ALL ASHORE: SOME NEWLY ARRIVED OCEAN LINER MATERIALS IN THE WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY

Today’s post comes to you from Dr. Laurence Miller, retired director of libraries at Florida International University. Some years back. Dr. Miller donated an extensive collection of ocean liner materials to The Wolfsonian-FIU library, and he has since been volunteering his time and expertise helping us catalog and digitize that collection, and other related materials. This past week, he helped us unpack and start cataloging a box of ocean liner materials sent to us by museum founder Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. as a promised gift. Here is his report:

Mr. Wolfson recently sent us from Paris a number of lovely, mostly prewar ocean liner brochures as a promised gift. The city of origin explains why a number of the items are in French.  Concerning Mr. Wolfson, we are fortunate that his love of ocean liners is equaled by his desire to share with the general public what he finds.  We won’t deny that the love of the hunt is also part of his pleasure.  In any case, we are the beneficiaries. First to catch the eye among his finds was a 1934 brochure illustrating Pacific Steam Navigation’s Reina del Pacifico. The cover and first pages have good color graphics, but this was before the era of color photos throughout.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

Reina was an attractive liner that rendered thirty-seven years of service in peace and war (1931-1958).  The ship served the Liverpool-Valparaiso service of the company which was a subsidiary of Royal Mail Lines.  In the brochure, the route is described as, “The Princes’ Route to South America.”  This arises from a trip that the Prince of Wales and Prince George actually made on the line’s Orpesa, a more modest vessel, the royal passengers notwithstanding.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

Elsewhere in the Wolfsonian collection is a 1957 brochure on the Reina which has the advantage of the accommodations illustrated in full color.  To contemporary eyes, the Spanish colonial décor in color conveys an attractive but occasionally eccentric ambience.  In any case, the interiors, in all their glory, are fun to look at.

GIFT OF LAURENCE A. MILLER

Ship aficionados will be familiar with the ship’s late-career grounding in Bermuda.  Passengers made the most of the occasion by inventing a “Reina on the Rocks” cocktail! This was guaranteed to make the evening news, and did.

Also acquired in Paris is a brochure advertising the various services of Lloyd Triestino as they existed in 1935. Included are the splendid Victoria from the line’s service from Italy to the Far East.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

The vessel was the product of distinguished marine architect Gustavo Pulitzer Finali, also responsible for most of the interiors aboard Conte de Savoia, one of the finest ships in the prewar Italian Line.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

Mr. Wolfson is especially interested in the Italian maritime heritage, so it is no surprise that among his purchases was a prewar Conte Grande brochure–(no date is provided)–unusual in its fine interior color illustrations of prewar Italia ships.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

This brochure gives a much fuller impression of the super-ornate Italian marine interiors of the 1920s.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

Moving from prewar opulence to postwar austerity and “make do,” included was a flier on the flagship of the Turkish merchant marine–the former American liner Tarsus, originally the American Export liner Exchorda of 1931. Exchorda and three sister ships, (collectively known as the “Four Aces”), maintained a passenger and cargo service for American Export Lines from New York to all the Mediterranean. They were fine and advanced ships. Three were lost while serving as troop transports, but Exchorda survived to be sold to Turkey.

Used for a short period for cruises from the United States, Tarsus returned to Turkey and served until she was lost in 1960 when a burning tanker collided with her. As part of the Turkish Maritime Line her service was from Istanbul to Piraeus, Naples, Genoa, and Marseilles.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

On a more modern note, in the 1960s, the Soviet’s contracted with East German yards to build a small fleet of 20,000 ton ships that were deployed on many services, notably transatlantic and the Europe-Australia migrant voyages. Some were later converted into full-time cruise ships. Best known was the Aleksandr Pushkin’s conversion into the cruise ship Marco Polo, currently sailing for Cruise and Maritime Voyages. The actual reconstruction took place in Greece for a British travel organization headed by Gerry Harrod. First deployment was for his company, Orient Lines, not to be confused with the venerable British company of the same name. The following illustrations give a fair representation of interior ambience of all these ships under the Soviet flag. However, Marco Polo, ex-Pushkin, continues to sail as a popular German cruise ship.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

Finally, a flier documenting the last stage of a useful but unglamorous career that began as Union Castle’s Bloemfontein Castle but continued, for much longer period as Patris of Chandris Lines.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

This involved a joint ferry service with the Karageorgis Line. As Bloemfontein Castle, the vessel continued the Union Castle Line’s long (and unintended) tradition of providing intermediate ships inferior in all respects to those of the Italian Line/Lloyd Trestino. It began in the 1932 when the transfer of the Atlantic liners Giulio Cesare and Duilio to the Italy-South Africa service forced Union Castle to upgrade its fleet. In the postwar period, the Union Castle vessels competed with what was then a Lloyd Triestino service, offering neither air conditioning, elegant décor, nor fine cuisine. Such disappointing passenger service, coupled with the container revolution’s impact on the cargo trade, caused most of the Union Castle ships to be scrapped prematurely. Bloemfontein Castle fared better than many of her fleet mates on the round-Africa service. The Greek shipping line Chandris bought the vessel, immediately installed air-conditioning, and rechristened as Patris she became a popular ship sailing between Greece and Australia—the first ship in a fleet that dominated that route. For a while, she sheltered refugees in Darwin, Australia in the wake of a cyclone that destroyed much of the city. The Patris’ final gig was as car-ferry crossing between Ancona, Italy and Patras, Greece.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

A BRIEF POST FOR “WORLD DAY AGAINST CHILD LABOUR” FROM THE WOLFSONIAN COLLECTION

As today is the official “World Day Against Child Labour,” I thought that I would share with my readers some historical items from The Wolfsonian-Florida International University collection on the subject and to simply let the images speak for themselves.

