Blog Mirror: 1920 Swift & Company Advertisement

1920 Swift & Company Advertisement

Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Mrs. Buttersworth depart. Was Lex Anteinternet: Exit Mia.

Back on May 2, before we ended up wherever we currently are on the national timeline, I posted an item about the departure of Mia from the Land O Lakes label. That item is here:

Lex Anteinternet: Exit Mia.: On July 8, 1921, Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association, a dairy cooperative, formed for the purpose of marketing their products. ...

I frankly thought the banishment of young Indian woman, who was drawn for the label by a Native American artist, from the labels was misguided.  But in that article I noted a couple of other such labels that featured depictions of a clearly racist origin:

Slowly, and sometimes controversially, after that time, people began to reconsider the depiction of people it had used in advertising where those people had been minorities.  It didn't just apply to Indians, of course, but too all sorts of things.  Sombrero wearing Mexican cartoon characters and bandits disappeared from Tex-Mex fast food signs.  Quaker Oats' "Aunt Jemima went from being a woman who was clearly associated with Southern household post civil war servants, who had only lately been slaves, in an undoubtedly racist depiction, to being a smiling middle aged African American woman whom Quaker Oats hoped, probably accurately", would cause people to forget what being an "aunt" or "uncle" meant to African Americans.  As late as 1946 Mars Inc. would feel free to do something similar but without the racist depiction and use the "uncle" moniker  and a depiction of  well dressed elderly African American for Uncle Ben's Rice, something they've kept doing as they'd never gone as far as Quaker Oats.  And these are just common well known examples.  There are leagues of others.

Well, the zeitgeist has caught up with Quaker and Mars.  Those labels are going.  As the CEO of Quaker stated:

While work has been done over the years to update the brand in a manner intended to be appropriate and respectful, we realize those changes are not enough

I was frankly surprised that these depictions weren't sent packing years ago, but departing from a successful brand logo isn't easily done. I frankly think sending both depictions down the road is long overdue.  As for Mrs. Butterworth? Well, I don't know that the amorphous Jabby like bottle of Mrs. Buttersworth depicts anyone of any race. 

Indeed, the Buttersworth trade dress has been oddly successful.  In 2009 a contest was held in which her first name was chosen, with that choice being "Joy".  In 2019 she was paired up with Col. Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken in an advertisement for chicken and waffles (something I've never had but which strikes me as a disgusting combination) which spoofed the dancing scene from Dirty Dancing.  She doesn't really strike me as a racist depiction of members of any race, but what is clear is that her 1961 introduction by Pinnacle Foods was an attempt to riff off of Aunt Jemima.

Getting back to that latter moniker, the reason that blacks legitimately find that logo offensive actually is well illustrated by an item that went up here earlier this week on June 15, the same day we depicted the Duluth lynchings. That was in the photograph of the Harding household cook, Inez P. McWhorter. That depiction his here:

Candidate Harding's household cook was photographed for the news wires.

  Inez P.McWhorter, Harding family's cook.

Things seemed to be slow in Washington D. C., where weekday summertime golfing at Chevy Chase was being enjoyed.

Now, there's nothing racist in the photograph  Ms. McWhorter was a household cook and that's honorable, real, work.  A lot more honorable and a lot more real than a lot of work that we label as "work" today.  But wasn't so honorable was the original news service caption, which read:

Inez P.McWhorter, the Aunt Jemima of the Harding household photographed at the Harding residence today.

I didn't post that as it is offensive, and rightly so.

Use of the "Aunt Jemima" name for the product goes back to 1889, and was more racist in depiction as you go back in time.  I note that as I'm not certain that the news service caption was using that simply as Ms. McWhorter was a black domestic cook, or because they were making an intentional reference to the product.  I suspect the former, but I don't really know.  You can seen in either instance, however, why blacks legitimately found the product usage to be racist and offensive, even if Ms McWhorters actual work was dignified.

As an aside, what is she wearing on her right wrist?

Well, anyway, I'll bet Land O Lakes is glad they made Mia depart when they did. They'd have to now, and it'd have the appearance of a corporation bending to the winds of the day for the bottom line, as the latter items do.  The irony is that the Uncle Bens and Aunt Jemima trade dress should have left long ago, and that Mrs. Buttersworth is just. . . whatever it is.

