Atlas 2014-2015 by Atlas Undergraduate Journal of World History

The Atlas|2015 UBC Undergraduate Journal of World History EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Jacob Goldowitz | Sepideh Khazei

FACULTY REVIEWERS Chris Friedrichs Eagle Glassheim Arlene Sindelar Sebastian Prange Tara Mayer Laura Ishiguro

SPECIAL THANKS Tara Mayer Michel Ducharme Tina Loo Hart Caplan

EDITORIAL BOARD

Lindsey Anton-Wood Nemee Bedar Gloria Chang Shermaine Chua Joseph Doyle Arianna Evans Lauren Hyde Alice Gorton

Josephine Gunapranata Alan Knee Kelsey Malden F. Zehra Naqvi Catherine Read Stephanie Santos Lyon Tsang James Watson

LAYOUT DESIGN

COVER ART

Gloria Chang

Jennifer Lee

! Dear Reader, You hold in your hands only a fragment of the wonderful work that students of history at the University of British Columbia are producing on a regular basis, year in, year out. We are convinced, however, that this is an exceptional fragment. We put it forward to convey to the extent that we can the originality and energy of our student body. As part of the History Studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Association, the Atlas proudly contributes to the mission of giving undergraduates a muchneeded forum to share the results of their research with an audience that extends beyond their professors and their faithful proof-readers (who, in many cases, are the very same as the authors themselves!). For us, the ideal university is a community whose foundation is as much dialogue between students as between professors. By picking up this 2015 edition of the UBC Atlas, you are helping to realize that ideal. Read together, the essays that follow provide an important distance and critical commentary to the sometimes invisible structures that govern our lives. Jason Fernando asks why the passing of time is laden with such anxiety for us, and if is there an alternative. Caroline Ho responds with the sacral medieval understanding of the seasons. Janice Li shows the power for common spaces to channel our experience. Simon Rayek, Arianna Evans, and Hanna Murray each discuss a variety of critical reactions to the problematic consequences of modern life, ranging from rejection, to resistance, to moral ambiguity. Thanks are due to our hardworking editors, our generous faculty reviewers, and last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s editors Stefani Haas and Kelsey Lee who showed the amazing reward of this labour. We hope that you enjoy the fruit! Sincerely, Jacob Goldowitz and Sepideh Khazei Editors-in-Chief

Table of Contents A BRIEF HISTORY OF “TIME IS MONEY” 1852-2011 Jason Fernando

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CHARLEMAGNE’S DIVINE WINTER Spring and Winter in the Carolingian World Caroline Ho 21-40 FROM GREAT EXHIBITION TO DEPARTMENT STORES A Victorian Spectacle of Commodities and Social Lives Janice Li 41-62 AN IMPROBABLE PARTNERSHIP Examining the Misrepresentation of History under Neoliberal Feminism Simon Rayek 63-89 EPISTOLARY OF RESISTANCE Italian National Imaginings and Cultural Permanence Arianna Evans

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TO KNOW SIN Science, Morality, and the Manhattan Project Hanna Murray 119-148

A BRIEF HISTORY OF “TIME IS MONEY” 1852-2011

Jason Fernando The phrase “time is money” generally is thought to have been minted by Benjamin Franklin, who employed the phrase in a 1748 essay entitled “Advice to a Young Tradesman”.1 Looking at this essay, it becomes clear that Franklin employed this phrase with more or less the same intended meaning as we are accustomed to today. “Remember”, he wrote, “that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and… sits idle, one half of the day… has really spent, or thrown away, five shillings besides.”2 Given the similarity between the manner in which Benjamin Franklin employed this phrase over 265 years ago and the manner in which it is commonly employed today, it is tempting to conclude that the cultural meaning of this phrase has remained essentially unchanged since the time of Franklin’s writing. I aim to problematize this intuitive conclusion by arguing that the cultural meaning of the phrase “time is money” has shifted substantively over time. In what follows, I expand !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1

Garson O’Toole has argued that the history of this phrase actually predates Benjamin Franklin by several decades, tracing it to a 1719 periodical entitled “The Free-Thinker.” For details, see: Garth O’Toole, “Time is Money: Benjamin Franklin?”, Quote Investigator, published May 14th, 2010, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/14/time-is-money/. 2 Leonard W. Labaree, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 304-308.

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on my research methodology before moving on to a qualitative examination of sources randomly selected from a source-base of 1361 documents. I then conclude by reflecting on what I feel to be the larger importance of scrutinizing the history of this phrase. Methodology The first stage of my research consisted of selecting a specific source-base and time period within which to gather sources. To this end, I chose to focus my research on the New York Times, and to limit my time period surveyed to 1852-2011. Focusing on a single newspaper allowed me to hold critical variables constant which would otherwise have had to have been taken into account individually. These include: the geographical location from which the sources were published, the social and political leanings of the publication, and the readership of the publication.3 Using this source base, I performed an analysis of the frequency with which the phrase “time is money” has been utilized throughout this time. This analysis revealed that, of the 1361 instances in which this phrase was employed between 1852 and 2011, 72% occurred in the second half of the period surveyed (1930-2011), with nearly a quarter of the total occurrences taking place in the 1980s alone (see figure 1). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1Naturally,

I am not claiming that the political leanings and readership of the Times have remained truly constant throughout this time. Rather , I simply mean that these variables are held relatively more constant than would be the case if I selected sources from a variety of periodicals.

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Figure 1: Frequency of phrase usage (“time is money”) in the New York Times: 1852-2011 Based on this analysis, I proceeded to investigate whether and to what extent the meaning of the phrase had changed throughout this time. To do this, I began by randomly selecting five primary sources from each of the sixteen decades included in the period 1852-2011, for a total of 85 sources.4 I !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! To do so, I made use of the “True Random Number Generator” available at random.org. The specific process which I employed in doing so is as followed: First, I took note of the number of sources existing within the decade in question; second, I input the number of sources available from that decade into the “Max” value field of the Number Generator (for example, a decade in which 100 sources were available would have “1” as its minimum value and “100” as its maximum value); third, I used the Number Generator to randomly generate a number falling within the specified range; fourth, I selected the source from the decade which corresponds to the number generated by the Number Generator; and fifth, I repeated the aforementioned process five times for each decade, adjusting the maximum value of the Number Generator according to the number of sources available in each decade. For more information regarding the True Random Number Generator, see: “Random.org 4

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then proceeded to perform close readings of each of these sources, compiling notes on qualitative details which purely quantitative analyses are unable to detect. In conducting this qualitative analysis, I observed two major themes. First, I found that instances of ambivalent and critical uses of the phrase “time is money” decline dramatically between 1852 and 1959, and disappear altogether from my sources from 1960 onwards (see figure 2).5 Second, I found that in the first 80 years of the surveyed period, sources employed the phrase “time is money” primarily in relation to business activities. By the 1930s we see a steady increase in the number of sources which employ the phrase in reference to society at large (see figure 3). I now will turn to concrete examples of these trends in the primary sources.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! True Random Number Service,” Randomness and Integrity Services, accessed March 19th, 2015, https://www.random.org/. 5 By “ambivalent and critical”, I am referring to sources which employ the phrase “time is money” in a manner which expresses at least partial reservations. For example, footnote 8 cites an author who employs the phrase while also suggesting that the cultural association of time with money can have deleterious effects. Additional examples are provided in footnote 9.

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Figure 2: Sharp decline in the expression of ambivalence toward the concept of time as money

Figure 3: Increasing usage of the phrase â&#x20AC;&#x153;time is moneyâ&#x20AC;? in relation to mainstream culture!

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1852-1899: “Time is Money” as Troubling New Reality “We are learning to place a low value on human life.”6 These are the words of an author whose March 1851 article entitled “Recklessness of Life” raised concerns regarding the effects of fastpaced commercial activity on society at large. Citing recent increases in fatalities arising from fast-speed transportation, the author faulted corporations engaged in the business of rapid transportation of taking shortcuts regarding the safety of their passengers in order to maximize their profits. Such companies, the author claimed, were guilty of “a selfish unwillingness to incur the expenses which are necessary to the public security.” Yet, in addition to calling attention to the inadequate safety standards maintained by corporations, the author also attributed the recent traffic fatalities to broader social changes: “Another cause of this prevailing waste and destruction of human life is found in the general spirit of the community. It is one of intense activity and high excitement. Men are too eager in their pursuits to heed the danger to which they are exposed. They are too busy in carrying on their own plans to pause and bury and avenge the dead, who have fallen at their side. They jump up bruised from the broken cars, or swim exhausted from the wrecked boat, and hasten to make up the time that they have !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Recklessness of Life,” The New York Daily Times (New York, NY), March 31st, 1854. 6

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lost. Travelers are themselves as frequently in fault as those who convey them. They demand speed rather than safety. Time is money, and money is life to them. They are proud of vast, showy boats, and lightning lines. They love the excitement of competition and of races. The enthusiasm, the pride, the patriotism, the poetry of many persons sees itself embodied in the rushing train, and hears itself expressed in the wild shriek of the locomotive. The song they love is “The Song of Steam.”” [Emphasis added].7 Although this article is notable for its style, it is by no means unique in its sentiment. Between 1852 and 1899, numerous authors expressed similar reservations regarding the perceived acceleration of the pace of life, for which the phrase “time is money” was viewed as a kind of slogan. We see this, for example, in a letter to the editor published in January 1874, in which the author implores readers to consider walking to and from their workplaces to ensure that room is available on street cars for mothers and their children.8 The letter, written in response to a previous article concerning an incident in which a mother and her daughter were denied entry to a street car because of insufficient room, makes clear

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid. “Letters to the Editor,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 26th, 1874. 7 8

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the author’s concern that the increasing speed of social life is infringing on basic social decorum.9 Yet for every article which expresses ambivalence toward the phrase “time is money” and its perceived social analogues, we find several others which greet the social ramifications of this ethos with enthusiasm. Thus, a May 1853 article entitled “Poor Richard Says a Word” implores its reader to seize upon the present moment as a means of making the most of their productive potential. “Time is money,” it proclaims. “Take it—not as an Alderman takes a bribe, but as a son coming to his inheritance: Take every golden minute, and buy with them treasures… that will make your baby laugh outright in the cradle.”10 The article’s moral is clear: embracing the timevalue of money is an essential prerequisite if one is to realize one’s productive potential. “Make the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Other sources which express ambivalence toward the perceived ethos of the phrase “time is money” include: “Other 1 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 5th, 1889; “The Queer Collectioner,” The New York Times (New York, NY), August 29th, 1887; “At the Court of Ubikwi,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 3rd, 1903; “Display Ad 16 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), May 16th, 1904; “Musings of the Gentle Cynic,” The New York Times (New York, NY), August 20th, 1911; “The Greenwood Lake Philosopher,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 22nd, 1912; John Martin, “The Dance: Graham Again,” The New York Times (New York, NY), November 25th, 1934; Sidney Feldman, “Ciudad New York,” The New York Times (New York, NY), November 21st, 1948; and “In speech at dinner she urges U.S. to go slow in europe,” The New York Times (New York, NY), April 8th, 1952. 10 “Poor Richard Says a Word,” The New York Daily Times, (New York, NY), May 31st, 1853. 9

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most of [time],” urges the author, “and you will be a better, richer, happier man.”11 Many sources from this period echo similar sentiments.12 Indeed, even those sources which express a degree of ambivalence toward the concept of time as money do so while implicitly accepting the pragmatic veracity of this phrase. For example, a September 1857 advertisement for the Mount Washington Collegiate Institute begins its appeal to parents by stating that “As time is money… it is the dictate of economy, no less than of morality, to select for the education of youth an efficient system of instruction, [as] administered… in this Institution.”13 Similarly, the author of the January 1874 letter to the editor cited above concludes his appeal to New York City commuters by acknowledging that “it takes time to walk, and… time is money,” to which he responds by stating that walking, owing to the absence of stoppages, can actually be faster than commuting by streetcar.14 Reading through the sources from !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid. For further examples, see: “Classified Ad 3 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 14th, 1857; “Letters to the Editor,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 12th, 1872; “Classified Ad 4 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 13th, 1870; “Senator Logan Accepts,” The New York Times (New York, NY), July 22d, 1884; “Railways Still at War,” The New York Times (New York, NY), November 30th, 1882; and “The Cape Cod Canal,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 27th, 1880. 13 “Classified Ad 3 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 14th, 1857. 14 “Letters to the Editor,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 26th, 1874. 11 12

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1852 to 1889, one gets the distinct impression that all social observers were in agreement that time was, for all intents and purposes, indeed equivalent to money. Where they took issue with this notion, they did so around the margins, criticizing the more egregious social consequences of this mentality while proposing interventions through which these negative consequences could be contained. By the turn of the 20th century, however, this thin vein of criticism regarding the concept of time as money disappears from the source-base entirely. 1900-1949: “Time is Money” as the Ethos of Business “Time served in business will many times pay the rent”: so boasts an April 1905 advertisement for the “Times Building”, a commercial tower in New York City.15 Under a lead title which screams “Time is Money”, the text reassures its reader of the “recognized financial and commercial standing” of the Times Building’s tenants, encouraging prospective buyers to consider the time-saving potential of a building in which “the elevators in front of the office door lead to the most central station of the subway.”16 This advertisement is indicative of a growing number of sources which, beginning roughly in 1900, employed the phrase “time is money” primarily in relation to the business community. It is in this context that we find a June 1918 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Display Ad 8 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), April 13th, 1905. 16 Ibid. 15

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advertisement for The Western Union Telegraph Company. Under an oversized header entitled “The Road to a Man’s Mind,” the advertisement informs us that the “crisp, imperative, penetrating clearness [of] the telegraph message [will bring] instant consideration to your business.”17 It concludes by observing, with what can only be described as crisp, penetrating clearness, that “More than ever time is money.”18 Nor was this emphasis on business limited to the realm of advertising. A 1925 article entitled “De Mille as Director is Disciplinarian” described the famous American film director Cecil Blount DeMille as a strict disciplinarian with a keen grasp of the time-value of money.19 “Time is money,” the author proclaimed, “and nobody appreciates this more than Mr. De Mille.”20 Although it was written over seventy years after 1853’s “Poor Richard Says a Word”, this article went on to draw the very same connection between timeconsciousness and the financial fruits of industry. It concluded by reporting that “Mr. De Mille has two imposing houses… and… [a] yacht. He works like a Trojan for six days a week and rests Sunday, and from the program of his daily routine one comes to the conclusion that he needs every hour of quiet he has on the Sabbath.”21 This close !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Display Ad 36 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), June 5th, 1918. 18 Ibid. 19 Mordaunt Hall, “De Mille as Director is Disciplinarian,” The New York Times (New York, NY), July 19th, 1925. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 17

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association between the phrase “time as money” and the business community predominated throughout the first half of the 20th century.22 By roughly 1950, however, we see the acceleration of a trend whereby the concept of time as money !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! For additional examples of sources which employ the phrase “time is money” principally in relation to the business community, see: “Display Ad 10 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 5th, 1894; “Nuggets,” The New York Times (New York, NY), May 24th, 1899; “Display Ad 13 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 25th, 1893; “Display Ad 16 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 18th, 1893; “Display Ad 7 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), August 19th, 1909; “Terminals and Distribution,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 9th, 1910; “Display Ad 76 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), May 22nd, 1922; Virginia Pope, “The Miracle of Mounting Skyscrapers,” The New York Times (New York, NY), May 2nd, 1930; “Charles Hayden, Banker, Dies at 66,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 9th, 1937; “Display Ad 78 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), April 28th, 1931; “Display Ad 91 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 26th, 1946; “Classified ad 114 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), March 3rd, 1968; “Classified ad 91 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 16th, 1962; “Display ad 115 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 4th, 1973; “Display Ad 143 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), May 16th, 1982; “Display Ad 278 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), February 4th, 1996; Laurence Zuckerman, “For Arbitrageurs, the Game is Afoot Once Again,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 4th, 1994; Ian Austen and Liz Robbins, “BlackBerry Breakdown Puts Users in Uproar,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 24th, 2009; and “Classified Ad 31 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), May 18th, 2003. 22

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expanded beyond the bounds of business to encompass a growing circumference of social life. 1950-2011: “Time is Money” as Mainstream Fact of Life The sheer diversity of contexts in which the phrase “time is money” can be found during the decades from 1950 to 2011 makes selecting specific examples an almost arbitrary task. We see this phrase employed in relation to subjects as diverse as policy analysis of the American space program (“[in] space, as on Earth, time is money”), chronic unemployment (“For Jobless, Time Is Money, And Both Are Running Out”), the attempted unionization of bike messengers (“Time is money for messengers, and many complain that they have too little of both”), temporary labourers (“Your available time is money”), and even the New York Times itself (“If time is money, think about how much time you’re used to spending every Sunday getting the Times”).23 Yet despite this multifaceted source-base, as with periods prior this period is by no means free of associations between the phrase “time is money” and the business community. On the contrary, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In order of appearance, the sources referred to are: Carolyn Porco, “NASA Goes Deep,” The New York Times (New York, NY), February 20th, 2007; Leslie Eaton, “For Jobless, Time and Aid Are Almost Up,” The New York Times (New York, NY), June 10th, 2002; Selwyn Raab, “Teamsters Seeking to Form Bicycle Messengers’ Union,” The New York Times (New York, NY), October 30th, 1994; “Classified ad 51 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 4th, 1962; and “Display ad 620 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), April 30th, 1978. 23

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numerous sources continue to draw this connection. What differentiates this period from prior decades is the relative growth of sources which implicitly treat the equation between time and money as a basic fact of life whose relevance includes, but is by no means limited to, the activities of business.24 One article is particularly indicative of this trend. Tom Scocca, in an article published in 2011 under the title “Why Walk when You can Stroll?”, provided an impassioned defense of the use of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! For additional sources which treat “time is money” as an ethos representative of mainstream culture, see: Walter Duranty, “Two Great Capitals of Change,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 7th, 1934; “Display Ad 53 -no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), November 20th, 1947; “Airliners Opening Rich Mine Regions,” The New York Times (New York, NY), February 13th, 1940; Francis Hackett, “Books of the Times,” The New York Times (New York, NY), April 14th, 1945; “Display ad 18 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 21st, 1954; “Classified ad 7 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), July 31st, 1959; “Display ad 28 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), August 26th, 1953; “Display ad 1563 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), March 12th, 1967; “Display ad 41 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), October 5th, 1979; “Classified ad 1034 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), October 16th, 1977; Michael T. Kaufman, “In Kinshasa, Where PalmGreasing is a Way of Life, War Seems Far Away,” The New York Times (New York, NY), April 19th, 1977; “Display Ad 8 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), September 16th, 1983; “Display Ad 28 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), October 11th, 1989; “Classified Ad 114 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), October 30th, 1983; Other 11 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), March 8th, 2011; and “Display Ad 23 -- no Title,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 22nd, 2010. 24

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strollers in New York City. After acknowledging the inconvenience which the use of strollers can sometimes cause for fellow pedestrians, Scocca went on to argue that, all things considered, the use of strollers benefits society by maintaining the speed of children at an acceptable level: “Would pedestrians infuriated by stroller traffic really be happier if the sidewalks were full of 2- and 3-year olds toddling along at their natural pace, clutching their guardians’ hands? I know it’s hard on others when I’m going up the subway steps with a giant bundle of child and stroller in my arms. But you would prefer a 3-year-old climbing… step...by...step? I wouldn’t. I like to go fast, too.”25 Scocca concluded with a defense of strollerbearing which would put Poor Richard and Cecille DeMille to shame: “[T]ime is money in New York: if I get [my son] to preschool briskly and punctually, which is not how a small child moves under his own power, I get 2 hours and 55 minutes at my desk, uninterrupted. Wheels are faster than little feet.”26 I draw attention to this article in order to show that the legacy of the phrase “time is money” extends into our present. Written just four years !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Tom Scocca, “Why Walk when You can Stroll?” The New York Times (New York, NY), April 3rd, 2011. 26 Ibid. 25