The first image is from Humanities, a book published during the Great Depression with illustrations by the famous American designer, John Vassos (1898-1985). With minimal text (provided by Vassos’ wife, Ruth), the tome was intended to serve as “an artist’s conception of the problems that confront Western civilization to-day.” One of the full-page illustrations is titled “Child Labor” and depicts young children working in agricultural fields, or as shoe-shine boys, newsboys, or laboring in sweatshops in the cities.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. COLLECTION

In 1937, Modern Age Books published a graphic history of the United States using pictorial statistics created by Rudolf Modley. An earlier post this week described the popularity of pictograms in making complex statistical information more palatable to the general public; this particular book was extremely influential in forwarding that trend in America.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, THE CHRISTOPHER DENOON COLLECTION FOR THE STUDY OF NEW DEAL CULTURE

Where Vassos rendered his social critique in his characteristic Art Deco style and Rudolf Modley used pictograms to make his point, another book in the Wolfsonian-FIU library collection, Archibald Macleish’s Land of the Free, tackled similar issues using a sparse and poetic narrative juxtaposed to full-page photographs.

GIFT OF FRANCIS XAVIER LUCA & CLARA HELENA PALACIO LUCA

A final booklet, Migrants of the Crops: They Starve that We May Eat, was published by the Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement at the end of the decade of depression. The text of the reform tract was supplemented with photographic illustrations by Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985), and Russell Lee (1903-1986), photographers originally employed by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the social ills of the era and to advocate for New Deal solutions.

PROMISED GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

As one of our curators, Jon Mogul, is installing a set of New Deal era mural studies in our fifth floor gallery later this month, I thought that I would end today’s post with one such painting which will not be on view, but which depicts women and children slaving away in a sweat shop.

“VICTORY OF LIGHT OVER DARKNESS” (1938) MURAL STUDY BY ERNEST FIENE FOR THE AUDITORIUM OF THE CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL OF NEEDLE TRADES, NEW YORK CITY

METADATA AT THE MUSEUM, OR, THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU INTERSECTS WITH THE SOCIETY OF FLORIDA ARCHIVISTS

Wolfsonian Digital Asset Manager Derek Merleaux and Sharf Associate Librarian Rochelle Pienn recently attended a Society of Florida Archivists conference held in Coconut Grove. There they presented a talk on the museum’s initiative to combine the (previously) separate object and library databases into a single digital catalog. Here is Rochelle’s report:

My first professional encounter with primary resources occurred when I was hired as the Historical Writer for the Committee for a Village Council for Coconut Grove. Coconut Grove resident, secessionist, and revved-up revolutionary Mr. Pan Courtelis asked me to research the where, why, and how of the Grove’s original and reluctant absorption into the City of Miami in 1925.

Pan Courtelis with the author.

I first spent hours on the eighth floor of the University of Miami Richter Library’s Special Collections department poring over antique photographs made by famed Grove pioneer Monroe. These were followed by countless more days at the Miami Dade Public Library’s Florida Room reading ancient Miami laws (archaic, occasionally absurd) along with miles of Miami Metropolis microfilm (fascinating, fact-filled, and invaluable) before I presented Pan with my paper. To wit: the Grove had been nudged into Miami by a ghostly and indeterminable group called the Committee of Four Hundred, and handed over to The City on an orange-tinted platter, so to speak.

Photo by Cory Czajkowski

Pan got his Village Council (though not his secession from Miami), and I got a job as a library assistant at the University of Miami (U.M.) Special Collections. This eventually catapulted into a faculty post at U.M., and later led to my current position as Sharf Associate Librarian at the Wolfsonian-FIU.

Photo by Cory Czajkowski

I found myself thinking fondly of my dear, late friend as I stood in the Crystal Ballroom on the twenty-ninth floor of the Courtyard Marriott in the Grove, where the annual Society of Florida Archivists (SFA) conference was taking place. Pan would have been annoyed by the excessive construction and tall buildings lining South Bayshore Drive. But I believe he would have enjoyed the eclectic gathering of Florida archivists, librarians, historians and computer whizzes whose charge it is to preserve the documentation of the past.

Althea Silvera

Beatrice Skokan

Photos by Cory Czajkowski

This year, Althea Silvera, Head of FIU Libraries Special Collections, and Beatrice Skokan, Manuscripts Librarian at the University of Miami Special Collections co-chaired the SFA conference.

Photo by Cory Czajkowski

My colleague, Derek Merleaux, Digital Asset Manager at the Wolfsonian-FIU, and I were honored to co-present “Metadata at the Museum” on a perfect, sunny Tuesday morning. We began, as everything always does, with a bit of history.

Wolfsonian-FIU collection

The Wolfsonian-FIU building began its life as a storage house for the furs, jewels, carpets, and even the fabulous cars of snowbirds, those flocks of Northerners who lived on Miami Beach during what residents call “The Season.” Its fascinating metamorphosis into the Wolfsonian-FIU is a story best retold by its founder, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., but Derek and I did our best to convey the unique character and quality of the collections, our founder, and our talented staff.

Photo by Cory Czajkowski

As Derek and I explained to our audience at SFA, the various types of objects and art, books and archival collections informed our staff’s efforts to describe and organize information for public access. Like many museums and special collections, The Wolfsonian-FIU re-assessed its best practices as technological advances in procedures were made.

Photos by Derek Merleaux

Cataloging and inventory of library materials and museum objects had been implemented using different techniques and separate systems.

Photo by Cory Czajkowski

Girl Sewing. Doris Emrick Lee (1905-1983), American painter. Oil on canvas, 1931. Wolfsonian-FIU.

GIFT OF JEAN S. AND FREDERIC A. SHARF

Priority was placed on the public’s ability to search for visual images and rare print antiquity, supporting the Wolfsonian-FIU’s collection emphasis on design and propaganda art.

Photo by Cory Czajkowski

Such dedication to rich and discoverable data in our cataloging records could sometimes be a lengthy project. For example, a library catalog record for Le Tour du Monde, a one-of-a-kind turn-of-the-century photograph album from the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection, contains fifteen subject headings and ninety images with manually entered captions.

