Divergent Perspectives of Emperor Ménélik II: From Satirical to Honorable Tributes

Today’s post comes to you courtesy of Matthieu Castillo, a dedicated English Literature student, currently serving as a library intern at the Wolfsonian—FIU. Matthieu hopes to become an academic librarian and desires to promote equity in school curricula and higher education. His persistent dedication is fueled by an intense commitment to advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in educational settings. In the process of accessioning some ephemeral materials in our rare book and special collections library, he encountered some items depicting Emperor Ménélik II of Ethiopia. Matthieu became interested in the very different depictions of the leader created in the wake of his successful defense of his nation during the First Italo-Ethiopian War (1895-1896). Here is his report:

Emperor Ménélik II (1844-1913) is remembered as a heroic figure in his homeland, a leader whose resistance echoes through the annals of Ethiopian history. He is an embodiment of national resilience and pride for his leadership during the First Italo-Ethiopian War. Emperor Ménélik II led his country to victory against Italian forces during the Battle of Adwa (1896) when Italy first attempted to conquer and colonize the region. Ménélik made Ethiopia the first African country to successfully resist European colonization. The Treaty of Addis Ababa, (or New Flower), affirmed Ethiopia’s independence on October 23rd, 1986, and ended the First Italo-Ethiopian War. March 2^nd is celebrated annually as Adwa Victory Day to commemorate Ethiopia’s victory in 1896.

Le Rire magazine cover with caricature of Emperor Ménélik II (1844-1913)

The French magazine Le Rire [Laughter] (1894–1971) used humor in its social and cultural commentary. It aimed to draw readers into a world where real-life events and social discourse intersected. Le Rire adopted an absurdist point of view and used vibrant images and caricatures to spread awareness of the political climate surrounding contemporary global affairs.

In 1897, Le Rire reported Emperor Ménélik II’s defeat of the Italian army. This is an example of how Le Rire involved themselves in international affairs, using their magazine as a resource for information. In this issue, Emperor Ménélik is depicted as a powerful creature, with an exposed Italian woman in his grasp. Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi’s decapitated head lies tucked in Ménélik’s arm, tied to a string, and hanging like a somber victory trophy. It symbolizes the fall of the Crispi’s government in 1896 following defeat in the war. With a crucifix draped on his chest to represent his Christian faith, Ménélik is portrayed as “the king of kings” with a caption that emphasizes his role:  “The good Négus benefits from victory, but he never abuses it.” Calling Ménélik the king of kings highlights his power and lauds his merciful qualities. The visual prominence of crucifix around his neck implies moral superiority. According to this interpretation, Ménélik is a devoted Christian and moral ruler.

On the other hand, this description can be interpreted as a warning. Le Rire might be critical of Emperor Ménélik’s governance. It could be satirical to refer to him as a good Négus who gains from victory, suggesting irony over his image of virtue. It could raise doubts about whether his acts are truly genuine by suggesting a difference between his Christian status and potentially “barbarous” behaviors. It is possible to see Ménélik’s idea of enjoying victory without abusing it as a critique of the dynamics of power relationships and its susceptibility to abuse, therefore discrediting his alleged moral superiority.

The caricature’s creator, Charles Léandre, used stereotyped features to portray Emperor Ménélik. Another interpretation could be that Ménélik reflects the biases that were popular during this era. While Léandre is seemingly congratulating Ménélik on his victory over France’s colonial rival, the unflattering depiction Ménélik still embodies the reigning ideals of European colonialism. The characterization of Ménélik as a monster with abnormal facial features tends to reinforce colonial justifications based on white supremacy. The racist judgment that Africans are “savage and barbaric” is confirmed through this image. Having Crispi’s head suspended from his hat symbolizes the shame and loss that the Italian government faced as an aftermath of their failed conquest, but also implicitly transforms the Christian king into a savage “headhunter.”

One final approach could be that Le Rire could simply be admiring Ménélik. The caricature is purposeful, adhering to the satirical elements that Le Rire has in place. This depiction appears to illustrate what happens when European audiences are unfamiliar with African culture. This lack of understanding, however, does not justify the use of racist parody art. Other depictions of the emperor include political circumstances while avoiding racial stereotypes.

Abynissinan War – The Négus Ménélik. P. Chocolaterie D’Aiguebelle.

Chocolaterie D’Aiguebelle, (a French chocolate factory originally founded by Trappist monks from the abbey Notre-Dame d’Aigubelle, France), depicts Emperor Ménélik in a noble and respectful manner. As a promotional gimmick, the chocolate firm paired their chocolate bars with collecting cards to broaden public awareness on worldwide issues. This specific card includes a portrait of Emperor Ménélik. Like Le Rire, the Chocolaterie d’Aiguebelle praises his successful reign but does not use racist caricature in the process. Rather, the emperor is depicted as sitting on a throne, signifying his position as a sovereign. With a gun at his side, he directs and leads his troops in preparation for the conflict between Italy and Ethiopia. Emperor Ménélik is represented in this image as a ruler rather than a monster, and his clothing serves as a visual cue of his royalty. Ménélik wears more opulent and attractive clothes than the warrior entering his tent, indicating their differences in status.

The collecting cards produced by Chocolaterie D’Aiguebelle demonstrate that it was possible to depict African leaders—like Emperor Ménélik—in an acceptable artistic style and without resorting to racist ridicule. Even though Le Rire‘s first impulse was to celebrate the emperor for his victory, the decapitated head of Franscico Crispi, whose administration went to disgrace with him, serves as an example of how Le Rire depicts Emperor Ménélik as a monster, outside of the barbaric features itself. The chocolate firm pays tribute to Ménélik in a non-offensive manner, depicting him as the king that he truly was.

Ultimately, Emperor Ménélik II is revealed to be a man of morals, in contrast to Le Rire’s “barbarous” depiction of him. He protected Italian officers and punished underlings who killed or mistreated prisoners. His dedication to extending mercy to those who invaded his land demonstrates his generosity and integrity. Ménélik deserves to live on as the hero and monarch that he was, his role of mercy and leadership recognized for all time.

What’s On the Menu? The American Appetite for French Cabaret!

Drawing upon some promised gifts and loans from long-term library supporter and board member, Vicki Gold Levi, The Wolfsonian organized, installed, and opened an exhibition of menus and associated ephemera in time to celebrate this year’s South Beach Wine & Food Festival. Titled What’s on the Menu, this installation examines how restaurant and dinner club owners took advantage of new print technologies and graphic design strategies to create alluring menu covers and printed marketing materials to promote their venues.

The installation, which will be open to the public through May 26, 2024, is divided into two sections and is displayed on two floors: our third-floor library foyer and the vitrines in our first-floor ramp leading to the museum gift shop. One section, subtitled Destination Dining, examines the ways in which a newly mobile leisure class began to travel for pleasure aboard ocean liners, trains, and airships to tourist destinations renowned for their iconic eateries.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Loan

The other section of the exhibition, subtitled Dinner and a Show, focuses on the covers of menus and programs used by restaurant, cabaret, and nightclub owners to pack their venues with patrons hungry not only for food, but for entertainment provided by celebrity performers, risqué vaudeville comedians, titillating burlesque dancers, and glamorous showgirls.  