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ago, the world Scocca described is the one in which we all currently reside. Investigations of the phrase “time is money” are far more than a purely academic exercise. They hold great potential for allowing us to perceive and potentially reimagine foundational premises which exert great practical influence in our culture and in our lives. Who Cares? The phrase “time is money” is important because the phrase itself is replete with implications. If time is money, then it makes sense to view the natural walking speed of one’s child as an impediment to one’s material quality of life. If time is money, then interactions with one’s child can indeed be viewed as unwelcome interruptions. The study of this history causes the essential element of these phrases—If—to become visible. This point is essential because the equation of time with money is an assertion and not a fact, one whose cultural influence is wholly dependent on the internalization of its logic by individuals. The belief that time is money is, in this sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although the present study is limited by a number of constraints—first and foremost among them being the inadequate size of the source-base on which its qualitative analysis depends—it is my hope that I have succeeded in calling attention to the fact that the equation of time with money is not an immutable fact, but rather a historically contingent belief which we have inherited from prior generations. A Mexican civil servant, asked

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to comment on life in New York City by a Times reporter in 1948, remarked: “Your time is money. Our time is life and pleasure.”27 If we understand that the equation of time with money is not a natural law, but is instead a social construct which varies in different times and places, we equip ourselves to begin to think of think of time in fundamentally different terms. We can then pose the question: what ought time be, for us?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sidney Feldman, “Ciudad New York,” The New York Times (New York, NY), November 21st, 1948. 27

CHARLEMAGNE’S DIVINE WINTER Spring and Winter in the Carolingian World Caroline Ho To the people of the Carolingian world, the seasons of winter and spring both possessed merits and flaws. Envisioning this early medieval period, one would likely assume that winter was experienced as a dreaded time, due to the bitter chill of uninsulated homes and the hunger that one might imagine to be ever-present; on the other hand, we might expect spring to be welcomed and celebrated as a reawakening from the cold and misery. Yet the people of this age did not necessarily associate these seasons with such sentiments. A multitude of sources suggest that temperatures1 and the rhythms of agricultural life2 made spring far more enjoyable than winter. However, an account of merely the physical world is inadequate when examining a culture where the perception of life was intimately tied to religion, where Christianity was seen as a defining and distinguishing feature of the Frankish identity.3 As !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1. Michael McCormick, Paul Edward Dutton, and Paul A. Mayewski, “Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Empire, A.D. 750-950,” Speculum 82, no. 4 (2007): 877-878. 2. Wandalbert of Prüm, On the names, the signs, the labors, and the weather conditions of the 12 months, c. 840, in Charlemagne’s Months and their Bavarian Labours: The politics of the Seasons in the Carolingian Empire, 53-70, by Charles I. Hammer (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1997), 53-70. 3. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni: The Life of Charlemagne, c. 830833, trans. Evelyn Scherabon Firchow and Edwin H. Zeydel, (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami, 1972), 47-51;

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will be demonstrated, this was a world where God's touch was thought to be present in every aspect, and so the lived experience of a season was inseparable from its religious connotations. Through the metaphysical lens of God's presence, the writers and poets of the Carolingian world viewed both the positives and negatives of spring—its fertility yet desperate fragility—as evidence of His actions.4 In the same way, even the most ruthless of winters could be withstood because of His favour;5 it was during these coldest months when one was most keenly aware of divine protection. Both spring and winter had liturgical significance, with the feasts of Easter and Christmas respectively, the two dates around which the rest of the Christian-based year revolved. Christmas will be shown to be the holier of the two. The ultimate proof of this lies with Charlemagne’s coronation on Christmas Day, in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 80-81. 4. Agobard of Lyons, “On Hail and Thunder,” c. 815, trans. W.J. Lewis, in Internet Medieval Sourcebook, by Paul Halsall, 2001, http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/AgobardOnHailandThunder.asp; Paul Edward Dutton, “Thunder and Hail over the Carolingian Countryside,” in Agriculture in the Middle Ages: Technology, Practice, and Representation, ed. Del Sweeney (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995): 112113. 5. Sedulius Scottus, “Plea for Patronage,” 9th century, in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, ed. Peter Godman (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 287.

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the year 800.6 On this day he assumed the title of Emperor and along with it the Church-sanctioned role as protector of the Christian faith,7 paralleling winter's representation of God as the protector of the Carolingian world. Through the comparison of experiences and interpretations of life during the two seasons, based on the accounts of poets and other writers, it becomes apparent that winter, over spring, was the time when one experienced the strongest connection to God. Constructing an image of a Carolingian winter or spring requires first an examination of the material world during both. Based on the weather itself and the kinds of lifestyles it entailed in winter and spring, it seems obvious that the former was a harsher time than the latter. Winter was cold, stormy, and presumably unpleasant because of it; Irish poet Sedulius Scottus embodies this sentiment aptly in his “Plea for patronage”: The gusts of the north wind are blowing and there are signs of snow; they terrify us with their sudden threatening movements; the earth itself trembles, stricken by great fear, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6. Royal Frankish Annals, trans. Bernhard Walter Scholz, in Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish annals and Nithard`s Histories, by Bernhard Walter Scholz and Barbara Rogers (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 81. 7. Selected Capitularies, in Readings in Medieval History, 4th ed, edited by Patrick J. Geary (North York, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 297.

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the sea murmurs and the hard stones groan, as the wind from the north sweeps on its violent way through the expanses of heaven… the earth winters under its snow-covered mantle.8 Winter was widely acknowledged as a bitter, desperate time, even suggested to be unquestionably terrible.9 Though there were also milder years, more common are the records documenting the colder extremes, including the Royal Annals and the writings of 10 contemporaries. A few notable winters stand out as being exceptionally deadly, such as the winter of 763-64: a contemporary Byzantine account describes it as being a “great freeze… the sprouts of the crops withered, and in the following year, hunger oppressed [Gaul] very severely, such that many people died from scarcity of bread.”11 Sedulius Scottus is not the only poet to equate misery to the cold season: Walahfrid Strabo, in his “Elegy on Reichenau,” evokes the frigid nature of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8. Sedulius Scottus, “Plea for Patronage,” 287. 9. Pierre Riché, Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, trans. Jo Ann McNamara (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 27, 250-251. 10. Ibid., 250; McCormick et al., ”Volcanoes,” 877-878. 11. Chronicon Moissiacense, trans. Georg Heinrich Pertz, in “Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Empire, A.D. 750-950,” by Michael McCormick, Paul Edward Dutton, and Paul A. Mayewski, Speculum 82, no. 4 (2007): 880.

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winter to illustrate his sense of abandonment.12 For these writers, winter was universally dreaded as a time of despair. In stark contrast, Carolingian poets frequently praise the glory of spring's return. Wandalbert of Prüm describes all twelve months by the tasks performed and the weather conditions; in March he praises how the “delightful beginnings of Spring warmly caress this month,”13 creating an idyllic atmosphere of awakening embodied by the season’s personification. His picturesque language makes it easy to envision the agricultural activities carried out in March, April and May: the “gardens to be renewed,” the “flowers and verdure from the folliage/For at this time all buds burst forth,” the “sprouting seeds surge up in shoots”14 — his imagery is vividly delightful, filled with joy at the visual promises of growth. In a similar vein, Power creates a fictionalized account of the daily life of the peasant Bodo, as an example of typical life for the lowly in the Frankish realm. Bodo cheerfully sings in appreciation of a world that is “pregnant with corn and plenteous in strength; hosts of grain shafts and of glittering plants!”15 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12. Walahfrid Strabo, “Elegy on Reichenau,” c. 827-829, in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, ed. Peter Godman (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 225-227. 13. Wandalbert of Prüm, On the 12 months, 55. 14. Ibid., 55-59. 15. Eileen Power, The Project Gutenberg EBook of Medieval People (2004), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ 13144/13144-h/13144-h.htm.

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Though it is doubtful Bodo uttered these exact words, it suggests that the fertility of spring was appreciated by a broader social order, although primary sources reflect only the perceptions of a certain class of writers. Nevertheless, among the works of these literati there is no shortage of poetic description that associates spring with relief and rebirth. Yet despite how people carried out their lives, Carolingian attitudes do not align so neatly with this dichotomy of spring as good and winter as bad. Their experiences and perceptions were filtered through their faith in forces beyond the physical. Sedulius Scottus’ “Debate of the rose and the lily” demonstrates this by personifying Spring as a paternal spirit. The two titular flowers are his quarreling daughters, both of whom are convinced that she is the more beautiful of the two. Spring, a pleasant character with his “garments embroidered with green grass” and his head “[gleaming] with a garland of honour,” intercedes to conclude that both are equally marvellous, and both serve to enrich the world and one another.16 He gives his children the “kiss of peace,”17 affirming Spring`s role as the mediator, the guardian of harmony in this time of beauty. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 16. Sedulius Scottus, “Debate of the rose and the lily,” 9th century, in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, ed. Peter Godman (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 285. 17. Ibid., 287.

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Winter, too, was associated with protection—and this was more overtly accepted, affirmed by numerous sources, and from a far more powerful source: the Carolingians’ Christian God. All the weather’s harshness was viewed as proof of His hand in keeping His people alive during this cold season. Radbod’s swallow poem illuminates this belief clearly. The swallow is driven to relocate in the winter, to “shelter from the harsh winds in the unknown caves” according to “the will of the Creator,”18 thus explaining how even birds and other creatures are guarded by divine power against the potential threat of nature. In his “Plea for Patronage,” Sedulius illuminates this sacred presence through the protection of the bishop Hartgar, rather than God’s direct touch. During this cruel season, Hartgar has ensured the safety of his people; with “imperturbable mercy the excellent bishop has overcome the winds, subduing their pride as they deserve.”19 This is explicit proof that, in the Frankish kingdom, piety and prayer could ease even the harshest of storms. Winter could be cold, terrible, and difficult to survive, but the fact that one did survive was the greatest evidence of God’s protection—whether manifested through His direct action or through His representatives on Earth.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 18. Radbod, “A swallow,” c. 899-917, in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, ed. Peter Godman (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 317. 19. Sedulius Scottus, “Plea for Patronage,” 187.

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Expanding upon this faith in intervention, it was commonly accepted that all weather stemmed from the divine. For example, ninth century bishop Agobard of Lyons thought it was common sense that God controlled such things as precipitation.20 Using examples from the Bible, Agobard explains that “the omnipotent God, whose hand is impossible to flee, punishes the enemies of the righteous by the strength of His arm using strange waters and hail and rains.”21 Ordinary men could influence this to some extent through prayer, but ultimately “no other person sends hail in the summer, other than the one who sends snow in the winter.”22 Poet Florus of Lyons confirms this perspective when he describes the punishment sent by God against the impious, as drought and famine are “sent by divine judgement to scour the earth, and the nourishment and rain of Heaven’s word are missing.”23 Weather was understood by these Carolingian writers as the most explicit sign of the Lord’s touch on the mortal realm. In a world as dependent as theirs on the weather’s cooperation, the phenomena of cold or warmth, devastating frosts or milder chills, were expressions of God’s favour or its absence.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20. Dutton, “Thunder and Hail,” 113. 21. Agobard of Lyons, “On Hail and Thunder.” 22. Ibid. 23. Florus of Lyons, “Lament on the division of empire,” 9th century, in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, ed. Peter Godman (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 271.

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If winter embodied God's mercy, perhaps the hardships of spring were sent by Him as trials of dedication, or signs of His displeasure. This season of supposed growth and abundance certainly came with its own challenges. Most notably, Alcuin’s “Debate of Spring and Winter,” the very poem by which Sedulius’ “Debate of the rose and the lily” is inspired,24 counterpoints the notion of spring’s triumph over winter. With the personification of both seasons, Spring is at first welcomed as expected, but Winter soon points out the many problems with his arrival, for Spring is “always accustomed to bring hunger with him,” and also has a habit of stirring up “battle after battle”;25 both of these claims are verified by multiple sources. Spring could be plentiful, but not necessarily plentiful enough to survive the coming year. Dutton in particular describes the fragility of the Carolingian world and their utter dependence on a good spring harvest.26 It was a world often on the very edge of sustaining itself, and a hailstorm that struck in spring before the wheat was harvested would haunt them for the rest of the year. Only starting in May could peasants could be somewhat confident they would !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 24. Peter Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 54. 25. Alcuin, “The debate of Spring and Winter,” 8th century, in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, ed. Peter Godman (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 147. 26. Dutton, “Thunder and Hail,” 119.

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survive the ensuing months. 27 The Salzburg “Labors of the Months” manuscript illustration from 820 depicts April with a man holding a sheaf of wheat in one hand, suggesting how deeply he relied on this crop.28 Survival in spring was therefore far from guaranteed, and it was not a comfortable, secure season. In addition to agricultural uncertainty, this was the time when the activity of warfare recommenced. The Royal Frankish Annals record many instances where Carolingian kings halted their armies during the winter;29 according to Wandalbert, the arrival of May meant it was time again to “muster the levy in castles and in battle order… to subdue the arms of the haughty enemy.”30 With spring's return came the resumption of all the rhythms of life, along with reminders of its mortality, welcomed or not. After the frenetic activity of spring and the rest of the seasons, winter provided the perfect break, a much-needed and well-deserved rest, as granted by God. Alcuin's lyrical debate evokes this atmosphere of relaxation: his Winter possesses “joyous banquets,” “sweet rest and a hot fire at home,”31 all of which were foreign to spring. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 27. Ibid., 120. 28. The Salzburg “Labors of the Months” in Vienna, National Library, Codex 387, fo.90v, in Charlemagne’s Months and their Bavarian Labours: The politics of the Seasons in the Carolingian Empire, 53-70, by Charles I. Hammer (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1997), 87. 29. Royal Frankish Annals, 35-125. 30. Wandalbert of Prüm, On the 12 months, 59. 31. Alcuin, “Debate of Spring and Winter,” 147.

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Radbod similarly associates winter with “sweet nests” and “hospitable hearths.”32 Both of these poets create a far warmer winter mood, implying that it was not dreaded but rather anticipated as an opportunity to break from what they saw as traditional labours; yet it was far from lazily idle for anyone. Legislation was especially productive in winter, such as in the year 801 when the Royal Frankish Annals describe Charlemagne’s efforts to resolve any disputes in Rome; supposedly “the emperor did nothing but this all winter.”33 For peasants, too, this was a time to catch up on other chores. Wandalbert of Prüm constructs a particularly pleasant winter scene, describing the lighter household tasks, accumulated throughout the busy year, which could finally be addressed.34 One of the tasks outlined with particular anticipation is the slaughter and preparation of pigs,35 which is also depicted in the Salzburg “Labors.”36 Winter from this perspective was the season for feasting and resting, a departure from the incessant and backbreaking labours that otherwise occupied Carolingian life. Complementary to the notion of divine protection, writers and poets logically assumed that winter was set aside by God in order to celebrate His benevolence. Satiated at the side of their hearths, sheltered from the snow and temporarily freed of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 32. Radbod, “A swallow,” 317. 33. Royal Frankish Annals, 81. 34. Wandalbert of Prüm, On the 12 months, 69-70. 35. Ibid., 70. 36. Salzburg “Labors of the Months.”

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their duties, this was the perfect time for people to appreciate His grace and provision. Both seasons, then, had their ups and their downs. Establishing which of the two was experienced as a better time thus seems dependent on comparing which one received greater celebration. Spring and winter each contained one of the two largest liturgical feasts of the year, Easter and Christmas respectively. Their importance as exceptional times of the year is evidenced by the imposition of penance on a magnate, as recorded by Paulinus of Aquilea: the man convicted of killing his wife was allowed to eat “no meat of any kind except at Easter and Christmas,”37 suggesting the dual distinctiveness of the two dates. It is important here to note that the Carolingian conception of the year was based on a sacred calendar, just as every other aspect of life was beheld in relation to God. Calculation of the months and seasons revolved around the annual liturgical feasts.38 Indeed, the very reason the Carolingians required a scientifically verifiable standard of time was to correctly find the date of Easter. Saint Bede the Venerable's De Temporum Ratione, a vast compilation of knowledge regarding temporal conceptualizations and astronomical calculations, was written for the sole !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 37. Epistolae Karolini aevi, vol. IV, 516, in Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, by Pierre Riché, trans.by Jo Ann McNamara (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 239. 38. Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 86.

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purpose of establishing this date. In his words, knowledge of this “feast-day on which the Mediator between God and man… might show its [inner] significance by means of the order of time.”39 The structuring of time itself, the passing of seasons and the reason the Carolingians felt the need for such conceptions as winter and spring, was based upon Easter. This seems to suggest that it was the most important celebration because it was so central to the understanding of the year. Yet the centrality of Christmas cannot be understated. In northern Europe, where the Carolingians ruled, it was especially prominent, partly because it incorporated elements of older pagan celebrations that took place around midwinter,40 but beyond this it was the single most remarked-upon time of the year. Christmas was the occasion for winter’s banquets and feasting previously mentioned,41 as well as giftgiving such as Charlemagne’s presents to the pope in 805.42 In the Royal Frankish Annals, in every single year of Carolingian military campaigns the location of Christmas’ celebration is noted, proving that it was absolutely necessary to recognize that this feast did take place.43 This !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Bede, The Reckoning of Time, 725, trans. Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 151. 40. Alexander Murray, “Medieval Christmas,” History Today 36, no. 12 (1986), 32. 39.

41. Wandalbert of Prüm, On the 12 months, 70; Salzburg “Labors of the Months.” 42. Royal Frankish Annals, 81. 43. Ibid, 35-125.

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seems especially noteworthy when one considers how, according to Einhard, Charlemagne “rarely gave banquets, and then only on special feast days for large numbers of guests.”44 Though Easter is often mentioned as well in the Annals, it is done as a passing afterthought, secondary to the more important celebration, since the accounts describe where Charlemagne “celebrates Christmas as well as Easter.”45 In fact, Easter is omitted in multiple years, including 775, 780, and 793.46 Based on this, Christmas is demonstrably the more significant feast, a greater focal point of the year. The prominence of Christmas explains why Charlemagne undertook the action of renaming December “holy month.”47 Combined with the particularly keen awareness of divine guardianship that the writers of the Frankish realm associated with the season, winter was unquestionably when God’s holiness was most visceral. In this light, Charlemagne’s coronation on Christmas Day in the year 800 seems to take on even more meaning—as an attempt to link this sense of divine protection to the role he himself took on as protector of a Christian realm and faith. Einhard makes frequent note of Charlemagne’s devotion to extending and protecting the Church. Many of his conquests were undertaken in order to force those such as the Saxons to “adopt the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 44. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, 91. 45. Royal Frankish Annals, 59. 46. Ibid., 51, 58, 73. 47. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, 101.

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sacraments of the Christian faith and religion,”48 in the same way that he made efforts to ensure that “everything done in the church should be carried out with the greatest possible dignity,”49 personally concerning himself with proper worship. Charlemagne’s Capitularies, his legal codes and reforms, make this even more apparent by outlining the kinds of Christian behaviour he advocated throughout his realm. The Synod of Frankfurt for example lays out the proper behaviour of bishops and priests: it sets standards for the administration of justice, the piety of the clergy, and the teaching of Christianity to the laypeople.50 Charlemagne’s coronation then, on this “highest of holy days,”51 extended his responsibility to promote correct Christianity. This was a duty given to him by the Pope, passed down from the authority of St. Peter. By occurring on Christmas Day, it drew a kind of symbolic link—transferring the mandate of God’s protection, which was already acutely felt during this season, into Charlemagne himself. He was the chosen divine representative, tasked with overseeing the people of his Christian kingdom; by his own Capitularies, Charlemagne, “the lord emperor himself, after God and his saints, has been appointed their protector and defender.”52 Winter was therefore the most appropriate season !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 48. Ibid., 51. 49. Ibid., 95. 50. Selected Capitularies, 286-290. 51. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, 99. 52. Selected Capitularies, 297.