On a final note, Cream of Wheat is debating changing their logo too. That depiction, however, is just a male cook who is black.  Perhaps it had a racist origin, but he's a strong looking guy doing real work as well.  Should that leave?

Exit Mia.

On July 8, 1921, Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association, a dairy cooperative, formed for the purpose of marketing their products.  They didn't like the name, however, and held a contest that ended up selecting a submission made in 1926, that being Land O Lakes, noting the nature of Minnesota itself, although we don't associate lakes much with dairy.    In 1926 the coop received a painting of an Indian woman holding a carton of their butter, looking forward at the viewer, with lakes and forests in the background.  They liked it so much they adopted it as their label and while they had it stylized by Jess Betlach, an illustrator, the image itself remained remarkably consistent with the original design, which says something as illustrations by Betlach sometimes approached the cheesecake level and depictions of Indian women in the period often strayed into depictions of European American models instead of real Indian women.

For reasons unknown to me, the depiction of the young Indian women acquired the nickname "Mia" over time.

And now she's been removed from the scene, quite literally.

In 1928 the Land O Lakes dairy cooperative hired an advertising agency to come up with a logo for them. The logo that was produced featured an Indian woman kneeling in front of a lake scene, with forests surrounding the lake, and holding a box of Land O Lakes butter in a fashion that basically depicted the woman offering it to the viewer.  From time to time Land O Lakes actually changed the logo on a temporary basis, but it always featured Mia, but not always in the same pose.  On at least one occasion she was shown in profile near a lake and seemingly working (churning) something in a pot.  On another, she was rowing a canoe.

Frederic Remington nocturn, The Luckless Hunter.  This is a fairly realistic depiction of a native hunter in winter, on the typically small range horse of the type actually in use on the Northern Plains.

The adoption of Indian depictions and cultural items as symbols in European American culture goes a long ways back, so Land O Lakes adopting the logo in 1928 was hardly a novelty.  In ways that we can hardly grasp now, European American culture began to admire and adopt Indian symbols and depictions even while the armed struggle between the native peoples and European Americans was still going on.  Frontiers men dating back all the way to the 18th Century adopted items of native clothing, which may be credited to its utility as much as anything else.  In 1826, however, a tribe was romantically treated in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, which virtually defined the "noble" image of the Indian even as the "savage" image simultaneously kept on keeping on.  The popular genre of Western art continued to do the same in the last half of the 19th Century, and often by the same artists (with Russel being an exception, as he always painted natives sympathetically, and Shreyvogel being the counter exception, as always did the opposite).  Cities and towns provided an example of this as their European American settlers used Indian geographic names from fairly early on, after the original bunch of European place names and honorifics ceased to become the absolute rule, with some western towns, such as Cheyenne, being named after Indian tribes that were literally being displaced as the naming occured.

William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody and Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, i.e., Sitting Bull, in 1885, the year he joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.  Sitting Bull received $50.00 per week, as sum that's equivalent to $1,423.00 in current U.S. Dollars.  He worked for the show for four months, during which time he made money on the side charging for autographs.  This came only nine years after he was present at Little Big Horn and only five years before his death at the hands of Indian Police at age 59, just two weeks before Wounded Knee.

The entire cultural habit took on a new form, however, in the late 19th Century, just as the Frontier closed. Oddly, the blood was hardly frozen at Wounded Knee when a highly romanticized depiction of American Indians began.  Starting perhaps even before the last major bloodletting of the Frontier had occurred, it arguably began with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, which employed Indian warriors who had only lately been engaged in combat with the United States.

The principal Indian performers, if we wish to consider them that, were men, as were most of the performers.  But women had a role in Wild West shows as well,  as did children.  As Cody was not unsympathetic to Indians in general, his portrayals of Indian women and children were not likely to have been too excessive, but this is not true of all wild west shows of the era, some of which grossly exaggerated female Indian dress or which dressed them down for exploitative reasons.