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

At the outset of the curatorial project, I was faced with an “embarrassment of riches” with so many items from which to choose. Inevitably, the work of a curator involves not only selecting those items that best tell the story, but also weeding out less critical items given the limited space available in vitrines and cases. Fortunately, blogs impose fewer constraints, so I have opted to publish a short series of posts that will allow me to delve more deeply into themes less substantially covered in the installation. In them I will include information that did not make it into the exhibit’s descriptive and interpretative label text and will also feature some items regretfully culled from the physical exhibition.

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

In organizing the exhibition, I was struck by just how many venues used images of scantily clad showgirls on their promotional pieces as their chief form of appeal—the subject of this first post. In the 1930s, many American nightclub owners looked to the Moulin Rouge and other famous Parisian cabarets as a model for attracting customers. The glamorous Chez Paree nightclub opened in the Streeterville neighborhood of Chicago in 1932 and pulled in patrons for more than two and a half decades by offering fine meals served with a side of vaudeville acts, musical entertainment, and chorus girl dancing.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift

Defying the Depression, in the mid-1930s a business conglomerate created a chain of stylish dinner clubs with venues in Chicago, New York, London, and Miami Beach. Taking over the vacant Rainbo Gardens theater on Lawrence Avenue and North Clark Street in Chicago, the businessmen commissioned Jules Stein and Corlett Huff to redesign, redecorate, and reopen it in the summer of 1934 as the French Casino. Stein, who served as president of the Music Corporation of America, hired Clifford Fischer, the legendary booking agent and producer of the Ambassadeurs theatre-restaurant in Paris, to organize, import, and tour a French-inspired cabaret floor show (the “Revue Folies Bergere”), as touring entertainment for the clubs. Chicago Tribune critics described the French Casino as “the most ambitious café entertainment now on view in Chicago.”

The popularity of Chicago’s French Casino likely contributed to the proliferation of other French-themed cabaret clubs in this era, but they may also have been inspired by the release in February 1935 and April 1936 of two Maurice Chevalier films, The Man from the Folies Bergere and Folies Bergere, capitalizing on and perpetuating the French cabaret craze in America.

In April 1935, another French Casino dinner club opened at 1235 Washington Avenue on Miami Beach, this one designed by architect Thomas Hunter Henderson. Like its Chicago namesake, the dinner club gained notoriety for its celebrity entertainers, vaudeville comedians, and cabaret performers.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Promised Gift

By 1937, however, the live comedic performances and chorus girl productions proved too costly to maintain and the theatre was converted into a motion picture cinema.

Inspired by Paris’ world renowned can-can chorus line dancers at the Moulin Rouge cabaret, the Boston showman, E. M. Loew, raised eyebrows in café circles when he opened The Latin Quarter nightclub on Palm Island in Miami Beach in 1940.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection

Two years later, Loew partnered with Lou Walters to open another Latin Quarter on Broadway and 48^th Street in New York City.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection

Despite pessimistic prognostications that New York already had too many nightclubs, their venture flourished, with Loew explaining his formula for success: “Always give the public its money’s worth—wonderful shows, great stars, exquisite girls, good food and keep prices as moderate as possible.” 

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

World renowned for its Broadway revues, New York City, offered a tantalizing array of nightclubs to entertain tourists and locals. In the 1930s, the Hollywood Cabaret Restaurant, on Broadway at 48^th Street, booked the famous heartthrob saxophonist, crooner, and bandleader, Rudy Vallee to draw in the dancing crowd. The dinner club also offered nightly floor shows, with revues drawn from scenes from popular Hollywood movies. At least one critic noted that the chorus girls appeared to have been chosen more for their good looks, shapely legs, and willingness to don revealing costumes, than for their talent as dancers. 

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

The Versailles nightclub opened in a former opera house located in midtown New York in the late 1930s. The club won notoriety for its European-style revues, with showgirls performing three times each evening. It also offered a nightly cabaret featuring singers such as the famous French chanteuse, Edith Piaf.

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

Opening in 1937, the International Casino was the largest of New York City’s popular, if short-lived, dinner clubs. It was housed in a streamlined modern building on Broadway near Times Square before it closed in early 1940.

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

Billboard magazine claimed that Café Zanzibar offered the “best colored show in town” after the 1940 closing of the Cotton Club. It featured top African American performers such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and others and did not exclude Black patrons, though they were seated in separate sections away from center stage.

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

The front cover of a souvenir program for Dave Wolper’s Hurricane Club, located on Broadway at 49^th Street in New York City, indicates that showgirls were a major attraction for its patrons as well. A caricature portrait of jazz bandleader Duke Ellington on the back cover, also suggests that celebrated musicians were another major draw. Ellington had performed at the infamous Cotton Club in 1938, but he next appeared onstage in New York City only after he signed a six-month contract to lead the house band of the Hurricane Club in 1943.

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

The Carnival dinner club operated out of the Hotel Capitol, in North Times Square. Brooklyn-born restaurateur, Nicholas Macario (“Nicky Blair”) served his patrons recipes that he learned from his Italian nonna (grandmother). But Blair also knew that any recipe for success in the business also required providing his customers with top notch entertainment. The Carnival treated its guests to vaudeville schtick, the bawdy humor of comedian greats like Milton Berle, and burlesque acts. Blair also hired Broadway producer, John Murray Anderson, to choreograph and stage “America’s Loveliest Girls in a spectacular revue” to keep the seats filled. 

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

Broadway producer, theater, and nightclub owner, Billy Rose also organized extravaganzas that relied on the beauty and talent of female performers. Rose created the popular Casa Mañana Revue (featuring exotic fan-dancer Sally Rand) for the Texas Centennial Celebrations, and Aquacade spectacles for the Great Lakes Exposition and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In the late ’30s, he filmed and brought his Casa Mañana show to Times Square, where he opened Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub.

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

Nightclubs featuring beautiful showgirls remained popular in New York City well into the 1940s, as soldiers and sailors and marines preparing to deploy overseas during the Second World War were eager for female entertainment before departing. Even after the war’s end, chorus girls remained an important New York City attraction. In an attempt to get the public to embrace a polio vaccination program in 1947, publicity photos were taken of Billy Rose’s leggy showgirls doing their part, lining up to get their shots.

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

Club Harlem dominated Atlantic City’s nightlife for more than fifty years. Opened by the father-son team of Leroy and Cliff Williams in 1935, Club Harlem accommodated two bandstands, a long and spacious bar, and seating for nearly a thousand customers. In the era of segregation, the club featured performances by “Sepia Revue,” “Beige Beauties,” and its own Club Harlem showgirls. Before the club finally closed in the 1980s, it could boast of having hosted such entertainers as: Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., and many others.

Courtesy of Vicki Gold Levi

The Wolfsonian installation, What’s on the Menu includes menus and souvenir programs from a number of West Coast restaurants and nightclubs as well. The exhibit features numerous promotional materials produced for Earl Carroll’s supper club-theater in Hollywood, California, which opened to the public in 1938. The venue proved popular with Hollywood directors and stars, and more than 100 celebrity-autographed concrete blocks lined the exterior “Wall of Fame.” A 20-foot-tall neon portrait of Carroll’s companion, (the glamorous entertainer, Beryl Wallace), was positioned above the entrance alongside Carroll’s trademark words: “Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.” Glamorous performers also adorned the menu covers, postcards, and photograph sleeves used to promote the club.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised Gift

After Carroll and Wallace died in a plane crash in 1948, the theater was sold. But in a fitting tribute to the influence that Parisian cabarets held sway over the American imagination, Las Vegas showman Frank Sennes reopened the club as the Moulin Rouge in 1953.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Promised gift of Vicki Gold Levi

Although most of the items included in this post do not appear in the current exhibition at The Wolfsonian–FIU, there are many other menu covers and other promotional materials sporting French cabaret-themed imagery on display, so those of you residing or visiting South Florida are encouraged to come see “the real thing.”