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to enshrine this, because winter too was a symbol of divine protection. A comparison of winter and spring shows just how deeply the people of the Carolingian world experienced their lives through the lens of Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presence. A cursory glance at the writings of poets and others constructs winter as a time of misery and spring as a time of renewal, verified by the physical conditions, but once religious associations are taken into account this narrative is reversed. Spring was a reawakening but not necessarily a welcome one, as it meant the resumption of agricultural and military activity, after the merciful respite of winter. Desperate as the cold months could be, they were never overwhelmingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;because it was God who sheltered His people, who provided this season of rest that they deserved for their labours and their faith. The celebrations of both spring and winter were incredibly significant, such that the year itself was based around them, but Christmas ultimately won out over Easter. It was more noteworthy and more meaningful because it took place during the holiest season of the year. The divine connotations of winter were capitalized upon by Charlemagne during his coronation, when he received both the imperial title and the imperial mandate to care for his subjects. The protection of God, to the writers of the Carolingian world, was necessary and explicit: it manifested itself through Charlemagne, just as it manifested itself through winter. Bibliography

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Primary Sources Agobard of Lyons. “On Hail and Thunder.” c. 815. Translated by W.J. Lewis. In Internet Medieval Sourcebook, by Paul Halsall. 2001. http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source /Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp. Alcuin. “The debate of Spring and Winter.” 8th century. In Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, edited by Peter Godman, 145149. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Bede. The Reckoning of Time. 725. Translated by Faith Wallis. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. Chronicon Moissiacense. Translated by Georg Heinrich Pertz. In “Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Empire, A.D. 750-950,” by Michael McCormick, Paul Edward Dutton, and Paul A. Mayewski. Speculum 82, no. 4 (2007): 865-895. Einhard. Vita Karoli Magni: The Life of Charlemagne. c. 830-833. Translated by Evelyn Scherabon Firchow and Edwin H. Zeydel. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami, 1972. Epistolae Karolini aevi, vol. IV, 516, in Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, by Pierre Riché, translated by Jo Ann McNamara. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Florus of Lyons. “Lament on the division of the empire.” 9th century. In Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, edited by Peter Godman, 265-273. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. !

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Radbod. “A swallow.” c. 899-917. In Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, edited by Peter Godman, 317-319. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Royal Frankish Annals. Translated by Bernhard Walter Scholz. In Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish annals and Nithard`s Histories, by Bernhard Walter Scholz and Barbara Rogers, 35-125. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Sedulius Scottus. “Debate of the rose and the lily.” 9th century. In Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, edited by Peter Godman, 283287. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Sedulius Scottus. “Plea for patronage.” 9th century. In Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, edited by Peter Godman, 287. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Selected Capitularies. In Readings in Medieval History, 4th ed, edited by Patrick J. Geary. North York, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2010. The Salzburg “Labors of the Months” in Vienna, National Library, Codex 387, fo.90v. In Charlemagne’s Months and their Bavarian Labours: The politics of the Seasons in the Carolingian Empire, by Charles I. Hammer, 87. Oxford: Archaeopress, 1997. Walahfrid Strabo. “Elegy on Reichenau.” c. 827829. In Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, edited by Peter Godman, 225-229. Norman,

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Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Wandalbert of Prüm. On the names, the signs, the labors, and the weather conditions of the 12 months. c. 840. In Charlemagne’s Months and their Bavarian Labours: The politics of the Seasons in the Carolingian Empire, by Charles I. Hammer, 53-70. Oxford: Archaeopress, 1997. Secondary Sources: Costambeys, Marios, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean. The Carolingian World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Dutton, Paul Edward, “Thunder and Hail over the Carolingian Countryside.” In Agriculture in the Middle Ages: Technology, Practice, and Representation, edited by Del Sweeney, 111137. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Godman, Peter. Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Hammer, Carl I. Charlemagne’s Months and their Bavarian Labours: The politics of the Seasons in the Carolingian Empire. Oxford: Archaeopress, 1997. McCormick, Michael, Paul Edward Dutton, and Paul A. Mayewski. “Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Empire, A.D. 750-950.” Speculum 82, no. 4 (2007): 865-895. McKitterick, Rosamond. History and Memory in the Carolingian World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Murray, Alexander. “Medieval Christmas.” History Today 36, no. 12 (1986): 31-39. Power, Eileen. The Project Gutenberg EBook of Medieval People. 2004. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13144/13 144-h/13144-h.htm. Riché, Pierre. Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne. Translated by Jo Ann McNamara. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.

FROM GREAT EXHIBITION TO DEPARTMENT STORES

A Victorian Spectacle of Commodities and Social Lives Janice Li As the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace opened in 1851, it introduced a whirlwind of new commodity culture to Victorian England. It was not limited to the formal exhibition setting but had a profound and lasting influence on the commerce and society of Victorian England and the subsequent development of museums, galleries, and department stores. The link between exhibitions and the rising dominance of department stores in social lives of Victorians in the second half of the century is particularly remarkable. A lot of existing literatures discuss in depth the influence exhibition and department store culture of the 19th century respectively, but not much of their connection. This essay aims to draw attention to the intricate nature of these social inventions and to explore the influence that the Great Exhibition’s architectural and visual culture had upon department stores. The impact “Exhibitonary Complex” had in the space of department store would be discussed through analyzing primary sources of photographs, advertisements, and journals like Punch and Illustrated London.1 By the end of the nineteenth !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sociologist Tony Bennett has applied Foucault’s idea of the disciplinary power, Panopticism, and governmentality from his Discipline and Punish: History, Theory, Politics (1975) to the public spectacle in the nineteenth century and termed it 1

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century, it had consequentially altered the pattern of consumerism and reflected changing social structure of Victorian England. Grand-scale department stores like Harrods, Liberty, and Selfridges, adopted quickly the exhibition method in their storefronts, interiors, and strategies of display. The architecture and interior of these establishments resembled those of a museum or exhibition hall. Visual arrangement of the Great Exhibition also had a huge impact on department stores’ strategies of aesthetic juxtapositions; by placing a large amount of objects of the same category in glass cases, they introduced a new way of seeing. Department stores were then transformed from a purely commercial venue to a social spot. Because of the massive space and display available, department stores branched out to incorporate restaurants, florists, and other services that allowed customers, or even, non-customers to mingle and spend time at department stores. Moreover, these spaces became a novel social destination that reshaped the horizons of many Britons, especially middle-class women. The emergence of a new consumption and social space led to changes not only in the commercial world, but also the social dynamics of Britons. Middle class women, specifically, had a brand new activity to attend and reshaped the Victorian stayhome “angel in the house” expectation. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “The Exhibitionary Complex”. Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4, no.1 (1988): 77.

Li!|!Great!Exhibition!to!Department!Stores!

The Great Exhibition was rooted in one major concept: to fully represent all human life and cultural endeavors by exhibiting 2 manufactured articles. It marked a turning point in the visual and social history of public spectacle, blending an array of presentation techniques borrowed from other media: including preexisting exhibitions, for-profit public entertainment of panoramas, shopping arcades, popular attractions like the Egyptian Hall and the Mechanics Institute exhibitions.3 The Planning Commission of the Great Exhibition, by blending the above techniques, created new “exhibitionary” forms that had a profound and lasting influence on the subsequent development of museums, art galleries, expositions, and department stores.4 It served as the blueprint of world’s first department store. For most of Victoria’s reign, the typical shop was small and independent (family-run); only after the Great Exhibition, the 1870’s saw the establishment of major department stores, as a continuation of commercialized space of exhibition.5,6 It inaugurated a new spectacle of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1815-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 17. 3 Peter Trippi, “Industrial Arts and the Exhibition Ideal,” Victoria & Albert Museum, Accessed 10/20/2014, www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1159_grand_design/e ssay-industrial_new.html#4 4 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4, no.1 (1988): 74. 5 L.C.B. Seaman, Life in Victorian London (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1973), 89. 2

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cultural and commercial life for Britons and its influence has endured to the twenty-first century.7 The symbol of the Great Exhibition was undoubtedly the innovative Crystal Palace. Rather than resembling the existing palaces in London, the Crystal Palace was more of an extravagant version of a modern greenhouse, industrially assembled with mass produced glass and iron. This breakthrough in public architecture was highly praised by its contemporaries. The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, published the year the Great Exhibition opened in 1851, states that the building was composed of “a unique blend of scientific and commercial talent exemplifying the machine-like virtues of modern factory discipline,” and it was “the epitome of soulless materialism, an apocalyptic monster of iron and glass.”8,9 The emerging British department stores evidently followed the exhibition model of building, which emphasized gallery floors, sweeping staircases, and dramatic glass roofs.10 Iron provided open spacious bays in which large quantities of goods !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1815-1914, 18. 7 Ibid. 8 Robert Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions (Cambridge: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1993), 38, 39. 9 Fyodor Dostoyeveky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), quoted in Robert Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions, 41. 10 Bill Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 25. 6

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could be displayed while allowing a massive crowd to move with ease.11 The Great Western Arcade (1875), City Arcade (1898) of Birmingham, and Kirkgate Market (1857) of Leeds, although reflected smaller business culture, they also resembled the Crystal Palace’s architecture on a smaller scale, with iron and glass as their main structural component.12 By comparing illustrations of the Crystal Palace and various British department stores in the late Victorian era, one could draw parallels between both of their interior and exterior. Figure 1 shows the interior of Bainbridge’s in Newcastle in 1898; the exhibition model of open space, wide staircases, and glass cases after glass cases full of merchandises is unmistakably present. It reminds one of the bustling interiors of the Great Exhibition as shown in figure 2. An advertisement of Harris & Sheldon’s from 1909 (figure 3) indicates that the department store saw the brass and glass structure as a selling point of their stores, alongside wax heads, dress & mantle, stand busts, and sundry fittings. While another illustration of Bainbridge’s in Newcastle (figure 4) shows its iron and glass entrance with no walls at all. These storefronts of department stores were not comparable of that of the Crystal Palace in scale (figure 5), but they did bear similarities in style and design. It is equally interesting to note how the glass windows of storefronts in these illustrations already display a wide range of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11 12

Ibid, 18. Ibid, 38, 39.

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goods, not restricted to the glass cases inside the stores. The displays in storefront windows, instore glass cases and open spaces were as novel as the architecture itself, whether in the Great Exhibition or department stores. These glass cases made ‘looking’ the principal exercise of going to the exhibition, or stores.13 In reference to the obsession of glass cases in the Great Exhibition, The Times, on 13 October 1851, writes, “we want to place everything we can lay our hands on under glass cases, and star our fill.”14 The Planning Commission of the Great Exhibition believed that no objects should be placed directly on the floor at the level of the routes of traffic; they were better exhibited on a plinth or on a shelf elevated above it, especially under glass and refraction of lights.15 Plinths, partitions, and vitrines separated the space of display from the space of the viewer. Aside from the utilization of glass and light though, no single element of the Crystal Palace display was new to the Victorian taste for luxury and ostentation, yet it synthesized and systematized these elements of spectacle by putting them under spotlight, all together under one roof, in the service of manufactured objects.16 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of NineteenthCentury Exhibitions, 53. 14 The Times (1851), quoted in Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions, 53. 15 Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of NineteenthCentury Exhibitions, 53. 16 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1815-1914, 21. 13

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This new approach of display shifted the axis of perception towards an objective perception of possession, redefining the relationship between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, as well as multiplying the possibilities of perception through the nineteenth-century science of statistics.17 This strategy of spectacle and browsing were integral to the exhibition’s success and businessmen saw tremendous potential of it for retailing; customers were encouraged to wander in its large space surrounded by stunning visual displays.18 Glass storefronts demonstrated the potential of the aesthetic employment of window displays. Harrods’ display told passers-by simultaneously to indicate the extensive variety of the same type of goods on offer; Selfridges’ storefront employed an overall aesthetically pleasing tactic in juxtaposing its merchandises to win over the hearts of shoppers on the streets before they entered the store. Looking again at the similarities between figure 1, 2 and 4, the glass case displays of commodities attracted viewers by putting focus on the objects as a show, as visual entertainment and interaction, without the sense of touch, and sometimes without real transactions. Although a simpler form of department store existed decades before the Great Exhibition opened, the aesthetic remodeling was clear. The Great Exhibition glorified the exchange value of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17 18

Ibid, 64, 65. Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History, 17, 18.

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commodities as it created an entertaining visual framework in which commodities’ intrinsic values were eclipsed.19 Art historian Ralph Nicholson Wronum commented on the new needs to be satisfied in an advanced state like Victorian Britain in his essay, Universal efforts show a universal want, and beauty of effect and decoration are no more a luxury in a civilized state of society than warmth or clothing are a luxury to any state: the mind, as the body, makes everything necessary that it is capable of permanently enjoying… Hence ornament in now as material an interest in a commercial community as the raw materials of manufacture themselves.20 The Victorian consumers were fixated upon manufactured objects and possessions, inviting visual attention, wonder, aesthetic appreciation, and browsing, as opposed to tactility or commercial negotiation. Although it did not bring about an immediate consumer revolution, the world of marketing and consumerism was never the same since. All kinds of objects were placed in various climate-controlled landscape, flooded with !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of NineteenthCentury Exhibitions, 61. 20 Ralph Nicholson Wornum, “The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste. An Essay on Ornamental Art as Displayed in the Industrial Exhibition in Hyde Park, in Which the Different Styles are Compared with a View to the Improvement of Taste in Home Manufactures,” 1851, quoted in Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions, 93. 19

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light, isolated in departments, channeled people through them, and turned into the focal points of aesthetic and linguistic contemplation.21 The overwhelming collectiveness of the aestheticized objects succeeded in producing a space that drove consumers to distraction. In mid-nineteenth-century, most department stores still prided themselves principally upon their specialization, while their favourite customers were the customers who partook in ‘carriage trade’ – purchases arranged in carriages to be sent home to wealthy wives.22 Draperies – dress material, general household drapery, and hosiery, gloves, and general haberdashery – were the first to show signs of mass production for a vast market. Attributed to Britain’s thriving textile industry, many of department stores in fact emerged from drapery stores.23 William Whiteley started the first model of modern department stores in England in 1863, in the exhibitionary concept of grouping various categories of manufactured goods into one location. By 1872 he had departments for dressmaking, gentlemen’s outfitting, tailoring, boots and hats.24 He named himself ‘The Universal Provider’ as he later branched out to the following departments: house agency, refreshment room, cleaning and dyeing service, and stationery, furniture, china, glass, ironmongery, food, house!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1815-1914, 30, 31. 22 Seaman, Life in Victorian London, 94. 23 Seaman, Life in Victorian London, 90. 24 Ibid, 95. 21

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decorating, hairdressing, banking deposit service, theatre ticketing, and even, funeral service.25 The number of departments in the stores by early twentieth century had risen to a new high. Punch poked fun of the obsession over departmentalization sprouted from the Great Exhibition, which was then found in fin de siècle department stores. The satirical magazines mocked the endless expansion of departments in an illustration in 1911 (figure 6) in which a shopkeeper has gotten lost amongst the countless departments within a multi-story complex. Henry Charles Harrod was unusual in starting his business as a grocer’s rather than a draper’s store. Moved to Eastcheap (north of London Bridge) in 1849 when business improved, Harrod took over his friend, Philip Burden’s grocery shop in the then-notorious district of Knightsbridge, south of Hyde Park in London.26 The Great Exhibition across the road in Hyde Park rapidly transformed Knightsbridge from “raunchy to ultra respectable”.27 Harrod’s son, Charles Digby Harrod, had the insight to develop business within their increasingly upmarket neighbourhood, and developed a trade in perfume, flowers, stationery, and medicine. By 1880, Harrod’s had over 150 workers and expanded to encompass new departments to sell china and ironmongery, and later on, also household items ranging from brass fenders to billiard tables. Harrods would not have achieved !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid, 95, 96. Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History, 22. 27 Ibid. 25 26

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its success if the Great Exhibition did not provide the change in social dynamics in the urban neighbourhoods, starting from South 28 Kensington. The combination of price tags, fabulous display, the ease of having all goods under one roof, the ability to browse, explore, and dream of potential ownership created a space of sociability, visual attention, and amusement, which heightened the shopping experience.29 Supported by the new and attractive setup, department stores were able to utilize visual psychology to revamp the shopping process. It was revolutionary in the history of commodity exchange, or non-exchange, as going to the stores did not necessarily involve buying of goods anymore. After Newcastleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s J.J. Fenwick established itself on Bond Street, London, in 1890s, his business transformed from a mere draper and dress tailor store to a multi-storey department store. Young Fred Fenwick announced in the local press on 27 November 1901, A welcome to customers to walk around the store. Assistants are not allowed to speak to visitors. Walk around today, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t buy. There is time for that another day.30

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! South Kensington is the neighbourhood around Exhibition Road that developed out of the Great Exhibition, including the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Baden-Powell House. 29 Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History, 17. 30 Ibid, 30. 28

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Fenwick’s message was extremely subtle and loaded with economic and social implications. It entailed a new type of liberty: anyone could enter, browse in departments, and wander from floor to floor, all without spending a dime.31 The Crystal Palace combined work, leisure, nature, and culture and dispensed them in a single confined space, establishing an equilibrium between public and private life and attempting to establish a new type of sophisticated space for cross-class interaction. The Planning Commission of the Great Exhibition carefully amalgamated two different constructions of the prototypical visitor: the middle class and the working class.32 The Punch illustration (figure 9), titled “Specimens from Mr. Punch’s Industrial Exhibition of 1850” shows people of the working class in glass cases, as if they were also merchandise exhibited in the Exhibition. Viewers were commoditized as part of the spectacle, and were observed and talked about by other bourgeois viewers. A commentary essay in the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review (April 1850) discusses about the rising possibilities to talk expressively and excessively about commodities – conversation regarding social and institutional life that was enclosed from the public before:33 Magnificent was the conception of this gathering together of the commercial travellers !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid, 18. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1815-1914, 65. 33 Ibid, 30. 31 32

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of the universal world, side by side with their employers and customers, and with a showroom for their goods that ought to be such as the world has never before beheld.34 This was extended to the sociability of the department stores and reflected the growing complexity of British society – the well-heeled clientele of imperial London and the booming population of the working classes. The department stores first catered to mature bourgeoisie with growing levels of disposable income. This confident class was the new dominant face of the modern world; lacking title and land, they turned to an almost-aristocratic realm of finery and consumer goods to signify their presence.35 Careful marketing ensured that some items were affordable to the less privileged, but of equal importance was the creation of an ambience which accommodated complexities of the British class system.36 The better off could illustrate their status by the price of expensive goods they purchased; poorer working class could enter a new world of material fantasy, they could see it and even touch it in some circumstances, without having to pay for the pleasure they consumed.37 In the department store scene, there was another class of audience that was yet !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Helix, “The Industrial Exhibition of 1851,” Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, April 1850, quoted in Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions, 25. 35 Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History, 18. 36 Ibid, 30. 37 Ibid, 30. 34