GIFT OF JEAN S. AND FREDERIC A. SHARF

In fact, Derek estimated that were we to unfurl one of our particularly detailed original catalog records, it might tower above the tallest archivist in the room.

Photo by Emily Gibson

On the other end of the spectrum, often records in the object and art collection were rather brief. After much research for a viable solution to these contradictory issues, we settled on adopting an entirely new utility, using SobekCM.

“A free, open-source digital library platform developed at the University of Florida, SobekCM natively supports a wide-range of metadata formats making it a good fit for a hybrid institution like The Wolfsonian – FIU,” Derek explained.

Photo by Emily Gibson

The resulting new Wolfsonian-FIU Digital Images Catalog effectively merges images and information from our independent software systems for easy discovery. Patrons could look at multiple images on a page via thumbnails, or even page-through images as if they were holding a book. It also eliminates much of the excessive and laborious hand-entry of individual hyperlinks.

Photo by Cory Czajkowski

The Wolfsonian-FIU Digital Images Catalog grows daily. The Wolfsonian-FIU photographers add new images all the time, attaching them to library and object descriptions. Derek constantly implements improvements to the system to keep it running smoothly, while the librarians and curators thoughtfully create intellectual access to archives and art with deep and thorough cataloging.

Photo by Emily Gibson

The Wolfsonian-FIU’s primary goals to preserve and maintain these incredible works are enhanced by its ability to choose creative and cutting-edge platforms for discovery. We encourage you to explore our collections online and in person, and we hope you have some revealing adventures of your own at: digital.wolfsonian.org

Photo by Carlos E. Prado Herrera

PICTOGRAMS: GRAPHIC STATISTICS FOR SOCIAL ACTION IN NEW DEAL AMERICA: SOME NEWLY CATALOGUED AND DIGITIZED ITEMS IN THE WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY

Sometimes timing is not always ideal. Last year, The Wolfsonian-FIU librarians hosted two residential fellows, (Sarah Rovang and Michael Golec), and worked with Florida International University Professor Ken Lipartito on an exhibition for the Frost Teaching Gallery at FlU. All of these scholars were interested in pictograms, a pictographic display of statistics that became extremely popular in the 1930s.

Whereas the more traditional graphs, charts, and tables could sometimes be off-putting to all but the most committed statistician, pictorially represented information was designed to be accessible to even semi-literate readers even as literacy rates were expanding.

Consequently, immediately recognizable pictographs representing men, automobiles, factories, money, and a wide range of products were produced and reproduced in texts and pamphlets published not only for scholars and social scientists, but for consumption by the mass audiences.

Just today, I was accessioning a backlog of depression-era items acquired in 2013, but which I had only just now had the opportunity to process. As I flipped through three issues of a periodical titled Social Action, I discovered a trove of the pictogram statistics that were so popular in New Deal America.

The serial was published bimonthly in the 1930s by the Pilgrim Press in Boston for the Council for Social Action of the Congregational and Christian Churches of America.

The publication was inspired by the Social Gospel tradition, and dealt with a wide variety of social and economic inequality issues once again coming to the forefront of our national debate.

  

What caught my eye, however, were not so much the issues of sit-down strikes, unionism, inequalities of wealth, and the rural poor, but the prolific use of pictograms and pictographic statistics to forward their social agenda.

While our visiting scholars had been almost exclusively focused on pictograms used in government produced publications, these periodicals published by religious institutions calling for social change demonstrated the universal popularity of such accessible graphical statistics in reaching and persuading their readership.

Anyone interested in seeing more of The Wolfsonian’s collection of graphic statistics can visit our website or look at a virtual exhibition of similar materials.

THE MOSCOW METRO: A WOLFSONIAN COMMEMORATION OF A SUBTERRANEAN PALACE OF THE PEOPLE

Eighty years ago, the workers of the Soviet Union completed the first section of the Moscow Metro, a subway system considered to be one of Russia’s greatest achievements of the twentieth century.

The metro was just one of Comrade Stalin’s ambitious plans intended to drag Russia into the industrial age and to demonstrate the technological capabilities of the new Socialist state even as the capitalist countries were seemingly paralyzed in the wake of the Great Depression.

The Moscow Metro became such a source of pride for the Soviet State that a line of cups and saucers and other porcelain were decorated with images of the stations.

 

Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich (1893-1991), an important Communist functionary and close associate of Joseph Stalin, was responsible for implementing many of the Soviet Union’s agricultural policies and rapid industrialization projects in the 1920s and 1930s, including the Moscow Metro.

Kaganovich’s forced agrarian collectivization policies and imposition of draconian grain expropriations on the kulaks (or peasant farmers) triggered the politically motivated and catastrophic 1932-1933 famine-genocide in the Ukraine.

CHICAGO AMERICAN, COURTESY OF FORUM 54 (SPRING 1983)

When Kaganovich was placed in charge of the Moscow Metro project, he first had to import British engineers with the technological know-how and experience drawn from working on the London Underground.

The profoundly paranoid Soviet leader, Comrade Stalin, however, considered the British experts to be “spies” and had them arrested, condemned in show trials, and expelled from the country in 1933. But many of the foreigners’ engineering designs, construction plans, proposed routes, and even recommendations to use escalators rather than elevators were integrated into the final project.

Kaganovich personally oversaw the work on the Moscow Metro, along with project managers Ivan Kuznetsov (and later Isaac Y. Segal).

The Moscow Metro first opened for service in May 1935, with tunnels that originally stretched some 11 kilometers long underground and the 13 stations which connected Sokolniki to Okhotny Ryad, and extended out to Park Kultury and Smolenskaya.

The metro was intended not only to be a technological wonder, but to “wow” the world by making the stations in the tunnels into underground “palaces of the people.”

Some of the most renowned architects and artists in the country were put to work designing the pavilion entrances and the marbled interiors of the underground stations, many of them adorned with mosaics.