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Behind the Scenes of a Wolfsonian Library Installation Examining the Dust Bowl

This past fall 2023 semester, I taught a Florida International University undergraduate history class titled America & Movies: Between the Wars, 1919-1939. Covering the eras of “Roaring Twenties” and “Depression Decade,” the students in the class viewed films made during or about the period and compared them to the historical reality as reflected in primary and secondary source materials and the stories that could be teased out of Wolfsonian museum artifacts. In lieu of the final paper project, six students chose instead to curate a library installation that opened just after the semester closed. Amal Albaladejo, George Lee, Dwayne Krier, Valentina Berrio, Sophia Medina, and Carlos Manuel Bleiker Morcillo spent numerous Saturday afternoons at The Wolfsonian Library looking over and selecting items that might help to visually tell the story of the greatest man-made ecological crisis of the 20^th century, the Dust Bowl, 1931-1939. After making an initial selection of materials came the hard work of researching each item and writing interpretive and descriptive texts in the compressed period of a couple of months. As the course was also designed to get them to deconstruct, critically analyze, and historicize films of the era, they were also tasked with choosing some film clips to accompany the artifacts and labels in the cases. Their collective efforts came to fruition last Friday as the student curators and public were invited to see the newly installed exhibition and to hear the students talk about the experience of putting the show together.

A lot of work goes on behind the scenes to put together an installation, involving numerous editors and the skilled labor of The Wolfsonian’s art handlers and exhibition installers.

For the student curators, perhaps the most painful part of the process was having to winnow down the pre-selected artifacts to choose only those essential to the story. Once the final cuts were made, the team laid out the items on paper templates of the cases to see what best fit and what juxtapositions helped reveal connections and transitions.

As the gallery space invites dividing the narrative structure into four sections, the student decided to focus on four: the period when scores of Plains Indian societies and millions of buffalo roamed the plains; the transformation of the grasslands into commercial wheat farms; the 1930s when Depression and drought forced millions from the region beset by dust storms or “black blizzards;” and finally, the Roosevelt Administration’s conservation programs designed to fix the human and ecological tragedy.  

The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Christopher DeNoon Collection for the Study of New Deal Culture

The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

Over the course of selecting items for display, there are times when the exhibition space itself pushes some items from the can to the cannot be included list. This was the case with a poster and a painting that the students hoped to place on opposite sides of the exhibition space. The poster, Indian Court, Federal Building was designed by Louis Siegriest (American, 1899-1989), published by the Works Progress Administration, and exhibited at the San Francisco world’s fair of 1939-1940. After a decade of dealing with dust storms, this poster beckons back to a “pre-fall paradise,” celebrating Plain Indian culture by reproducing figures reminiscent of those drawn on buffalo hide teepees by the native peoples.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

In stark contrast to the patriotic palette used for the government-sponsored poster, the painting, Missouri Woman (1938) by Burr Singer (American, 1912-1992) forces the viewer to confront a care-worn woman in faded red, white, and blue clothes holding an empty flour sack and standing resignedly before a desert-like landscape and dark storm clouds.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

While a few items included in the first section date from the period when the transcontinental railroad brought homesteaders and speculative farmers into the region, most were created in the immediate wake of the Dust Bowl, when railroad companies and nature enthusiasts published nostalgic images of the grasslands, buffalo, and Plains Indian peoples to promote domestic tourism and a new ecological vision of the region’s future. One such item, Whistling-Two-Teeth and the Forty-Nine Buffalos (1939), a children’s book written and illustrated by Naomi Averill with the collaboration of naturalist Donald Peattie, includes color lithographs inspired by Native American paintings to depict their spiritual and harmonious relationship to the land and other creatures.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Before drought, overproduction, and poor farming techniques created the Dust Bowl crisis, most depictions of the region focused not on the native creatures and native peoples but on the farmers who believed that “the rain follows the plow,” and who were determined to transform the arid “desert” grasslands into America’s breadbasket. Railroad companies, land speculators, and the Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged American citizens to occupy and “improve” plots, even as industrial farming techniques and equipment plowed up lands ill-suited to monocropping. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White collaborated with author Erskine Caldwell to publish a pictorial biography of the U.S.A. in the 1930s, choosing an idyllic image of man and machine creating the bountiful harvests that made the Great Plains the nation’s breadbasket.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

By the 1930s, most of the original three hundred million acres of wind-swept grasslands had been plowed under and planted with grain. Industrialized farming and overproduction, combined with the Plains’ natural drought cycle, brought disaster. Dust storms transformed farms into desert dunes, suffocated cattle, and sickened and killed farming folk with dust pneumonia. Photographers commissioned by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Resettlement and Farm Security Administrations documented the magnitude of the disaster while artists rendered prints and paintings to provoke public empathy for refugees.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

The Roosevelt Administration responded to the Dust Bowl crisis by introducing an alphabet soup of federal programs, including the Resettlement Administration (RA), Farm Security Administration (FSA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Soil Erosion Service (SES) and Soil Conservation Service (SCS). Abandoned lands deemed unfit for cultivation were seeded with drought-resistant grasses while RA and FSA employees set up sanitary relief camps in California for the Dust Bowl refugees.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.

Farmers determined to cling to salvageable plots in the arid region were encouraged to adopt new cover crops, contour plowing, and terracing techniques to prevent soil erosion. CCC enrollees and SES and SCS workers planted billions of trees to hold down the topsoil and create shelterbelts and windbreaks. The programs began to pay off. Three years after Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation Act into law in April 1935, soil erosion had dropped 65 percent, and by 1939, the worst of the storms had ceased. Helen West Heller, who produced at least 76 prints, paintings, and murals for the Federal Art Project (or FAP), created this woodcut print titled “Reforestation,” to celebrate the conservation work of Roosevelt’s “Tree Army” or CCC enrollees.

Print, Reforestation, 1935 / by Helen West Heller,

The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

A couple of experts, including Jeffrey Gold of the Living New Deal, showed up for the reception for the student curators and their families, and the students not only presented their installation but intelligently fielded the questions of the attendees.

The student curators’ installation will remain on view through February 11, 2024, so if the winds happen to blow you our way, do drop in.

Varied Views for a Variety of Visitors

Even considering the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday breaks, November and December are invariably the busiest months of the year in terms of exposing The Wolfsonian Library to visitors.

In early November, Florida International University Professor Maria Antonieta Garcia organized and brought students from her Francophone Literature class and members of Le Cercle Francais at FIU to our rare book and special collection library.

Professor Garcia and the students were especially interested in French colonial materials, and we laid out a display of rare books, exposition catalogs, and other items in anticipation of their visit. Museum founder Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. spends a great deal of time in Paris and has substantively added to our already strong holdings of French language materials. Consequently, we were able to show the group materials not previously seen before, including a rare book featuring the artwork of several French Orientalists.