Nonetheless, as this occurred, a real romantic view of Plains Indians arose and white performers affected Indian dress or exaggerated Indian dress and an entire romanticization of a people who were still very much alive and not living in the best of circumstances oddly took off.  White performers made the circuit performing as romantic Indian couples and an adopted romanticized Indian culture seeped into the general American culture in various ways, including in the form of depictions and ritual.

Camp Fire Girls in 1917.  The first half of the 20th Century saw the rise of the scouting movment and in the English speaking world this spread to girls after it has become very successful with boys.  The Boy Scout movement had military scouting and hence military men as the model for its idealized muscular Christianity movement, but no such equivalent existed for girls.  In the US this came to be compensated for, however, by the adoption of the Indian woman as the model, as she was outdoorsy and rugged by default.

This saw its expression in numerous different ways, including in its incorporation into the Boy Scout inspired female scouting organizations and in popular "Indian maiden" literature.  But it also saw the development of the use of depictions of Indians in advertising and popular culture.

Out of uniform Girl Scouts in 1912 in clothing and hair styles that were inspired by presumed native female dress.

In 1901 one of the legendary American motorcycle companies simply named itself "Indian", for example.  Savage Firearms named itself that in 1894, with there being no intent to demean Indians but rather to name itself after Indian warriors.  Cleveland called its baseball team the "Indians".  The NFL being a late comer to American professional sports, the Washington football franchise didn't get around to naming itself the "Redskins" until 1932 in contrast.

The psychology behind this cultural adaption is an interesting one, with a conquering people doing the rare thing of partially co-opting the identify of the conquered people, even as those people remained in a period of trying to adopt to the constantly changing policy of the post frontier American West.  Celebrated in their pre conquest state, and subject to any number of experiments in their day to day lives, it was as if there were two different groups of people being dealt with, the theoretical and the real, with the real not doing so well with the treatment they were receiving.  Indeed, that's still the case.

Following World War Two this began to be reconsidered, with that reconsideration really setting in during the 1970s.  Books and films, and films based on books, that reflected this reconsideration became widely considered. Thomas Berger's brilliant Little Big Man remains in its brilliant and accurate reflection of Plains Indian culture what True Grit is to the culture of the southern American European American West.  Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee destroyed any remaining claim the Army had to the event being a battle definitively.  The 1973 American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee brought the whole thing into sharp focus.  Kids who had gone to school their entire lives with Big Chief writing tablets would finish the decade out with Son Of Big Chief, who looked a lot more like he'd been with AIM at Wounded Knee or maybe even at Woodstock.

American Indian Movement flag.

As this occured, people questioned the old symbols and depictions. But it wasn't really until the late 1990s that the commercial and popular ones began to go.

Slowly, and sometimes controversially, after that time, people began to reconsider the depiction of people it had used in advertising where those people had been minorities.  It didn't just apply to Indians, of course, but too all sorts of things.  Sombrero wearing Mexican cartoon characters and bandits disappeared from Tex-Mex fast food signs.  Quaker Oats' "Aunt Jemima went from being a woman who was clearly associated with Southern household post civil war servants, who had only lately been slaves, in an undoubtedly racist depiction, to being a smiling middle aged African American woman whom Quaker Oats hoped, probably accurately", would cause people to forget what being an "aunt" or "uncle" meant to African Americans.  As late as 1946 Mars Inc. would feel free to do something similar but without the racist depiction and use the "uncle" moniker  and a depiction of  well dressed elderly African American for Uncle Ben's Rice, something they've kept doing as they'd never gone as far as Quaker Oats.  And these are just common well known examples.  There are leagues of others.

But removing labels and depictions has been slow.  The Washington football team remains tagged with the clearly offensive name "the Redskins".  Cleveland finally retired the offensive Chief Wahoo from their uniforms only in 2018.

So what about Mia?

She started leaving, sort of, in 2018 when the logo was redesigned so that the knees of the kneeling woman were no longer visible, in part because in the age of easy computer manipulation she became a target for computer pornification by males with a juvenile mindset. That fact, however probably amplified the criticism of the logo itself, which was changed to being just a head and shoulder depiction.  Now, she's just gone.

But did that really make sense, or achieve anything, in context?