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distinguishable in the Great Exhibition – the middle class women. For middle class housewives, travelling to the department stores on high streets usually involved a journey out of their home neighbourhoods, but the overwhelming attraction and experience of the vast variety of goods in splendid display, competitive prices, and the sociability of the department stores lured the middle class married women back again and again.38 By 1890s, the growing labyrinth of London’s underground railway system and a rapidly improving surface transport network heightened the competition amongst the newer shopping centres of Knightsbridge, Oxford Street, and the mushrooming new suburban high streets.39 The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of many of London’s premier department stores. At that time, almost each urban and suburban area in London boasted at least one or more department stores: Harrods and Harvey in Knightsbridge, Liberty on Regent Street, Dickens and Jones, Marshall and Snelgrove, Debenham and Freebody and Selfridges on Oxford Street, Fortnum and Mason and Swan and Edgar in Piccadilly Square, The Bon Marché in Brixton, and the list goes on.40,41 The London middle class housewife could then easily !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yaffa Claire Draznin, Victorian London’s Middle Class Housewife: What She Did All Day (London: Greenwood Press, 1922), 163, 164, 165. 39 Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History, 23. 40 Ibid, 23, 24. 41 Seaman, Life in Victorian London, 94. 38

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take a short train journey to department stores in Westbourne Grove, Kensington High Street, Knightsbridge, and Oxford Street. For the first time she could do all her shopping in one destination, instead of having to go from one specialized outlet to another.42 What attracted middle-class women the most in these department stores, as many historians believed, was the many new options of social spots they offered. Whiteleys opened a refreshment room for the ladies in 1872.43 Harrods boasted of being a ‘recognized social rendezvous,’ and started a Ladies’ Club and a Gentlemen’s Club in their stores.44 The restaurants and teashops in department stores provided somewhere for women to meet each other outside their own homes without scandalizing their families or spending much money; this trend gradually influenced the habits of the middle class.45 These places became meeting venues during the New Woman movement. According to the Daily Mail of January 29th, 1903, Londoners would “shortly be able to experiment with the first of a number of American “quick lunch” establishments in which customers [would] wait on themselves.”46 The tea shops, lunch rooms, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Draznin, Victorian London’s Middle Class Housewife: What She Did All Day, 163. 43 Ibid, 159. 44 Alison Adburgham, A Punch History of Manners and Modes 1841-1914 (London: Hutchinson &Co (Publishers) Ltd, 1961), 219. 45 Ibid, 219. 46 Ibid. 42

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lounges, writing rooms and “retiring rooms” (lavatories) allowed women to rest and chat with her friends and made the shopping experience highly pleasurable. These amenities were found nowhere else in one single location. From the department store experience, the middle-class wives were relieved from sewing and kitchenwork; it was not merely the ready-made products they purchased eased their chore loads, but the act of travelling around town to get to the department store and socialize.47 The Great Exhibition and department store phenomena are exemplary of 19th century Victorian social culture on its own, but the impact “exhibitionary complex” had on department store visuals transformed the world of consumption – silently expanding female realm in public space. This research of Victorian consumption culture aims to connect the dots between existing extensive studies, finding how department store culture came to what it was and thus what it still is, as a legacy of the industrialized capitalist world. More significantly, it investigates how department stores spun off from its original inspiration of the Great Exhibition; by adopting exhibition strategies, modern department stores were extremely effective in inventing new social spaces, and transforming perceptions of commodities and social relationships for a wide demographic. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Draznin, Victorian London’s Middle Class Housewife: What She Did All Day, 166. 47

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Figure 1. “Bainbridge’s interior,” Newcastle upon Tyne City Libraries, 1898

Figure 2. “Great Exhibition of 1851, Main Avenue” Whipple Museum, 1851 !

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Figure 3. “Harris & Sheldon Shop Front Showcases,” British Library, 1909

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Figure 4. “Bainbridge’s Newcastle ‘Man’s Shop’,” Newcastle upon Tyne City Libraries, 1898

Figure 5. “Façade of the Crystal Palace,” Whipple Museum, 1851

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Figure 6, “Our Mammoth Stores,” Punch, 1911

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Bibliography Adburgham, Alison. A Punch History of Manners and Modes 1841-1914. London: Hutchinson &Co (Publishers) Ltd, 1961. Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4, no.1 (1988): 73-102. Brain, Robert. Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions. Cambridge: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1993. Draznin, Yaffa Claire. Victorian London’s Middle Class Housewife: What She Did All Day. London: Greenwood Press, 1922. Lancaster, Bill. The Department Store: A Social History. London: Leicester University Press, 1995. Lemire, Beverly, “Consumerism in Pre-Industrial and Early Industrial Britain: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes,” Journal of British Studies 27, (1991): 1-24. Olsen, Donald J. The Growth of Victorian London. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1815-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Seaman, L. C. B. Life in Victorian London. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1973. Trippi, Peter. “Industrial Arts and the Exhibition Ideal.” Victoria & Albert Museum. Accessed October 20, 2014. http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/ 1159_grand_design/essayindustrial_new.html#

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AN IMPROBABLE PARTNERSHIP Examining the Misrepresentation of History under Neoliberal Feminism Simon Rayek Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind She’s always controlled, she’s always confined Controlled by her parents until she’s a wife Then slave to her husband for the rest of her life -Wagoner’s Lad, traditional folk ballad In her provocative article “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” gender studies professor Catherine Rottenberg discusses a new breed of feminism, one that espouses market values as a means of realizing women’s liberation.1 Locating the recent resurgence of popular feminism amongst the liberal upper-middle class to Cheryl Sandberg’s bestselling and much discussed book, the self-proclaimed “feminist manifesto” Lean In, Rottenberg argues that neoliberal ideals have seeped into and subverted feminist discourse in ways that dismiss and deflect from feminism’s historical criticism of structural capitalism.2 At the core of Sandberg’s feminism is its contention that “the laws of economics”3 and free market values !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1Catherine

Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418-437. 2Sheryl Sandberg, Lean in: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013), 9. 3 Sandberg uses this generalization to describe capitalism in Lean In, 7.

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actually encourage women’s liberation.4 This incarnation of feminism subscribes to neoliberal ideals, arguing that free market capitalism facilitates liberation. In support of this argument, neoliberal feminists cite the “progress” of women’s participation in the workplace, which they claim demonstrates the function of capitalism as a liberating agent.5 However, the neoliberal feminist contention that capitalism in general, and neoliberal policies in specific, advanced women’s liberation is situated in misleading interpretations of the history of women in the workplace, and is ultimately untrue. As I argue in the following examination of three classic historical instances in which women became more incorporated into the wage-labour market, the supposed advancement of women’s rights within a capitalist globe is contingent on their functioning as cheap labour. Pointing to the evolving role of women’s work that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, World War Two, and the global turn to neoliberalism in the last 30 years, this paper sheds light on the fundamental flaw of the neoliberal feminist philosophy: women will never be truly free in a system that values, above all, monetary profit, which historically has been predicated on the exploitation of women as a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Neoliberal feminism such as Sandberg’s may be seen as a more extreme incarnation of liberal feminism, which is situated in the belief that equality is possible under a capitalist world-system. While this paper focuses on the arguments made by the former, many of the critiques made also apply to liberal feminism. 5 Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” 422. 4

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source of labor. Drawing on scholarship of socialist feminists in reference to the three historical instances named above, I aim to demonstrate that in promoting free market values, neoliberal feminists actually strengthen an exploitative economic system that is based upon patriarchal attitudes, under which true liberation can never be realized. Before proceeding to my formal argument, I would be remiss if I neglected to share three short disclaimers which I hope will situate myself and this work within the broader context of academic feminist literature which informs this paper. I should acknowledge that these authors emphasise the oftentimes neglected implications of lived experiences in the writing process as well as the ultimate necessity for a post-structural approach to scholarship.6 My first disclaimer is perhaps the most pressing: it seems antithetical to the feminist cause for a male writer to lecture readers—many of whom are sure to identify as women—on the economic and social structures that I argue function to empower people like me at the expense of more marginalized groups. Mindful of this dichotomy, I make a concerted effort to base my argument on the work of women scholars so that my argument be mostly rooted on their experiences instead of my own. My second disclaimer is to acknowledge that aside from a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In “Beyond Women and Economics,” Drucilla K. Barker articulately laments the underuse of poststructuralist and postmodernism in feminist economists’ scholarly work—and in academia at large. 6

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brief analysis of neoliberalism’s effects on women in the Global South towards the end of this paper, my discussion of women’s experiences in the workplace largely focuses on that of white, uppermiddle class women in the Anglo-American world. The reason for this is simple and, I believe, pardonable in the context of this particular paper: neoliberal feminism is a phenomenon both for and espoused by those very same upper-middle class women. While I would have liked to have engaged with the intersectional dynamics which shape the workplace experiences of women of different identities (Indigenous, AfricanAmerican, queer, to name only a few) when analyzing and tracing the principles of neoliberal feminism in a paper of this length and ambition, it makes most sense to do so in the context of AngloAmerican Feminism. Lastly, some readers might find the conception of “women” presented in this paper to be problematic—and justly so. In recent years, gender theorists have rightly destabilized terms like “man” and “woman” in order to address and include the identities of trans and other non-cisgender individuals (meaning that their self-identity does not conform with the gender that corresponds to their biological sex at birth). Adhering to outdated terms when speaking of “women’s liberation” serves to dismiss the identities and ongoing struggles of transgender individuals. In truth, as much as one might want to include a discussion which incorporates all marginalized identities, it is almost impossible to do in what ultimately is a brief historical discussion that does not centre on trans-rights.

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The best a writer in my shoes can do is to utilize the outdated terminology while recognizing its inherent shortcomings. I ask readers to keep these disclaimers in mind and think about the way they may have shaped the writing process as I proceed to my formal argument. Women’s exploitation within the capitalist system is evident in its earliest iteration on the outset of the Industrial Revolution, dating to the mid-18th century in Britain. Prominent feminist economist Heidi Hartmann argues that women’s subjugation under the capitalist system lies in the sex-ordered division of labour.7 Hartmann concedes that patriarchal social-division of labour existed within European societies before capitalism (though to a lesser degree, as is outlined below), tracing it to the guild system of the 16th and 17th centuries.8 Women were largely excluded from the guild system. Though women were technically members of whatever guilds their husband belonged to, they received limited to no benefits, except on the occasion of their husband’s death. Hartmann argues that since guilds grew in prominence congruently with the rise of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, they served to augment women’s subjugation. Notable feminist scholars including Zillah Eisenstein, Nancy Fraser, and Wendy Brown support !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Heidi Hartmann. “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 207 8 Ibid., 212. 7

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Hartmann’s analysis on capitalism as being based on patriarchy and perpetuating its dogma.9 Hartmann’s argument is as follows. The social-division of labour during the earlier iterations of guilds was comparatively limited, as British women were able to participate in the three activities which significantly contributed to the subsistence of European families: the cultivation of agriculture, the creation of woolen textiles, and the manufacturing of other various crafts. In tending to their farms, which were almost always leased or rented, as well as spinning and weaving products sold at local markets, work done by women accounted for a considerable proportion of a family’s overall income.10 This work made up what is called the domestic industry—work done from home which generates income. Dependent on their small plots of land, women’s participation in domestic industry decreased substantially as larger farmers increasingly displaced their smaller counterparts. Unable to work their own land and facing the centralization of labour that came with the rise of the factory system, men saw themselves whisked into the perilous realm of wage labour. It was then that guilds consolidated their power, and as they were not a major portion of the working population, women were excluded from the guilds themselves. In the increasingly capitalistic ideals of the Industrial Revolution (valuing profit above all else), women’s work largely became !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Refer to the bibliography for notable works by the mentioned scholars, all of which helped inform this paper. 10 Hartmann, “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,” 212. 9

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marginalized and devalued, as they were disallowed from participating in wage labour and no longer had access to the domestic industry and thus unable to generate an income. Hartmann indicts male workers for systematically excluding female workers, and harassing factories which employed them, the symptom of an increasingly capitalist system which promotes competition amongst workers.11 Eventually, capitalists in the 18th and 19th century took note that not belonging to guilds, women could be a source of cheap labour—thus originating women’s subjugation in the labour market.12 Business owners’ motivation for employing women workers was by and large for the sake of increasing profits and exploiting women’s perilous status within a patriarchal system. In the so-called domestic sphere, the series of revolutions that characterized the 17th and 18th centuries in France, Britain, and the United States might have served to free men from the oppression of monarchs (and, some might argue, to replace monarchs with the white bourgeoisie). However, the rights gained in these revolutions did not extend to the most marginalized—people of colour, in some cases those without property, and of course, women. Men were free of kings, while women remained shackled to the will of their fathers, and then their husbands, as Wagoner’s Lad perceptively notes. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11 12

Ibid,, 219 Ibid., 213

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More than the Industrial Revolution, neoliberal feminists point to World War II as exemplary of their argument that women’s liberation will be achieved through capitalism. It is undeniable that the drought of male workers during the war allowed capitalist access to white female labour—largely untouchable up to that point. In its issue on August 9th 1943, Life Magazine ran a piece on the labour shortage that resulted from the recruitment of the male-dominated workforce into the military in order to fight the Axis threat. The piece focused on the previously sequestered women that American industry recruited in order to fill the deserted labour positions once occupied by the 12 million men now in uniform.13 As Life informed its readers, the new bulk of women labourers were engaging in industries which they had been all but formally prohibited from: “In 1941 only 1% of aviation employees were women, while this year they will comprise an estimated 65% of the total. Of the 16,000,000 women now !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Glen Jeansonne, “America’s Home Front,” History Today 45, no. 5 (1995): 23. 13

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employed in the U.S., over a quarter are in war industries.” Women labourers were entrusted with “an amazing variety of jobs - some completely unskilled, some semiskilled and some requiring great technical knowledge, precision and facility.”14 Male workers, who had been the most fervent opposition to women’s participation in wage labour, could do little to stop it: their resistance was overcome by the crushing economic forces of total war.15 These men were comforted by the assumption that women’s inclusion in the workplace was temporary—a desperate wartime measure that would be reverted once the fighting ceased. Even Life Magazine, which applauded female labourers for proving “that in times of crisis no job is too tough for American women,” expected them to “return once more to home and family.”16 The capital system had, however, penetrated a previously untouchable labour force, which, because of its !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14Bourke-White,

Margaret. "Women in Steel: They are Handling Tough Jobs in Heavy Industry." Life Magazine, August 9 1943, 75. 15 This discussion focuses on middle class white women, who made up the majority of the Western female population. Minority women— such as women of colour in the United States— had been forced into the workforce long before by the institutionalized systems of oppression that curtailed their families’ access to economic security, and were usually subject to the harshest and most punitive conditions, as examined by Angela Davis in Women, Race and Class. 16 Bourke-White, Margaret. "Women in Steel: They are Handling Tough Jobs in Heavy Industry." Life Magazine, August 9 1943, 75.

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historical exclusion from the labour market, would work for less than their male counterparts; in 1944, skilled female workers made an average weekly wage of $31.21 compared to their male counterparts who earned $54.65 weekly.17 Moreover, although women’s participation in unions rose from 9.4 percent at the start of the war to 21.8 at the war’s end, they were egregiously discriminated against. A number of unions refused women altogether, and those who accepted them ensured that women were the first to be laid off and last to be promoted. 18 The exclusion of women from unions benefited employers who could force women to work exorbitant hours in unsafe conditions without fearing union reprisal.19 Thus, the increased inclusion of the female workforce was not accomplished by an altruistic desire to empower women, nor was it the use of capitalistic forces to facilitate the rejection of patriarchal sentiments. Neoliberal feminism contends that cases like these show capitalist forces as dismantling patriarchal attitudes, but it achieves this by highlighting that those same patriarchal values were very much at play even at what is a pivotal development in feminist history. Masked as a step towards women’s liberation, this proved to be another mode of oppression. Women’s subjugation in a capitalist system is not limited to their participation in wage labour, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 42. 18 Jeansonne, “America’s Home Front,” 22. 19 Ibid., 24. 17

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but actually extends to their historical role as domestic caregivers. “Gender oppression,” writes gender studies professor Drucilla Barker, “[is] a result of the sexual division of labor, which under capitalism meant the division between paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive, and domestic and wages labor.” 20 Not formally commoditized, female caregiving work is devalued in a capitalist economy.21 Caregiving is overlooked regardless of the fact that a functioning capitalist society requires both what is called productive labour alongside reproductive labour.22 Of course, the two modes of subjugation suffered by women—within the realm of wage labour and within the domestic sphere—are not entirely independent phenomena; rather, they feed into one another. The gendered division of domestic labour facilitates a bias against women’s competence which taints their status in the realm of wage labour, the mode of labour held in the highest regard by capitalist regimes.23 In other words, the stigma of domestic work—almost always attributed to women— makes it so that the work and ability of women in the formal wage economy is also devalued. The depreciation of domestic labour has proved especially devastating for women following the onset of neoliberalism beginning in the 1980s. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Drucilla K. Barker, “Beyond Women and Economics: Rereading ‘Women’s Work,’” Signs 30, no. 4 (2005): 2192. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 2196. 23 Juanita Ellis, “Women Workers and Labour Standards: The Problem of ‘Human Rights,’” Review of International Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 48. 20

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The 1980s witnessed a fundamental shift in the structuring of the West’s economic ideology as embodied by the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher and that of Ronald Reagan the year following. The two politicians’ meteoric rise to power sounded the death knell of the Progressive Era rooted in the policies of the New Deal, peaking with Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society in the United States. With Reagan and Thatcher at the helm, the socialist bend that characterized the previous 50 years was replaced with a neoliberal ideology and the implementation of corresponding policies. Described as a revival of the “classic” liberalism most famously articulated by Adam Smith in 1776’s The Wealth of Nations, neoliberalism “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade.”24 In its current incarnation, neoliberalism is most associated with the work of famous 20th century economists Fredrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The 1947 version of the Mont Pèlerin Society’s Statement of Aims, of which Hayek and Friedman were amongst its founders, nicely describes neoliberalism’s driving tenet: Individual freedom can be preserved only in a society in which an effective competitive market is the main agency for the direction of economic activity. Only the decentralization of control !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64. 24

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through private property in the means of production can prevent those concentrations of power which threaten individual freedom.25 The widespread dissemination and adoption of neoliberal dogma in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world had two major negative impacts on the lives of women: guided by the belief in the absolute benefits of limiting government interference in the free market, neoliberal agents have persistently dismantled the social safety nets and entitlements on which the most vulnerable members of society—women, and particularly minority women— are dependent. Secondly, neoliberal entities have also sought to coerce the opening of markets in the Global South as a means of attaining even cheaper sources of labour (a majority of which is made up of women workers) through conditions imposed on them by international financial institutions (IFIs). The two effects are related: as jobs in the Global North jobs that had traditionally paid men well are exported to places where they can be done at more exploitative wages, married women (and children) in the Global North are forced into the labour market in order to supplement their husbands’ incomes. Again, this was not capitalism dismantling patriarchal values, but rather a way of increasing profits by taking advantage of androcentric sentiments that allowed for women’s !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dieter Plehwe, introduction to The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, by Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009): 22-23. 25

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exploitation.26 As more women entered the labour market and government regulations on private enterprise loosened, employers started eliminating what is referred to as family wage. Family wage is the practice of paying a substantial enough wage so that a single-earner (the father, in practice) would earn enough to cover the expenses of his entire family, as was common in the days preceding neoliberalism. The diminishment of wages would have a disproportionate, negative impact on women (especially single mothers), who would be forced into the workplace by the implementation of neoliberal policies that have characterized the past 35 years, perhaps best embodied by effect of the drastic restructuring of the American welfare system in the mid-1990s. Bill Clinton’s overhaul of the welfare system rooted in the New Deal proved to be the biggest boon for capitalist interests at the expense of American women. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) devolved welfare responsibility from the federal government to individual states. The legislation sought to eliminate the notion of welfare as an entitlement, and in doing so, the Clinton administration truly did bring about the “ending of welfare as we know it.”27 PRWORA now required welfare recipients to enter wage labour two years after !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization,” Science & Society 13, no. 43 (2005): 500. 27 Barbara Vobejda, “Clinton Signs Welfare Bill Amid Division,” Washington Post, August 23 1996, sec. A. 26