Cavalier dans l’Oued / Louis Antoni

Un intérieur israélite à Constantine / A. Assus

Une chambre d’Ouled Nail / Maurice Bouviolle

Mosquée El-Djedid / Alex Rigorard

L’Oasis / André Suréda, The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift

In addition to these beautiful works of art, the group also perused some more mundane but interesting ephemeral items, such as some recently processed and catalogued collecting cards showing off France’s overseas empire in the 1930s.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Fund

The visitors also had the opportunity to look at some rare children’s books produced in France in tandem with the Exposition Coloniale Internationale held in Paris in 1931, before breaking for some snacks and a tour of our own museum exhibitions.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.

Ironically enough, soon after re-shelving the materials pulled for the class visit, our chief curator was contacted by the former French cultural attaché arranging a visit by a delegation from French Guiana to see some materials from our collection related to their homeland.

Fortunately, it was easy enough to retrieve some rare materials produced for various international and colonial expositions.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.

In mid-November, The Wolfsonian Library also hosted a visit by 12 FIU students from the Fine Arts Student Association (FASA) interested in doing some sketching in the galleries. The trip was organized by Maurizio Gomez and Wolfsonian student + academic engagement coordinator, Molly Channon and provided the students with a guided tour of All the World’s a Stage: The Sketchbooks and Theatrical Designs of Albert Wainwright. Afterwards, the students had the chance to see some more original sketchbooks housed in the library.

One of those items was created by the budding artist, Charles Laborde, a French book illustrator who achieved some notoriety in the 1920s and 1930s for publishing a set of four portfolios celebrating the “rues et visages” of the great metropolitan cities of Europe and America.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

While less well-developed, the early pencil and pen and ink drawings of England and the Basque country in Laborde’s early sketchbook reveal a consistent interest in facades and faces.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.

Each year, Art Basel Miami Beach draws thousands of contemporary art lovers to The Wolfsonian museum. Marco Brambilla, who screened King Size, a meditation on the intertwined legacies of Elvis Presley and Las Vegas, in our lobby last Wednesday, returned after hours to peruse some world’s fair and international exposition materials for inspiration for, and possible integration into, a new project he is developing.

He and his colleague, Kathleen Forde, were especially interested in a souvenir catalog of the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair designed by Donald Deskey.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Exploring the idea of yesterday’s utopian views of tomorrow, they were eager to see some original catalogs dating from more recent fairs. Not only did we have a postcard illustrating the Atomium built for Expo ’58, the international exposition in Brussels, but we also hold a rare oversized book with detailed plans of that and other buildings and structures from the fair.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Michele Oka Doner

While our holdings for the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair and later international expositions are not so comprehensive, we did have a couple of leaflets, view books and children’s pop-up and paper toy assembly books that caught their eye and imagination.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Loan

Even before our open house began on Friday evening, December 8th, curators from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and a group of students led by Indira Sanchez of the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico, came to the library for a sneak peak at the display of materials laid out for the Art Basel visitors.

That same evening, the museum was swarmed with more than a thousand Art Basel enthusiasts; hundreds of these visitors came up to the library foyer where Dr. Harsanyi introduced them to the installation on Albert Wainwright, as they qued up to enter the main reading room to view a Jazz Age-themed display and presentation.

Materials included sheet music covers and books ridiculing the passage of Prohibition, flouting the dry laws, or encouraging thirsty Americans to vacation in Cuba where the rum still flowed like water.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Vicki Gold Levi

To complement the Silhouettes: Image and Word in the Harlem Renaissance exhibition in our seventh-floor gallery, we also included a few of the more than a hundred rare books on the topic donated to our library by Daniel Morris of Historical Design gallery in New York. Many feature dust jacket designs and illustrations by Aaron Douglas and other artists associated with the movement.

Stompin’ at the Savoy / Al Hirschfeld

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Historical Design, New York

Daniel Morris also gifted to The Wolfsonian Library a rare portfolio of pochoir plates by Paul Colin celebrating Josephine Baker.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Historical Design, New York

After moving from New York to Paris, Ms. Baker became an overnight sensation, dancing in the Folies Bergère for more than a decade.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

Not only is she reputed to have introduced and popularized the “Charleston” to Parisians, but she quickly became a renowned singer and star of the French silver screen.

We hope that all of our Art Basel guests and our virtual visitors enjoyed this glimpse inside The Wolfsonian Library. Until next time!

From Prohibition and Flappers to New Dealers and the Lunatic Fringe: Wolfsonian Library Collection Highlights

Over the course of the semester, students enrolled in my Florida International University course, America & Movies, have been watching films and reading primary and secondary sources that illuminate topics of U.S. history between the wars, 1919 through 1939. Recently, that class had the opportunity to come to The Wolfsonian–FIU on Miami Beach to peruse some historical artifacts from the era. Each student was enjoined to pick an item or two from the materials on display, and to deconstruct, critically analyze, and historicize them. What follows is a selection of some of their choices and conclusions.

Several students focused on materials related to U.S. Prohibition. The Wolfsonian Library has several sheet music covers published in anticipation, or in the immediate wake of, the enforcement of the law prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcohol in the United States. At least a couple of these song sheets include cover illustrations that hint at the need for such laws to curb public drunkenness and disorder.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

The vast majority of the sheet music covers in the collection, however, bemoan the closing down of bars and drinking establishments catering to male “tipplers.” Many of the cover illustrations and song lyrics satirized the new moral order being imposed on them by the anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and other moral reformers and advocates of the “sweet dry and dry.”

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

At least one student was interested in the connection between Prohibition enforcement and the spectacular rise to power of bootlegging and rum-running gangsters.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, purchase

Seeing the money to be made supplying the now illegal demand for “hooch,” “giggle water,” “moonshine,” or “bathtub gin,” organized crime assumed control over the booze business. They racked in so much “moolah” (money) that they could afford to bribe municipal officials, prohibition agents, and cops on the beat to ignore their “blind pig” or “gin-joint” clubs. In New York City alone, between 30,00 to 100,000 “speakeasies” sprouted up by 1925 to flout the anti-liquor law.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift made in honor of Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.’s 80^th birthday

Several of the students whose families hailed from Cuba were taken with a series of postcards printed by Bacardí, the largest homegrown family business operating in Cuba in the era. The Cuban government encouraged Americans to escape the Prohibition desert by hopping a steamship and vacationing down in Havana. They promised that the rum still flowed like water in the island nation that lay just 90 miles beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. Prohibition laws.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection

Some American barmen decided to move their operations to Havana to avoid the hassles of Prohibition altogether. Some 7,000 bars in Havana catered to the first great wave of thirsty American tourists arriving in the 1920s and early 1930s. The drinking habits of the tourists is also reflected in the comedy, Havana Widows, released in theaters the same year that Congress repealed the unpopular Prohibition law.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

While some students were enthralled by cultural artifacts from the era of Prohibition, others were drawn to the “new woman” or “flapper” ideal also associated with the Roaring Twenties. Liberated by the automobile from the courtship rituals of chaperoned visits in the family parlor, these socially and sexually liberated girls “bobbed” their hair, drank, smoked cigarettes, and flouted the stifling Victorian conventions of the older generation.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, purchase

Some memorable illustrations capturing the flapper look were penned by the Cuban artist, publisher, and caricaturist, Conrado Walter Massaguer. Inspired by the fame achieved by Charles Gibson in picturing the late Victorian debutant or “Gibson Girl,” Massaguer decided to link his name to his illustrations of the young and care-free women of the 1920s. He published his “Massa-girls” on the covers, inside pages, and even in the advertisements of his Social and Carteles magazines.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi promised gifts