A literal association between Native Americans and dairly would be odd and was probably never intended.  While native agriculture varied widely, no Indian kept cattle until after they'd been introduced by European Americans and cattle are, of course, not native to North America.  Indians did adapt to ranching in the West, something that's rarely noted for some reason, and indeed the entire Mexican ranching industry is a mestizo one and therefore a blending of two cultures by definition.  On the northern plains some Indians were working as cowboy and even ranchers by the early 20th Century and Southwestern tribes had adopted livestock in the form of sheep by the mid 19th.

But dairy cattle are a different deal and there's no, in so far as I'm aware, Native American association with it.  Indeed, 74% of Native Americans are lactose intolerant.*  This isn't surprising as its fairly well established that lactose tolerance is a product of evolutionary biology.  By and large, the vast majority of cultures have had no reason over time to consume the milk of cattle they were keeping, which were kept first for food, and then for labor, and then as things developed, for labor until they could not, at which time they became food.  Milk wasn't high on the list.  And for Native Americans, being one of the three inhabited continents in which cattle were not native, it was obviously off the list.**

Some critics have called the imagery racist. North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Buffalo, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, says it goes “hand-in-hand with with human and sex trafficking of our women and girls, by depicting Native women as sex objects".  But that comment seems misplaced with this logo. She's definitely not the odd blue eyed "Navajo" woman wearing blue beads that still appears on the doors of the semi tractors of Navajo Express.

Indeed, the irony of Mia is that in her last depictions she was illustrated by Patrick DesJarlait, who was a Red Lakes Ojibwe from Minnesota.  He not only painted her, but he painted her wearing an Ojibwe dress.  So she was depicted as an Indian woman, by an Indian artist.

It's hard to see a man panting a woman of his own tribe, fully and appropriately dressed, as being a racist or exploitative act.

Indeed, the opposite really seems true.  The original dairy co-op was really trying to honor their state in the name and they went the next step and acknowledged the original owners.  Mia was the symbol of the original occupants.

And now she's gone, and with that, the acknowledgment of who was there first.

Which doesn't seem like a triumph for Native acknowledgment.

________________________________________________________________________________

*As are 70% of African Americans and 15% of European Americans. Surprisingly 53% of Mexican Americans are, in spite of dairy products being common to the Mexican dietary culture.  A whopping 95% of Asian Americans are lactose intolerant.

Just recently I've come to the conclusion that I'm somewhat lactose intolerant myself, something I seem to be growing into in old age.  Only mildly so, and I've only noticed it recently.  My children, however, have problems with dairy.  My wife does not. So they must get that via me.

***Cattle are not native to the new world or Australia, but are found just about everywhere else.

Blog Mirror: Dumbest Blog Ever: Advertising Space

Advertising Space

Poster Saturday: Technicolor is Natural Color

Actually, it isn't.  And this isn't a poster either, but an advertisement.

Oh well.

Technicolor was beautiful movie color, irrespective of it not being really natural.  It was sort of more natural than natural.  It actually evolved, and pretty significantly, from when the process, which I'll skip the details on, was first introduced.

The first Tecnicolor motion picture,  using the first process, was released in 1917.  That movie, The Gulf Between, required a special projector and had a limited run.  Of course, it's now a lost film, destroyed in a fire in 1961, with only some snippets remaining.

Scene from The Gulf Between.

The second technicolor movie was 1922 The Toll Of The Sea, which didn't require a special projector and which is still around.

Scene from The Toll Of The Sea.

Caffeine in shaving cream?

Takeaways from Super Bowl LIV

The Akron Pros, the 1920 Champions.

1.  The Roman numerals for 54 are LIV.

When it gets to the big Roman numerals, I always get confused.

2.  I'm older than the Super Bowl, although not by much.

The National Football League completed its 100th Season, which means that the NFL started in 1919.

Except it didn't. The NFL was founded on August 20, 1920.  It hasn't started its 100th Season. This is the second year in a row that they've claimed 1919 as their foundational date, but it isn't.

3.  The halftime show was weird.

And I do mean weird.  I'm not sure what was up with it.  Shakira's singing was lackluster and her dancing was both embarrassing and odd.  Jennifer Lopez was effectively nude. 

The whole thing was much like a cabaret scene out of Godfather II, which is supposed to demonstrate the fallen nature of pre revolution Cuba.