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receiving benefits and placed time limits of five years on welfare assistance. Single mothers no longer had the safety net of government assistance, no matter how inadequate, for raising children.28 As the federal government put the provisions of PRWORA into effect, the Buffalo News succinctly summed up the inherent flaws in this new work provisions: “By themselves, work requirements don't create new jobs, and it is unlikely that the […] economy will be able to create the number needed for those required to go to work.”29 Thus, marginalized women who depended on welfare, arguably the most vulnerable of citizens, were thrust into an already overly-saturated labour market, which would predictably exploit them for the sake of increased profitability. This exploitation manifested in women working for lower wages and longer hours, on part-time or temporary basis (robbing them of the government-mandated benefits guaranteed to full-time workers), and without union representation.30 Capitalists were doubly rewarded, for poor women thrust into the labour market were now competing with undocumented !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In pages 501 to 502 of her article, Hester illustrates how the workfare requirement was also largely situated in racist mentality which, following the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s associated welfare with women of colour. 29 Daniel Weir, “Welfare 'Reform' is Set Up to Give Thousands in Wny a Grim Choice: Food or Rent,” Buffalo News, February 13, 1997, sec. D. 30 Aaron Bernstein, “Waking Up from the American Dream: Dead-End Jobs and the High Cost of College Could be Choking off Upward Mobility,” Business Week, December 2003, 54-8. 28

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workers, whose rights to decent working conditions are silenced by their tenuous status as non-citizens. Access to these two massive pools of easily-exploitable workers allowed capitalists larger profits by giving out even lower wages for what were already meager-paying jobs.31 The dismantling of federal welfare was firmly rooted in neoliberal ideology, which saw the existing system as harmful government intervention into the market. As had been the case historically, women’s further inclusion in the labour market might now be masked as a dismantling of patriarchal dominance, but in reality, it was a means of promoting profit-generating exploitation. The Anglo-American turn towards neoliberalism not only produced domestic policy which served to shackle women in their own countries to exploitative jobs, but had an equally, if different, negative impact on women in the developing world. Multinational corporations are dependent on these women as an unparalleled source of cheap labour. Under the conditions imposed by IFIs demanding that they abandon state-led development and instead reorient their economies to focus on exporting, indebted countries in the Global South created “free trade zones” where multinational corporations could operate almost always free from taxes and tariffs, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Grace Chang, Disposable Domestic: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy, (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), quoted in Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization,” Science & Society 13, no. 43 (2005): 502 http://jstor.org/stable/40404269. 31

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and where legislation and government practices prohibited the formation of trade unions.32 The conditions imposed on the vulnerable countries of the Global South had the effect of forcibly funnelling women into the labour market. With the institutions they depended on decimated—including accessible health care, free education for their children, affordable housing, food and fuel, and sometimes communal land— women in the Global South have been coerced into supplying the much-needed cheap labour necessary for the incessant growth of multinational corporations. In export-processing economies, which embody the exploitative nature of neoliberal globalization, low-paid women workers make up about 80 percent of the labour force.33 However, the economies of almost all of these countries fails to produce enough positions to employ the women it forced into the labour market. Looking for a means of subsidence—and with different degrees of enthusiasm— women make their way into the informal economy, that which functions outside of government regulation. For women in the Global South, this means anything from selling goods in local markets, to prostituting themselves or their children, or occasionally immigrating to richer countries in order to sell their labour (often as domestic workers to the same neoliberals who believe in the liberating power of the open market). IFIs first !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison?,” 503-4. Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweatshops: the Globalization of the United States Apparel Industry (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002), 245. 32 33

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considered women’s turn to the informal economy as temporary, but their increasing support for microcredit lending practices suggests they are abandoning the unrealistic notion that the private sector will provide women with sufficient qualitypaying employment opportunities so as to deter their participation in the informal sector.34 In both the formal and informal economies of the Global South, women are subject to the same capitalistic exploitation which has plagued them for centuries. It is necessary to acknowledge that some feminists have positive interpretations of the increasing female participation in the Global South’s economies. While they recognize the exploitation of women that occurs in the formal and informal sectors, these feminists argue that working women ultimately gain freedom. They support their claims by citing cases such as the electronics boom in 1970s Japan, during which the increasing number of employed women were given the opportunity to leave their peasant villages and obtain certain liberties such as the right to choose their husbands—a fundamental tenet of the feminist cause.35 Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and Diane Wolf discuss the uncomfortable tension that faces feminist scholars who work on neoliberal !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The relationship between microcredit as a result of the havoc wreaked by neoliberal policies in the Global South and women in the informal economy is a nuanced, but tangible one. For a more detailed description of it, I point readers to Julia Elyachar’s “Employment Money: The World Bank, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Value of Culture in Egypt.” 35 Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison?” 504. 34

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globalization: on the one hand, a global economy based and built on neoliberal ideals “produces new kinds of patriarchal and capitalist controls over women” in the form of low-wage, exploitative jobs which often function well below subsistence standards. On the other hand, these jobs may supply for women “tools with which [to resist] patriarchy,” citing women workers in Java who prefer labouring in urban-located sweatshops to working in the rice fields of their local—often more conservative—villages.36 Perhaps the only feminist voice who holds an unequivocally positive opinion of neoliberal globalization’s effect on women is that of Shelly Feldman. Feldman dismisses the “narrative” that women are coerced into participating in the labour economy by the policies imposed onto the Global South by neoliberal-minded IFIs. She sees this line of reasoning as juvenile, one which propagates “false sense of economic determinism”. Instead, Feldman maintains that women in Global South willfully engage in the economy (both formal and informal) as a means of obtaining freedom.37 This paper does not mean to assess the debates in feminist circles over whether women in the Global South are less disadvantaged in the neoliberal system or whether they were freer prior to this relatively recent phenomenon. For our purposes, it is enough to point out that whatever freedom !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and Diane Wolf, “A Dialogue on Globalization,” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 1246. 37 Shelley Feldman, “Exploring Theories of Patriarchy: A Perspective from Contemporary Bangladesh,” Signs 26, no. 4, (2001): 1222. 36

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these women obtain is contingent on their being a source of cheap labour which can be exploited for capitalist interests. Like in the case of AngloAmerican women during and following the Second World War, whatever increase in rights granted to these women is done so as a means to an end—to incur monetary profit. Growing profitability depends on cheap labour, and so, under neoliberal-capitalist conditions, women in the exploited Global South will never be able to obtain true liberty, nor will they elsewhere in the world. Women’s liberation would mean an increase in their wages and working conditions and, therefore, a decrease in profitability. Those pushing for capitalist means of liberation ignore the systematic exploitation suffered by women both home and abroad in the name of neoliberalism. Their ability to ignore systems of exploitation may be traced back to the process of de-industrialization of the Western world since the 1980s.38 As conceived by Barry Bluestone, deindustrialization consists of two components, both rooted in neoliberal ideology: the first consists of manufacturers moving elements of the production industry to countries in the Global South, which, under conditions imposed on them by IFIs, offer cheap-labour and powerful anti-union sentiments. The second is a more intensive effort of lobbying governments to promote and enact free trade !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization” in Science & Society, 489 38

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zones and other neoliberal policies.39 Now that labour-intensive work is being done in countries outside of the neoliberal feminist’s own, the exploitation of workers is not as visible and, therefore, easier to forget, or if one would rather be cynical, to be wilfully ignored. Meanwhile, the exploitation of women in the domestic service industry (a sector which employs a majority of women and in which the majority of working women are engaged), takes shape in less explicit terms than those of the Third World factory. This exploitation is manifested in the aforementioned lower wages and longer hours, employment without the government-mandated benefits of full-time work, and without union representation. De-industrialization also facilitated the rise of financialization: as defined by Kevin Phillips, financiliziation is “the processes of money management, securities management, corporate reorganization, securitization of assets, derivatives trading and other forms of securities packaging are steadily replacing the act of making, growing and transporting things.” 40 Essentially, the most !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! As discussed previously in this paper, the neoliberal policies of nations in the Global South which allowed for cheap labour were largely due to coercion from international financial institutions of the Global North such as the International Monetary Fund. For a comprehensive on how international financial institutions utilized their lending power to force neoliberal policies onto vulnerable nationstates, I recommend readers look at Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Ban and WTO written by Richard Peet and published by Zen Books. 40 Kevin Phillips, “Crises: One After Another for the Life of the System,” Monthly Review 54, no. 6, (2002): 48. 39

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physically exploitative, labour-intensive jobs have been shipped overseas, allowing for a new finance-based economy. Women of a very particular privileged class and background are allowed to participate in this finance-based economy, which neoliberal feminists like Sheryl Sandberg misconstrue as capitalism facilitating womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s liberation. Neoliberal feminism upholds the values of capitalism while ignoring the structural inequalities in which the system is entrenched. It instills the idea that the barrier to womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s liberation is the subjugated women themselves, which can be overcome by the opportunity of upward mobility in a capitalist system. It ignores the rigorous limitations historically placed on women in capitalist societies, which continue to hinder their liberation. In espousing the stories of the few women who have managed to transcend those structural limitations, it erases the realities of most, who are confined to low paying jobs as a result of structural systems of oppression. It ignores the dynamics of race and class as well as the disproportional marginalization of minority women both in the workplace and at home. Neoliberal feminism is based on a myopically heteronormative view of the world, confining people of all identities to outdated gender binaries which facilitate the same systems of oppression that feminism has traditionally dedicated itself to dismantling. Neoliberal feminism also fails to reconcile the fact that the success of few, privileged, women is predicated on the exploitation of other women, both at home and in

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the ever-globalizing world. It forgets the traditional feminist ideology that no woman is free until all women are free, and that women will not be free until everyone is free. Masking itself in the rhetoric of women’s liberation, neoliberal feminism looks to enhance the lives of very few women at the expense of the majority. The traditional folk ballad might no longer be completely accurate when it states that “hard is the fortune of all womankind.” Under the banner of women’s liberation, neoliberal feminists like Sheryl Sandberg make great fortunes perpetrating and promoting the capitalist system oppressing the many. Bibliography Barker, Drucilla K. “Beyond Women and Economics: Rereading ‘Women’s Work.’” Signs 30, no. 4 (2005): 2189-2209. http://jstor.org/stable/10.1086/429261. Bernstein, Aaron. “Waking Up from the American Dream: Dead-End Jobs and the High Cost of College Could be Choking off Upward Mobility.” Business Week, December 2003, 54-8. Bourke-White, Margaret. "Women in Steel: They are Handling Tough Jobs In Heavy Industry." Life Magazine, August 9 1943, 7481. Brown, Wendy. “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and DeDemocratization.” Political Theory 34, no. 6

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(2006): 690-714. http://jstor.org/stable/20452506. Chang, Grace. Disposable Domestic: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy. Cambridge: South End Press, 2000. Quoted in Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liason? Feminism and Corporate Globalization,” Science & Society 13, no. 43 (2005): 502. http://jstor.org/stable/40404269. Chatterjee, Ipsita. “Feminism, the False Conciousness of Neoliberal Capitalism? Informalization, Fundamentalism, and Women in an Indian City.” Gender, Place and Culture 19 no. 6 (2012): 790-809. Davis, Angela Yvonne. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House, 1981. Eisenstein, Hester. “A Dangerous Liason? Feminism and Corporate Globalization.” Science & Society 13, no. 43 (2005): 487-518. http://jstor.org/stable/40404269. Eisenstein, Zillah. Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (London: Zed Books, 2007). Ellis, Juanita. “Women Workers and Labour Standards: The Problem of ‘Human Rights.’” Review of International Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 45-57. http://jstor.org/stable/20097949.

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Elyachar, Julia. “Employment Money: The World Bank, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Value of Culture in Egypt.” Public Culture 14, no. 3 (2002): 493-513. Feldman, Shelley. “Exploring Theories of Patriarchy: A Perspective from Contemporary Bangladesh.” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 10971127. Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia and Diane Wolf. “A Dialogue on Globalization.” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 1244-1249. Fraser, Nancy. “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56, no. 1 (2009): 97-117. Gambetti, Ozlem AslanZeybep. “Provincializing Fraser’s History: Feminism and Neoliberalism Revisited.” History of the Present 1, no. 1 (2011): 130-147. Hartmann, Heidi. “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex.” In Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein, 206-247. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979. Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Jeansonne, Glen. “America’s Home Front.” History

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Today 45, no. 5 (1995): 20-26. Mimiko, Nahzeem Oluwafemi. Globalization the Politics of Global Economic Relations and International Business (Portland: Carolina Academic Press, 2012). Peet, Richrad. Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Ban and WTO (London: Zed Books, 2009). Phillips, Kevin. “Crises: One After Another for the Life of the System.” Monthly Review 54, no. 6, (2002) 47-59. Plehwe, Dieter. Introduction to The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, by Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe, 1-45. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Rosen, Ellen Israel. Making Sweatshops: the Globalization of the United States Apparel Industry. Berkley: University of California Press, 2002. Rottenberg, Catherine. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418-437. doi: 10.1a080/09502386.2013.857361. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean in: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. New York: Knopf, 2013. Vobejda, Barbara. “Clinton Signs Welfare Bill Amid Division.” Washington Post, August 23 1996, sec. A. Weir, Daniel. “Welfare 'Reform' is Set Up to Give

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Thousands in Wny a Grim Choice: Food or Rent.â&#x20AC;? Buffalo News, February 13, 1997, sec. D.

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EPISTOLARY OF RESISTANCE Italian National Imaginings and Cultural Permanence Arianna Evans The Italian “Resistenza” (Resistance) during the Fascist regime has left indelible imaginings of idealistic patriotic martyrdom in the national folklore of the country. The permanence of these imaginings can hardly go unnoticed in presentday Italian culture. So deeply written into the subtext of Italian heritage and its everyday performance, the Resistance lends its name to many Italian streets and town squares: via della Resistenza, piazza Partigiani (Partisan Square), or piazza “25 aprile” (April 25th Square), the anniversary of the day Italians liberated themselves from Italian Fascism and Nazi occupation in 1945.1 For years after the war the “myth of resistance” remained the conceptualization of an Italian-led partisan movement against occupying German forces. Yet, because the myth has been more recently dispelled, the much more important narrative of the internal struggles of the nation has become the subject of great interest and study in Italian historiography. Both Mussolini’s Fascist regime and the Resistance—less coherently organized but nonetheless widespread—were developed and sustained by a deeply nationalistic discourse, both

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Tom Behan, Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies (New York: Pluto Press, 2009), 1. 1

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characterizing the other as the “monster” within the nation.2 There is perhaps no greater artefact of this movement than the epistolary bodies left behind by those men from the Italian Resistance who were sentenced to death. Before continuing, however, it is important to clarify what is intended by the term “epistolary bodies.” Letters—unlike books or journals, which can be understood as being in the public sphere—are part of the private sphere. Because of this they are “intimately identified with the body…and the somatic terrain of the emotions, as well as with the thematic material of love, marriage, and the family.”3 In this study in particular, “epistolary bodies” will be taken to mean the inscription and reproduction of the private person into letterform—that is, in lieu of their corporeal presence—and the creation of the immutability and permanence of that person because of it. The textual performativity of these men’s final words express their convictions most fervently, though the depth of their observations goes far beyond into revealing insights into questions of their nationalistic motivations, how the nation was imagined, and the communicant’s conceptualizations of kinship and temporal permanence of the idyllic Italian nation. By taking !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Juan Pablo Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816-1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 1. 3 Elizabeth Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 6. 2

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into scrutiny a collection of letters compiled by Piero Malvezzi and Giovanni Pirelli, Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana4— analysed both as a corpus and epistolary genre as well as select individual letters—through the use of theoretical and methodological frameworks enunciated by intellectuals such as Benedict Anderson and Michel Foucault, this study hopes to bring into evidence essential theoretical societal frameworks that inform the everyday of Italian society and are ever-present elements in Italian political discourse. The testament of men sentenced to death in the Italian Resistance from 1943-1945 is best suited in expressing the ramifications of the nation’s grip on the social body. It is ultimately the fraternity of nationhood that commands the legitimacy to die for the utopian imaginings of what the nation ought to be.5 Nowhere is the metaphorical rebirth of the nation through the altering of discourse, the symbolic transformation of the fatality into continuity and the permanence of nationalism, better represented than in these epistolary bodies. Nationalism’s Implications for the Resistance Nationalism is inevitably lamented as a highly untenable yet conspicuously tangible phenomenon in any scholarly endeavour that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Piero Malvezzi and Giovanni Pirelli, Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza Italiana, 8 settembre 1943-25 aprile 1945 (Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1963). 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: 2006), 7. 4

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seeks to study its implications. As a concept, nationalism itself varies in foci. It can be defined by a community’s shared language, territorial boundaries, religious beliefs, or shared cultural values, to name a few. As a result, it is difficult to define, yet, as Benedict Anderson notes, “nationness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” and its powerful command over emotional legitimacy prompts its study.6 Ultimately, however, nationalism is defined by the purpose of the study, and in historiographical studies there has been a fetishizing of the nation as a motivational force throughout history and the explicatory promises it tends to hold; it can never be distanced from the historiographical dialectic for they are intrinsically linked, mutually complementing the theoretical needs of the other. Here, the same consideration will be given, as within the Resistance, nationalism acted not as an abstract concept, but as a concrete set of meanings and symbols of which the partisans were very much aware. What is nationalism? Primordialist scholars such as Anthony Smith understand the nation as a naturalised and universal concept inherent in ethnic groups even prior to the emergence of the nation state.7 More realistically, modernist approaches, such as Anderson’s, trace its roots to economic and political developments borne !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid., 3. Elfie Rembold and Peter Carrier, “Space and Identity: Constructions of National Identities in an Age of Globalization,” National Identities 13 (2011): 363, accessed December 13, 2014, doi: 10.1080/14608944.2011.629425 6 7

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alongside the nation-state, and conceived of as an “imagined community…imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”8 The nation is contingent on modern conditions because it stresses an individual’s search for identity in an impersonal world with fellow members of a community beyond the bounds of social relations, but with a vivid understanding of communal ties.9 Anderson argues the nation is, in essence, the idea of a solid body politic, homogenously moving through historical currents.10 If, as it has been shown, nationalism has at its roots the concepts of kinship and unity, it implies a minimum of social harmony. A nation divided is a nation in dispute about its national symbols.11 Disputing such elemental conceptions allows for the legitimacy of the governing entity to be questioned. The Resistance and fascism were both undoubtedly nationalistic, but the Fascist regime seemingly compromises long-held Italian values, the idea of italiani, brava gente (Italians, good people), imbuing the partisans with legitimacy and the authority to resist. In the drama of the letters of the men sentenced to death, the protagonists are the victims and the executioners, both inform the other’s patriotic motivations. Many try to assert the legitimacy of their claims to “true nationalism,” as one of the men in the letters remarks, “For my family, for my Patria !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. Ernst B. Hass, “What is Nationalism and Why Should We Study it,” International Organization 40 (1986): 708 . 10 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26. 11 Haas, “What is Nationalism,” 709. 8 9

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(fatherland), I can serenely say that I have loved both with more love than those men who today will take my life.”12 The Italian Resistance plays out in a different setting than those of other European countries during the war. Almost everywhere the motivation to fight back was the desire to resist a foreign enemy, physically distinct and officially recognized from the outset.13 In other words, the enemy of ‘la patria’ (fatherland) was perceived in those within the population who threatened the homogeneity of the current national imaginings.14 Nations are constructed discursively in relation to their opposites. The Italian Resistance Although it is beyond the purpose of this study to relay a comprehensive history of the Italian Resistance, it is important to better define the historical parameters within which these letters were functioning. It was, although also fought against the Germans, first and foremost a civil war in political terms, against Fascism in all its forms, but primarily against Italian Fascism.15 “The historical record shows that the Italian Resistance was an inspiring story,” a story of how ordinary people—the largest social categories of the partisan movement were industrial workers, agricultural workers, and artisans—played a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Per la mia famiglia, per la mia Patria, dico però con serenità che ho amata l’una e l’atra con amore piú di quegli uomini che oggi mi tolgono la vita…” qtd. in Malvezzi and Pirelli, Lettere di condannati, 43. 13 Ibid., 15. 14 Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City, 4. 15 Behan, Italian Resistance, 225. 12