Still, other students were attracted less to the glitter and glamour of the Jazz Age than to the Depression decade, when the global economy took a nosedive and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced an alphabet soup of federal relief projects and programs. Several students were captivated by the N.R.A.—no, not the organization dedicated to rifles—but rather the National Recovery Administration intended to help put big business back on its feet and get unemployed industrial workers back into the factories. The NRA had many promoters and detractors in the day; those in favor of government intervention in the economic sphere through the imposition of voluntary industry codes used patriotic colors (red, white, and blue) and symbols (Uncle Sam and the NRA eagle) to mobilize support for the program on everything from price lists, stickers, to sheet music covers.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, The Christopher DeNoon Collection for the Study of New Deal Culture

The Wolfsonian–FIU, purchase

Industries and business leaders who resisted NRA regulation might be depicted as unpatriotic rugged individualists who endangered Roosevelt’s recovery efforts.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi promised gift

On the other side of the fence, ideologues on both the left and the right criticized the NRA program, and visually lampooned its blue eagle symbol. Communist and socialist critics depicted the thunder bird with bayonet wingtips or pictured it as a capitalist bird of prey with industry and labor clutched in its talons.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Even as the New Dealers squared off with their critics over programs and policies, songwriters were advocating laughter as the most simple and effective way of dispelling the Depression.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

Some in the Administration must have been listening. By 1935, President Roosevelt had shifted gears from top-down bureaucratic solutions like the NRA and created bottom-up programs like the Work Projects Administration (WPA). The WPA provide government-paid work for the unemployed, and government-funded art projects to restore the nation’s morale and keep culture alive in hard times. The musical film, Stand Up and Cheer (1934) imagined the president creating a Department of Entertainment for such a purpose, foreshadowing FDR’s Federal One (Federal Theatre, Federal Music, and Federal Art, and Federal Writers’ projects). The movie includes a scene encouraging depression-weary citizen to laugh and sing their blues away.  

One of the students in attendance focused on several Federal Art Project announcements and programs printed for the community art center established in Chicago’s south side. African Americans had been particularly hard hit by the Great Depression, experiencing rates of unemployment at double the national average. In establishing a Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in New York City, overnight the federal government became the largest single employer in Harlem. Similarly, the federally funded art center in the south side of Chicago provided that beleaguered community with a stimulus to art and culture unseen since the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Programs that positively impacted the lives of African Americans, and the fact the First Lady visited and lent her endorsement to such projects, helps explain why African American voters began shifting their allegiance from the party of the Great Emancipator to the Democratic Party over the course of the Depression decade.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Finally, a couple of students gravitated towards some caricatures and cartoons lampooning some of the “lunatic fringe” that coalesced in opposition to the Roosevelt Administration towards the middle and end of the thirties. The library holds works by and about Huey P. Long of Louisiana. Senator Long planned on challenging the incumbent president in the 1936 elections on a Bible-based “share the wealth” political platform. While the populist demagogue’s campaign song promised to make “Every Man a King,” a Communist Party artist, Hugo Gellert, penned a cartoon that hinted that the poor could expect nothing better than crowns of thorns under a Long presidency.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

When an assassin’s bullet took Senator Long out of the running, it was left to spoilers such as the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, the “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, and the old age pension promoter, Francis Townsend to capitalize on his legacy, and for cartoonists to satirize their efforts.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gifts of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

By the time Roosevelt decided to make an unprecedented run for a third term in office in 1940, some who opposed him used similar tactics as were used against Upton Sinclair when he ran for governor of California in 1934. In that election, the conservative movie studios paid performers to act as indigent and ignorant Sinclair supporters, and glamorous silent screen actresses to pose as educated anti-Sinclair voters. A postcard circulated in advance of the 1940 elections deployed the same tactic, reproducing a popular image of the “new boy” (a gap-toothed imbecile) to imply that only an ignorant “hayseed” would support Roosevelt for a third term in office.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

Decades later, the publishers of Mad magazine would recycle, revive, and adopt “Alfred E. Neuman” as its mascot.

Skullduggery: Happy Howl-O-Ween from The Wolf

Halloween enthusiasts living in or visiting Miami Beach, Florida are invited to don a costume and join us this coming Sunday, October 22, 2023, for a Howl-O-Ween Day of Dreadful Fun at The Wolfsonian–FIU museum. All afternoon the museum will be offering a variety of spooky experiences for visitors of all ages. Activities include: craft-making, live music, dramatic readings of the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, an eerie photo-op, and a display of creepy historical items from our Rare Book and Special Collections Library—all designed to set your spine tingling.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

There is even something for those vampires and ghouls rendered dead to the waking world by late night SoBe socializing. Those of you unable to rouse yourselves before the rays of the sun start setting can wait until early evening to crack your crypts and drag your corpses across the street to the O Cinema South Beach to view the German expressionist film classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The 5:30 pm screening of the iconic silent horror film will be introduced by Dr. Francis Luca, Wolfsonian Chief Librarian and FIU Adjunct Professor of History, who will provide some historical context for better appreciating the movie.

Today’s post provides our “early bird” virtual visitors with a glimpse of some of the rare materials that will be on display in the library Sunday afternoon. Our historical Halloween selection will feature some of the more macabre visual materials in the collection, ranging from illustrations of skeletons and skulls to demons and devils. This post will focus on just a couple of illustrated books and window display posters dating from the First World War; the former created by the Dutch cartoonist, Louis Raemaekers (1869–1956) and the latter by American propagandist and Florida land developer, Barron Gift Collier (1873–1939).

Images courtesy of the Library of Congress

Louis Raemaekers was so outraged by the German invasion of neighboring Belgium at the start of the Great War that despite his own nation’s declaration of neutrality, the editorial cartoonist felt impelled to publish scathing satires of the German Kaiser and the atrocities committed by his occupying army. Raemaekers rendered his cartoons with an underlying sensitivity and humanity uncommon for the typical propagandist. While his cartoons and caricatures are uncompromisingly harsh in their attacks on the German Emperor and Military Command, they are more restrained and sympathetic in their treatment of the German people and soldiers drafted into military service. The cartoonist frequently includes skeletal images in his work as an allegorical representation of death and recognition of the war’s costly toll in bodies and souls in the trenches stretching across both sides of “No man’s Land.”

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Many of Raemaekers’ cartoons, including “It’s Fattening Work,” “The Harvest Is Ripe,” and “To Your Health, Civilization,” personified death in the form of a skeleton and had that ghastly figure providing bitter commentary regarding the bloody and costly nature of industrialized war.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

In another couple of cartoons, “A Spring-Song” and “The German Tango,” Raemaekers evokes the imagery of the “Dance Macabre” to represent a German maiden and the German crown as irrepressibly drawn into a dance with death.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Leaving little doubt as to whom Raemaekers blamed for the carnage, in a cartoon titled “The Bill,” a skeleton dressed as a waiter brings the tab directly to the Kaiser’s table.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Raemaekers’s cartoons did not endear him to the German Military Command, and after the latter put a price on his head, the artist fled his native Netherlands to England where he carried on with his campaign. His cartoons proved so popular and influential that he was invited to tour the United States after President Wilson declared war on Germany and entered the fray. Not only were his cartoons widely disseminated in newspapers with millions of subscribers, but many were reproduced as postcards, cigarette collecting cards, and were later reprinted once America entered the fray and at the war’s end in oversized “editions de luxe” and “victory volumes.”