A second section was opened up in March 1938, with stations decorated in a Socialist Realist version of the Art Deco style popular in this period.

 

A third stage of construction was delayed (but not completely halted) by the Second World War. During the siege of Moscow in the fall and winter of 1941, the Metro Stations (like their London Underground counterparts) also served as air-raid shelters.

Thanks to a donation by Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf, The Wolfsonian now possesses some original drawings by Polish artist Feliks Topolski (1908-1989) of the Russian people taking shelter in the tunnels.

GIFTS OF JEAN S. AND FREDERIC A. SHARF

LAST OF THE ROMANOVS: SOME WOLFSONIAN REFLECTIONS ON THE LAST RUSSIAN CZAR ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF HIS CORONATION

Having already assumed the throne following the death of his father in November 1894, Nicholas II and his wife, the German princess, Alexandra, were crowned czar and czarina of Russia in the old Ouspensky Cathedral in Moscow on May 26, 1896.

GIFT OF JEAN S. AND FREDERIC A. SHARF

During his tempestuous reign, Nicholas II would be overwhelmed by challenges to his rule. Desperate to preserve the autocratic rule he inherited, he dismissed demands for reform and steered the nation into two disastrous wars (first against Japan in the East and later against Germany and Austria-Hungary in the West). These wars would both spark revolutions; the latter one would ultimately cost him the throne and his family their lives. But when he first ascended the throne and during the earliest years of rule, things looked decidedly more promising.

Only months after their coronation, the royal couple made a state visit to France in the fall, stopping in Cherbourg, Paris, Sevres, Versailles, and Chalons-sur-Marne.

MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. LONG-TERM LOAN

A Franco-Russian alliance had already been initiated by Alexander III in 1892, but the official visit of Nicholas II and Alexandra to Paris in October 1896 established ever more cordial relations. The Romanovs spoke excellent French and enjoyed escaping the parochial and restrictive Russian Court.

MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. LONG-TERM LOAN

France provided the Russian czar with loans to finance a program of industrialization, and Russia provided France with an ally in the East capable of countering the growing power and influence of the expanding German Empire.
Ironically, although Nicholas II resisted any attempt to curb his royal authority or weaken czarist absolutism, he was by nature and inclination poorly suited to wield such absolute power. The Russo-Japanese War ended so disastrously for the Russians that it provoked the Russian Revolution of 1905.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. COLLECTION

GIFTS OF JEAN S. AND FREDERIC A. SHARF

While Nicholas was able to stay in power by recognizing a representative assembly, and by promising constitutional reforms, he repudiated such concessions and repeatedly dissolved the Duma. With reform effectively thwarted, more radically-minded revolutionary groups, like the Bolsheviks, began to win popular support.

GIFT OF THE HOLY TRINITY ORTHODOX SEMINARY LIBRARY

Russian participation in the Great War again demonstrated the incompetence of Romanov rule as Nicholas personally took command of the army in 1915, leaving the Czarina at home to deal with domestic concerns.

Alexandra’s popularity at court had declined considerably, having fallen under the influence of the Russian mystic Rasputin, who arbitrarily replaced many of the czar’s competent ministers and officials with less qualified appointees.

GIFT OF THE HOLY TRINITY ORTHODOX SEMINARY LIBRARY

In March 1917, Nicholas was forced to abdicate, and a Provisional government came to power, marking the end to Romanov rule. Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children were later transferred to Tobolsk in Western Siberia under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet that shared power with the Provincial Government in the early days of the Russian Revolution. With the aim of knock Russia out of the war, the Germans sent Lenin and other revolutionary exiles to Russia in a sealed railway car in order to foment revolution and civil war.

In November 1917, the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seized power from the Provisional government under Kerensky and established the Soviet state. In April 1918, the royal family was transferred to Yekaterinburg in the Urals. That summer, the civil war broke out, and as “White” Russian forces advanced on Yekaterinburg during a campaign against the Bolsheviks, the Yekaterinburg Soviet passed a death sentence on the imperial family. The Romanov dynasty was no more.

GIFT OF THE HOLY TRINITY ORTHODOX SEMINARY LIBRARY

UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARY, RMS LUSITANIA: SOME WOLFSONIAN REFLECTIONS ONE HUNDRED YEARS (AND ONE DAY) LATER

GIFT OF THOMAS C. RAGAN

At 2:10 in the afternoon of May 7, 1915, a German U-boat fired a single torpedo into the British flagged passenger liner, the RMS Lusitania as it cruised along the Southern coast of Ireland which had been declared by the Germans to be a “war zone.”

Among the dead were 128 Americans, including Arts & Crafts publisher and printer, Elbert Hubbard and his wife. Ironically, Hubbard had memorialized those who had perished when a collision with an iceberg had sunk the “unsinkable” Titanic three years earlier.

Hubbard had singled out Ida Straus, who had refused to board the lifeboat with the other women and children.

The calm courage that was yours all your long and useful career was your possession in death. You knew how to do three great things—you knew how to live, how to love and how to die…to pass out as did Mr. and Mrs. Isador Straus is glorious. Few have such a privilege. Happy lovers, both. In life they were never separated and in death they are not divided.

Ironically, Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard would experience the same “glorious” fate as the Lusitania sank into the icy waters.

The Lusitania (and her sister-ship, the Mauritania) were originally commissioned by the Cunard Company as a response to competition from “Kaiser class” ocean liners being built in Germany by Norddeutscher Lloyd and Hamburg Amerika Linie under the encouragement of  Wilhelm II. This was the “civilian” equivalent of the “naval” arms race between Great Britain and Germany.

 

 Construction first began at the John Brown shipyard on the Lusitania’s keel on June 16, 1904. So great was the keel that the shipyard had to be reorganized, and railway tracks installed alongside the ship and across the high tensile steel deck plating in order to bring in the construction materials for this goliath.