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pivotal part in overthrowing a seemingly unbeatable dictatorship.16 The scale of the resistance is often underestimated. The majority of the population, in some form, ‘resisted’ fascism, but because of strict delineations17 as to what it meant to be part of the movement, by 1945, 300,000 were categorized as fighting in the resistance.18 If anything speaks to the scale of popular discontent with the socio-political atmosphere, it is the speech a Vice Chancellor made to university students in Padua, in which he invited them to take up arms against the government in 1943, a surprisingly bold and public act.19 It was a war fought by men, and women, taking initiative for a cause, knowing of the inherent commitment of their life to that cause. One man, for example, writes to his mother that he will die for the “Blessed Italian cause.”20 When Mussolini came to power, his goal was to gain the greatest citizen consensus as he had considerable political talent for making promises people wanted to hear. At the outset, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid., 2, 3, 223. “A person only officially became defined as a partisan if they had carried arms for at least three months in an officially recognised unit, and taken part in three armed actions or acts of sabotage. Those arrested and held in jail as anti-Fascists were only classed as partisans if they were held for longer than three months; and those providing logistic support for partisan units needed to have done so for six months.” Ibid., 3. 18 Ibid., 3.; Malvezzi and Pirelli, Lettere di condannati, 16. 19 Behan, Italian Resistance, 4. 20 “per la Santa causa Italiana,” qtd. in Malvezzi and Pirelli, Lettere di condannati, 201. 16 17

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however, he spoke of the need for force if not met with consensus, and by 1943, neither force nor consensus were working in Fascism’s favour.21 What prompted such growth in popular resistance? The situation in Italy during the Second World War, as in many other European nations, was dire, leaving most with the sense that there was little left to lose. By 1942 the Allies were bombing many Italian cities, jobs and food were becoming scarce; dying from a bullet seemed a far better option than dying from hunger.22 The tangibility of the Allied success was becoming more apparent, and for many conscripts, fighting alongside the invading Nazi forces, or giving their allegiance to Mussolini’s German-created puppet regime, was simply never taken seriously.23 It was popular, because it was not a movement forced upon Italians, they volunteered for a cause they believed to be just. There were, undoubtedly, intellectuals in the midst of the Resistance. Most present in popular memory, for example, is Antonio Gramsci, although the movement was best characterized by its popular inflections. These were participants who were reacting to a fastchanging situation, not accustomed to political !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ‘I want to govern, if possible, with the greatest citizen consensus. But, until this consensus can be formed, nourished, and fortified, I stock up the greatest amount of force available. Because it may be that force will lead to consensus and, in any event, should consensus be lacking, force is there.’ qtd. in Behan, Italian Resistance, 43. 22 Ibid., 4. 23 Ibid. 21

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debate or even just the freedom of discussing different ideas.24 Those imprisoned, those sentenced to death, reflect the diversity in the body of the resistance. All the letters considered in this study were written by men imprisoned for their personal and political views, not for any serious infringement of the criminal code. These prisoners were “hostages in a war of attrition,” sent to jail for belonging to political organizations the government had declared illegal, publishing articles critical of the regime, for more serious crimes against the regime, or, most impactful, for simply being in the streets during moments of social unrest.25 Letters, Imprisonment, and Epistolary Bodies The epistolary collection used herein contains letters from 194 prisoners sentenced to death. Of all those categorized as “giustiziati” (“executed”) by the Fascist forces, the letters that survived prove only exiguous: some 80,000 were those categorized as executed, the numbers even today disputed.26 Moreover the study is met with the impossibility of establishing distinctions between those, who even though were not categorized as “executed,” were categorized as “morti a causa di guerra” (“dead during war”), from those who were civilians, militants, or partisans, and others who were entirely !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid., 60. Charles Klopp, Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 4. 26 Malvezzi and Pirelli, Lettere di condannati, 27. 24 25

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undocumented.27 Of these letters, some have details on the motivation for their arrests, others biographical details, and some lack any background information, lending the notion that some of those sentenced could be categorized as “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Inherently, the apparent risk of oversimplification presents itself, but the most important contention to keep in evidence is exactly this diversity and the fallibility of historical fact-finding—that is, the methodological difficulty or even impossibility of retrieving historical fact—and the diversity of those condemned. All, nevertheless, were executed for their political affiliations and therefore personal motivations. There is, on a pivotal note, a fundamental equality created by the condition of death. As a subject, somewhat uncommon in liberal Europe, these letters present an opportunity to look at the historical phenomenon of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes under new light. These letters constitute, in a sense, a retribution or revenge, against the execution of their authors and the excesses of irony here are not lost: those guaranteeing the survival of many of these letters were the very repressive authorities who often conserved them by means of sequestration.28 The contexts within which these men wrote are rife with signifying processes that inflect meaning unto the letters. Why did those imprisoned write? Under what conditions were !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid. Victoria De Grazia and Sergio Luzzato, Dizionario del Fascismo (Torino: G. Eiunaudi, 2002-2003), 28. 27 28

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they writing? How did the physical constraints and reality of their context play out in their epistolary transactions? Living in confinement, distinct from more common and historically voiceless criminals, these political dissidents lived in extreme solitude.29 These authors were forced by the extreme situation of their confinement to contemplate the ultimate significance of their existence. “One writes to populate the desert,”30 faced with imminent death, one writes in contemplation and to reaffirm one’s convictions: they wrote to reinforce the bonds they had with the outside world, with their family outside the prison walls. What the recluses wanted to achieve with the process of writing, with the textual inscriptions of their life and affect for their kin, was a reaffirmation of their motivations and pride in the choices they made. Gramsci expressed, for example, the fear that “the entire personality will be swallowed up by a new individual with impulses, initiatives, and ways of thinking different from before [confinement],” referring to the penitentiary institution as comparable to cannibalism.31 If writing is a signifying process, as it will be shown to be, then the imperative felt by prison writers was to confirm their existential !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Klopp, Sentences, 7. Ibid., 3. 31 “L’intera personalità sarà inghiottita da un nuovo individuo con impulsi, iniziative, modi di pensare diversi da quelli precedenti.” qtd. in De Grazia and Luzzato, Dizionario del Fascismo, 29. 29 30

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motivations, inscribe the permanence of their struggles and immortalize the body. In addition to enabling the imprisoned authors to textualize their existence, their motivation, and their sacrifice, it also gave them the physical means by which they could reassert their connections with the nation, and thus reassert their connection to the history and the flow of time.32 It was their clandestine communication that allowed them to establish meaningful definitions of the self and to bind those definitions to the historical currents of their nation. Significantly, and what distinguishes these writings from mere autobiographical elements or simple “verbal lifelines” with the outside, is the opportunity given these men to tell their story, to contradict the narrative that would be told by their oppressors and executioners. They reject the institutional aphasia, of sentences imposed upon them by authorities whose legitimacy they did not always recognize and for ‘crimes’ they did not consider wrong and which threatened to efface the individual’s meaning of life and position in history.33 As the Italian proverb would have it, the caged bird does not sing from love but from rage.34 The conditions under which these letters were written is perhaps one of the most difficult elements to consider: the conditions of their !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Klopp, Sentences, 10. Ibid., 186. 34 “L’uccello che canta nella gabbia Non canta d’amore ma per rabbia.” qtd. in Ibid., viii. 32 33

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imprisonment motivated them to write, it was essentially the bounds of their physical constraints which would dictate what they could write, and it was their mental confinement that would determine the permissible and impermissible of what to write in their letters. Prisoners, in all these cases, became witness to both a physical and psychological pain, and the bodies became the “emissaries of textual significance.”35 The “regime carcerario” (penitentiary regime)—creating a condition for the “deprivation of liberty” and the “technical transformation of individuals”36— imposed a myriad of physical and mental forms of imprisonment and restraint on letter writing: the physical realities of constraint, self-imposed restraint, the limitations of familial relationships, political censure, the overlapping of the public and private, and by the conventions and limits of writing itself—the constraints intrinsic to textual creation, dissemination, and interpretation.37 Customarily, the prisoner was confined to individual cells. This was dictated more by the architectural realities than overt penal mandates as the prisons were often refurbished convents or monasteries.38 However incidental these institutions, the organization of cells, and the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid.,192. Massimo Sargiacomo, “Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,” Reviews ad Overviews 13 (2009): 277, Accessed on December 11, 2014, doi: 10.1007/s10997-008-9080-7. 37 Klopp, Sentences, 11, 192. De Grazia and Luzzato, Dizionario del Fascismo, 29. 38 Klopp, Sentences, 5. 35 36

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disciplines of the penitentiary system create, as Foucault would have it, “complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and 39 hierarchical.” In one of the letters the physical constraints are made especially apparent by almost illegible writing, in which the phrase “I am writing badly because I have handcuffs on” can barely be read.40 Invariably, these inmates created letters within harsh and arbitrary externally monitored institutions wherein the prison authorities served pivotal roles in controlling the content, length, and frequency of all letters. Political prisoners especially, as opposed to those guilty of transgressions of the criminal code, were placed in constraints not with the primary goal of preventing further physical transgression, but of preventing further transgression of the spirit.41 They were held in confinement to restrain their non-conformism, and because writing, conceived as a signifying process, immortalized their transgression into being, the letters became the foremost subjects of scrutiny. The messages from prison ought to be interpreted through the lens of this specific context, making these letters not only a study of those imprisoned, but also of the prisons they were in. Speaking retrospectively of his time in prison, Ernesto Rossi spoke of one of the greatest sufferings emerging “from not being able to write !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sargiacomo, “Michel Foucault,” 273. “Sto scrivendo male perché ho le manette,” qtd. in Malvezzi and Pirelli, Lettere di condannati, 271. 41 Klopp, Sentences, 8, 11. 39 40

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what we thought.”42 Prisoners, without exception, had to take into account the “destinatario ombra” (“shadow reader”) and were forced to practice a style of writing that would, with its blank spaces, create a communication, or in Italian, the “non dire e far capire” (silence allows for an understanding).43 Letters were always the result of an “unwanted collaboration between bitter enemies;” even if the censor did not physically intervene in the letter by editing the writing and obliterating its meaning, he was ever present, essentially creating a three-way conversation that the prisoner must take into consideration when writing.44 This meant that the writing process became a substantially mediated process, always self-reflexive, always self-aware. Some ways to evade the grip authority had over their letter writing would be to write in “inchiostro simpatico” or invisible ink (though the literal translation is far more colourful, as it would be called “jokester ink”), procured from starch extracted from prison meals, acidic juices, or even blood or bodily fluids.45 The former was compounded further by the fact that the censors were not always the same, and not always did they follow the same criteria, connoting a substantial ambiguity of the genre. Giancarlo Pajetta, a scholar particularly versed in the prison letter genre, relays bluntly that by their very nature, prison letters can never fully be !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! De Grazia and Luzzato, Dizionario del Fascismo, 28. Ibid. 44 Klopp, Sentences, 9. 45 Ibid. 42 43

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understood, not by their recipients and especially not by people outside of that context.46 The letters by anti-Fascist prisoners never revealed the full extent of their mental and physical suffering, partly because they did not want to worry their original recipient, and partly to deprive their captors a moment of triumph. They are products of unusually self-reflexive individuals, guarded in almost every sense of the word, placing themselves at “the centre of a personal panopticon where they are both the surveillants and the surveilled.”47 Next on the list of censure are the uncomprehending recipients, the kin to whom these men wrote their last words. Unfortunately, those sentenced to death were in great part the Italian youth whose familial ties became especially important, with the dominant figure being the mother.48 In effect, many, if not most, of the final letters contain an ode to the mother, a gratitude for their upbringing or a “forgive me, mammina (an affectionate word for mother), if I impose this great pain unto you.”49 At the heart of the concept of the family in Italian culture is the idea of a “give and take” of sorts: a taking on the part of the children of all the protective opportunities the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “'All the prison letters were written in code’; 'not a single word, not a single affirmation, even the most insistent, not a single bit of news, even the simplest and banal one, meant what an outsider finds in it today.'” qtd. in Ibid., 193. 47 Ibid. 48 Malvezzi and Pirelli, Lettere di condannati, 19. 49 “Perdonami, mammina, se ti cagiono questo grande dolore,” qtd. in Ibid., 55. 46

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family provided, with a ‘giving back’ when the parents are in their old age. This is a sentiment in fact expressed in many of the letters in the collection, an “I’m sorry for dying, not for fighting.”50 The letters are of a typology that calls for the consideration of the variety of personal rapports that tied, not without tensions, those imprisoned with those who were outside the prison walls. These prisoners also had to sometimes contend with the fact that the addressee might not have shared their political beliefs and thus could not even seek approval but only respect and understanding.51 Thus the sender censored their letters even to safeguard the recipients, who could only be the closest of kin. The limitations and self-censorship imposed by familial relations compounded a variety of complex mediations into the writing of these letters. A mix of desires to reassure family members, to manifest restraint in expressing their physical state and psychological disturbances, the effort to avoid ‘playing the hero’, or, worse still, ‘playing the victim.’52 On the other hand, those imprisoned were irritated by the fact that their kin could never fully comprehend the nature of life in prison. Gramsci, for example, expressed a “verità dolorosa” (painful truth): often those who wanted to give consolation or affection were in reality “more ferocious than the tormentors.”53 It is the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid. Ibid., 20. 52 De Grazia and Luzzato, Dizionario del Fascismo, 29. 53 “Spesso chi vuole consolare, essesre affettuose ecc. è in realtà piú feroce dei tormentatori,” qtd. in Ibid. 50 51

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superimposition of the public and the private, the personal and the political, of kin and of enemy, that were synthesized into their textual manifestation by the inscription of the body of the men sentenced to death. Yet there are those who found a surprising peace in their imprisonment. In some ways, prison can be understood as a non-consensual extreme equivalent to society’s normal homogenizing processes. Instead of creating civility through a negotiated social contract, it creates a hypercivilization founded on mutual hostility.54 It is perhaps the allegory of the prison in relation to society that commands such grip on the public imagination. Some of those who survived the incarceration even recall their imprisoned years as some of the best of their lives. This paradox explains the aforementioned ‘prison allegory,’ and the fact that it created a ‘bubble’ in which the prisoners could concentrate on meditating and reflecting on the self.55 As is evident from the collection of letters here in question, Lettere di condannati, this peace in the prison is reflected in some of the writings. Some instead found comfort in religion, as evidenced by some letters and their mention of forgiveness from God, some even finding their cause to be godly in and of itself; a priest for example writes: “I die serenely for your salvation and that of your family, and I too will give my life, like Jesus, though unworthily, for the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 54 55

Klopp, Sentences, 19. De Grazia and Luzzato, Dizionario del Fascismo, 30.

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salvation of souls.”56 On the other hand, those who prided themselves on being secular found solace in reinforcing their convictions and commitment to their nationalistic and political cause. Writing a letter, a final letter that is meant to say everything they needed to say to give meaning to their life and comfort to their family, is an immensely daunting task. Somehow, the men writing these letters had to textualize their character, behaviour, and emotions.57 Within these strict communicative conditions, they devised strategies to inscribe the body, making the letter a proxy of the self so that the letter would feel like the presence of the communicant.58 Moreover, men sentenced to death had to imagine what lay at the receiving end of the text: they had to imagine the family and ‘la patria’ beyond the walls of their imprisonment. According to Walter Ong, such writing constituted a “break down [of] the dense continuum of experience,” and a uniquely transformative process that heightens 59 consciousness. In addition, writing to their loved ones meant reaffirming their connections with the people to whom their letters were addressed— !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “io muoio sereno per la salvezza tua e di tutta la tua famiglia—godo di dare pure io—indegnamente—come il mio Maestro Gesú la vita per la salvezza delle anime,” qtd. in Malvezzi and Pirelli, Lettere di condannati, 240. 57 Gary Schneider The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Erly Modern England, 1500-1700 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 116. 58 Ibid. 59 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 101, 80. 56

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family, friends, political compatriots, or the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;yet, despite their actual confinement, the physical process of writing causes them to be inherently alone. The Final Letters In what follows there will be a brief study of seven letters, or forms thereof. The letters herein analysed were selected considering the theoretical framework developed throughout this study, with the intention of using those letters which best represent the constraints, motivations, and implications addressed thus far. As such, they vary in form, style, the social status of the condannatiâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an anonymous man, a working class man, an intellectual, two women, and military menâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and they vary in the circumstances of the letter writing. The only constant, the only commonality aside from their capture, imprisonment and imminent death, are the overt nationalist inflections and calls for a remembrance of the sacrifice they made in the name of their nation. The author of this study is the sole translator, with the hopes of remaining as true to their original form as possible and limited only by the lack of images of the letters as originally presented in their collection. There is further, an important acknowledgement to be made in terms of paying respect to the emotive quality of these texts. Broken down into short quotations, the ethos of the letter is inevitably altered, for this reason it is important to ask the reader to strongly consider that these were the words of men and women who knowingly were about to die, they are the last pieces of themselves they wanted to !

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leave to their kin, and the gravity this inflects on the meaning of the letters should not be underestimated. An unknown prisoner writing to what appears to be his lover, Anna, and signs his name Antonio Fossati, is one of the few men who relay their true—as true as it can be in written text and in those confines—suffering, writing a chronology from his capture. He begins his letter with “I die happy to have done my duty as a “Vero Patriota” (True Patriot),” and then begins to recount his time of imprisonment.60 He ends his text on a similar note: making a final plea to Anna, to keep his “tri-colour ribbon” (the colours of the Italian flag) that he always wore on his heart to show himself as a true Patriot.61 At that time, patriotism was his foremost concern in this letter, wanting the love and faith he held for his country to be manifested by those he left behind. In essence, he is writing for the future of Italian patriotism above all else. He further speaks to his physical pain and suffering as a way to reinforce the notion of his sacrifice and willingness to suffer for his country: detailing his torture (ripped eyebrows and eyelashes, ripped nails, lit candles held under his feet, and the administration of electrical current) and reaffirming his endurance at each step. He ends his letter by writing: “now I truly must stop !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 60“Io

muoio contento d’aver fatto il mio dovere di Vero Patriota,” qtd. in Malvezzi and Pirelli, Lettere di condannati, 33. 61 “Ti prego di tenere per ricordo il mio nastrino tricolore che lo portai sempre sul cuore per dimostrarmi vero Patriota,” qtd. in Ibid., 34.