4. Why does a football game require a big halftime show?

I still don't get why this is.  The entire thing was not only weird, but really overblown.

5.  Electric cars are set to replace gasoline engined cards quicker than I supposed.

I had thought it would be a decade.  The full scale electric car advertisements by major automobile manufacturers would strongly suggest that it'll be quicker than that.  More on that tomorrow.

6.  Virtue signalling works better in the abstract.

A few liberal media outlets spent some time hand wringing over the Kansas City Chiefs and their traditions, with the dying New Republic taking time out from advertising its trip to Cuba this year (maybe to see the cabaret?) to really dive off into the shallow end of this pool.

It's probably because my interest in sports is so small that I don't really worry much about this, but at any rate everyone seemed to get over it for the game.

7.  It was the Women's Year in advertising, sort of, if not in the halftime show.

A few companies spent some time really attempting to show that they back women and women's causes, even showing some in football uniforms, even though actual physical size and strength requirements make football solidly a male game.  To watch them, we'd nearly suppose that there was a campaign to require female admittance into the NFL, when in fact women are free to enter the NFL if they can play the game.  Biology generally prevents that, although I'd be surprised if the day doesn't arrive when there's a female kicker (there was, fwiw, a female professional baseball player as early as 1922).  That's not the point.

The point is that its really odd to see the advertisements in the same year that featured a blatantly sexist halftime show.  Perhaps a person isn't supposed to say that, as both performers are Latina performers and much of the performance was in Spanish, but a pole dancing Jennifer Lopez isn't intrinsically different from a pole dancer at a strip club, particularly as Lopez started off wearing less than strippers probably wear when they start their act. 

It's weird how in an era when we're having a trial of Harvey Weinstein for being a creeper we're parading Shakira and Lopez around nearly nude on stage.

Something is wrong with that.

8.  The NFL has no pre war heroes?

Or so it would seem.

Professional football really wasn't a big deal until after World War Two, but you would think that in listing its fifty great players for its pre game celebration of its centennial it'd have found at least a few of them who played the game before 1945.

What about Jim Thorpe, for example?

9.  Mr. Peanut is back.

Thank goodness.

June 6, 1919. Portents

When we think of this day in terms of history, we naturally think of June 6, 1944.  But just a short twenty five years prior there was a lot going on, including a lot associated with the war that had just ended . . . and some that would figure in the war to come.

Some American troops who were not American citizens were becoming the same.

"Large group of overseas soldiers who applied for Naturalization, June 6, 1919. Man in center is Raymond Crist, Director of Citizenship, Bureau of Naturalization, Department of Labor".  June 6, 1919.

Those men had survived the Great War.  I wonder where they were when the Second World War came about and was raging?

Russian POWs who had survived at least the latter part of the war remained in German captivity while their country was itself aflame.

"Interior of the Clothing Supply Room, at American Red Cross Headquarters, Berlin. Sgt. Carl Olson, U.S.A. Supplying two Russian officers, Prisoners, with complete new outfits, Berlin."  The officer on the right retains the Imperial Roundel on his cap and the one on the left is a Cossack.  I wonder if they returned home?

 Russian POWs in a POW camp, June 6, 1919.

I really wonder about the fate of the men depicted above.  All we can really tell is that if they returned home, and most likely did, that fate was grim.  The country they had fought for was in a horrific civil war and they were of military age.  They were likely going into it, and no doubt many didn't survive it. Those who did, had World War Two in front of them, and no doubt many of the men shown here, if still living during the Second World War, served in their second war with the Germans.

And the nature of their country they had served here would never be the same again.

Residents of Cheyenne received the word that the last of Wyoming's Guardsmen still in service were now on their way home.

They were returning, of course, by sea.

Hampton Roads, Virginia.  June 6, 1919.  Hampton Roads was a major Navy installation.  It would have been busy in 1919, just as it would have been in 1944.

One country turned towards regulating the air, and became the first to do so.

Air Board ensign from 1922 and 1923.

Canada established its Air Board, making it the first country to have a regulatory body over air travel.  It's duties would be assumed by a successor entity in 1923.

An older means of transportation was also in the news.