 

 When complete, the Lusitania would measure 790 feet in length, 88 feet in breadth, with a gross tonnage of 32,500 tons. She would be equipped with four funnels, and four steam turbines driving four separate propellers.

The Lusitania was launched on June 7, 1906 and her engine and first sea trials took place in the summer of 1907.

The central half of the ship below the waterline contained four boiler rooms. Coal bunkers were placed along the length of the ship outboard of the boiler rooms, for convenience and safety.  The hull was divided into twelve compartments by 35 hydraulically operated watertight doors. Unfortunately, sliding doors to the coal bunkers needed to be open while the ship was moving to allow for a constant supply of coal.

At the time of her completion, the Lusitania was (if briefly) the largest ship ever built (soon topped by the slightly larger Mauritania).

The Lusitania offered 552 saloon class, 460 cabin class, and 1,186 third class accommodations, and luxurious dining halls and common spaces.

The Lusitania was expected to be able to make the Liverpool to New York transatlantic crossing in about one-third of the time needed by the Britannia.

The Lusitania’s four funnels distinguished her from other ships; the smoke from those stacks made her an easy target to find and track.

Between 1907 and 1914, the Lusitania had an illustrious career in the transatlantic service.   At the outbreak of hostilities, she was temporarily repainted drab grey to minimize her visibility, but with the German Navy effectively blockaded, the Royal Navy determined Atlantic crossings to be safe. Although German U-Boats still posed a threat, Cruiser Rules required a submarine to surface and to allow passengers and crew to take to the lifeboats before attacking. On the surface, the submarines were extremely vulnerable, and contrary to the rules of engagement, the British Navy ordered merchant ships to ram and sink submarines as they surfaced. The Captain of the German U-20 submarine did not surface before firing off one of its torpedoes.

A single torpedo proved sufficient to cripple and sink the Lusitania. After a second internal explosion, the luxury passenger ship began to list so dramatically that the crew was only able to successfully lower 6 of the 48 lifeboats. Of the 1,962 passengers and crew aboard, 1,191 drowned or succumbed to hypothermia.

 The Germans accounted the sinking of Britain’s largest ocean liner still operating a civilian passenger service to be a great victory, and emphasized the folly of transporting munitions of war aboard a passenger ship.

MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR PROMISED GIFT

A German even struck a commemorative medallion to mark the occasion, depicting on one side a skeleton in a Cunard booth selling tickets for the transatlantic crossing, and the ship sinking under the weight of the contraband armament on its decks.

World opinion, however, be moved by more emotional appeals, as images of the funerals were circulated and political cartoonists took aim at this latest German atrocity that claimed the lives of some many non-combatants. A French postcard, for example, pictures a drowning child clutching a lifesaver, piteously crying for his mother and asking “why?”

The British published a folding recruiting poster mailer that included an illustration of women and children drowning in the wake of the sinking ship.

Although the Dutch remained neutral during the Great War, the artist Louis Raemaekers felt compelled by events to deploy his talents in creating political cartoons that were highly critical of the Germans. After the sinking of the Lusitania, Raemaekers depicted Kaiser Wilhelm as the bloody tyrant King Herod, whose guilty conscience has wondering “Are they crying, ‘Mother’ or ‘Murder’?”

While American reactions to the sinking varied, a survey of editorial cartoons published on the subject indicate that while many still thought the country ought to remain neutral, there also appears to have been a decided shift in sympathies against German barbarism. At least one questioned the wisdom of permitting Americans to take passage aboard a powder keg, and another the fairness of supplying Britain but not Germany with arms.

But many more cartoons focused on German actions and a number depicted the Kaiser as a bloody pirate.

Some cartoons ridiculed Uncle Sam for inaction in the wake of the Lusitania sinking and advocated for a more aggressive approach to dealing with Germany.

Some political cartoons specifically attacked President Woodrow Wilson after his “Too proud to fight” speech. One depicted him with a scrawny peacock feather in his cap as the Kaiser thumbs his nose and tramples the American flag behind his back!

Others, by implication, praised Uncle Sam for maintaining “strict neutrality” and depicted the advocates of “military preparedness” as warmongers eager to see American drawn into the European conflict.

Still other cartoons focused on the need for America to defend her own commercial interests against both warring parties.

But by far, it was Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan who received the lion’s share of criticism after he “jumped ship.”

A committed “pacifist,” Bryan resigned in June 1915 over what he considered to be a too strongly worded diplomatic message delivered to Germany demanding a cessation of “unrestricted submarine warfare.” Several cartoons inserted a white feather (symbol of cowardice) in his cap.

Bryan did not help his cause, with comments like “…why be so shocked by the drowning of a few people, if there is to be no objection to starving a nation.”  Some found the former Secretary of State’s new pacifist stance towards Germany to be more than a little hypocritical given that Bryan had advocated American military intervention in Mexico’s civil war in 1914.

Other cartoons went even farther by implying that Bryan was either a blind “peace at any price” dupe, or a treacherous German “scarecrow” and sympathizer.

A couple of cartoons even went so far as to place a German pickelhaube helmet, an iron cross, or a Kaiser-like mustache on his face!.

President Wilson’s diplomatic strategy successfully forced the Germans to suspend their campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in the immediate aftermath of the Lusitania sinking. But by 1917, the German military command decided to once again unleash the U-boats, gambling that one great offensive on the Western Front might win the war before American soldiers could even be deployed overseas. It was a gamble they would lose.

 

BEAUTY AND THE BEACH: WOMEN’S BATHING SUITS AND THE PROMOTION OF MIAMI BEACH

In the days when Miami Beach was first being incorporated and developed as a “bathing beach,” it was not so common for people to actually “swim” in the ocean.

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, private COLLECTION

In spite of the name, the first casinos” built on Miami Beach were not gambling establishments, but rather simple “bathhouses” where visitors could stow away their clothing and valuables in lockers and rent and change into “bathing suits.”