After the U.S. Government resolved to intervene in the war, American propagandists began producing all manner of images designed to whip up hatred for the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Barron Collier contributed a series of window display posters to the cause that paired caricatures of the German Emperor with the Devil to imply that the former was as evil as the latter. The posters use only black, red, and white—colors associated with the German flag—and employ skulls and bones to demonstrate the enemy leader’s supposed bloodlust. Titling one such poster, “Über Alles” (the German slogan for Fatherland “above all others”), the imagery places the demonic Kaiser on a throne made of bones atop a pyramid of human skulls.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Another, titled “Morning prayers,” has the Devil and his minions bowing down before the evil Kaiser.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

After the war’s end, the American advertising entrepreneur turned his attention towards real estate. His wartime propaganda being largely forgotten, he is most remembered today for becoming the largest private landowner and developer in the state of Florida in the 1920s, for investing millions of dollars to drain swamp lands and build the Tamiami Trail, and for the county in Southwest Florida named in his honor.

The WWI-era cartoons of Raemaekers and Collier are only a few of the illustrated works that will be on display in The Wolfsonian Library, so we dare those of stout heart and constitution to visit us and be treated to a wide range of horrifying imagery to set the mood for Halloween.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

“All the World Is a Stage”: The Sketchbooks of Albert Wainwright

Born in the small mining town of Castleford, England, the gifted artist Albert Wainwright (1893-1943) did not live long enough to win the international renown that his schoolmate at the Leeds College of Art, Henry Moore, achieved with his avant-garde sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. But within the circle of the theater arts scene in the cities of Leeds and Wakefield in West Yorkshire, Wainwright’s legacy lives on in the surviving sketches of costumes and theatrical sets that he produced for the local stage.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

His artwork also survives in a series of original watercolor illustrations and sketchbooks that museum founder, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. purchased from the estate of the artist’s sister, and gifted to The Wolfsonian–Florida International University. Some of these will be featured in an installation opening soon in the foyer of the museum’s rare book and special collections library. Many of Wainwright’s original costumes and sets found their inspiration not only from his fertile imagination, but also from his personal acquaintances. The artist frequently sketched and painted watercolor portraits of actors and performers he knew, and used some of the schoolchildren he taught as models.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Wainwright loved to travel. He regularly spent his summers in the coastal village of Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire, and some of the locals, buildings, and landscapes appear in his watercolor renderings. But the artist also loved to cross the English Channel to draw inspiration from his excursions on the European continent.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

In the 1930s, Wainwright made the obligatory “grand tour” of Italy, making sketches and watercolors of the street scenes, buildings, and inhabitants of Milan and Venice. He creatively decorated the cover of his Italian sketchbook with a collage of memorabilia, including everything from wine labels, postage stamps, ticket stubs, stickers, and magazine clippings.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Unsurprisingly, Wainwright sketched and made watercolor paintings of the most famous buildings, piazzas, bridges, and canals of the Italian cities.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Given his interest in producing theater sets, however, Wainwright often focused on the details of more ordinary buildings as if to suggest their potentiality as a painted theatrical backdrop.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Ever on the lookout for costume ideas, he employed his pen and brush to capture the nuances of the clothing worn by altar and choir boys, as well as the uniforms of sailors, carabinieri, and Balillas, an Italian Fascist youth organization established by Benito Mussolini.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Other sketches from life capture images of some of the more picturesque locals who could easily be imagined as costumed characters in a play.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Wainwright traveled most frequently to Germany from the late 1920s through the 1930s, always recording his visits with snatches of musical notation, written descriptions of his impressions of cities, towns, and the characters he encountered, and, of course, watercolor renderings of the same.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The artist frequently convinced locals, and most especially young men, to pose as models, and he endeavored to capture every detail of their clothes as well as their immediate surroundings.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

These trips also provided him with inspiration for costumes and theater backdrops, and he filled numerous sketchbooks with ethnic and regional clothing and city and rural landscapes to be transformed into theatrical costumes and sets.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Wainwright was especially fascinated by developments in Germany in the tumultuous years of the late 1920s and 1930s. His watercolors document the contrasts between the uninhibited cabaret life and ethos of the twenties and the suffocating rise of the National Socialists and their disciplined and regimented Hitler Youth, whom he depicted marching under the gathering clouds of impending war in the late nineteen-thirties.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Those of you living in or planning to visit Miami Beach this fall should plan on visiting The Wolfsonian museum and coming up to the library to see more of Albert Wainwright’s theatrical designs and travel sketchbooks.

The Wolfsonian Library Unwrapped

Located in South Beach, The Wolfsonian–FIU museum is housed in a historic edifice erected in 1927. It faces Washington Avenue with a decorated exterior inspired by the plateresque façade of the University of Salamanca, a Spanish-influenced architectural style popular on the beach before the transition to Art Deco in the 1930s.

Courtesy of: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39607

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Washington Storage Company Archive

The original structure was built after the Great Hurricane of 1926 made a direct hit on the barrier island and Miami mainland, claiming hundreds of lives and destroying much of the region’s infrastructure.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Michael Hughes

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Matthew’s family recognized a business opportunity in the wake of the devastating storm and laid the groundwork for a three-story, high-end storage facility.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Washington Storage Company Archive

A company brochure boasted that forty per cent more steel was used in the construction of the fortress-like facility than was required by the strict building codes that went into effect in the aftermath of the hurricane. Mr. Matthews aimed to cater to the well-to-do families occupying mansions on the beach during the winter season, but who returned to the northern climes when the weather grew too warm and inhospitable before the advent of air conditioning. Company trucks would drive out to their clients’ mansions and transport all their worldly possessions to the facility for safe keeping: wrapping and crating paintings, carpets, and furniture, and storing silver, books, and other valuables in vaults.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Washington Storage Company Archive

The storage company even provided storage space for automobiles, bringing them up to the third floor by way of an industrial elevator still in service today.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Washington Storage Company Archive

When patrons returned for the next winter season, the Washington Storage staff offered such extra services such as vacuuming and steam-cleaning carpets, polishing silverware, and even reupholstering furniture before bringing their furnishings back to their clients’ homes.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Washington Storage Company Archive

Business was booming in the 1930s, as Miami Beach’s economy rebounded after the land bust that followed the Great Hurricane and new hotels, apartments, and entertainment venues sprang up even as the rest of the country suffered through the doldrums of the Great Depression. To meet the demand for storage, the Matthews family added two more stories to the original Washington Storage Company building.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Washington Storage Company Archive

By the 1980s, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., a Miami native and avid collector, had squeezed out virtually all the storage company’s other clients till Mr. Matthews hit him with an ultimatum: either take over the establishment and the building holding his collection, or get out. Mr. Wolfson rose to the challenge. Moving the collection to another building, he hired architect Mark Hampton to renovate and transform the storage facility into a state-of-the-art museum and research center. Two more gallery floors were added to the top of the building.

Within two years of opening The Wolfsonian to the public on Armistice Day, 1995, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. donated the museum building and its collection to the state of Florida, and it became part of Florida International University. While the museum’s collection has continued to grow under the continued generosity of Mr. Wolfson and other enthusiastic donors and supporters, the aging structure and limited space of the original building has required more renovation and plans for expansion.