Man o' War won the Belmont stakes, the first race on his way to fame.

Chicago Police Department inspection at Grant Park, June 6, 1919

Chicago's finest, who were about to endure one of the worst decades in their history, due to Prohibition, stood for inspection.

Mussolini's fascists, meanwhile, published their Manifesto in an Italian newspaper.  They were on their rise and just becoming a force that some would come to think, for a time, was the wave of the future, including some in the free world who thought that such movements had perhaps eclipsed democracy.

Here's what it stated:

Italians! Here is the program of a genuinely Italian movement. It is revolutionary because it is anti-dogmatic, strongly innovative and against prejudice.
For the political problem: We demand:
a) Universal suffrage polled on a regional basis, with proportional representation and voting and electoral office eligibility for women.
b) A minimum age for the voting electorate of 18 years; that for the office holders at 25 years.
c) The abolition of the Senate.
d) The convocation of a National Assembly for a three-years duration, for which its primary responsibility will be to form a constitution of the State.
e) The formation of a National Council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made from the collective professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a General Commission with ministerial powers.
For the social problems: We demand:
a) The quick enactment of a law of the State that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers.
b) A minimum wage.
c) The participation of workers' representatives in the functions of industry commissions.
d) To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants.
e) The rapid and complete systemization of the railways and of all the transport industries.
f) A necessary modification of the insurance laws to invalidate the minimum retirement age; we propose to lower it from 65 to 55 years of age.
For the military problem: We demand:
a) The institution of a national militia with a short period of service for training and exclusively defensive responsibilities.
b) The nationalization of all the arms and explosives factories.
c) A national policy intended to peacefully further the Italian national culture in the world.
For the financial problem: We demand:
a) A strong progressive tax on capital that will truly expropriate a portion of all wealth.
b) The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor.
c) The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.

Or, in the published Italian:

Italiani!
Ecco il programma di un movimento sanamente italiano. Rivoluzionario perché antidogmatico e antidemagogico; fortemente innovatore perché antipregiudizievole. Noi poniamo la valorizzazione della guerra rivoluzionaria al di sopra di tutto e di tutti. Gli altri problemi: burocrazia, amministrativi, giuridici, scolastici, coloniali, ecc. li tracceremo quando avremo creata la classe dirigente.

Per questo NOI VOGLIAMO:
Per il problema politico

a. Suffragio universale a scrutinio di lista regionale, con rappresentanza proporzionale, voto ed eleggibilità per le donne.

b. Il minimo di età per gli elettori abbassato ai 18 anni; quello per i deputati abbassato ai 25 anni.

c. L'abolizione del Senato.

d. La convocazione di una Assemblea Nazionale per la durata di tre anni, il cui primo compito sia quello di stabilire la forma di costituzione dello Stato.

e. La formazione di Consigli Nazionali tecnici del lavoro, dell'industria, dei trasporti, dell'igiene sociale, delle comunicazioni, ecc. eletti dalle collettività professionali o di mestiere, con poteri legislativi, e diritto di eleggere un Commissario Generale con poteri di Ministro.

Per il problema sociale:
NOI VOGLIAMO:

a. La sollecita promulgazione di una legge dello Stato che sancisca per tutti i lavori la giornata legale di otto ore di lavoro.

b. I minimi di paga.

c. La partecipazione dei rappresentanti dei lavoratori al funzionamento tecnico dell'industria.

d. L'affidamento alle stesse organizzazioni proletarie (che ne siano degne moralmente e tecnicamente) della gestione di industrie o servizi pubblici.

e. La rapida e completa sistemazione dei ferrovieri e di tutte le industrie dei trasporti.

f. Una necessaria modificazione del progetto di legge di assicurazione sulla invalidità e sulla vecchiaia abbassando il limite di :età, proposto attualmente a 65 anni, a 55 anni.

Per il problema militare:
NOI VOGLIAMO:

a. L'istituzione di una milizia nazionale con brevi servizi di istruzione e compito esclusivamente difensivo.

b. La nazionalizzazione di tutte le fabbriche di armi e di esplosivi.

c. Una politica estera nazionale intesa a valorizzare, nelle competizioni pacifiche della civiltà, la Nazione italiana nel mondo.