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[writing] because it pains my hands and now they begin to bleed,”62 a final ode to the sacrifice he made even to write the letter, to transform his experience into an exclusively textual and immortalized form. Paolo Braccini—formerly employed at the University of Turin as a zootechnics specialist, left that position to join the clandestine movement in Turin 1931, and was arrested and killed in 1941— wrote to his wife and daughter in three separate letters. To his daughter, Gianna, he writes: “I will be shot at dawn for an ideal, for a faith that you, my daughter, one day will understand fully, always have pride in the death of your Padre (Father)”.63 Here again there is the idea of the futurity of the nation, and the need to promulgate patriotism. To his wife he writes a letter brimming with rhetoric of affect, and concludes he did not lose his life unconsciously but willingly for his faith and asks her to go to the prison after his execution to get his personal effects, such as his wedding band. Most interestingly he asks her to take his pen, pencil, and books.64 The tools that he used to write with are among the things he wanted to leave his wife, a moving symbol of the significance of writing, of the overwhelming need to write. It is here Braccini expresses his !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Ora veramente devo terminare perché mi fanno molto male le mani e mi fanno sangue,” qtd. In Ibid. 63 “Sarò fucilato all’alba per un ideale, per una fede che tu, mia figlia, un giorno capirai appieno,” qtd. in Ibid., 87. 64 “Non ho perso la vita incoscientemente: ho cercato di salvarmela per te, per la mia bambina, per la mia fede. Per quest’ultima occorreva la mia vita,” qtd. in Ibid., 88. 62

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mindfulness in the act of writing. In addition, as was the case with most others, he is entirely cognizant of the implication of his political affiliations, to subject himself to the looming possibility of death. It is texts, and not the physical bodies that survive, prison writing especially was an opportunity to articulate experiences that would otherwise go unattested.65 In 1944 Costanzo Ebat wrote to his son Mario. As will be shown, Ebat was highly aware and concerned with the idea of the legacy of the nation and legacy for the family. After telling his son to honour his name and to follow his shadow of honesty and loyalty, and telling him to take care of his mother and respect his grandmother, he went on to say: “But above all love and have faith in the motherland. To her you must give your foremost affections and if she asks of you your life offer it singingly. You will feel then, how I feel now, how beautiful it is to die for her and that death has an effective value.”66 It is the idea of the nation and the imaginings of ideal national values that held a powerful command of emotional legitimacy, enough to warrant sacrificing one’s life. Though not entirely reflexive of the patterns found in this study, Paola Garelli’s letter !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Klopp, Sentences, 192. “Ma soprattutto ama e abbi fede nella tua Patria. Ad essa anteponi tutti gli affetti e se ti chiede la vita offrigliela cantando. Sentirai allora, come io lo sento adesso, quanto e bello morire per lei e che la morte ha un effettivo valore,” qtd. in Malvezzi and Pirelli, Lettere di condannati, 135. 65 66

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to her daughter, one of the few female texts in the collection, makes for an interesting aside. Unlike most other letters, she does not specifically write of the nation, and in all but about 100 words she tells her daughter to study twice: “be good, study,” and, “When you are older you will understand better. I ask only one thing of you: study.”67 As an essentially intellectually based movement, the act of studying would imply an act of defiance against Fascism. Another woman, Irma Marchiani, writes instead with fervent patriotism to Pally, supposedly a dear friend, “I heard the call of the Patria for which I have fought, and now I am here… soon I will no longer be, I die sure of having done everything I possibly could for liberty to triumph.”68 Though beyond the purpose of this study these letters are perhaps reflexive of more nuanced and gendered social inscriptions. Nevertheless, both manifest their firm convictions in the face of death. Shortest of all these “letters,” yet most poignant of all, were the words left behind by Ignazio Vian. The twenty-seven-year-old former Roman teacher was arrested, tortured, and hanged without trial. On a small loaf of bread found in his cell, now conserved by his family, he was able to write “coraggio mamma” (courage mother), and the words “Meglio morire che tradire” (better to die than !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Sii buona, studia”; “Quando sarai grande capirai meglio. Ti chiedo una cosa sola: studia,” qtd. in Ibid., 168. 68 “Ho sentito il richiamo della Patria per la quale ho combattuto, ora sono qui… fra poco non sarò piú, muoio sicura di aver fatto quanto mi era possibile affinché la libertà trionfasse,” qtd. in Ibid., 223-224. 67

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to betray), written in his blood on the cell wall 69. This is at once reflective of the aforementioned physical constraints of the penitentiary system, and of the true extent of the limits placed on writing. The inherently patriotic use of blood to write a message for the nation, and the homeliness of the bread to write for his mother, are emblematic of fervent nationalism, a want for the ‘right kind of nationalism’—that of the Resistance and not Fascism—to have permanence, and the values of Italian kinship. In a similar vein, Sabato Martelli Castaldi writes his final words on the walls of his cell: When your body, will no longer be, your spirit will be even more alive in the memory of those who remain—Make it so it can always be of example.70 Existence is exclusively textual, in depriving the imprisoned men from that basic action deprives them of being able to write their bodies and write their ideals into existence. Defying that imposition of power in even extreme conditions of confinement, both Vian and Castaldi manifested writing as a signifying process, and as an immutable form of memory, in its best possible form. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ibid., 385. “Quando il tuo corpo non sarà piú, il tuo spirit sarà ancora piú vivo nel ricordo di chi resta – Fa che possa essere sempre di esempio,” Ibid., 227. 69 70

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Conclusion The Italian Resistance of 1943-1945 against the Fascist forces is essential to understand, both in its historic significance and in its implications for the socio-political life of today. The ultimate fraternity of the nation commanded enough emotional legitimacy for these men to die for ‘la patria’; there is no symbol more apt at expressing the impact of the nation on the social corpus than the letters of those men sentenced to death. New post-violence narratives can be identified by looking at the “Italian” identity as a concept of nationhood within the epistolary spaces of Resistance prisoners sentenced to death. These letters sublimate the bodily horrors as written forms of cultural affect and patriotism and because they are characterized by their immutability, letters are crucial ingredients in the cultural reconstruction of societies that have undergone transformation. They tell stories that are meant to shape the memory of future generations and refer to a moment in history in a vested and forward-looking manner, always with the future of the nation—or rather with the imagined future of the imagined nation—in mind. These letters are artefacts of the nation, they are the inherent aesthetics and performances of nation-ness and manifest in “l’ansia per l’italia di domani” (the anxiety for tomorrow’s Italy) and as such transform the fatality into continuity, the permanence of ‘la patria.’

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Bibliography! Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: 2006. Behan, Tom. Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies. New York: Pluto Press, 2009. Cook, Elizabeth. Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters. California: Stanford University Press, 1996. Dabove, Juan Pablo. Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816-1929. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. De Grazia, Victoria and Sergio Luzzato. Dizionario del Fascismo. Torino: G. Eiunaudi, 2002-2003. Hass, Ernst B. â&#x20AC;&#x153;What is Nationalism and Why Should We Study it,â&#x20AC;? International Organization 40 (1986): 707-704. Klopp, Charles. Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Malvezzi, Piero and Giovanni Pirelli. Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza Italiana, 8 settembre 1943-25 aprile 1945. Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1963. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.

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Rembold, Elfie and Peter Carrier. “Space and Identity: Constructions of National Identities in an Age of Globalization,” National Identities 13 (2011): 361-377. Accessed December 11, 2014. Doi: 10.1080/14608944.2011.629425. Sargiacomo, Massimo. “Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,”Reviews and Overviews 13 (2009): 269-280. Accessed on December 11, 2014. doi: 10.1007/s10997-008-9080-7. Schneider, Gary. The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500-1700. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.

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TO KNOW SIN Science, Morality, and the Manhattan Project Hanna Murray We blessed ourselves, smelling the victory. We put on jubilant smiles in the face of the outcome. But the smiles fell off unable to withstand the great success. - Benjamin Alire Saenz, Creation1 Introduction The creation and military use of the atomic bomb is among the most significant events of the twentieth century. Not only did it dramatically increase the potential destructive power of war, it also changed both the nature of international relations and the role of scientists and science in politics. The creation and use of the bomb not only had a profound impact upon its target, the Japanese, but also on American society. Specifically, the creation of the bomb affected those who were responsible for its creation, the atomic scientists. In this paper, I will examine the atomic scientists’ responses to the bomb and reflections upon their involvement in the Manhattan Project, providing an explanation for these responses. Although all atomic scientists participated in events leading to the creation of the atomic bomb, the scientists’ responses to the bomb were not unanimous, and their perceptions of the morality of their participation in the project in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Benjamine Alire Saenz, “Creation,” in Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, ed. John Bradley (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1995), 4. 1

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particular were extremely varied. Some scientists felt deep remorse about their role in the creation of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most destructive weapon whereas some had no qualms at all. The trauma and guilt that the scientists experienced is very much a result of the conflicting questions of morality surrounding the creation and the deployment of the bomb, answers to which are extremely contested. In order to understand the development of the bomb as a traumatic event in the lives of the scientists and, more specifically, their varied responses to it, it must be examined within the context of the Second World War. Important to consider here is the question of scientistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; role as perpetrators of violence in war, whether indirect or direct. In working on the bomb, were the scientists conscious actors, responsible for the deaths that the atomic bomb was eventually to cause, or were they simply fulfilling their calling as discoverers of knowledge? To understand how the scientists viewed the creation of the atomic bomb, and to understand their emotional reactions, or lack thereof, in the years following the war, it is necessary to examine the reasons for which the scientists agreed to work on the Manhattan Project in the first place, and to determine what they believed was their role in both the project and the war effort as a whole. While many of those who worked on the Manhattan Project were physicists, the knowledge and experience of scientists of all disciplines were required to make the atomic bomb a reality. The accounts used in this paper, therefore, come from !

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scientists of a variety of disciplines in the field, leading to the use of the more general term “scientist” to refer to those working on the Manhattan Project. For the sake of simplicity, the atomic bomb is most often referred to as simply “the bomb,” as this is the manner in which many of the scientists themselves referred to their work. The scientists of the Manhattan Project participated in innumerable interviews, produced many memoirs and innumerable accounts of their experiences and responses to the atomic bomb project. In researching for this project, I have only been able to provide a sampling of the opinions expressed by the physicists, chemists, engineers, and others, numbering in the hundreds, who toiled to bring the Manhattan Project to its realization. Here, I have focused primarily on the ideas and statements expressed by the expert scientists of the project, those who were given most attention by the press and subsequent interviewers, and thus became the most available sources for the purposes of my project. I understand that by choosing to focus on these scientists I am silencing the voices of countless others who worked on the Manhattan Project, voices who could have lent us a more complete understanding of the effects of the bomb on the atomic scientists as a whole. It is my hope that the views and reactions of these scientists will be examined in future works, extending on my analysis in this paper. Finally, scientists’ views on the ethics surrounding the development and probable use of the atomic bomb and their role in the project were

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certainly not static. Indeed, many of the opinions that they expressed differed from interview to interview, especially when a great deal of time has passed between the two. The opinions expressed by Edward Teller (1908-2003), Manhattan Project physicist and â&#x20AC;&#x153;father of the hydrogen bomb,â&#x20AC;? in interviews conducted in different decades reflect this to a large extent. However, not all scientists experienced a change in opinion about the bomb; some, like Hans Bethe, one of the eminent scientists working on the Project, maintained that their decision to work on the bomb was the correct one, and that they had no regrets in participating in the project. Some of the scientists, most notably J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, have very complicated, even seemingly contradictory views on the bomb, making it rather difficult to make a judgement on his state of mind; this, in many ways, points to the complexity of the impact of the atomic weapon on the scientists. Examination of the Manhattan Project within the Context of War The Manhattan Project had its origins in a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 from Albert Einstein, at Leo Sziliardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s request. Szilard had become increasingly concerned about the implications of new developments in both atomic physics and world politics and he believed that the President should be made aware of these. Although, Roosevelt signed an order that created the Office of Scientific Research and Development in June 1941, the Project did not really begin to take full-force until it came under the direction of !

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General Leslie Grove, who made J. Robert Oppenheimer the scientific director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1943. The Manhattan Project was the first governmentfunded foray into research and development of its size and its overall cost was around $1.85 billion 1945 dollars.2 The question of the Manhattan Project scientistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; roles as perpetrators is a delicate one and very difficult to answer. The scientists were not the ones to make the decision to use the atomic bomb on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they certainly were not the ones who actually dropped the bomb. Very few were even involved in the actual assembly of the atomic weapon and were mostly concerned with puzzling out the theoretical problems of a nuclear fission chain reaction. However, without the atomic scientists, there would have been no atomic bomb, no demonstration of its tremendous power upon the unsuspecting Japanese cities, and no subsequent nuclear arms race. On one hand, no individual scientist, even the most brilliant, was absolutely essential for the creation of the bomb. The endeavour was so large that had one single scientist decided not to participate in the Manhattan Project, it would ultimately have had very little impact on the eventual outcome of the Project. On the other hand, there would have been no project at all had each and every scientist refused to participate. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! More detail on the creation and costs of the Manhattan Project can be found in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster: 1986). 2

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Can simply building a weapon be considered an act of war, even if those who built it are not the ones to order its use? By building the bomb, the scientists created the opportunity for it to be used. Many, like Oppenheimer, believed that the “decision [to drop the bomb] was implicit in the project,” and claimed that there had been very little discussion about the matter at Los Alamos, “We always assumed that if they were needed they would be used.”3 As J. Samuel Walker argues in his study of the decision to drop the bomb, Prompt and Utter Destruction, there was no compelling reason for Truman not to use the bomb once it had been created and indeed, “military, diplomatic, and political considerations weighed heavily in favour of the use of the bomb.”4 This military, diplomatic, and political framework, in concert with the desire to justify the cost of the project, was such that the use of the bomb, if its creation was successful, was almost a foregone conclusion, a fact of which many scientists seemed to be aware. Thus, the scientists, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! J. Robert Oppenheimer, interview in Fred Freed and Len Giovannatti, The Decision to Drop the Bomb (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1965), 328. Many more of the atomic scientists, such as James B. Conant, have expressed similar views on the matter. 4 J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 95. Militarily, the bomb would speed the end of the war; diplomatically, it would impress the Soviets; politically, ending the war would be immensely popular but not using the bomb could potentially be disastrous. 3

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in making the decision to work on creating the bomb, knowingly worked towards its use. However, in many ways, the very structure of the Manhattan Project worked to prevent the scientists from fully realizing that they were creating a weapon. One of the foundations of the project was compartmentalization, deliberately implemented by General Groves, the military and government director of the Manhattan Project. Groves was adamant that “each task was to be performed in isolation from all others” so that the security risks implicit in the project would be minimized.5 By focusing on smaller tasks, scientists could ostensibly solve more quickly the multitude of problems involved with the project. However, compartmentalization also meant that, while each scientist was engaged in work that contributed to the final aim of building the atomic bomb, many could not see the connection between their work and the deployment of the atomic bomb. As one Oak Ridge physicist remarked, “I still don’t see how my job ties up with the bomb, and I certainly don’t know any more than you do just from reading the papers. I wouldn’t know what to say even if I did open my mouth.”6 Since the scientists were so far removed from the decision-making process and the actual dropping of the atomic bomb, it is easy to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), 99. 6 Unknown, quoted Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope, The Scientists’ Movement in America: 1945-47 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 112. 5

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conclude that it had been difficult for many to connect their actions with the deaths of 130,000 Japanese people, predominantly civilians.7 However, interviews with the atomic scientists suggest that many were keenly aware of their role and its implications. What does differ from scientist to scientist, is their moral and ethical judgements about the deaths that were ultimately caused by the creation of the atomic bomb. In an interview with John L. Greenberg in 1984, Seth Neddermeyer, the scientist who first suggested the implosion method for detonating the atomic bomb, discusses his role in the Manhattan Project: “I just have this horrible guilty feeling all the time, like a cur with his tail between his legs… I’m not the least bit interested in who gets credit for what.”8 In complete contrast, Harold Agnew, who worked on the Manhattan Project in various locations and served as the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1970-1979, expressed absolutely no regret over its use.9 Many scientists !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Although estimates of the destruction caused by the bomb are debated, Samuel Walker has estimated that this figure is the closest to those who were directly killed by the bomb. Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction, 77. 8 Seth H. Neddermeyer, interview by John L. Greenberg. Pasadena, California, May 7, 1984. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives. Retrieved November 3, 2014 from the World Wide Web: http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Neddermeyer_ S 9 In an interview with Theresa Strottman on November 20, 1992, Agnew states that “we have been on the defensive for many years with regard to Hiroshima and I don’t think we should.” He also claimed that the Japanese have been 7

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were not ashamed to have worked on the project and some were even proud of their involvement in the endeavour, but still expressed feelings of discomfort and regret over the number of lives lost because of the atomic bombs. Yet another group of scientists, like Bethe, expressed absolutely no regret over the initial use of the bomb against the Japanese, but believed that the circumstances had been unique and that the bomb was overall an evil creation that should not ever be used again.10 In an interview that took place in the mid-1990s, towards the end of his life, Teller dismissed these debates about the morality of working on the atomic bomb project as inconsequential, claiming that regrets over the atomic bomb are a result of a false sense of pride, a false sense of agency in the decision-making process of the dropping of the bombs.11 Regardless of the individual emotional reactions of the scientists, the development of the bomb was a traumatic phase in their lives, just as it was for much of the American population. The transition from life at Los Alamos to ordinary academic life was a difficult one for many of the scientists, especially as family and friends learned, with no little degree of astonishment, of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “playing Hiroshima for all its worth” in the years after the war. 10 In response to a question about whether Bethe regretted the use of the bomb, he responded emphatically “I do not” yet described the bomb as an evil thing later in the interview. Hans Bethe, interviewed by Mary Palevsky in Atomic Fragments: A Daughter’s Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 23; 30. 11 Edward Teller, interviewed by S.L. Sanger. 1989.

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scientists’ activities in the last years of the war. The bomb changed people’s understanding of how the world worked, of the destructive power that could be wielded by man. The scientists, especially those who had witnessed the Trinity test, were the ones best equipped to understand exactly how and to what extent it wrought these changes, a reality that had an enormous impact on many of their lives. Scientists’ Rationale for Involvement in the Manhattan Project: Bernhard Geisen writes that perpetrators are subjects “who, by their own decision, dehumanized other subjects and, in doing so, did not only pervert the sovereign subjectivity of the victims but challenged also their own sacredness.”12 It is true that only a few accounts of the scientists recall active consideration during the Project of who would become the victims of the atomic bomb and those who did feel horror and sorrow for the victims often recalled doing so after the bombs were dropped and the realization struck. However, the scientists did actively and freely choose to participate in the Manhattan Project and the ultimate aim of the project, the creation of an atomic weapon to be used on opponents to the Allied nations, was never hidden from them. In this sense, the scientists did make a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Bernhard Geisen, “The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 114. 12

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choice, one that would eventually contribute to the deaths of over 100,000 people. While some claim to have never considered the implications of the project they had willingly agreed to work on, Teller, in his memoirs, states the opposite: “I do not believe that any of us who worked on the bomb were without some thoughts about its possible consequences.”13 The scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project did so for a variety of reasons. Many scientists felt the same sense of duty to their respective countries during the war as did many of those who enlisted to fight; Ben Diven, for example, one of the scientists at Los Alamos and then a graduate student at UCLA Berkeley, recalls attempting to join the navy out of a sense of duty to his nation, before being told to go see Oppenheimer before he quit his job as a teaching assistant.14 As Alice Kimball Smith claimed in her 1965 book A Peril and a Hope, like the majority of their fellow citizens, the scientists “did the job for which their talents and experience best suited them.”15 Some of the scientists, such as Teller, who was Hungarian, had personal connections to the war or had family left in Nazi-occupied territory, increasing their incentives to participate in the project.16 Indeed, to oppose the creation and later !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Edward Teller, Memoirs: a Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub., 2001), 212. 14 Ben Diven, interview by the American Heritage Foundation, April 8, 2003, transcript. 15 Smith, A Peril and a Hope, 3. 16 Edward Teller, Memoirs, 201. 13

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use of the bomb seemed to suggest to some that one was unpatriotic, or untroubled by the realities of the war; as General Groves later remarked, “As far as I know, none of the scientists who were against the dropping of the bomb had any close relatives at the front.”17 Overall, the general expectation was that, as American citizens or, in the case of the non-American citizens working on the project, those who opposed the “tyranny of fascism,” the scientists would contribute as best they could to the victory of the Allies, regardless of the means in which it was achieved. One of the most commonly cited reasons for agreeing to work on the atomic bomb project was the fear that Germany would manage the feat before the Americans. Almost from the first moment of the discovery of fission, physicists realized that a bomb of immense power could be made, and as Bethe later claimed, “once fission was found and there was a war, it was a foregone conclusion that the bomb would be made.”18 The only question was who was going to develop it first. The likelihood of a German bomb was particularly worrisome for those atomic scientists who had lived in Germany or in the countries surrounding it and who had witnessed Nazi aggression firsthand, such as Neils Bohr or Edward Teller. Although the German project was underfunded and years behind the American efforts, there was no way that the scientists working on the Manhattan Project could have !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Groves, quoted in Chevalier, Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship, 199. 18 Hans Bethe in Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 30. 17

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known that, and indeed, Bohr brought with him to America an account of a meeting with Warner Heisenberg in Copenhagen that confirmed that the Germans were working on an atomic weapon.19 A German bomb was therefore a very real possibility and atomic scientists envisioned themselves in an atomic arms race. By the time the limited success of the German bomb project became known, with Germany’s defeat in 1945, the Manhattan Project’s goal had nearly been realized and could not have been halted. Too much money and time had been spent on the Project, and as Smith argues, “only rarely did any of the scientists consider what would happen if Germany was defeated before the bomb was ready and it became not a defensive weapon against a probable competitor but an offensive weapon against Japan.”20 Aside from the fears of an atomic bomb being in hostile hands, more purely academic concerns came into play in the scientists’ decisions to work on the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer recalled in 1954: …almost everyone realized that this was a great undertaking… Almost everyone knew that it was an unparalleled opportunity to bring to bear the basic knowledge and art of science for the benefit of his country. Almost everyone knew that this job, if it were achieved, would be a part of history. This sense of excitement, of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 19 20

Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 83. Smith, A Peril and a Hope, 4.