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, gift OF FRANCIS X. LUCA & CLARA HELENA PALACIO LUCA

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, private COLLECTION

Men (and boys) as well as women wore suits that modestly covered their chests.

MIAMI BEACH HISTORICAL ARCHIVE (1921), MB 1

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, PRIVATE COLLECTION

Early bathing suits were made of wool, and for women, the outfit included a skirt, long cotton stockings, and even bathing shoes, as modesty forbade any glimpse of female leg.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, GIFT OF LAWRENCE WIGGINS

Some ladies even sewed weights into the hems of the skirts to prevent them from riding up and exposing their legs in the surf. While the women wearing such contraptions were in little danger of sunburn, obviously swimming in such a suit was out of the question, and so wading in the shallow surf was about as much as a person might dare without risking drowning. Other women might choose to roll down their stocking a bit for a bit of sun, or at least for a quick snapshot.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, GIFT OF LAWRENCE WIGGINS

We can forgive the artistic license taken by the illustrator of this early promotional pamphlet in depicting the bare shoulders and backs of the female bathers–this at a time when men were still wearing tops at the beach!

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. PROMISED GIFT

Things started to change in the early 1900s as a new generation of women began to shake loose from prudish Victorian values concerning female propriety. In “puritan” New England, an Australia swimmer, Annette Kellerman, dared appear on a Boston beach in 1907 wearing a formfitting one-piece suit. She was promptly arrested. In the nineteen-teens, however, women would no longer face arrest merely for showing their legs or shoulders at the beach. And bathing suits, while still made of wool, became slightly more functional.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, GIFT OF LAWRENCE WIGGINS

In the early 1920s, the proprietors of the Miami Beach bathhouses organized bathing beauty contests that shamelessly exposed women’s legs as a means of generating positive publicity for the fledgling winter resort.

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, PRIVATE COLLECTION

While Carl Fisher is duly credited as one of the founders of Miami Beach, his young wife, Jane, also contributed to the promotion and development of the city as a resort and tourist destination. After Carl purchased and took over one of the early bathing casinos, Jane grew frustrated as she was trying to work on her Australian crawl swimming strokes. At that time, modesty still dictated that women’s bathing attire include a dress or skirt, and long black cotton stockings; hair was to be tucked into a bathing cap. Jane reordered her bathing attire so that her skirt dropped only to her knees and she substituted short anklets in place of long stockings. Apparently, her “skimpy” suit scandalized and offended some of Miami’s religious folk, but her husband, Carl, encouraged her to persevere, and other women followed her example. According to Jane’s memoir, Fabulous Hoosier, “within a few weeks of my public pillorying, not a black cotton stocking was to be seen on the Beach.”

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. PROMISED GIFT

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, PRIVATE COLLECTION

Never one to miss an opportunity to capitalize on free publicity, Carl not only quietly encouraged his wife to flaunt social convention, but had photos taken of beautiful young models sitting around his Flamingo Hotel swimming pool wearing swim suits that left most of the women’s legs exposed. These publicity photos were reproduced in albums and in promotional campaigns designed to attract male vacationers down to Fisher’s warm winter playground for the well-to-do.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, illustrations or colorized photographs of beautiful women wearing formfitting bathing and swim suit attire were printed on brochures and postcards as a means of luring winter-weary Northerners down to sunny Miami Beach.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU

 

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, PRIVATE COLLECTION

While the rest of the country (and the world) were still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression, an advertisement for the Sun-Ray Sanitarium in Miami was enticing “convalescents and chronic cases” to come down to South Florida’s healthful climate. The brochure’s cover features a pictorial map of North and South America with Miami as its center, and photographic illustrations of attractive young women in swimsuits perhaps intended to allude to Florida’s “fountain of youth” legend. While the women on the left panel posing by a palm tree are wearing the more “modest” swimsuits typical of the period, the young woman standing next to an illustration of a thermometer on the right hand panel has been photographed in a two piece outfit that covers her navel but leaves part of her midriff exposed. This was extraordinarily unusual given that the “bikini” was not formally introduced until after WWII, and even then did not catch on until the 1950s and 1960s. Considering that this sanitarium promoted sun-bathing and warm pool activities as a health benefit, and provided treatment facilities that included electrotherapy and special terraces for nude sun-bathing, it is not so shocking to assume that they also promoted less constricting swimsuits maximizing sun-exposure.

During the Second World War, tourists and local residents had to share the beach with tens of thousands of soldiers as the community was transformed from a sleepy winter tourist destination into a year-round military base for the U.S. Army Air Forces.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, GIFT OF JUDITH BERSON-LEVINSON

Periodicals published by the military to keep up the morale of the officer candidates and technical trainees stationed in Miami Beach featured lots of illustrations of the women that the average “Joe Jeep” was likely to encounter at the beach and in his dreams.

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, GIFT OF JUDITH BERSON-LEVINSON

In the post-World War II era, women in swimsuits continued to be used to bring men down to Miami Beach. Even the Miami Beach Kennel Club promoted its greyhound dog track by pairing the sleek racing dogs with attractive models in swimsuits.

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, PRIVATE COLLECTION

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, GIFT OF LINDA LA ROCQUE AND BLISS VAN DEN HOUVEL

Miami Beach’s Copa City Nightclub, (which opened in a building designed by Norman Bel Geddes), published and distributed entertainment programs in the early 1950s that also included photographic illustrations of women at the beach wearing the revolutionary new swimsuit—the bikini. Just four days after the nuclear tests on the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, French engineer Louis Reard first introduced what he hoped would be an equally earth-shattering design in July 1946. So revolutionary was his two-piece “bikini” design that he was unable to convince a single Parisian fashion model to wear it, although a nude dancer proved willing. The bikini was officially banned from beauty pageants in the 1950s, and largely remained “taboo” until 17 year old French actress Brigitte Bardot popularized it by wearing one in the sultry French romance released in 1952 under the title, Manina, la fille sans voiles. Notwithstanding the motion picture censorship Hays Code prohibition of exposure of the midriff, the film debuted in the United States in October 1958 as Manina, the Girl in the Bikini. As these Copa City programs suggest, however, Miami Beach promoters did not wait for France or the rest of the country to jump on the bikini bandwagon. Issues of Copa City magazine published in 1951 and 1952 to promote the Miami Beach night club’s beauties boldly pictured their show girls sporting bikinis and losing their “pale ‘night-club tan’ on the sun-drenched beaches of Florida.”

THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU, MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. PROMISED GIFT

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, PRIVATE COLLECTION

While nightclub owners and burlesque dancers flaunted social convention in the early fifties, by middle of the decade it was the model and photographer Lennea Eleanor (Bunny) Yeager who was shaking things up. Having moved to Miami at age 17, “Bunny” won numerous local beauty pageants (including Miss Personality of Miami Beach) and become one of the most photographed models in Miami. In the 1950s, she also personally designed, sewed, and modeled hundreds of bikinis and did much to popularize the fashion in the United States. She also met the “infamous” Bettie Page in 1954 and took more than 1,000 photographs of her that year. Some of Bunny’s photographs of Page and other models were reproduced on postcards promoting Miami Beach.

During the first years of the sixties, staff photographers for the City of Miami Beach News Bureau were snapping publicity shots of beautiful models in swimsuits enjoying the sun, surf, and sand.

MODEL DOLORES KIRBY, MIAMI BEACH HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, MB 342_1_15

MODEL DIANE VARGA, MIAMI BEACH HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, MB 342_1_1_1

The early 1960s also brought the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant to Miami Beach, where, in the course of the competitions, beautiful women from around the globe competed for the title. Contestants wore the more traditional one-piece swimsuits; the bikini was not permitted.

MIAMI BEACH HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, MB 1908_8, GIFT OF DONNA VICTOR IN MEMORY OF HER FATHER, MEL

MIAMI BEACH HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, MB 948_2

Bathing suit style rules were not restrictive for other contests, as during the Miss Miami Beach Golden Girl Pageant, organized in 1965 as part of the city’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations.

MODEL NORMA EVE SHERER, MIAMI BEACH HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, 914_10

MODEL SHELLY MACY SHARPE, MIAMI BEACH HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, 914_5

MISS MIAMI BEACH GOLDEN GIRL PAGEANT CONTESTANTS, MIAMI BEACH HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, 914_5

LANITA KENT, MISS GOLDEN GIRL, 1965, MIAMI BEACH HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, MB 914_2

While the bikini gained some acceptance in the early 1960s, most female sunbathers and swimmers on Miami Beach appear to have preferred the one-piece outfit, in spite of the wishful thinking of at least one cartoonist.

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, PRIVATE COLLECTION

Color images of bikini-clad women on postcards began to be a popular means of promoting Miami Beach in the mid- to late-1960s.

 

LAWRENCE WIGGINS, PRIVATE COLLECTION

These Miami Beach “bathing beauty”-type postcards have remained popular ever since.

MIAMI BEACH, TODAY AND YESTERDAY: CENTENNIAL CELEBRATIONS AND GLIMPSES OF THE CITY’S EARLY HISTORY

Last month marked the hundred year anniversary of the founding of Miami Beach, and residents and visitors have had all sorts of opportunities to get nostalgic and to celebrate, ranging from attending swimwear and fashion shows; a free centennial concert (featuring Andrea Bocelli, Gloria Estefan, and Barry Gibb); watching a Jackie Gleason TV Marathon at the Fillmore; and watching the Miami Vice pilot episode on the New World Center Wallcast.

Diners, shoppers, and pedestrians taking a stroll down Lincoln Road at night also have the chance to get to know the city better as social media posts, animated art, images of “Miami Beach Legends,” and historical photographs, brochures, and postcards are projected onto the wall of the H&M building (formerly the Lincoln Road Theater). The public are invited to send in their own photos, art, and video footage for inclusion in the nightly displays.

Some of the images projected onto the H&M and bank tower buildings on Lincoln Road come from The Wolfsonian-FIU library collection, including a copy of a rare publicity photograph album of Carl Fisher’s Boulevard Hotel. Before Fisher had entered the picture, John Stiles Collins and his son-in-law, Thomas Pancoast, had already been clearing land, planting avocado groves, and dredging canals to tap the island’s agricultural potential, and begun construction on a wooden bridge connecting the beach to the mainland; developers like J. N. Lummus had formed the Ocean Beach Development Company and had been burning and clearing the palmetto and mangrove and ridding the island of rattlesnakes, raccoons, rats, and other “pests.”

When the Indianapolis automobile and speedway promoter and self-made millionaire, Carl Fisher entered the scene, he began swapping much needed capital for real estate lots with the aim of transforming the narrow peninsula into a winter retreat for the well-to-do. Fisher’s wife, Jane was originally aghast at her husband’s investments in this desolate sandbar, but as the number of Carl’s luxurious hotels took root and other wealthy socialites began to buy into the beach, she too began to revel in the atmosphere so unlike Palm Beach.

 

Years later in an interview she confided that the well-to-do in Palm Beach “thought we were just scum…nouveaux riches,…New money from the Midwest, automobile money from Indiana and Michigan” as opposed to the “old money from the East, bankers and railroads….” While Carl was promoting the beach as a resort for millionaires like himself, in August 1926, he opened the Boulevard, his last Miami Beach hotel.

Unlike his other luxurious grand hotels that catered exclusively to wealthy patrons, the Boulevard courted and catered to a more modest, middle-class clientele, with prices half that charged at Carl’s Flamingo Hotel. The Boulevard, located on the “new Venetian Causeway,” had been designed by architect William F. Brown, and featured the expected Mediterranean-influence touches common to Carl’s other hotels.