Per il problema finanziario:
NOI VOGLIAMO:

a. Una forte imposta straordinaria sul capitale a carattere progressivo, che abbia la forma di vera ESPROPRIAZIONE PARZIALE di tutte le ricchezze.

b. II sequestro di tutti i beni delle congregazioni religiose e l'abolizione di tutte le mense Vescovili che costituiscono una enorme passività per la Nazione e un privilegio di pochi.

c. La revisione di tutti i contratti di forniture di guerra ed il sequestro dell'85% dei profitti di guerra.

That manifesto did include some radical elements, particularly in regards to the Church, but like a lot of radical movements its radicalism was largely hidden or obscured except where it appealed to simplistic populist elements. There was a lot of that going on in this time frame and it would help bring the world into war in 1939. For that matter, it helped cause a lot of big wars for the remainder of the 20th Century.

Worth noting, and contrary to the way that some latter day pundits tend to view it, the manifesto demonstrated Fascism's hostility to religion.  And while it had very strong nationalistic and militaristic elements, it combined those with socialistic elements, which was true of it wherever it was and in all its normal forms.   For these reasons, the conventional defining it on a left and right basis isn't really accurate, which has caused some people to debate its classification on the political right from time to time.

Well, at least there was something you could really sink your teeth into. Canned whale.

It's not actually the food or cooking depicted. . . .

FILSON FOOD: CAST IRON BREAKFAST SCRAMBLE

It's the setting.

Marketing genius, really.

So on a morning when I went up and microwaved a breakfast burrito I bought from the youth group last Sunday, which is 100% more breakfast than I usually eat, it's a bit deflating to see some guy dressed in checked wool cooking on a wood burning stove.

Urban Farming, 1944. Rural Electricity, 1919.

This was a stunt to some extent. The Secretary of whatever it was (Agriculture?) didn't normally travel all over the Eastern Seaboard with Sparky and Rex and put in garden fields on common urban grounds.  And he probably didn't finish the plowing  here.

But on a day in which my cell phone started ringing at 7:15. . . . eell even though I know that this photograph was taken less than two months prior to Operation Overlord, in which thousands of men would die, and the same amount of time from when the Allies would take Rome, for which thousands of men had died, and three months away from the landings on Guam, it's hard for me to not look at this photo and be wistful.

Wistful isn't the way the electric companies were looking at thing a little over twenty years prior.  This electric company advertisement aimed at farmers ran in the April 12, 1919 issue of The Country Gentleman.

I wonder where the electric company thought we'd been fighting?  Sure, the Boy had seen a lot of the world, but it had probably been something like Camp Dix, and then on to some rural French town that didn't have electricity and where the villagers were still using privies, to some small German town that probably did but where he was told not to associate with the Boche, and then back to St. Naziere which was a rough dock town where he lived in a tent, to Camp Dix again.

"[E]lectric lights, running water, shower baths, and all that sort of thing"?

Probably no lights, shaving in cold water and showering in the same, and all that sort of thing.

He probably hadn't become that used to "city" life and he was probably sick of "army life" by this time.

Oh well.  Electricity was coming on everywhere.

Where have all the classifieds gone?

I've written here before about the decline of newspapers, which is hardly news.  The slow death of the print newspaper industry is well known.

But one thing I didn't appreciate until just recently is that, apparently, people don't advertise in papers much anymore.

I've never been a big classified advertisement reader.  Some people really are, or I guess I should say that they used to be.  I've known people who followed classified advertisements as close as they did the news, which you'd know as they'd assume that other people did as well.  As in "did you see the advertisement for. . . ?"  As I don't read the classified advertisements unless I'm really looking for something, the answer is generally "no".

Well, I have been looking through the local classifieds recently as I need to replace one of our old trucks.  And its been a real shock.

The Tribune used to have a lot of automobile advertisements in the classifieds from people selling their own cars. Indeed, at one time (and maybe still) there was a separate category for four wheel drives, and classic cars, etc.  There were always a lot of cars in the paper.

Well, no longer.

Indeed, now about the advertisements for cars in the paper are those placed by actual car dealers, including the used car dealers.  That's about it.