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devotion and of patriotism in the end prevailed.21 The scientists realized that they were attempting something that had never been possible before, and were expanding the realm of human knowledge in areas that were previously untouched. Indeed, the allure of knowledge was enough to draw many scientists into the project, without the leaders telling them specifically what they would be working towards. Glenn Seaborg, co-discoverer of plutonium and the physicist in charge of the separation process for plutonium during the Manhattan Project, recalled that oftentimes, simply writing, ‘“You just come here and I’ll tell you what it is”’ to the young scientists, “almost always brought them.”22 The opportunity to work on a discovery that was seen to be “more important that the discovery of electricity” was understandably one that many scientists could not pass up.23 Some of the atomic scientists, like Teller, believed that in the sense of the discovery of knowledge, the atomic bomb was a good thing: “My position is that knowledge is good and must be separated from the application of knowledge. And anything that can be applied can be used or misused.”24 Teller’s views on knowledge provide !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Richard Polenberg, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 20. 22 Glenn Seaborg, interview by Stephane Groueff, February 11, 1965, transcript. 23 Ibid. 24 Teller, in Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 55. 21

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a way into understanding his actions and statements both during the Manhattan Project and in the decades after. While Teller considered the detonation of the atomic bombs on Japan to be a mistake, “I think in 1945 we made a great mistake. It was war and the mistake was understandable. Yet, I’m sure it was a mistake,” he separated his role as a discoverer of knowledge from his role as the creator of a weapon of mass destruction.25 Teller’s morally convenient distinction between knowledge and its application guided his endeavours after the Manhattan Project; despite believing that the dropping of the atomic bomb was a mistake, Teller was one of the scientists who both advocated and worked for the development of the hydrogen bomb.26 Even though this bomb was a thousand times more powerful than either of the atomic bombs, knowledge was still within the grasp of the scientific community, and according to Teller it would be an evil to let it remain hidden. The allure of venturing into this hitherto unknown area of knowledge was apparently enough to allow most scientists to overcome what moral qualms they may have had about the project. Indeed, only a handful of scientists refused to participate in the Manhattan Project or left the project midway for moral reasons. Lise Meitner, one of the co-discoverers of nuclear !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Teller, in Giovannatti, The Decision to Drop the Bomb, 329. Indeed, Teller is often considered the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb” as it was he and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam who were primarily responsible for the creation of the thermonuclear weapon. 25 26

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fission, was one of these scientists; as her nephew and co-discoverer Otto Robert Frish recalled, “Meitner was invited to join the team at work on the development of the nuclear-fission bomb; she refused, and hoped until the very end that the project would prove impossible.”27 Others grew uneasy with the political motivations for constructing the bomb. Joseph Rotblat, a member of the British team at Los Alamos, left the Project after the defeat of the Germans and when the intended target changed to the Japanese. Rotblat was particularly disturbed to hear General Groves remark that the real purpose of the bomb was to subdue the Soviets and, as he claimed, “felt deeply the sense of betrayal of an ally.”28 While some scientists regretted their decision to work on the project after its completion, with the exception of a handful of cases, most scientists seemed to believe that working on the Manhattan Project was an opportunity that could not be refused.29 The refusals of Meitner and Rotblat to work on the Project are significant in that they highlight the fact that working on the bomb entailed a moral choice, one that every scientist who worked on the bomb made. More scientists seem to have had more moral misgivings with the creation of the hydrogen bomb than with the atomic bombs. Indeed, the creation of hydrogen bombs marks the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Frisch quoted in Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 228. Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect, 150-151. 29 Wilson later claimed that he regretted not leaving the project after V-E Day. Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect, 157. 27 28

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first time that there was serious debate within the scientific community about whether the progress of certain scientific discovery should be halted. Eminent scientists such as Oppenheimer, Bethe, and Victor Weisskopf, leader of the theoretical division at Los Alamos, who had all stood by their decision to work on the atomic bomb, were opposed to its development.30 An in-depth discussion of the creation of the H-bomb is a subject for another paper, but the debates surrounding its creation serve to illustrate how the scientists saw their work after the creation and dropping of the atomic bombs. The atomic bombs and the enormity of the destruction that they wrought in Japan had been terrible enough for many of the scientists, enough to cause them to seriously advocate remaining ignorant of the technical possibilities of science.31 The H-bomb was developed in a very different context than the atomic bomb – the United States was not engaged in war – which may have contributed to the scientists’ difference of opinion regarding it and the atomic bomb. Whatever the differences in contexts may have been, the feelings of guilt experienced by many of the scientists and the firsthand knowledge of what a weapon of this sort !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Bethe, quoted in Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 154. Indeed, even Teller had some qualms about working on the Hydrogen bomb project, telling Mary Palevsky that he had not wanted to work on it but had rather wanted others to, only agreeing to the project when he saw that others would not, 62. 31 Edward Teller, Better a Shield, 4-5, quoted in Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 72. 30

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could accomplish were undeniably a major factor in the debates surrounding the hydrogen bomb. The Scientists’ Debates about the Dropping of the Bomb Many of the scientists were either unable or refused to acknowledge the connection between their work and the ends for which their creations were used. In an interview with Mary Palevsky, Teller claimed, “the scientists, by giving you the tools, are not responsible for the use of these tools. But they are responsible for the effectiveness of the tools and for the understanding of the tools.”32 Similarly, Oppenheimer saw his role as a scientist, not as a decision-maker; years after the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer stated, “I did my job which was the job I was supposed to do. I was not in a policymaking position at Los Alamos. I would have done anything that I was asked to do.”33 In reality, the scientists really did have very little say in whether the bomb was used or not, or how it was to be used. A handful of the most prominent atomic scientists, namely Oppenheimer, and three other prominent atomic scientists, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Laurence, and Arthur Compton, served on a scientific panel that advised the Interim Committee. The purpose of this Committee was, ostensibly at least, to discuss if and how the atomic bomb should be used to end the war and the prospects for nuclear energy. In reality, however, as Thorpe argues, “the emphasis !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Teller, in Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 55. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in James A. Hijiya, “The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” 140. 32 33

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in creating the panel was less on giving the scientists input into decision making than diffusing potential opposition to the use of the bomb,” and the Interim Committee made their decisions independently.34 There were other attempts to sway political decisions about the bomb. Leo Szilard, a physicist who had been instrumental in the creation of the Manhattan Project, tried to circulate a petition protesting the use of the bomb on moral grounds, writing in a letter to Teller that “I personally feel that it would be a matter of importance if a large number of scientists who have worked in this field went clearly and unmistakably on record as to their opposition on moral grounds to the use of these bombs in the present phase of the war.”35 However, this petition was blocked by Oppenheimer, who told Teller that “the leaders in Washington… are the people who should make such decisions.”36 Other efforts by scientists, such as the Franck Report of the Committee on Political and Social Problems at the Metallurgical Laboratory, met with similar limited success.37

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect, 163. Szilard letter to Teller, quoted in Teller, Memoirs, 205. 36 Oppenheimer, quoted in Teller, Memoirs, 206. 37 The Franck report stated that the “use of such a weapon as the atomic bomb would necessarily involve the killing of thousands of people. This was morally reprehensible” and suggested that a demonstration of the atomic bomb be made instead of dropping it. Arthur Holly Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 235. 34 35

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Scientists’ Reaction to the Use of the Bomb and Later Reflections Cathy Caruth defines trauma as “a moment of violent intrusion or conversion that the consciousness [is] not able to perceive or to grasp in its full importance when it [happens].”38 The bomb did indeed have this impact on the scientists. Observing those that were returning to Los Alamos Base camp after witnessing the Trinity test, Stanislaw Ulam, who was later to become one of the key inventors of the hydrogen bomb, recalled: “You could see it on their faces. I saw that something grave and strong had happened to their whole outlook on the future.”39 A common claim among the atomic scientists was that the momentum of the project intensified so much as to completely distract them from thinking about the moral implications of creating the world’s most destructive weapon. As Phyllis Fisher, wife of Los Alamos scientist Leon Fisher, claimed, “the sheer size and challenge of the scientific effort occupied their thoughts completely” and many other accounts echo her claim.40 Certainly, when this momentum finally came to its climax, many scientists were stunned by the realization of what !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cathy Caruth, quoted in Bernhard Giesen, “The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Alexander et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 113. 39 Stanislaw Ulam, quoted in John Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 72. 40 Phyllis Fisher, Los Alamos Experience (New York and Tokyo: Japan Publications, Inc., 1985), 111. 38

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they had helped to build – some would never be able to fully make the connection between the bomb that they helped build and the destruction that it wrought upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the subject was by no means banned, and the scientists did have full knowledge that they were building the world’s most destructive weapon, Oppenheimer and the rest of the project’s leadership did not encourage open discussion about the implications of the bomb and its use. The discouragement of open discussion may be one of the reasons that many scientists claim they did not think very deeply about the implications of the bomb until after the Trinity Test or even Hiroshima. Victor Weisskopf, a theoretical physicist working on the Manhattan Project, claimed that the constant discussions about the destructive power of the bomb “led to a growing numbness toward those terrible consequences.”41 However, according to many accounts, the discussion about the destructive power of the bomb was limited to estimates of bomb productivity and did not include any discussion of the ethics of the project. It was this combination of factors that prevented many of the scientists from fully realizing the implications of their work. However, as tempting as it is to conclude that the scientists were oblivious to the ends to which their work was headed, many made !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Weisskopf, quoted in Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. 41

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statements indicating that they did think about the implications of their work. Even the leaders of the Project, so insistent that the development of the bomb be successful, had concerns; as Oppenheimer wrote to his friend Herbert Smith, “you will believe that this undertaking has not been without misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair.”42 Many scientists did feel a sense of responsibility for the new weapon and for the changes that it would bring about in the world; the Franck Report stated, “in the past, scientists could disclaim direct responsibility for the use to which mankind had put their disinterested discoveries…we cannot take the same attitude now.”43 The report acknowledged that the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb were unprecedented in scale; science had joined with industry to consciously produce the world’s most destructive weapon and it was up to the scientists to guide society in this new world. Many scientists justified the bomb in the context of the war. As Fred Vaslow claimed, “Yes, it was a horrible thing to do. But this was a time of horrors… There were any number of horrors, so

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oppenheimer to Herbert Smith, quoted in Inventing Los Alamos, 77. 43 James Franck, “The Franck Report, June 11, 1945,” in The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age, ed. Michael B. Stoff et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 140. 42

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this was another one of these horrors.”44 Many, such as Bohr and Oppenheimer, believed that the atomic bomb was so terrible a weapon that it made future war impossible.45 If this was indeed so (and many scientists believed it was) then the horrors that the bomb had visited upon the Japanese people had been worth it. Others simply believed that the American lives saved by ending the war with the bomb were all the justification needed to drop the bomb; one counter-petition to that which was circulated by Szilard claimed “if we can save even a handful of American lives, then let us use this weapon – now!”46 Furthermore, some scientists including Bethe argued that dropping the atomic bomb actually saved Japanese lives.47 Oddly enough, this was not an absurd claim; indeed, the Allies had already made extensive use of firebombing in Japan, a tactic that was just as destructive, if not more, than either of the nuclear bombs.48 Thus the victims of Hiroshima could be seen as a necessary sacrifice for future peace: as Bethe remarked, “in a way, the victims of Hiroshima died so that other people could live. It is unhappy, but that is the way it is.”49 Although some did find this concept of a sacrifice for peace profoundly disturbing, it was !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fred Vaslow, interviewed by Cindy Kelly, August 13, 2013. 45 Bethe, quoted in Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 69. 46 Quoted in Compton, Atomic Quest, 242. 47 Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 28. 48 Walker outlines the American tactical conversion in Prompt and Utter Destruction, 25-27. 49 Bethe, quoted in Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 70-71. 44

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one way in which many scientists attempted to justify their involvement in the project. Many scientists claim that the creation of a bomb was inevitable; once fission had been discovered, the necessary outcome would be the building of an atomic weapon. I.I. Rabi, a Manhattan Project consultant, claimed, “these instrumentalities were natural consequences of the scientific knowledge at our disposal, and as such were inevitable.”50 Indeed, many scientists seem to have accepted the position that the inevitability of the bomb absolved them of any crimes associated with its creation. Samuel K. Allison, a physicist working on the Manhattan Project, recalled, “when the second bomb was released, we felt it was a great tragedy.”51 Notable is his use of the word “tragedy” instead of “crime” or “sin”; Allison felt the gravity of the event and was moved by the suffering of the Japanese, but did not seem explicitly to connect his actions to their suffering or see himself as an agent in the creation of this suffering. Some scientists argued that although the discovery of fission itself might not have necessitated the bomb’s creation, the political climate in which fission was discovered did. Had it not been for the war, many postulated, nuclear research might have been pursued for the purposes of energy, not destruction, or the knowledge would have been shared with all, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Rabi, quoted in Smith, A Peril and a Hope, 80. Samuel K. Allison, quoted in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 49. 50 51

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mitigating the hostilities surrounding nuclear bombs.52 Even in cases where the scientists did experience profound concerns over the work they were doing, many recalled feelings of jubilation after hearing of the weapons’ successful deployment. One young Manhattan Project scientist recalled, “I confess that the feeling of concern I had felt during the preceding three years on the project for what we were engaged in was lost that evening in a feeling of relief at the relaxation of security, pride in our part in ending the war, and even pride at the effectiveness of the weapon.”53 The jubilation of the young scientist was understandable; the creation of the atomic bomb and its use meant that his efforts over the past three years had been a success. Science had traditionally been practiced in near isolation from the state and politics; the Manhattan Project gave scientists the opportunity to more actively participate in their nation’s affairs. In working on the atomic bomb, scientists had used their talents to aid their nation in a time of war. Their endeavours had been successful and their objective had been achieved: they had saved American lives. The extent of the scientists’ social and political influence must not be exaggerated. Even though the scientists were arguably the most wellinformed about the bomb’s existence and potential !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Herbert F. York, quoted in Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, 204. 53 A. Squires, quoted in Smith, A Peril and a Hope, 81. 52

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use, the bombing of Hiroshima still came as a shock to many. This can be partly attributed, in some cases, to the scientistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lack of comprehension about what they were really working on. However, it must be remembered that, essential as the scientists were to the project, the vast majority were not involved in the political processes surrounding the proposed purpose of the bomb. Only a handful of people ostensibly had some political sway in the decision-making processes surrounding the bomb and, as made evident, their opinions in reality meant very little to the real decision-makers, General Stimson and President Truman. Thus, the scientistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; role in the destruction caused by the two bombs was in the creation of the weapons themselves, not in their deployment, which undoubtedly lent some comfort and, to some extent, assuaged their feelings of guilt. Conclusion The Manhattan Project and the creation and dropping of the atomic bombs were traumatic experiences in the lives of the atomic scientists, whether or not the scientists explicitly thought of them as such. The vast number of interviews, articles, memoirs, and other literature produced by the scientists about the Manhattan Project and their role in it is indicative of this. This could be a reaction to changing societal views on the morality and justification for the use of the atomic bomb; indeed, public opinion on whether the bombâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use was justified shifted as the Second World War become more and more a distant memory, especially when the international consequences of !

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the atomic age, such as the Cold War, emerged and grew. Consequently, the scientistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; motivations for working on the Manhattan Project were called into question and undoubtedly many of the scientists felt compelled to respond. However, this cannot account for all of the literature produced by the atomic scientists that many felt compelled to write for a variety of reasons. Some scientistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; writings read like a confession of past sins, like a working through of a traumatic experience whereas some scientists are unapologetic about their participation; regardless of their respective stances, most seemed to feel the need to provide some justification for their actions. Most scientists continued to work in the field after the Manhattan Project ended, but where they concentrated their efforts within the field, differed from scientist to scientist. Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam continued to develop and improve nuclear weaponry, most notably the hydrogen bomb. Others, like Joseph Rotblat, refused to work on anything related to weaponry or war. Some even went so far as to actively organize and participate in protests against nuclear research and development. Some scientists seemed to be completely broken by their experience. Most notable among these ranks was Oppenheimer who spoke out against the creation of the hydrogen bomb and whose security clearance was revoked in 1956. This is the capstone of irony. The scientist who was ultimately the driving force behind the project and who was its most ardent defender was to be the one most completely destroyed by it, both in his

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personal and political life. This is perhaps not ironic at all as no one is impervious to the effects of destructive weapons; whether they be physical or psychological, the effects of the development and deployment of atomic weapons will always be decidedly and globally grievous.

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Bibliography Agnew, Harold, interview with Theresa Strottman on November 20, 1992. Manhattan Project Voices. http://manhattanprojectvoices.org/oralhistories/harold-agnews-interview-1992 Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Bradley, John. Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1995. Chevalier, Haakon. Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship. New York: George Braziller, 1965. Compton, Arthur Holly. Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Geisen, Bernhard. “The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Diven, Ben. Interview by the American Heritage Foundation, April 8, 2003, transcript. http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/o ral-histories/ben- divens-interview. Fisher, Phyllis. Los Alamos Experience. New York and Tokyo: Japan Publications, Inc., 1985. Franck, James, et al. “The Franck Report, June 11, 1945” in The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age.

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Edited by Michael B. Stoff, Jonathan F. Fanton, and R. Hal Williams. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Freed, Fred and Len Giovannatti. The Decision to Drop the Bomb. New York: CowardMcCann, Inc., 1965. Hijiya, James A. “The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 144, no. 2 (2000): 123167. Hunner, Jon. Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Palevsky, Mary. Atomic Fragments: A Daughter’s Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Polenberg, Richard. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002. Rhode, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Seaborg, Glenn. Interview by Stephane Groueff, February 11, 1965, transcript. Voices of the Manhattan Project. http://manhattanprojectvoices.org/oralhistories/glenn-seaborgs-interview Smith, Alice Kimball . A Peril and a Hope, The Scientists’ Movement in America: 1945-47. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Teller, Edward. Interviewed by S.L. Sanger. 1989. http://manhattanprojectvoices.org/oralhistories/edward-tellers-interview

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Teller, Edward. Memoirs: a Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub, 2001. Thorpe, Charles. Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Vaslow, Fred. Interviewed by Cindy Kelly, August 13, 2013. Walker, J. Samuel. Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Seth H. Neddermeyer, interview by John L. Greenberg. Pasadena, California, May 7, 1984. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives. Retrieved November 3, 2014 from the World Wide Web: http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:O H_Neddermeyer_S

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