The Boulevard had a central terrace, clay roof tiles and a tower, ornamental columns in the hotel lobby, and arches that still afforded views of the neighboring golf course.

But in contrast to the other hotels, the Boulevard offered “plain, American home cooking” in its cafeteria-style dining room that was open to the general public.

Timing, of course, is everything in life—and in real estate as well. The Boulevard opened just one month before the Great Hurricane of 1926 hit Miami Beach, destroying a great deal of property and claiming the lives of hundreds of tourists and residents.

Jim Snedigar, son of early Miami Beach mayor, Louis “Red” Snedigar, was only two and a half years old when the hurricane hit and nearly completely blew away the family’s brick home on Collins Avenue.  With the entire island under nearly three feet of water, “Red” Snedigar tied his family together with sheets and swam across the Dade Canal to seek shelter in the Boulevard Hotel.

Though the hotel survived the storm with relatively little damage, Fisher’s flagging fortunes did not. Already overextended with a new real estate venture in Montauk, Long Island, the hurricane damage, bad publicity, and instant end to the real estate boom ruined Fisher and brought the beach into a serious economic depression years before the rest of the country and world were overtaken by the Crash and Great Depression in 1929. Needless to say, Miami Beach’s fortunes revived, even as Carl Fisher’s fortunes went from rags to riches, and back to rags again.

OVERT / COVERT: MIAMI DADE COLLEGE STUDENTS USE WOLFSONIAN ART OBJECTS TO DECODE THE ICONOGRAPHY OF LABOR

Yesterday afternoon, I crossed the bay separating Miami Beach from the mainland to deliver a lecture to a class of Miami Dade College students enrolled in a museum studies course. I had been informed that the students had put together an exhibition titled Overt/Covert dealing with the confluence of propaganda and labor, with artifacts drawn from the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Study Centre in downtown Miami. The exhibition had recently opened in the Museum of Art + Design located in the historic Freedom Tower at Miami Dade College—at one time the tallest building in downtown Miami, though it has since been dwarfed by a plethora of glass towers!

The subject matter of the student exhibition was not new to me. I have worked at The Wolfsonian museum for more than two decades and have been teaching for another decade at Florida International University, often about the Great Depression and New Deal era.

I had prepared a Powerpoint presentation for the occasion illustrated with examples of American, Soviet, Fascist, and National Socialist labor propaganda with images drawn from The Wolfsonian-FIU museum library collection. Some of the American materials dealt with the irony of the 1930s mania for picturing “men at work” in an era of extreme unemployment; the depiction of strikes (and their suppression) by left-leaning artists; and the celebration (and criticism) of New Deal “back to work” projects, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and the Federal Arts Project (FAP).

My presentation compared and contrasted such images with those produced in the Soviet paradise of “full employment.” In the early years of the revolution, much artwork was done in the Constructivist style; other works conformed to the Socialist Realist style dictated by regime after Comrade Stalin assumed power.

Turning from the Soviet Union to Fascist Italy, I included a number of images showing the relative tolerance of Benito Mussolini for depictions of labor in radically different styles. Il Duce did not seem to care whether artists worked in the Futurist or Neo-Classicist styles, or even if they employed techniques like photomontage–so long as they supported the values and goals of the regime.

I ended my discussion of labor imagery with propaganda produced by the National Socialists in Hitler’s Germany. As in Stalin’s Russia, there was  little room for free expression in Germany. Artists and photographers were constrained to depict Der Fuhrer (doing more than his fair share of shoveling), armies of shovel-wielding Hitler Jugend, or Aryan maidens working in the fertile countryside and churning out future soldiers for the Nazi state.

I actually began my talk and slide show with a couple of iconic images from the depression decade. One was a photograph taken by Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940) used to decorate the dust jacket of his Men at Work, published in 1932; the other, was a lithographic print from Comrade Gulliver: an Illustrated Account of Travel into that Strange Country the United States of America, an oversized portfolio published in 1935 by Hugo Gellert (1892-1985).

Although published during the darkest days of the Great Depression, Hine’s photograph celebrates the incredible feats and accomplishments of labor (symbolized by the smiling young man dangling from a skyscraper-erecting crane), even as one-quarter of the American workforce had been thrown out of work.

As a committed Communist who placed all of his artistic talents into the service of the “cause” of the laboring classes, Hugo Gellert subversively lampooned such images. One of his illustrations, aptly titled “Useless,” instead depicted a despondent construction worker dangling precariously from a derrick with no work to do.

After the lecture was over and some colleagues and I were given a guided tour of Overt/Covert, I was thrilled to discover that one of the student curators, Giselle Gonzalez, had not only included a small format version of Comrade Gulliver open to the same image, but had juxtaposed it to a color lithograph poster by the same artist, titled: See the Soviet Union in the Making published in 1930.

She also used a silhouette of the poster to illustrate the cover of the exhibition catalog.

I had never seen the poster before, and was immediately struck with the realization that the “Useless” illustration dating from 1935 had been recycled and modified from this earlier illustration. Although strikingly similar, the first pictured a confident Soviet worker hanging from acrane and was designed to celebrate the industrialization of the Soviet Union; the latter image substituted a downcast American worker intended to mock the failures of American Capitalism during the decade-long depression.

After some introductory remarks, each of the student curators focused on at least one of the labor-themed selections they had made, providing additional background information, and talking about the piece’s historical and or cultural significance.

One of the student curators, Johnathan Sanabria, has been interning at The Wolfsonian-FIU library this semester. In addition to talking about the Wrigley’s chewing gum advertisement he selected for the exhibit, he also introduced our staff to a projection of historical clips he had pulled together of people at work.

The montage included an excerpt from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, a brilliant and hilarious satire of working life in the industrial age.

So, having originally crossed the bay to deliver a lecture, I found myself learning quite a bit about the subject from the student curators. I highly recommend that anyone interested in seeing more on the subject head to the Freedom Tower in downtown Miami to check out this great exhibition.