This realization caused me to look at the remainder of the ads.  In the Sunday paper there were very few "help wanted" ads.  Entire categories of miscellaneous stuff no longer appears there.  The entire section seems to be down to a selection of Sunday only "help wanted" ads and ads by local car dealers. Some pets appear there for sale as well.

I guess it makes sense, with fewer people subscribing to the paper, why place an ad there, particularly if you don't subscribe to it yourself.  The Trib claims it has the biggest readership that its ever had, if you include the online readers, but they don't seem to be placing ads, so if that's true, and I suppose that translates to daily readership of a sort, its intrinsically different in this fashion.

I'm sure people still sell their own stuff, including cars, but where do they advertise them now?

Is the National Football League 100 years old?

That comes up due to an advertisement the NFL ran during the Superb Owl. . . um Super Bowl.



The NFL apparently claims this year, 2019, is its centenary.  But I'm not sure why.  It was actually founded in 1920.  So it's almost 100, but not quite.

I'm actually really surprised, fwiw.  I know that football was a big college game a century ago, but I wouldn't have guess that there were professional football teams of any kind at that point.  I'm knew they were around by the 1940s, and therefore presumably by the 1930s, but not the 1910s.

Good advertisement however.

Why Are Christmastime Perfume Advertisements So Weird?

Why are Christmastime perfume ads so excessively weird? 

Okay, that's weird.  But we didn't mean that sort of weird.

Do women really spend piles of time laying around swimming pools waiting for guys with scruffy beards to show up and molest them? 

Are Italian men actually all overdeveloped mutes?  Was it their inability that doomed their efforts in World War Two?

Italian soldier surrendering to British troops, World War Two.  Or is he just headed to the swimming pool of French speaking wanton Italian women who populate perfume ads?

Are all Italian women actually hanging out by large bodies of water apparently stoned out of their minds and waiting to be taken by the aforementioned mute?

Italian women, circa 1905-15. Waiting for their spot at the pool?

Is it really the case that the state of education has declined in France to such extent that the only sentences that French women can utter are about three or four words long and all have to do with adoring somebody?

The Countess d'Haussonville, leader of the Union of French Women and wartime (WWI) participant in Red Cross efforts in France.  It's almost as if she knew how to say more than "J'adore", or whatever.

Is it really the case that all American women are in their 20s and the seeming victims of Auschwitz starvation, given their pixie like weight, and they hang around on beaches looking pissed off all the time (they're probably hungry) and saying one word sentences of wanton wanting?

Young women smiling. . . and eating. . . maybe those commercial chicks are just really hungry?

Is anything depicted in a perfume advertisement even an appropriate thing to think in the Me Too age?

Is all of this really necessary to sell something which, frankly, just stinks?

Must Watch! CBS Introduction of Army/Navy game 2017 - Chills. From the 2017 Game

2018 Army-Navy Game Uniform: First Infantry Division (Hmmm, not quite sure what I think of this one)

A Hundred Years Ago: Barrington Hall Coffee Advertisement

An interesting advertisement link in on A Hundred Years Ago:

Barrington Hall Coffee Advertisement

Check this out over your morning coffee (I was typing this while enjoying my morning coffee. . . well that's a bit exaggerated as at the time I was killing time while working on a second pot of coffee as I was having a severe reaction to an allergy shot and I tend to rely on the older methods to address that stuff rather than the newer ones. . . so enjoying the context of "gee, I hope this keeps me from going into shock. . . don't follow this advice, it's stupid by the way).

Anyhow, check out the "steel cut" line and the commentary that follows.  Quite interesting.

The first indoor species.

Now that's a scary thought.

Not REI advertising.  No, that we're the "first indoor species", as their advertisement, set out below, in part, notes:

LEARN ABOUT DIVIDEND

Poster Saturday. More American Reserve Power

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago: Hundred-Year-Old Food Advertisements Poem

An interesting look at advertising of some years back:

Hundred-Year-Old Food Advertisements Poem

A Hundred Years Ago: 1918 Advertisement for Skookum Apples

A Hundred Years Ago:  1918 Advertisement for Skookum Apples

Shipping apples all the way to France for your soldier?