The Wolfsonian Library has not been immune from such growing pains. Housing a collection of some 75,000 rare and reference books, 50,000 printed ephemeral items, and more than 2,600 rare periodical titles, the library had begun to run out of shelving and space. A successful IMLS grant will permit us to install space-saving compact shelving units to make better use of our back stacks. But such good tidings also came with the knowledge that construction noise and dust would soon be heading our way.

Occasionally, the librarians, interns, residential fellows, and visiting scholars and researchers had to put on noise cancelling headphones while jackhammers rang out above our heads. When construction and renovation work came to our own floor, we continued to catalog and provide reference services for staff and patrons even as much of the library was temporarily shrouded in cardboard and plastic curtain barriers.

With the concrete repair and restoration work completed, the library staff is now gearing up to temporarily move the library collection to another floor to prepare for the installation of compact shelving.

We plan to continue to curate installations in our foyer, to provide reference services to museum staff and researchers, and to remain open to the FIU faculty, students, and the public (by appointment) throughout this process. We hope that those of you living in or visiting South Florida will stop by to see us next month when our next library exhibition opens, highlighting the sketchbooks, costumes, and theatrical set designs of Albert Wainwright.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

A New Deal for the American Indian

In the final paragraph of the address he delivered at the Democratic National Convention on July 2, 1932, Democratic presidential candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt concluded his speech with the words: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” That promise of a “new deal” was taken up by his campaign, the press, the public, and later historians of the era to describe the wide scope of economic experiments, reforms, and alphabet-soup programs prescribed by FDR as remedies for the Great Depression. The federal government’s relations with Indian tribes would also undergo a radical departure from policies and practices that could be traced back to the earliest years of European colonization and the foundation of the American Republic. Although far from perfect and predictably paternalistic, the Roosevelt Administration’s dealings with the aboriginal peoples living on reservations in the United States most definitively constituted a “New Deal” for the Indian.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift

In the wake of two research visits by scholars respectively interested in the intellectual origins of the New Deal and the Work Progress Administration’s Index of American Design, I was inspired to reflect and focus on items in The Wolfsonian collection that document and define the new relationship forged between the federal government and Indian tribesmen. Collectively, these artifacts demonstrate how the New Dealers embraced a new economic ethos and cultural and religious pluralism that changed for the better the lives of Native American peoples.

When Spanish conquistadors and colonizers first encountered the native peoples of the Americas, they vacillated between keeping them in separate repúblicas de indios under traditional indigenous leaders subject to royal authority versus Christianizing, assimilating, and integrating them into colonial society. A Works Progress Administration (WPA) guide to the San Xavier del Bac mission in Arizona, provided written and photographic descriptions of the historic edifice where Christian missionaries had been deployed on the fringes of the empire to transform “wild” Indians into “pacific” peons.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Christopher DeNoon

From the earliest days of the young Republic, too, presidential administrations oscillated between exclusion and “civilizing” policies, alternately negotiating land cessions and encouraging Indians to remove to the West, or coercing native peoples into assimilating into American society. Once the last of the proud and independent Plains Indian nations had been subdued and reduced to reservations as dependent wards of the state in the late nineteenth century, efforts continued to detribalize and “civilize” the natives. The Dawes Severalty Act was passed by Congress in 1887 with the aim of dissolving tribal entities and dividing communally-held tribal lands into small plots allotted to individual Indians. While leftover lands were made available to non-Indian citizens, the remaining natives were expected to become subsistence farmers even when economic realities, native cultural traditions, and the small, arid allotments they were settled on were ill-suited for success. Christian missionaries served as an unofficial arm of the federal government on reservations; in that capacity, they advocated removing Indian children from their families and shipping them off to remote boarding schools where they were stripped of their native tongue, traditional culture, clothing, and hairstyles.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift

Under such combined pressures, by the 1920s the demographically dwindling and culturally disoriented reservation Indians were viewed by most American as a “vanishing race.” But they were not without sympathetic American champions. Chief among these was a Columbia University professor and “father of American anthropology,” Franz Boas, and his many students. One of those protégés, Lucy Kramer Cohen, would marry (and advise) Felix Cohen, the New Deal lawyer responsible for drawing up the legal frameworks of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. A decade before Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, an urban reformer named John Collier traveled to the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, where he founded the American Indian Defense Association. This organization investigated and fought attempted encroachments on native land rights. Collier went further, criticizing even the Christian missionaries who attacked and forbade traditional native dances and ceremonies. Another champion of Navajo and Pueblo Indians, Anna Wilmarth Ickes published Mesa Land in 1933, even as her progressive Republican husband, Harold L. Ickes was tapped to serve as Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

Attitudes towards Native American peoples and their cultural traditions were already undergoing a transformation even before President Franklin Roosevelt took office. In 1931, for example, an art opening in New York City showcased tribal art and material culture and boasted at being the “first exhibition of American Indian art selected entirely with consideration of esthetic value.”

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

But changing cultural attitudes were given great political impetus when Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated President Herbert Hoover in November 1932 and appointed several individuals sympathetic to the Indians to positions of power. The curmudgeonly Harold Ickes was named Secretary of the Interior, the cantankerous crusader, John Collier was appointed commissioner of Indian Affairs, and the avowed Socialist lawyer, Felix Cohen was made the legal architect of the Indian New Deal. Even as the new commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier blocked Christian missionaries’ attempts to suppress native rituals and dances, Work Progress Administration (WPA) artists reinforced the shift in policy by producing prints for the Museum Extension Project designed to educate the nation’s youth and instill a sense of pride in America’s aboriginal culture and ceremonies.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift

Passage of the Johnson-O’Malley Act of 1934 enabled the federal government to provide education, medical services, and social welfare to Indians. With the able assistance of his anthropologist wife, Felix Cohen drafted the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (or IRA). This piece of New Deal legislation allowed his boss, Harold Ickes to end the sale of allotments even as John Collier hit the brakes on the federal government’s “Americanization” programs aimed at eliminating Native American traditions. The IRA received an annual budget of $250k for organizing chartered corporations and tribal councils on Indian reservations and $10 million revolving credit to promote tribal economic development. Although far from perfect, the Indian Reorganization Act did conserve Indian land, soil, water, and stem the tide of communal land loss.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift

Given the dire crisis of the Depression, the first and most important goal of the Indian New Dealers was to provide work and subsistence for desperate native families. Towards that end, as many as 25,000 reservation Indians were recruited and enrolled by the Emergency Conservation Work Agency and found employment in 75 camps scattered across 15 western states. Other Indian youths whose parents were unemployed were enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps doing forestry work and earning wages sufficient to support their families.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift

As commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier pushed to have Indians transferred from distant, Christian-run, boarding schools to local community day schools that encouraged bilingualism and promoted traditional Indian craftsmanship. The Wolfsonian Library holds more than three dozen Wyoming W.P.A. reports from the mid-1930s that document the federally funded projects in that state. Several of these reports include typed descriptions and photographs of reservation Indians who participated in and benefited from these federally subsidized projects. Many Indian men were employed in soil conservation work while Indian women worked in traditional carpet weaving and leather tanning projects aided by modern sewing machines.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

