consensual and otherwise). In its attempts to protect the economic value implicit to a female’s marriage and Penn History Review

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sexuality, the Westminster Statutes obscured the reality of sexual violence by associating it with a property crime. This obfuscation begs an analysis of the ramifications this legislation had on the female’s changed experience of rape, and of ravishment prosecution. Through their treatment and trivialization of rape, the Westminster Statutes reflect the commodification of female sexuality. This proprietary conception thus requires an acknowledgement of class- the greatest and most basic indicator of socio-economic standing. By examining the disparate experiences of noblewomen, nuns, middling class women, and peasant women with this legislation, my thesis explores how a female’s proprietary value inherently shaped her socio-legal experience in late medieval England.

Virtuous Citizens in Revolution: How virtue shaped the concept of female citizenship during the French and American Revolutions Mackenzie Rose Warren This thesis compares concepts of female citizenship in revolutionary France and post-revolutionary America by examining how two written sources defined female virtue. Their definition extended beyond a modern concept of sexual virtue and included ideas of civic duty and participatory citizenship.

This thesis aims to add depth to the feminine experience and how women worked within societal expectations in order to find a political activeness equivalent to politically and militarily engaged men. The research methods used extensive reading of secondary sources to better understand and contextualize female education and ideas of motherhood and womanhood. The two primary sources used were short-lived periodicals written mostly by and for women between 1791 and 1792. The French source was a single voice mimicking a popular style of entertainment and political critique, arguing for more militant action by women.

The American source was a place where multiple collaborators debated what it meant to be a good wife and mother, and how 154

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that contributes to society. The findings of this thesis challenge the idea that women only participated in these male dominated revolutions through “republican motherhood,� but instead created a space for themselves by living within a gendered political framework.

One Law, One Movement, Many Directions: the Struggle of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, 1918-Today Ian Wenik Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards is intended to be the primary legislative outlet for the Conservative Jewish movement in America, as its rabbis have struggled for over 100 years to give the movement something more concrete to define itself by other than what it is not. Time and again, rabbis have focused in on adapting and redefining halakha (Jewish law) to the realities of life in America as a method to galvanize the movement. Yet these results have been mixed, to say the least.

Under various names and bylaws, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has appeared at times throughout to be proactive and engaged with the Conservative Jewish community and at other junctures in history, it has appeared to be non-functional.

How, then, has the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards attempted to define itself, and through what methods has it attempted to change halakha in order for the code to meet the changing needs of its constituency in a secularized American society? My research intends to answer that question.

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