While the supervisor of the Federal Arts and Crafts project in Wyoming was too modest to claim any great contributions to the arts, he did note the discovery of Willie Spoonhunter, “an Indian lad on the Shoshone Reservation,” whose native abilities were added to the Arts Project. On a recent trip to the reserve, the WPA administrators were gratified to see several of the budding artist’s “Original Indian Designs” adorning the walls of the day school’s dining room. Photos provided in the report stressed that “Nothing in the way of a black and white photograph can do them justice since the colors used, true to the coloring of the West, lend a peculiar charm to the work.” The delegation even accepted a gift of one of Spoonhunter’s paintings rendered on a traditionally tanned deer skin.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The radical change in federal Indian policies is also reflected in calendars published by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) aimed at promoting domestic tourism to stimulate the economies of Western states like Oklahoma and New Mexico. Whereas native dances and festivals had been demonized and suppressed by Christian missionaries in the 1920s, under the aegis of sympathetic New Deal administrators, such activities were actively encouraged. Taking advantage of a new climate of tolerance and interest in Native American culture, the WPA collaborated with local chambers of commerce to publish calendars of events compiled by Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) and illustrated by Federal Art Project (FAP) workers. While the fanciful illustrations rendered by FAP artists may or may not have faithfully represented such native dances, they certainly generated new interest in Indian customs once deemed “savage” but now recast as “exotic” and worthy of interest.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

In addition to promoting pioneer days, square dances, fiestas, picnics, and rodeos, these calendars announced inter-tribal ceremonials, festivals, and costumed dances, with imaginative illustrations of the same.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Federal Writers’ Project workers also traveled across the country recording American folkloric traditions. As can be seen from the covers of a couple of Nebraska Folklore pamphlets, the compilers not only preserved pioneer tales and cowboy songs but also local Indian legends.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Collier’s role in the New Deal for the Indian was the most far reaching and controversial. Citing the recognition of Indian citizenship, Collier argued that Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom applied to native peoples as well. Consequently, he forbade federal officers from requiring Indian attendance at Christian Churches, much to the chagrin of missionary groups. We should not overestimate Collier’s influence or assume that the New Deal completely upended decades of bureaucratic and paternalistic policy. The caption of a press photograph of new building construction in the Reno-Sparks Indian Village in January 1937 noted “How Administration, the Church and Education go hand in hand” as the Administration building, frame church, and new school were erected before any of the new single-room houses were built to accommodate the 250 native inhabitants.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vincent J. Luca, Sr. Press Photo Collection

The New Deal ended in 1939 as unemployment evaporated as war clouds darkened European skies and American workers poured into factories as President Roosevelt put the nation on war-readiness status. But even as the Roosevelt Administration pivoted from “make work” jobs to making America the “arsenal of democracy,” the New Deal’s salutary impact on the American Indian grew rather than diminished. While Congress began defunding many New Deal programs, the federal government continued to promote Native American-inspired art. WPA posters and tribal art graced the walls of the Indian Court in the Federal Building erected for the Golden Gate International Exposition held in San Francisco from 1939 to 1940.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

While the Federal Art Project’s Index of American Design focused its efforts on identifying and preserving Spanish colonial and Euro-American folk art traditions almost to the exclusion of artwork by American Indians, a project to create color illustrations of North Pacific Coast Indian masks begun under WPA auspices was completed and published by the Cranbrook Institute of Science in 1941.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Another lasting product of the Indian New Deal was the government’s recognition that native languages and cultural traditions were worthy of preservation. Abandoning the earlier policy of shipping young Indians to boarding schools and forcing them to speak only in English, the Educational Division of the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs under Collier’s direction actively promoted bilingualism. The Educational Division even published children’s books for Navajo children with parallel texts in Navajo-English and employed a Navajo native, Hoke Denetsosie, as illustrator.

Ironically, the preservation of the Navajo language came just in time, as Navajo braves enlisted in the Armed Services during the Second World War, and a code derived from their ancient tongue helped keep the Japanese enemy in the dark during campaigns in the Pacific.

“Sam-I-Am”: The Passing of Cartoonist Sam Gross

Sam Gross could have followed in his father’s footsteps, earning a decent living working as a tax accountant. Not that there is anything wrong with being an accountant; my uncle Joe became a CPA, and every year I continue to send my tax information to his firm. For those who are good with numbers, being a tax accountant is a profession one can count on. In an oft-quoted quip penned by Benjamin Franklin in 1789, he said that “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Well, a few days ago, the former came for Sam Gross.

Sam will not likely be remembered for his numerical wizardry by any of his tax clients, because he had the chutzpah to make a different choice, to pursue his dreams, and go in a very different direction. Sam decided to gamble on his art and sense of humor, and he succeeded in making a living doing what he loved: rendering witty and clever cartoons that made and continue to make people laugh. Many of his illustrations are just universally funny; others reflect a slightly off-beat sensibility.

I first had the opportunity to meet Sam in person while I was visiting some collectors in New York City. He invited me to come to his Upper East Side office where we sat surrounded by filing cabinets filled with more than 30,000 cleverly rendered cartoons produced over the course of his long and prolific life. Sam’s parents hailed from Eastern Europe and came to the United States about the same time that my own great-grandparents arrived from Italy. All of them had their names garbled and “simplified” by linguistically challenged immigration agents. I imagine their experiences were not so unlike those depicted by Charlie Chaplin in this silent classic, The Immigrant (1917):

Born in the Bronx at the nadir of the Great Depression, Sam grew up and spent his formative years living there. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School, he attended City College, starting out as a business major before shifting his focus to advertising. It was expected that Sam would become a certified public accountant like his father, but while he inherited his father’s work ethic and organizational skills, he longed to use those traits in more creative and artistic endeavors. He was also courageous enough to use his comic genius to ridicule neo-Nazis, often using adorable animals to heap scorn on their hateful swastika symbol.

Nearly twelve of these original cartoons are currently on display at The Wolfsonian museum in an installation that creates a dialogue between Sam’s contemporary critiques and some historical lampoons of Nazis from the 1930s and World War II era.

Even while working for his father during tax season, Sam spent much of the less-busy months drawing cartoons. He first started regularly drawing cartoons while serving overseas in the Army, rendering a series of weekly cartoons that were afterwards republished in book format as Cartoons for the GI. He later returned to Europe, earning a dozen or so francs for his work before moving back to the States in the early 1960s. Many of his cartoons demonstrate his breadth of knowledge of Western civilization, art, and culture, even when such details are subtly inserted in a cartoon with an anti-Nazi message.

Some of Sam’s work graced the pages of The New Yorker and Cosmopolitan; others were submitted to, and printed by, various satirical magazines catering to a male clientele, such as The Realist and National Lampoon. But regardless of whichever publication chose to print his cartoons, Sam claimed to have drawn his cartoons for his own amusement rather than designing them for a particular audience. Asked in 2011 by The Comics Journal interviewer, Richard Gehr, about his philosophy of cartooning, Sam simply stated that “The highest form of cartooning has no caption.” I can think of no better cartoon from the installation to close with than his iconic cartoon of a man sawing off a limb of a swastika to create Love.

The Wolfsonian Library is privileged to have received ten books of Sam’s collected cartoons and to be exhibiting nearly a dozen original illustrations in our library exhibit.

My condolences go out to Sam’s wife, Isabelle, and all of his family, friends, and fans. We will miss Sam’s pictorial wit and humor. My thanks to his family, his loved ones, and his executor, Pat Giles, for giving me permission to include a few of Sam’s cartoons in this post, which, more than my words, best capture his spirit and sense of humor. We are grateful to the family for also allowing the original works that Sam loaned us for our library installation, Tyrants and Terrorists: Satirists Bite Back, (originally scheduled to close on May 28), to remain on view as we extend the exhibition through August 27 in his memory.